Free Nemesis of the Dead by Frances Lloyd

chance.’
    ‘Sheer arrogance, that’s what. To Ambrose, all women are fair game, like pieces of meat. He belongs in the Stone Age, shambling about carrying a club with his knuckles dragging on the ground.’
    ‘Why does Marjorie put up with him?’
    ‘Don’t ask me. I’d have shoved him off the ferry on the way over.’
    Corrie suddenly stopped and bit her lip. She was thinking about life insurance, Medusa and Poseidon and what the professor had said about indiscretions outside the boundaries of their narrow domestic lives. This was indeed a strange, hypnotic island.
     
    When they reached their room, Corrie opened the windows and went out on to the balcony. The air was hot and very still. Even the cicadas had stopped chirping. Katastrophos seemed to be holding its breath, sensing a storm. From the back of the hotel she had a clear view of the hills and, to the south, the monastery ruins soaring high above the dark, brooding sea. She stood for some time, not moving, then she called out suddenly to Jack.
    ‘Quick, come here and look at this!’
    Jack ambled out on to the balcony wearing his pyjama bottoms and with a foaming toothbrush in his mouth. ‘What?’
    ‘Look.’ She gestured up at the summit of the towering rock. ‘Sidney was right. There is someone in the monastery. There’s a light flashing up there.’
    Jack took the toothbrush out of his mouth and pointed with it. ‘Yes, and look there.’
    Far out on the silent indigo sea, another light signalled back in response.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T he next day dawned humid and heavy. The threat of a storm had become a promise. Jack had seen Greek island storms – they were dramatic and dangerous. It was a spectacle you never forgot and more important, it was distracting, so it was crucial that he stayed alert and ready to act.
    He had known from the start that this assignment carried more than an acceptable degree of risk. Under normal conditions, he would have found a safer way to handle it but as the chief super had pointed out, the conditions were far from normal and there really was no other way.
    ‘You’ll be flying by the seat of your pants on this one, Jack.’ You could always rely on the DCS to dredge up a weary platitude to boost your confidence. There had been no time to plan properly or do sufficient groundwork and knee-jerk policing was not Jack’s style. Detection based on hunches and intuition had a nasty habit of going balls-up when you got to court. But he acknowledged that this was an exceptional case, requiring exceptional measures and the price of getting it wrong was high. What he had not foreseen was that he would be trying to operate whilst impeded by a bunch of muppets. What the hell was wrong with everybody? If he didn’t know better, he would say they were doing all they could to foul things up on purpose. According to his sparse background information, most of these individuals were reasonably rational, well-balanced people when in their natural habitat. But from the moment they arrived on the island, Katastrophos seemed to have loosened everyone’s screws.
    There was that pompous old idiot Ambrose trying, impossibly, to jump Diana, whilst Diana was quite obviously planning to get into Sid’s shorts at the earliest possible opportunity. Ostensibly, that was none of Jack’s business except it could be a real complication if she managed it, and he had no doubt that she would. It was impossible to get any sense out of Tim and Ellie who were going about like a couple of tits in a trance. He had no clear idea of what, if anything, he should to do about them but the situation needed watching. As for Sky, the unhinged hippy – God alone knew what planet Sky was on. Nobody had briefed him about her.
    The professor’s loony rant against murderous salad-eaters had come as no surprise, it was predictable and in character, but what with Maria and her mother summoning up saintly impregnation, Yanni looking shifty most of the time and ghostly