A Victim Must Be Found Read Free Page A

ago. This canal bypassed Grantham’s centre of gravity and the town began to look elsewhere for a reason for being. Somehow, some called it a miracle, the Stephenson House was spared in the general rethinking that slowly went on following the close of the Hitler war. No longer a spa noted for its healing waters, the hotel put out feelers to social clubs and Grantham’s most exclusive circles. When the private boys’ school named after the martyred Bishop Cranmer held a public dance off its Western Hill campus, the location was invariably the Stephenson House. In fact, when a fire put part of Cranmer’s lower school out of service, classes were held at the hotel until the damage had been repaired. When the mayor held a function that required a hotel’s amenities, the Stephenson was booked and the proprietors of other local hostelries didn’t even begin to question the choice. The Stephenson House was a hotel that was out of its category, a find in a small city like Grantham.
    From the fifties to the seventies the hotel had been owned by the Lawder family, one of the oldest families in the district. I went to school with one of the Lawder girls, who impressed all of us when she passed around a photograph of her horse, Pegleas. I remember it with jealousy unabated over these many years. During the last decade, the hotel had changed hands at least twice that I heard about. But, then I’m not the first to hear about the wheeling and dealing among the powerbrokers of the city, even when the power is losing its steam and the broking is largely trying to pay off an incrustation of mortgages deposited along the classical lines of the ancient brick main building.
    So, Pambos Kiriakis had a piece of it. Good for him. Some of the old blood around these parts is getting thin. It was time for some transfusion to come along and take a fresh look at the old place. Kiriakis had caused some local eyebrows to be raised when he began managing the hotel. I remember the gossip from St. Andrew Street about this Greek coming along and pushing old Phin Lawder off to pensionland. A day earlier the same people had been trading stories about Phin’s wasteful and intemperate ways. Phin was a drunk and a spendthrift, but he came from a good family. At least it was a good one back in 1813. Pambos’s family didn’t arrive on the scene until at least a century and a half later. His father, so he told me, became a shoeshine man in a narrow store near Queen and St. Andrew in the early 1960s. Pambos’s older brother fell in with some unpleasant characters in Malham, south of Grantham, and ended up as a sacrifice to appease some god of the wars between the mobs. While he was still alive, Pambos said, it was hard not to get a ticket for going through a green light. The cops took their responsibilities more broadly back then. But Pambos never showed any sign of letting his brother’s failure to make a success of crime build up a resentment in him for law, order and the establishment. Quite the opposite in fact. The first time I talked to Pambos, he told me about the beginnings of his coin collection, which he figured at the time was worth several thousand dollars. He didn’t get this by brother Costas’s methods, but by simply culling his change at the end of the day and checking catalogues.
    Now that I think about it, Pambos was always dipping into a catalogue of one kind or another. I remember him telling me about a couple of auctions that I might have taken advantage of, if I hadn’t been living in a hotel room where all the furnishings were marked by matching cigarette burns. He once invited Wally Skeat from the TV station and me to look at his art collection. When we got to his apartment, we saw the usual Van Gogh prints on the walls. The art collection was in an old cardboard portfolio left over from public school. Three pencil drawings! Now what kind of art collection is that? One was a picture of old Joe Higgins, on his crutches selling balsa