Manolis crossed the road and found an empty table. He had not eaten for more than two days, and now he was as hungry as a wolf. The waiter put down bread and water and Manolis ordered. There were three cooked meat dishes ready, pork, lamb and chicken, and he asked for them all, along with a cold beer. His head bent over the plates, he shovelled food into his mouth and mopped the juices with his bread, drained a second bottle of beer, paid and left. He had made no eye contact with anyone, not even with the waiter.
As Manolis was eating his first meal on the mainland, Andreas was being transferred from the police station in Agios Nikolaos to a prison cell in Neapoli. There was no question about his guilt. Only about his motivation.
In the kafeneía and tavernas of Lassithi, nobody talked of anything but the Vandoulakis murder. The family’s name was known to everyone in the east of Crete, and rumours quickly circulated that the heir to the great family estate had shot his wife in a jealous rage. Everyone who worked for the Vandoulakis family, from domestic servants to estate managers and workers, was instructed by Alexandros neither to speak with family or friends about what had happened, nor to exchange views with each other. It was a pointless edict. Anna’s housekeeper, Kyría Vasilakis, swearing a friend to secrecy, mentioned that she had seen Manolis come and go from the house on several occasions. From that moment, gossip and speculation became fact. Manolis had been the cause. And soon his disappearance was as much talked of as the murder itself.
Antonis was one of the few who did not speak ill of Manolis. Even though he now knew that his best friend was probably the catalyst for this terrible tragedy, his feelings were confused. He did not blame Manolis for what had happened, but he did find his loathing of Andreas stronger than ever.
Anna had been lost to him for years now, and love had long ago given way to dislike. Nevertheless, he was obliged to attend her funeral. The whole of Plaka was there, and given his family’s proximity to the Petrakis family, he had no choice.
It was a gruelling few hours, standing in the church watching the women of the village weep, the open coffin with Anna’s still body at the centre. He did not want to look but found himself unable to prevent himself staring at her waxen face.
This was no ordinary funeral. Such levels of horror and grief were rarely experienced. Some older inhabitants of Plaka remembered a vendetta half a century back where a couple and their child had been murdered, but there had been nothing like that since then.
‘How could so much tragedy strike a single family?’ they all muttered behind their hands. The return of Maria from Spinalonga one moment, the murder of her sister the next. To most, the two events seemed entirely unrelated. How could such things happen? People were dismayed.
Anna had been mostly absent from Plaka since her marriage a decade earlier, but everyone remembered her as a child and an adolescent. Her father was still a beloved member of the village, all had fond memories of his wife, Eleni, and Maria had always been admired for her kind demeanour.
The absence of the Vandoulakis family at the burial of a woman who bore their name was no surprise, but many felt that they should have sent a representative. ‘One of their own murdered her,’ they said indignantly. Others understood their absence and could imagine the fathomless depth of that family’s shame. ‘How could they be here? They would have been shunned even if they had come.’
Instead of being buried in the grand Vandoulakis plot in the Neapoli cemetery, Anna remained in Plaka. The village’s nekrotafeío was in sight of the sea and of Spinalonga. Giorgos contained his grief with dignity that day, but in the subsequent forty days when he went to Anna’s grave, he would look across to Spinalonga and weep bitterly. It could have been some consolation that his wife and daughter were within sight of each other, but it was not.
In the weeks following the funeral, Maria was by her father’s side every moment of the day, and often, like him, she looked across at the island. Her thoughts were very different from his, however. She caught herself wishing she was back there. In those latter months on Spinalonga, life had been so much sweeter than it was now.
Chapter Six
FAR AWAY, BEYOND Spinalonga and the Gulf of Mirabello and hundreds of kilometres north across the Aegean, Manolis was also thinking of a happier life that had so unexpectedly and brutally been cut short.
The man who had always faced adversity with good cheer found himself entirely without resources to deal with the emotions that swept over him day after day after day. He had lost both parents as a young child, and then a fiancée to a leper colony, but these events had scarcely dented him. Life had always been an adventure, with obstacles and challenges, and each one he overcame had simply magnified his confidence. Then came Anna. The seismic aftershocks of her loss followed one after another and never seemed to lessen.
Agathi had no complaints about Manolis. He paid his rent on time and removed his boots when he came in the front door. He was clean and well mannered, and when their paths crossed, he gave her a broad smile that made the back of her neck feel slightly hot. One morning she decided to change his sheets and give his room a cursory dust. While she was doing so, she could not resist a speedy inventory of his possessions as she put away one of his shirts in the drawer. ‘Tidying up’, she called it. At first it seemed that all he owned were a few clothes and a heavy roll of drachmas stuffed into a sock, but then, at the back of the bottom drawer, she came across two photographs.
The first, she surmised, was of his parents. The second was more challenging. She scrutinised the image of two men, a woman and a baby. The man on the left could be Manolis, even though his hair was much shorter than her lodger’s, but the man on the right looked even more like him. He wore a wedding ring, which she had noticed her lodger did not. She could only conclude that the two men were twins. The baby could have been either boy or girl. The real focus of the picture was the woman. She looked like a Hollywood movie star. She was sensationally beautiful, with pearls around her neck, ornate drop earrings, and a large diamond on her finger. Her hair was glamorously pinned up as if to accentuate not just her long, slender neck, but her jewellery too. It was a photograph that might have appeared on the cover of a magazine.
What a divine trio, Agathi thought to herself. Like royalty . . . and now one of them is living here.
It was all very mysterious, and she held the picture in her hand for a moment before burying it back in the drawer beneath a vest. Perhaps she would coax the information out of him one day.
She continued with her dusting, picking up a saucer on which lay a cut-throat razor and a button that must have fallen off. If she noticed that one of his shirts was gaping, she would happily sew it back on for him. Beneath the razor, something sparkled, so she pushed the blade aside with her finger. It was an earring with pretty blue stones.
Delving into the drawer once again, she pulled out the photograph and held up the earring to confirm that it matched.
Ah, she thought. Something sad happened here. Maybe even something bad.
Agathi was a woman who studied the flitzáni, the coffee grounds, to read the past and foretell the future, and she prided herself on her accuracy. She did not need supernatural powers, however, to imagine something from such signs. The image showed a happy moment that had passed. This, after all, was what most photographs portrayed. The presence of a single earring among Manolis’s belongings told another story.