She glanced at me, then turned to her boyfriend. ‘That’s so sad. I wonder what happened.’
The boyfriend lowered his voice. ‘Seventy-two was one of the darkest times in our history. The junta controlled Greece and thousands went missing. Martial law, torture, executions . . . nobody wants to talk about it.’
‘Good grief! That’s not so long ago.’ From her accent, I figured the girl must be a British student. ‘I’ve got my dad’s record collection from the seventies – Elton John, Michael Jackson, Queen. Hard to believe stuff like that was going on here, in Europe, at the same time. It’s a bit close to home, don’t you think?’
I studied the handsome youth. He bore a resemblance to the man I married, with his shoulder-length dark hair, intense brown eyes with flecks of gold and strong, lean body. I had loved – still loved – him passionately. I touched my throat, longing to explain how brave and noble my husband had been. How he’d suffered for his country and its people, always putting them before himself.
Leaning back in my seat, I closed my eyes, and allowed my imagination to flesh out the bare bones of my memories. Images from my past returned with great joy and great pain.
CHAPTER 1
ZOË
London, present day.
ZOË JOHNSON WOKE ON A damp pillow, clutching at a dream as it slipped away.
Her first thought was: Megan, where are you?
She flipped her pillow. The touch of cool cotton against her cheek brought her back to reality. A simple trick to stop the terrible lurch towards soul-destroying thoughts of what if . . .
Her throat ached; she was coming down with a bout of acute sadness. The duvet held her in a half nelson, tempting her to submit and stay in bed. She closed her eyes, reminded herself she was due in court later and pulled herself out of bed.
After slipping into her robe and slippers, she headed towards an ordinary day. Two aspirins and a caffeine hit should help improve her mood.
After seven months of worry, her search for her daughter Megan had nowhere to go. In the month after she had run away, leaving nothing but a note behind, Zoë’s heart had leaped with every phone ring or door knock – but this had changed recently. Coping, people called it. Coming to terms. But how could they possibly understand a mother’s turmoil when she didn’t know the whereabouts of her teenage daughter?
Zoë sighed, and tried to dampen the emotions fired up at the sight of the date on her phone.
She recalled the explosion of joy, on a rainy Wednesday morning exactly seventeen years ago, when Megan had drawn her first breath. Each year that followed, Megan had closed her eyes and scrunched her face with the seriousness of a birthday wish. Sixteen birthday cakes. Zoë remembered them all. Teletubbies, Pingu, Peppa Pig . . . They had sliced through colourful fondant together, Zoë’s hands over Megan’s, the knife big in her child’s dimpled fists.
Zoë hugged herself, wishing she had held her daughter more often in the last few years. Knowing that teenagers wanted freedom, not cuddles, she had stood back, her heart bursting with love and pride.
Now she paused in the kitchen, tears itching, Megan’s seventeenth birthday filling the day. Another cake, red-and-white-iced L-plates on chocolate fondant, awaited collection at the bakery. Her birthday gift would be driving lessons.
If Megan came home.
She had to come home today.
Zoë tried to think of happier things, and cast her mind back to this time last year. The day after Megan’s birthday, they’d set off for Crete. It was their last holiday as a family, just weeks before Frank’s election campaign. Just months before Megan disappeared.
They’d cycled through traditional villages, enjoyed the company of locals in ethnic kafenia, and joined in the Greek dancing. They had planned their vacation to coincide with Greek Easter, as that year it fell within the British school holidays, knowing that Megan would love the local processions, bonfires and fireworks of Crete’s greatest four-day festival. Even thirteen-year-old Josh was determined to make the most of the holiday. Walking the Samaria Gorge was something Zoë would never forget.
*
At the edge of a dull plateau, the Samaria Gorge started with astonishing suddenness. They were faced by a great cleft opening right before their brand-new hiking boots. Across the way, in spitting distance (as Frank so elegantly put it), rose the gaunt face of Mount Gingilos. Megan picked up a pebble and hurled it at the mountain and Zoë squealed, fearing she would lose her balance and fall into the deep canyon. At 6 a.m. the freezing air had them bellowing steam like angry bulls.
‘Come on, let’s get going before it gets too hot,’ Zoë said, her voice echoing in the stillness, over a thousand metres above sea level.
They gripped the handrails and started down log steps, zigzagging to the base of the gorge. Half an hour later, they drank cold water from a spring and admired the view, then followed a stream that gushed and gurgled through lush vegetation. The air warmed; butterflies and dragonflies chased each other over wild flowers that fringed the brook. Hours later, they stopped to bathe their hot feet in icy water, Megan and Josh splashing each other, children again in the privacy of the canyon. Two of the national park’s wardens, hardened hikers, had passed, reminding them to fill in a questionnaire at the end of the trek. Then the four of them were alone.
Zoë needed the loo, and the constant sound of running water didn’t help. The guidebook told of a WC in the abandoned village of Samaria, a couple of kilometres ahead, but she couldn’t wait.
‘Need a wee,’ she called to Frank and the kids, the words echoing embarrassingly around her. ‘Don’t wait, I’ll catch you up!’
She scrambled towards the wall of the canyon and noticed a cave almost entirely covered by a pink-flowering oleander bush. What a blessed relief to hide behind the shrub and relieve herself in relative privacy. With her shorts around her ankles, she glanced into the grotto, and was suddenly startled to see a pair of amber eyes staring back.
My God! Someone’s watching me!
‘Do you mind looking the other way?’
The culprit was probably an illegal camper who had stayed overnight in the gorge.
The eyes continued to stare. Zoë felt her stomach turn. She had an intense feeling of danger – no, not exactly danger, more like powerful evil.
‘Frank!’ she yelled. ‘Megan! Josh!’
The eyes jerked back into the dark interior. Zoë dragged her shorts up and felt around the ground for her rucksack, never taking her stare from the murky depths of the cave.
This was a mistake.
She snatched hold of a vicious thistle. The thorns drove deep into her palm.
‘Ouch!’
The moment she took her eyes away from the cave he rushed out, straight at her.
Zoë fell onto her back and lay there, stunned, like a dead bird in the road. In an instant his thickset body was over her, eyes fierce, breath snorting from his flared nostrils. The largest pair of ribbed horns she had ever seen turned back from his enormous head. They were curled almost into a circle, a metre across. She stared into his blazing old-gold eyes; the rectangular pupils were satanic, and at the same time hypnotic. Hardly breathing, she kept perfectly still. He took another step, his cloven hoofs clacking on the rock. He sniffed the air between them, then made a deliberate nod, as if giving her permission to leave.