overnight bag out of the back of the Peugeot and checked himself in to the middle hotel of the three establishments. Ensuring that the room he’d been given overlooked the rear car park, he went down to the bar and ordered a beer and a bar snack in lieu of the dinner he’d been forced to miss that evening.
Just an hour after locating the Seat, Murphy climbed into his hotel bed, his travelling alarm clock set for six- thirty in the morning. He intended to be up and dressed long before Stein appeared in the car park below to reclaim his vehicle.
Chapter 23
Saturday
George Pallios had been a police officer on Crete for almost his entire adult life. He’d been born in Chania, shared a small apartment in the town with his wife of six years and their two children and, when he thought about it at all, he guessed he would eventually die there. Always having wanted to become a police officer, from the day he first donned the uniform he had done his best to live up to the standards he knew were expected of him.
It therefore had genuinely been something of a shock to realize that these standards included a certain amount of blind-eye activity in return for envelopes containing notes of fairly high denominations, but it hadn’t taken him too long to get comfortable with the idea. After all, most of his fellow officers seemed happy to do exactly the same thing.
He’d also got used to not having to buy meals or drinks whenever he was in uniform. Most bar and restaurant owners were only too pleased to receive occasional visits from a local police officer – as a useful reminder to their clientele to behave – so they were more than happy to offer a beer or a glass of raki in exchange. Any proprietors whose hospitality was less forthcoming tended to find that their calls for assistance were answered tardily, or not at all.
Life, in short, was pretty good most of the time. The worst part of his job, Pallios decided, was the night- shift. The streets were more or less deserted and almost everywhere was closed while the island slept. With no bars open where he could enjoy a glass or two, nothing much to look at in the towns apart from parked cars and closed doors, and an occasional sleepwalking goat on the country roads, Pallios sat behind the wheel of his patrol car and cruised slowly around, fingers tapping out tunes from one of the local radio stations.
Where he drove was up to him, so long as he covered a specified minimum mileage. Tonight he’d started just after midnight in Chania and decided to spend some time cruising the tangle of roads linking Chania, Souda and the Akrotiri peninsula. That yielded nothing of interest, and by three-thirty Pallios was driving out of Chania again and heading west.
He drove slowly through the towns he came to, alert for any sign of trouble because, despite his relaxed and accommodating attitude, Pallios was, at heart, a lawman and he took his job seriously. Galatas, Platanias and Gerani: all were quiet. He skirted the edge of Maleme and drove on out to Kolymvari, arriving there a little after five. He debated then about following the main road to its natural end at Kastelli, but decided not to. He’d check Kolymvari and Maleme, then head back to Chania and call it a night.
He reached Maleme at six and began a slow sweep through the town, passing the hotel where Stein had left his hire car at six-twenty. If he’d been much earlier, he probably wouldn’t have spotted the blue Seat Cordoba or at least realized it was blue because it would have been too dark to see the colour.
In the early-morning light Pallios instantly noticed the vehicle as his eyes swept the car park of a small hotel on the outskirts, but he didn’t immediately react in any way. He drove on past the hotel without changing speed and continued around the next right-hand corner. There he stopped the car and switched off the engine. On a clipboard secured to the dashboard were several sheets of paper comprising current watch notices, warnings and other instructions. Pallios was certain one of them had mentioned a blue Seat.
He flicked through the pages and then stopped at the one he sought. He memorized the registration number, but also noted the instruction – underlined and in bold type – not to approach the car or its driver. Pallios took a small pair of binoculars out of the glove box, climbed out of his patrol car, locked the door, checked that his pistol was loaded and the holster flap unclipped, and moved slowly back down the silent street towards the three adjoining hotels.
Reaching the corner, he paused and visually checked up and down the street before continuing. He stopped again about seventy metres short of the car-park entrance, staying on the opposite side of the street and well out of sight of the hotel windows. There he raised the binoculars to his eyes and looked carefully at the front of the Seat Cordoba. Then he nodded in satisfaction, turned and retraced his steps.
Three minutes later Pallios was a little over half a mile away, microphone in hand and describing the exact location of the parked car to his control room.
At six fifty the SIS mobile phone beside Richter’s bed began playing the theme tune from the television series
‘We’ve found the Seat,’ Fitzpatrick informed him. ‘It was spotted by a police officer in Maleme about half an hour ago in a hotel car park.’
‘Nobody was in it, I presume?’ Richter asked, waking up fast.
‘No. Following his orders, he didn’t approach it to feel the bonnet or anything to see if it had been there all night, but he confirmed the registration number. It’s definitely the car that this Watson or Jones character hired in Rethymno yesterday.’
‘What else has been done so far?’
‘Nothing at all. The orders were most specific: no approach to either the car or the driver. Once he was satisfied it was the right car, the cop just climbed back into his patrol car to radio in his report and drove away.’
‘Right,’ Richter reached for a notepad, ‘give me the details.’
Murphy had settled his hotel bill in advance, explaining that he would have to leave very early in the morning. By six fifty-five he was sitting in the Peugeot, his bags stowed in the boot. The night before he’d positioned the car with an unobstructed view of the rear of the three hotels. That way, he would be able to spot Stein the moment he left his hotel to enter the car park.
He couldn’t see the Seat itself, which was out of sight behind a Renault Espace and a Volkswagen Transporter, but he reckoned that was less important than covering the hotel exits: he wanted to be able to start his car and get mobile the moment Stein appeared. He planned to follow him as he drove away, then take him down somewhere quiet, recover the case and the file, and then get the hell off the island.
It was cool so early in the morning, and Murphy ran the engine for a few minutes to get the heater working. Then he switched it off and settled down for what could be a very long wait.
It was quite amazing just how many surface contacts there were around the western rim of Crete, even that early in the morning. Most of them, as the Surface Picture Compiler knew, were fishing boats, ferries, yachts, power boats, ski boats and a host of other types of pleasure craft that were heading out into the mirrored blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean to take advantage of yet another beautiful day.
The orders the SPC had been given were quite specific: he was to track and report any surface contacts that appeared to be heading for a landfall anywhere on the western coast. Theoretically, that meant he could disregard all those contacts heading away from the island, but the problem, as he’d realized almost immediately, was that the vast majority of those contacts were at some point going to turn round and head back the way they’d come, for lunch, a refuel, change of passengers, an overnight stop or whatever, so actually he was having to track almost everything that moved.
