Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) by Paul Johnston Read Free Book Online Page A

matching plain wood frames that were the only ornament on the waist-high bookcase beside Dorothy’s chair. Individuals and families, they made up the dual heritage that Mavros lived with. His Scottish mother was self-reliant and had never been able to come fully to terms with the priority Greeks gave to family. The individuals in the family, especially his father and his brother, were strong characters, leaders, but they had taken their strength from the family that nurtured them. Mavros had always felt split between the demands and duties of family and a burning need to be alone, to find his own way in the world. But whatever he did, Spyros and Andonis were never far from his mind—and he was glad they weren’t, for all the pain he had from his memories of them.
    He looked at the photos. Spyros had been in his fifties when the picture was taken. Five years later, his heart gave out a few months before the Colonels started persecuting the leaders of the left. His thick black hair was combed back from his handsome face, the hooked nose both his sons had inherited dominant. Above the open-necked shirt the skin on his throat was heavily wrinkled, giving him the look of a much older man. The years he’d spent in detention camps on remote islands after the Second World War and the subsequent civil war had taken a heavy toll. The old communist’s mouth, surmounted by a heavy moustache, rose at the corners to form a tentative smile, hinting that, despite the terrible weight of his suffering, he had somehow retained his faith in humanity. His eyes, dark blue in life but glossy black in the photograph, seemed to have witnessed great happiness.
    Dorothy took in the direction of Mavros’s gaze but kept her own eyes to the front. ‘Let them be, Alex,’ she said in a lower voice. ‘They were with us and now they have gone. Will you never learn to accept that?’
    Mavros was only dimly aware of her words. He was staring into the flat pools of Andonis’s eyes. The photo didn’t do them any kind of justice. Although Andonis was eleven years older than his little brother and had disappeared when Alex was only ten, the bright blue of his eyes was what people still remembered about him. Alex’s were darker, the brown flecks in the left one the result of a rare genetic mutation that made him stick out from the crowd. But Andonis had also been prominent since he was a small child, the burning blue of his eyes joining with the force of his personality to cast a spell on everyone he met. Boys listened to him and laughed with him, girls fell head over heels in love, both at school and later at the polytechnic. He had been one of the most daring of student anti-dictatorship leaders, even though he was younger than many activists. He was his father’s son, resourceful and inspiring, possessing few of his mother’s analytical powers and never for a moment in doubt of his abilities. There were a few people who had found him arrogant and overbearing.
    And then, one night in December 1972, he had failed to return to the family home in Neapolis where he still slept. He had been at a meeting of an underground cell in the nearby town of Paiania and his comrades took him to the bus stop. But no one had seen him since.
    Mavros sometimes wished that he could lose sight of his vanished sibling, even though the sudden flash he’d had of Andonis today when he was looking at the lekythos on the museum poster had been more vivid than the image in the photograph. He suspected that things would be easier if he could move on. But he’d been haunted by his brother for so long that he couldn’t imagine life without him. It was Andonis who lay beneath his work, it was his love of Andonis that drove him to search for strangers—as if by finding them he was keeping some faint glimmer of his brother alive in the family.
    ‘Alex,’ Dorothy said quietly, ‘you have to stop chasing shadows and ghosts. You’ve tried everything. You’ve spoken to witnesses,