Because Paphos is a British outpost, not an American one, there are fewer posh designer stores than you might expect to find. Lots of full English breakfasts, lots of places to buy souvenirs, lots of jewelry stores where you can buy loose diamonds to hide inside your toothpaste where customs agents won’t find them; not as much Gucci or Versace.
They do however have a mall every bit as boring as a typical mall in Kansas, and there one can, with effort, find decent shoes. Which is what I was doing when who should I run into but Cyril Kiriakou.
‘Mr Mitre!’ he said as I emerged from the Aldo store with a passable Wiellaford loafer and three pairs of socks. ‘I was shopping for my wife’s birthday, and I run into you.’
‘Yes. What an amazing coincidence.’
‘It is, it is,’ he said, nodding along. ‘Especially so since I wished to speak with you.’
‘Oh? About your murder case? I imagined that was either solved or, perhaps, put on the shelf.’
He shook his head very slightly and met my gaze. ‘Murder is never put on the shelf.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Nor is attempted murder. Even breaking and entering is taken seriously. Shall we go to Costa and have a coffee?’
It was a short walk, half a mall’s length, to the food court where I was assaulted by the aromas of my one-time home: Burger King and Taco Bell. The walk was just long enough for me to run through the possibilities, which came down to two: either I was being tailed, and professionally so; or Kiriakou had a GPS tracker on my car. Which would not be a good thing.
We ordered and took a table ‘outside’, meaning in the mall.
‘So, how is it going?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘Perhaps I should ask you.’
‘You’re the policeman, I’m just a writer.’
‘Indeed. Yes. Just a writer. Then, as a writer you may find it interesting that we have suffered something of a crime wave lately. There was quite a dramatic scene at the Aphrodite’s Conch hotel. It seems a knife fight broke out in an elevator, if you can believe it.’
‘Huh. Was anyone hurt?’
His eyes went to my bandaged hand. Then to the bruise on the side of my jaw. Then up to me, eyes merry and sly. ‘It seems someone was. Our forensics team had quite a time collecting blood samples. The inside of the elevator car was smeared with blood.’
‘DNA?’ Eyebrows up in anticipation.
‘Eventually. For now we have numerous eyewitnesses, some of them from the elevator itself. Of course we showed them … what is the term of art? Six packs, yes? Six photos, some of people known to be innocent, some of known criminals.’
‘Any luck?’ I knew the answer. I knew what was coming next. But I was curious about how he’d lay it out for me, how he would build his case. I’d have been more afraid but he wasn’t here to arrest me, he was ‘fronting’ me, poking me with a stick to see what I said or did.
‘Well, a very interesting thing. Purely as a joke, you understand, one I thought might amuse you, I inserted a photo of you.’
‘Really? A flattering one, I hope.’
He tilted his head, amused by me. ‘Surprisingly there are very few photos of you. The official photo you use, it seems, is a stock photo.’
I shrugged. ‘I’m a private person.’
‘There are photos of you at book signings, but it is fascinating how few of those are usable shots showing your full face. Nevertheless …’
‘If you dig deep enough in Google Images …’
‘… I was able to have my little joke and insert a photo of you.’
He waited. I waited. We looked at each other. This was the moment where he expected me to lie. If I lied, he’d know. If I lied, he’d produce his trump card, presumably GPS from my … And then I remembered: we’d gone in Delia’s car, not mine.
‘I hope your witnesses did not pick me out,’ I said.
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah, I mean I hope they ID’d the guy you’re looking for.’ I managed with Herculean effort to squeeze out a confident smirk.
‘Well … as it happens no one accidentally identified you. Or any of the other mug shots.’
There were definite quotation marks around that word, accidentally. He’d expected to identify me. He’d been hoping to.
‘Huh,’ I said, oozing sympathy, ‘it’s funny how people in a lift with a stabby dude don’t recall faces.’
‘Indeed. I see that you have injured yourself.’
‘Got that right, Cyril, I cut the shit out of my hand.’ I held it up as proof that I did indeed have a hand, and that said hand was in fact bandaged. ‘I slipped in the shower. Hand went right through the glass door and managed to smack my head on the side of the sink stand as I was going down.’
Go ahead and check, asshole, you’ll find the glass shower door is shattered. You’ll find traces of my blood on some of the glass, which I swept up and bagged but did not put out for the weekly collection. Because I didn’t just fall off the back of a turnip truck, pal, I am a professional and it’ll take more than some bent yokel cop to ever catch me out on an alibi. None of which I said.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he said at last. ‘Did you see a doctor?’
I shrugged. ‘Nah. No need. I put in a couple stitches myself. Some Neosporin. It’ll be fine.’
‘You stitched your own hand?’ He made a disgusted face and winced, which I sympathized with.
‘Painful as hell, too, but I can handle pain – with a bit of help from whisky.’
‘I salute you,’ he said with all the sincerity of a tobacco company spokesman. ‘It is a week for blood, it seems. Blood in a hotel elevator, blood on a second-floor balcony in Limassol. I have ordered DNA testing to see if perhaps there is a match.’
I was almost insulted by that because he said it with an understated but definite leer, a got-you-now look. In recent years, technology has come online that allows DNA testing in a few hours. But as a practical matter the turnaround for DNA testing tends to be expressed in days if not weeks, and I was pretty sure Cyprus, a country that bought signs warning of speed cameras but no actual speed cameras, had not invested in the latest DNA tech.
I nodded. ‘Maybe you’ll catch the guy. That would be pretty definitive, matching blood samples from two locations. Excellent sleuthing, Cyril. But I don’t see the connection to your murder.’
‘Have you been to Limassol?’ he inquired innocently. ‘It’s very different from Paphos.’
‘I was there just yesterday evening,’ I said.
That disappointed him. ‘Business?’
‘Curiosity. I wanted to see it. And as it happened, I met a woman and … well, we had a nice time.’
‘This woman …’
I was morally certain now that he had a GPS tracker on my car and was dying to spring that on me. But of course I had parked a good quarter of a mile from Tatiana’s house. He could put me in Limassol – conceded. He could put me in the right neighborhood. But the beautiful thing was that his own GPS data would place me well away from the breaking and entering. He had needed me to lie about being in Limassol.
Nice try.
I leaned forward and lowered my voice. ‘We spent some time at her apartment. And the embarrassing thing is I don’t even remember her name, let alone where we ended up.’ I made the universal sign for drinking. ‘I was a bit … confused, shall we say?’
‘Perhaps you entered the address in your car’s guidance?’
‘No, she had me follow her. Very twisty-turny.’
He smiled for himself alone, shook his head bemusedly and changed the subject. ‘I see you’ve been shopping.’
‘I have. I’ve been invited to a gala tonight and found I had no proper dress shoes.’
‘The Feed the Forgotten gala? I suppose they know you as a famous author.’
I glided over the implication that there might be some other way to know me, and said, ‘Actually, someone from the movie is staying downstairs from me and was kind enough to invite me. I’m afraid midlist crime novelists don’t rank very high where Hollywood folks are concerned.’
We made some more polite noises and parted with a handshake. I had the distinct feeling that my pal Cyril was frustrated. I went into the men’s room, hid in a stall for a few minutes and came back out. Then, with my Aldo bag in hand, very much the casual shopper, I spotted Kiriakou and tailed him at a discreet distance. I followed him around Carrefour as he picked up batteries and a pack of mechanical pencils. Then back out into the mall, walking with purpose, presumably heading for his car. He stopped suddenly at Marasil, a kid’s clothing store, and I had the terrible sense that he was searching the display window for my reflection. Had he spotted me?
But after a moment’s hesitation, he went into the store and emerged ten minutes later with a shopping bag. And then went to his car.
I drove home with my new shoes, parked and slithered beneath the hot engine. It took a couple of minutes to find the Spark Nano tracker up behind the muffler. It’s a good device that retails for $129.99 but can be found on sale for $79.99. I’ve used them on occasion. I decided to leave it in place for now: evidence jiu-jitsu, using the force of the enemy’s attack against him.
I went inside and found Delia and Chante sitting on my terrace drinking my wine and chatting amiably, an activity I’d never imagined Chante to be capable of.
Chante was fetching in a tailored dark gray suit, the sort of thing you wear to apply for a job, but with a pale-yellow silk blouse it was not eye-catchingly drab. Delia wore a blue dress with an enticing slit, and a short matching jacket.
‘Well, aren’t I the lucky one?’ I said. ‘I get to escort not one but two gorgeous women.’