Czytaj książkę: «The Phoenix»

PROLOGUE
Outside Athens, Greece

From the terrace of his elegant, whitewashed villa, former president Dimitri Mantzaris gazed out across Vouliagmeni beach to the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. He was an old man now and vastly fat, gorging himself daily on cheese and wine and baklava, the sweet, honeyed treats he’d always loved but had resisted as a younger man, back when his greed was at war with his vanity. At eighty years old, that war was over. The last vestiges of his good looks were long gone now, along with his political career. All the urges that had once driven and defined him – his naked lust for power, his insatiable sexual drive, his legendary avarice – had crumbled to dust, like the walls of the Parthenon. Eating was Dimitri Mantzaris’s last remaining pleasure of the flesh, and he indulged it without restraint.

But not today.

Today, for the first time in decades, Dimitri Mantzaris had no appetite.

Stavros Alexandris, his former Minister of the Interior and close friend, had brought him the picture this morning, on the third page of I Avgi, Greece’s top-selling daily newspaper.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.’ Stavros Alexandris’s hands were shaking. A sprightly sixty, and as wirily thin as his former boss was obscenely fat, Alexandris had a reputation for both ruthlessness and calm. At this moment, however, the latter quality had deserted him. ‘You don’t think …?

‘She’s still alive …?’ Mantzaris finished for him. God I hope so.

Athena Petridis. His nemesis. His conspirator. His muse. His angel. His betrayer. Except Athena had never been ‘his’. Athena Petridis had never been anyone’s, not even her husband’s, the truly evil Spyros Petridis. Like her immortal namesake on Mount Olympus, Athena had condescended from time to time to meddle in the affairs of men. But only when it pleased her, and only ever for her own ends.

Dimitri Mantzaris had been president, the most powerful man in Greece, at the time of their affair. And yet not for one day, not for one moment, had he held the upper hand in their relationship. Athena Petridis had owned him the way other, lesser women might own a dog. She still owned him. Even though she and her husband had been dead for twelve years.

Mantzaris looked at the picture again. It showed a tragic but sadly all-too-familiar image of a drowned child, a little boy this time, washed up on the beach at Lesbos. With hopelessly overcrowded boats leaving Libya every day, Greeks were becoming indifferent to the relentless death toll of the migrants. In many places, in fact, attitudes had swung right through indifference, to anger and resentment. Why did these people keep coming? Why did they put their own children at such appalling risk? Didn’t they know that Greece could barely afford to feed her own people, let alone open her doors to thousands of foreigners?

Dimitri Mantzaris did not share these views. The pictures still moved him. He was not, despite what many believed, a man without a heart. Yet it was not the dead boy that stirred such profound emotion within him now. It was the insignia tattooed on his heel, like a slave brand. The ancient Greek letter ‘L’. To scholars, this was the sign of the Spartan warrior, emblazoned on their shields in tribute to their home state of Laconia. But to Dimitri Mantzaris, along with many of the world leaders of his generation, the sign had a very different meaning. It was the secret, personal signature of Spyros Petridis, an illiterate peasant from Lagonissi who also happened to be both Athena’s husband and the most successful organized crime boss since Carlo Gambino.

‘It must be a hoax,’ Stavros Alexandris babbled nervously.

Dimitri Mantzaris nodded.

‘Or a coincidence.’

‘Yes.’

‘It can’t be her.’

‘No.’

‘She’s dead. They’re both dead.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Even so, I think Daphne and I might get away for a while. Out of the country. Perhaps to Chile? Just until things die down. We have friends there …’

Alexandris left, and Dimitri Mantzaris lumbered out to the terrace and sank down into his favorite chair. He knew he would never see Stavros again. The mark on that child’s heel was no coincidence and they both knew it. It was a message. A message only one person would have dared to send.

Closing his eyes, Dimitri Mantzaris let the memories wash over him. Athena’s soft skin, her musky scent, her deep laugh. With anguish he recalled the cloying desperation of her heavenly body, built for sex the way a Ferrari was built for speed.

‘Athena …’

The word hung on his lips.

Mantzaris had friends too, people who owed him, who could help him disappear before it was too late. But he was too old to run.

He would stay here and wait for Athena to come for him.

It would be wonderful to see her face again. Even if just for a moment, before she put a bullet in his brain.

Osaka, Japan

It wasn’t until two days later that Professor Noriko Adachi saw the picture. The tattoo on the dead child’s foot filled the screen on her office computer like cancer on an X-ray. Awful. Disgusting. Yet Japan’s most famous living literary scholar couldn’t stop herself from looking at it.

No sooner had charity workers on the beach noticed the unusual ‘L’ sign than theories began abounding on the web as to what it meant. Most were laughably wide of the mark. One or two came closer to the truth, more by luck than judgment in Professor Adachi’s opinion, pointing the finger at ‘people-traffickers’. But no one had yet said the word ‘Petridis’.

Most people still don’t know, Professor Adachi thought bitterly. And those who do are too cowardly to speak out.

Lovingly, she picked up the gilt-framed photograph in pride of place on her desk and traced a finger over the glass. Her only son, Kiko, was standing outside his dorm room in America, beaming with pride in his UCLA T-shirt. Above him, the dazzling California sky shone cartoon-blue. Fifteen years ago next week. What a perfect day it had been, so full of hope and promise.

A year after that picture was taken, Kiko Adachi was dead. The hardworking, diligent student and athlete, and love of his parents’ life, had fatally overdosed on a new, lethally strong brand of cocaine, recognizable by the ‘L’ insignia on the baggies, specially shipped onto US college campuses by Spyros Petridis.

A year after that, Noriko and her husband Izumi, Kiko’s father, had divorced. Izumi complained that his wife had become obsessed with Petridis and his glamorous wife Athena, by that time a UN special ambassador and world-renowned philanthropist whose charisma and beauty had so dazzled the world’s most powerful men that her husband operated their empire with near impunity.

Izumi was right. Noriko was obsessed. She wrote countless articles about the Petridises’ criminal activity, which no one had the balls to publish. She even penned a novel about her son’s death, with the names and identities thinly disguised, but no one would print that either, despite the professor’s fame. After two and a half years of fruitless effort, it was the happiest day of Professor Noriko Adachi’s life when she woke up to the news that Spyros Petridis’s helicopter had gone down in a remote part of Utah, killing him and his wife instantly in a white-hot ball of flames. All that was left of Spyros Petridis had been a few charred bones, just enough to confirm a DNA match. As for Athena – Lady Macbeth – the heat was such that she’d been completely incinerated. Burned to dust. Erased.

In the twelve years since, Noriko Adachi had returned to the University of Osaka and rebuilt her career and what was left of her life. Spyros and Athena had robbed her of her family, but she still found some solace in books, in the literature of tragedy and loss and rebirth that had been her academic world since her own student days.

Until now.

Her gaze returned to the screen.

One picture, one emblem, and it all came flooding back.

Another dead boy.

Somebody else’s son.

Nobody could have survived that crash, Noriko told herself, forcing her rational brain to kick in, to override her emotions. No human could have lived through that fire.

But perhaps Athena Petridis wasn’t human? Perhaps she was truly a monster, a devil, an evil spirit like the Japanese Kamaitachi, mythical sickle-wielding weasels who would slice off children’s legs. Perhaps she was a witch.

Professor Noriko Adachi sat at her desk and let the hate take over, pumping like poison through her veins.

If Athena Petridis is alive … I’ll kill her.

Los Angeles, California

Larry Gaster pulled over on Mulholland Drive, his silver Bugatti Veyron gleaming in the sun. On the passenger seat, the image of the drowned child’s branded heel filled the screen of Larry’s iPad.

It was a struggle to breathe. Reaching forward, the legendary Hollywood producer opened the glove box, fumbled for the bottle of Xanax, and crammed three pills into his mouth, grinding them between his porcelain-veneered teeth with grim desperation.

A profoundly vain man, Larry Gaster looked much younger than his sixty-five years, thanks to the efforts of LA’s most talented surgeons and their patient’s limitless funds. Larry’s skin was smooth, his brown eyes bright, and his luxurious chestnut hair still only lightly flecked with gray. Unlike most of Hollywood’s big hitters, Larry Gaster wasn’t satisfied with having young actresses line up to go to bed with him simply because he was powerful and rich. He wanted them to want him too. To desire him, physically. These days, despite his best efforts, that was becoming harder and harder to achieve. Some people might put that down to his age. But Larry Gaster knew different.

It was Athena. Athena Petridis.

If only he’d never laid eyes on her!

Larry Gaster had been forty-seven and one of the most desired men in Hollywood when he had agreed to produce a biopic about the great Greek beauty’s life. Athena met him at the Beverly Hills Hotel for lunch in a white flowing dress that made her look like an angel. It was the beginning of the end for Larry. He fell in love with her immediately and although they never slept together, never even kissed, Larry’s obsession for Spyros Petridis’s wife became the driving force in his life.

Athena was a victim. A good woman, a perfect woman, trapped in a violent marriage to a monster. That was the truth, and it was what Larry Gaster portrayed in his film. Larry wanted to rescue Athena from Spyros. He wanted to keep her in America, to build her a palace up in the Hollywood Hills where she could live, safe in his protection, eternally grateful for his gallantry like Queen Guinevere to Larry’s Sir Lancelot.

But things hadn’t happened like that. The day after production wrapped on the movie, Larry Gaster was kidnapped outside his office on Sunset Boulevard in broad daylight. No one knew what had happened during the week the producer was missing, and no one ever would. Larry had said nothing – to the police, to his family, to anyone. He’d simply shown up at the gates to his Beverly Hills estate one morning in a state of shock. The fourth finger of his left hand had been severed and the letter ‘L’ had been branded on the base of his right heel.

L for Larry. That was what he told people who noticed it in later life.

The film was never released.

And Larry Gaster never saw Athena Petridis again.

After the helicopter crash, little by little, Larry resumed his career, picking up where he’d left off. In the last decade he’d produced four blockbuster hits and remarried. Twice. Life was good. Until this.

Winding down the window, he picked up his iPad and hurled it out of the car, over the edge of the precipice that dropped down to the valley.

Then, like a small child, Larry Gaster began to cry.

London, England

Peter Hambrecht closed his eyes and lost himself in the music, his baton moving through the air with a grace and fluidity that set him apart from all the other great conductors. Hambrecht was the maestro, the undisputed best in the world. Every musician in London’s Royal Albert Hall felt privileged to be there that night. Because to be swept up in Peter Hambrecht’s genius, even for a moment, was to play to one’s full potential. To shine like a star.

‘Thank you, Maestro!’

‘Wonderful performance, Maestro!’

After the concert, Peter shook hands and signed autographs with his usual good grace. Then he put on his thick cashmere overcoat and walked the few short blocks back to his flat on Queensgate.

The next morning, he saw the picture, the same day it was published. An old friend emailed a copy.

‘I thought you’d want to see this,’ the friend wrote.

That struck Peter as odd. Who in their right mind would ‘want’ to see a picture of a drowned child? But of course, his friend was not referring to the child, only to the emblem burned into his flesh, as if he were an animal or a piece of meat. Peter winced, imagining the pain the poor little boy must have suffered.

Later, the friend telephoned. ‘Do you think Athena …?’

‘No.’

‘But Peter …’

‘Athena is dead.’

Peter Hambrecht had known Athena Demitris, as she was then, since they were children, and had loved her all his life. She was his best friend, his confidante, the sister he’d never had. In the tiny village of Organi where they grew up, blonde, blue-eyed Athena had been adored by everyone. Dark, shy, effeminate Peter, on the other hand, with his German father and his strange accent and the little piccolo he carried with him everywhere, was an outcast, a favorite target of the local bullies.

‘Hey, Sauerkraut!’ they would taunt him. ‘Why don’t you wear a tutu, so you can dance to that gay classical music you’re always playing? You want us to make you a tutu?’

‘He can borrow my sister’s.’

‘I don’t think he wants a tutu. I think he wants us to jam that flute up his ass. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Sauerkraut?’

Peter never rose to their jibes. But Athena always did, roaring to his defense time after time like a lioness, taking on his tormentors, alive with righteous fury on his behalf.

‘How can you let them talk to you like that? You have to fight back!’

‘Why?’ Peter would ask.

‘They’re calling you gay!’

‘I am gay,’ he shrugged.

‘No,’ Athena insisted, with tears in her eyes. ‘You aren’t gay, Peter. You love me.’

‘I do love you,’ he assured her.

‘More than anything?’

‘More than anything. Just not like that.’

Athena covered her ears with her hands. ‘No, no, no. Stop saying that. You’re confused. You’ll change your mind, you’ll see. When we’re married.’

Peter laughed. ‘It’s not my mind that needs to change, Athena!’

But there was no stopping her. There was never any stopping Athena. They married the year they both turned twenty and moved to a minuscule apartment in London, where Peter had won a place at the Royal College of Music.

‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ Athena would demand, every morning, as he pored over sheet music in their tiny kitchenette.

Peter had to admit that he was, blissfully happy. The bullies were gone, he was playing his beloved music twenty-four hours a day, and he got to come home to his best friend, the most magical, gregarious, and most alive person he knew. Giving up sex with men seemed like a small price to pay.

He was even happier when, a few months later, Athena fell pregnant with their first child, a boy.

‘We’ll call him Apollo,’ she gushed, ‘after the god of music and beauty.’

And beautiful he had been, so impossibly beautiful, for the twenty short minutes of his life.

CHD the doctors said. Congenital Heart Disease. ‘He didn’t suffer,’ they told Athena. ‘Not at all.’

But three hearts broke that day, and Athena suffered enough for all of them. Later, Peter came to realize that the girl he had known all his life had died along with their son. That the Athena who came after was not the same as the one who had been before. Weeks of mute shock gave way to months of deep depression. Desperate to help, Peter tried everything: dragging Athena out to dinner and the park, taking her to doctors and therapists and hypnotists. He still remembered how delighted he was when Athena looked up at him one night, after another silent, miserable supper, and suggested that she take a trip back home to Greece.

‘There’s a place on Mykonos, my mother told me about it. It’s in a tiny village, between Kalafatis and Elia. They do “rest cures” and programs to help people through grief. It’s not cheap …’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Peter assured her. ‘Go. You must go. I’ll find the money, don’t worry about that.’

It was the first proactive thought Athena had had since Apollo’s death, and Peter grabbed at it with both hands like a drowning man. He couldn’t have known that that would be it. The end.

It was on that trip to Mykonos that Athena met Spyros Petridis. Or rather, it was there, at her lowest ebb, that she fell under his evil spell. She wrote to Peter twice, strange, formal letters that sounded nothing like her, explaining that she had met someone and fallen in love and that she wasn’t coming back. Peter was gay and she needed more than a platonic relationship. The marriage would never have survived long-term.

Only in the very last line she wrote did Peter hear what sounded like Athena’s true, authentic voice. ‘Every time I see your face, I see his,’ she wrote. ‘It’s more pain than I can bear.’

And so he’d let her go. That was thirty years ago now, and Peter Hambrecht had had other, great loves in his life, not to mention a wildly successful career. But he’d never forgotten Athena. Over the years, as her fame, and her husband’s infamy, grew, Peter had watched Athena on television like a child watching a cartoon character. Or rather, characters, plural. The gracious socialite and hostess. The saintly goodwill ambassador. The untouchable beauty, People magazine’s ‘sexiest woman alive’. None of these was the real Athena.

Rumors swirled about Spyros Petridis’s criminal dealings, his murder squads and his drug gangs and his people-smugglers. But nothing was ever proven. Athena’s dazzling light, her aura of goodness, her magic, seemed to blind people to the dark underbelly of her husband’s world.

Peter suspected the rumors were true. But he never blamed Athena, not then, not now. However she might have changed, he knew his Athena could never, ever be responsible for the death or suffering of a child. Even if she were alive, there was no way on earth that she would be connected to what happened to that poor little Libyan boy. No way.

But she wasn’t alive.

She was dead, burned alive alongside her monstrous husband.

May God rest her soul.

East Hampton, NY

‘Goddamn it!’

Mark Redmayne shielded his eyes from the sun as he watched his golf ball veer wildly to the left of the eleventh hole before landing with an audible plop in the depths of the lake. He stiffened. Damn. A brilliant but ruthless businessman, Redmayne was in his early fifties, although he had the physique of a much younger man. Coupled with his stiff, soldier-like bearing, it helped preserve the aura of barely repressed violence that hung around him constantly, intimidating rivals and friends alike. Mark Redmayne was not a man one wanted to cross.

He was playing like an amateur today. Technically, of course, he was an amateur, but only because he didn’t have time to play golf professionally, not because he wasn’t good enough. Running a Fortune 500 company turned out to be a tiresomely full-time gig. And then of course there was Mark Redmayne’s other job. His duty. His calling. That was even more demanding. Especially on days like today.

He’d come to the golf course this afternoon to try to detach. It wasn’t working. His conversation of a few hours ago with Gabriel, one of The Group’s very best operatives, continued to haunt him.

‘It’s her, sir,’ Gabriel informed him bluntly over the telephone. ‘She’s alive and she wants us to know it.’

‘She’s not alive. She’s dead,’ Mark Redmayne said, as if by saying the words forcefully enough, he could make it so. ‘We killed her.’

Pinching the bridge of his nose to try to shut off the headache hammering wildly inside his skull, he gazed out of his office window. Below him, Manhattan lay spread out like a dream, a glorious kingdom he had conquered. Mark Redmayne hadn’t founded his company, but under his leadership he had grown it from the modest printing business his father had left him into a global multi-billion-dollar empire. It was incredible the effect a tragic childhood could have on one’s ambition, one’s determination to succeed at all costs. Business success, however, meant nothing to Mark Redmayne compared to this. The Group, and the work they did under Mark’s leadership – that was reality. That was what mattered.

‘We killed them both,’ he muttered, as much to himself as to his operative on the other end of the line.

‘Maybe not,’ said Gabriel.

‘“Maybe?” … Don’t you give me “maybe not”!’ Redmayne exploded. ‘I was there, OK? I watched that chopper go down.’

Most of The Group’s agents were terrified of the boss’s temper, and with good reason. Mark Redmayne wasn’t known for his compassion; his retribution, once invoked, was ruthless. But Gabriel was one of the few people immune to his outbursts. Nothing could sway him from the facts.

‘Athena Petridis’s DNA was never found, sir.’

A muscle on the side of Mark Redmayne’s jaw began to twitch.

‘Because her remains were destroyed in the fire.’

‘But her husband’s weren’t?’ Gabriel challenged. ‘They were in the cockpit together, side by side. If his bones didn’t burn, why should hers?’

‘I don’t know,’ Redmayne admitted grudgingly. ‘I just know that they did. This discussion is over.’

He hung up, which was childish, but he didn’t have the strength or the patience to listen to any more of the agent’s doubts. Largely because they were his doubts too. As soon as he saw the picture, the dead child with his branded foot, he knew. Athena Petridis, that bitch, that witch, that untouchable monster of a woman … was alive.

Mark Redmayne had hated the Petridises for a very long time. There was a special place in his psyche for people who hurt children. The terrible secret of his own childhood – the single, awful event that had made him who he was and led him to The Group in the first place – had fanned the flames of his loathing into a raging, crazed, homicidal inferno which no force on earth could ever put out.

But what if somehow – impossibly – Athena Petridis had survived the crash that had killed her husband? And she was out there right now, laughing at them, laughing at him, for having the audacity to think he’d won. For twelve years, she’d played dead, lulling The Group, and the world, into a false sense of security. But now, with this sick, cruel message, this violation of an innocent child – L – she was back.

‘I’ll fetch you new balls, sir.’ Mark Redmayne’s caddy looked nervously at his employer. Mr Redmayne was not used to losing, and had a reputation for taking his frustrations out on the closest underling to hand. This time, however, to the caddy’s relief, he seemed oddly calm.

‘No need, Henry. There’s nothing wrong with my old balls. I just need to remember I have them.’

‘Sir?’

‘And then I need to start playing a bit better.’

Back in his Bombardier Challenger Learjet after the round, Mark Redmayne made the call he’d been putting off since this morning.

‘Let’s say you’re right.’

‘Sir.’ Gabriel waited.

‘Let’s say she’s alive.’

‘She is alive, sir.’

‘So you say. But what leads do you have?’

‘None yet, sir.’

‘Well find some if you expect me to take you seriously,’ Mark Redmayne commanded, and hung up.

Opening his briefcase, he looked again at the picture of the dead boy. No name. Just a tiny, maimed corpse, washed up on the beach like so much trash. That was how Spyros Petridis had treated the poor and the powerless. Like trash to be discarded. And his she-devil wife had helped him do it.

No governments had had the balls to take on the Petridises. It had been left up to them, to The Group, to do what needed to be done. To right what was wrong. To track down evil wherever it lurked, and destroy it whatever the cost. The Group operated outside of laws, outside of boundaries, outside of national interest or political or religious affiliation. They took risks no one else would take. And they covered their tracks. Always.

Killing Athena Petridis once had been Mark Redmayne’s duty.

Killing her twice would be his pleasure.

Sikinos, Greece

Sister Magdalena, Mother Superior of the tiny Convent of the Sacred Heart, bowed her gray head in prayer. Dusk had already fallen, and through the windows of the remote, Byzantine chapel set deep in the island’s wilderness, one could glimpse the setting sun bleeding its dying rays into the sea.

Forgive me my transgressions, the elderly nun murmured, her arthritic fingers worrying at the rosary beads around her neck. Help me to find the right path, Lord. Guide me through the darkness.

Most of the nuns were at supper in the refectory, a simple repast of tomatoes, olives and vine leaves stuffed with wild rice. But Sister Magdalena always fasted on this day: the anniversary of Sister Elena’s arrival.

Sister Elena and the visiting priest, Father Georgiou, were the only other souls in the chapel tonight. Across the stone-flagged nave, inside an exquisite, medieval carved wooden confessional, Sister Elena was receiving the sacrament.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

The Mother Superior could hear only mumbling: first Elena’s soft, singsong tones and then Father Georgiou’s deep baritone. Although of course she knew the words by heart.

‘Name your sins, my child.’

What sins could Elena possibly have? This kind, gentle, endlessly patient soul? This stoic, even cheerful, sufferer of torments that would have broken any ordinary human being? Poor Sister Elena. She had lost so much. Her youth, her beauty, her loved ones. Even now, all these years later, the doctors said she was in constant physical pain. And yet her faith remained as strong as ever, a shining beacon of hope through the dark night of despair.

She should be leading us, Sister Magdalena thought, for the thousandth time. Not me. I’m like John the Baptist, unfit even to wash her feet. And yet Sister Magdalena accepted that this was God’s plan. Elena had come to them on the boat from Ios like baby Moses in his basket of reeds, a helpless refugee. Although she had never spoken of what or whom exactly she was fleeing, no one doubted the sincerity of her plight. Back then she’d been too weak to lead the community. Now she was too humble, too devoted to her own spiritual life of purity and sacrifice.

Sister Elena emerged from the confessional. Seeing the Reverend Mother kneeling there, she bowed her head once respectfully, then hurried back to her cell to begin her penance. Could words and prayers and fasting really right the wrongs of the past? Or the present, for that matter? It was a nice idea. Evil and goodness existing like numbers on some sort of balance sheet that could be moved around at will. If only that were true.

In the privacy of her bare room she began removing her garments one by one and laying them neatly on her bed. The heavy wool tunic, belt, scapular and veil, all black, followed by a black veil, extra-thick in Sister Elena’s case, then a white one, and finally the white ‘coif’ or headdress worn by all the fully professed sisters at Sikinos. Finally she stood naked, relieved to be free of her torturous habit on this stiflingly hot night.

There was no mirror in the cell, nor any other accouterment of vanity, but at night the fifty-year-old nun could clearly see her reflection in the glass windowpane. Her figure was still beautiful, slender yet rounded, with full high breasts and a narrow waist tapering into softly curved hips and thighs almost as firm as they had been in her youth. From the neck down, she was still a beautiful woman. But her face was marked with sin.

My face is my penance, she reflected.

Then again, there was more to life than physical perfection.

Power, for instance.

Reaching into the pocket of the tunic lying neatly on her bed, she pulled out the piece of paper Father Georgiou had given her, unfolding it carefully with slow, practiced hands. Newspapers were forbidden at the convent, along with all other contact with the outside world. Just seeing the words H Avγ (Athens top-selling daily newspaper translated as ‘The Dawn’) at the top of the page after all these years gave Sister Elena a little thrill.

But not as much of a thrill as the photograph.

The dead child. The sign. Right there, for the whole world to see!

There were many of them out there, children and adults alike, branded like this young boy. Brothers and sisters in fire. In pain. Reaching down, Sister Elena ran her fingers over the grooves of the brand seared into her own flesh, at the top of her inner thigh. A simple letter ‘L’, the same mark as on the migrant boy. How ironic that it should be this child, this nameless refugee – this nobody – whose death had brought their signs out into the open. Put them on the front page of the newspaper, no less, and all over the television news.

God bless you, child.

Putting her hands up to her face, Sister Elena let the paper flutter to the ground, aware of an unfamiliar sensation she couldn’t quite place.

Then, all at once, it dawned on her what that was.

Sister Elena had just done something that she hadn’t done in well over ten years.

She’d smiled.