The Lost Labyrinth (37 page)

It was still early, the roads were empty and good, gorgeous shrubs in full bloom either side, like an extended fairway at Augusta. Bugs tapped the windscreen every few minutes, leaving little smears of themselves. He made excellent time to Vrises, cut south and headed up into the White Mountains. Black nets hung from the steep hillsides like widows’ veils. There was a haze in the air, as though someone had lit bonfires. He passed through Petres, then had the road entirely to himself. At first he enjoyed it, taking the hairpins a little faster than was prudent, but gradually the complete quietness began to alarm him. Even this early on a Saturday, it shouldn’t be
this
quiet. He was nearing the top of a high pass when he saw the first sign of trouble, road so freshly laid that the glistening tarmac slurped stickily at his tyres. He’d only gone another quarter mile when he saw a pair of huge grey pipes by the side of
the road ahead, supports for a tunnel being bored in the cliff. A thin slurry sprayed against his undercarriage as he drove over it, and then the surface disintegrated even further, just raw bedrock in places, scattered with weeds and grasses. He went down into first gear, crested the peak and then wound back and forth on the descent, half expecting to meet some impassable obstacle. It wasn’t that great a surprise, therefore, when he saw the two red-and-white barriers across the road, and the bulldozers and earth-movers parked nose-to-tail beyond them, along with huge hummocks of hardcore and tarmac waiting to be laid.

He pulled to a stop, clenched his steering wheel. At another time, he might rather have savoured the righteousness of his indignation that no one had seen fit to put out warning signs thirty miles back, but all he felt at this moment was a dreadful foreboding, an irrational yet overpowering sense that Gaille was in terrible danger. He grabbed his car-rental map. His choices were awful: a massive detour through the mountains or returning all the way to the north coast, then east to Rethymno and south from there. Either option would cost him at least three hours. He got out of the car, slammed his door in frustration, then walked between the barriers to go study the road ahead.

Gaille let herself into Argo’s pen to refill his emptied bowls. He danced in joyful circles and snuffled and put his paws up on her, smearing her shirt, his tongue like sodden sandpaper on her cheek, his rapture at seeing her extraordinary, more akin to a reprieve from bereavement than a reunion after a night apart. She couldn’t help but be touched by it, by mattering so much to another creature, and she hugged him warmly, while wishing his breath wasn’t quite so pungent.

Iain called out farewell as he vanished through the orange trees, the Mauser over his shoulder. She didn’t buy his story about wanting to bag some game; they had plenty of food in the pantry. He’d simply wanted the rifle for himself, or to deprive her of it. The thought sobered her. She watched him until he’d vanished into the walnut grove then went back inside, uncertain what to do. A decent mobile signal was the best part of an hour’s climb away, even for Iain. Add in time talking, she probably had two hours before he got back. She needed to use that time well, which meant learning more about Petitier’s finds and Iain’s incursions. She went back into the house, pushed aside the armchair, rolled up the rug, lifted the trap-door and limped down the steep steps into the darkness, fumbling for the lights. She
started by double-checking that it had truly been Iain in the photographs, that her imagination hadn’t been playing tricks.

It was him all right. No question.

Boots scuffed behind her. For the second time that morning, she looked around to see Iain standing there, the Mauser still slung over his shoulder. ‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d found something.’

‘But I only just did a moment ago,’ she blustered. ‘It was all those photos on his wall. I mean, how on earth could he have had them developed? No one does black-and-whites any more. So he had to have his own darkroom. Don’t you see?’ She spread her hands, aware she was blathering, unable to stop. ‘And it had to be somewhere in the house, because of that vinegar we smelled. Acetic acid, you know. Developers use it as a fixing agent.’

Iain wasn’t listening. He was staring in astonishment around the basement. Then he looked back at her, at the folder she was holding. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’

He walked over and snatched it from her, throwing her a superior stare as he opened it. ‘What the…?’ he muttered, when he saw the photographs of himself. His complexion paled as he flipped through them, quickly at first, then
more slowly, buying himself time to come up with some kind of story. But he must have realised it was useless. He let the folder and the pictures drop to the floor, then shook his head sadly at her, as though she only had herself to blame for anything that happened now.

Knox stood on the edge of the hillside and stared down. He could follow the grey ribbon of road through countless tortuous hairpins to the valley far beneath, where it straightened out and ran for miles before vanishing over the distant horizon; yet he couldn’t see a single vehicle upon it. He’d hoped that someone might be coming the other way, that he could hitch a ride with them when they were forced to turn around. No chance. He got out his mobile instead, to try Gaille’s number again or see if he couldn’t somehow summon a taxi. But he was too high and too remote to pick up a signal.

Those options closed to him, he studied the road again. The irony was that he could probably make it past the road-works and the parked vehicles,
but a landslide, presumably triggered by all this heavy machinery, had bitten a great chomp out of the road’s underpinning just a little further on, leaving only a precarious slab of rock like a bridge to the other side, but with virtually nothing beneath to support it.

Knox stepped carefully out onto it. Even under his own modest weight, it seemed to bow a little. He measured its width at its narrowest point, then went back to the Hyundai. The road was perhaps a foot wider than the car; if it held, at least. He pulled a face, unhappy with his options. Apart from anything else, the car wasn’t his, and he was puritanical about respecting other people’s property. Besides, Theofanis was surely right: Mikhail was dead, and it was only paranoia to think he’d have arranged something malevolent before he died. And, even if he had, it wasn’t as though Gaille was alone. Iain was with her, and he was no pushover. People often underestimated him, because of his boyish looks and fair hair, but—

Knox went cold. Belatedly, he realised why the figure in the hotel CCTV had looked so familiar. It had been Iain. He was sure of it.

It made up his mind for him, at least. He needed to get to Gaille now. He moved the barriers aside, got back in his Hyundai, put it into first gear and edged forwards, driving with painful slowness up and over a heap of hardcore, his
undercarriage scraping rock, though too slowly to do any damage. He rode his brakes down the far side, letting gravity do the work. There was a pile of tarmac next, dumped against the cliff-face. It crunched beneath his tyres, setting off small cascades, tilting him at so steep an angle that he had to lean against his door. But finally he was over that too. He passed the earth-moving equipment more easily, his tyres still crunching from the accreted tarmac, then reached the narrow bridge.

He put on his handbrake and got out to inspect it once more. Even if it held, it was going to be incredibly tight. He got back in, steered as far away from the drop as he could, until his passenger side scraped the cliff-side. He hated causing such wilful damage, but he steeled himself and pressed on. He heard something crack beneath him and then the whole section of road he was on lurched perceptibly and began slowly to tip sideways like a ship being launched into the sea. It was too late to reverse back out, so he stamped his foot down and surged forwards. His front tyres bumped the far side and rode up it even as his back wheels sank behind him, his undercarriage scraping along the torn edge of the road. He stamped down even harder and his wheels span furiously, but then somehow they gained traction again and he spurted forwards
onto the other side as the road fell away behind him in a furious avalanche of rock; but now he was hurtling too fast at the upcoming hairpin, he slammed on his brakes and hauled on his steering wheel with all his weight, throwing the Hyundai into a skid that brought him to a halt less than a metre from the edge, his engine stalling, the sweat pouring off him, fully aware of how close a call he’d just had.

He sat there a few moments to compose himself, then got out. The next stretch of road was scattered with debris from the landslide he’d just caused, but there was nothing he couldn’t clear away or steer around. He took a tour of the Hyundai. His driver-side front tyre was buckled and flat, and the offside wing looked as though it had been shredded by some vengeful harpy; but he didn’t need it looking good, he only needed for it to run.

There was no point wasting time changing his tyre or clearing the road until he’d found out the answer to that question, so he got back into the driver’s seat, his heart in his mouth, and tested the ignition. Unknown things rattled, clanked and whirred within the bonnet, then died away again. He tried it a second and then a third time, without success.

But on the fourth it came reluctantly to life.

There was something uncomfortably vault-like about this basement, Gaille suddenly realised. If someone should die down here, and the trap door was sealed, their body might never be found.

‘So I’ve been here before,’ said Iain. ‘So what?’

‘You might have told me,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ admitted Iain. ‘Perhaps I should have. But it would only have made you suspicious, when there was nothing to be suspicious about. I mean, look at it from my point of view. When I started doing the research for my book, I found I was consulting the exact same materials as Petitier had already consulted. The
exact
same ones.’

‘You got curious?’ suggested Gaille, shuffling fractionally to her right, trying to open up a line to the doorway.

‘
Of course
I got curious,’ agreed Iain, stepping sideways to block her. ‘Why wouldn’t I have done? So the next time he turned up, I kept an eye on him. You should have seen him. Clapping his hands all the time. Cackling. I knew he must have found something good. It was obvious. What was I supposed to do?’

‘Inform the authorities.’

‘Of what? It’s not illegal to do research, you know.’

‘So you followed him?’

‘He didn’t make it easy,’ nodded Iain. ‘He was paranoid as hell. He kept stopping and getting out and glaring at the traffic behind him. It took me three goes, and I had to use a different car each time. Do you really expect me to have told you that straight out? I’d never even met you before. What if you’d got all holier-than-thou on me and insisted on going to the authorities? It could have killed my career.’

‘I gave you the perfect cover, didn’t I? A chance to come here and check this out, then blame me if it went wrong.’

‘This is absurd, Gaille. You’re being absurd. I didn’t have to bring you here at all. I could have kept it to myself. You’d never have found out. No one would. But your friend was in trouble, and I thought I could help. Was that really so wicked? Anyway, how come it’s okay for you to investigate, but not me? You think you’re so special, don’t you, you and Knox? You make a couple of lucky finds, and now you think you’re
entitled
. Well I’m a Minoan scholar, I’ve spent my whole life studying places like these. What’s your reason for being here?’

‘Augustin.’

‘Sure! Nothing to do with coveting glory, I suppose. Do you two even realise the harm you’ve done to archaeology? I had to suffer through that bloody Alexander press conference with my wife
sitting next to me. You and Knox and that fat bastard from the SCA.
Knox!
This zero of a guy I was at university with; this
also-ran
! And suddenly he’s a global superstar. You should have seen the way the little darling looked at me after that.’

‘You’re not blaming us for your failed marriage, are you?’

‘It should have been me,’ he said, his eyes blazing. ‘I was always ahead of Knox at university. I was always the destined one. Ask him, if you don’t believe me. He was
nothing
. He was
a nobody
. I was the one! It was
me
!’

‘You got angry,’ murmured Gaille.

‘Too bloody right I got angry.’

‘That’s why your wife left you. She became afraid.’

‘That’s it! Take
her
side.’

‘You hit her. She was pregnant and you hit her.’

‘Don’t say that!’ said Iain, taking a step towards her. ‘Don’t you dare say that! I never hit her. I never laid a fucking finger on her.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘She was going to take away my son,’ he yelled. ‘What the hell was I supposed to do?’

‘And this was your way to win her back, was it?’ asked Gaille. ‘To prove you were a somebody after all. That was why you couldn’t let Petitier give his speech, wasn’t it? You couldn’t have him
going public before your book came out. So you followed him to Athens.’

He took half a step back in surprise. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re always travelling there. That’s what you told me last night.’

‘It was a figure of speech.’

‘Sure! And that Athens Metro ticket in your backpack. Is that a figure of speech too?’

He stared numbly at her. Too late, Gaille realised how reckless she’d just been. She nodded twice, as if she were the one in charge, then walked for the stairs, hoping he’d be too dazed to stop her. But he came after her when she was barely halfway up, pushed past her and turned to block her escape. ‘We’re going to talk this out,’ he said.

‘Talk what out?’ She tried to get by him, but he was too strong. They jostled a moment, his forearm accidentally pressing against her breast. His throat coloured; he scowled and shoved her tumbling to the bottom. She landed on her side and winded herself on the point of her elbow. He began walking down towards her, a disturbing mix of resentment, fear and lust in his eyes. She scrambled into the chemistry lab, slammed its door behind her, grabbed the chair and leaned it at an angle beneath the handle.