The Dance of Dimitrios

The Dance of Dimitrios

Patrick Brigham

EVROS EDITIONS PUBLISHING

The Dance of Dimitrios is a mystery story which mixes some of the horrors of illegal immigration with everyday events. DCI Michael Lambert knows about people trafficking and the problems it causes administrations throughout the world. Greece is the gateway into Europe for countless Middle Eastern migrants, political refugees and terrorists.

Lambert works for Europol, the European equivalent of the FBI, and he is sent to Greece in order to solve a cold case. It involves the discovery of a woman's body, found floating in the River Ardas in northern Greece. Believed to be of Middle Eastern origin, she is buried in a communal grave, along with other Islamic victims of drowning, and promptly forgotten.

One year on and her fingerprints – taken at the time of her autopsy – are run through the Europol computer. This reveals that she is actually an Englishwoman called Marjory Braithwaite, who has been living for some years in Greece. The British Government turns to Europol for help and, realising that it probably means murder, DCI Lambert is dispatched to Greece.

When it turns out she is not just an ordinary Englishwoman but a well-known writer, Lambert is inclined to look for murder suspects within the world of literature. But, as a retired war correspondent and an Arabic scholar, his attention is also drawn to Mrs. Braithwaite’s past – as a journalist in the Lebanon, Syria and Jordan – thereby introducing the reader to Al Qaeda, people smuggling and finally MI6, the British secret intelligence service.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Some need the Glories of This World; and some Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come; Ah, take the Cash, and let the Promise go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

Verse XIII

DEDICATION

To Sally Brigham at

www.pukkaproofreading.co.uk

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2015 Patrick Brigham

Cover Design: Great Writers Publishing

ISBN 9786188240018

Except for review purposes, this document shall

not be transmitted, copied, modified, duplicated

or reproduced, in full or in part, in any manner

without the written authorization of the author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses,

places, events and incidents are either the products

of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious

manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living

or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Down by the River Ardas

Chapter 2 The Meeting at New Scotland Yard

Chapter 3 The Village of Kzenia

Chapter 4 Sorting out the Paperwork

Chapter 5 A Trip to the Doctor

Chapter 6 A Suspect in Mezek

Chapter 7 A Serious Suspect

Chapter 8 The Chase Begins

Chapter 9 Death in Borisova Gradina

Chapter 10 The Details Mount Up

Chapter 11 Death in Malandrinos

Chapter 12 The Hangman Awaits

Chapter 13 Back in the Old Routine

Chapter 14 This Time it’s Forever

Chapter 1 - Down by the River Ardas

Dimitrios Pantzos was an old man. In his eighties, his thoughts dwelt, not only on his own austere past, but also on that of his parents’. In 1923 they had been forced to move from Turkish Thrace, as part of the Great Migration, to the then newly fashioned country of Greece. As a first generation Greek National he had little reason to love the Turks and felt a deep resentment for the damage they had caused his family and their lives.

Once from a wealthy family of landowners, his father – and those members of the family who managed to survive Ataturk’s bloody partition – had been forced to cross the River Evros into Greece, only to become a subsistence farmer.

In common with many in the Evros region, when he became a man, Dimitrios Pantzos held a grudge, which his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren could never truly understand. Living in the little riverside village of Kzenia, overlooking the meandering River Ardas, he too had tilled the soil throughout his life, witnessing Greece’s turbulent past, the various political upheavals – the rule of the colonels and their cursed junta – and finally their spendthrift successors. But, somehow, he had managed to survive.

Hidden in the northern reaches of the Evros region, the next door neighbour Turkey was literally five minutes away by road, and driving north – and twenty minutes by car – was the recently renamed Democratic Republic of Bulgaria. He had heard these days that Bulgaria now had a king as prime minister, but Dimitrios Pantzos remained ardently unimpressed, believing them all to be The Devil’s Children!

He remembered the Communists during the troubles in 1948 and, like many other Greeks, hated them like the plague. But, because he didn’t like the Turks either, he – akin to many of his fellow citizens – felt isolated and detached from the outside world.

The Greek newspapers glibly repeated the mantra that Greece was now a fully-fledged member of the EU, which – other than some minor help to subsistence farmers – had improved life very little for him or his family. With worn-out tools and increasingly arthritic joints, it had become a struggle to survive the recent past, and he was pleased when a neighbour reluctantly agreed to rent his land from him. Now, all he could manage to plant were a few vegetables, exclusively for his own private needs.

A widower for some ten years, the loneliness he felt was indescribable. Even with the other old men in the village – who inhabited the pensioners’ café – he had little in common. They rarely seemed mournful for very long and when their loved ones died, they somehow accepted their passing as a matter of course. But Dimitrios Pantzos was different, because – although he had been a farmer all his life – above all, he was a musician, a philosopher and a poet.

The ever present grief, which for years had held him in its icy and unrelenting grip, often stopped him from performing even the most mundane daily tasks and rarely seemed to go away. This grey and numbing spectre had appeared the very same day that his wife died. It happened quite suddenly, one Sunday morning, during the cruel month of April. The horror of waking up next to her cold and lifeless body was a memory which could never be adequately described, even by a philosopher and poet such as himself. It was as though his life had also come to an end.

This had all happened some time before, but to the old man, it still seemed like yesterday. Many in the village thought him quite mad because, as a self-proclaimed intellectual, he appeared to inhabit some unfathomable and distant in-between world which they simply didn’t understand. And so he learned to ignore the cruel whispers and jibes coming from his neighbours and, of course, all his so-called friends.

They laughed at his claims to understand the very essence of Greece, which was something he described in his poems and songs. Maybe this was because they were far too preoccupied reading their seed catalogues and farming magazines – that was, of course, if they could read at all.

Dimitrios Pantzos had a small piece of land next to the River Ardas. It was good for nothing except for a few trees and, being next to the river path, it was occasionally prone to flooding in winter when the Bulgarians – usually quite gratuitously – opened up the river sluice gates on their side of the border. But in spring and summer the land remained dry and usable – adjacent plots having become occasional barbecue sites – and so Dimitrios, in his loneliness and with little else to do, opened up a small riverside café.

The tables and chairs were an eclectic mixture – some tables merely being planks of wood on makeshift trestles – but many items were also donated to him free of charge, often with a smirk or a patronising grin, by local people, who had never really taken him very seriously. Finally, he built a little wooden hut to house the coffee machine and the sink unit, both of which had been given to him by the owner of a defunct café in Orestiada.

By connecting a garden hose to a nearby tap and by plugging into the local electricity substation, he was finally able to open his café which he named after his late and beloved wife. He called it Café Marta.

On each and every table, he placed a candle and, strung across the trees, the little outdoor café now had fairy lights, and a spotlight which shone high into the sky at night, and so Dimitrios was now set for his long awaited opening. He advertised the event in the village post office, the supermarket and petrol station but, sadly, on opening day nobody came.

Even the local Greek Orthodox priest refused to come and bless the opening, claiming that he would be ridiculed by his local parishioners were he to do so, and the villagers refused to come because they said the old man was mad.

But Dimitrios Pantzos defied their insults and the brutal humiliation handed out to him and, despite the villagers’ obvious scorn, he opened his riverside café early one summer evening. That night, Dimitrios Pantzos loudly played his beloved Marta’s favourite traditional Greek love songs, sang with passion to the glittering stars and, seeing Marta’s smiling face before him, only he could hear her words of love.

Over the passing years, despite local derision and his increasing loneliness, he continued his daily walk each day down to the river. There, he would patiently unlock his hut, play his favourite music very loudly and, occasionally, Dimitrios Pantzos would even dance.

With arms held out straight, his fingers clicking, his face stern and full of the emotion which only Greek men can truly display when they weep, Dimitrios Pantzos would slowly twirl, jump and spin amongst the assorted tables and chairs, and in so doing he would reverently display the deep and painful loss he felt for his beloved Marta, and pray that one day they would finally be reunited in heaven.

***

One summer’s day, old Dimitrios saw a woman’s body floating face down in the River Ardas. Practically opposite his café, she was lying in a pool which had formed in the delta and was snagged by the bough of a tree which had fallen during the night; she was completely motionless. It was early one morning and, as usual, there were no people around.

Knowing that it would take him some time to get to the village – due to his age – with great determination, he painfully ascended the steep hill leading up from the river to the village centre and then turned left towards the high street. Too early for the other village elders to be gossiping in their usual café by the bus stop, Dimitrios made for the post office which always opened at seven a.m.

‘I have just seen a body floating in the river, by my café,’ he blurted out to the postmistress and her husband. They were sitting and drinking frappe at a roadside table.

The man sucked noisily through his straw and then smiled at Dimitrios. ‘It is a bit early for you to be on the tsipouro, isn’t it, Dimitrios? Or did you have a rough night drinking on your own at your famous riverside café?’

The contempt in his voice was harsh. Punctuated by a spurt of tobacco smoke – which he blew ostentatiously from the corner of his mouth – and grinning at the old man, the postmaster’s brown, coffee-stained teeth displayed very little humour and looked more like a sneer.

‘Was it one of your customers, Dimitrios? I expect you poisoned them with that dreadful coffee of yours!’ The couple both laughed at his poor joke, leaving the old man feeling humiliated.

‘I tell you I saw her. She was face down by the underwater bridge. She was caught on a tree. I knew she was dead, you could tell, so you’d better call the police in Orestiada and they will send a detective.’

‘I’m not phoning anyone until I am sure what you say is true, you old loony. We can drive down to the river in my jeep, if you like, and then you can show me exactly where this body of yours is. But I will only phone the police when I am convinced you are telling the truth and not before. It might just be one of your silly stories!’

They climbed into the Suzuki jeep and the postmaster drove down the steep hill to the underwater bridge, where they got out. ‘Well, I can’t see any bodies, you old fool; you must have been seeing things.’

The old man looked bewildered and then started along the river towards the local council dump. ‘There she is; she must have been freed up by the current. The Bulgarians must have opened up their river sluices while I was away and the body must have been carried on down the river.’

The brown-toothed man looked with considerable apprehension at the woman’s unmoving body, now bobbing gently in the undulating water. His face gradually turning white, the village postmaster began to feel nauseous.

Finally he blurted out, ‘Okay, you old fool, I believe you now,’ and turning in haste towards his jeep, he said in a hoarse whisper, ‘I’d better get back to the post office and phone the police.’

Knowing full well that the postmaster wouldn’t dream of mentioning his name in his report to the police, old Dimitrios slowly walked back towards Café Marta and got on with his daily chores.

Minutes later, now sitting behind the post office counter, the self-important postmaster leaned back in his chair and, with great authority, explained the situation to the Orestiada police.

‘It is definitely a woman, Warrant Officer Panagos, and judging by her clothes she is probably one of those illegal immigrants who occasionally get washed up these days. I wish those bastards would go to Italy or Bulgaria instead; bloody foreign scum.’

Old Dimitrios sat outside his little shed, drinking strong, sweet Greek coffee, which he had prepared on his little camp-gas stove. He did this every morning, despite the fact that the coffee grains occasionally got stuck under his denture plate. Lighting up a strong Balkan cigarette, he looked at the day and at two Grey Herons which – seemingly fearless – strutted along the nearby underwater concrete bridge as if they owned it.

In the distance he watched a noisy moped driving onto the bridge, splashing water into the air. The young rider was nonchalantly resting his legs on the front mudguard as he crossed the bridge, before climbing the hill and then on up to the village. The two Grey Herons casually stepped to one side as he passed and continued fishing for minnows.

Half an hour later, a distinctive blue and white police car arrived at the river scene, driven by a uniformed police officer, with a young woman sitting in the front passenger seat. Occupying the rear seat was the postmaster. He appeared to be having an animated conversation with the two front-seat passengers, whilst waving his arm in the general direction of the woman’s floating corpse.

Old Dimitrios Pantzos was completely ignored, but even so, he watched events very closely. Meanwhile, the postmistress had arrived in the Suzuki jeep in order to collect her husband – who, having waved goodbye to the two officers – cheerfully left the tragic scene, both of them ignoring the old man as they swiftly drove on past.

After a few minutes’ discussion, the woman – who may well have been a police detective – returned to the car and, holding a microphone, proceeded to talk to someone over the radio. Thirty minutes later, a Mercedes mortuary ambulance arrived, closely followed by a red-painted emergency vehicle, out of which four burly men emerged. Later still, a shallow river punt appeared from downstream and, manned by two tough-looking men in wetsuits, moored up to a nearby post.

The two men in wetsuits – after donning tanks and masks – then searched the area underwater, while the four men from the emergency vehicle manhandled the woman onto the riverbank. Having put on latex gloves, the two police officers then appeared to briefly search the body, presumably for some sort of identification, which – judging by the way they shook their heads – they couldn’t find. Then, having taken photographs of the woman’s corpse, the body was duly zipped up in a green body bag and carried by stretcher to the awaiting mortuary ambulance.

To old Dimitrios, these events had happened so quickly that, before he knew it, he was once more alone on the riverbank and left to his own devices. He thought how strange it was that old people became invisible to others, even over matters of life and death. Dimitrios Pantzos wondered who the poor unfortunate woman might have been and how she had come to be drowned in the river. But, with his limited knowledge of the world, he finally concluded that she must have either been an Ottoman or a Frank. Either way, the river was better off without her, whoever she might have been.

***

Detective Sergeant Electra Boulos looked at the photographs of the dead woman and the notes she had taken during her recent visit to Kzenia. Coming from the nearby village of Petrota, she had been brought up to understand how secretive and unimaginative local people could be and so she took very little for granted. In the country areas of Evros, most people were poor and introverted, and always put on a brave face whenever they were questioned.

The sergeant had only been a detective for just over a year but, with her command of English, not only was she a good local liaison officer but also a very useful member of the Orestiada police team. In an area which had more than its fair share of illegal immigrants – crossing the River Evros – and situated at the crossroads with Bulgaria and Turkey, there were many criminal cases to deal with, where the only common language was English. With illegal immigration and people trafficking came indiscriminate smuggling – including drugs and contraband cigarettes – and so the Evros Delta was a sensitive area to police.

To see Orestiada as just a little isolated rural outpost in northern Greece was to ignore the staggering level of corruption and the criminal activities that had dogged the area for a hundred years or more. But now that her attention had been diverted by the discovery of a body in the village of Kzenia, DS Electra Boulos believed she might finally get down to some proper police work.

Her team leader, Warrant Officer Panagos, was happy to hand the case over to DS Boulos, who in the past had shown considerable initiative and great forbearance. Nor was he likely to forget that she was the only member of the local police force in Orestiada who held the Greek Police Medal for Gallantry. Three years before, she had been obliged to use her weapon at a police raid in NEA Vyssa and had killed a notorious Al Qaeda Arab terrorist.

Autopsies for the Evros region were normally carried out at the teaching hospital in Alexandroupolis, where the pathologists and forensic scientists were adept at completing fast and accurate pathology. This skill was mainly due to pressure caused by the frequent deaths of illegal immigrants, who these days crossed the River Evros from Turkey into Greece in increasing numbers. In order to escape the realities and hardships caused by the many wars in the Middle East, it was an easy escape route which took them directly into the EU and their final destination.

But escaping Afghanistan or Iraq was not the only reason for people trafficking into Evros. Due to the small number of border police in Greece and the total lack of government resources, Greece had also become a prime target for terrorists and people smugglers from all over the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa. Due to soft EU laws concerning human rights’ issues, Greece also found herself swamped with people originating from all over Asia, too. The problem was that many of those who were trafficked in this way simply didn’t make it.

Most of the immigrants entering Greece illegally didn’t have any identification documents with them and so, alive or dead, it was the Greek Government's policy to fingerprint each person and to take DNA samples. So, the mysterious woman found on a lonely stretch of the River Ardas was treated no differently than the rest.

When the autopsy was completed, within a matter of a few weeks, the nameless woman was buried in a mass grave, along with others, just outside the town of NEA Vyssa. The local imam said a few holy words over the communal grave, and the nameless woman – along with twenty other Islamic river victims – was duly forgotten. But Electra Boulos did not forget.

Reading through her case notes, now almost a year after the event, she realised that the statement taken from the postmaster and mistress appeared to be a little too glib. Acting as judge and jury, the couple at the post office had somehow influenced the official police view that the victim was just another bloody illegal immigrant or foreigner who had been fished out of the drink.

In contrast to many, Electra Boulos saw the dead woman simply as a victim and, unquestionably, a suspicious death. She knew that it was rare for bodies to emerge from the River Ardas at that point and although within sight of a well-known trafficking route, it was too far upstream from the normal crossing point – right next to where the Greek and Turkish borders meet – and the Greek border town of Kastanies.

The sergeant had seen other bodies in the water close to that point in the river but unless there had been a big river swell – caused by a sudden rush of water from the River Maritza in Bulgaria – the actual location of the body caused certain doubts to linger in her mind.

One year on and, other than her case notes, photographs, the official results of the autopsy, fingerprints and DNA samples – and short of digging up a mass grave containing twenty nameless bodies – that was all she had to go on. The autopsy report was naturally quite brief. Officially referred to in the report as Ardas 23 – A Female, the forensic pathologist from the area hospital in Alexandroupolis stuck to the facts.

They recorded the height of the dead woman, her probable weight before death and a general description of her condition on arrival at the laboratory, giving her approximate age as sixty years.

Oddly enough, she was described as well nourished, but because her body had been in the water for a few days it was difficult to ascertain her actual time of death. So the pathologist took an off the record stab at three days. The contents of her stomach were a kind of vegetarian mixture, which she could have consumed almost anywhere, and it was noted that there was bruising on her ankles, probably caused by the emergency team when they dragged the body out of the water. Any cuts or abrasions were put down to her being three days floating in the river.

Without any unusual distinguishing marks on her body – other than her dyed black hair – a dental cast was made, noting that dental work had been carried out within the previous five years or so, including various fillings and a single gold-capped incisor. No information was given about her racial type – despite her obvious suntanned complexion – or her country of birth, other than possibly being of Mediterranean origin.

***

It had been over three years since Electra Boulos had been in touch with DCI Michael Lambert from Europol and she had no idea how he would react to her getting directly in touch with him after all this time. Going through the usual police procedures was always a time-consuming process in Greece and to get the attention of anyone at Europol in The Hague was a major task.

Electra still remembered a time when she and Mike Lambert had been close. Their short affair had occurred during a complicated Europol case in which they had been mutually involved. It had helped her to recover from the subsequent mental trauma caused when she was forced to shoot and kill a gunman who