James Barrington - Pandemic

Actually, that had suited him quite well. He’d first grabbed a light breakfast in the hotel dining room, then used his credit card to obtain some cash and gone shopping. There were two items he had particularly wanted to buy, and he came upon both of them in the fourth shop he tried.

The 800 Squadron maintainers arrived from the Invincible by Merlin late that same morning. They had first been briefed by the Squadron Engineering Officer, and then Commander (Air) had taken the Chief Petty Officer in charge aside for a few minutes, and explained exactly what he wanted the team to do here at Brindisi.

Richter was meanwhile back at the airfield, standing outside the squadron building and wondering what to do about lunch, and also why he hadn’t bought something to read in the airport shop, when he heard the distinctive clatter of the Merlin’s rotors. The helicopter approached Brindisi from the south-east at five hundred feet, dropped down to fifty feet once inside the airfield boundary, then air-taxied over to the dispersal area where Richter’s Sea Harrier was parked. Once the big helicopter had settled on the ground, its engines shut down and the rotors stopped, Richter walked over and waited while the squadron maintainers climbed out.

The CPO spotted Richter immediately – it wasn’t difficult, as he was the only person anywhere on the dispersal who wasn’t wearing either an Italian air force uniform or maintainer’s overalls – and walked over to join him. ‘Wings had a word with me before we left the ship, sir,’ the Chief said, ‘so I know what we’re supposed to be doing.’

Richter grinned in a conspiratorial fashion. He knew exactly what Wings had told the CPO, because he had spent half an hour with the Commander explaining precisely what was going to happen, before he left the ship. ‘Thanks, Chief. Can you just make sure she’s fully fuelled and ready to fly before you leave? I may need to get out of here fairly quickly.’

‘Consider it done, sir. Do you want us to pre-flight her as well?’

‘Yes, please, that’s a good idea. Turn the aircraft round so that she’s facing the taxiway. When you’re working on her, don’t forget that the Aden cannon are loaded. I know it’s not SOP, but could you remove all the external locks and pull and stow all the pins except for the ejection seat and the MDC. Oh, and can you leave a ladder attached, so I don’t need to bother the ground staff?’

‘No problem.’ The CPO winked.

Kandíra, south-west Crete

The police arrived first because, from the telephone description furnished by a tremulous Christina, supplemented by hysterical squeals from her friend Maria, it was clear that Spiros Aristides had been murdered – hacked to death.

The first two police cars arrived from Chaniá an hour and a half after Christina’s excited phone call, and the officers immediately set up a cordon around the victim’s house. The senior officer pulled on latex gloves, then opened the street door, entered the building and climbed the staircase to the upper floor. There he took one look inside the bedroom and quickly closed the door. It would definitely be better, he decided immediately, to wait for the arrival of the forensic team and scene-of-crime officers he’d requested from the main police station in Irakleío.

Ninety minutes later a white van arrived. Three men wearing white overalls and carrying plastic cases full of gloves, pads, bags, tweezers, cameras and all the other paraphernalia of criminal investigation, climbed out of it. The forensic scientist in charge – who also happened to be a medical doctor – introduced himself to the senior policeman.

‘Dr Gravas,’ he said, ‘Theodore Gravas. And you are?’

‘Inspector Lavat. The house is cordoned off, and nobody’s been inside except those two women’ – he gestured across the street where a grim-faced Christina stood with one arm protectively around the shoulders of her tearful friend – ‘and me. I wore gloves, of course, and touched nothing inside the house apart from the bedroom door handle. I didn’t even enter the bedroom, nor, I understand, did the women.’

‘ They found the body?’

‘Yes. According to the older one, she heard a moaning sound from the bedroom window.’

‘Hacked to death, I believe?’ Gravas said.

Lavat nodded. ‘I didn’t approach the body closely, but that’s certainly what it looks like.’

‘Right.’ Gravas turned to brief the other two members of his team. ‘I’ll go up myself first to confirm that death has occurred and to perform an initial examination. Then we’ll follow the standard procedure, starting with the bedrooms and working down through the house.’

Gravas pulled on plastic overshoes, thin latex gloves, and a paper mask to cover his mouth and nose. He picked up his small scene-of-crime bag, and stepped over to the door, turned the handle and eased it open. He climbed the stairs slowly, peered inside the spare bedroom, then switched his attention to the closed bedroom door across the landing. He slowly and carefully opened it wide, then propped it open with a chair from the landing. Only then did he turn his attention to the corpse lying on the bed.

His first impression was that the attack must have been almost incredibly brutal. The old man’s entire face was a mask of blood, only the very top of the forehead and his hair seeming untouched by the viscous red liquid. Below, his chest was a carpet of red, and the bedding beneath him soaked through. It looked almost as if the body had been completely drained of blood, there was so much of it evident around him.

Gravas sniffed, trying to identify conflicting odours. Blood, definitely and unarguably. Urine, faeces – and something else? Something faint, unfamiliar and unpleasant.

He walked across the room to the bed, eyes flicking from side to side as he looked for any clues, any sign of a weapon or anything out of place. Any incongruity, in fact.

He stopped beside the bed and looked down. One glance at the body told him this was a complete waste of effort, but he stretched out his hand and felt for a pulse in the side of the man’s bloodied neck. Nothing, of course. Then he bent forward and gently touched the flesh of the face with his gloved fingertips. He looked more carefully, then used both hands to search for the wounds that he was sure were there.

Two minutes later he turned his attention to the torso, and five minutes after that he stepped back from the bed. Behind the mask, his expression was puzzled. Nothing that he’d seen and felt on this body made any sense.

Spiros Aristides was undeniably dead, and from the initial approximate body temperature measurement – obtained simply by placing a long thermometer in the dead man’s armpit for two minutes – he had probably expired about three to four hours earlier. But at that precise moment Gravas had not the slightest idea what had killed him.

He was reasonably certain that death had not been caused by any kind of sharp-edged weapon, nor as far as he could see, probing the skin underneath the sodden clothing, by a bullet. He had found no lesions of any kind on the face or head. The torso was another matter, because there could be wounds he had failed to detect still hidden beneath the carpet of blood. For a definitive answer he would have to wait until he got the corpse back to the mortuary.

What he did know was that whatever had killed the Greek had caused virtually all his blood supply to haemorrhage from every orifice. The bloody facial mask was the result not of some frenzied attack by a machete-wielding homicidal maniac, but of blood pouring from eyes, nose, ears and mouth.

And that was something Gravas had never seen before, and hoped never to see again.