Mrs Pargeter 03; Mrs Pargeter’s Package

∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧

Forty-One

Now of course the wind could have been about to change at that moment, anyway. Winds do change all the time for no particular reason – it’s regarded as part and parcel of the job, if you happen to be born a wind – and they are particularly prone to variation near the sea shore.

But the speed with which those flames, at one moment about to swallow up the wooden hut, had in the next changed their minds and retreated, leaving only skeletal vestiges of smouldering brush in their wake, did seem more than coincidental.

Mrs Pargeter was not by nature superstitious, but thereafter she always felt a particular affection for the memory of St Spiridon and, in subsequent moments of extremity, was more than once heard to invoke his name.

The recession of the flames, which consumed lustily everything they found in their path to the point of the headland, coincided with the return to consciousness of Larry Lambeth. After a few minutes of reorientation, he released the two women from their bonds.

As they were easing their stiffened limbs, they heard approaching shouts and saw a crowd hurrying up from the village. Arming themselves with branches of brushwood, the men of Agios Nikitas attacked the fire’s last pockets of resistance.

And soon they heard drawing near the drone of the first fire-fighting aeroplane.

By romantic serendipity, it was Yianni who first entered the hut to check if anything was alight in there. And a romantic novelist might have observed, from the enthusiasm with which she threw herself into his arms, that the only flame therein was the one that burned in Conchita’s heart.

It was only when the last sparks of the real fire were being extinguished that the bodies were found.

Sergeant Karaskakis, fleeing from the flames, had stumbled over the cliff edge and broken his neck on the rocks below.

Spiro, by contrast, had stood his ground and the flames had consumed him so thoroughly that he could only be identified by a process of elimination.

St Spiridon had not only answered Mrs Pargeter’s prayer, but had also, with a godlike facility for killing two birds with one stone, contrived at the same time to fulfil the prophecy of the older Spiro Karaskakis.