Nemesis of the Dead by Frances Lloyd Read Free Book Online

slight, like the bumpy vertebrae of a dinosaur. Because they rose so sharply and the island was small, they assumed a dominance far greater than their modest altitude warranted. Corrie reckoned they were probably limestone as the peaks had that bare and eroded look. Around the foothills were low-lying olive groves, rich and very old with huge-trunked trees, some of them marvellously twisted.
    The Hotel Stasinopoulos was not the ugliest building Corrie had ever seen but it came pretty close. It was built into the side of a slope so that it had three storeys at the front but only one at the back. She and Jack were at the back with a balcony view of the hills and olive groves. The balconies at the front looked out across the turquoise crescent of Katastrophos Bay.
    The crumpled information leaflet for touristas that Corrie had found on the reception desk was in peculiar English and badly misspelled but she worked out that the hotel used to be an old merchant’s house in the days when pirates regularly raided the sea villages on the Greek mainland. They hid the booty (and themselves) in the hills and sea caves of obscure, hard-to-access islands like Katastrophos.
    Corrie wandered around to the front and glanced up at the flaking façade of the ugly house. There were three large and hideous stone sculptures gazing down from the flat roof. She recognized them from her school days as the Gorgons – three female monsters with wings, claws, and repulsive human heads. The middle one was Medusa, which was a spooky coincidence after what she had said to Jack the previous night about Diana eyeing all the men and turning them to stone. Mischievously, Corrie recalled a particular myth in which Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden with long golden tresses, but she made the mistake of desecrating Athena’s temple by lying there with Poseidon, god of the sea. Hardly a big deal, thought Corrie, because randy Poseidon exerted his power over women whenever he could. He had it off with virtually everyone in the mythological world, including his own sister. Not surprisingly, his many love affairs resulted in some strange children, including one by a sea nymph that was half-human, half-fish, and Pegasus, the flying horse, a product of his hanky-panky with Medusa. Athena, however, was outraged and turned Medusa’s beautiful golden hair into living snakes.
    Poseidon, thought Corrie dreamily, was a maddening personification of male bigotry and chauvinism. If you looked hard enough, you could find a parallel for everyone in Greek mythology. If Diana’s roving eye made her Medusa then Ambrose, sexist and domineering, was clearly Poseidon. Corrie shielded her eyes with her hand and gazed out at the aching glitter of the sea, unaware that the ancient myth and mystery of Katastrophos were already working their powerful magic on her.
     
    Breakfast was served outdoors, under the vine-covered pergola where Jack had promised Corrie a romantic meal alone. However, the Greek tradition of conviviality meant that everyone dipped into the same dish, so they were seated together around a big oval table made of gnarled olive wood. Not totally together, because the young Greek woman sat a little away from them, eating her breakfast under a tree. The meal consisted of orange juice, slices of seed-cake, Greek yogurt and honey. Maria fussed round them with slices of juicy melon and tiny cups of thick, sweet coffee.
    Ambrose Dobson, still wearing a collar and tie and braces but with his jacket hung carefully over the back of his chair, made a huge fuss about how he couldn’t drink coffee, especially strong coffee. He had a serious congestive heart complaint, he said importantly, that needed constant medication to control its pumping rate. He took tablets at exactly the same time every day and Marjorie saw to it that he had the accurate dose. Caffeine, he said, and anything else that might interfere with it, was out of the question. He turned on Maria