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the owner and the customer at the counter. The voices were raised and a fine range of shrugs, facial grimaces and expansive hand gestures were on display. In England it would have looked like the last stage in a verbal exchange before the first punch was thrown, but in Greece it was a normal transaction and probably between long standing friends. To Steve it was now routine, and he passed the time while the conversation gradually petered out in trying to improve his knowledge of written Greek by reading the headlines of the national and local Greek newspapers on display on the carousel.
    The news was grimly familiar, the same two topics spread across each front page: the economic crisis and the alarming spread of wild fires. This latter was seen as a symptom of dramatic change in world climate, which had caused the unusually dry winter and the intense heat of early summer accompanied by gale force winds. Each of the papers took an apocalyptical tone; wherever Steve looked he saw scare stories, and according to his Greek acquaintances, this wasn’t alarmist journalism: there was plenty to be scared about. The global financial crisis hit Greece particularly hard, and in a land of sharp divisions, with a recent history of civil war, the fear of anarchy loomed large. Although there were some, particularly the young, who welcomed the prospect of rapid and violent change.
    He knew this from a conversation he’d had back in the village. The elder son of one of the fishermen home from university in Athens for the summer was helping out as a waiter. When business was slack, he’d sit and talk with Steve. He’d been involved in the demonstration in the capital that degenerated into a riot. He, like all his friends, was angry and looked forward to the autumn when he predicted the increase in direct action would topple the government. But, as always, there was no commonly held opinion on who to blame and the arguments split the community.Some blamed the Americans, some the communists; the only real consensus was that the bankers and the Euro played a major role.
    The panic caused by the fires was worse. The island was heavily forested and dry as tinder; there were rumours that some of the fires had been started deliberately and in a fire near Vathia two goat herders, arrested on suspicion of arson, had been almost torn apart by a small mob of locals as the police tried to take them away. The island was divided and tension was rising with the thermometer.
    However, there was something else, only covered in the island papers, which Steve found morbidly disturbing: a body had been fished out of the water near Aghios Spiridos. A body marked in a particular way that the police would not disclose, but which the papers linked with unsolved murders earlier in the year. The reports stated that the local police were now under the direction of a senior homicide detective from Athens but were no nearer to closing the case.
    Under the headline “Devil strikes again in Island horror”, the piece suggested that the killings bore the marks of satanic ritual and that perhaps ancient traditions, rather than the police, might be the only answer. Steve felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, but before he could read more the conversation in front of him abruptly ended and the heavily moustached man behind the counter asked him what he wanted. He bought the smokes and, as an afterthought, the paper which he put into his sack alongside the unread and toxic letter from Tim Thompson.
    The heat of the day was increasing and he tried to stick to the shade as he walked from the square to his parking place by the river. The river had run dry even earlier this year and was now little more than a wide stinking trench of cracked and dried mud strewn with rubbish. As he walked across the waste ground by its banks, which was signposted a civic car park, his scuffed boots kicked up clouds of thick white dust from its surface. Inside the old Fiat, which he