Nemesis of the dead, p.3
Nemesis of the Dead, page 3
The other couple, locked in each other’s arms on the back seat, looked about sixteen. They were so engrossed, it was doubtful they even knew they were on a bus, let alone aware of the other passengers. Jack and Corrie, upholding the deep-rooted British tradition of not fraternizing with strangers on public transport, settled themselves somewhere near the middle. The driver started the engine and after much grinding of gears and stamping on the floppy clutch, he steered the bus out of the terminal car park and on to the main highway to Methóni.
Soon they were bumping along the coast road that skirted the dazzling Gulf of Messinia. The sea flashed below, blue as a kingfisher’s wing. Jack stood up and wrenched open the window to let in a welcome breeze. It smelled of the open sea. He leaned close to Corrie and spoke into her ear so she could hear him above the noise of the engine and the rattle of loose bits of bus.
‘That bloke must be baking in those clothes. Makes me sweat just to look at him.’ He indicated the man in the front seat who was ignoring both his wife and the stunning scenery and reading an English newspaper.
Corrie looked and smiled. The man was a caricature of the old-fashioned, British, middle-aged man abroad – short and portly with dull brown hair and bland, rimless spectacles. Despite the soaring temperatures, he was wearing a collar and striped tie under a brown worsted suit. Corrie knew even before she glanced down that the socks in his leather brogues would be of the hairy woollen variety. He looked vaguely familiar but it was only when she spotted the panama hat placed carefully on top of his wife’s neatly folded cardigan that she remembered, with a pang of guilt, where she had seen him. He was the ‘dithering old pillock’ who had held up the queue at the car-park ticket machine. He had a very red face and kept taking out a khaki handkerchief to mop his brow. His wife, cool and bare-legged under her sleeveless dress, sat quietly by his side looking out of the window.
‘D’you reckon they’re going to Katastrophos?’ Corrie asked Jack.
‘Probably. She looks pleasant enough but I bet he’s a real pain in the arse.’ Jack’s recollection of his briefing more or less confirmed it.
‘You never know,’ said Corrie. ‘They might be stopping off at one of those other islands. The ferry passes between them before it puts out to sea.’ She glanced back at the young couple who were sharing a cheese torpedo, nibbling at it lovingly from either end. She nudged Jack. ‘I hope they’re coming with us. Aren’t they sweet?’
Jack put a finger down his throat in a mock vomiting gesture and Corrie smacked him on the arm.
The bus veered west, away from the coast, as the road curled inland, cutting across the south-west promontory of the Peloponnese peninsula. Now they drove through tiny villages with narrow streets snaking between flower-decked, whitewashed houses. Washing was strung out to dry from every balcony, bright as bunting. In the gardens, walnut-skinned crones in black headscarves dozed in the shade of magenta bougainvillea as the afternoon sun gonged down out of a brazen sky.
Jack wondered what the traffic cops back home would make of the driver’s road safety. Occasionally he drove on the right, but more often than not he steered straight down the middle, hooting and shouting Greek obscenities at the drivers coming the other way. Since they were also driving down the middle, they responded in a similar manner with much gesturing and cursing but there was no real malice, as far as Jack could tell. To them, it was perfectly normal. The rationale seemed to be that you drove on whichever part of the road was shady and had the fewest potholes.
The atmosphere freshened as the bus began to drop back down to the coast on the west side of the peninsula. The road looped around the headland and Corrie had a fine view of a pretty bay and the closer group of islets. According to the short and vague directions that Jack had managed to pull off the Internet, the ferry port that served Katastrophos was roughly five miles south of Methóni.
The bus driver pulled up next to the harbour of a tiny fishing town alongside a dilapidated wooden jetty and everyone clambered out, hot and sticky. Still with pendulous cigarette, the driver heaved everyone’s suitcases out of the luggage compartment and dumped them on the quay-side. Jack and the young man each put coins in his outstretched hand but ‘short-and-portly’ blatantly ignored him, and started fussing with his bags and his panama hat. His wife looked embarrassed.
The driver trousered the cash, smiling happily. ‘Which island you go? Sapientza – see lighthouse? Schiza? Venetiko? Very nice – very secluded.’ He winked at the young couple, still joined at the hip.
‘Katastrophos.’ The reply was unanimous.
It might have been Corrie’s imagination but she thought the driver’s smile faded fractionally. He fingered the bunch of St Christophers at his throat. ‘Good luck!’ he called ambiguously and climbed back into his bus. ‘Ferry leave in one hour. Maybe.’ Soon he was jolting back down the bumpy road to Kalamata.
The six travellers stood in an awkward circle around their bags like girls at a nightclub waiting for the music to start.
‘Well,’ said Jack, affably. ‘I suppose we should introduce ourselves since we’re all headed for the same island.’
‘I don’t see why,’ said ‘short-and-portly’ pompously. ‘My wife and I dislike holiday friendships. They impinge on one’s privacy.’
Now they were up close and she had her glasses on, Corrie could see that his dull brown hair was actually a hairpiece and a not very convincing one. How pretentious. She smothered a giggle. The Greek sun would play havoc with the glue.
‘I wasn’t suggesting friendship.’ Jack gave Corrie a look that said: I told you this bloke was a pain in the arse. ‘I just thought that as Katastrophos is so small, with just the one hotel, we’re likely to keep bumping into each other.’
‘Absolutely,’ said the young man. He withdrew an arm reluctantly from around the waist of his beloved and held out his hand. ‘I’m Tim Watkins, and this …’ he looked at her adoringly, as if he could not believe his luck, ‘… this is my wife, Ellie.’
The two were wearing identical shorts, T-shirts and trainers and were physically intertwined to such an extent that it was hard to see where one started and the other finished. They had short matching haircuts and scrubbed freckled faces. For modern youngsters, they were quaintly wholesome and distinctly uncool, thought Corrie. Like presenters from a very old Blue Peter programme.
Ellie smiled at Tim, blushed and lowered her eyes to look at her wedding ring.
‘We’re on honeymoon.’
Looking at the agonizingly young newly-weds, Corrie suddenly felt embarrassed. She and Jack were on honeymoon, too, but they were in their forties and it seemed slightly indecent somehow. She relaxed, knowing instinctively that Jack would keep it secret. He had already asked her not to tell anyone he was a policeman. It was a profession, he said, second only to undertaking for making people feel uncomfortable on holiday. She and Jack were incredibly close when it came to understanding each other’s feelings. Almost telepathic. He would sense immediately that their honeymoon status was not something she would want to advertise.
‘That’s a coincidence,’ he blurted. ‘My wife and I are on honey … ouch!’ Sometimes, thought Corrie, telepathy needs a helping hand – or foot.
‘I’m Coriander Dawes,’ she said amiably, ‘and this is my husband, Jack. Congratulations to you both. You look very happy.’
Tim and Ellie smiled shyly and re-entwined.
‘Dobson,’ muttered ‘short-and-portly’ gruffly. ‘Ambrose Dobson.’ Then he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘This is the wife, Marjorie.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ Marjorie smiled as if she might like to chat further but her husband took her arm.
‘Come along, Marjorie. We’ll sit over there and wait for the ferry.’ He steered her towards a rickety wooden seat further down the jetty.
At seven o’clock they were still waiting. Corrie had always been fascinated by Greek mythology but now, watching the sun begin to set over Homer’s wine-dark sea, she began to feel a compelling affinity with the gods of ancient Greece that was totally unexpected and a bit spooky. It was almost as if she could feel their presence, watching and waiting to amuse themselves with mere mortals, like cats toying with mice. More substantially, her stomach began to rumble. So much, she thought, for their romantic dinner under a vine-covered pergola at Hotel Stasinopoulos.
The quayside was practically deserted. It was that time of the evening when holidaymakers are indoors getting dressed up for the clubs or a meal at their favourite taverna. Apart from the Katastrophos group, there was just one young woman, sitting cross-legged on the sea wall reading a Greek magazine propped up on her backpack. She was dressed in the old hippy style with braided, purple-streaked hair, black lips and eyes and an awesome array of tattoos.
‘I suppose we’re in the right place,’ said Corrie, drowsily. ‘I can’t see anything remotely like a ferry – only that tatty old fishing-boat.’
Just below them, a salt-encrusted vessel with six inches of dirty water sloshing around in the bilge, bobbed gently up and down on its moorings. Jack checked the travel documents again.
‘This is the place all right. I expected more people to be waiting here, though.’
‘But didn’t you say very few tourists visit Katastrophos?’
‘Yeah. Apparently the ferry can only carry a handful of passengers and the service is sporadic, which seems to mean “when the ferryman feels like it”. I guess the island is very remote. People who go there, go mainly for a specific reason. It isn’t the kind of place travel agents normally recommend. Obviously you and I and Tim and Ellie are here for a private, romantic honeymoon. I suspect the Dobsons are here because he’s a miserable old sod and doesn’t want to socialize with anybody.’
‘You don’t know that. He might just be shy,’ said Corrie charitably.
The prospect of being alone with Jack had seemed like bliss when Corrie was at home. Now, she was slightly uneasy about being cut off completely from civilization for two weeks with not even a mobile phone for comfort. They would never find a signal on an island in the middle of the Ionian Sea. Mindful of her honeymoon hex, she was starting to wonder whether it might not be safer to stay where they were on the mainland. These mental meanderings were cut short when a taxi pulled up and a tall, stooping, spindly-legged man in shorts and a fluorescent orange anorak jumped out. He ran round to the boot and dragged out several pieces of expensive-looking Louis Vuitton luggage with huge bony hands. Then he ran back round to the front and dragged an equally expensive-looking blonde away from the drooling taxi driver. He gathered everything up, including the blonde, and struggled across to the jetty.
‘Well, here we all are then!’ He beamed at everyone as though he were greeting old friends. He had a thin, blotchy face with a hawklike nose, slightly bulging eyes and tufts of ginger hair sprouting from everywhere except his bald head.
‘Gordon’s the name. Professor Cuthbert Gordon. I’m a botanist. You may have read my books.’
‘For Chrissakes, Cuthbert, of course they haven’t. Normal guys read thrillers and spy novels and porn. They sure as hell aren’t interested in books about boring old plants.’ The nasal drawl, Corrie reckoned, was definitely New York, probably Manhattan. The designer shirt and skintight jeans might have been Madison Avenue, or Paris, or Rome. The blonde, drop-dead gorgeous and oozing sex, homed in on Jack like a testosterone-seeking missile and offered him a slim hand with a huge diamond on the scarlet-tipped middle finger. A cloud of musky perfume settled over them like acid rain.
‘Hi there, honey. I’m Diana Gordon.’ She tossed back a thick curtain of golden hair and smiled seductively at him from beneath impossibly long eyelashes. ‘I hope you’re coming to Katastrophos. We’ll have a real good time.’
Over my dead body, fumed Corrie. She glanced at Jack. He was holding Diana’s hand and his mouth was open but no sound was coming out, so Corrie decided she had better take charge of the introductions.
‘Hello, dear. I’m Corrie Dawes and that hand you’re holding belongs to my husband, Jack.’ She smiled sweetly.
‘Corridors?’ repeated Diana, amused. ‘Your name is Corridors?’
‘Yes, I know. Awful, isn’t it? It’s short for Coriander.’
‘Not at all awful.’ The professor’s face lit up. ‘Coriander sativum is an excellent herb. Solid ridged stems and sensible bipinnate leaves. Relieves flatulence and aids the digestion.’
Thanks a bunch, thought Corrie.
Diana teetered off on four-inch Blahnik heels to repeat the vamping routine with Tim Watkins, but her husky voice was drowned out by a deafening racket like a huge, defective lawn mower starting up. Clouds of smelly blue smoke billowed up from the old fishing-boat moored below.
Professor Gordon rubbed his hands together enthusiastically. ‘Splendid!’ he bellowed over the din. ‘Old Charon’s woken up at last. On board, everyone, he won’t wait for dawdlers.’
Jack and Corrie exchanged glances.
‘That’s never the ferry,’ said Corrie, horrified.
‘Charon?’ Ellie giggled nervously. ‘Wasn’t that someone nasty in Greek mythology?’
‘The ferryman of the dead,’ said Professor Gordon. ‘Just a macabre nickname, my dear. They have a droll sense of humour, the Katastrophans.’
They watched as a wizened old man in a filthy peaked cap clambered, wheezing, on to the jetty. He hawked and spat a couple of times, then began throwing everyone’s luggage down into the bilge water in the bottom of the boat. Glowing embers fell from his stinking cigarette and etched themselves into Diana Gordon’s Vuitton vanity case.
The prospect of putting out to sea in a decaying old rust bucket with a wheezing pensioner at the helm was not an appealing one. Nobody seemed keen except Professor Gordon, who was clearly eager to be off.
‘Damned outrage!’ blustered Ambrose Dobson, predictably. ‘Call that a ferry? It’s a blasted disgrace. So is the captain. I’m going nowhere in that wreck. I shall write a strong letter to the travel company, sue the blighters. Come away, Marjorie.’
Tim and Ellie simply clutched each other even tighter and waited to see what everyone else was going to do.
‘I take it you’ve been on this ferry before, Professor?’ said Jack.
‘Oh yes – many times. Safe as houses. Been coming here for years. It’s the flora, you see. There are plants on Katastrophos that you won’t find growing anywhere else in the world. Fascinating, don’t you think? Of course, my lovely wife doesn’t always come. She’s very much younger than me, as you can see. Prefers a bit of excitement, don’t you, old girl?’
‘You bet,’ drawled Diana, winking at Jack.
Old Charon began gesturing wildly at them to get on board. ‘Ghríghora!’ he screeched. ‘Hurry!’
Corrie looked uncertainly at Jack. If she wanted to spend her long-awaited honeymoon on Katastrophos, she had little choice.
‘Come on.’ Jack took her arm. ‘I’ll look after you if you look after me.’
Bracing themselves, they followed the Gordons down into the boat which rocked precariously. Tim and Ellie separated just long enough to climb in, then re-entwined anxiously. The Dobsons appeared to be having a heated debate on the quay during which she could be heard pleading, ‘Please, Ambrose.’ Then they too picked their way down the weed-slimy steps and into the boat.
The young Greek hippy who had been sitting, staring out to sea, stood up and walked briskly down the jetty. She threw her backpack into the boat, jumped nimbly down and settled herself on some cases of wine stacked up in the stern – as far away from everyone else as possible.
The old ferryman opened the throttle and the engine changed up an octave from a moaning wail to a high-pitched scream.
‘Oi! Wait for me!’ Another passenger came tearing along the jetty and flung himself and his bags headlong into the boat just as it was moving away. He staggered unsteadily to his feet, swayed a bit, then wriggled his behind into a gap between the Dobsons.
‘Evening all,’ he said cheerfully. ‘That was a close one.’
He had a smile that lit up not only his face, but a goodish part of the world around him, like a lighthouse.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ asked Marjorie, concerned. ‘You landed with a terrible wallop. You haven’t broken anything, have you?’
The newcomer peered anxiously into an airport carrier bag and checked the bottles. ‘No, it’s all right, love. Nothing’s broken.’ He rummaged in his pocket, pulled out a deck of business cards and handed them round. ‘Sidney Arthur Foskett. Master plumber. Anything from a dripping tap to a rat up your downpipe. Pleased to meet you.’
The engine belched a plume of oily smoke high up into the sky and next minute they were bucketing out of the harbour in an erratic zigzag, mainly because half the rudder was missing and Charon had let go of the wheel to light another fag. The old fishing-boat wobbled and dawdled across the dark-blue crescent of the harbour, through the narrow strait between the Oinousai islands and out into the open sea beyond. Somewhere out there, Corrie remembered, were the far lagoons where the Battle of Actium was fought and lost. The thud and swing of the open sea began to make itself felt.
‘Well, this is very jolly, I must say. We don’t normally have such good company, do we, Diana?’
Professor Gordon beamed at everyone over his half-moon spectacles like a benevolent scoutmaster rallying his troop. They were several miles out to sea and the swell was tossing the boat up and down like a roller-coaster. The professor turned to Sidney, who was an unfetching shade of green.
‘Have you been to Katastrophos before, old chap?’
‘No, squire, and I’m starting to wish I wasn’t going now.’ He put a hand over his mouth and gulped.
Corrie didn’t dare look at Jack. He got seasick just listening to the shipping forecast. Even the glamorous Diana looked a tad ruffled. Tim and Ellie were leaning over the side, still welded together, even while throwing up. Only Marjorie seemed calm, passing tissues to Ambrose who alternated between vicious defamation of the travel company and saying goodbye to his breakfast, lunch and tea. The young woman in the stern, whilst not physically sick, was clutching the rails and looking grimly at the horizon. Blithely oblivious to the angst going on around him, Professor Gordon took a paper bag out of his backpack and peered inside.
