Free The Green Lady by Paul Johnston Page A

other activities, and the usual would happen. Then again, there were no boys on the trip to Mount Kithairon. Could Lia have been seeing someone and run off? If so, he couldn’t be at her school because Angie would have heard about another disappearance. She could hardly have met someone outside of school hours. The schedules her mother had sent were pretty full, plus she was ferried around by a driver who was also trained as a bodyguard. Paschos Poulos took security seriously. Which made him wonder. How could his client be sure her driver cum muscleman hadn’t reported her solitary walk up Philopappos, or even followed her? Maybe she had some kind of arrangement with the guy.
    The situation was made worse by the fact that it was August and Lia’s classmates were on holiday. Maybe some of them had stayed around for the Games rather than hightailing off to their family houses on the islands or abroad. In any case, he couldn’t talk to them. Lia’s computer would have been useful, but it had been handed over to the police and never returned. It was likely they hadn’t found anything useful, given her continuing absence. Or was there something more to all this?
    He shook his head. Anything could happen in Greece, as recently proved by the sprinters who had won medals at the Sidney Olympics. Required to attend drug testing, they had apparently crashed their motorbike and needed hospital treatment; then they had withdrawn from the competition. The whole thing smelled like a rotting rat.
    Back in his room, Mavros booted up his laptop and started to go through the lists of names Angie had given him. Was it really credible that the woman in charge of the group of girls back in May would have accepted what Lia said in her phone call – that her father had picked her up – without checking with one of the parents? Answer: no – even though Angie had said that Maria Bekakou and her husband were family friends. He put the woman’s name into a search engine and found not her but her husband, Rovertos. He was a lawyer – according to his pretty basic website, a one-man operation with expertise in business law. His photograph showed a handsome face with graying hair swept back. Rovertos Bekakos. The name rang distant bells. He went back to the list of references produced by the search engine. Most were entries in the gossip columns of the less respectable papers, though all that the lawyer and his wife seemed guilty of was attending the most exclusive soirées and dinner parties. Then he found an article from a year back in one of the low-circulation satirical magazines,
Theophrastus
. It was entitled ‘Snake in Paradise’:
    What exactly has Rovertos Bekakos been doing in Paradheisos? The exceedingly well connected – not to mention exceedingly rich – lawyer has been seen several times recently in the not-so-new town in Viotia. Surely he can’t have been sampling the delights of the Corinthian Gulf. The nearby aluminium works render the beaches less than attractive. Perhaps he and his lovely wife Maria, who usually accompanies him, are extending a hand of friendship to the workers in the village following the Hellenic Mining Corporation’s decision to replace two hundred men on high wages with unskilled school-leavers, leaving the former without homes or full pensions. Or maybe the couple has suddenly become aware of the environmentalists who have started campaigning in the area. As one of Mr Paschos Poulos’s chief advisers, there is much for Mr Bekakos to get his teeth into in that strange part of the country – the rural bliss ruptured by strip mines and huge machines, the deep blue gulf ruined by pollution. Readers will remember that Mr Poulos stated, when he took over HMC ten years ago, that the company would do more than national and international pollution standards require, as well as honour all existing labour contracts. So who are Adam and Eve in this