"Brian Lumley - E-Branch 1 - Defilers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

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everyone else, had learned from the experience.
Now, in every village and on every beach, there were warning signs in four
languages, and apart from the native Greek it seemed likely that all the others
read as badly as the English:
NO FIRES!
NO BARBEKU! SMOKERS:
PLEASE EXTINGUISH CIGARETE
BEFORE YOU THROWING AWAY!
But everyone got the message, and it gave the sun-scorched English tourists something to chuckle
over other than the translations in the taverna bills of fare.
On the other hand, there was an item in the Greek newspapers that no one was chuckling over. . .
especially not the Greek Islands Tourist Board in Athens. A woman's body had been washed ashore
near the village of Limari. It couldn't as yet be called a murder, because the circumstances of
her death were a mystery and her identity was unknown. The way she'd been found (the condition of
the body, which had been in the sea for a week to ten days) left no clues as to what had befallen
her. But there were several anomalies that at least suggested foul play: namely the fact that most
of her face was missing, which

included her upper teeth and entire lower jawbone. She wasn't going to be identified by use of any
dental records, that much was certain. Of course, she could have been hit in the water by some
boat's propeller, but how did she get in the water? Swimming? What, in the nude? There were nude
beaches in the islands, true, but not on Krassos. Nor was the rest of her body intact/ her nipples
were gone (probably nibbled by crabs or fishes), her eyes were eaten away, and her ears had been
shorn off close to the skull-accidentally or deliberately was similarly conjectural. And strangest
of all, no one had been reported missing.
Detective Inspector Manolis Papastamos, an expert on Greek island life, lore, and legend, had come
over by ferry from Kavala in answer to a request for help by the island's constabulary, which
consisted of one fat old sergeant and four mainly untried village policemen. This kind of
investigation fell well outside their scope on an island that was less than sixty miles around,
where tourism-the sun, the sand, and the clear blue sea-was the principal industry. But tourism
had been suffering for more than fifteen years now, and at a time when the drachma was only very
shaky this sort of thing made for extremely bad publicity.
The body had been in cold storage for twenty-four hours by the time Papastamos and Eleni
Barbouris, a forensic pathologist who had come over with him from Kavala, got to see it where it
lay under a crisp white sheet and a light dusting of frost in a commandeered ice-cream chest in
the back room of a whitewashed, bare-necessities police post at Limari.
Manolis Papastamos was small and slender, yet gave the impression of great inner strength. All
sinew, suntan, and shiny-black, wavy hair, he was very Greek with one noticeable exception: in
addition to the fierce passions of his homeland, he was also quick off the mark in his thinking,
reflexes, and movements. In short there was nothing dilatory about him, and his mind was inquiring
to a fault. In his mid-fifties, Manolis looked dapper in his charcoal-grey lightweight suit, white
open-necked shirt, and grey shoes. And despite the weathered-leather look that was beginning to
line his face, he was still handsome in the classical Greek arrangement of his features: his
straight nose, high brow, flat cheeks, and rounded, slightly cleft chin.