The Last Red Death (A Matt Wells Thriller) Read online

  And now Greece, after a quarter of a century. Was she up to it? The decision to return hadn’t been difficult to take when the time had come at last—she’d been turning it over in her mind ever since she’d become an adult—but she was still uncertain. Could she handle being back in the country where she’d seen her father murdered?

  A vision flashed before her of her father’s head being pulled back by the hair, the blade slicing across his throat to release a fine spray of crimson. And in that instant, as so often before, everything she had achieved in her life was nullified, turned to insubstantial shadow and smoke. However much she tried to get beyond it, his death continued to haunt her, to define her life. The only salvation was to find the man who had killed him. Not for anything as simplistic as revenge, though she sometimes wanted to wreak some awful physical retribution on the butcher. No, what she needed was the sense of an ending, the tying of a knot, a steel cap over the damped-down fires of her early life—and that would only be attained by hearing the man’s explanation of his actions; then she might at least have a chance of moving on.

  And then, maybe, she might finally be free to find a man, she thought, spreading her arms and legs across the king-size bed, a man who meant something. The only ones she’d ever known fell into two categories. There were the one-hour stands, the pick-ups who gave her brief moments of hungry fumbling and stifled release—there had been plenty of those over the years—but she was tired of the routine, the farewell fuck that tipped her into an abyss of dreamless sleep at the end of each tour in the jungle or the desert. And there were the carers, the guys who tried to bring her out of herself, apparently inspired only by the desire to help her. One was on her case now. She was sick of the pattern her emotional life had fallen into. There must be something more.

  Grace got up and went to the window. The multicoloured lights of the city were spread out all around like those of competing stalls in a vast fairground, the sound of the traffic—accelerating engines, brakes and horns, the angry shouts of drivers and pedestrians—carried up on the caustic air. The place was a madhouse, she thought. What was she doing here? There were over three million people in this conurbation alone. How was she going to find a guy with a false name who’d disappeared into the night twenty-five years ago?

  At least she had enlisted someone to help her. Alex Mavros’s slim figure in leather jacket and jeans appeared before her. He was as Greek as any Athenian male, but his dual heritage gave him something else, a hint of the alien north in the Mediterranean city. With his long hair and unshaven face, he didn’t look like an investigator. But there was something about him that reassured her, a reservoir of calm beneath the driven exterior. He gave the impression that he knew what he was doing, and his caution about how to proceed with the case struck her as pretty smart.

  Then there were his eyes. She’d noticed them the first time they met, in his apartment when the crazy woman had laid into him with her fists. The right one blue and perfect, the left one drizzled with flecks of brown. She’d never seen such a thing before, apart from rock stars who affected contact lenses that didn’t match. For some reason, Alex’s eyes had provoked a kindred feeling in her. Maybe it was because she had recognised him subconsciously as an outsider like herself, a pariah living on the margins of conventional society. She smiled. Or maybe she just had the hots for him.

  The telephone on the glass-covered table rang. She looked at her watch. The prearranged call was never missed. But before she could put the receiver to her ear, an over-amplified orchestra of sirens began to play along the street below.

  When Grace looked down, it took her a couple of seconds to work out that the bright red patch that had suddenly appeared on her free hand was a rose petal. It must have dropped from the single rose she’d been given with the hotel’s compliments.

  Welcome to Athens.

  Mavros had left Grace Helmer outside her hotel, having promised to call her in the morning with a detailed plan of action. She’d insisted on accompanying him everywhere he went on the case, which he wasn’t keen on but was prepared to go along with at least temporarily. After all, she was paying. Usually clients who clung like limpets let go after a day or two, finding the legwork and the repeated questions that made up the investigator’s day more tedious than filling out a tax return. Right now he was still on the job, even though he’d told Grace he was going home. The lead she’d given him about the song ‘The Voyage of the Argo’ had made him want to find out more about the poet who’d written the lyrics, and he knew who could give him a detailed character sketch of the old man.

  ‘Mother?’ he called, after he had turned the key in the lock and found his progress barred. He was relieved to find that she’d followed his advice to apply the security chain in the evening, though the downside was that it was harder to get to her if anything happened inside the flat.

  He heard tentative footsteps and waved his hand through the gap.

  ‘Alex,’ said Dorothy, as she opened up. ‘How nice.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘If unexpected.’

  Mavros caught the hint of disapproval. Although she spent her life trying to get him to call round, she liked to manage her timetable. ‘Sorry. I’m not disturbing you, am I?’

  ‘Of course not, dear,’ she said, linking her arm in his as she led him into the saloni. Her desk was heaped with open volumes, a typescript in two uneven piles in the centre. The radio was playing softly in the background—Dorothy always had the classical channel on when she was working. ‘I’m just starting to read a book I was given by a man I first met in the sixties. Do you remember Geoffrey Dearfield? I wish he’d bought himself a computer. He must have used the same typewriter he had when he was a young man.’

  ‘Dearfield?’ Mavros said. ‘The English guy who was in the mountains during the war?’

  Dorothy sat down on the sofa and beckoned to him to join her. ‘That’s right. He was in the Special Operations Executive, fighting the Germans and Italians, and then he was some kind of military adviser to the government forces during the civil war.’

  Mavros had a dim recollection of the man. ‘Wasn’t he an MP in the U.K.?’

  His mother nodded. ‘In the fifties, yes. But he came back here permanently after that. His wife’s Greek. He’s written what he calls a “polemical memoir”. If it lives up to that description the lawyers will have to read every line, even though most of the protagonists will be dead now.’ She shook her head. ‘You know how sensitive people are about their family name in this country.’

  Mavros raised an eyebrow. ‘What would the old man think of you publishing a book by an ex-British officer? Those liaison guys weren’t exactly friendly towards the Left.’

  Dorothy gave him a sharp glance. ‘Your father was many things, but he wasn’t a bigot. If Geoff’s book adds to our knowledge about those terrible times, I’ll bring it out without a trace of guilt.’

  Mavros opened his hands in submission. ‘All right, all right. I’m no fan of censorship.’ He sat back and ran his fingers across his forehead. ‘God, those bloody wars. Everything seems to lead back to them. The Colonels all fought in them, didn’t they?’

  Dorothy turned to look at him, her own brow furrowed. ‘What are you talking about?’

  He told her about ‘The Voyage of the Argo’, how the song had cropped up in a case, without mentioning Grace and her father. ‘Remember how Andonis used to play it during the dictatorship and you used to turn down the volume?’

  His mother looked stricken. ‘Yes, I remember. But what’s that song got to do with the occupation and the civil war? Oh, I see. Kostas Laskaris wrote the lyric.’

  ‘He was in the resistance. And in the Democratic Army during the civil war in the late forties.’

  ‘He was,’ Dorothy agreed. ‘Poor man. He suffered terribly. Your father knew him, of course. They were in the concentration camp on Makronisos together after the final defeat.’

  Mavros had a flash of the narrow island off the coast of Attiki, one of several
used to confine left-wing prisoners. Many had died on its arid slopes. ‘You knew Laskaris too, didn’t you? After they were released.’

  ‘Yes, your father and I saw him occasionally when he came up from that old tower he was renovating in the Mani. They fell out about the Party’s policies in the sixties, I think.’ She sighed. ‘And now he’s dying, I’m sure of it. His eyes were restless and he’s losing the fight. I’d like to—’ She broke off as Mavros made a movement with his hand and went closer to the radio.

  ‘…normal programming to bring our listeners an emergency news report,’ came the excited tones of the announcer. ‘There has been an explosion inside the Megaro Mousikis during this evening’s performance of Verdi’s Macbeth. It is not yet known how many people have been injured. Police and firefighters are…’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Dorothy said. ‘Oh, my God.’ She was staring at her son, her features twisted in horror. ‘Anna and Nondas—they were going to the opera tonight. Oh, my God, Alex.’

  Mavros was already pressing buttons on his mobile phone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE Fat Man had been in his bedroom listening to a football match on the radio. The illicit card table he held every evening in the café had finished early because the players had run out of cash. He didn’t care—he’d already taken his cut and they’d be back tomorrow. That would be their last chance until after Christmas as he was leaving for a week in the Peloponnese with his mother. Maybe it would do his soul good to stop making money for a while. If the comrades found out how much he had in his bank account, they’d want most of it for Party funds. No chance. Karl Marx would have understood, he knew how the market worked, though Lenin and the megalomaniac Stalin wouldn’t have been so forgiving. So what? He was a Greek first and then a Communist. And Greeks were born individualists, weren’t they? They’d never taken well to authority.

  ‘Yiorgo?’ his mother called from downstairs. ‘Come and help me. Now.’

  He raised his eyes to the ceiling. Although Greeks might think they were individualists, they had to operate within the close confines of family, Communists included. He’d tried to shake off the coils, but after his father had died on the prison island in the sixties, he had known he was stuck with the old woman for life. Kyra Fedhra was now in her eighties. All day she’d been working in the kitchen of the two-storey apartment prior to their departure for the south. The Pandazopoulos family had moved to the central district of Neapolis from their mountain village before the war. He had grown up in the streets around the hill of Strephi, an overweight lump even during the famine years of the occupation because of his mother’s devotion. His father, Vladhimiros, was a hardliner who had been a commissar during the war and had paid for it, then and afterwards. Yiorgos had run errands for the Party as an adolescent, had worked in the lower echelons of the banned organisation until the dictatorship fell, but in the last decade he had begun to drift away. The comrades had almost given up on him, regarding his café as a capitalist tourist trap, which showed how infrequently any of them visited it.

  Yiorgos got up from his bed and lumbered downstairs.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ his mother said. ‘I’ve been waiting for hours. Fetch me down those oven pans. I’m going to make a baklava for our relatives in the village.’

  ‘Now?’ the Fat Man said, looking at his watch. ‘Didn’t the doctor say you should be in bed by ten?’

  ‘Never mind him,’ Kyra Fedhra said dismissively. ‘What does he know? Besides, I’ve been so busy with other things that I haven’t made your galaktoboureko yet.’ She gave her son a sharp look. ‘And where would your customers be without their morning treat?’

  Yiorgos handed her the pans and rapidly withdrew. As usual, the old woman was right. He’d have a riot on his hands if he didn’t have a pastry for his regulars—Kyra Fedhra’s delicacies were renowned among the market traders and the Flea Market con men who drank their coffee in his place every morning. Alex Mavros wouldn’t be impressed either.

  As he heaved his bulk back upstairs, the café owner thought about his friend. What the devil was the madman doing? No one talked about Iason Kolettis—no one spoke that name if they had a brain in their head. There were some things that the Party had always managed to keep secret and he was sure that had remained one of them. Otherwise the authorities and the press would have been on Kolettis’s trail years ago. But Alex wasn’t to know. He’d only been a kid when the name was first used, and even when the Iraklis group was operating at full throttle, he had been little more than a pimply student. But, Christ and the Mother of God, where had he picked it up? The only people who knew about the butcher were the comrades, and not many of them were in on the secret. After the madman had split from the Party, security had been as tight as a cat’s arse. Alex had better keep his head down.

  The Fat Man pricked up an ear as another goal went in. He wasn’t particularly interested in the game, but the noise kept his mother at bay—she hated football with a passion. He felt worms of unease twisting in his gut. One related to his decision not to report Alex’s use of the name to the Party, despite the unwritten but firm order issued years ago about that. Leaving aside his years of friendship with Alex, he had too much respect for the memory of Spyros Mavros to bring down the wrath of the comrades on his son’s head. But that wasn’t all. A bigger worm was squirming around, a worm of guilt. He should have told Alex: he was entitled to know. Every day of his life his friend was haunted by the unburied shade of his brother. But that evening Yiorgos had remembered a rumour that Andonis Mavros had once had dealings with the man who called himself Iason Kolettis. What would that do to Alex? What would the consequences be if he started to dig out that filthy pit?

  There was a break in the radio transmission, the gabbled commentary suddenly replaced by a more officious voice. Marx and the martyrs, what next? Some crazy fool had tried to blow up the opera.

  *

  Mavros got the messaging service on both Anna and Nondas’s mobiles. He called their home number and heard the voice of their usual teenage babysitter, one of his brother-in-law’s nieces. As far as she knew, they had gone to the opera as planned. She clearly hadn’t heard the emergency news bulletins, so Mavros left her in the dark to avoid panic. He cut the connection and turned to his mother. Her face was pale and her eyes wide.

  ‘Look, I’m going down to the concert hall,’ he said, touching her arm. ‘The emergency number will be jammed and my contacts in the police won’t be much use so soon after the event. I need to be on the spot.’ He squeezed briefly, feeling bone beneath the slack muscles. ‘Don’t worry. The chances are they’re fine. I’ll ring as soon as I can.’ He ran to the door.

  And ran all the way down the flank of Lykavittos to the wide avenue, his ears filled with the wail of sirens and the burgeoning hubbub of traumatised people. As he approached the concert hall, the mass of humanity on the pavements increased, off-duty police personnel vying with curious onlookers. Turning on to Vasilissis Sophias, he saw a dense crowd outside the building, the road on that side blocked to traffic by fire engines and other emergency vehicles.

  ‘What happened?’ a middle-aged man asked.

  His companion shrugged, striding ahead with an avid expression. ‘I heard it was a bomb. Lunatic terrorists.’

  ‘It’s Iraklis, you can be sure of that,’ put in a raddled woman, with mascara-laden eyelashes.

  Mavros pushed on through the press of humanity. Greeks were not known for their reticence when it came to accidents and crime scenes. He was struck that people were already assuming that the long-extinct terrorist group was responsible. If nothing else, that showed how easy it was to manipulate opinion; a piece of olivewood left on the victim in Piraeus and there you were—resurrection.

  The police had erected barriers on the pavement, bulky operatives in riot gear lined up behind. Since the incident had happened in the middle of the embassy district, it hadn’t taken the much-despised MAT riot-control units long to appear. Mavros considered flashin
g his private-investigator’s card, but dismissed the idea. All that would do was draw attention. Better to see if he could spot someone he knew in authority.

  ‘Alex!’ came a male voice to his right.

  He peered through the crush of bodies and made out the tall figure of Lambis Bitsos. He thrust himself into the mêlée.

  ‘They won’t let me in,’ the crime reporter complained when Mavros reached him. ‘Arseholes! Even the press has to wait on this side while they clear the building.’ He stared into the eyes of the riot-control officer in front of him. ‘This is a free country, isn’t it? There is freedom of the press here, isn’t there?’

  Mavros watched as the policeman’s eyes narrowed behind the wire face-guard of his helmet. In the old days those questions would have earned Bitsos a truncheon in the belly, but the MAT were more circumspect now. There were several camera crews in the vicinity.

  He stood on tiptoe, trying to pinpoint Anna and Nondas. There was a large huddle of people on the road in front of the Megaro, their clothes rumpled and their faces slack with shock. None seemed to be injured, though they were being tended by paramedics, who were handing out blankets. The flow of the audience coming out of the building was weakening and it struck Mavros that there would be several emergency exits. His sister and brother-in-law could be anywhere around the large concrete box.

  Then, above the scream of the sirens and the shouts of the onlookers, he heard his mobile ring. Fumbling to receive the call, he heard a voice he knew. ‘Alex?’

  ‘Nonda? Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, don’t worry.’ There was a jumble of sounds in the background. ‘We’re both fine. We got out the back way. Anna called your mother and discovered that you were coming down. Where are you?’