Mrs Pargeter’s Package

∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧

Thirty-Two

Their main course arrived, garnished with a few boiled potatoes and a delectably pungent sauce. Larry Lambeth ordered more retsina and they devoted their full attention to the meal.

When her plate was just a pile of shell fragments, Mrs Pargeter dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin and purred, “That was delicious.”

“Told you this place was good.”

“Yes.” She took a long swallow of retsina. “Larry, you said you’d found out some stuff too…”

“Right, Mrs Pargeter. Right, yes, I have. You know you asked me to get a bit of background on the whole Agios Nikitas set-up?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I done a bit of research, you know, asking around, and it seems like the tourist thing is comparatively new there.”

“How new?”

“Fact is, thirty years ago Agios Nikitas was just a little fishing village. The harbour obviously was there, otherwise just a few huts. Only people who lived there was the fishermen, and they went back to Agralias in the winters.”

“Was there a taverna?”

“Yes. Same building as there is now, but very primitive. Run by Spiro’s old man.”

“Also called Spiro.”

“Right. Pretty safe guess most of the time out here. Anyway, reason I’m concentrating on that time is there was something odd happened then.”

“Odd?”

“An unexplained death. Body never found.”

“Oh? Who died?”

“Well… Look, I better give you a bit more background on the whole Karaskakis family bit.”

“Stephano, you mean?”

“He comes into it, but not just Stephano. They’re all called Karaskakis round here, you see… Spiro, Georgio, Theodosia, Yianni – they’re all Karaskakises.”

“Oh.” Mrs Pargeter looked thoughtful.

“Anyway, old Spiro’s wife had died young… Complications on the birth when she had Theodosia, I think. Fairly primitive medical facilities back in those days. And, time I’m talking about – 1959, round then – old Spiro’s sick, too… dying of cancer, as it turned out, though it wasn’t diagnosed at the time. Anyway, he’s worried about what’s going to happen to the taverna. Tourist business just starting to build up on the island, you see, and, though it hasn’t hit Agios Nikitas in a big way yet, the old man can see that his little taverna’s a potential gold-mine. Trouble is, though, Spiro – young Spiro, you know, the one who owns it now – he’s not that interested. He’s round fifteen and really likes school, touch of the old academic, wants to go to university, that kind of number. Well, old Spiro won’t hear of this, wants the taverna to stay in the family and he doesn’t trust his other son to run it.”

“Other son?” Mrs Pargeter echoed.

“Right. They’re twins, you see. Spiro’s the good one, but Christo is a bit of a tearaway.”

“Christo? Did you say Christo?”

“Yes. That’s the other son’s name. Identical twins they was.”

“Of course,” Mrs Pargeter murmured.

“Anyway, this Christo hangs around with a bad crowd – including, incidentally, his cousins Georgio and Stephano – and, though he’s very interested in getting the taverna ‘cause he reckons there’s money in it, old Spiro doesn’t trust him. He’s determined that, whether the boy wants to or not, the older twin Spiro’s going to take over the family business.”

“So who died?” Mrs Pargeter asked softly.

Larry Lambeth rubbed his chin reflectively. “There’s a lot of different versions of exactly what happened, but it was Christo. Killed in an accident on a boat.”

“How?”

“Story goes, Christo and his cousins –”

“Georgio and Stephano?”

“That’s right. Anyway, they stole a boat. Dinghy with an outboard – someone along the coast had bought a few of them to rent out to the tourists. So they nick this thing, but apparently the outboard’s dodgy – it blows up, the boat catches fire, sinks – and Christo is never seen again.”

“Missing, presumed drowned?”

“That’s it.”

“But what about Georgio and Stephano? Why weren’t they hurt? How did they escape?”

“Well, by coincidence, they aren’t on the boat when the outboard blows. Christo has just dropped them off at the harbour, he goes out for a little joyride on his own and – boof!” Larry’s hands opened out, miming the explosion.

“Was there any suggestion at the time that the boat might have been sabotaged?”

“Certainly was. More than that, there was the suggestion that Christo was sabotaging it himself when it blew up.”

“An own goal? You mean he was making a booby-trap for someone else?”

“You got it, Mrs P. Care to make any guesses who he was planning to bump off?”

“Spiro,” Mrs Pargeter murmured.

“That was the rumour that went around at the time, yes.”

“But it went wrong…”

“Right, Christo hoist with his own whatsit.”

“So, with his brother dead and his father dying, Spiro had no choice but to take over the taverna?”

“Yes. Old man dies soon after, Spiro has to put aside his intellectual aspirations, like, and buckle down to running the family business. Does all right out of it, and all.”

Mrs Pargeter was silent as the avalanche of her thoughts gathered momentum.

“So, anyway,” Larry concluded, “got two unexplained deaths to think about now, haven’t we, Mrs P.? I always remember something that your old man once said. “The explanation for a murder often lies in a previous murder.” You ever heard him say that?”

“No,” she replied rather primly. Murder was not a subject that had ever come up in her conversations with the late Mr Pargeter.

“Well, I reckon odds are,” said Larry, “that there’s got to be some connection between Joyce Dover’s death and Christo Karaskakis’ death back in 1959.”

“Assuming, of course,” said Mrs Pargeter quietly, “that that was when he died.”