Yiannis placed his coffee on the desk and sat upright. I saw that he was gripping his knees with his hands.
‘Since you came to see me, Petra, two more people visited me. One was a Romanian maid, who works on the outskirts of Nicosia. She came here to tell me about a childhood friend of hers, Cristina Maier, also Romanian, who has disappeared with her daughter, Daria, who is five years old. The young girl lived here with her mother. As a Romanian citizen she was able to do so. It turns out that mother and child went missing two months ago. The friend has tried everything to raise the alarm, but her employers and police are not interested. The second is again a woman from Romania, Ana-Maria Lupei with her daughter, Andreea. They were reported missing last Wednesday, exactly a week ago, this time from another town near Nicosia, and again she had her young daughter with her. Her employer, an old veteran, came here with his son to speak to me just yesterday. Apparently, she had popped out one evening to meet a friend. She took her daughter with her – and they didn’t return. The old man was beside himself with worry. He is very fond of them both. He went to the police and found the encounter futile.’ Tony shrugged. ‘In both cases, the women disappeared without warning; in both cases, friend and employer insist that it was out of character, that they left without belongings or passports, and in both cases the police were not interested in pursuing an investigation. The only difference here, however – and what is even more disturbing – is that these two women have disappeared not on their own, but with their daughters.’
Tony was silent now, letting his words sink in. He held his cigarette with his elbow on the table, looking from me to Yiannis and back again.
Yiannis inhaled deeply and his breath came out in fragments. I did not turn to look at him. I couldn’t. Any hope I might have had drained out of me: the disappearances wove together now in a complicated web. It had become so much bigger; something dark and wrong clawing at the edges of the booth.
Tony threw his cigarette butt in the ashtray and lit another. The flick of the lighter was loud, the flame cracked into existence, the smoke travelled around us.
Yiannis suddenly stood up, brought his hand up to his face, brought his palm down over his eyes and mouth.
‘Are you OK, Yiannis?’ I said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just don’t understand.’
‘Clearly,’ Tony said, ‘they must be connected. It’s too much of a coincidence. There has to be one person or a group of people behind this. It’s transpired that one of the women was going out on a date. I have no information about the person she was intending to meet –I’m working on that – but she let one of her friends know before leaving home. This confirms, more so, that the police are wrong. These women did not just decide to run away to the occupied territory in the north. I’m going to go back to the station tomorrow with all the facts I have here before me.’ He placed his hand on the notebook. ‘And I’m not going to leave until they agree to take this seriously.’
Yiannis was still standing, his head bowed as if he was praying. Without saying anything, he sat down again and placed his hands on his knees, as before, except this time the anguish was evident on his face.
‘Do I have your permission to share the information that you’ve given me about Nisha?’ Tony now asked.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Do you have anything that you could add?’
There was a pause. Then Yiannis spoke, his voice gaining strength as he did so: ‘We now know,’ he said, ‘that Nisha was heading out to meet a colleague of mine. His name is Seraphim Ioannou. He and I are involved in an illegal network involving poaching. Songbirds, specifically. Nisha had found out and had arranged to meet him. Apparently, she never turned up for the appointment.’
Tony’s eyes turned to slits. He opened the notebook and asked Yiannis to repeat the name. ‘Do you have proof that she was going to meet him?’
‘Yes, Seraphim has confirmed it to me.’
Tony nodded and scribbled down a few more notes. Then he closed the pad, leaned back in his chair, looking now for the first time through the glass at his restaurant that had begun to fill up, considerably.
*
We drove back in complete silence. The sun vanished into the sea as the afternoon turned late. Aliki would be home from school by now. Mrs Hadjikyriacou was collecting her and probably keeping her company with her stories, while Ruba made them something warm and fragrant for supper.
Yiannis stared at the rain ahead beating down on the windscreen and only spoke when I turned into Nicosia.