The Facts Of Death by Benson Raymond

Author:Benson, Raymond [Benson, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ian Fleming Publications Ltd
Published: 2012-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

THE NEW PYTHAGOREANS

BOND AND NIKI SPENT TWO HOURS AT THE CRIME SCENE SPEAKING WITH Greek police inspectors and gathering what information they could. Before leaving the Temple of Poseidon, Bond stood at the edge of the cliff and looked out to sea. A wave of melancholy hit him inexplicably. He looked out at the horizon toward the west. The sun was on its way down, casting its orange glow over the water. Although the scenery was quite different, the view reminded him of Jamaica and his beloved Shamelady. He longed to be there. Niki came up behind him and watched with him for a moment before speaking.

“I feel a great sadness in you,” she said finally. “What is it?”

Bond sighed. “Nothing. Come on, there’s not much more daylight. We had better go and see Romanos’s house.”

Niki looked at him sideways, then let it go. “Look there, to the north.”

She pointed toward the hills away from the temple.

“Do you see that building there? That’s the Hotel Aegaeon. Now, just beyond that, do you see the mansion with red windows and beige walls?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where Romanos lives. Let’s go. I’ll tell you in the car what the inspector told me.”

They got into the Jaguar and drove away from the site.

Niki said, “They have to perform a postmortem examination, but the medical examiner at the scene thought that Charles Hutchinson had been dead about three days. He obviously wasn’t killed here, but his body was moved here overnight. It was discovered by tourists this morning.”

Bond said, “The number ‘seven’—if Charles was killed three days ago, that’s around the same time as the two incidents in northern Cyprus. They were numbers ‘five’ and ‘six.’ ”

“Yes, they were all done the same day.”

“The first series of attacks didn’t occur on the same day. And there were four of them.”

“Yes, but they were committed very close together in time,” she said. “I think the significance is in the numbers, not in the time frame.”

“What else did you find out?”

“We’ll get the full autopsy report, but from the looks of it, Charles Hutchinson was killed in a fall of some kind. His body was badly battered—not from a beating or torture, but from an impact. He also had an old Greek coin in his mouth.”

“Just like Whitten. Payment for Charon the boatman to take him across the River Styx.”

“I’m trying to figure out why the body was dumped at the Temple of Poseidon.”

“Poseidon was one of the statuettes found at Episkopi.”

They pondered the mystery in silence as the car pulled up to the gate of the large mansion they had seen from the temple. A stone fence surrounded the property, and an intercom screened visitors before the automatic gate would open. The two-story house was built in the 1920s. Some lights were on in a few of the windows, but the only other sign of activity was that a man dressed in black was washing a black Ferrari F355 GTS on the drive. He looked up and saw them peering through the gate, but kept on washing the car.

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