by Desmond Cory
Two years can be a long time, though, when you’re an Assistant Professor, as Dobie remembered only too well. ‘Yes, I remember her as being very ambitious. But I never supposed—’
Mrs Berry Berry looked at him, seemingly a little startled. ‘Oh, that’s right. You knew her, didn’t you? She was one of your students. Berry told me, but then it slipped my mind. She was good, was she? I mean as a student?’
‘Brilliant.’
‘That’s exactly what Berry always said. I can never understand why it is that academics think brilliance excuses everything. God, I’ve been married to one for thirty-five years so I ought to understand it. But I don’t.’
‘Perhaps Derya thought that. About herself.’
‘I’m sure she did.’
‘But then,’ Dobie said, ‘so did her husband. Seymour. From all accounts. It’s not just academics who think that, you know. It was all those writers and people who started it.’
‘Yes. Oscar Wilde. He must have been really surprised when events caught up with him the way they did; he clearly thought of himself as being untouchable, somehow. But I adore Oscar Wilde. Don’t you?’
‘Not really.’ It would, Dobie felt, be somewhat imprudent to admit to any such an infatuation and, in any case, his knowledge of the works in question was of the sketchiest. ‘And anyway, Derya wasn’t like that. Surely?’
‘She was always ready and willing to declare her talent,’ Mrs Berry Berry said frostily. ‘But there I suppose the resemblance ceases.’
It would be interesting for Dobie, in retrospect, to reflect that after so many excursions leading into dead-ends, after so much agonised beating – as she would have said – about the bush, it was Mrs Berry Berry who would eventually prove to have set him on the right track and that, as often happens, through a chance remark. Naturally, though, he wasn’t aware of this at the time, his attention being at that moment elsewhere engaged by the arrival of a group of people with whom he wasn’t yet acquainted but whom he recognised as other university colleagues; they had driven over, doubtless, from the other professorial compound located on the outskirts of Famagusta. Mrs Berry Berry had risen and gone across to greet them. Dobie, thus left on his tod, allowed his gaze to wander over to where smoke was drifting upwards from the barbecue grill and where, under Berry Berry’s supervision, the earnest student Ali was blackening numerous succulent chunks of chicken.
Ozzie, taking refuge from this expertly delivered form of chemical warfare, was moving away from the lee side of the grill and approaching Dobie’s bench; these outdoor parties, Dobie reflected, indeed often resemble some obscure form of tactical military engagement, with battle lines being drawn up, alliances formed and discarded, and with any number of fiery sparks whizzing carelessly through the air. Undoubtedly it was through the exercise of command in innumerable backgarden skirmishes that Kensington High Street had acquired its Imperial General Staff incisiveness, not to mention its vocabulary. Ozzie, a neutral by temperament and by training, planked himself heavily down beside Dobie. ‘When the goin’ gets tough,’ he observed, ‘the tough get goin’.’
‘Ah, so you’re off, then?’
‘Nah. Jus’ that I’m not one for kebabs meself. Cookin’s best done in the kitching is my opinion. What say you?’
‘Well, for me at least it’s got the charm of novelty. We don’t get many opportunities for outdoor cooking in Cardiff.’
‘True enough. Wet an’ windy old Wales, right?’ But Ozzie’s eyes were clouded over with nostalgia. ‘An’ Lunnon’s no better. Wun’t mind bein’ there right now, all the same. Trouble with this place, it’s so dam’ boring.’ His eyes then jerked a little apprehensively across the tangled bushes towards Dobie’s residence. ‘At least, I didn’t mean … Sorry. I meant in, like, the ornery way.’
Dobie tried to rescue his mind from the haze of mild befuddlement into which it was slipping. It often did that when he felt a trifle peckish. ‘But you’re a bachelor, aren’t you, Ozzie? I’d have thought you’d welcome a chance to get out of the kitchen.’
‘As for cookin’,’ Ozzie said, ‘I never rightly got the ’ang of it, all them pots an’ pans an’ things an’ I never know what to put in where. It’s all got too scientifick these days. So I’ll settle for a nice cheese sangwidge most of the time.’
That of course was one of the troubles with an all-male community. ‘I know Hillyer’s divorced. What about what’s-his-name? Kaya?’
‘Oh, he’s got a wife an’ fambly over in Turkey. Runs over to Ankara to see ’em every so often. An’ old Hillyer, he’s a special case, don’t you think? Doesn’t go in much for the social thing. Hasn’t come today, as you’ve noticed.’
Dobie hadn’t. ‘He seems quite cordial to me. We had lunch together, as a matter of fact.’
‘Oh. You’d get on all right with him, you’re both Brits, I mean, aintcha? But he doesn’t mix all that much as a general rule. Bit of a puritan I always think.’
Dobie looked round, puzzled. ‘So he doesn’t hold with all these lascivious garden parties?’
‘What? Oh, see what you mean. Well, no, you got a point there. But of course it was different when Derya was around; we had a bit of colour about the place, or glammer, you might say. Bound to lead to trouble, though, one way or another.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, with all us blokes around, don’t you see?’ Ozzie waved a hand around his head, drawing Dobie’s attention to the presence of all those ravening males currently cluttering up the garden. ‘I expeck most universities are like that an’ geezers like you an’ Hillyer, you prob’ly got used to it. Bit different when you come in from outside, when you’ve been in the world of big bizness with sexy little secretaries an’ such wigglin’ their behinds at you. Miss out on it, you do. All right, you’ll say we got sexy little students instead an’ so we have, yis, but it ain’t the same somehow, if you see what I mean.’
‘But you’ve been teaching here for some time now.’
‘Three years. An’ it seems a bloody sight longer.’
‘So you came here at the same time as Derya. And Seymour.’
‘So I did. And Cem. We were all old Tolga Arkin’s recruits, like I told you. You met him the other day, didn’t you? What did you make of him?’
‘He’s quite a … dynamic personality.’
‘Oh, he’s a top gun an’ no mistake. He’ll get to be President here I shouldn’t wonder. Bit of a strain for old Cem, though, tryin’ to live up to the image, as they say.’ Ozzie jerked his chin towards where, through the clinging haze of smoke, Cem Arkin’s bulky outline was vaguely discernible, stooped over a little as he chatted with Berry Berry. ‘Gets him down a bit sometimes. He’s quite honest about it, y’know. He’ll tell you so.’
‘I’ll be seeing him tomorrow, as it happens. I have to make a formal call. But,’ Dobie said, ‘I don’t think—’
‘Not just his old man, neither. His uncle as well. Famous, I mean. My old man ran a shoe repair business in Wandsworth an’ I’m just as glad. No one ever expected nothin’ very much of me. You know Wandsworth?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Pretty big place innit, Lunnon.’
Berry Berry was the next to approach, red-eyed, pink-nosed and with tiny fragments of grey charcoal ash clinging to his bristly moustache. This added, Dobie found, to the general effect of some other relic, or possibly refugee, from the Raj. ‘Afraid I’m neglecting my duties as a host, Dobie. But I saw my wife had you in tow, so … Everything OK?’
‘Yes indeed,’ Dobie said. ‘Pukka.’
‘That’s what I’m often tempted to say but …’ Holding a handkerchief to his streaming eyes Berry Berry sat down in the place only recently vacated by Ozzie. Dobie was beginning to feel there was something seriously wrong with his detective methods; if only he were a public nose or whatever these American characters called themselves, whizzing about from place to place in Cadillacs and pausing only to take in a snort of rye or to get themselves
rather seriously stomped on by assorted evildoers, that would clearly be very much more interesting than sitting around in a cloud of smoke and being talked to by every casual passer-by. On the other hand, it seemed a bit too late to do anything about it now. ‘So what have you been up to?’ Berry Berry enquired, pressing the point home.
Nothing much. ‘Well, I’ve been to see Salamis. And Alanici.’
‘Alanici?’ Berry Berry raised an eye towards him in some surprise, the other eye being temporarily out of service. ‘Whatever for? Nobody goes there. Well, they won’t let you in for a start. The army won’t. Not unless you have a pass or know somebody there.’
‘I just wanted to see if there was a stream or a river or anything like that. But no. There wasn’t.’
‘Of course not.’ Berry Berry raised a hand in salutation and half rose from his seat as a very fat lady walked by, subsiding again with a little thump. ‘No attractions whatsoever. Quite the contrary. The locals never go near the place if they can help it. Rather a nasty incident there at the time of the troubles, you see. That’s why the place is deserted.’
‘I know,’ Dobie said. ‘I read about it.’
‘Did you? Where?’
‘In a book.’
Berry Berry treated him to another searching red-rimmed glance, obviously suggesting that a serious mathematician ought to have a mind above such frivolous diversions. Reading books, indeed. Whatever next? Better things had been expected of Professor D. ‘Never been near the place myself. Nobody goes there.’
‘I’m told that Derya did.’
‘To the occasional hop, perhaps, at the army base. That was different.’
‘What,’ Dobie asked, ‘exactly happened there?’
‘I don’t think anyone knows. No survivors. Apparently one of the local Greek murder gangs came along one night and put everyone in the village into trucks and drove off and that was it. All murdered out in the hills somewhere.’
‘It’s appalling.’
‘Yes, but that sort of thing was happening all over Cyprus. It was probably meant as a reprisal for some other killing somewhere. No one’s ever been able to suggest any other reason for it. If you can call that a reason.’
‘They would know what happened. The ones who did it.’
‘Of course, but no one knows who they were. They’ll be over Greek-side now, what’s left of them, but the chances are high that most of them are dead. The EOKA lot had a high attrition rate, which isn’t surprising when you consider the enemies they made. No one pretends that our lot behaved like angels, either, and all those Greek gangs were killing each other at one point. We don’t like to talk about it much, but nobody’s forgotten.’
‘All the same,’ Dobie said, ‘it happened a long time ago. Derya was at school in England then. And so was Seymour.’
‘And so was Cem Arkin. And I was teaching in the States. None of us was here then. Kaya was in Turkey …’ Right now he was, Dobie saw, over by the partition fencing, talking inscrutably with the very fat lady. ‘But we all feel it, you know. A national disgrace and we have to recover from it. That’s how Tolga Arkin feels, and very strongly.’ Berry Berry stopped twisting his handkerchief between his hands, dabbed his left eye with it and put it away. ‘I expect you’ll cotton on to these things in time. By the way, you didn’t go down to the village by yourself? You want to be careful about doing things like that. Perfectly safe as long as you stay on the road, but don’t ever wander off into the woods or above all take a walk down any of the mountain valleys. It’s very risky.’
‘Because someone might take a shot at me?’
‘Good heavens, no. Nothing like that. Except in the hunting season, and then by accident. No, but the stones and rocks are always shifting around and if you fall and break a leg you’ve probably had it. Tourist went missing two years ago and they only found what was left of him last summer – twenty yards away from a road at that. Trying to photograph the mountain scenery, obviously. There’s some lovely views up there so it’s a temptation. And even some of the locals have gone out hunting by themselves and vanished for ever. I know you’ll get a bit tired of being cooped up here with the rest of us for weeks on end – we all like to get away by ourselves sometimes for a bit. But be careful when you do. No solitary hikes.’
They seemed, Dobie thought, to be selecting exceptionally gloomy conversational topics even for a barbecue party. The chicken kebabs seemed, however, to be almost ready, which was just as well; his stomach was beginning to make plaintive creaky noises. Looking ravenously around him to see where the inevitable disposable plates had been stacked, he perceived Mrs Berry Berry approaching at a rate of knots. Arrived beside them, she at once addressed him in breathless and archly conspiratorial tones. ‘A telephone call for you. A lady. Extremely urgent, she says.’
Dobie was pleased but also more than a little surprised. How could Kate have got Berry Berry’s number? Was there no end to her resourcefulness? ‘Dr Coyle, is it? Did she give a name?’
‘She did. But not that one. Caroline Bartlett.’
Bartlett? Bartlett?
‘You can take the call on the hallway extension, if you wish,’ the Colonel said grandly.
Dobie barely had time to down a couple of finger-lickin’ chicken joints before rushing off chez lui for a hasty shower and a change of clobber. He couldn’t see the force of Ozzie’s complaint that life in Cyprus was boring. Boring? Never a dull moment. Call me Twinkletoes. Even as he was hurling himself into a clean shirt Mahomet, in the not unpleasing shape of the nice lady, arrived at the mountain, this time in an important-looking grey Mercedes with a portly tight-blue-suited character at the wheel. Regretfully abandoning his claim to any further skewered and smouldering morsels, Dobie politely conducted his visitors into the sitting-room, where the nice lady seated herself primly on one of the armchairs and the portly gentleman prowled up and down with his hands interlaced behind his back, staring belligerently out of the window. Earlier at the front door the p.g. had introduced himself as Mr Bilsel, the defence counsel; very possibly, Dobie thought, he had allowed his courtroom customs to affect his private life and was on the point of whipping round to address the members of the jury. Not that this was a private call. Far from it.
‘I would like,’ he said, not whipping round but continuing to gaze out of the window, ‘to see where you found the document. Exactly.’
Dobie obediently escorted him to Derya’s bedroom and showed him Derya’s wardrobe and Derya’s shoe.
‘H’m,’ Mr Bilsel said, poking at this latter object with his index finger much as Dobie had done. ‘An ingenious hiding-place. No question, I would say, of the document having been placed there other than as of intention. The chance of it having arrived there by accident would seem to be remote.’
Dobie, the logician, having worked out more or less what Bilsel seemed to be saying, observed that one premise followed from the other and nodded a cautious agreement.
‘So the further question may well arise of how you happened across the document in view of its, um, er, somewhat recondite situation.’
‘You mean how I came to find it?’
‘Just so. Perhaps you make a practice of examining the insides of ladies’ shoes? You are, maybe, what I think is called a fetishist?’
‘Oh, no. Nothing like that. I was really looking for something else.’
‘Such as what? A lady’s foot?’
‘No. Mud.’
‘What?’
‘Mud.’
‘Not blood?’
‘No. Mud.’
Bilsel shook his head slowly; here, his manner suggested, was a witness who had at all costs to be kept out of the box. ‘Certainly,’ he said judiciously, anxious to be fair, ‘I detect traces of mud on the shoe in question. But what were you intending to do with the mud when you’d found it?’
‘Do with it? Nothing. I just wanted to make sure it was there.’
‘I see. Yes. Of course. Silly of me. There was, I take it, no one els
e present when you made this discovery?’
‘No.’
Bilsel sighed. ‘A pity.’ They returned to the sitting-room and Bilsel this time elected to seat himself. Dobie did the same.
There followed rather a lengthy silence, at the end of which Dobie cleared his throat. ‘Er, well …’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Thus prompted, Bilsel sprang into action. He did this by placing the tips of his fingers together and initiating a strange bottom-waggling seesaw motion on the armchair cushions. ‘It’s a most interesting discovery you’ve made. And a perplexing one. I may say that we’ve managed to trace the person to whom the document was originally issued. And when I say trace, I mean that we have definitely established her identity. That may, in the rather peculiar circumstances, be all that we shall be able to do. I must ask you, by the way, to treat everything connected with this matter in the strictest confidence. Indeed, I’m only divulging such information as we have gained on Mrs Bartlett’s insistence. The issues involved are very delicate, very delicate indeed.’
‘You haven’t divulged anything yet,’ Dobie pointed out, ‘I mean, we know who she is already. Someone called Sabiha something. Unless —’
‘Sabiha Metti. But that wasn’t her true name. Not exactly.’
‘When you say it wasn’t her name—’
‘You grasp my implication quickly. Yes, she’s dead, or at least has been presumed dead for these past sixteen years. In fact, virtually since the date on the document. August 1974.’
‘In that case,’ Dobie said, ‘I suppose it can’t be a very promising lead.’
‘That depends. Sabiha Metti was the maiden name of the lady: her married name was Sabiha Arkin. She was then the wife of our present Minister of Education.’ His eyes turned again towards the window. ‘And of course the mother of your colleague just across the road. You may possibly have heard something of the story. Which is deeply tragic.’
‘I heard that she was killed in the war. Yes.’
