a steep flight of stone steps on the left side of the property that ascended to the first floor.
‘Which floor, Inspector?’ Hardin asked.
‘The first,’ Lavat replied. ‘It’s the only door up there. You’ll need a knife to cut the seal on the door.’
‘I have one here,’ Gravas said. He took a small folding penknife from his pocket and opened the main blade. He walked towards Hardin, but stopped when he was a couple of feet away, then placed it on the ground and backed off.
Hardin stepped forward and picked up the knife. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Be careful with it,’ Gravas said. ‘It’s very sharp.’
Hardin nodded, crossed the road and began to climb up the stone steps. At the top he paused before walking across to the door itself. Then he stopped and stared for a few seconds at the ripped fabric seal. One end had been nailed to the door and the other end to the frame, forming a symbolic rather than a literal or physical barrier, and the fabric had torn away from the nail in the door. Hardin walked back to the top of the outside stairs and called down to the street. ‘Inspector?’
‘Mr Hardin?’
‘We have a problem here. Somebody has broken the seal. Someone has clearly entered this building since you and Dr Gravas were here.’
‘What?’ Lavat exclaimed, and started up the steps. He stopped a couple of treads from the top and stared across at the broken seal.
‘This makes your missing police officer look more worrying,’ Hardin said. ‘Perhaps something has happened to him.’
Lavat nodded, turned back and started down the steps. ‘I’ll check,’ he said.
Hardin put Gravas’s penknife down on the low parapet, then opened the apartment door and stepped inside.
Ten minutes later he walked back down the stone staircase, laid the penknife on the ground and looked around. Gravas and Lavat were nowhere in sight, and he assumed they were searching the immediate area. He turned back to stare up at the house again just as Lavat walked around the corner.
‘Any luck?’ Hardin asked.
Lavat nodded briefly. ‘Yes, we found him.’
‘What did he tell you?’ Hardin asked.
‘Nothing at all,’ Lavat’s reply was low and angry, ‘because he’s dead. He’s been tossed in a ditch like so much garbage, along with the bodies of two elderly locals. Dr Gravas is examining them all now.’ Lavat paused and shook his head. ‘This is turning into a massacre. It started out as a simple murder investigation,’ he said, ‘and we’ve now got five dead bodies, one of them a police officer. Two men killed by some germ, another two villagers and one of my officers slaughtered like animals by the same people who created that germ. I knew that young man personally. I’ve known him for three years and I’m the one who’s going to have to tell his wife that she’s a widow, and that’s not a job I’m looking forward to.’
Lavat stared across at the space-suit-clad figure still standing in the middle of the street, his eyes moist and emotion choking his voice. ‘You didn’t find that missing container, did you?’ he asked.
Hardin shook his head. ‘No. There’s nothing of that nature anywhere inside the apartment.’
‘No,’ Lavat said, ‘because the bastards who killed my officer got here before us and took it away with them. But I’ll find them. They must still be somewhere on this island, and if it’s the last thing I do I’m going to track them down. I’ve already set the wheels in motion.’ He turned as the doctor appeared behind him. ‘Well?’ he demanded angrily.
‘They look like professional killings,’ Gravas said, pulling off a pair of surgical gloves. ‘The police officer was struck from behind, then somebody smashed his nasal bone upwards into his brain. That’s a killing blow taught in certain schools of martial arts. They also crushed his larynx to stop him crying out. The two old men were basically strangled, but only after receiving crippling blows to their bodies.’
‘I’m really sorry about this, Inspector,’ Hardin said eventually into the long silence that followed the doctor’s remarks, ‘but we have to move on now. Dr Gravas, could you use the hand-sprayer, please?’
Gravas nodded and opened Hardin’s bag, which he himself had carried from Spiros Aristides’s house. The hand-sprayer it contained was fed with a bleach solution from an attached bottle. As Hardin stood in the middle of the street with his arms outstretched, Gravas walked all around him, spraying this solution liberally over the CDC investigator’s Tyvek suit. As instructed, he started at the head, then worked his way slowly down to the American’s booted feet.
The bleach was a high-concentration solution, which filled the still evening air with a stinging pungency.
‘Normally we’d put this stuff in a biohazard bag and just dispose of it,’ Hardin explained, as he pulled off the strips of tape to remove his hood, ‘but we’ve limited equipment here on Crete and I’ve been very careful not to touch either body, so I intend to re-use this suit. That bleach solution will kill all known pathogens.’
Hardin bundled the suit into the biohazard bag Lavat had brought with him, added the hood and blower assembly, and closed the zipper. Lavat had a separate, smaller, biohazard bag, into which Hardin put both the pairs of surgical gloves he’d used, then sealed it. That bag and its contents would be destroyed by fire in due course. Hardin picked up the two biohazard bags and the three men began walking back towards the main street that ran through the village.
‘So,’ Gravas said, glancing back up the alley, ‘no container.’
‘No, so we have to assume that Nico had it in his possession and that whoever killed my police officer and then entered the property has now retrieved it. We also have to consider the possibility that Spiros found more than one container. We can be fairly certain that they opened one of them, but the fact that somebody has since been onto this scene…’ Hardin suddenly halted, and Gravas turned to him curiously.
Something had been gnawing at Hardin’s subconscious ever since he’d stepped out of the elder Aristides’s house. Something he’d seen or heard that didn’t seem quite right, but exactly what it was he hadn’t been able to remember. Like a half-seen figure in fog, it had been too indistinct to discern but was equally obviously there. And suddenly he knew exactly what it was.
‘God, I’ve been slow,’ Hardin said. ‘I should have realized back at the first house. I think you told me you closed his bedroom door after you, Dr Gravas?’
‘Yes. I closed all the internal doors – it seemed a routine precaution.’
‘But when I went upstairs, both bedroom doors were wide open. That means somebody else had access before I got there. I think we’re up against somebody who knows exactly what’s going on here and what they were looking for. And the fact that they’re prepared to kill a police officer and two innocent bystanders tells me that the stakes are high, and are only going to get higher.’
A little after eight that evening Hawkins arrived at Lower Cedar Point and parked his car close to the water’s edge, his watery pale blue eyes gazing across the Potomac towards Dahlgren and the setting sun. To the north there was a constant stream of traffic crossing the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge, which carries US 301 from Virginia to Maryland.
After a few minutes, the passenger door opened and he turned to greet the man who had telephoned him earlier. He was grey haired, big and bulky, and despite the warm weather was wearing a long black leather coat.
‘John,’ Hawkins said in brief greeting.
‘CJ.’
‘How did this happen?’ Hawkins asked. ‘I thought the wreck was too deep for divers to find it.’
‘It should have been, but when the Lear was hit it looks like the pilot managed to retain some directional control and pointed the aircraft towards the nearest landmass, which happened to be Crete. That shouldn’t have been a problem, because the water at that end of the Mediterranean is really deep, but unfortunately when the Lear finally speared in it was right between two islands about twenty miles south-east of Crete.
‘Everywhere else in the area the seabed is far enough down that only really specialized equipment can reach it, but right where the Lear crashed the water’s only about a hundred feet deep. It’s not my field, but apparently that’s pretty deep for a free diver using an aqualung, but it’s not an impossible depth to reach as long
