Strangers in Company (31 page)

His arm was firm under hers. “Look!”

Ahead of them, Mrs. Adams had reached the checkpoint. Her passport was handed back to the policeman, who took one look at it and snapped his fingers. Two others appeared on either side of her. There was a little scuffle as she resisted for a moment. Marian saw Mike move forward, then, apparently, think better of it. He did nothing as she was led away, screaming horribly now in a torrent of language Marian had never heard before.

Belatedly, Mike made some kind of protest but got a short answer. The queue was moving forward again, very quiet now. Instinctively, Marian let Stella go first. With luck, no connection need be seen between them. Stella was through and looking back; could it be anxiously?

Marian handed up her passport with a cold hand that
did not shake. “I trust you have enjoyed your visit, Mrs. Frenche,” said the passport officer, glancing at it. “We think highly of your husband's work, here in Greece.”

“Her ex-husband.” Edvardson was close behind her. It was incredible. They were through. Turning to look back, she saw the look of relief on Mike's face wiped clean off. Two policemen had appeared beside him. The last thing Marian saw, as she started down the stairs to the lounge, was his defeated back as they led him away.

“And that's that,” said Thor Edvardson as he settled her and Stella on one of the stiff brown plastic seats. “And calls for a drink.”

“You mean, we're through?” Marian still could not believe it.

“As near as dammit. It looks to me as if Stavros bungled. Whether accidentally or otherwise I guess we'll never know. I don't know that I blame him, either way. But clearly they've got Medusa, and someone's talked.”

“Adams perhaps,' said Stella. “He was mad enough for anything.” Suddenly, her arms were round Marian, and she was sobbing on her shoulder. “Oh, Mrs. F., I'm so happy; I'm so ashamed.… Will you ever forgive me?”

“You knew?” The question hardly needed answering as Marian planted a firm kiss on the white cheek.

“All the time. But David said we must keep it up till the last minute because of Mike. In case he had accomplices we didn't know about.”

“David?”

“Yes. He and the professor rescued me, yesterday morning.” Marian felt the shudder that ran through her. “A good thing they did. That Adams was getting madder every minute. He kept kind of circling round me as if he didn't know where to begin. Or when. But here's the professor. He'll tell you.”

“Medicine. And your last ouzo.” Edvardson handed them round. He had heard Stella's last words and looked at her gravely. “Yes,” he said. “I'm glad I wasted no time. I think the strain of that fake honeymoon must have been too much for him. That's why he killed when he
was told only to create accidents. And that's why”—apologetically, to Marian—“I thought Stella must come first”

“Just so,” she said dryly. “Besides, you wanted me as bait to catch Medusa, didn't you?”

“You're no fool. Will you forgive me in the end? For that terrible day?”

“I expect so. But what I can't understand is why, when you'd got her, you let her go.”

He looked from her to Stella, then back. “Well, you see.” He plunged into it. “She was my wife.”

“Your—” Marian's eyes went down to that huge diamond.

“My ex-wife. I married her when I was first sent here. God, what a young fool.… After all the briefings we'd had, I let her make a monkey of me. I wasn't even suspicious when she insisted we keep our marriage secret. Mind you, it was lucky for me she did. She left me soon enough, when she found I didn't talk secrets, even to my wife.” He looked sombrely back at the past. “You heard what that policeman said. Later there was a girl. Medusa had her killed. I divorced Medusa, of course, in her real name, when I got back to the States. Frankly, I hoped she was dead. And then I saw the likeness between you, that day at Olympia, and knew she must be alive, must be behind all the crazy disasters of the tour. Then I had to find her. I think I meant to kill her. With my bare hands. Something romantic and absurd like that. But when it came to the point, of course, I couldn't.”

“I see.” She did. It would take years to think about. And she would have lonely years to do it. But it reminded her of an easier subject. “Talking about exes”—she made her voice light—“how do you think the people here knew about mine?”

“I expect Mike told them, don't you? As an added protection for what he thought was Medusa.”

“Of course.” She remembered that odd little conversation when Mike learned who she was. “Well, it came in useful,” she said fairly.

“It sure did. Just like that gang's absurd cell system.
Ah, there you are, David—” Edvardson pushed over the extra ouzo he had brought. “I was just going to tell Marian about our great rescue operation.”

David blushed and laughed and sat down on the other side of Stella. “Poor Adams,” he said. “He was the most surprised man I ever saw. He was so sure you were the boss. Of course he let us in—” This was to Marian.

“And then?”

“David knocked him out,” said Stella. “Bang. Like that.” Could she and David really be holding hands?

“It was a pleasure,” said David grimly, and put a firm arm around her. “Thank God you wasted no time, professor.”

“I knew here was none to spare. God, I was in a rage with myself. After all the precautions I'd taken, to walk you into a trap like that! In the old days”—he turned to Marian—“that restaurant was a safe house. How was I to know they'd put a gate into the yard? And there I was thinking I had you snug for the evening.” He smiled grimly. “I was just waiting till I'd got you safe back to the hotel to have it out with you. I couldn't be sure, you see”—he was still talking mainly to Marian—“how much you knew.”

“Or which side I was on?”

“I guess I felt pretty sure about that. Now Stella here was something else again. I wasn't completely sure about her till I saw what Adams had done to her.”

“Thanks,” said Stella, looking down at her bandaged arm.

“What I still don't understand,” said Marian, “is how you got on to it in the first place.”

“Don't forget my sordid past, love. You don't forget the habits of my kind of business in a week, or a month, or a year. And it stood out a mile that there was something fishy about that tour. I'd taken lots of them, you see. It was a way of seeing Greece without getting mixed up with my old friends and maybe compromising them. There's nothing like a tour for protective colouring. But this one was something else again. One accident, yes. Two, odd.
Anything more.… No, ma'am. So then I did start getting in touch. Lucky I did, too. Mind you, it cost me plenty to get that football match organised at Delphi when the crazy pair of you went off to the stadium.”

“Well, we had to talk,” said Stella.

“A pity you didn't choose to talk to me.” He looked from one embarrassed face to the other. “Don't tell me; I know. You thought I was one of them.”

Marian, scarlet, was speechless. Stella spoke up for them both. “You must admit that it seemed pretty odd, your not admitting to speaking Greek, when things got so serious.”

“Fair enough.” His smile forgave them. “But you'd be surprised the things you learn when people think you can't understand them. That's how I found out about their cell system. And admit, Stella, that saved you. We'd never have been able to break into that underground fortress of theirs at the hotel.”

“No.” Her face was grey with the recollection. “I still don't understand how you worked it.”

He smiled at them benevolently. “Easy as rolling off a log. As soon as I realized that none of them knew who the boss was, I decided to take a hand. They just got messages, you see, in hotel pigeonholes. So easy. And so easy to fake. I'm an old bird at this game, remember. And they were nothing but a bunch of young amateurs. Lucky for us they were. All we needed was for one of them to remember me as the crazy American from that Christmas of 1944 when we shot it out with the Communists in Athens, and I'd have been sunk. But that was the whole point, don't you see? They'd been picked, the Greeks, that is, just because they were too young to remember. Anyone who really knew about Medusa wouldn't have been fooled by that story of her being a ‘liberal sympathiser'—not for a moment. Well, you saw what happened when they did recognise her.”

“What will happen to her?”

“I hope she's dead this time,” he said.

Marian was looking down at her new ring—the ring
she would give back so soon. But for the moment, she still had a part to play. “I can see how you managed to fool them into thinking you were the boss, but who
was
really?”

“Mrs. Spencer, of course. I hope they caught her along with Medusa. I figured that out pretty fast, because I knew she hadn't been on the flight out. I don't forget faces.”

“Like poor Mrs. Hilton.”

“Yes.” As they looked soberly back over the disasters of the trip, the loudspeaker crackled into life. “There's our flight at last. Time to go home, love.”

The false endearment was more than she could bear. “Don't.” David and Stella, so shining with happiness themselves, were looking at her strangely. “I can't.…” She looked down at the flashing, mocking diamond. Medusa. Thor's wife. Her own double.

Around them, people were standing up, collecting the accumulated loot of their holiday. She sat there, silent now, turning the ring with cold fingers. All illusion. Get it over with. End it now, tactfully, gracefully. And mourn him for the rest of her life.

“Time to go.” David was on his feet, pulling Stella up with a brisk, loving hand.

“Not quite.” The professor watched them move away across the lounge, then reached down to put his own hand over Marian's icy ones. “Nonsense,' he said. “And you know it.”

“Do I?” Her wide eyes, looking up at him, were pitiful.

“Yes.” He pulled her, almost roughly, to her feet Standing, she was nearly his height. Beside them, the Esmonds, laden with packages, paused for a moment. “Shall I prove it to you, here and now?” asked Thor Edvardson, looming over her.

“No!” She looked around the crowded lounge. This was no place for their first kiss. “Are you always going to read my mind?” she asked, falling into step beside him.

“If you'll let me,” he said.

Jane Aiken Hodge
was born in Massachusetts to Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Conrad Aiken, and his first wife, writer Jessie McDonald. Hodge was 3 years old when her family moved to Great Britain, settling in Rye, East Sussex, where her younger sister, Joan, who would become a novelist and a children's writer, was born.
From 1935, Jane Hodge read English at Somerville College, Oxford University, and in 1938 she took a second degree in English at Radcliffe College. She was a civil servant, and also worked for Time magazine, before returning to the UK in 1947. Her works of fiction include historical novels and contemporary detective novels. In 1972 she renounced her United States citizenship and became a British subject.

Discover books by Jane Aiken Hodge published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/JaneAikenHodge
A Death in Two Parts
Leading Lady
Rebel Heiress
Strangers in Company

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
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First published in Great Britain 1973 by Hodder & Stoughton
Copyright © 1973 Jane Aiken Hodge
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eISBN: 9781448207329
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