‘This is good girl. You like my boat?’
Billie nodded. She seemed to have rallied somewhat. She was a little more responsive. He knew he had the old man close to a deal. It was time to go. He didn’t know where to go, but it was definitely time to get off this island. He felt certain Jennifer wasn’t here. She might never have been here. She might have caught the six o’clock hydrofoil yesterday while he was at Episkopi. She had plenty of warning, if she hadn’t wanted to see him. And now with this Alex business he was panicky, feeling trapped. At the very best, if the cops were relaxed about it, it would take time and the trail would cool. What bloody trail — he just had to get off the island.
Outside the rain had stopped and the dog caught his eye, rising to its feet to shake itself. Water blurred from it and Billie slipped off her chair.
‘Don’t go far, love.’
Billie passed by the crowded tables and headed for the door. Scully saw now; it was the dog from the hydrofoil again.
‘Ermione is too much.’
‘Fifteen, twenty kilometres.’
‘Too much this,’ Kufos said with the wave motion again.
‘How about Hydra beach just across there. That’s less than ten.’
‘Signomi, Kyrios Afstralia. My boat she is too much slow for this. You take taxi Niko.’
‘Nick Meatballs?’
‘Neh. Is fast. Volvo Penta.’
Scully sat back. Meatballs was the biggest macho on the island. His taxi was the envy of every man and boy. Seventeen feet. 165 horsepower sterndrive and a sliding perspex canopy like an old Spitfire fighter plane. Forty knots on a smooth sea, no sweat. Joan Collins and Leonard Cohen had been among his passengers last summer. Meatballs was a living legend.
‘Pou ine? Where is he?’
Kufos shrugged, seeing the money elude him.
Scully ordered a bottle of Metaxa for the old man and offered his thanks. Then there was a growl and a scream from outside, and the whole taverna was in uproar.
Twenty-two
SCULLY RAN ACROSS TABLES to get outside where Billie sat bellowing inside her mask of blood. Her eyes were blank and wide as coins. Scully held her rigid in his arms and spoke quietly to her in the moments before the terrace was overrun with shouting men and women. With his fingers he probed her face for the wounds and found punctures in her cheek, her forehead, an eyebrow. With his handkerchief he wiped the gore away for a moment and saw that there was a gash in front of her ear and a hole in her scalp that showed a flap of fatty tissue. He tried to soothe her, calm her before anything else, but it was impossible with all the yelling and the many hands that reached for her in sympathy. He hoisted her on his hip in time to see old Kufos beating the dog to death with his unopened bottle of Metaxa, and he ran for the hospital.
Along the cobbled alleys slippery as creekbeds, Scully slid and lurched, leaving a bright trail on the stones. He saw the open eyes and mouths of people at their doors as he plunged across the square and through the ghostly trunks of the whitewashed lemon trees to the clinic steps.
He found a dim corridor, an empty room, then a roomful of bored people with their backs to the walls. They rose, startled, fearful, shouting, and then the mob came behind to surge in with their roars and bellows and great indecipherable swathes of language. He wanted to shout, to demand, but his breath was gone and he could not think of enough words in Greek.
Two women in white stiff-armed their way through the crowd and their eyes widened and their businesslike boredom evaporated. The child’s face was so disfigured by lumpy, dark blood, and her clothes so spattered and gluey with it, that it was hard to know what she was, let alone what the problem might be. They grabbed her, but Billie clung to him. Her nails pierced his clothes and found his skin. Men shouted across him to the staff who dragged them both into another room where a male doctor waited with a cigarette and a stethoscope.
The doctor motioned kindly, almost jovially as the nurses continued to pry Billie from Scully’s chest. At the big stainless steel sink they held her arms and head and swabbed her face. Her eyes were mad. Cattle eyes. Killing yard eyes. Her screams felt as though they could shave paint from the walls. The staff squinched up their faces. They lost any composure they might have planned on displaying when she bared her teeth and lunged at all those dark, hairy forearms locked about her.
‘Ochi, ochi!’
The doctor howled as Billie latched onto his wrist, gnashing and growling. The others let go in an instant and Billie crashed back against her father’s chest.
‘That’s it! That’s enough. She’s fucking hysterical, she’s scared out of her mind, for Godsake!’
‘Scully?’ someone called behind him.
He wheeled and saw Arthur with Kufos who had blood and brains all down his tunic.
‘Tell them to give me some stuff and I’ll fix her up myself! She’s shitscared.’
‘What are you going to do, sew her up on your own?’ cried Arthur.
‘Just tell em.’
‘What about the scars?’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ, help me!’
Screaming, screaming. Circus. Nightmare. Slow-motion pantomime. Scully’s sinews sprang in him like wires. His spine creaked with fear and hatred. He was drowning in noise, flapping hopelessly between words he couldn’t recognize. He tried to soothe Billie, almost sobbing his pleas to her, while Arthur and Kufos argued with the staff who shook their heads and waved their hands in outrage. Back and forward, the words, the scowls, the pleading, the slapping of fists and hands, and then when Scully realized he wasn’t breathing anymore, he turned with Billie in his arms and bolted from the room with the crowd parting fearfully before him. Down the long antiseptic corridor, the anterooms with their lordly portraits, and out onto the rain fresh steps beneath the sky where he roared until he felt her hands on his bursting throat and her voice in his ear.
‘Stop. Stop, it hurts!’
Twenty-three
ARTHUR BROUGHT ANOTHER BOWL OF hot water and Scully gritted his teeth and cut the patch of matted hair with the nail scissors. Billie closed her eyes and sucked in a breath as his fingertip pressed the flap of scalp down and took up the disposable razor. Arthur averted his eyes. Scully felt his arse tighten as he applied the blade to the wound and shaved the ragged skin. He saw the tears run from her tight-shut eyes and kept at it until the wound was clean and bleeding freshly again. The scalp lifted enough to sicken him.
‘You can’t sew that, Scully.’
‘Gimme those strip things, will you? We’ll press it flat and get it together again.’
‘The hospital wants you to sign a form.’
‘Just wash those scissors again, will you?’
Billie began to whimper as he squeezed antiseptic into this last gash.
‘You’re a brave girl,’ he murmured with a quaver in his voice. ‘Nearly finished.’
‘Kufos came for me,’ said Arthur.
‘Yes,’ Scully said, wiping the bald patch dry.
‘He said you wanted Nikos Keftedes.’
‘Arthur, the strips, okay? She’s in pain here.’
‘The sea’s treacherous out there,’ Arthur said, wrestling a pack of steri-strips open.
‘Here, hold the flaps down with your thumbs.’
‘Oh, dear. You should have —’
‘Just put your thumbs… right, I’ll bind it closed. Hold tight, love.’
Billie cried out as the men’s fingers pressed at her. Her feet rose into their bellies and her back arched from the sofa. She was sweating and the strips wouldn’t stick.