‘Let’s get away from here!’ I urged, taking the gun from her hand and placing it in my pocket. I pulled her arm and led her along the path until we reached the highway again. As we approached our vehicle, two police cars, with their sirens blaring, scorched along the road to pull us beside us sharply. Four policemen emerged from the cars and raced across the road towards us. Two of them grabbed me roughly and forced my face down on the bonnet of the Volkswagen, pinning my arms behind me. Pain seared through my body like a red hot poker and I groaned loudly almost falling into a faint. They propped me up as I slid sideways while one of them ran his hands over my body reaching into my pocket to remove the revolver. Another one uttered something in Greek which in any language would have translated into: ‘You are under arrest!’ Then I was rudely handcuffed before being thrust into the rear seat of one of the police car like a common criminal. They drove back to the police station at tremendous speed with the siren on the roof of the vehicle wailing like a lonesome banshee as we raced towards the streets of Heraklion.
I had expected someone to read out a charge on my arrival and then to be interrogated after contacting the British Embassy or by a lawyer who spoke English. As it happened, I was very much mistaken. There was no communication, no questions, and no explanation for my arrest. Rough hands grasped my upper arms and I was pushed down a short flight of steps before being tossed into a filthy cell. It was a dingy awful place. The only furniture available was a flea-infested mattress which lay on the floor, covering half the space, and an old stench-ridden bucket with flies darting to and fro above it. The sides of the cell were damp and covered with fungi while high on the wall, some ten feet high, was a barred window from which streamed a narrow shaft of light. After the cell door was locked, I sat on the mattress and struck it with my fist several times in frustration. Eventually I calmed down to evaluate the situation. There was no doubt the police would link the gun they took from me with the three dead bodies in the valley. They were well aware that a capital crime had been committed. I was doomed to a life of imprisonment in a foreign country! Someone must have contacted them with the information otherwise I would not have been arrested. As a result of the prima facie evidence of the dead bodies and the murder weapon , which I had taken from Penny and placed in my pocket, I was the prime suspect. No… I was the only suspect! Nothing I could say or do would change their minds. I wasn’t sure whether the authorities in Crete jailed murderers for life or whether they executed them. It wasn’t a pleasant thought either way.
I lay down on the mattress to east the pain in my legs and to rest my throbbing head. There was a slight chance that I might have fractured my skull in the crash. It certainly felt as though something was wrong. If so, a medical examiner might be able to prove that I was out of my mind when the murders were committed… even though I knew I hadn’t carried them out. If I was saved from a death sentence, being sent to prison might be commuted to ten years.
Primar had become angry when I insisted that Penny Smith has to accompany me on the journey. She was my secretary with whom I was having an affair… a diminutive young attractive woman who took dictation from me, ran the outer office efficiently, served me with coffee throughout the day, and looked after all my business activities. Her recruitment to Dandy Advanced Electronics had taken place seven years earlier, nearly five of which was spent as my secretary. During the past year we had become lovers, involved in an affair which we both enjoyed. Yet, strangely enough, I still loved my wife intensely. It would seem that one woman was not enough for me in life. There was nothing extraordinary to report concerning her office activities or her private life, except that we continued on a clandestine affair yet she had executed three people with considerable ease, seemingly without any remorse. Admittedly, each time she had burst into tears after the event, playing the innocent, but it was too much to believe that they were all incidental… especially with regard to the killing the woman who was her double. At the back of my mind there was something else that kept trying to trigger the answer but for the moment it just wouldn’t come. Yes… suddenly there was a phrase she had used which caused a ripple in my brain. I tried to squeeze it from my mind by concentrating my thoughts but nothing sensible emerged, It was a few moments later when the piece of the jigsaw fell into place. I had run through the events at the time of the crash in minute detail to recall something she had shouted that made me leave the aircraft when I was searching for documents. ‘Someone’s coming!’ she had called out. ‘I can see a man at eleven hundred hours!’ And then Tomas Duran appeared. A phrase of that nature was adopted only by the military. Only women employed in the armed forces would ever express a direction in such a manner. When I employed her as my secretary, I took great care to examine her records. There was no mention of service in the armed forces. Now that I had time to think it through there was evidently more to Miss Penny Smith than met the eye.
In addition to my current dilemma, there were two acute problems which concerned me. Someone had tried to replace us with duplicate look-a-likes. Why did they want to do that? Surely it had nothing to do with the game of bridge although, apparently, that activity was a criterion. The only other possibility was my employment at Dandy Advanced Electronics. I needed far more time to deliberate on the prospects in depth. Primar knew of my indifference to my employer as well as my lack of loyalty. Like a fool, I never made any pretence of it when we were on holiday on the Costa del Sol. No doubt, if I failed to fathom the reason, someone would enlighten me at some future date. There was another problem that was far more imminent. We had told Commander Spring of the death of Tomas Duran but what would happen when he discovered that the false Jason Scott and Penny Smith were also dead? Somebody had taken a lot of trouble for find another person who looked exactly like me. Perhaps that was the reason why someone placed a bomb in the aircraft expecting to eliminate myself and my secretary to make way for the other two. But why should they do that? Yet the assumption blew a hole in my previous theory. If Penny Smith was on their side, whoever they might be, why did they want to kill her? None of it made any sense!
A little later I fell asleep. Throughout the night I twisted and turned on the filthy straw mattress until the morning light began to filter through the bars of the tiny window. The noise made by the warder, as he slid the breakfast tray noisily across the stone floor of the cell, awoke me. I rubbed the stubble on my chin, moving my legs sideways, wincing at the pain, and rose to walk stiffly to the door. At least the throbbing in my head had stopped. As I bent to pick up the tray, which contained a cup of ugly-looking liquid and a hunk of stale brown bread filled with caraway seeds, I noticed that the cell door was slightly ajar. I shook my head to clear my sleepy mind and pushed it gently with my right hand to make sure that my eyes did not deceive me. It was definitely open! Within seconds, I discard the evil breakfast and hobbled swiftly out of the cell into the corridor making my way stealthily towards the steps. I crept up the short staircase into the main area of the police station only to find that the desk sergeant was absent. In fact it appeared that there was no one in the police station at all. I had a golden opportunity to escape completely unnoticed. I hesitated for a moment thinking that it might be a trap so that they could shoot me to avoid embarrassment on an international scale. There was quite a lot of international pressure and activity when trials of foreign subjects came to the attention of the relevant authorities and were reported in the Press. Perhaps the method they used in Crete was simply to eliminate the problem by shooting escaping foreign prisoners. In the face of trial for murder however, I really had no option but to take my chances.