Stephanie by Winston Graham
His daughter would never split an infinitive. It didn’t matter if she was crazed with grief and half-drunk. The way she had been taught a few simple English grammatical rules made it impossible. She might just as easily have written: ‘This is the hend. I can’t go hon.’
Henry would understand if it were pointed out to him. Perhaps few others. Some would be derisive. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he knew; and this conclusion – this certain knowledge – had saved him from even contemplating what Henry had feared he might contemplate. Stephanie’s peculiar handwriting was easy to imitate. Anne Vincent’s interference had spoiled a careful plan, which would have resulted in a simple verdict of suicide and no more reason to ask questions. By his testimony at the inquest, Errol Colton took the odium but escaped any suspicion of guilt.
James had not said anything about it to Henry. He had come to Corfu alone, and if the solution lay here Henry would know in good time.
The other note he carried was the typewritten one he had found in Errol’s photographic folder: The Boss says scrap numbers 22 and 49. At this time he wants no more links than need be. C.
Exhibits 22 and 49 were in his breast pocket. The front of a house, presumably in Corfu. James had thought of producing them to the manager last night, but overcaution had stopped him. He hoped to see and recognise for himself.
The sun was up now and its light reflected from the shimmering harbour. A motorboat scored a white scar on the polished surface. Too early to get up, but James rang down and ordered breakfast.
Pericles Anemoyannis turned up at ten, and it was soon clear that his English was not as good as the manager had promised. He was a heavily built dark-featured cheerful man who claimed to speak French better than English, but so guttural was his accent that James gave it up and relapsed into English.
Before they left the manager said, yes, he had found Elena Mavrogodatos, formerly Mrs Errol Colton. She had reverted to her maiden name and was living in Corfu Town. She worked nightly at a taverna called Tripas at Kinopiastes, a few miles south of the town.
‘Is it a good taverna?’
‘Not elegant, sair, but the best food in Corfu.’
‘Book me a table tonight, will you. And, Mr Grouas …’
‘Sair?’
‘Do you know of a man called Erasmus?’
An unidentifiable expression floated across the manager’s face. ‘I know of him. I knew of him. He lived in the extreme south of the island, beyond Lefkimi.’
‘Lived?’
‘I have not heard of him recently. It is perhaps so that he still lives there. It was his custom, I know, to come only for the summer.’
‘Would you ask Anemoyannis if he knows where it is, and that I want him to drive me there.’
‘Sair, he speaks English, as I have said.’
‘Tell him in Greek, will you, so I can be sure he understands.’
II
The road south from Corfu Town, if one doesn’t follow the coast, leads through the least developed, most primitive part of the island. The roads are equally undeveloped, giving a fair idea of what all the island was like before the intrusion of tourism. Pericles Anemoyannis took the inland road, and they bumped and jolted and twisted through tiny villages linked by orange groves and lemon groves and vineyards, with goats and stray dogs (all apparently of the same parentage) and chickens and donkeys disputing the right of way. But above all and omnipresent the olive trees, shouldering each other, bent and gnarled and of great age. Indeed, the further they progressed the more the olive tree took over, so that approaching Argirades one drove through groves of such antiquity that one could not imagine them having changed much since the days of the Angevins. Were these Roman soldiers, caught in the moment of agonising dissolution and turned in their contortions to wood and stone?
The age of a man was as nothing to trees such as this. Even less the life of a girl who died before she was twenty-two.
Beyond Lefkimi the countryside, which had lost its mountains some time ago, became flat and featureless with low-lying earth walls and a sense of desolation. Unerringly Pericles turned down a rough track, and after five bumpy minutes cheerfully drew up before double gates leading to a big low stone-built house overlooking the sea. As soon as he saw it James knew it was not the house he sought.
III
‘Mrs Colton?’
‘Yes? Georgios told me you wanted to see me.’
They were in the restaurant, a bare extension built on the side of a cottage; trestle tables, noise, clatter, mountains of appetising food banged down upon the tables, Greek white wine by the litre; it was quiet yet to what it would become.
‘My name is James Locke. I wonder if you have time for a word.’
‘Are you from England?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you want? Is it about my husband?’
‘Yes. I wished to ask you –’
‘He is dead, murdered; are you from the British police?’
She was a hard-faced young woman with a tight mouth, but her eyes, though unfriendly, were not unfeeling.
‘No, I’m not. Just a private individual. Your husband was friendly with my daughter.’
‘He would be.’
‘She died some weeks ago.’
She wrapped and unwrapped a coloured serving napkin about her wrist. ‘ What I want to know is what will happen to my daughter!’
‘How did he come to have custody of her?’
‘He paid me. His lawyer paid me monthly. A hundred pounds a month. But that agreement was made years ago. Prices have gone up.’
‘Perhaps his second wife will come to some arrangement.’
‘I am his only wife! That woman living with him is not his wife! I want my daughter back!’
‘How did your husband come to be associated with the drug trade?’
She blinked. ‘ What? What do you ask me? I do not know anything about his later life.’
‘Do you know a Mr Erasmus?’
‘Down in the south. Yes, I know him.’
‘I went to see him this morning.’
‘You would not find him. He has been away for a long time.’
‘His factory goes on.’
‘What factory?’
‘His house down there is used as a factory for processing olives. What else does it process?’
‘I do not know. Why do you not ask them?’
‘I did. There were a half-dozen workmen about but they pretended not to understand English – or French or German.’
‘Why should they pretend? This is Greece. Greek is our language.’
‘Do you know nothing about the factory? In a small island like this it must be difficult to keep secrets.’
She looked around at a group of ten who had just arrived and were noisily seating themselves.
‘I must go. I cannot stand here idling.’
‘Give me your home address. I will call on you tomorrow.’
‘I wish to have nothing more to do with you.’ She turned away.
‘One thing more,’ he said, and fumbled to produce the now creased photographs. ‘ Do you know this house?’
She stared at it. ‘I do not recognise it. It is not Corfu.’
‘Why do you say that?’
She said: ‘Go home, old man.’
IV
In the morning the taxi did not arrive. Anemoyannis, the manager said, had telephoned that he was unwell. They found another taxi outside the hotel, and the driver seemed to have a better grasp of English than Pericles. James showed him the photographs and he frowned and then grinned.
‘Paleokastritsa,’ he said.
‘Where is that?’
An expansive wave of the arm. ‘Up north. I will take you.’
As James settled in the taxi he thought of last night, when Elena Mavrogodatos had not come in again with the many good things set before him – food for a hearty man, no doubt, but of a high quality – nor was she to be seen waiting at any of the other ta
He did not ask for her home address, feeling sure he would have no difficulty in finding her if she lived in Corfu Town; but he doubted whether anything useful would come of another meeting. She had been unwilling to talk about the things he was interested in. (Not quite the barely hidden hostility he had met with at Mr Erasmus’s factory, but resentful and wary.) It was only his determination to grasp at every crumb which had taken him to see her in the first place. It had been distasteful to force himself to speak to her.
The country they were driving through was beautiful – Corfu being almost the only greenly wooded of the Greek islands – with delicious glimpses of a cobalt sea and towering cliffs as they approached the west coast. Paleokastritsa was one of the beauty spots and therefore a tourist attraction. Bronzed holidaymakers in shorts pedalled bicycles or buzzed by on mopeds. Three municipal buses crawled up the hill on their way to the other coast.
Abruptly, just before the steep descent into the village, the taxi turned off and went up a rutted road, stopped before barred gates with wire on the top. The driver got out and opened the door for James.
‘Here is.’
James pulled himself out and sticked his way to the barred gate. The house was now visible round a bend in the short drive.
‘There is,’ said the driver.
James gritted his teeth. This might be more like the photographs than yesterday’s specimen, but the colour of the stone was different and the trees not grouped aright.
He had thought Elena had been lying when she said the house was not on Corfu.
‘This is not it. Look? Look at the photographs.’ He thrust them at the driver, who frowned at them and lifted his cap to scratch his head.
‘Not this?’
‘Not this.’
‘Ah.’ The driver handed the photographs back and shrugged.
They stood in the Attic sunshine. A seagull drifted silently overhead. James wished he had never come. He wished that the years would roll back and that he and Stephanie and Teresa and Janet were here, all together again, pedalling hired bicycles down to the sand and the sea.
‘You like to go round island?’
‘No. Take me back to Corfu Town.’
Should have done this in the first place. Gone to the Information Office, seen some knowledgeable person – identified the bloody photographs or not. Not careering round the island in the company of idiot taxi drivers …
‘I take you back by Scripero? Eh? Little further. Few kilometres. Show you the eastern coast. Eh?’
James hauled himself into the car. So what? He was leaving tomorrow. Good riddance.
They set off back towards the central massif of the island, climbing away from the tourists and the bicycles and the scooters and the buses. It was warm in the car in spite of the open windows, and James found himself dozing off. He didn’t normally need a lot of sleep, but the cumulative effect of so many disturbed nights, the monstrous nature of the situation, the feeling of bitter disappointment brought him to the edge of consciousness.
He woke with a jerk of the car, peered over the sunlit groves and shouted: ‘ Stop! Stop! Stop!’
The driver obeyed him, looked round.
He had stalled his engine. Ahead of them in the sunny silence Pantokratos loomed. They were in the mountains.
‘That house,’ James said. ‘ Drive nearer.’
‘Not possible this side. No way. Fields. Look, I take you other side.’
They turned in a gate, watched by a little girl tending three wickedly bearded goats, in five minutes came round from a side road and bumped along a cart track laid with huge uneven stones. The car lurched and rattled, scattering smaller stones from under its tyres and came to a jolting stop before two ancient stone pillars which would not have looked out of place on the Acropolis. Beyond them, exactly identified by the position of the cypress trees, stood the house.
‘This is it! Look, it is plain to see!’
The driver studied the photos again and smiled and nodded.
‘Ne. That is so. So I find him for you, eh? After all?’
It is difficult in Mediterranean countries to be sure whether a house is in use, because shutters are always closed tight against the relentless sun; but this house did look unoccupied. Yet well kept. The grass lawn in front of the house was green and tidy and must have been watered daily.
James got out again, tottered a few steps inside the gates.
‘Where is the caretaker?’
The driver did not understand this word but presently broke into Greek with a sentence that sounded like Anatole Seferis.
‘Where is he? Take me to him.’ And then: ‘Do you know who this house belongs to?’
‘Ne,’ said the driver, nodding vigorously. ‘ Not here now. Not here yet. Englishman.’
‘What is his name?’
The driver scowled in an effort of recollection. ‘Milord. English milord. Sir Peter Brown.’
‘Brown? Do you – mean Brune?’
‘Ne,’ said the driver, nodding again. ‘Is so. This house. Sir Peter Brune.’
V
James put through a long telephone call to Colonel Henry Gaveston, who was entirely and absolutely incredulous, then he rang down to confirm his flight home tomorrow. The receptionist informed him that unfortunately because of a strike of the pilots of Olympic Airways there would be no Greek flights to London tomorrow.
James exploded, undignified and angry. The receptionist said she would do what she could and presently rang back to say that all she could offer him was one tourist seat, unexpectedly available, on a charter plane to Paris. It should get him to Charles de Gaulle Airport in time to catch an Air France flight, reaching Heathrow, with the adjustment of time, at 12.55. James told her to book it.
In the night James blamed himself for not going out to Tripas again to see if he could prise more information out of Elena. But there was an element of fatigue and fatalism in his feelings now. He knew anyway that the object of his mission had been partly if horribly accomplished.
Along with the two photographs of the house and the one of Stephanie and Errol on the balcony of their bungalow in Goa was a notebook he had carried with him ever since the inquest and the notes he had made directly after his meeting with Sir Humphrey Arden. With a good memory sharpened by bereavement – reinforced by frequent reading of the notes he had made – he remembered pretty well everything Humphrey had said.
‘There was this doctor in Edinburgh, I think it was March ’78. He was away for a couple of days, and the maid found his wife dead in bed just before he returned. His wife apparently drank a lot, but on this occasion she had taken a large quantity of sleeping pills. As it happened, they were Medanol tablets she took. Scotland was never my patch, but I was called in by the chap up there because there was one suspicious circumstance – a light bruising in the throat. He thought – and I agreed – that this could have been caused by thrusting, however gently, a rubber tube down into the stomach and so giving the woman a fatal dose of barbiturates.
‘The police decided to take a chance and charge the doctor. I don’t believe if he had stood firm they would have had a hope in hell of getting a conviction, but under persistent questioning he broke down and confessed the whole thing. Apparently he’d been having an affair with a patient and his wife had threatened to report him to the GMC. He picked his time carefully and came home when she wasn’t expecting him. He found her as he’d hoped, having just drunk enough to be a bit fuddled. He told her his affair with the other woman was over, and after a reconciliation he mixed her another gin. In this he slipped three much stronger barbitone tablets. The outcome of this would be that his wife would be yawning her head off in ten minutes and after half an hour would be out like a light. Get me?’
‘I get you very well.?
‘Well, apparently what this doctor did then was to break open the capsules – her own capsules – of Medanol – twenty, I believe he said – and mix them in a couple of glasses of dilute gin. He then passed the tube of a stomach pump into the victim’s mouth and very gradually down her gullet into her stomach. It’s a tricky operation but it’s done constantly in overdose cases. Difference is that in such cases a bruising of the throat is an acceptable part of the exercise. Here it was clearly not, and this gave him away. He’d been clever enough to add the containers afterwards, dissolving them in half an ounce or so of water – they’re red, you see, and stain the contents of the stomach and stomach wall. Without such staining the pathologist would at once have been suspicious. Then he left the house and was careful not to come home until after the maid had discovered the body next morning.’
‘Clever,’ James had said.
‘Very clever, but he fell at the last hurdle.’
James remembered there had been a roar of laughter from some men at the bar, and Sir Humphrey had winced and adjusted his hearing aid.
‘I very much hesitated to tell you this story, James. It is all the purest speculation, and the last thing I want to do is implant in your mind a suspicion – or indeed a certitude – where no certitude can exist. You suspect foul play, and that this man Errol Colton is responsible. I almost went away, preferring that you shouldn’t have this irrelevant story troubling your mind. I think it must be irrelevant for one very good reason.’
‘What is that?’
‘Colton is not a doctor. Only a skilled medical man could have successfully committed such a crime.’
‘And there was no bruising on my daughter’s throat?’
‘No. After you had rung me I rang Ehrmann and got a copy of his post-mortem report. I didn’t know quite what you were going to ask me, but it pretty certainly had something to do with the PM. There was no bruising of your daughter’s throat.’
At this point James remembered the noisy crowd at the bar had moved off, and sudden peace and silence fell, leaving the barman polishing glasses, and three other old men muttering in a far corner.