In that she was mistaken. At the last minute, Ariadne emerged from the hotel and ran across the quayside, jumping aboard just as they were leaving.

‘I’m coming too,’ she announced, her sweet face with its almond eyes set in unusual determination. ‘It was me the goddess spoke to!’

While Dora looked shocked, Karl made room for her, adding with his usual twinkle: ‘I rather think you heard us discussing our little trip last night.’

‘If you are looking for the goddess, I need to be with you,’ Ariadne insisted.

‘You know,’ Dora said gently, ‘she is actually a statue, not a real goddess?’

The girl didn’t answer and stared at the horizon instead.

As they motored towards the open sea, Dora couldn’t resist glancing behind her.

‘You know,’ Karl pointed out in his quiet way, ‘you really shouldn’t keep looking behind you. It makes it seem as if you’re doing something you shouldn’t be. Besides, I think you can be pretty sure that in a place as small as Kyri, everyone will know exactly what everyone else is doing.’

‘You may be sure he will know,’ Ariadne stated matter-of-factly. ‘The rich Athenian the goddess hates. He keeps a glass in his bedroom to look far away. I have seen it when I cleaned there.’

‘Well, there’s your answer,’ Karl laughed, and he turned back towards the quayside and waved.

Their captain decided it was time to take control. ‘Oriste, my friends. Where is it you would like to go today?’

‘I would like to see a little of the coastline in that direction,’ said Dora, pointing the opposite way from the caves.

‘Aha.’ Karl tapped his nose in confirmation. ‘Confuse the opposition, eh?’

‘But there is nothing of interest that way, kyria,’ the captain protested. ‘That way, only the beaches that have suffered from debris being thrown from many yachts.’

‘Ah,’ Dora announced self-righteously, ‘but I am extremely interested in the topic of pollution by plastic.’

Even Ariadne got the giggles at this.

‘Kyria Dora,’ she stated through her laughter, ‘you are beginning to sound like your friend Penelope!’

After they had tutted at a beach where the blue edge of the waves was not created by nature’s palette but made of minuscule pieces of blue carrier bags, which Dora photographed enthusiastically on her phone, they set off back in the direction that really interested them.

‘So where exactly is this cave where you saw something suspicious?’ Karl enquired in a low tone.

‘We follow the other boats to the popular pirate caves, and it’s a little further on,’ Dora explained.

They stared down into the gin-clear water, where little troupes of striped tiger fish darted ten feet below.