by Desmond Cory
He needed, perhaps, to put in a few hours’ work back in the department. That might restore to him a proper sense of values.
But work was just what he couldn’t settle down to. Proper work. Everyone said that it would be different when the students arrived; well, he knew that. But there were still two weeks to go before full term commenced; exactly two weeks if you thought of time in that way, and for some reason Dobie couldn’t now do that, either. He felt disorientated. Usually before the beginning of term there was a certain amount of work, quite clearly specified, that had to be got through: classes to be prepared, lecture notes to be revised, programmes to be drawn up. Time could be measured in terms of a simple countdown to D-day, of leisurely but steady movement towards a concrete aim, a movement he’d executed many times before and could carry out with little expenditure of effort, almost unthinkingly. There was an aim and there was progress towards it, that was the point.
That didn’t seem to be the situation here at all.
He had papers in his briefcase all right, plenty of them. Papers to be gone through. Their bulk seemed to be building up, if anything. He had several pages of an impenetrable typescript called, for some unfathomable reason, The Mask of Zeus. He had an official transcript recording the results of a police interrogation. And he had five pages of printed bumf that Kate had faxed to him from Cardiff, he didn’t know why. Well, no, he knew why all right – because he had asked her to. That was why. What he didn’t know was why he had asked her to. It was all like that. Papers, yes. Plenty.
Progress, zilch.
He had the faxed pages on the desk in front of him now, and again, he didn’t know why. They didn’t tell him anything. Together with the proofs Kate, with her customary thoroughness, had sent a copy of the biographical note on the back of the book’s dust-jacket and of the accompanying photograph of the author, which naturally had come through rather badly smudged. All you could see was a vaguely oafish and heavily bearded face, almost as indeterminate in outline as that of the still unknown Sabiha Metti had been after her sojourn in the sole of Derya’s shoe. To clarify matters the publishers had very considerately featured the author’s name in bold capitals directly under the photograph, thus:
ADE SEYMOUR
… is a graduate of the University of Cardiff, which he left with a first-class honours degree in English and with a considerable reputation as an actor and producer of college plays. He has since written two highly praised novels and a stage play, awaiting West End production. For the past three years he has lived and worked in Cyprus and his profound knowledge and love of the island is displayed in this searching personal study of the place and its peoples – not a guidebook but, as he himself says, an ‘investigation’ of the island’s many mysteries and hidden secrets. This book may, like Bitter Lemons, become itself a part of the troubled and turbulent history it graphically describes …
You see, Dobie? It doesn’t tell you anything. Clarify matters? Not at all. Nobody had ever called Seymour ‘Ade’, that Dobie could remember, or even ‘Adrian’. Well, maybe Derya had, but nobody else. No doubt Perriam and possibly even Perriam had favoured the shortened version as being more friendly and Neighbours-like, but that was just exactly what Seymour hadn’t been. And still wasn’t. Dobie pushed the top page aside and riffled through the pages of close-packed print underneath.
Hopeless.
No, the search for the mask of Zeus in London had been a waste of time, a pursuit of something that once had been but now wasn’t, and his stroll round Salamis with Kaya no better; Seymour’s story, if that was what it was, a boojum bird whizzing round in ever-decreasing circles before disappearing up its own back end. As for Derya’s escapades and other peccadilloes, these were quite simply none of Dobie’s business; what earthly point could there be in raking them up? Or digging down into all this archaeological rubbish? Sam Spade might have been the man for the job. He-he-he-he. But Dobie wasn’t. That was for sure.
Unfortunately the nice lady still didn’t seem to agree with this opinion. She rang through just as he was shovelling his papers back into the briefcase and she sounded a little het up. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning. Where have you been?’
‘Oh, out,’ Dobie said vaguely. ‘Looking into this and that. You know, I’ve been thinking this matter over—’
‘Well, listen. My clerk’s identified that document you sent me and it’s extremely interesting.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes, it is. Apparently it’s a travel pass. A safe-conduct. They were used in ’74, my clerk tells me, at the time of the Turkish invasion, when people were travelling from the Greek side over to the Turkish-controlled area. It was a clearance paper, really, to make sure that whoever had one wouldn’t be stopped and sent back by the Turkish patrols.’
Dobie rubbed his eyes, which had begun to ache a little. ‘So who is she?’
‘Well, we don’t know that yet, but my chap’s working on it. No. Listen. We do know that whoever she was, she travelled from Nicosia to the Famagusta area and we know that she did go there because the pass has been stamped, and we know she went by car because the car registration number has been filled in, so if we can trace the owner’s name which shouldn’t be too difficult—’
‘We know her name. Sabiha something. That’s not what I meant. I meant, who is she? What’s she got to do with Derya? Or with Seymour? Or with anything? 1974 … They were neither of them here. They’d both have been kids, for God’s sake.’
‘All the same it might be important. Very important. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’
‘Have you tried showing it to Seymour?’
But the telephone had already clicked in Dobie’s ear. He put it down. Not a very sensible suggestion anyway. Seymour might or might not recognise the photograph but either way he wouldn’t say anything. Why not? Because he wouldn’t, that was all. He’d said all he had to say and that was it.
Importance is a relative concept. That’s the trouble. For some while now it had seemed to Dobie very important to find out what Derya, and, for that matter, Seymour had been doing earlier that evening: Cem Arkin claimed to have seen them drive off together at around four o’clock and nobody seemed to have seen them since. Either of them. General opinion appeared to hold that Derya had been screwing around somewhere and Seymour’s story confirmed that opinion. Yes, but only in the vaguest possible way. And what had he been doing meanwhile, anyway?
He’d come back later in a taxi. From the university, according to Zeynep. All right, maybe he’d been researching something, in the library or wherever. Nothing easier, in any case, than to ask him. If you didn’t mind wasting a whole lot more time. Because he wouldn’t tell you anything. Why not? He wouldn’t. That was all. Unless in some way he could be forced. And it wasn’t very easy to see how. But then, Dobie thought, that’s what this is all about. All these papers on my desk. Everything. He stared down at the sheet of notepad paper upon which he had written, for some reason or other, 1974, then crumpled it up and threw it in the wastepaper-basket.
He felt tempted to do the same with all the rest of it. The Mask of Zeus by Adrian Seymour indeed. It meant about as much as 1974 scribbled on a telephone notepad. It was a story or it wasn’t a story. It told the truth or it didn’t tell the truth. And you could say the same of the confession transcript. ‘Jacko gets ’em every day,’ Kate had said. ‘Or so he claims. By the dozen, whenever a case gets into the newspapers. They don’t mean a thing.’ Kate had a nice voice; soothing, somehow. Even on the telephone. Thinking about Kate’s voice, Dobie felt the tightened corners of his lips relax.
‘Well, the police are acting on this one. Although they don’t seem to have very much else.’
‘Are you sure it’s a fake?’
‘There are some very odd things about it,’ Dobie said. ‘But then he’s a very odd person.’
‘You think he didn’t do it?’
‘He may or may not have done it but either way I don’t
think he’s telling the truth about what happened.’
‘Well, I’ve just sent off the stuff you wanted but I had a glance through it on the train and I can’t see that it’ll be any help. Just a lot of semi-highbrow stuff about some kind of porn picture or other … Dobie, you got to behave yourself while you’re out there, you hear?’
‘Oh, I will. But—’
‘What?’
‘I wish you were here. As the postcards say.’
‘Yes. So do I. If only to keep you out of … Dobie, do you really know what you’re doing?’
‘To be honest,’ Dobie said, ‘no.’
The office door was opening. Dobie removed the idiotic smile from his face, picked up his ballpoint and looked alert and intelligent.
‘Oh, there you are,’ Hillyer said.
‘Yum.’
‘I hear you’ve been doing the rounds with Kaya.’
‘Yes, I have. Most illuminating.’
‘And exhausting. Fancy a spot of lunch?’
‘That sounds like a good idea,’ Dobie admitted. He rubbed his eyes again as he stood up, then reached down for his briefcase. ‘I’ve got something here you might care to take a look at. Afterwards.’
‘Oh, right. Jolly good,’ Hillyer said.
9
They went to the Aramis Hotel and the murl there was all right but in no way better, Dobie thought, than the nosh Zeynep served up in the little lokanta, though the atmosphere of course was a good deal posher. I don’t like posh nosh, he said to himself, cuddling his tumbler of post-prandial five-star cognac; let’s go where the posh is nosher, let’s go to the pub next door. Bread from Evans’s, tea from Thomas’s, beer from the Collier’s Arms … The foggy Rhymney valleys far from him now though never quite forgotten as he looked down on to a strip of beach drenched in Mediterranean sunshine and crowded with tourists, a strip of tourists (a good collective noun, that), many of the girls nearby being almost in the state attributed by Kaya to their pagan forebears; one of them had certainly entered the sea respectably attired in a cotton singlet and tight red knickers but these didn’t help matters much when she emerged from it. Cardiff was never like this. Mindful of Kate’s prevention, Dobie manfully averted his eyes and regarded instead the less rewarding spectacle of Hillyer with his elbows planked firmly on the table, scrutinising with an air of mistrust the final sheet of those spread out before him.
‘Very strange,’ Hillyer said. ‘Very strange indeed. Very puzzling.’
‘It seemed so to me,’ Dobie said. ‘But then I don’t read much fiction, you see, in the ordinary way. And I’m not even sure if you’d call that fiction or not. So I just don’t know how to approach it.’
‘It’s literary all right. Too much so, some would say. I mean it’s over-written, that’s obvious, but Seymour tended to do that anyway. It reads rather as though he’d somehow managed to get through that block of his at last and then went on just writing and writing, getting it all down before it died on him. Or before the effects of the drug he was on wore off. That’s my first impression of it, anyway.’
The girl in the wet singlet had taken it off and was lying down now in the sun. Dobie repressed an anguished groan and tried to address himself to the matter in hand. ‘It’s as though he doesn’t even know who he is. That’s the trouble.’
‘Yes. That’s the change of persona. Shifting viewpoints. Moving from himself to this Zeus figure and back again. I don’t see that as too much of a problem, though; it’s a fashionable literary device these days, to the point of being overdone, perhaps. I don’t think—’
‘Viewpoints. That’s all you get.’
‘Sorry?’ Hillyer looked up in mild surprise, struck no doubt by the hint of a bovine bellow in Dobie’s voice. The girl on the beach had just sat up and was reaching across for a cigarette. ‘I don’t quite follow—’
‘It’s all about what he sees. Not about what he does. He never even says that he kills her, not in so many words.’
‘The whole effect,’ Hillyer said, ‘is meant to be voyeuristic. Or is voyeuristic, irrespective of what he intended. But then voyeurism is so often to be associated with impotence … it’s as though he’s releasing himself from his mental block through this really rather intense visualisation of the scene—’
‘Supposing,’ Dobie said, ‘he saw someone else.’
‘Someone else?’
‘Killing her.’
‘But that’s absurd.’
‘I’m not really into this. I’m just supposing.’
‘Coming from someone who lays no claim to a vivid imagination, that’s about the most extraordinary theory I’ve ever come across.’
‘Yes. That’s what I thought. It’s quite a relief for me to hear you say so.’
‘But I’m not inclined to dismiss it out of hand. Not altogether.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No. I mean … Coleridge springs to mind.’
‘Not to mine he doesn’t.’
‘Well, it’s now fairly generally believed that in writing The Ancient Mariner he sublimated the guilt complex he suffered from in consequence of his having in his childhood made an attempt upon the life of his brother. “With my cross-bow,” if you remember, “I shot the albatross.” And was made to suffer accordingly. Crime and punishment. And a kind of confession, if you like, expressed in symbolic terms. Is that the sort of thing you’re hypothesising?’
‘I don’t quite know. Is it? I just thought he might have got to see her being killed, right? Being more than halfway stoned on drugs at the time, and then not being able to face up to the fact of it, sort of thing, maybe because it was something he’d wanted to do himself but couldn’t … Yes, I suppose a guilt complex is what you’d call it. Because of course he didn’t do anything to stop it. Just watched it happen. I can imagine anyone feeling bad afterwards, after a thing like that.’ Dobie picked up the pages of typescript and leafed through them.
Hillyer watched him for a moment in silence. ‘But if Seymour didn’t kill her, then someone else did.’
‘And you think that’s impossible?’
‘No. Not impossible, I suppose. But in that case Seymour must certainly know who that person was. He may for some reason be inhibited from explaining—’
‘He mightn’t if that person was wearing a mask.’
‘A mask? Well, yes, of course. The mask of Zeus. How stupid of me not to … But it does seem a rather melodramatic touch. In fact almost farcical. Unless one could think of some practical reason why … And I suppose one could, without great difficulty. Such indeed as the one you’ve just given. To prevent recognition. In which case we have further to suppose that Zeus in his human guise, so to speak, would be known to Seymour or to Derya. Or to both.’
‘I think I would have to assume that anyway.’
‘Quite. It wouldn’t have been a burglar or … a breaker-in … But that’s a very uncomfortable assumption for us to make. In its implications.’
‘Yes, it is. As you were all here and in the compound at that time.’
‘And that’s where we come up with a bump against reality. I mean, we’re all academics here, aren’t we? I’m an academic. That’s why I find it, well … rather fun in a way to pursue these ideas of yours to an O altitudo. But no one of us could possibly have … To put it on the crudest level, we wouldn’t have had the guts.’
‘Sometimes it’s more a matter of being pushed hard enough.’
‘But who by? And why? Seymour was maybe being pushed. By Derya herself.’ Hillyer sat back. ‘When it comes down to brass tacks, you know, it so very obviously had to have been him that I don’t think it occurred to any of us to suppose otherwise. Even before we’d heard about his confession.’
‘The trouble is,’ Dobie said, ‘we’re all living in such an intimate little enclave … and what’s more it’s virtually sealed off after midnight because that’s when Ali closes the gates. Well, I know it’s only a wooden barrier really—’
‘And quite unneces
sary. They put that up two years ago,’ Hillyer said huffily, ‘when we had some minor thefts. But that’s Cyprus for you. Once something’s there, it’s there for ever.’
‘The point is that cars can’t drive in after midnight without Ali’s knowing about it. And again, we’ve all got garages and there’s no other place to park cars except the turning space at the end, and no one could leave a car there without everyone in the compound noticing – and probably complaining about it because it’d be in the way.’
Hillyer sighed. ‘Yes. But that’s—’
‘There doesn’t seem to be any possibility of any unauthorised person having entered the compound that night – not if Ali’s to be believed. And we have to cross him off the list at once because there’s no way a one-armed man could avoid being recognised, mask or no mask, or could bump off a healthy young woman anyway. Shoot someone, yes, maybe – but not suffocate anyone with a pillow. For the rest, you can’t bring a boat in to the beach behind the houses because of that line of rocks and you can’t get in any other way because the bushes are too thick and scratchy and all wired off. So it looks as if—’
‘She could have brought someone in with her.’
‘How?’
‘Hiding in the back of the car, maybe. It’d have been dark, after all. Ali very easily might not have noticed.’
‘But why should she want to do that?’
‘I don’t know. We’re just considering theoretical possibilities, after all, and everything you say goes to prove my point. It couldn’t have been anyone else and it wasn’t any of us. Therefore, it must have been Seymour. QED.’
