An Inch of Time (32 page)

‘Not in this thing, thanks; I've seen how it drives. I'll follow you in my car.'

‘All right. You've had enough practice.'

Back at Ano Makría, Gloves performed a six-point turn by the holly oaks and left the big Toyota parked with the nose aimed downhill. In case of a quick getaway? Just because she claimed to be Kyla's ex-girlfriend didn't mean I had to trust her, but so far she'd been quite convincing.

She stood on the path by the churchyard and took in the sights. ‘Looks a lot better in daylight.'

‘You've come here at night?'

‘Several times. Me and God-knows-who-else. I came up one night and there were two sets of people crawling about the village, one spying on you, another spying on them and me spying on all of you. For a ghost village, the place is bloody busy.'

‘Did you recognize any of them?'

‘I had the feeling that one lot may have been local plod.'

‘Hard to know just how plodding they are.'

‘And I think I recognized the chap who runs the cafe in Neo Makriá.'

‘Dimitris. Talking of spying, how did you know I was going to Corfu in the first place? I don't remember advertising it.'

‘But you did. I was right there on the pavement in Marlborough Buildings when you said goodbye to Kyla's downstairs neighbour. You didn't notice me then, either. I was trying to find Kyla; Mrs Walden said you were going off to find her, so I followed you. It wasn't difficult. Bloody expensive, but not difficult.'

‘Why be so secretive? Why didn't you make yourself known? We could have pooled resources earlier.'

‘Is that what we're doing here, pooling resources?' she said doubtfully. She stood, arms akimbo, in front of me on the goat track, looking for something in my eyes. She was still wearing black leather gloves.

‘Take off your gloves.'

She shook her head. ‘No.' But she turned and walked in front of me towards the house now while she talked. ‘You were hired by Morton. I don't trust John Morton, I don't trust the supermarket. I don't trust, full stop.' She walked along as though she knew the way.

‘You don't trust the supermarket?'

‘No. And especially Morton. He's a troubleshooter, a specialist at burying things. If you ask me, he hired you
not
to find Kyla. No offence.'

‘He hired me to see how well she was hidden. And now he's paid me off. The question is: did he pay me off because I got close or because I didn't?'

‘There's no telling until you do. But people like Morton don't usually reward failure. If he paid you, then you did what he wanted you to.'

‘I was told she had turned up, gone back to Bath and was now going to work for the company in Canada.'

‘Did you believe it?'

‘I didn't. I checked and she's not been back.'

At the entrance to the courtyard, Gloves stopped. When I drew level with her, I could see why. Everybody was there, including Annis, sitting in a wide circle, drawing. They were drawing Charlie who was posing naked by the well with a stoneware pitcher in a mock Greek-urn pose. ‘So it really is an art-schooly place.'

‘Yes, though when I left, the naked water sprite was still only a half-naked builder. The life-drawing thing is a new development. Bound to happen sooner or later, I suppose.'

Annis noticed us first. She clocked Gloves's gloves and put down her pad and pencil. I nodded my head towards the house and told Gloves to follow me. ‘I'll have to get this stuff into the kitchen and start preparing tonight's food. It'll take ages.'

Annis followed us in and I made the introductions. ‘This is Annis, my accomplice; this is
maybe
Louise, aka Gloves. Kyla's ex.'

‘Welcome to the weirdness.'

A few explanations later and the girls were drinking coffee, while I stood at the kitchen table peeling a kilo and a half of tiny onions for the
stifado
I was cooking. It was agony. ‘So Charlie's been promoted to life model? Or is it demoted?' I sniffed.

‘Morva thought life drawing was one of the things that was missing on her course. Apparently, she had toyed with the idea of asking you, but thought she knew what you'd be saying.'

‘Yeah: not bloody likely.'

‘Exactly. Sophie and Helen are certainly drawing with renewed vigour, I noticed, though I'm not so sure Rob is enamoured with the idea of staring at naked builders for hours.'

‘It wouldn't do much for me, either,' said Gloves.

I changed the subject. ‘Gloves . . . sorry, Louise recognized one of the guys in the Polaroid: he's an olive oil bigwig. I think our excursion to the olive estate may not have been so irrelevant after all.' Only a handful of onions peeled and I'd gone blind with tears. ‘Excuse me,' I said snottily and went outside to blow my nose. My jacket still hung on the back of a chair in the courtyard. I liberated the group picture with Kyla that Tim had mailed me from its lining and went back inside. Kyla looked quite different in the two pictures. ‘Which one's more typical?' I asked.

‘Oh, the holiday one. The managerial face is pure acting. Kyla wasn't like that at all; at home she was more like a kid. Teenage movies and computer games,' she said lightly, then suddenly her face fell. ‘Did I say “was”? I said “was”, didn't I?'

‘Because she's your ex. That's normal,' Annis assured her. ‘It doesn't mean anything.'

‘I'm hellishly superstitious. Not black-cats-'n'-ladders superstitious. I know it's nonsense, but on some level I always feel that we make things happen, that words make things happen.'

‘Words do make things happen. But not magically. Words are real; they can become things. Facts, anyway. It's called civilization.'

They were getting deep quickly over their cups of coffee. ‘Any chance of a hand with peeling these onions? There's millions of them.'

‘Yeah, all right.' They put down their cups and armed themselves with knives.

‘Great, that means I can prepare the lamb.' Words do make things happen. It's called delegation.

Louise still hadn't taken off her soft black leather gloves. As she watched her pick up an onion and begin to peel it, Annis asked, ‘Do you ever take those off?'

Louise stopped, sighed. Deliberately, she put down the onion and knife and tugged off one of her gloves. ‘Only if I'm lecturing people on what not to do in the event of a chip-pan fire.'

‘No wonder . . . no, I mean . . . that looks painful.'

‘I was lucky. By a miracle, it somehow missed my face. But it didn't miss much else.'

‘Could they do something with plastic surgery?'

‘This is
after
plastic surgery.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Easy mistake to make, don't worry. But hey, at least I'm only “Gloves”, not “The girl in the leather mask”.' She pulled her glove back on and picked up her knife and onion.

After the meat had been browned, the cinnamon, cloves, onions and tomato added and the big dish shoved in a slow oven, I cleared up the mess. I picked up the photograph to put back in my jacket.
Wait a minute
. So far I had only ever looked at Kyla, the other faces simply filed away as ‘other supermarket employees'. I took the photo next door into the studio where I had seen a large magnifying glass on a stand. I took it off the shelf and shoved the picture under it. No doubt about it: the face next to Kyla belonged to the bored-looking man in the back of the BMW. He'd been at the Lord Byron restaurant, too. I took it outside where Annis and Louise were watching the students struggle with Charlie's naked form. Metaphorically speaking. Though I suspected one or two of them also had a more literal interest. I put the picture in front of Louise on the table and tapped the figure next to Kyla. ‘Who is he?'

She barely gave it another glance. ‘That's Sanders. He was then her boss; she took over from him last year.'

‘And what's Mr Sanders do now, do you know?'

‘Why are you interested in him? He quit. Left the company. I don't know where he went next.'

‘I do. He went here. I saw him leave the olive oil co-op and I saw him again at a restaurant along with a load of shady characters, like your oily Sotiris and Niko from the other photograph.'

‘Interesting.'

‘More than interesting. I don't know whether Annis has told you, but we paid the oil co-op a visit and one of several curious things we found was—' But I didn't manage to finish the sentence as two things happened at the same time: the drawing session finished and Tim Bigwood turned up.

Woolly of hair, though certainly not of mind, Tim had had no problem finding us, just as he had predicted. ‘Finding space to leave the car was the tricky bit. Quite a collection of automotive junk you have up here, to go with the tottering architecture, I presume. Toyotas excluded, naturally,' he said with a nod to Louise, whom he recognized as its driver from my description.

We spent a while bringing Tim up to speed, though he made it quite clear that he had come here for sun, sea and sand. ‘The coldest and wettest spring since records began, pretty much everywhere except down here. Expect an invasion round Easter. Is that your cooking I can smell, Chris? I'm starving.'

Naturally, Louise was asked to stay. After another hour bashing around in the kitchen I managed to produce a convincing feast for Morva with the lamb
stifado
as a centrepiece, and just before sunset nine of us sat down to supper at the long table in the courtyard. Margarita, of course, would have thrown a medium-sized fit being asked to cook for this many people. Since I had turned up less than two weeks ago, the population of the ghost village had more than doubled, a fact that couldn't have escaped Morva's enemies at the village. I raised my beer glass in a silent toast to Margarita and wondered when the next ghost-village resident would turn up. As it happened, I didn't have long to wait before I found out.

I'
d have preferred Charlie in naked quietude, but it was the din of half-naked cement mixing that made me jump out of bed late next morning, surprisingly unencumbered by any hangover. One look at the groaning dehydrated form I had left behind under the sheets reminded me that, unlike her, I had avoided the local wine that apparently went so well with lamb.

Apart from Charlie toiling at the other end of the courtyard, there was no one to be seen, so, after taking the Desiccated One a glass of orange juice to help with her reconstitution, I prepared Turkish breakfast. Well, there were today no Greeks to offend, who, by their own admission, didn't go in for breakfast much anyway. I had no idea where everyone else was, but I was one hundred per cent certain that Tim was still asleep in the finished room next to ours. I am, of course, quite often one hundred per cent wrong about things, but I could hear Tim snore – and nobody snores like Tim.

‘What's Turkish breakfast?' he asked suspiciously, not quite admitting to being awake.

‘Tea, orange juice, boiled eggs, olives, feta cheese, sliced tomatoes, butter, honey, jam and, sadly in our case, yesterday's bread.'

He opened one eye. ‘Real orange juice?'

‘Carton.'

He opened the other eye. ‘Still . . .'

Charlie was levelling the cement floor on the last room, two doors down from Tim's. ‘Fancy a second breakfast? It's on the table.'

‘In a minute. I have to finish this before it sets.'

‘You're really getting them done quickly.' In fact, I could have sworn he had only just finished the room Tim was in. I laid a hand on the door handle of the third room. ‘Has this one got a bed in it yet? We could have offered it to Louise; save her driving back to her
pensión
last night.'

‘No, we couldn't! I mean, no, it hasn't.' Charlie backed out of the room he had been working on. ‘I haven't done the floor in that one yet.'

I opened the door on the third room.

‘See, still a mess,' Charlie said. ‘Breakfast, did you say? Lead me to it.' It was the worst impression of unconcerned-builder talk I had ever heard.

The room was full of junk. Strange junk. A lot more junk than I seemed to remember from when I first looked at the place. Some of it I had definitely seen before, probably by the ruined house with the cistern.

I dropped an octave down to my schoolmaster's voice. ‘Charlie . . .?'

‘Yes, Chris.'

‘This is the most
arty
pile of junk I have ever seen.'

He shrugged apologetically. ‘Yes, Chris.'

‘It's an amateur-dramatics barricade, Charlie.'

‘I know, Chris.'

‘Who built it?'

‘I had nothing to do with it; Morva did it.' This primary school thing was catching.

‘Why?'

‘It's only until everybody has left, she said.'

‘Why?'

Tim emerged from next door. ‘I'm ready for your Turkish breakfast.'

‘Go ahead; it's on the table. We'll join you in a minute. I think. You were saying, Charlie?'

He lowered his voice to a murmur. ‘I found something. When I started preparing the floor. I thought it was a bag of rubbish at first but it wasn't. It's a body, Chris. There's someone buried in there.'

‘And you piled junk . . . What
kind
of a body?'

‘A really dead one.'

‘
Charlie
. . .'

‘It's not her. It's not that woman you were looking for. I'm pretty sure it's a bloke. Definitely a bloke, actually.'

‘Let me get this straight: you found a dead body in there, but you thought it was really
quite
a good place for him?
Best
to just leave him there?
No
point
bothering the police with trivial stuff?'

‘Hey, first she wanted me to simply put the cement floor over him, but I refused.'