MORNING SERIAL
“ILLIE,” I said, “I will paint for you as long as you need me to paint for you. But I need to know who killed Lou.”
He looked up at me, a glaze to his eyes, and he said, “Why?”
I was trying to find an answer, trying to summon something that made sense, but faintly we were both alerted to a voice in the distance. It was Evgeny calling Illie’s name.
Illie looked up to me, his eyes now wide and his face old and tired. “Go see him for me, will you? I need to be here today.”
Eighteen
Evgeny was calling into the air – it looked as though he had already searched the house for Illie, and the tower, and was heading back along the ridge. I caught up with him and told him Illie was in the wood and he didn’t want to be disturbed.
“Then you will have to come,” he said. He said it with urgency, without much contemplation of who I was or what had gone before. “We have found the tunnel, but we need supplies,” he said, walking quickly back to the house. “We need to follow my girls with supplies.”
Back in the house Viktor was already filling cardboard boxes with anything he could find in the kitchen cupboards. Evgeny turned to me. “Fill these boxes with food. Anything that would be good for a camping trip, for instance,” he said. “I am going to get more blankets.”
“You have taken the girls to the neutral zone?”
He stopped and glared at me. “Are you going to help or not?”
I said nothing and as he went off out of the kitchen I could hear him grumbling something about too many questions.
We packed the car with several cardboard boxes of tinned and packet food, and Evgeny filled the boot with blankets and sleeping bags. As Viktor drove with calmness in speed, Evgeny only spoke to begrudgingly answer my sparse questions.
“Famagusta is different to what we thought,” he said without looking at me. “Illie said it was a safe place. A ghost town. But the girls will need to be taken care of while they hide there.”
CONTINUES TOMORROW