3

Two days passed, and he had just spoken to Helen on the phone. The situation in England was still a nightmare. Fiona, their mother, was on a ventilator, and Joe and Helen were taking turns to stay with her.

Helen always said that she was ‘fine’, but Day knew better than to believe it. He felt powerless to help her, and the powerlessness frustrated him almost more than anything. He wished he could have cancelled his students and gone with her to England, but the first group were due in a few days. The undergraduates were scheduled to spend time with him on Naxos as part of their programme of study, and travel plans had been fixed well in advance. To hell with it, he should have told the university to postpone. Too late now. Guilt and regret kept him awake every night; Helen needed him.

He stood up abruptly and went to shut the balcony doors. He needed time away from the house. Pausing only to double-check that he had saved his latest work, he closed down the computer, picked up the car keys and left. He had no idea where he was going, but it would be somewhere remote, somewhere he could look at the sea, talk to nobody and try to sort out his head. As he had said to Sofia, he needed to correct his vision, for the sake of both his eyes and his mind.

He drove past Apiranthos without stopping there, but it filled his mind with memories. A village of white houses and marble footpaths that dominated the flanks of Mount Fanari, it was the home of a seventeenth-century tower, an important Byzantine church, and an ancient walkway to the sea. Even more importantly, Apiranthos reminded him of Christos Korres, with whom he had collaborated on a crime scene in one of its historic houses. For a while, Day lost himself in his memories and paid little attention to the road. It was just as well that he habitually drove slowly.

As the road meandered through the central hills, Day decided to go to the village of Moutsouna on the far east coast. The road there was renowned for its difficulty and the drive would take all his concentration, but Moutsouna was one of the most remote villages on Naxos, and its isolation and historic past offered much-needed solace. He would sit with a coffee in some bar that overlooked the tranquil water of the bay, and put his thoughts in order.

Moutsouna had once been an important place. It had had the deepest port on that side of the island, a feature which had guaranteed its wealth and reputation for hundreds of years. Here ships could be laden with Naxos’s black gold, emery, for transportation across the Mediterranean. A unique natural abrasive, emery had been in high demand since antiquity for working both stone and metal objects. Pliny the Elder had even referred to it in his writings. Then, with the invention of a synthetic substitute in the twentieth century, the emery trade had come to an e