Read Online Death of an Elgin Marble by David Dickinson - Free Book Online Page A

Let’s just hope a letter is all we get.’
    Johnny Fitzgerald was rewarded with a large glass of Brunello di Montalcino, a new recommendation from Powerscourt’s wine merchant, when he brought the news of the Isles of Greece and the other Delphic messages from Sokratis Papadopolous to Markham Square shortly after 6.30 on the evening of his trip to the hospital. Lady Lucy had observed to her husband only the day before that Johnny seemed to be drinking much less than usual. She had heard a whisper from a distant outstation of her relatives in Warwickshire that Johnny was romantically involved with a rich and attractive widow resident in that county and in Flood Street, Chelsea, but no mention had been made of the putative love affair.
    ‘What do you think it all means, Lady Lucy? Shades of the prison-house and the other stuff comes from a poem by Wordsworth as far as I know. The High City probably means Acropolis. Half the bloody cities in ancient Greece had their own acropolises, didn’t they? I can’t make any sense of either of those. But “The Isles of Greece”, I mean, like the fellow said. What was he on about?’
    ‘It could be anything, Johnny, he was a very strange man that Lord Byron who wrote it. Some long dead relation of mine was supposed to have been in love with the poet, you know,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Your dying friend did say it was a riddle, didn’t he? Like the Sphinx and what walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening.’
    ‘Could be a pub, the Isles of Greece,’ said Johnny hopefully, contemplating perhaps the long reconnaissance mission needed to identify such a place.
    ‘Or a restaurant,’ Powerscourt chipped in, ‘roll up, roll up for the freshest seafood in London.’
    ‘How about a nightclub?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Dusky Greek maidens dancing to the music of the lyre and the pipes of Pan perhaps?’
    ‘Seven veils?’ asked Johnny. ‘Six? Eight? Ten?’
    ‘That would depend on the time of the evening, I think, Johnny,’ Lady Lucy replied. ‘The later the hour, the fewer the number of veils, I imagine.’
    ‘How late before the veils disappear down to zero?’ asked Johnny.
    ‘What about a shop?’ suggested Lady Lucy, keen to escape from the veils. ‘Posh sort of place in Knightsbridge perhaps, selling luxury produce from the Greek islands, olives from Rhodes, toy bull dancers from Crete, a better class of ouzo from Mykonos, warm jumpers for seafarers in the winter months, hand-knitted by Greek grandmas by the fire in their peasant cottages while the wind howls round the Aegean.’
    ‘It could all have been a bluff, of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe the fellow meant that the secret of the Caryatid’s disappearance actually does have to do with the Greek Islands. It wasn’t really a riddle at all.’
    ‘There are a couple of verses at the end of “The Isles of Greece” about Samian wine,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘They might appeal to you, Johnny. I looked it up earlier. Here we are: “Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! Our virgins dance beneath the shade – Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep; There, swanlike, let me sing and die: A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine – Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!”’
    ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Johnny, ‘I bet those rogues at the Greek pub near the Orthodox cathedral have some Samian filth hidden in the cellar. Do you think I should go to Samos, Francis? Check out the wine and the veils and the maidens?’
    ‘He said “The Isles of Greece”, mind you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Surely if he wanted to refer to Samos, he’d have said Samos, wouldn’t he?’
    ‘There must be hundreds and hundreds of Greek islands,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling that the riddle wasn’t going to yield up its secrets very easily.
    ‘How long did it take that fellow Odysseus to get home to his island from Troy?’ Johnny Fitzgerald put