Stephanie (30 page)

‘Paleokastritsa,' he said.

‘Where is that?'

An expansive wave of the arm. ‘Up north. I will take you.'

As James settled in the taxi he thought of last night, when Elena Mavrogodatos had not come in again with the many good things set before him – food for a hearty man, no doubt, but of a high quality – nor was she to be seen waiting at any of the other tables. When it became clear that after some Greek songs and folk dancing, the diners were being invited to join in the revelry, James paid his bill and limped to the kitchen and asked for Elena. He was told she had gone home.

He did not ask for her home address, feeling sure he would have no difficulty in finding her if she lived in Corfu Town; but he doubted whether anything useful would come of another meeting. She had been unwilling to talk about the things he was interested in. (Not quite the barely hidden hostility he had met with at Mr Erasmus's factory, but resentful and wary.) It was only his determination to grasp at every crumb which had taken him to see her in the first place. It had been distasteful to force himself to speak to her.

The country they were driving through was beautiful – Corfu being almost the only greenly wooded of the Greek islands – with delicious glimpses of a cobalt sea and towering cliffs as they approached the west coast. Paleokastritsa was one of the beauty spots and therefore a tourist attraction. Bronzed holidaymakers in shorts pedalled bicycles or buzzed by on mopeds. Three municipal buses crawled up the hill on their way to the other coast.

Abruptly, just before the steep descent into the village, the taxi turned off and went up a rutted road, stopped before barred gates with wire on the top. The driver got out and opened the door for James.

‘Here is.'

James pulled himself out and sticked his way to the barred gate. The house was now visible round a bend in the short drive.

‘There is,' said the driver.

James gritted his teeth. This might be more like the photographs than yesterday's specimen, but the colour of the stone was different and the trees not grouped aright.

He had thought Elena had been lying when she said the house was not on Corfu.

‘This
is not it.
Look? Look at the photographs.' He thrust them at the driver, who frowned at them and lifted his cap to scratch his head.

‘Not this?'

‘Not this.'

‘Ah.' The driver handed the photographs back and shrugged.

They stood in the Attic sunshine. A seagull drifted silently overhead. James wished he had never come. He wished that the years would roll back and that he and Stephanie and Teresa and Janet were here, all together again, pedalling hired bicycles down to the sand and the sea.

‘You like to go round island?'

‘No. Take me back to Corfu Town.'

Should have done this in the first place. Gone to the Information Office, seen some knowledgeable person – identified the bloody photographs or not. Not careering round the island in the company of idiot taxi drivers …

‘I take you back by Scripero? Eh? Little further. Few kilometres. Show you the eastern coast. Eh?'

James hauled himself into the car. So what? He was leaving tomorrow. Good riddance.

They set off back towards the central massif of the island, climbing away from the tourists and the bicycles and the scooters and the buses. It was warm in the car in spite of the open windows, and James found himself dozing off. He didn't normally need a lot of sleep, but the cumulative effect of so many disturbed nights, the monstrous nature of the situation, the feeling of bitter disappointment brought him to the edge of consciousness.

He woke with a jerk of the car, peered over the sunlit groves and shouted: ‘ Stop! Stop! Stop!'

The driver obeyed him, looked round.

He had stalled his engine. Ahead of them in the sunny silence Pantokratos loomed. They were in the mountains.

‘That house,' James said. ‘ Drive nearer.'

‘Not possible this side. No way. Fields. Look, I take you other side.'

They turned in a gate, watched by a little girl tending three wickedly bearded goats, in five minutes came round from a side road and bumped along a cart track laid with huge uneven stones. The car lurched and rattled, scattering smaller stones from under its tyres and came to a jolting stop before two ancient stone pillars which would not have looked out of place on the Acropolis. Beyond them, exactly identified by the position of the cypress trees, stood the house.

‘This is it! Look, it is plain to see!'

The driver studied the photos again and smiled and nodded.

‘
Ne.
That is so. So I find him for you, eh? After all?'

It is difficult in Mediterranean countries to be sure whether a house is in use, because shutters are always closed tight against the relentless sun; but this house did look unoccupied. Yet well kept. The grass lawn in front of the house was green and tidy and must have been watered daily.

James got out again, tottered a few steps inside the gates.

‘Where is the caretaker?'

The driver did not understand this word but presently broke into Greek with a sentence that sounded like Anatole Seferis.

‘Where is he? Take me to him.' And then: ‘Do you know who this house belongs to?'

‘
Ne
,' said the driver, nodding vigorously. ‘ Not here now. Not here yet. Englishman.'

‘What is his name?'

The driver scowled in an effort of recollection. ‘Milord. English milord. Sir Peter Brown.'

‘Brown? Do you – mean Brune?'

‘
Ne
,' said the driver, nodding again. ‘Is so. This house. Sir Peter Brune.'

James put through a long telephone call to Colonel Henry Gaveston, who was entirely and absolutely incredulous, then he rang down to confirm his flight home tomorrow. The receptionist informed him that unfortunately because of a strike of the pilots of Olympic Airways there would be no Greek flights to London tomorrow.

James exploded, undignified and angry. The receptionist said she would do what she could and presently rang back to say that all she could offer him was one tourist seat, unexpectedly available, on a charter plane to Paris. It should get him to Charles de Gaulle Airport in time to catch an Air France flight, reaching Heathrow, with the adjustment of time, at 12.55. James told her to book it.

In the night James blamed himself for not going out to Tripas again to see if he could prise more information out of Elena. But there was an element of fatigue and fatalism in his feelings now. He knew anyway that the object of his mission had been partly if horribly accomplished.

Along with the two photographs of the house and the one of Stephanie and Errol on the balcony of their bungalow in Goa was a notebook he had carried with him ever since the inquest and the notes he had made directly after his meeting with Sir Humphrey Arden. With a good memory sharpened by bereavement – reinforced by frequent reading of the notes he had made – he remembered pretty well everything Humphrey had said.

‘There was this doctor in Edinburgh, I think it was March '78. He was away for a couple of days, and the maid found his wife dead in bed just before he returned. His wife apparently drank a lot, but on this occasion she had taken a large quantity of sleeping pills. As it happened, they were Medanol tablets she took. Scotland was never my patch, but I was called in by the chap up there because there was one suspicious circumstance – a light bruising in the throat. He thought – and I agreed – that this could have been caused by thrusting, however gently, a rubber tube down into the stomach and so giving the woman a fatal dose of barbiturates.

‘The police decided to take a chance and charge the doctor. I don't believe if he had stood firm they would have had a hope in hell of getting a conviction, but under persistent questioning he broke down and confessed the whole thing. Apparently he'd been having an affair with a patient and his wife had threatened to report him to the GMC. He picked his time carefully and came home when she wasn't expecting him. He found her as he'd hoped, having just drunk enough to be a bit fuddled. He told her his affair with the other woman was over, and after a reconciliation he mixed her another gin. In this he slipped three much stronger barbitone tablets. The outcome of this would be that his wife would be yawning her head off in ten minutes and after half an hour would be out like a light. Get me?'

‘I get you very well.'

‘Well, apparently what this doctor did then was to break open the capsules – her own capsules – of Medanol – twenty, I believe he said – and mix them in a couple of glasses of dilute gin. He then passed the tube of a stomach pump into the victim's mouth and very gradually down her gullet into her stomach. It's a tricky operation but it's done constantly in overdose cases. Difference is that in such cases a bruising of the throat is an acceptable part of the exercise. Here it was clearly not, and this gave him away. He'd been clever enough to add the containers afterwards, dissolving them in half an ounce or so of water – they're red, you see, and stain the contents of the stomach and stomach wall. Without such staining the pathologist would at once have been suspicious. Then he left the house and was careful not to come home until after the maid had discovered the body next morning.'

‘Clever,' James had said.

‘Very clever, but he fell at the last hurdle.'

James remembered there had been a roar of laughter from some men at the bar, and Sir Humphrey had winced and adjusted his hearing aid.

‘I very much hesitated to tell you this story, James. It is all the purest speculation, and the last thing I want to do is implant in your mind a suspicion – or indeed a certitude – where no certitude can exist. You suspect foul play, and that this man Errol Colton is responsible. I almost went away, preferring that you shouldn't have this irrelevant story troubling your mind. I think it must be irrelevant for one very good reason.'

‘What is that?'

‘Colton is not a doctor. Only a skilled medical man could have successfully committed such a crime.'

‘And there was no bruising on my daughter's throat?'

‘No. After you had rung me I rang Ehrmann and got a copy of his post-mortem report. I didn't know quite what you were going to ask me, but it pretty certainly had something to do with the PM. There was no bruising of your daughter's throat.'

At this point James remembered the noisy crowd at the bar had moved off, and sudden peace and silence fell, leaving the barman polishing glasses, and three other old men muttering in a far corner.

‘However,' Arden had said. ‘It's the fact that Colton is not a doctor which puts the hypothesis right out of court. More so than the absence of bruising.'

‘Why more so?'

‘Well, the doctor in Edinburgh wasn't quite clever enough. He omitted to use glycerine.'

The flight to Paris was crowded and noisy as were James's thoughts. In an attempt to keep some balance in his mind, he tried to think of Teresa and his first grandchild. He hoped for a boy, though it would never bear the name of Locke. Teresa's attitude was eminently sensible: ‘ I don't in the least mind so long as it's got two eyes and four limbs.'

Had he in his heart always felt a slight preference for the younger and prettier and more awkward of his daughters? Teresa was a marvellous girl, and to save his sanity and good sense he must concentrate on her and all that he had got left.

He had bought yesterday's
Times
in the hotel before he left and he tried to read this on the plane. It was useless. England were heading for defeat in the first Test match against the West Indians. It was happening in another world. A British barque called the
Marques
had foundered in heavy seas off Bermuda while taking part in a tall ships race, with the loss of nineteen lives, including a baby. Very sad. The death toll in the Lancashire underground water treatment plant explosion had risen to fifteen. The cost of first class post was to be put up to seventeen pence. The miners' strike was going on for ever, and there was a threat of more disturbances. President Reagan was arriving in London tomorrow to attend the London Economic Summit.

James folded the paper again and again, and thrust it impatiently in the net pouch in front of his seat, took up an illustrated French magazine. There was an article entitled ‘
L
'
an de Georges Orwell
', and he tried to read it, No go. This was not quite the world Eric Blair had imagined; but it was nasty and brutal and evil and in most ways unspeakably vile. Perhaps Big Brother would have been better after all.

The DC3 put down quietly at the airport, and then it was wheelchair and bus and wheelchair again, moving from one satellite to another. The second wheelchair attendant was a negro with a cheerful face and a whistle he employed throughout the journey to the point of take-off.

Charles de Gaulle Airport is innovative in that its designers employ enclosed moving platforms to a unique degree. James found himself being pushed, or in the main simply steered – since effort was unnecessary – inside a transparent tube which was like progressing through the intestines of a caterpillar. Sometimes you went uphill and sometimes down, and alongside at varying times was a similar caterpillar in which strangers passed in the night or kept one company before separating and going off in some other direction.

People stood there like Aunt Sallys at a shooting range. In his present mood James toyed with the idea of having a gun and venting his grief and frustration on some innocent passenger travelling to Stuttgart or Madrid. His mind was still full of astonishment and enormity; it was weighed down with enormity, struggling with enormity for air and light and understanding.

And then he looked again and shouted, ‘Halt! Halt!'

The wheelchair attendant stopped whistling and bent down over his passenger inquiringly, but allowed the moving platform to carry them along.