They came to a halt alongside the older folk, and the girl looked up at us. Pete let out a low whistle. She was definitely pretty in a conventional sense, but her eyes were black and venomous; even when she was smiling. I had once known a diamondback rattlesnake named Alice, who lived in a Plexiglas case and had travelled around Europe with the American forces. She had a hit list that the Compton brothers would have been proud of, and this girl had Alice’s black eyes. I wouldn’t have wanted her in my family either.
I beckoned her over. Her smile broadened and she said, ‘Hello. You’re English, aren’t you? Have you come to rescue me?’ What was the accent? Not uneducated, but maybe northeast somewhere – Gateshead, I thought. Somewhere like that.
‘Yes. You’re going home now.’ Was I wrong or was there a small grimace flitting across that heart-shaped face? ‘I’m sorry if you’ve been mistreated.’
She said, ‘It was no worse than my boarding school. I think I’ve been a bit of a bother to them.’ That sounded like a candidate for the understatement-of-the-year award.
Warboys entered my line of vision from stage left. He said, ‘I’d like you to ride up front with us, if you don’t mind, miss – it’s getting crowded in the back.’ Then he passed a grubby handful of notes to the old man. I think it was some of the money he had had from the priest. The old man looked at me, and shrugged. Then he smiled. He was still smiling as we drove away. The hand he waved in farewell was full of money.
Leonidas scowled. ‘You paid my family debt, you bloody bastard.’
Warboys must have heard him, because he laughed back at him through the small cab window. ‘Yes, and by the end of the week every village in the Troodos will know about it, won’t they?’ Then I heard him tell Pat, ‘Terrible gossips, these GCs.’ Pat laughed, and I heard the girl giggle.
Pete pushed Leonidas back behind us again, and on his side.
‘Reminds you of Alice, doesn’t she?’ he said to me – he’d obviously noticed it as well. I probably made a face and nodded. He made the machine gun safe, but stayed behind it all the way down to the first made-up road.
Occasionally, on the roads back through the mountains, and down onto the lower terraces, we would pass a shepherd or goatherd with a few animals. Invariably it would slow our progress slightly, and invariably the shepherd or goatherd would be sitting on a bank alongside a bundle covered by sacking or an old coat. Invariably the shepherd or goatherd’s hand would be resting on the bundle. Pete would traverse the MG to cover them, and they would smile toothless smiles, and wave the hand that had been on the bundle. I was in no doubt that under each bundle was a gun, or grenades. Leonidas’s men were doing what they could to cover him.
Warboys let him off a mile up the proper road to Nicosia. After we had stopped, and Warboys and Pat had walked round to let the tailboard down, Pete and I manhandled Leonidas down onto the road. He immediately sat cross-legged in the dust with his head bowed. He looked exactly like men in photographs I had seen from the war, of prisoners or Jews about to be executed by German soldiers. His head was bowed for the neck shot. I wonder if he expected it. Warboys squatted alongside him.
‘You think I’m going to shoot you? Is that it?’
‘Why not?’ Leonidas’s voice was strained and low.
‘Is that what you would do?’
‘I would probably have to, wouldn’t I? Get on with it.’
‘No, Leonidas, not today. I’m going to do something much worse.’ He hung a key on a string around his captive’s neck. Handcuffs. ‘I’m going to give you two days to get off the island. Will that be enough?’
There was no reply. I asked Pat, ‘What’s going on? I thought we were supposed to let him go.’
‘We will, Charlie. That’s the point – nobody really expected it. Standing instructions say you catch a terrorist, under any circumstances, you bring him in. We know it and the GCs know it . . . and this pig’s wanted for several murders. If we let him go every Greek on the island will know within twenty-four hours that Mr Warboys had the notorious EOKA killer Leonidas in irons, but then paid his debts and let him go. What would you think?’
‘That we turned him, of course. What will happen?’
‘If he’s still on the island in forty-eight hours the GCs will kill him themselves – no one likes a turncoat. Athens is his only hope now. Mr Warboys is offering to hold back the news of his release for two days to enable him to get clear.’
‘Won’t we get into trouble then as well?’
Pat shook his head.
‘It won’t be that kind of news broadcast, Charlie. It will be a word here and there, in the markets and the bazaars. There will be nothing on paper, an’ if yer asked we’ll just deny it, won’t we?’
‘What about the girl?’ It’s in my nature, I suppose. I like the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed. Warboys looked up from Leonidas.
‘She’ll be out of here on a plane tonight – after a brief but telling reunion with her family. I hope they find a stout cage to keep her in.’
It was at that point that the girl wandered back. She looked down at the Greek and said, ‘He had me, you know, but I made him pay for it. Are you going to kill him?’
Warboys said, ‘No, we’re going to let him
