Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

Knox rang the bell. No reply. He put his ear to the door, but the neighbours had the builders in, their hammers and drills making it impossible to hear. He pounded on the front door, then looked up at the first floor windows. Not a sign of life. The letter box attached to the front gate was overflowing with junk mail. His apprehension grew. Maybe Antonius had hated the noise of construction so much that he'd decamped: but with Petitier dead, and Mikhail Nergadze on the loose, it was hard not to worry.

A narrow passageway led down the side of the house. The paintwork was scarred and blistered, as though it had come second in a knife-fight. A sash window was raised a few inches, allowing the house to breathe. He tried it and it lifted easily. Surely Antonius would have locked up properly if he'd left for a few days. He glanced around to make sure that no one was looking, then clambered inside. There was a sour smell to the place, as though something was rotting. 'Hello!' he called out. 'Anyone home?'

No answer. He walked along a short corridor into the kitchen. The shades were down over the back windows; the door was blocked by stacks of crates and boxes. A half-eaten crust of sliced bread on a plate had curled up its corners and turned green.

He turned the other way. The carpet in the downstairs loo was soaked. He reached a gloomy room with a cheap pine table and chairs, their joints splashed with clumsy archipelagos of white glue. The walls were so damp that the old lining paper was peeling freely. Afternoon sunlight through the slat blinds threw a grid on the brown-cord carpet, half-covered by discarded envelopes and their onetime enclosures: bills, summonses, demands, furiously-phrased letters from small tradesmen. A life falling apart.

The hammering next door grew so violent that the walls shook, releasing motes of dust into the air that caught in Knox's throat, so that he had to cough quietly into his fist to clear it.

There was a stack of books on the table, as though Antonius had been going through them. Knox glanced down their spines. Robert Graves, Apollonius, others with equally obvious connections to the golden fleece. There was a pile of Internet print-outs too. He flipped through them. Stories of the mega-rich buying up art and history, names underlined or highlighted. He kept looking until he found a story about Ilya Nergadze celebrating the purchase of a cache of Georgian gold from Turkmenistan.

A green light was blinking on the answer-phone. He pressed play with his knuckle, wary of leaving prints. Beeps and silences mostly, people calling but not leaving messages, save for a woman who yelled abuse and a man demanding payment or else. The last messages were both from Nico, sounding anxious, asking him to call him back. The tape finished and rewound. Knox's sense of foreboding, already strong, turned to fatalism. He went out into the hall and turned towards the stairs, and found what he'd almost been expecting.

Back at the house, Mikhail's anger was building. For one thing, Olympia hadn't yet shown up, despite the clear instructions he'd given her the previous night. For another, his men were making little headway in tracking down the owner of the Volvo. He stood on the stairs with folded arms and watched them work their phones and the Internet, wondering who to take it out on. He'd promised consequences, after all. It was time to demonstrate that he meant what he said.

The doorbell sounded at that moment. Olympia, no doubt. He'd known she'd turn up eventually. Whores like her couldn't help themselves. He went to let her in, but found instead a teenager with lank brown hair sitting astride a moped. 'Michael Nergadze?' he asked, holding up a brown paper bag. 'I've got a delivery.'

'Who from?'

'A man.' The kid gestured vaguely over his shoulder. 'He didn't give his name. Just this bag and twenty euros.'

'I'm Nergadze,' Mikhail told him.

'If you say so,' said the kid.

The bag was stapled closed. Mikhail ripped it open and pulled out a pay-as-you-go mobile. 'You can go now,' he told the delivery boy.

'What about a tip?'

'I said you can go.' He waited until he was out of sight before turning on the mobile. It searched for and found a signal, then beeped to alert him to a message. It turned out to be a telephone number. He called it. 'You don't know me,' said a man, answering almost instantly. 'I was in that Volvo earlier.'

The fear in his voice was gratifying to Mikhail. 'You followed me,' he said.

'It was the woman. I didn't know what she was up to, I swear I didn't. She said you were her husband.'

'Who is she?'

'All she said was Nadya. She found me through my website, yesterday. She asked me to tail you guys from the airport when you arrived, so I did. It's what I do. Divorces, I mean. Not this kind of shit. And then this morning I collected her from the airport. But that's all.'

'Describe her to me.'

'I can't. I swear I can't. She wore a scarf and glasses the whole time. All I know is she's maybe forty, short, thin, pale skin. And she has a slight limp when she walks.'

'Which side?'

A pause. 'Her right, I think. But you know how it is with limps. Both legs go funny. But the thing is, I know which hotel she's staying at.'

'And?'

'You won't come after me?' pleaded the man. 'Promise you won't come after me.'

'We won't come after you,' said Mikhail. 'Not if your information is good.'

'She's at the Acropolis View. It's in Plaka.' Then he added vengefully: 'Stupid bitch thought she could switch on me.'

'What about the man you picked up?'

'I dropped him off outside Sepolia. I think she arranged to meet him again, but I can't swear to it, they were talking French.'

'Thanks,' said Mikhail. 'Now keep your mouth shut and get out of town.'

'I'm on my way.'

'If I should ever see or hear of you again…'

'You won't. I swear you won't.'

Mikhail ended the call then stood there brooding. He was curious about this woman in her own right, and she also seemed his best way of finding Knox. She'd seen the black Mercedes earlier, however, and his Ferrari was hardly the most discreet of vehicles. He went back inside, beckoned to Zaal. 'Get me a van,' he told him. 'Nothing flashy; just make sure it's roomy and private in the back.'

'Yes, boss,' said Zaal.

A woman called Nadya who walked with a slight limp and who'd flown all the way from Georgia to track him down. He felt, for a moment, a mild but pleasurable buzz. Life was getting interesting.

Antonius was hanging from a short noose tied to the base of the banisters above, his feet dangling just an inch or two from the bottom step, as though he could reach it if he just stretched out his toes. But of course he'd be doing no such thing ever again. Knox had seen death before, but nothing quite this ugly. He was an old man, and thin. Rigor mortis was already making grotesque contortions of his limbs and rucking up the sleeves of his blue jacket. There was a bulge in his grey trousers from a post-mortem erection, and his feet were so badly swollen that the laces on one of his scuffed black shoes had actually popped, while the other merely bulged like a joint of sirloin wrapped in string. A folded sheet of note-paper lay on the second bottom step. Knox lifted the flap carefully with his fingernail, just enough to read the scrawled message upon it. A simple and direct expression of regret, exactly what you'd expect. But with Petitier so recently dead, and a clear connection to Mikhail Nergadze, not entirely convincing.

Knox's heart sank, partly in sympathy for Antonius, but also-less commendably-because of the fix he now found himself in. He couldn't just leave the poor old sod hanging there, but he dared not cut him down either, in case this proved to be a crime scene. And if he notified his new friends in the Athens police, they'd doubtless use his presence here to throw more muck at him. He needed an intermediary.