The Dead Travel Fast by Nick Brown Read Free Book Online

slouched off towards his house. Steve watched him go. There was something reassuring about the steady rolling walk: something almost graceful for such a strong and weathered man. The bar lights went out; he leaned back onto two legs of his chair and sat for a moment watching the reflection of the fat yellow moon as it stretched and shifted over the gently rippling waters of the Aegean.
    Next day, not more than half an hour after waking, Steve sank back into the rich leather upholstery of the limo. The shaven-headed driver accelerated out of the steep bends leading up into the hills. It was before eleven and outside the day was already hot, but in the back with the air-con at full blast it was refreshingly cool. Despite the refusal or inability of the driver to reply to the remarks Steve had addressed to him in his best practised Greek, he felt a pleasurable anticipation. Once up amongst the vineyards, the car left the road to take the hidden entrance of a dirt track that he’d not noticed before.
    The track twisted and turned up away from the road towards the mountains. Steve lost all sense of direction; since taking the track they’d passed no houses, only one dilapidated shepherd’s hut. Yet the track was in surprisingly good condition and so, he guessed, must be privately maintained. Then, as the road seemed in danger of running out of mountain to climb, they crested a sharp rise and there was the house.
    Steve couldn’t tell where the rock ended and the house began, so cleverly had it been designed: it seemed to grow straight out of the mountain spur and hang over a sheer drop towards the sea. The limo drove through elaborate iron gates into a spacious courtyard. The car stopped and the driver, with surprising grace and lightness of foot for such a big man, got out and held open Steve’s door.
    “You get out here.”
    It was only the second thing he’d said since picking Steve up.Opposite him, standing in an open doorway, an ancient woman in the uniform of a maid from a previous age was waiting. She beckoned him to follow her into a marble-floored atrium with a high and exquisitely sculpted two storey high ceiling.
    “Wait here and Kirios Vassilis will see you when he is ready.”
    The walls were hung with oil paintings, none of which were less than three hundred years old and two of which Steve thought he recognised, although due to the lack of natural light he couldn’t be sure. The only furniture in the large space was two Second Empire chairs either side of an ivory inlaid escritoire on which stood an exquisite black figure-ware wine jar which Steve knew, from his work in the new museum at Pythagoreio, was finer than any exhibit on display.
    He decided not to risk sitting on either of the chairs, so wandered from painting to painting becoming increasingly uncertain of the nature of his visit. Then, after what seemed an age, the woman returned, opened one of a pair of double doors and indicated that he was to follow her. He followed through a long passage with a number of turns to another pair of doors at which she knocked and then, hearing a voice shout, opened.
    The startling change in lighting temporarily dazzled him, so his first impression of Vassilis was tonal rather than visual.
    “Welcome, Doctor Watkins, we are in your debt and in my family such things are not taken lightly.”
    The voice bore the hallmarks of an Oxbridge education spoken through a near eastern filter. Steve took the proffered handshake: the hand was large and fleshy, the cold grasp almost nonexistent. As his eyes adjusted to their surroundings Steve took his first clear sight of his host.
    Vassilis was tall, fleshily built with a sallow complexion, his face fat-lipped with a strongly aquiline nose and jet black hair slicked back from his forehead. His eyes were heavily lidded and almost lazily half shut, part concealing the striking green of the iris. The room was a cross between a richly furnished study and a highly selective