My Brother Michael

by Mary Stewart

Genres: Literary Fiction; Suspense; General Fiction

Synopsis

One of Britain's most beloved authors, Mary Stewart leads her listeners on a journey of murder and deceit through the dusty roads of mid-century Greece in this tale that fans of Agatha Christie and Barbara Pym are sure to love.

'Nothing ever happens to me...'

So begins Camilla Haven's letter home during her quiet holiday in Athens. But when a stranger begs her to drive a car to Delphi, swearing that it is a matter of life and death, Camilla impulsively takes the opportunity she's been offered. Before long she is caught up in a whirlwind of intrigue, deceit and murder as she spins along the dusty Greek roads in a race against time to solve a 14-year-old mystery.

'The longer I waited the less possible it seemed to walk out of the café and leave everything to settle itself without me, and the more insidiously did the other possibility begin to present itself. Dry-mouthed, I pushed it aside, but there it was, a challenge, a gift, a dare from the gods....'

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

Why, woman,

What are you waiting for?

SOPHOCLES: Electra.

(tr. E. F. Watling.)

Nothing ever happens to me.

I WROTE the words slowly, looked at them for a moment with a little sigh, then put my ballpoint pen down on the café table and rummaged in my handbag for a cigarette.

As I breathed the smoke in I looked about me. It occurred to me, thinking of that last depressed sentence in my letter to Elizabeth, that enough was happening at the moment to satisfy all but the most adventure-hungry. That is the impression that Athens gives you. Everyone is moving, talking, gesticulating – but particularly talking. The sound one remembers in Athens is not the clamour of the impatiently congested traffic, or the perpetual hammer of pneumatic drills, or even the age-old sound of chisels chipping away at the Pentelic marble which is still the cheapest stone for building … what one remembers about Athens is the roar of talking. Up to your high hotel window, above the smell of dust and the blare of traffic it comes, surging like the sea below the temple at Sunion – the sound of Athenian voices arguing, laughing, talk-talk-talking, as once they talked the world into shape in the busy colonnades of the Agora, not so very far from where I sat.

It was a popular and crowded café. I had found a table at the back of the room near the bar. All along the outer wall big glass doors gave on to the pavement, standing open to the dust and din of Omonia Square which is, in effect, the commercial centre of Athens. It is certainly the centre of all the noise and bustle of the city. The traffic crawled or surged past in a ceaseless confusion. Crowds – as jammed as the traffic – eddied on the wide pavements. Knots of men, most of them impeccably dressed in dark city clothes, discussed whatever men do discuss at mid-morning in Athens; their faces were lively and intent, their hands fidgeting unceasingly with the little loops of amber ‘nervous beads’ that the men of the Eastern Mediterranean carry. Women, some fashionably dressed, others with the wide black skirt and black head-covering of the peasant, went about their shopping. A donkey, so laden with massed flowers that it looked like a moving garden, passed slowly by, its owner shouting his wares in vain against the hurly-burly of the hot morning streets.

I pushed my coffee cup aside, drew again at my cigarette, and picked up my letter. I began to read over what I had written.

You’ll have had my other letters by now, about Mykonos and Delos, and the one I wrote a couple of days ago from Crete. It’s difficult to know just how to write – I want so much to tell you what a wonderful country this is, and yet I feel I mustn’t pile it on too thick or you’ll find that wretched broken leg that prevented your coming even more of a tragedy than before! Well, I won’t go on about that, either … I’m sitting in a café on Omonia Square – it’s about the busiest place in this eternally busy city – and calculating what to do next. I’ve just come off the boat from Crete. I can’t believe that there’s any place on earth more beautiful than the Greek islands, and Crete’s in a class by itself, magnificent and exciting and a bit grim as well – but I told you about it in my last letter. Now there’s Delphi still to come, and everyone, solo and chorus, has assured me that it’ll be the crown of the trip. I hope they’re right; some of the places, like Eleusis and Argos and even Corinth, are a bit disappointing … one leaves oneself open to the ghosts, as it were, but the myths and magic are all gone. However, I’m told that Delphi really is something. So I’ve left it till last. The only trouble is, I’m getting a bit worried about the cash. I suppose I’m a bit of a fool where money is concerned. Philip ran all that, and how right he was …

Here a passing customer, pushing his way between the tables towards the bar-counter, jogged my chair, and I looked up, jerked momentarily out of my thoughts.

A crowd of customers – all male – seemed to be gathering at the bar for what looked like a very substantial mid-morning snack. It appeared that the Athenian business man had to bridge the gap between breakfast and luncheon with something rather more sustaining than coffee. I saw one plate piled high with Russian salad and thick dressing, another full of savoury meatballs and green beans swimming in oil, and innumerable smaller dishes heaped with fried potatoes and small onions and fish and pimentoes, and half a dozen things I didn’t recognise. Behind the counter was a row of earthenware jars, and in the shadow of their narrow necks I saw olives, fresh from the cool farm-sheds in Aegina and Salamis. The wine-bottles on the shelf above bore names like Samos and Nemea and Chios and Mavrodaphne.

I smiled, and looked down again at the page.

… but in a way I’m finding it wonderful to be here alone. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean you! I wish like anything you were here, for your own sake as well as mine. But you know what I do mean, don’t you? This is the first time for years I’ve been away on my own – I was almost going to say ‘off the lead’ – and I’m really enjoying myself in a way I hadn’t thought possible before. You know, I don’t suppose he’d ever have come here at all; I just can’t see Philip prowling round Mycaenae or Cnossos or Delos, can you? Or letting me prowl either? He’d have been all set to dash off to Istanbul or Beirut or even Cyprus – anywhere, in short, where things are happening, not centuries ago in the past, but now – and even if they weren’t happening, he’d make them.

Fun, yes, it was always fun, but – oh, I’m not going to write about that either, Elizabeth, but I was right, absolutely right. I’m sure of it now. It wouldn’t have worked, not in a million years. This trip on my own has shown me that, more clearly than ever. There’s no regret, only relief that perhaps, now, I’ll have time to be myself. There, now I’ve admitted it, and we’ll drop the subject. Even if I am quite shatteringly incompetent when I am being myself, it’s fun, and I muddle along somehow. But I do admit …

I turned the page, reaching forward absently with my left hand to tap ash from my cigarette. There was a paler circle showing still against the tan at the base of the third finger, where Philip’s ring had been. In ten days of Aegean sunshine it had begun to fade … six long years fading now without regret, leaving behind them a store of gay memories that would fade, too, and a sneaking curiosity to know if the beggar-maid had been really happy once she was married to King Cophetua …

But I do admit there’s another side to this Great Emancipation. Things do seem a trifle dull occasionally, after so many years spent being swept along in Philip’s – you must admit – magnificent wake! I feel just a little bit high and dry. You’d have thought that something – some sniff of an adventure – would have happened to a young woman (is one still young at twenty-five?) marooned on her own in the wilds of Hellas, but no: I go tamely from temple to temple, guide-book in hand, and spend the rather long evenings writing up notes for that wonderful book I was always going to write, and persuading myself I’m enjoying the peace and quiet … I suppose it’s the other side of the picture, and I’ll adjust myself in time. And if something exciting did happen, I wonder just what sort of a showing I’d make – surely I’ve got some talent for living, even if it looked feeble beside his overplus? But life never does seem to deliver itself into the hands of females, does it? I’ll just finish up as usual in the hotel bedroom, making notes for that book that’ll never get written. Nothing ever happens to me.

I put down the cigarette and picked up my pen again. I had better finish the letter, and on a slightly different note, or Elizabeth was going to wonder if I wasn’t, after all, regretting the so-called emancipation of that broken engagement.

I wrote cheerfully: On the whole, I’m doing fine. The language wasn’t a difficulty after all. Most people seem to speak a bit of French or English, and I have managed to acquire about six words of Greek – though there have been sticky moments! I haven’t managed the money quite so well. I won’t pretend I’m exactly broke yet, but I rather let myself go in Crete – it was worth it, ye gods, but if it means passing up Delphi I shall regret it. Not that I can miss Delphi. That’s unthinkable. I must get there somehow, but I’m afraid I may have to scamp it in a one-day tour, which is all I can afford. There’s a tour bus on Thursday, and I think I’ll have to be content with that. If only I could afford a car! Do you suppose that if I prayed to all the gods at once …?

Someone cleared his throat just above me. A shadow crept half-apologetically across the page.

I looked up.

It wasn’t the waiter, trying to winkle me out of my corner table. It was a little dark man with patched and shabby dungarees, a greasy blue shirt, and a hesitant smirk behind the inevitable moustache. His trousers were held up with string, which it appeared he didn’t trust, because he held on to them firmly with one grimy hand.

I must have looked at him with a chilly surprise, because the apologetic look deepened, but instead of going away he spoke in very bad French.

He said: ‘It is about the car for Delphi.’

I said stupidly, looking down at the letter under my hand: ‘The car for Delphi?’

‘You wanted a car for Delphi, non?’

The sun had probed even into this corner of the café. I peered at him against it. ‘Why, yes, I did. But I really don’t see how—’

‘I bring it.’ One grimy hand – the one that wasn’t holding up his trousers – waved towards the blazing doorway.

My eyes followed the gesture, bemusedly. There was indeed a car, a large shabby-looking black affair, parked at the pavement’s edge.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand—’

‘Voilà!’ With a grin, he fished what was patently a car key from his pocket, and dangled it above the table: ‘This is it. It is a matter of life and death, I understand that – oh, perfectly. So I come as quick as I can—’

I said with some exasperation: ‘I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about.’

The grin vanished, to be replaced by a look of vivid anxiety. ‘I am late. This I know. I am sorry. Mademoiselle will forgive me? She will be in time. The car – she does not look much, but she is good, oh, a very good car. If mademoiselle—’

‘Look,’ I said patiently, ‘I don’t want a car. I’m sorry if I misled you, but I can’t hire one. You see—’

‘But mademoiselle said she desired a car.’

‘I know I did. I’m sorry. But the fact is—’

‘And mademoiselle said it was a matter of life and death.’

‘Madem – I didn’t. You said that. I’m afraid I don’t want your car, monsieur. I regret. But I don’t want it.’

‘But mademoiselle—’

I said flatly: ‘I can’t afford it.’

His face lighted at once with a very white-toothed and singularly attractive grin. ‘Money!’ The word was contemptuous. ‘We do not speak of money! Besides,’ he added with great simplicity, ‘the deposit is already paid.’

I said blankly: ‘Deposit? Paid?’

‘But yes. Mademoiselle paid it earlier.’

I drew a breath that was three parts relief. It wasn’t witchcraft after all, nor was it an intervention of the ironic gods of Greece. It was a simple case of mistaken identity.

I said firmly: ‘I’m sorry. There has been a mistake. That is not my car. I didn’t hire it at all.’

The dangling key stilled for a moment, then swung in front of me with unimpaired vigour. ‘It is not the car mademoiselle saw, no, but that one was bad, bad. It had a – how do you say? – a crack in it that the water came out.’

‘A leak. But—’

‘A leak. That is why I am late, you see, but we get this car, oh so good, since mademoiselle say it is so urgent a matter that Monsieur Simon have the car at Delphi straight away. You leave straight away you are in Delphi in three hours – four hours …’ his look lingered on me momentarily, summing me up … ‘five hours maybe? And then perhaps all is well with Monsieur Simon, and this matter of—’

‘Life and death,’ I said. ‘Yes, I know, But the fact remains, monsieur, that I don’t know what you’re talking about! There is some mistake, and I’m sorry. It was not I who asked for the car. I gather that this, er, Monsieur Simon’s girl was to have been in this café waiting for the car …? Well, I can’t see anybody here at present who might fill the bill …’

He spoke quickly, so quickly that I realised afterwards he must have followed my rapid French only sketchily, and was pouncing on a phrase that made sense – the sense he wanted to hear. The key still swung on his finger-tip as if it was hot and he wanted to drop it. He said: ‘That is it. This café. A young lady sitting alone. Half past ten. But I am late. You are Simon’s girl, yes?’

He looked, with that bright brown uncomprehending gaze, so like an anxious monkey that my near-exasperation vanished, and I smiled at him, shaking my head, and summed up one of my six hard-learned words of Greek. ‘Ne,’ I said, as forcefully as I could. ‘Ne, ne, ne.’ I laughed and held out my cigarette-case. ‘I’m sorry there’s been a muddle. Have a cigarette.’

The cigarette seemed to be an amazing cure-all for worry. The lines vanished magically from his face. The vivid smile flashed. The key dropped with a jingle in front of me while the hand that wasn’t holding up his pants reached for my cigarette-case. ‘Thank you, mademoiselle. It is a good car, mademoiselle. Have a good journey.’

I was feeling in my bag for matches, and not until I raised my head did I really take in what he’d said. And by then it was too late. He had gone. I caught a glimpse of him sliding through the crowd at the café door like a whippet let off a string, then he vanished. Three of my cigarettes had gone too. But the car key lay on the table in front of me, and the black car still stood outside in the violent sunlight.

It was only then, as I sat gaping like an idiot at the key, the car, and the sunlight on the cloth where a moment ago the little man had cast a shadow, that I realised that my momentary piece of showing-off was likely to cost me pretty dear. I remembered a little sickly that, in Greek, ne means yes.

Of course I ran after him. But the crowd surged and swayed on the pavement, regardless, and there was no sign in any direction of the shabby messenger of the gods. My waiter followed me anxiously on to the pavement, ready to grab, I suppose, if I showed signs of taking off without paying him for my coffee. I ignored him and peered earnestly in all directions. But when he showed signs of retreating to bring up reinforcements to escort me personally back to my table and the bill, I judged it time to give up the search. I went back to my corner, picked up the key, threw a quick worried smile at the still-pursuing waiter, who didn’t speak English, and pushed my way towards the barcounter to seek out the proprietor, who did.

I elbowed my way through the crowd of men, with a nervously reiterated ‘Parakalo’, which, apparently, was the right word for ‘Please’. At any rate the men gave way, and I leaned anxiously over the counter.

‘Parakalo, kyrie—’

The proprietor threw me a harassed sweating glance over a pile of fried potatoes, and placed me unerringly. ‘Miss?’

‘Kyrie, I am in a difficulty. A queer thing has just happened. A man has brought that car over there – you see it, beyond the blue tables – to deliver it to someone in the café. By a mistake he appears to think I’m the person who hired it. He thinks I’m driving it up to Delphi for someone. But I know nothing about it, kyrie; it’s all a mistake, and I don’t know what to do!’

He threw a dollop of dressing over some tomatoes, pushed them towards a large man perched on a small stool at the counter, and wiped a hand over his brow. ‘Do you wish me to explain to him? Where is he?’

‘That’s the trouble, kyrie. He’s gone. He just left me the key – here it is – and then went. I tried to catch him, but he’s vanished. I wondered if you knew who was supposed to be here to collect the car?’

‘No. I know nothing.’ He picked up a large ladle, stirred something under the counter, and threw another look at the car outside. ‘Nothing. Who was the car for?’

‘Monsieur, I told you, I don’t know who—’

‘You said it was to be driven somewhere – to Delphi, was it? Did this man not say who it was for?’

‘Oh. Yes. A – a Mr Simon.’

He spooned some of the mixture – it seemed to be a sort of bouillabaisse – into a plate, handed it to a hovering waiter, and then said, with a shrug: ‘At Delphi? I have not heard of such a one. It is possible somebody here saw the man, or knows the car. If you wait a moment I will ask.’

He said something then in Greek to the men at the counter, and became on the instant the centre of an animated, even passionate discussion which lasted some four or five minutes and involved in the end every male customer in the café, and which eventually produced, with all the goodwill in the world, the information that nobody had noticed the little man with the key, nobody knew the car, nobody had ever heard of a Monsieur Simon at Delphi (this though one of the men was a native of Chrissa, only a few kilometres distant from Delphi), nobody thought it in the least likely that anyone from Delphi would hire a car in Athens, and (finally) nobody in their senses would drive it up there anyway.

‘Though,’ said the man from Chrissa, who was talking with his mouth full, ‘it is possible that this Simon is an English tourist staying at Delphi. That would explain everything.’ He didn’t say why, merely smiling with great kindness and charm through a mouthful of prawns, but I got his meaning.

I said apologetically: ‘I know it seems mad, kyrie, but I can’t help feeling one ought to do something about it. The man who brought the key said it was—’ I hesitated – ‘well, a matter of life and death.’

The Greek raised his eyebrows; then he shrugged. I got the impression that matters of life and death were everyday affairs in Athens. He said, with another charming smile: ‘Quite an adventure, mademoiselle,’ and turned back to his plate.

I looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly, ‘yes.’ I turned back to the proprietor, who was struggling to scoop olives out of one of the beautiful jars. It was apparent that the rush-hour and the heat were beginning to upset even his Athenian good manners and patience, so I merely smiled at him and said: ‘Thank you for your goodness, kyrie. I’m sorry to have troubled you. It seems to me that if the matter really is urgent, then the person who wants the car will certainly come and get it as arranged.’

‘You wish to leave the key with me? I will take it, and then you need have no more worry. No, it will be a pleasure, I assure you.’

‘I won’t trouble you yet, thanks. I must confess—’ I laughed – ‘to a little curiosity. I’ll wait here for a bit, and if this girl comes I’ll give her the key myself.’

And, to the poor man’s relief, I wriggled back out of the press and returned to my table. I sat down and ordered another coffee, then lit another cigarette, and settled down to a pretence of finishing my letter, but in reality to keep one watchful eye on the door, and the other on the shabby black car that should – surely – by now have been hurtling along the Delphi road on that matter of life and death …

I waited an hour. The waiter had begun to look askance again, so I pushed aside my untouched letter and gave an order, then sat playing with a plateful of beans and some small pink fish while I watched, in an expectancy that gradually gave way to uneasiness, the constant coming-and-going at the café door.

My motive in waiting hadn’t been quite as straightforward as I had suggested to the proprietor of the café. It had occurred to me that, since I had become involved in the affair through no fault of my own, I might be able to turn it to advantage. When ‘Simon’s girl’ arrived to claim the car, it might surely be possible to suggest – or even to ask outright – that I might be her passenger as far as Delphi. And the possibility of getting a lift up to Delphi was not the only one which had occurred to me …

So the minutes dragged by, and still no one came, and somehow, the longer I waited, the less possible it seemed to walk out of the café and leave everything to settle itself without me, and the more insidiously did that other possibility begin to present itself. Dry-mouthed, I pushed it aside, but there it was, a challenge, a gift, a dare from the gods …

At twelve o’clock, when nobody had appeared to claim the car, I thrust my plate aside, and set myself to consider that other possibility as coolly as I could.

It was, simply, to drive the car up to Delphi myself.

It was apparent that, for whatever reason, the girl wasn’t coming. Something must have prevented her, for otherwise she would simply have telephoned the garage to cancel the order. But the car – the urgently wanted car – was still there, already an hour and a half late in starting. I, on the other hand, wanted very badly to go to Delphi, and could start straight away. I had come straight up from Piraeus off the Crete steamer, and had everything with me that I needed for a short stay in Delphi. I could go up today, deliver the car, have two days there with the money saved on the bus-fare, and come back with the tourist bus on Thursday. The thing was simple, obvious and a direct intervention of providence.

I picked up the key with fingers that felt as if they didn’t belong to me, and reached slowly for my only luggage – the big brightly-coloured hold-all of Mykonos weaving – that hung on the back of a chair.

I hesitated with my hand touching it. Then I let the hand drop, and sat, twisting the key over and over, watching with unseeing eyes the way the sun glinted on it as it turned.

It couldn’t be done. It was just one of those things that couldn’t be done. I must have been mad even to consider doing it. All that had happened was that Simon’s girl had forgotten to cancel the order for the car and claim the deposit. It was nothing to do with me. No one would thank me for intervening in an affair that, in spite of my silly mistake, had nothing whatever to do with me. That phrase a matter of life and death – so glib a chorus, so persuasive an excuse to interfere – was only a phrase, after all, a phrase from which I had built up this feeling of urgency which gave me (I pretended) the excuse to act. In any case, it had nothing to do with me. The obvious – the only – thing to do was to leave the car standing there, hand over the key, and go away.

The decision brought with it a sense of relief so vivid, so physical almost, that it startled me. On the wave of it I stood up, picked up the car key, and swung my hold all up to my shoulder. The unfinished letter to Elizabeth lay on the table. I reached for it, and as I folded it over to thrust it into my bag, the sentence caught my eye again. Nothing ever happens to me.

The paper crackled suddenly as my fingers tightened. I suppose moments of self-knowledge come at all sorts of odd times. I have often wondered if they are ever pleasant. I had one such moment now.

It didn’t last long. I didn’t let it. It was with a sort of resigned surprise that I found myself once more at the counter, handing a slip of paper across it to the proprietor.

‘My name and address,’ I said rather breathlessly, ‘just in case someone does come for the car later on. Miss Camilla Haven, the Olympias Hotel, Rue Marnis … Tell them I – I’ll take care of the car. Tell them I did it for the best.’

I was out in the street and getting into the car before it occurred to me that my last words had sounded uncommonly like an epitaph.

It’s a long way to Delphi.

EURIPIDES: Ion.

(tr. Philip Vellacott.)

EVEN if it wasn’t Hermes himself who had brought me the key, the hand of every god in Hellas must have been over me that day, because I got out of Athens alive. More, unscathed.

There were some sticky moments. There was the shoeblack who was so urgent to clean my shoes that he followed me to the car and clung to the side and would certainly have been hurt when I started off, if only I’d remembered to put the car into gear. There was the moment when I turned – at a cautious ten miles per hour and hugging the left-hand pavement – out of Omonia Square into St Constantine Street, and met a taxi almost head-on on what I thought was his wrong side, till the volume and fervour of his abuse shocked me back on to my own right. Then there was the encounter in the narrow alley with two furious pedestrians who stepped off the pavement without a single glance in my direction. How was I to know it was a one-way street? I was lucky with my brakes that time. I wasn’t so lucky with the flower-donkey, but it was only the flowers I touched, and the driver was charming about it. He refused the note I hastily held out to him and he actually gave me the flowers I’d knocked out of the donkey’s pannier.

All things considered, people were very forgiving. The only really unpleasant person was the man wh. . .