by Desmond Cory
‘His mother? Tolga Arkin’s wife?’
Berry Berry nodded sombrely. ‘Very sad business, that was. I don’t think Tolga ever really got over it. He left the country almost at once, of course, and never got married again, which rather suggests … and his brother was killed as well.’ He stopped nodding and shook his head instead, no less sombrely. ‘Something of a national hero, his brother was, as I expect you’ve gathered.’
‘A little odd he should have wanted to come back here, don’t you think? Tolga, I mean. He can’t have very many happy memories.’
‘No, but he’s very patriotic in his way. He isn’t really into politics the way his brother was, but he’s probably done a great deal more for his country than Uktu ever did. Hardly a fair comparison, as Uktu died very young, but you’ll follow my meaning.’
Not really. Dobie was getting even more than ordinarily confused with all these Tolgas and Mai Tais and Uktus and whatever but then, he told himself, it had to be remembered that these chaps were foreigners, after all, and shouldn’t therefore be expected to make too much sense, at any rate to begin with. ‘I’m not into politics, either,’ he said. ‘Though I did vote Labour in the last election.’
‘Things are a little different here. You could almost say the word has a different meaning.’
‘They lost, of course. By a convincing margin.’
‘Well, you may have better luck next time.’
‘I very much doubt it,’ Dobie said .
In fact nobody really wanted to talk about politics. Everybody seemed to want to talk about the murder. Well, that was human nature for you, Dobie decided. Violent death seems to be a staple subject of conversation everywhere, a subject of perennial and sometimes morbid interest. But then he knew that already. He’d had every opportunity recently to discover that fact for himself.
At least this time it was the death of someone else’s wife – and not his own – constituting the topic of general interest. The topic was still, for Dobie, a somewhat delicate one. And chiefly, he didn’t want to become involved. There was no reason why he should be. He wasn’t here to talk about murders or politics either. He was here to lecture on mathematics. He was a jolly good mathematician, that nobody could deny. Not a politician. Not a detective, amateur or otherwise. Ensconced once again in his armchair in his hot little sitting-room, Dobie stared for a while at the photograph on the wall. Cardiff, 1986, or thereabouts. Not so long ago. Yet now the girl in the photograph was dead and the photograph itself had become somehow dateless, had become imperceptibly a tiny part of the curious time-capsule effect that life in Cyprus appeared to have upon the unsuspecting arrival from the UK, who found himself pitched into an ambience where the events of 1985 and 1974 and 1960 and of 1985 BC seemed to be virtually coetaneous because equally relevant to the present moment. Or equally irrelevant, as the case might be.
Not a politician. Not a detective. And not, of course, any kind of an archaeologist or researcher into pagan and unpalatable mythologies. He wondered who Amphitryon was when he was at home. Or wasn’t the point about him that he often wasn’t? And when he was, was prone to receive unpleasant and improbable surprises? Dobie, who also in the not-so-distant past had made disagreeable discoveries of a (broadly) similar nature, sighed plaintively and wondered what to do next.
Normally he’d have expected to find plenty to do down at his office. Routine preparations. But Derya’s wall planner and lecture notes had indicated a perfectly straightforward teaching programme that he could, he felt sure, conduct while standing on his head, though any such feat of gymnastics would hardly be necessary here in this Alice-in-Wonderlandish island where everything appeared in any case to be upside down. And he had, of course, already run Derya’s mini-discs through the computer, rather in the spirit of a Test-class spin bowler (Derek Gower, maybe, or someone like that) idly entertaining himself at a schoolboy practice net. Nothing much there for him, either, except for run-throughs of familiar calculi and derivations from the Hundred Best-Loved Equations; oh, and a set of what looked like geometrical variants belonging or anyway relating to someone called HARRY O, this being the name entered on the starter access code. Having further leafed through a couple of textbooks and having thus exhausted the immediate resources of his office (and very possibly of the entire department), Dobie had found himself free to pursue his own devices, which had consisted of a series of small squiggly loops and circles drawn on a sheet of paper over a period of some twenty minutes. Outside, the sun had been shining in a virtually cloudless sky and the gentle waves of the Mediterranean had lapped insidiously on a white and sandy beach. To hell with it, Dobie had thought.
Back to square one. Why not?
Square one being much as he’d described it in his letter to Kate, now duly completed, stamped and posted. A pleasant two-storey villa of inoffensive design, placed amongst other seemingly identical villas in a gated compound beside another white and sandy beach some eight miles from Famagusta or Gazi Magusa. Every damned place in Cyprus, Dobie had discovered, had two different names, one Turkish and one Greek, together with a third name you used when you wanted to refer to it in ordinary converse, this particular villa complex (Tuzla Gardens) being thus generally known as the Bughole – a succinct if unfair appellation suggestive, as was so much in North Cyprus, of frowsty Junior Common Rooms in minor English public schools and of pork pies being toasted on cold winter evenings in the midst of a seasonable fug. Dobie’s own bughole, of course, bore no resemblance to any schoolboy study he had ever inhabited: the ground floor consisted of a sizable living-room (with terrace) whence a passageway led past a small bedroom (used by Seymour as a study) to an equally small kitchen, this last redolent of burnt cooking oil and rotten tomatoes. Dobie had managed last night to locate the tomatoes in a plastic bag inside a cupboard and had promptly re-located them in the dustbin outside the back door, which had rather surprisingly seemed to be full of paper ash. The melody, however, lingered on despite the open kitchen windows and meantime Dobie was making a point of eating out, in the small bar-cum-restaurant just outside the compound gate, where indeed he intended in a few minutes’ time to respond to Hillyer’s invitation of the previous evening and join some of the others in the dismemberment of a sirloin steak or some such delicacy. He was starting to feel a little peckish.
He was also, though for a different reason, making something of a point of avoiding the main bedroom upstairs, which still bore numerous unmistakable signs of previous occupancy. A wardrobe full of Derya’s clothes, for a start, with her husband’s rather less ostentatious trousseau hanging forlornly from a crossbar to one side of it. Dobie, suitcase in hand, had opened the wardrobe, closed it again and at once had plodded downstairs to set up shop in the other bedroom; Seymour’s things were all over the place here, too, but Seymour at least was still alive and … Well, Dobie felt more comfortable there, that was all.
There was a desk with a typewriter standing on it and a filing tray full of sheets of blank paper. There was a well-laden bookcase and there were a lot more books strewn over the floor beside the desk. There was also, of course, a single bed. Dobie, a tidy man at heart, had in fact picked up the books and had relegated them not to the dustbin outside but to the top shelf of the bookcase, which was where they had probably originally been stacked; he had made an exception, however, in the case of a paperback volume entitled Hot Sex in the Sauna, bearing on its cover the luridly coloured depiction of several unclothed ladies disporting themselves variously (and uninhibitedly) around a recumbent figure whose facial features, at least, bore a striking resemblance to those of the rector of Dobie’s home university. The resemblance in other regions was very much less marked but Dobie set the book reverently aside on the table beside the bed, where he felt it might come in useful should he feel the need for a little enlightenment and/or improving uplift in the small hours of the night.
He was on the whole a tidy but not, as he’d already said, an imaginative man. Which wasn’t to say that he fe
lt completely at ease in this particular … bughole. He didn’t. It was hard to say why. But it wasn’t because the former chatelaine of the house had been from all accounts somewhat spectacularly bumped off in the upstairs bedroom. Rather was it because the other occupant of the house was still alive, if not exactly kicking, and Dobie was unable to rid himself of an uneasy feeling that he might at any moment walk in through the front door prepared to oust the present usurper through bodily violence, as after all he presumably had a certain right to do. Even if your actual grievous bodily harm was not involved, his entry, Dobie thought, would almost certainly be an emphatic one; Seymour, he remembered, had always been a decidedly emphatic young man, dogmatic in his opinions and often over-aggressive in his presentation of them. And Benthall or whatever his name was had intimated clearly enough that his manner hadn’t changed in that respect. He and all the other people Dobie had so far conversed with had expressed various degrees of courteous regret and even shock about the bumping off, but nobody had seemed to be particularly surprised. In the undertones of Cem Arkin’s comments Dobie had even detected the lurking suggestion that she might, to employ an inappropriate vulgarism, have had it coming. That wasn’t, however, a topic upon which Dobie wished to speculate.
Or, if he did, not right now.
Glancing, as it were instinctively, towards the photograph again, he suddenly remembered who it was that Derya, in that particular posture, reminded him of. The physical resemblance could hardly have been slighter, but there was something about the carriage of the head and the marginally over-confident what-she-tells-all-the-boys expression that had caused Dobie to make the connection. Unconsciously, no doubt. Most of Dobie’s mental processes took place on that level, as Kate assured him. Arguably they were doing so now. And since the person of whom he was being thus reminded was in fact his late wife Jenny, Dobie wished that they wouldn’t.
Ah, but there was no real resemblance, not really. No real resemblance at all. One thing that having achieved notoriety as a Professor Bluebeard does for your unconscious mental processes is render you, perhaps, a little over-sensitive in such matters, and also more than ordinarily sympathetic to other unfortunate ex-husbands in similar cases. Dobie had already determined now that he was in Cyprus to make a point of visiting the Othello Tower in Famagusta; Othello he now felt to be a much-maligned and misunderstood character who had thrown up, clearly in a fit of pique, what was clearly an excellent chance of beating the rap.
And Seymour’s chances, if it came to that, had to be rather more than non-existent. This was a Mediterranean country, after all, where murdering a wife or two might well be regarded in certain circumstances as being the only gentlemanly thing to do. Dobie, it was true, was aware of a certain essential difference between himself and Seymour: he, when all was said and dun, hadn’t dunnit. Seymour apparently had. Well, he’d confessed to it, at any rate.
So it wasn’t, as in Dobie’s case, a matter of sneaky and meretricious innuendoes appearing in the popular organs of the tabloid press. A statement made to the police would have been another matter entirely, and that, it had to be supposed, was what Seymour had offered up. Under duress? It didn’t seem likely. While bemused by the intensity of his emotions? Possible, but also improbable. While under the influence of narcotic drugs? Well, if what that what’s-his-name chap, yes, Arkin had said was true, and there seemed to be no reason to doubt it …
But of course there’d be a lawyer, someone who’d have looked into all that side of things and … And a British consular representative, there’d have been someone like that. The Cypriot police would be civilised and well-trained officers, not like that bunch in Midnight Express though the kid in that film (to which Dobie, by the way, had once been dragged under emphatic protest, since he wasn’t in any way interested in train-spotting) had been fingered for drug offences, hadn’t he? They might call it a Turkish Republic but Cyprus wasn’t Turkey. And if it came to that, Seymour …
It isn’t as though I liked the man, Dobie thought (almost in desperation). I hardly even knew him. And what I did know of him I didn’t like at all. Of course they all said he was enormously talented but not in my field he wasn’t and anyway that had nothing to do with it. What he did was to divert Derya’s attention at a crucial point in her studies with all that acting and theatrical nonsense and that was how he got me pissed off. Of course it was serious in a way – they got married which might be held to prove it – but the final year of a doctoral assignment isn’t a good moment for that sort of thing and even if her thesis had been duly approved it didn’t seem that the marriage had been too much of a success if they’d …
Dobie sighed. Don’t say it, Kate, he thought …
‘Dobie, you’re a prick.’
Yes. In some ways, it’s true. But old habits of thought die very hard. And new ones—
He looked up, suddenly alert. The telephone was ringing. He hoped it was Kate.
But it wasn’t.
4
He had been prepared for the car and even for the uniformed driver but not for the twin flags to either side of the bonnet that fluttered gaily in the wind and made flicking, snapping noises like hungry terrapins as they drove at high speed down the main road towards Pirhan. Together with the comfortably appointed car interior they made Dobie feel like an American politician on his way to an assassination date. He gazed out of the window towards the mountains to his far right with a definite sense of foreboding, wishing he could have found it in him to be less accommodating to the nice lady with the cultured (not to say sexy) voice who had called him up on the telephone and who now, barely a half-hour later, sat beside him on the back seat. ‘It’s really very good of you,’ the nice lady said, possibly sensing a certain recalcitrance in her chosen victim and sounding even drawlier and Roedeanier than before, ‘to find the time for this visit. I have to say that not all Mr Seymour’s compatriots here have been so co-operative.’
Dobie shifted the angle of his gaze to take in, no less glumly, the nearer of the red-crescented flags on the car bonnet. ‘Well, I understood you to say the Foreign Office—’
‘Yes, that’s quite right.’
‘But I thought you meant ours, you see.’
‘Maybe I should have said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but that always sounds so cumbersome. And it isn’t a very exact translation anyway. I’m afraid that as a British subject you don’t have any formal diplomatic representation in North Cyprus, other than through the High Commission, and neither, of course, does Mr Seymour. That’s rather the point.’
‘So how do you come into it?’
The nice lady exhaled a sweetly perfumed breath with a sound that in a less refined context might have passed for a groan. ‘I’m in charge of the English section of the Ministry and I’m able to liaise semi-officially with the British people over the other side. Between us we’re able to sort out most of the problems that arise when all those fat-headed tourists get themselves into some kind of trouble Turk-side. Provided there’s no criminal charges involved, smuggling or espionage or anything like that, it’s not so very difficult. It just keeps me busy, that’s all. But Mr Seymour …’ The nice lady sighed. ‘That’s a different kettle of fish.’
‘Or can of worms.’
‘Or can of worms, yes. I suppose you know something about the background to the whole business?’
‘Something, yes.’ The nice lady had very nice legs, which she had at that moment elected to cross, but they offered, Dobie sadly thought, inadequate compensation for his own prospective involvement in this business, as she called it. And with a local government department, furthermore. ‘What I don’t know is what you want me to do about it.’
‘Just talk to him, that’s all.’ The voice now held a faint undertone of surprise. ‘I thought I’d made that clear. We’re hoping that if you do that, he’ll talk to you. He did ask to see you, after all.’
‘How did he get to know I was here?’
‘He read about your appointment in
the local paper. He reads a lot. He reads all the time. He just won’t speak to anyone, that’s the trouble.’
‘I’m surprised he remembered my name,’ Dobie said. ‘He never knew me all that well.’
‘They tell me you supervised his wife’s thesis some years back.’
‘So I did.’
‘You see, he won’t talk to anyone. Not to his lawyer, or to me, or to anybody else. That’s been the problem all along – or part of it, anyway. Right now they’ve got him in this military hospital and under guard, of course, but the people there don’t really seem to know how to treat him. They’re not too experienced in the use of modern psychiatric techniques, as you can imagine.’
‘Oh, but I’m not, either. I’m not a psychologist if that’s what you thought. No, no. I teach mathematics.’
‘Well, but let me explain. They managed to get him off his drug dependence all right, they gave him cold chicken or whatever they call it, but he went through a really bad time one way or another and now they’re talking about catatonic states and withdrawal syndromes and so forth and what they seem to mean by all that is that he won’t talk to anyone any more. Like I said. He just sits around and listens to the radio and reads the papers but he won’t talk, he won’t tell us what happened or talk about anything concerned with it. And that’s making it pretty damned difficult for the lawyer who’s preparing his defence. And,’ the nice lady said, ‘it’s indirectly embarrassing for the Ministry, too.’
‘I suppose he can talk? I mean, when you say he asked to see me —’
‘Oh, yes, he speaks, he can tell them what he’d like for breakfast, he can ask for a clean shirt, he’ll even converse with the medical orderlies up to a point. In Turkish. But he won’t tell us what we want to know. The doctor says he’s incapable of facing up to what he’s done, we’re up against some kind of a mental block. I suppose that could be true. But he did ask to see you, that’s the whole point, and maybe if he sees someone he used to know in England, someone who isn’t connected with his life in Cyprus or with his marriage in any way at all —’
