‘Thanks to your efforts, Chief, I did,’ Richter replied, shaking the CPO’s slightly grubby hand. ‘If you hadn’t pre-flighted her it would have been rather a close call. As it was, I had to get quite persuasive to leave that airfield.’
‘That would be thirty-millimetre persuasion, as supplied by a pair of Aden cannon?’ the Chief asked.
‘Got it in one,’ Richter said. ‘Thank you again. Now, a small favour. I need something reasonably heavy that can also be discarded.’
‘Discarded as in dropped over the side?’
‘Pretty much, yes.’
Four minutes later Richter was walking back through the hangar, heading aft, clutching a collection of nuts and bolts with stripped threads, and two small pieces of steel plate.
Back in his cabin he laid out his bloody T-shirt on the floor, put the flick-knife and the metal bits and pieces in the middle of it, and rolled it up. Then he wrapped the jeans around the T-shirt and put the whole bundle into the carrier bag. He put his discarded trainers right on top and then tied the neck of the bag securely. Richter made his way down the stairs to the Quarter Deck, walked over to the starboard side guard rail, and dropped the bag straight down. As it hit the water, it floated for a couple of seconds as the air was expelled from it, then sank swiftly beneath the waves.
It was late afternoon before the first reporters began to arrive at the cordon surrounding the village, but by early evening it seemed to Inspector Lavat that almost every newspaper in Greece had at least one man standing at the police barrier either asking questions or taking pictures. There were even a couple of stringers for the international press hovering at the edge of the group.
What was unusual was that none of them showed any inclination actually to cross the cordon and enter the village itself. But they did talk persistently to the police officers manning the barriers, and they shouted questions at anybody they saw moving inside the cordon. This story, Lavat knew, was going to be known world-wide within just a few hours.
About an hour after the first of these pressmen had arrived outside the cordon, an elderly Suzuki jeep rattled down the road towards the village and stopped well short of the barriers. The two elderly Cretan men in the car looked about them in some astonishment and confusion for a few moments, then got out of the vehicle and made their way over to one of the police officers manning the barricade.
‘What’s going on?’
‘We have a medical emergency here,’ the policeman recited the formula that Gravas had instructed them to memorize. ‘No one is allowed to enter or leave Kandira until further notice.’
‘But we live there,’ the second man spluttered. ‘I want to get home.’
‘I’m afraid you can’t. One man is already dead, and the doctors fear an epidemic.’
‘Dead? Who? Who’s dead?’
The policeman shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said.
A reporter for one of the Irakleio papers who had overheard the exchange came trotting over. ‘It was a Greek,’ he interrupted, ‘by the name of Spiros Aristides. One of the forensic people told me.’
‘Aristides? But he was fine last night – we saw him in Jakob’s. What happened to him?’
Immediately the Cretan said these words, the reporter sensed a story. What he had here was not an eyewitness to the actual death of Spiros Aristides, but almost certainly someone who had seen the Greek just hours before he died. Even if this man had only seen the casualty in the street, he could still use what the Cretan said to embellish the story he was already mentally composing.
He took the man quietly by the arm and led him and his companion across to his own car. He opened the rear door, took out two cans of beer and offered one to each of the old men, then took another for himself.
‘A bad business,’ he said, ‘very bad. Did you know Spiros well?’ The use of the dead man’s first name was quite deliberate. It implied a familiarity and acquaintance where none existed, and was a device this reporter used frequently. As he had hoped, the elderly man took a swallow of lukewarm beer, then began to talk.
‘No, I didn’t know him well,’ he said. ‘We exchanged only a few words if we met in the street, you know, or in Jakob’s.’
‘Jakob’s?’
‘The
‘And last night?’ the reporter prompted.
‘Just like any other night, really.’ The Cretan indicated his companion and took another mouthful of beer. ‘We were there, in Jakob’s, just talking and drinking, when Aristides came in. He looked tired and a bit irritated. He had a drink at the bar, then came over and sat down by himself at the table next to us.’
‘Did he say anything to you?’
The Cretan shook his head. ‘No, he just sat drinking whisky for a while, until Nico arrived.’
‘Who’s Nico?’
‘Nico Aristides. He’s a nephew or cousin. I think they do business together.’
The reporter made a mental note to talk to this Nico Aristides as soon as possible. ‘And then?’
‘They sat together and talked, you know.’
‘What about?’
The Cretan glanced at his companion, as if for reassurance, before replying. ‘I don’t know if we should tell you,’ he said. ‘You see, Spiros wasn’t talking to us. We just happened to be sitting at the next table. But we did overhear them talking about some aircraft.’
The reporter didn’t even blink. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, lying with the aplomb and confidence that come only after years of newspaper work, ‘I heard something about that, too. What did they say?’
The reporter’s apparent prior knowledge reassured the naturally suspicious old man. ‘Well, you know that Spiros was a diver?’ The reporter nodded encouragement and the Cretan continued. ‘He was a diver, but he hadn’t got a permit – you know, from the Department of Antiquities – so he never said to anyone where he’d gone diving. We couldn’t help hearing him say how he’d found some kind of a small aircraft, but he didn’t say where it was. It had been there a long time, though, so it wasn’t a recent crash.’ The reporter nodded again, and the man continued. ‘The water was quite deep so he’d had to make several dives to search it.’
‘Did he say what he’d found there?’
The Cretan shook his head. ‘No, but he thought the aircraft had been shot down. It hadn’t just crashed, you see.’
‘Did he say anything else you can remember?’
‘No, nothing, really. The only other thing was the piece of paper.’
‘What paper?’
‘Spiros passed Nico a piece of paper with numbers on it. He said it was the registration of the crashed aircraft. Just a short while after that they both left Jakob’s, and Nico dropped the paper when he stood up to go. After they’d left, I picked it up.’
‘Do you still have it?’ the reporter asked eagerly.
The Cretan nodded, fished around in his jacket pocket, pulled out a torn and crumpled slip and handed it over.
‘Can I keep this?’ the reporter asked, looking at the single letter and three numbers written on it in thick pencil.
The Cretan nodded. ‘It’s no use to me,’ he muttered.
The reporter extracted another four cans of beer and handed them over. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Could I take your names for my newspaper?’
‘No, no,’ the Cretan said firmly. ‘I don’t want my name in the paper.’
No matter, the reporter thought to himself. He already had enough to scoop his rivals, and the story about a wrecked aircraft could become central to the mystery of Aristides’s sudden death. Maybe whatever had killed the Greek had been found on that aircraft. The possibilities were endless.
And he could quote the elderly Cretan as being a ‘close friend’ of Spiros Aristides. After all, the Greek himself wasn’t around to dispute it.
