The Age of Olympus Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Gavin Scott and Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1 Sunset Over Athens

  2 His Beatitude

  3 Tin Face

  4 The Speculations of Inspector Kostopoulos

  5 Going to see the General

  6 On the Waterfront

  7 Into the White Mountains

  8 Minotaur

  9 The Hunter and the Hunted

  10 Cyclops

  11 Poseidon

  12 Penelope’s Island

  13 The Thumb of St. Peter

  14 The Bay of Limani Sangri

  15 The Pediment

  16 Bitter Herbs

  17 The Trio

  18 The Gun Emplacement

  19 The Legend of Count Bohemond

  20 Vanishing Point

  21 Aftermath

  22 Into the Woods

  23 The Field Telephone

  24 The Man from Athens

  25 The Windmill

  26 Truth and Consequences

  27 The Affair

  28 The Choice

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  THE AGE OF OLYMPUS

  ALSO BY GAVIN SCOTT AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  The Age of Treachery

  The Age of Exodus (April 2018)

  GAVIN

  SCOTT

  THE AGE OF

  OLYMPUS

  A DUNCAN FORRESTER MYSTERY

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Age of Olympus

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783297825

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297832

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: April 2017

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2017 Gavin Scott

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  TO MORRISON HENRY JACKSON

  1

  SUNSET OVER ATHENS

  “We held them off for a week up there back in 1944,” said the press attaché, pointing up to the Acropolis.

  “The Germans?” said Sophie.

  “No, dear lady,” said the attaché, a pop-eyed man with a military moustache, “the Greeks.”

  Sophie glanced at Forrester, puzzled. “I thought the British were on the same side as the Greeks,” she said.

  “We were on the same side as the Greeks, yes,” said the attaché. “But not the communists.”

  They were inching their way along Aeolos Street, which runs west from Stadium Street to the foot of the Acropolis, and every few yards the car had to slow down to avoid old ladies spilling into the roadway offering hot chestnuts, green-dyed cakes, black market cigarettes, candles decorated with pictures of the Virgin Mary, transfers of the crucified Christ to stick on your arm, and fireworks with which to celebrate Holy Week, 1946. Forrester had flown to Athens because, to his amazement, the Empire Council for Archaeology had finally given him the funds for his expedition to Crete. But it turned out there were people in the Greek capital who wanted to see him before he set off for the island, and the press attaché from the British Embassy had been waiting for them at the airport in a Lagonda, which must have been in use before Archduke Ferdinand went to Sarajevo. Possibly when the Archduke went to Sarajevo.

  “During the war, of course,” said Forrester, “the communists were some of the best fighters. And we were all on the same side.” Every other house, Forrester noted, now seemed to be daubed with red communist slogans.

  “That was then,” said the attaché, whose name was Lancaster, “but ever since the Germans left, the Reds have been trying to take over. Came as close as dammit just after I arrived, too, in forty-four. Hence the fight outside the Parthenon.”

  “Which I imagine would have been a very good defensive position,” said Forrester.

  “That’s my point, old chap,” said Lancaster. “Made you realise why the Greeks put the Acropolis there in the first place. It looks magnificent – but it’s all about power.”

  Countess Sophie Arnfeldt-Laurvig’s eyes met Forrester’s in a secret smile. They were both savouring the delight of being together again after their brief, dangerous encounter in Norway. When Forrester had asked her if she wanted to come with him in the Cretan expedition he had held his breath, wondering whether he had misread what had passed between them during those tense, tender and almost fatal hours at Bjornsfjord, but to his profound relief she had responded to his invitation immediately. After four years of balancing the demands of supporting the Norwegian resistance and protecting the tenants on her estates from the German occupiers, she was eager to escape, and when they had met at London Airport it was as if they had never parted. During the flight to Athens she had clasped his hand tightly in hers, and though they had said little, it seemed that little needed saying. The war was over and they were back together again. It was enough.

  Now they were being driven through what was left of the old Turkish bazaar, past alleys full of toymakers, shoemakers and coppersmiths, like something out of the Middle Ages. There was even a row of shops whose windows were entirely filled with buttons. Sophie smiled. “I must go to those shops,” she said. “In Norway, for some reason, it was impossible during the occupation to readily obtain any buttons.” Her English, lightly accented and perfectly pronounced, was composed of a slightly old-fashioned vocabulary once provided to the nobility of Europe through well-qualified governesses.

  “Say again?” asked Lancaster. “Hard to hear through this din.”

  Which was an understatement. The Greeks, Forrester had always felt, had a unique passion for noise. Radios blared from every open window, the street was loud with conversations being carried on at the top of voices, seconded by church bells, crowing cockerels, the clanging of trams and the roar of internal combustion engines. A motorcycle passed them with a deafening boom.

  “Look at his exhausts,” said Lancaster, his fingers drumming the steering wheel. “I’m pretty certain that not only are those not silencers – they’re actually amplifiers.” The attaché’s Christian name was Osbert, which Forrester remembered reading somewhere, during the war.

  Lancaster turned to Sophie. “So what was it you wanted to shop for, Countess?”

  “Buttons,” said Sophie.

  “Buttons tomorrow,” said Lancaster decisively. “Sunset tonight,” and swerved the car violently into the kerb beside a ramshackle taverna whose sign was almost hidden under a canopy of vines. “Hop out and grab a table.”

  Moments later they were looking over the shoulder of the proprietor, an unshaven man in a shirt that looked as if it had not been washed since the German invasion, as he poured liberal doses of yellow retsina into well-chipped drinking glasses.

  “It’s only going to last two minutes,” said Lancaster, “so keep your eyes open.”

  Obediently, Sophie and Forrester fixed their eyes on the Acropolis.

  “Watch how the last rays of the sun leave this hideous city in bl
essed darkness and just light up the hilltop.”

  Sure enough, as post-war Athens vanished into the dusk, the marble of the Parthenon and the Propylaea began to gleam as if with an inner fire, and behind them Mount Hymettus turned rose-red.

  “It’s perfect,” said Sophie. And it was. It was like a stage set, complete with lighting, which had been arranged for their delight two and a half thousand years before.

  “Your health,” said Lancaster, raising his battered glass – and then paused and held up his hand in warning. “Have you alerted the countess to what this stuff tastes like, Forrester?”

  “The wine has hints of pine resin,” said Forrester to Sophie.

  “For which read emphatic overtones of the best turpentine,” said Lancaster.

  Forrester smiled. “But you might come to enjoy it.” He clinked his glass against hers, and Lancaster’s, and as they drank, the sunset reached its climax. Sophie looked at Forrester, her eyes bright with merriment.

  “My admiration for the ancient Greeks is very much increased,” she said, “if they built their civilisation while drinking muck like this.”

  “They say this was the hour that Socrates took the hemlock,” said Lancaster, his long fingers caressing his silky moustache, “so you may be witnessing the last thing the old boy ever saw.” They watched in silence as darkness reclaimed the great temple, thinking of the snub-nosed, henpecked philosopher who had paid the price for questioning the gods four hundred years before the birth of Christ.

  “Tell me more about your run-in with the communists,” said Forrester. “Some of them were probably chaps I fought alongside during the war.”

  “Doubtless some of them were splendid fellows,” said Lancaster, “but we couldn’t let them turn the cradle of civilisation into a Soviet People’s Republic.” He swallowed some more wine, and grimaced. “Not without an election anyway, which they seemed to want to avoid. So, there was much fighting in the streets, embassy under siege, British peacekeeping force outnumbered, machine guns, mortars, bombs, all that kind of thing. And then in the middle of the battle who turns up but Winston Churchill? In a Royal Navy cruiser, naturally. Horribly dangerous, but he was in his element, of course. Insisted on holding a press conference while hostilities were still in progress – in the embassy garden, of all places.”

  “What was wrong with the embassy garden?” asked Sophie.

  “Nothing in itself, but you came into it down a set of steps, and I knew that as soon as Winnie clapped eyes on them he’d stop at the top and strike a heroic pose for the photographers. They were all waiting eagerly among the rose bushes down below. And here was the problem – the top of the steps was the one place in the garden where a sniper in one of the surrounding houses could take you out. I explained this to Winnie and he promised to keep moving, but I knew perfectly well he wouldn’t be able to resist temptation, and sure enough, as soon as he comes out of the embassy he adopts one of his bulldog stances and the flashbulbs start going off and he wouldn’t move till they’d stopped taking pictures. I was sure the end had come.”

  “What did you do?” asked Sophie.

  “Pushed him down the steps,” said Lancaster. “Not a very elegant solution, but sure enough, at that very moment there was a rifle crack and a handful of plaster flew out of the embassy wall right where he’d been.”

  “I hope he was grateful,” said Sophie. Forrester grinned.

  “Knowing his probable reaction to having his moment of glory spoiled,” said Lancaster, “I said the ambassador did it.”

  Sophie grinned, there was a pause, and Forrester knew they were about to discover the reason why Lancaster had given them a lift from the airport.

  “Anyway,” said the press attaché, “I wanted to fill you in on the situation before you meet up with everybody.”

  “Everybody?” said Forrester. “A reception committee?”

  “No, no,” said Lancaster, refilling their glasses. His and Forrester’s anyway: Sophie’s remained largely untouched. “It’s just that there happen to be a lot of people you know in town at present. Paddy Fermor, for a start.”

  Patrick Leigh Fermor had been in charge of the operation in Crete in which British commandos had captured a German general and spirited him away to Egypt. It was while performing his diversionary role that Forrester had found, in the Gorge of Acharius, the cave he was coming back to excavate. He grinned as he heard Leigh Fermor’s name.

  “What’s Paddy doing here? Last I heard he was in London looking for a job.”

  “Well, he’s found one here, lecturing on British culture to the Greeks on behalf of the British Council.”

  Forrester laughed. “I wonder what the Greeks make of that,” he said.

  “They lap it up,” said Lancaster, “because all he really does is tell them war stories, and there’s nothing they like better than a war hero telling his tale. Xan Fielding’s backing him up, and we hope you will too.”

  “If it helps,” said Forrester.

  “Every little thing helps,” said Lancaster. “The fact is we’re in a precarious position here, and so is Greece. The fighting’s over for the time being, but it could start up at any moment. The communists are putting together an army and when the time comes, they’ll strike. Tito’s backing them from Yugoslavia.”

  “So the Iron Curtain could fall over Greece too?” said Sophie.

  “It could indeed,” said Lancaster, and fixed his pop-eyed gaze on Forrester. “And that’s where your old friend General Alexandros comes into it. We’re a bit worried about him.”

  “He’s not a communist,” said Forrester. “I know that for a fact.”

  After the Germans invaded Greece in 1941, Forrester and Aristotle Alexandros had spent weeks together, planning guerrilla operations while hiding out in a cave near Mount Olympus, and they had talked about every subject under the sun, including the Soviet Union. “He’s the most rational man I’ve ever met. One of the best read, too. He saw through Marx as a teenager.”

  “But after you parted he spent the rest of the war fighting the Nazis alongside the communists,” said Lancaster, “and that makes him a suspect now as far as the Greek Army is concerned. They’re all royalists, you know.”

  “But he’s the best strategist in Greece,” said Forrester. “Best tactician too. Don’t tell me the regular army’s put him on ice.”

  “That’s exactly what they’ve done,” said Lancaster. “And he’s getting bored and impatient. The communists want to put him in charge of ELAS.”

  “ELAS?”

  “Their strike force. The so-called Greek People’s Liberation Army.”

  “But surely he wouldn’t—”

  “The present regime’s pretty rotten. Too many people who cosied up to the Germans. He might think he could use ELAS to take over, clean house and start again with a fresh slate.”

  Forrester was silent for a moment. It was all too plausible. And if Aristotle Alexandros joined the communist army, they would win. Stalin’s campaign to control Europe would be one step closer to fulfilment.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  “Just talk to Alexandros, find out what you can about his thinking. Then let us know.”

  “I’m very fond of him,” said Forrester. “I’m not going to sell him down the river.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of asking you to, old boy,” said the attaché. “Just sound him out about whether he’s going to join ELAS, that’s all.”

  “If we come across each other.”

  “Oh, you’ll come across each other,” said Lancaster. “This is Greece. Besides, there’s a party tonight at the Regent-Archbishop’s, and I’ve wangled you both an invitation.”

  “I had hoped to have a quiet dinner with Sophie,” said Forrester.

  “I know,” said Lancaster, with patently insincere sympathy, “but I also know we can rely on you to be a good scout, old man. They speak very highly of you at the War Office, and the same can’t be said for most academics, I can tel
l you.”

  2

  HIS BEATITUDE

  They walked through the warm evening air along Kifissia Street, which ran from Syntagma Square alongside the Old Royal Palace, its grounds now known as the National Garden. The topiary bushes and winding paths, Forrester knew, concealed the hastily buried bodies of the victims of the failed communist uprising in 1944, but he did not mention this to Sophie, determined not to disturb her pleasure in exchanging the cold austerity of Scandinavia for the balm of the Mediterranean.

  Opposite the gardens were the pompous, wedding-cake buildings of the Egyptian Legation, the French Embassy, the Greek Foreign Office and the Ministry of War, but the edifice to which they were headed, Skaramangar House, residence of His Beatitude the Orthodox Archbishop and Regent of Greece, surpassed them all in opulent vulgarity.

  “You’ll recognise it quite easily,” Lancaster had told them when he gave them directions. “It’s built in a style I call ‘Hollywood Balkan’.” Forrester placed the name then: before he became a press attaché, Osbert Lancaster had published several very funny books about, of all things, architectural history, inventing names for pompous styles and skewering them in spare, elegant cartoons. “Make sure you look out for the debased Byzantine capitals,” he had advised as they parted. Sophie looked at Forrester, puzzled.

  “Debased?” she said. “Doesn’t that mean—”

  “I think in this case it’s a technical term,” said Forrester. “But we are in Athens. You never can tell.” The Archbishop’s door opened and a liveried footman ushered them into a vast and crowded room. As he took their names they stopped, astonished at the spectacle before them.

  Massive oak beams rested on squat pillars (topped, as promised, by the gilded shapes of the debased Byzantine capitals) from which hung baroquely ecclesiastical candelabra illuminating a sea of guests resplendent in dinner jackets, heavily braided uniforms and elegant evening gowns. Waiters glided around the room offering spanakopita, saganaki and tiropitas. A huge log roared in a fireplace so immense it reminded Forrester of Xanadu in Citizen Kane, which he and Barbara had seen the night before he parachuted into Sardinia.