Manolis stared at Rex blankly. ‘I better go,’ he said.

‘Go? But Ma’s cooking her famous lamb curry tonight. It melts in your mouth.’

‘Thank you, but no. I need rest.’

Rex held Manolis’s gaze a moment before half-closing his eyes. ‘I understand.’ He sounded disappointed and resumed his seat. ‘We’ll see you later then, Kojak.’

‘See you.’

The blackened shell of the Val remained beside the sheriff ’s office. A burnt smell hung in the air, the wreck still releasing toxic vapours. Manolis sat on the verandah and rolled his nightly smoke. Expelling his own noxious air, he pictured his father doing the same, hunched over a horseracing form guide, studying it fastidiously, making his selections with the precision of a surgeon.

‘Signomi, Baba. And sorry about the car too.’

Manolis had usually visited Con in hospital during the early evenings. He often found him sitting up in bed, staring into space, or sleeping. Maria sat there for hours waiting for him to wake up. She was then barked at for doing something incorrectly or not to his liking, and limped home in disgust and disappointment. Manolis knew that much of his father’s anger was frustration at himself, at his ageing body failing him. As hard as it was to witness, Manolis knew it was healthy. It was a spark. It was life.

But it was also wrong. Having given up her entire day, Maria often shambled home in the winter chill wondering why she’d bothered. And yet, she stayed devoted to the very end. Although Maria often drove her son crazy with her old-fashioned ways, Manolis remained firmly of the view that Greek women were the strongest on the planet because they’d endured a lifetime of Greek men.

With a light sigh of contentment, and a pang of guilt, Manolis extinguished his cigarette butt. He took out his notepad and wrote his thoughts in preparation for the next day. Unclicking his biro, he went inside and showered with his eyes closed, imagining the streams of water as pummelling rocks. For a brief moment, just before he fell asleep, Manolis thought he smelt the moisturiser his wife normally applied before bed each night.

His furry possum friend did not visit that night, probably still scared away by the fumes and the fear of fire. But the sound of explosions came again, in the near distance, somewhere in town. Manolis stepped outside for a better listen and look, but by then the world had gone quiet. The quick series of bangs, two nights in a row, left him pondering their significance.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14