The Evolution of Fear (Claymore Straker #2) - Paul E. Hardisty Page 0,80

booth wedged up against a lamppost.

Crowbar answered first ring. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he barked in Afrikaans.

‘Guess.’

Crowbar hesitated a moment. ‘That was you?’

‘You heard?’

‘It’s all over the papers today.’

‘And you, broer?’

‘We have to meet.’

Clay gave Crowbar Hope’s address.

‘Tonight, then.’

‘Hope says it’s hard to find.’

‘Fok, Straker, you growing an old woman’s beard now? See you there in two and a half hours.’

Clay put down the phone and walked back to the car. Hope was already sitting in the passenger seat, the dome light on, a copy of the Cyprus English-language daily spread across her lap. A photo of the wall, the slogan clearly legible, the burnt-out buildings in the background accompanied the headline: Six Dead in Karpasia Revenge Attack.

Clay started the car and pulled onto the coast road heading west.

After a while Hope folded the paper, switched off the dome light. ‘It says that two men are now in hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation, but are expected to recover.’

Clay said nothing, drove on.

‘You saved them, Clay,’ she whispered.

Grey tarmac scrolled away under a myopic funnel of light.

‘The Turks are making a big noise about it,’ she went on. ‘They say they have identified three of the dead attackers as Greek Cypriots. They are demanding that the Greek Cypriot government round up the senior members of Neo-Enosis and bring them to justice. It also says that the Turkish Cypriot police have evidence that at least two others who were involved fled the scene on foot that night, possibly to the coast and by boat to the south. They are wanted for questioning. There is no mention of my friend.’

But Clay wasn’t thinking about the fire, or the shootings. He was thinking about Rania. He’d gone ashore that night hoping that the villagers might provide something that would lead him to her, perhaps tie her disappearance to Erkan. Knowing that Erkan was there, in his monastery in Karpasia, had given him the vague hope that he might have been able to press on, confront the bliksem one more time, find her there, bring her home. Now he had nothing, just a scared scientist and more police after him.

It was dark by the time they reached Paphos. Hope directed him through the town to the coast and along a maze of narrow roads that snaked through the rocky carbonate hills rising up from the sea. After a while they came to a small hamlet, twenty houses perhaps, perched on the edge of a rocky hillside, the coast a fractal white line half a dimension distant, the sea stretched out across the whole world, dark and foreboding, as if you might fall into it. The road was barely wide enough for one car. Clay slowed and looked back over the darkened hills. A pickup truck sauntered along the winding valley-bottom track towards the coast road. Hope waved them on past a series of abandoned homesteads – there were so many here, derelicts of crumbling masonry and caved roofs, the arches slumped and ragged, the keystones dropped like old teeth.

‘Here,’ she said, pointing to a narrow, tree-lined lane. ‘Stop.’ Hope jumped out of the car, opened a tin postbox, pulled out a clutch of letters and sat back in the car. ‘Just down here,’ she said.

Clay pulled the Beretta from his pocket and checked the action. Then he guided the car down the lane to a rock-edged turnaround, where he switched off the engine. Hope took him by the hand and led him on foot through an old stone archway into a night garden of thick underbrush and tall, swaying trees, their branches black against a moonlit sky. The house was old, limestone brickwork casements and corners, clay-tile roof, wood-shuttered windows, a tiled veranda set with wicker chairs and a wooden table, and everywhere the cascade of vegetation, as if the place were clothed in it. She opened the front door, lit a hurricane lamp and led him through the house, carrying the lamp before her by its handle. A black-and-white tile floor, a stonework fireplace, flashes of framed watercolours on the walls, hand-drawn, washed sketches of sea creatures, turtles and fish and crustaceans of the kind you see in guidebooks. Hope handed him the lantern, opened up a set of French doors, then unlatched and folded back floor-to-ceiling shutters. A cold breeze flooded the house. The Med sparkled under a cloud-strewn night sky.

Hope left him on the balcony and reappeared a moment later with a couple of beers, handed Clay one,