Mrs Pargeter 03; Mrs Pargeter’s Package

∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧

Thirty-Six

Larry Lambeth shot across the room towards the source of the sound. Mrs Pargeter was a little behind him and stood in the doorway to the kitchen, looking at the sight illuminated by his narrow torch-beam.

Theodosia was crouched like a cornered animal on the rough pallet which served her as a bed. Her scream had subsided to a feral whimpering, and her usually impassive face was ravaged by tears.

Larry Lambeth snapped some questions at her in Greek, which reinforced the strength of her sobbing.

“Be gentle with her,” murmured Mrs Pargeter, as she moved across the room towards the terrified woman. She sat on the pallet and put a plump arm round the quivering shoulders.

Theodosia’s first instinct was to flinch as if to break away, but Mrs Pargeter’s stroking hands and soothing but uncomprehended words gradually brought calm. The pace of the sobbing slowed, and the woman’s head sank down on to her comforter’s shoulder. Mrs Pargeter could feel the warm dampness of tears through the thin cotton of her dress.

“She’s a witness of what we done,” said Larry Lambeth twitchily. “She’ll tell Stephano and Georgio and that lot.”

“She can’t tell them. She can’t speak.”

“She has ways of communication.”

As if taking his words as a cue, Theodosia suddenly let out a different sound. A strange, unearthly sound, that seemed to come from deep within her, torn painfully from her frame.

It took a moment before Mrs Pargeter realised that the woman was speaking.

The voice was rasping and rusty, but with an incongruously innocent lightness. Through its strangeness, it was the voice of a child, the child Theodosia had been the last time she had spoken, before experiencing the shock which had struck her dumb for thirty years.

“What is she saying?” whispered Mrs Pargeter urgently.

“She says that she heard me read her father’s curse. It frightens her very much.”

More strange sounds were dragged from Theodosia’s body.

Larry Lambeth interpreted. “She did not know that Christo had deliberately sabotaged the boat. She saw the fire. It was terrible.”

Theodosia mouthed hopelessly, once again robbed of speech by this recollection. Mrs Pargeter felt sure it must have been the sight of her brother apparently going up in flames that had traumatised her all those years before.

But the woman regained control and once again the uneven, unaccustomed speech began.

“She hates her brother now she knows the truth. She adds her curse to her father’s curse. She hopes he will die.”

Too late, thought Mrs Pargeter. That merciful tumour on the brain of Christo Karaskakis – or Chris Dover – had saved him from the literal fulfilment of old Spiro’s curse. But who knew what flames of conscience had scorched him at the moment of his death?

Or, though she didn’t really believe in hell, she could recognise that the idea of Chris Dover roasting there for all eternity would neatly tie up all the ends of his story.

A new urgency came into Theodosia’s voice.

“She says they’ve got the girl.”

“Girl?” Mrs Pargeter echoed. “Conchita?”

Yes, of course. At the time she had seen nothing odd in Conchita’s non-appearance at Spiro’s Greek party, putting it down to some tiff between the girl and Yianni. But now the absence took on more sinister colouring. And that had been late evening. Conchita could have been missing for up to seven hours.

Larry Lambeth’s translation confirmed her worst fears. “The dark-haired English girl, she says.”

“Who’s got her?”

He urgently relayed the question to Theodosia.

“The tourist woman – that must be Ginnie – the tourist woman arranged to meet her on the headland, but Stephano and Georgio were waiting there, and they took the girl.”

“Oh no!” Mrs Pargeter could not forget the reference to Stephano in old Spiro’s deposition. Stephano had aided and abetted Christo in the earlier crime. Christo was dead, but Sergeant Karaskakis was still very much alive and very dangerous. “Where have they taken her?”

The translation came back quickly. “There’s an old fisherman’s hut on the headland. They’ve got her in there.”

Mrs Pargeter grabbed Larry Lambeth’s hand. “Come on! We must get there – quickly! There have already been too many deaths in Agios Nikitas!”