Chapter 3
Monday
Brilliant white stars studded the sky over Crete, but Spiros Aristides saw none of them as he trudged from his simple home down the narrow unlit streets towards the centre of the village. He was both preoccupied and irritated, and badly needed a drink – or, better, several drinks.
He had hoped – in fact, he’d felt certain – that the steel case contained valuables, but unless something remarkable popped out when he finally opened those flasks, as far as he could see he’d just been wasting his time. He would have done better to have just left that damned case where he’d found it.
The murmur of conversation stopped briefly as Aristides pushed open the pale green door of the
It was just a small, scruffy room with half a dozen tables and twenty or so assorted chairs, most in need of some repair. Down one side ran a battered oak bar behind which Jakob – that wasn’t his real name, but the previous incumbent had been called Jakob and old habits died hard in Crete – stood wearing a once-white apron and dispensing drinks with the kind of ill grace that frequently made his clientele wonder why he hadn’t opted for a different profession, like tax collector or maybe New York yellow cab driver.
As far as Aristides could tell, the bar hadn’t changed in any significant way since he had first arrived in Kandira a little over eight years earlier, and nor had its occupants. Every evening the old men of the village trickled in, in their ones and twos, took their usual seats at the discoloured tables and, without a word being exchanged, were served their usual tipples by Jakob. Then they talked or just sat in silence. Sometimes a pack of cards would be produced and the usual bar noises would be punctuated by the slap of pasteboard on a table and the cries of exultation or recrimination as some game progressed.
After Aristides pushed the door closed behind him, the murmur of conversation began again. Two or three of the customers smiled or lifted a hand to acknowledge the Greek, gestures to which Aristides responded with a nod, but most of the old men ignored him. He was, after all, a relative newcomer who wasn’t even Cretan, and he was still considered by many of them to be a suspicious foreigner.
Aristides walked across to the bar and looked at Jakob, who looked straight back at him. The Greek had been drinking in the bar three or four nights every week for the past eight years, but Jakob still pointedly regarded him as a stranger.
‘Whisky,’ Aristides snapped. Greek he might be, but he didn’t have a Greek’s palate for retsina or ouzo.
Jakob slapped a small glass on the bar and poured a measure of golden liquid into it from a bottle labelled ‘Glenfiddich’, but which Aristides was quite certain the man kept topped up with the cheapest whisky he could find on his weekly trips to the supermarkets in Chania. He had never, since he first walked into this bar, seen the bottle anything other than half-full, and he had never seen Jakob open a new bottle of Scotch of any brand. There were two other permanently half-full bottles of whisky on the shelves behind the bar, one of them labelled ‘Johnnie Walker’ and the other ‘Famous Grouse’, and the contents of all three tasted absolutely identical. Only their prices were different.
Aristides drained the Scotch in two gulps, gestured for Jakob to refill his glass, then dropped some coins on the bar, picked up his drink, walked across the room and sat down at an unoccupied table in the corner.
He’d been sitting there for something over half an hour and three Scotches, when the bar’s door opened yet again. Like everyone else, Aristides looked up at the new arrival and, for the first time since he’d walked in, he smiled. The man at the door smiled back and walked over to join him at the corner table.
‘I tried your house, but it was in darkness, so I guessed you’d be here.’
‘Sit down, Nico, sit down. A beer? Something stronger?’
Nico Aristides, one of Spiros’s numerous extended family, pulled up a chair and sat down. He gestured to Jakob, and the swarthy unsmiling Cretan plopped a beer bottle and a chipped and dirty glass down on the table in front of him. Nico took one look at the glass and decided to drink straight from the bottle.
‘You were out again today?’ Nico said, more of a statement than a question. ‘Anything?’
Nico had never enjoyed diving but he had numerous clients on Crete, and scattered around the Eastern Mediterranean, who were always keen to purchase any interesting objects that his uncle recovered from the bottom of the sea. And, whenever possible, Spiros obliged, hauling up ancient artefacts that the archaeologists, given the choice, would far rather were left in situ. Nico, in effect, acted as his uncle’s fence.
Spiros shook his head, deciding in that instant to say nothing, yet, about the flasks in the steel case.
‘Nothing, really. A wrecked plane, but nothing of value inside.’
‘A plane?’ Nico’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He was used to his uncle finding amphorae, statuary, pots and occasionally ancient jewellery, but he’d never expected him to find a recent wreck, far less so an aircraft. ‘Where?’
Aristides gestured vaguely to the south, but didn’t specify a location.
‘What sort of aircraft? Fighter? Bomber? From the war?’
Spiros grinned at him, revealing a selection of yellowish teeth amid an almost equal number of gaps, then shook his head.
‘No, a modern one. Some kind of a small jet – a private jet, that kind of thing. But it had certainly been in the wars,’ he added enigmatically.
Nico looked at him, then glanced around the tiny bar. Almost every seat was now occupied, and as he looked at the table a couple of feet to his left, he met the level stares of two Cretans who had obviously overheard Spiros’s last remark. Under Nico’s gaze, the two men looked away and seemed to resume their conversation.
‘I don’t follow,’ Nico said, leaning closer, and gesturing to Aristides to do the same. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ Aristides rasped in his gravelly voice, ‘that there were three bodies inside it, and another one lying on the bottom, all of them still strapped in their seats.’ Nico’s eyes widened and he shivered involuntarily. ‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ Aristides added, more loudly now, settling down to tell his story and oblivious of the interest still being shown by the occupants of the adjacent table. ‘That plane didn’t crash. Somebody shot it down.’
‘Is
Richter took his time, studying both photographs with exaggerated care. They weren’t bad either, bearing in mind the circumstances in which they had been taken. Each showed two men standing inside a house, illuminated by the light of a small chandelier and framed by a tall window, apparently talking to each other. Because the pictures had been shot from a distance, and through the window glass, the images naturally weren’t as clear as if taken in the open air.
In both of them, the man on the right-hand side was in profile. In the first shot, the other man was also in profile, but in the second photograph he appeared full-face, apparently staring straight into the lens of the camera. Richter had no doubt, absolutely no doubt at all, that this was Lomas, but he shook his head.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s very like him, but I really need to see him in the flesh. Photographs can be deceiving.’
Perini looked disappointed. ‘We had hoped you could provide us with a positive identification just from these pictures,’ he said.
Richter shook his head again. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t be completely certain. It could be Lomas, but to be absolutely sure I’ll have to see him face-to-face.’
Simpson eyed Richter with deep suspicion. ‘Remember what I said, Richter,’ he snapped, ‘not sliced or diced.’ Richter put down the photographs and looked back at him without expression.
‘I’m sorry?’ Perini said, with a puzzled frown, as he looked from one man to the other.
