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.
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 Chania 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 Irakleio.
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.’
‘
‘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.
David Elias had just decided to lock up his desk and office safe, and head off for an early-morning coffee and a crap, not necessarily in that order, when his internal phone rang.
‘Elias? I’ve got a few questions for you. Come up.’
The coffee would have to wait, Elias decided. By now the crap couldn’t, but he’d have to be quick. ‘On my way, Director.’
When he reached the top floor, John Nicholson’s door was already open, but Elias knocked anyway and waited for a response before entering and standing beside the leather armchair that faced the big oak desk. The Director, he thought, looked somewhat irritated, and Elias wondered which of his own recent reports was responsible, and exactly how severe a dressing-down he was about to receive.
Elias was essentially an analyst, and had only worked in the Intelligence Directorate for a little over a year, although altogether he’d been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency for almost ten years. He had been drafted into Intelligence from Administration, where he’d worked as a bean-counter, after a senior officer had noticed that he spoke fluent Malay and workable Japanese. He now specialized in the Pacific Rim, and enjoyed what he did.
‘Sit down, Elias,’ Nicholson said, looking up from the open file lying on the desk in front of him. ‘This has nothing to do with your work here,’ he began. Elias relaxed noticeably, but still felt puzzled. ‘Tell me about your diving skills.’
‘What? Sorry, Director?’ Elias’s puzzlement increased.
‘Your diving. Have you had formal training or is it just a hobby for you?’
‘Both, really, sir. I got given my first scuba outfit when I was a teenager, and it just sort of took off from there. I joined the local sub-aqua club, got all the qualifications I could, and I’ve been diving ever since. I’m a qualified blue water instructor, and I’ve spent about, oh, fifteen hundred hours underwater, I guess.’
‘You done any deep diving, then?’
Elias nodded. ‘I was involved in a couple of projects down in Florida, where we worked at depths in excess of a hundred feet. I’ve used exotic gases a few times, done a bit of saturation work.’ Nicholson now looked
