27

THE AFFAIR

When Forrester woke the next morning the bed beside him was empty and the sun was high.

He was still lying there, looking up at the pattern of light on the ceiling and letting the tumultuous events of the previous day run through his mind, when Sophie appeared with breakfast on a tray. He smiled, took a deep gulp of the strong, milky coffee, and listened as she told him what was going on in the rest of the house.

She herself had been awoken by a cry of distress from the main bedroom and had gone in to find Penelope Alexandros almost literally tearing out her hair, a note from her husband crumpled on the bed. Sophie had tried in vain to calm her but Penelope had rushed out of the house, gazed in anguish down at the harbour, and then rushed up the path into the woods.

Then as the news of Alexandros’s departure reached the monastery, Giorgios Stephanides appeared, still heavily bandaged, and it was clear the General’s defection had shaken him to the core. Pulling a rucksack over his shoulder, he went into the woods after Penelope.

Inspector Kostopoulos denounced the General angrily, claimed that his departure was a slur on his, Kostopoulos’s honour, and promptly departed for Athens on the boat that had brought him and his military escort.

Durrell had been almost equally appalled at Alexandros’s departure. The British government had a strong interest in Greece remaining a democracy and the news of Alexandros’s decision to join the communists had to be conveyed to London as soon as possible. Forrester and Sophie reached the quayside as Runcorn and Durrell made the boat ready and Helena Spetsos chivvied them impatiently.

“Are we going to wait all day? Or are we going to go after him?”

“We can go after him as soon as you like,” said Ariadne Patrou, “but we will not catch him if he does not want to be caught, and I don’t think he does.” Venables was already on the bridge, and gave Forrester an ironic, slightly melancholy salute as he caught his eye.

“Do you really think Alexandros is going to make such a difference?” said Forrester as he helped Durrell and Runcorn cast off the lines.

“I’m afraid so,” said Durrell. “I very much fear that what’s happened on this little island in the last few days is the beginning of a terrible disaster for millions of people.”

And with that, the last line was cast off and the minesweeper curved out into the bay.

* * *

Sophie wanted to go to look for Penelope, but Giorgios Stephanides came down to the kastello later that morning to say he had found her and she did not want to see anyone. From the hints he dropped it seemed she was roaming through the woods, maddened by her loss, and as soon as he had gathered some supplies he was going back to be with her until calm had returned. Forrester could not help thinking she had become one of the maenads of old, and felt a secret relief that he and Sophie did not have to try to calm the distraught woman.

Convincing Yanni Patrakis that the hunt for Kretzmer was over and the issue between them resolved took some time, and it was not until the Cretan had personally visited the monastery infirmary and inspected the pale, weak German for himself that he was convinced Forrester and Sophie were finally safe from their enemy. He said very little to Kretzmer but examined the stone with great interest.

Yanni did not leave the island straightaway, however: it seemed that amidst all the events of the past few days, he had come across a comely widow from Limani Sangri, and decided to stay on for a while to see how things developed. Besides, he told Forrester, the fishing in that vicinity was very good, and with few boats around the size of his, there was very little competition.

For the next few days Forrester and Sophie spent most of their time at the monastery, Sophie assisting Brother Thersites in nursing Kretzmer back to health, and Forrester working with him on their first tentative attempts to relate the hieroglyphs on one face of the stone with the mysterious Minoan script on the other.

Not entirely to his surprise, Forrester found the German’s almost feverish intensity both stimulating and challenging. It was as if the physical battle between them had been transformed into a mental contest in which the enemy now was those ancient and impenetrable symbols.

But absorbing and satisfying though this was, Forrester was troubled. It was not just the fact that as a result of Atreides being identified as the killer Alexandros had given his backing to a cause Forrester believed would be disastrous not just for Greece but for all southern Europe. It was also the fact that his instincts told him there was something deeply flawed about the evidence that had convicted the royal cousin.

To calm his mind, and as a respite from the intense intellectual effort on the stone, Forrester took long walks across the island. He passed through the grove many times and examined the fallen shrine again and again. He went back to Bohemond’s castle with the diagrams that he, Yanni and Sophie had created, and retraced his steps on the day that Keith Beamish was shot. None of this activity proved that Atreides could not have been behind both the collapse of the shrine or the shooting at the castle, but all of it reinforced his growing conviction that there was something very skewed about the official verdict.

Several times as he walked the island, trying to tug aside this mental curtain, he had sensed the presence of someone watching him, and was almost certain it was Penelope Alexandros. But he had as little appetite for meeting her as she apparently had for meeting him.

And then came Kretzmer’s bombshell. He did not intend it as a bombshell. The remark came quite casually, as they were taking a break from considering a Minoan symbol, and concerned a certain Major Heinz Baumann, whom Kretzmer had met on the Eastern Front.

The major had, he told Kretzmer in the midst of a particularly vicious bombardment, been the commandant of a small Greek island earlier in the war, where he had been persuaded to go easy on the islanders by a gravely beautiful woman of much local influence with whom he had had a torrid affair. Kretzmer did not know either the name of the island or the Greek seductress, but Sophie came into the room as he was finishing his story, and almost dropped the tray she was carrying.

Afterwards, as she and Forrester walked back to the kastello, she said, “That was what Penelope was talking about. That night when she talked to me at the lookout.”

“What?” said Forrester. “I don’t understand.”

“She was talking about sacrifices,” said Sophie. “Sacrifices women have to make during wars. Sacrifices she’d had to make to keep the islanders safe. Sacrifices men wouldn’t understand.”

“You think she was the woman Baumann was talking about?”

“I’ve no idea. It doesn’t matter. But I’m sure she was referring to exactly the same situation.”

“You mean that she slept with one of the German commandants here? To protect the island?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. She wanted to talk about it, but she couldn’t.”

Forrester stared at her. “Blackmail,” he said. “Somebody knew what had happened and was blackmailing her.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Sophie.

“Blackmailing her to say that Atreides had gone into the castle before Keith Beamish was shot.”

“Yes.”

They sat down on a patch of turf overlooking the village.

“What about Socrates?” said Forrester. “He testified that he smelt the explosive on Atreides. Why would he lie?”

“To protect her.”

“Of course,” said Forrester. “He must have known about her and the German commandant. Whoever was blackmailing Penelope approached him and said that unless he denounced Atreides, the truth about what had happened during the war would come out. And of course he would have done anything to make sure Alexandros didn’t find out, whatever lies he had to tell.”

Sophie’s face darkened. “Does that mean whoever was doing the blackmailing was the killer?”

Forrester considered. “I think it does,” he said at last.