Free The Green Lady by Paul Johnston Page B

story? And who is the snake in Paradheisos?
    Mavros had initially been deceived by the headline.
Paradheisos
meant ‘paradise’, but was also the name of the small town that had been built in the Sixties to house workers at the bauxite processing plant three kilometers away. As the photograph accompanying the article showed, the box-shaped houses were white in the sector nearest the beach, yellow in the central area and pink at the rear. He found the town’s website and was informed that ordinary workers were allocated homes in the white part, middle management in the yellow and senior management in the pink. He wondered if the architect had read the works of Orwell and Huxley. Social engineering was unusual in a country full of individualists.
    But where did this get him? If Maria Bekakou was married to one of Poulos’s closest advisors, what connection could she possibly have to Lia’s disappearance? There was only one way to find out.
    Akis Exarchos was sitting at the bedroom window, the wooden slats of the shutters filtering the afternoon light. The burning sun was on his heavily tanned knees and calves. He should have kept out of the rays – the doctor had told him so after several cancerous growths were removed from his neck – but it didn’t matter any more. Cancer had taken his wife Yiorgia a month ago, eating away her womb. They had no children, even though they’d been trying for ten years. Akis, aged thirty-three, felt like an old man. He looked out across the sparkling bay, the usual cloud from the works drifting over the headland. To his left, five kilometres away, the striped blocks of buildings in Paradheisos climbed up the slope, the road that led out of the valley coiling away up the defile beyond. People there worked at the aluminium works, even though they had to leave after their contracts ended. Here in Kypseli, there was nothing. More experienced fishermen than him couldn’t make a living. They had to go so far out into the gulf to make a worthwhile catch that there was no time to drive to the inland towns to sell the fish. Nobody in Kypseli would risk eating the fruit of the sea nearby, considering the muck that was dumped in the water during bauxite processing. The huge ships that came to pick up the finished aluminium had been known to leave slicks of fuel oil too.
    That was why he had got involved with the ecologists. At first he and the other locals thought the newcomers from Athens were troublemakers, but people were coming round to their way of thinking. Even the beehives that had given the village its name no longer provided much honey. Bees were more intelligent than humans.When they started dying, they left. Yiorgia no longer had that option.
    Of course, the mining corporation’s representatives had been round, offering money to anyone with a legitimate grievance. A woman with a fake smile had come to Akis’s house a week ago. She was very sorry about his wife’s death, while stressing there was no link between her cancer and the company’s activities. But, in a gesture of good will, HMC was prepared to make a one-time offer of ten thousand euros, as long as he promised never to involve himself in what she called ‘misguided conservationist actions’. He wasn’t even sure what that meant, but he recognised blood money as quickly as he did the varieties of ever-shrinking fish in his nets. He told her to leave, shouting only when she expressed surprise.
    The long-haired, bearded young man and his sandal-wearing woman were right. Kypseli and Paradheisos were a toxic Eden and he wasn’t going to take it anymore.
    Mavros made preparations. He shaved and then dressed in up-market tourists clothes, consisting of a pair of pale blue chinos his mother had given him and a yellow Bondai Beach T-shirt a friend had brought back from down under. The pièce de résistance was a floppy green hat that almost obscured his eyes, his hair