Nemesis of the dead, p.10
Nemesis of the Dead, page 10
‘I’m going to sunbathe down the other end of the island where it’s more private,’ she had whispered. ‘I need to tan my white bits. Why don’t you get the other boat and follow me? We’ll have lunch together in one of the caves.’ She patted the picnic basket that Ariadne had been prevailed upon to provide. ‘You bring the wine, honey. See ya!’ And she’d pulled expertly on her oars and skimmed away like an Olympian athlete going for gold. Sid watched the fluid movement of her arms and legs, bronzed and sinuous, as she disappeared around the curve of the bay and out of sight. Then, consumed with a lust that totally annihilated his better judgement, he went to fetch a bottle of Yanni’s wine and the other boat.
Now, he bent to his oars again and at last got some sort of rhythm going. All he had to do was follow the coast until he spotted Diana’s boat beached on one of the little coves at the north-west end of the island. After that, he wasn’t sure what he’d see but he had a pretty good idea and it made his mouth dry.
Marjorie was in the lobby of the hotel, furtively sticking a stamp on a postcard to Dan. She had bought it secretly in St Sophia and had hoped to post it, equally secretly. Ambrose was sitting outside on the terrace, ostentatiously drafting letters of complaint to the travel company and his solicitor, both of which were currently running into six pages. It would keep him occupied for some time, she thought. He seemed to be enjoying himself for the first time since they arrived. She even heard him laugh a couple of times, anticipating the distress and alarm he was sure his threatening rhetoric would evoke. He had an unpleasant, mirthless laugh, more of a neigh really. She could hear him now. Hner, Hner, Hner.
Ellie appeared, fresh and scrubbed in one of Tim’s check shirts and over-large, cropped cargo pants from which her thin white legs protruded like a couple of pieces of string. She was clutching a postcard, too.
Marjorie was surprised to see her alone. It was rare to see one half of the heavenly twins without the other.
‘Hello, dear. Where’s Tim?’
Ellie smiled, her dim blue eyes peeping out from under her ginger fringe. Like a startled fawn, she never seemed to look anybody straight in the eye.
‘He’s still in the shower. If I hurry, I’ll be back before he realizes I’m missing. I just popped down to post this card.’ She dropped it in a cardboard box on the desk, which had POST written on it in red felt tip.
‘Is it to your mother, dear? Only it’s just occurred to me that the post must have to go to the mainland and I expect that means Charon will collect it when he comes to pick us all up again in his ferry on Saturday week. We’ll probably be home long before our postcards arrive.’
Ellie giggled. ‘I never thought of that. Oh well, never mind. This card is for Poppy, my puppy. I can read it to her when I get home.’ She skipped off, straight back upstairs to her besotted husband.
If anything, thought Marjorie, smiling fondly after her, that girl is even drippier than when she arrived. But the mutual bond between her and Tim was there for all to see, shining and solid, like golden chains binding them together. Marjorie wondered if Ellie knew how lucky she was. She posted her card through the slot in the box and made her way outside, this time through the front door, preferring the angry gaze of the Gorgons to the even angrier gaze of Ambrose. She shielded her eyes and stared out to sea, bathing in the dreamy, soothing blueness of Katastrophos Bay. Has it all been my fault for allowing it? she wondered. She sensed that that was what Corrie thought. But when you’ve suffered years of bullying and humiliation, in whatever relationship and however deserved or undeserved, it isn’t just your self-esteem that goes, it’s your faith in the future, your ability to believe that anything you might do could make the slightest difference. Life seems pointless when you can’t see an end to the misery. What do you do when there aren’t any bits of happiness left to cling to?
‘I’ll tell you what you do,’ she said aloud, into the sea breeze. ‘You pull yourself together and you put a stop to it.’
Sidney spotted Diana’s boat halfway up a pebble beach in a very pretty cove with sparkling white sand. The sun gonged down on the burning shingle but there was shade from some olive trees that grew right down to the shoreline. He couldn’t see Diana but as he dragged his boat up the beach next to hers, he noticed the cave – one of the sea grottos Yanni had told him about, only found on the exposed north-west coast. It had a big hole in the roof and a clump of cypress at the entrance. He fetched the wine from the boat, and crunched up the beach into the cave, calling her name so she would know he was coming.
Diana was lying on a blanket in the shaft of sunlight that streamed in through the hole in the roof. She was smiling. He knew that because he was focused firmly on her teeth to stop himself ogling her bare breasts like some sad yob. It was with considerable relief that he noticed she was still wearing the bottom half of her bikini – a tiny red triangle held in place by a couple of strings. She rose languidly to give him a welcoming kiss. At the same time, he bent awkwardly to receive it and found his face winging in at bust level. One glorious breast actually brushed his cheek. A faintly unsettling experience, but nothing to the one into which he was plunged a terrible moment later. Handing over the bottle of wine, he somehow contrived to trap her nipple between his fingers. He recoiled with a small gasp and apologized.
She laughed, a delicious gurgle. ‘Sidney, relax.’ She produced a corkscrew from the picnic basket and, with the bottle gripped firmly between her thighs, she uncorked the wine, the impact jiggling her superstructure just enough to make Sid’s hot head sing.
It wasn’t as if Sidney was unaccustomed to toplessness. In Benidorm, acres of boobs in various shades of brown stretched supine to the sea, trembling the air above them with shimmering oil. There, though, they were impersonal. They could be anything – cakes with cherries on, skullcaps, stranded jellyfish – anything. But these boobs were Diana’s: firm, delectable and quite clearly available to him.
He coped reasonably well at first, managing not to look when she began stroking sun-oil into one of them. It was when she handed him the bottle and asked him to do the other one that the rudder of his self-control was shot away. He jumped up with a light laugh, concealing the straining bulge in his speedos with a carefree hand, then ran down the shingle and hurled himself trembling into the sea.
When he came back, cooler and with a grip on himself, she had poured the wine and set out the food. He picked up one of Ariadne’s anonymous kebabs and nibbled at it, his appetite eclipsed by another more urgent need.
‘The sea’s very clean here, isn’t it? I could see me trainers through it. Course, if you believe Corrie Dawes, there’s monsters out there.’ He scanned the horizon, shading his eyes against the Ionian glint. ‘Sirens, Tritons, you name it. To hear her talk, you’d think half of flipping Loch Ness comes down here in the summer.’
Diana laughed. ‘They say Lord Byron thought Katastrophos so beautiful he wanted to buy it, but Homer describes it as “overrun with barren rocks and cliffs and only good for goats” – that’s assuming Katastrophos was the island they were referring to. Nobody can be sure.’ She looked around her, sipping her wine. ‘Don’t you just love it in here, Sidney? This is the Cave of Nymphs where Odysseus is supposed to have hidden some treasure on his return from the Trojan War. I lie here sometimes, imagining how incredibly randy Penelope must have felt, seeing her husband again after ten long years.’
Sidney looked at her in surprise. ‘Fancy you knowing all that academic stuff.’
She sighed. ‘You disappoint me, darling. Don’t tell me you see me as a blonde bimbo, too?’
‘No, course not,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s just that I was temporarily blinded by your amazing body. Be fair, Di. It’s the first thing to hit a bloke and it stuns him before he has time to investigate the brain department.’ He drank some wine, feeling his self-control gradually ebbing away. ‘I suppose I don’t really know anything about you, do I?’
‘There isn’t much to know. My mother’s Swedish, my dad’s American and I was born in Cairo. I can speak five languages, drive a truck, hit a mean home run and I’m after your body. What more do you need to know?’
Sid grinned. ‘I guess a clever man like the prof would have spotted your brain a mile off. How did you meet him?’
Diana refilled their glasses. ‘At college. I was a student and he was my faculty head. He was interested in me then. Now I think he’d only notice me if I grew leaves.’ She laughed but not happily.
‘Oh Di, if you were mine, I’d …’ Sid broke off because she wasn’t and he couldn’t.
‘Sidney, you are so cute.’ Without warning, Diana threw her arms around him and pressed soft lips on his.
Sid struggled – but only slightly – and concealed his feelings, as he always did, by joking.
‘Madam, please. Put me down. You’re crushing my souvláki!’ He picked blobs of greasy kebab off his chest, thinking that if he were one of those Sunday newspaper journalists, this would be the time to make his excuses and leave.
Diana smiled seductively, stood up and slowly untied the strings on the bottom half of her bikini. Then she parted her legs slightly and let it fall to the ground.
Had he found himself dropped into a whole cave full of naked girls, the situation might have taken a sexual turn, certainly, but Sid felt he would have coped. A bit of raunchy banter, winking and so forth, but he pictured himself remaining cool, poised, nonchalant, even occasionally stifling a sophisticated yawn and examining his fingernails. Not sitting, as he was now, mesmerized and helpless, his eyes rolling around in his head like marbles in a soup plate.
‘Strewth!’ he heard himself croak. He’d been able to have a half-decent conversation with her until she stripped off and dried his throat. ‘Look, Di, I want you like hell, but I don’t think we should be doing this. I mean, you’re married and there’s the prof to consider and …’
She sank to her knees beside him and breathed a throaty sigh that sent tremors through the only thing she was wearing – her diamond necklace. Then she kissed him again, slipping her tongue slowly into his mouth. This came as a surprise to Sid, whose main experience of women’s tongues was hearing them nag him about how slowly he worked and how expensive he was. Before he could recover, Diana grasped his head and pulled his face against her bare breasts, bouncing his lips from nipple to nipple.
‘You don’t give up, do you?’ he said, muffled.
‘No, Sidney, baby. You’re the one who’s going to give up.’ She pushed him gently backwards until he was lying on the blanket, then slowly straddled him, looking deep into his eyes. He heard himself jabbering inanely, anything to take his mind off what he knew was about to happen so he might keep a vestige of control over the rampant bulge which was threatening to burst through his speedos.
‘’Course, the beaches where I come from – you know, Southend and Margate, the councils spend their money on deckchairs and bandstands and lifebelts and coloured lights on the lampposts and stopping the piers from rotting and going round with spikes, picking up rubbish off the sand and …’ he gulped as she slid her fingers into the top of his speedos and eased them down.
Sidney felt a brief – a very brief – pang of guilt. It wasn’t his style to have it off with another man’s wife. On the other hand, the prof didn’t seem to care or even notice. He was more turned on by the pudenda of a hibiscus – whatever that was. It was such a terrible neglect of a passionate, beautiful woman. Too late now, anyway. Diana was already well on top of the situation. So he lay back and thought of England. They must have been playing unusually well because pretty soon he heard himself shouting out loud with sheer joy.
With Corrie occupied in the kitchen, Jack the All-Seeing was lounging outside the hotel on Ariadne’s camp bed, admiring the crescent of turquoise glass that was Katastrophos Bay. One half-open but vigilant eye had spotted Diana, rowing swiftly away in the direction of the deserted, north-west end of the coast. He was surprised, briefly, knowing Diana to be a gregarious, fun-loving woman who became bored very quickly with her own company. As far as he knew, that part of the island had only historic or mythological interest. There were sea grottos where pirates had once hidden their loot and, according to Corrie, a couple of monsters whose names he couldn’t remember had lived in one of the caves, eating passing sailors alive and making deadly whirlpools by sucking in and spitting out seawater. Charming. A few minutes later he saw Sidney come out of the hotel with a bottle of wine and climb into the other boat. After a shaky start, he had set off in the same direction. Jack shrugged. So that was it. Well, whatever they were about to get up to, he didn’t think it had much to do with pirates or sea monsters – and anyway, it was none of his business. At least it meant he could relax for a bit. He closed his all-seeing eyes.
Jack, I’ve just remembered!’ Corrie came hurrying out of the kitchen and into the shady olive grove where she plumped down hard on the foot of his camp bed. The head end rose several inches into the air, bouncing Jack upright.
‘What have you remembered, my little suet dumpling?’
‘I’ve remembered where I last saw Marjorie.’
‘I hadn’t realized we’d mislaid her.’
‘For goodness’ sake, Jack, try to concentrate. This is important – or at least, I think it is. Do you remember when we first arrived, I said I thought I’d seen her before, without Ambrose, but I couldn’t remember where?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, now I’ve remembered.’
‘Good for you.’ He tipped her gently off the end of the bed on to the scrubby grass and lay down again.
‘Don’t you want to know?’
‘Not especially.’
Corrie sat down again, harder this time, and Jack had to grip the sides to avoid being catapulted off. ‘I know why you’re doing this.’ She pulled a cross face. ‘It’s to put me off the scent, isn’t it? Stop me from helping you.’
He grinned. ‘Helping me with what?’
‘The case – the person you’re keeping an eye on. It’s Marjorie, isn’t it?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I’ve remembered where I last saw her.’
‘I think this is where I came in.’ He struggled to sit up. ‘Shall we have a cup of tea or would you prefer a glass of wine?’
Corrie pushed him back down. ‘Neither, thank you. Marjorie was at Lavinia Braithwaite’s funeral.’
This made Jack sit up. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure. She was standing on the other side of the grave when I accidentally threw my glove in.’
‘Why would she be at Lavinia’s funeral?’
‘She must have been one of her fund-raisers. It all fits if you think about it. She told me Ambrose won’t allow her to get a job. She said he makes enough fuss about her charity work. And she recently came into a little money which she used to pay for this holiday on Katastrophos. It was a legacy from Lavinia, like the one she left me to buy a new van. I’ve got it all worked out. You never did explain why you were at Lavinia’s funeral when you barely knew her. I asked you at the time if you were investigating one of the mourners. It was Marjorie Dobson, wasn’t it?’
Jack looked convincingly nonplussed. ‘Why would I want to investigate Marjorie?’
‘Because she’s married to Ambrose, who’s been a bastard to her for thirty years. He has a bad heart and she has him insured for a very large amount. And because you think she’s brought him to Katastrophos to bump him off.’
CHAPTER NINE
The following Saturday morning at breakfast, everyone gathered around the olive-wood table chatting cheerfully and tucking into scrambled eggs with tomatoes and smoked Greek sausages, fragrant with nutmeg and cinnamon. Everyone, that is, except Ambrose Dobson.
‘Where’s Old Misery Guts this morning?’ asked Sid, mopping his plate with Corrie’s home-made bread. ‘Doesn’t he want any grub?’
‘He’s having a lie-in,’ replied Marjorie. ‘He wants me to take him some up on a tray.’ She carried on eating without showing any sign of the anxious haste to carry out his orders that had been so apparent when they first arrived.
‘And are you going to?’ asked Corrie.
‘Eventually.’ She helped herself to more sausages from the communal dish of food in the middle.
‘Better hurry up, Marjie, or there won’t be any left,’ said Sid, blithely unconcerned.
‘Well, he’ll have to go without, then, won’t he?’
Whilst Corrie delighted in Marjorie’s new-found spirit, she was nevertheless uneasy. Ambrose struck her as, like Poseidon, his mythological alter ego, an insidious kind of bully, exerting his power over weak women and glorifying masculine brutality. He was of the kind who would not hesitate to use violence when he lost his temper and, like Poseidon, would consider it his right to inflict fear and punishment. Enough to provoke even the most timid woman into bumping him off. She spoke quietly so the others wouldn’t hear.
‘You will be careful, won’t you, Marjorie?’
Marjorie put a hand on her arm and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, dear. I’ll be careful. I’m really good at it. I have a diploma in careful.’
*
Maria appeared at the end of the meal, hollow-eyed and noticeably thinner, but back on her feet and smiling.
‘Thanks to St Sophia, I am now well again,’ she announced.
To be fair, thought Corrie, a few others of us had quite a lot to do with it, Sky in particular, but she said nothing.
‘My mother is now able to take over the cooking again, kiría Dawes, and we are most grateful for your kindness in helping out. It is after all your holiday and you are our guest.’
Corrie nodded graciously.
‘Tonight,’ continued Maria, ‘there will be another, very special feast.’
