Murder in Horio

Eine Engländerin lebt glücklich und zufrieden auf einer griechischen Insel – ohne zu ahnen, in welcher Gefahr sie schwebt. Von J. B. HUTCHINSON

Susan Whitehead was unable to sleep. The wind was howling and the rain was noisy against the windows. It was a bad storm, especially as it was only the end of September. The month had been cold and rainy. Now, the season was winding down. Most of the tourists had left the island. The number of day trippers from Rhodes had also decreased over the past weeks, as the sea had been too rough for the hydrofoil.

Tourists don’t come for this kind of weather, Susan thought.

She got out of bed to shut a half-open window, feeling her way through the darkness of her bungalow. Like most of the Tymos islanders, Susan lived in Horio, the village with stone paths high up on the hill near the Crusader ruins. It looked down on Nomos harbour, where most of the shops, tavernas and hotels were, along with her cafe.

The wind was now deafening. But as she felt her way through the dark room, she thought she heard something behind her. She turned and saw a figure in the darkness. “You? What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the ni–––”

When Susan hadn’t opened the cafe in the morning, George, the cafe’s cook, walked up the hill to Horio. The door to her bungalow had been broken open. He called the police.

Tymos was a peaceful island, Captain Nikos Capras thought. In all his years with the Tymos Police Authority, there had never been a murder. Until now.

Arriving at the scene, Capras looked at the lifeless body. Susan had been stabbed in the chest. The murder weapon was gone. The bungalow had been torn apart – not that there was much to steal. A few clothes, some food, a book about medieval art lying open on the table, books about Tymos, mysteries. Someone had been looking for something. But what? No one here had much money. “Greek tragedy,” Lieutenant Stamos said. “Shakespearean. She was English,” Capras said, trying to add levity to the situation.

Susan had been the owner of Cafe Tymos in the harbour. Everyone on the island knew her, including the two policemen. She was one of the many British expats who had made a new life for themselves on this quiet island of 2,000 people. The Greeks and the expats on Tymos lived alongside and with each other. Most of the Brits here learned Greek. They worked in shops or opened their own. Many were artists, writers, academics.

On the island, everyone knew everyone else’s business – and there was gossip. Susan had been more a listener than a gossip. Like the sea sponges sold at the harbour shops for tourists, Susan absorbed.

“Any idea who could have done this?” Capras asked George, who was visibly upset.

“None. Everything at the cafe was running smoothly. Susan had seemed content in the last couple of weeks. She said she’d found something that made her really happy.”

George’s alibi for the night was his wife – they had been at home together.

“Well, she would give him an alibi, wouldn’t she?” Stamos said.

“You sound like a TV cop,” Capras said.

While waiting for the results of the autopsy, from Rhodes, they questioned Susan’s customers. First, they spoke to Celia James, her best friend.

“Did Susan have problems with anyone?” Capras asked.

“No,” Celia said. “She loved Tymos. Every morning, she took a walk before work and posted beautiful photos on Facebook. She loved this island, the quiet and the people.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“No, she was happy on her own,” Celia said. “She spent most of her time with George. And Yannis and Arielle are always at the cafe, but that’s not news. The professor’s been around a lot lately chatting with her, but no boyfriend.”

Capras and Stamos thanked Celia and walked up the Kali Strata. There, they spoke to Yannis Vardalos, a fisherman and cafe regular who was known to the Tymos police. He had once beaten his wife, another time a rival fisherman.

“Why are you talking to me?” Vardalos said. “I don’t have anything to do with this.”

“Well,” Capras said, “she was stabbed. Your boat is full of knives.”

“You never been fishing? We all have fillet knives. Now, leave me alone.” Vardalos slammed the door shut.

The autopsy report arrived the next day. The wounds had been made by a small dagger blade, smooth and tapered on both sides. “Not a fishing knife,” Stamos said. “Hmm,” Capras wondered.

They walked to the professor’s house. Meredith Marsden was a professor of Byzantine history and archaeology from Cambridge. Susan had loved art and architecture, and the two women often spent hours talking about the riches of Greece.

Capras and Stamos knocked on the door of her bungalow. Meredith opened the door and let them in.

“It’s terrible,” Meredith Marsden said. “I don’t understand who could have done this.”

She offered the men coffee. “Susan loved this island. She didn’t have enemies. Such a wonderful, intelligent woman.” “She knew a lot about art?” Capras asked.

“Yes, she was self-taught. She was one of the few people I could talk to here.”

While she was making coffee, something on Meredith’s writing table caught Capras’s eye. When Meredith turned around with the coffees, she stopped dead.

Her face went white.

Capras was holding a medieval Crusader dagger with a beaded hilt.

“No, no, please...”

“It’s this you killed for – and with. Am I right, professor?”

Meredith could not find words to talk her way out. “How did you know?” she asked.

“The art book in Susan’s bungalow was opened to a page showing this, or a dagger very much like it,” Capras said. “I’d always heard that there was supposed to be Crusader treasure hidden somewhere on the island.”

“She found it!” Meredith screamed. “She beat me to it! She was going to give it to the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes as soon as the hydrofoil was running again. It should have been mine!”

As soon as the stormy sea settled, Capras transported both the professor and the dagger to Rhodes, where they would each be locked up in their new homes.

And the rest of the Crusader treasure remained where it had been – hidden somewhere on Tymos, untouched and known only to itself – for seven hundred years.

“How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), English writer and philosopher