The Dark Side of the Island - Jack Higgins [40]
"Why did you never marry?" he said softly. "A girl like you must have had offers."
She turned very slowly and in the weird orange light reflected from the sea she might have been Helen gazing on Troy burning and never more beautiful.
Her eyes were dark pools a man could never fathom. When she whispered his name and took a step forward they came together naturally and easily. Her hands pulled his head down as her mouth sought his and then he lifted her in his arms and laid her down on the rug.
She was crying, her face wet with tears, he was aware of that and then a great wind seemed to gather them up and carry them off to the other end of time.
As they went through the garden to the house they walked hand-in-hand like children. Katina's linen dress was badly crumpled and stained with salt water and Lomax chuckled and kissed her gently on one cheek. "You'd better change before supper. We don't want to shock Oliver in his old age."
They moved through the sitting room into the hall and paused at the bottom of the stairs. "I think I'll take a shower as well," she said. "I'll see you in half an hour."
He nodded. "I'll be on the terrace with Van Horn."
She kissed him briefly and turned away and he stayed there, aware that her fragrance still lingered in the air around him, feeling curiously sad.
For a little while he had managed to escape from the world of hate and violence into which he had been plunged. But what he had just experienced on the beach had been a brief foretaste of a happiness he could only have if he solved a seventeen-year-old mystery. He was beginning to doubt whether that was possible.
Van Horn was sitting on the terrace in the same canvas chair smoking a cigarette and looking out to sea with a pair of night glasses.
"Ah, there you are," he said. "Enjoy your walk?"
"I went down to the beach," Lomax told him. "Quite a boat you've got there."
Van Horn nodded. "Comes in very handy. It means I can get across to Crete when the mood hits me. The mail boat only calls here once a week."
"I'm only too well aware of that fact," Lomax said.
He leaned against the balustrade and looked out over the darkening sea and after a while, Van Horn said softly, "Why did you come back, Lomax? Why now after all these years?"
Lomax shrugged. "I felt like a change, it was that simple."
"But nothing ever is," Van Horn said.
Knowing at once that he was right, Lomax frowned, trying to get it straight in his own mind. After a moment he said, "I seemed to have taken a wrong turning somewhere."
"You wanted to be a writer, didn't you?"
Lomax nodded. "Oh, I became one all right. Not the great novelist I'd imagined or anything like that, but I've done all right in the film game."
"Learning to compromise is one of the hardest things in life."
Lomax laughed harshly. "In my case it seemed at times as if life had done the compromising. I reached a state in which my mornings carried a permanent taste of dead yesterdays. I thought that if I came back to the Aegean, took some time off to think, that I might find where I'd gone wrong, begin again."
Van Horn sighed. "Isn't that what we all want to do and never can? We wouldn't make the same mistakes twice--we'd simply make fresh ones." He smiled softly. "There's an old Greek saying: 'For every joy the Gods give two sorrows.' We must accept life as it is, Lomax, and work from there."
Lomax shook his head. "Too fatalistic for my taste. A man must be willing to fight back when the going gets rough."
"Presumably you intend to do just that?"
Lomax nodded. "I'm fully aware that I have some sort of moral responsibility for starting what happened here, but I didn't pull the trigger on these people. I don't see why I should carry the cross for the person who did."
"But you've nothing to go on. You don't even know what you're looking for."
"It's quite simple really," Lomax said. "I'm looking for the member of the original group who doesn't fit into the general pattern. The person