by Desmond Cory
‘Nothing in it for me, you say? That’s what you think, Doctor. Real swine, these hit-and-run bastards can be. Poor old geezer had taken a few aboard, hadn’t he?’
‘A few beers, yes. Oates’ll tell you about how many when he’s done the PM.’
Jackson signalled to the ambulance crew, who advanced at their usual bent-kneed lope with body bag and stretcher. Detective Constable Box turned to look up the road, down the road, and finally up at the sky; droplets of rain splashed against his face. ‘Missed the last bus, like as not. Walking home. Probably none too straight and in the road anyway, to judge by the skid marks.’
‘ET call home,’ Jackson said. ‘Tell them the body’s on the way. No ID as yet. Check with the mortuary as usual.’ But Box had already ducked back into the police car; he knew the form as well as Jacko did and he welcomed the chance to get in there out of the rain. Jackson escorted Kate across the road, where her own unassuming 1978 Escort waited in the shadows. ‘Sorry to get you out of bed, Doctor, on a night like this. Thanks for coming.’
‘I hadn’t gone to bed. I was reading.’
‘Reading, eh? There’s nice. Any news of Mr Dobie?’
‘Rang me up last night.’
‘Did he now.’
‘At considerable length. Must’ve cost him a bomb,’ Kate said with some satisfaction.
‘Don’t suppose it’s raining like this in Cyprus. Nice place, from what I’ve heard.’
‘Yes. And quiet and peaceful. Until he got there.’
‘Oh,’ Jackson said. ‘Like that, is it?’ In the act of suppressing another yawn, he sneezed instead.
‘Like that. I don’t understand it.’
‘Amazing, the trouble he goes and gets himself into. But then he’s not such a fool as he makes himself out to be. He’s quite a hirsute character, when push comes to shove.’
Kate shook her head tiredly. Hirsute? Jacko had her beat this time. ‘Now he wants me to find out something about someone called Amphitryon. Well, I ask you.’
‘No good doing that. I wouldn’t know. Sounds like some kind of a foreigner.’ Jackson considered the matter. ‘I expect there’s a lot of ’em running about, over there.’
‘I suppose there would be,’ Kate said. ‘Funny. I never thought of that.’
Dobie wasn’t at all in a philosophical mood the next morning. Work was what he felt he needed, none the less essential for being largely routine. In a week’s time he’d be facing his first seminar groups and he still had to familiarise himself with the detailed requirements of the syllabus. Seated in his office, he went through the relevant departmental memos and course descriptions and checked them out with Derya’s lecture notes. Not a few of them were based on material covered in his own supervisory tutorials and it was strange to be reading once again her small, neat, careful handwriting; it brought her very much closer to him than had that photograph on the sitting-room wall which reflected, after all, another aspect of her personality and one that he hadn’t known so well, indeed hardly known at all. She’d been an exceptionally gifted student and that for him, as always, had been enough. But she seemed also to have been, whatever her other defects, a competent and conscientious teacher; his future students, again as always, would be of varying abilities but all would appear to have been sufficiently well prepared for third- and fourth-year courses.
He spent most of the rest of the morning running her programs through the computer and they seemed to be straightforward, though one of the discs in the file puzzled him a little. He searched the records cabinet for the corresponding print-outs, but they weren’t there. In the end he set the disc aside and did a little work in the old-fashioned way, using pen and paper. When he’d finished these calculations he ran the disc again and still couldn’t make head nor tail of it. He ran a new set of print-outs and took the sheets round to Berry Berry’s office.
‘What’s all this then?’ Berry Berry said.
‘I don’t know. I thought at first she’d been working on some vector analyses but the outlines aren’t right and anyway that doesn’t come into the course she was supposed to be teaching. I thought you might know something about it.’
‘Maybe some private work she was undertaking. Or some research project.’ Berry Berry studied the sheets for a while, his eyebrows raised and forehead theatrically furrowed. ‘Have you tried expressing these ratios graphically?’
‘Yes. I can’t make anything of them that way, either.’
‘Address is given as K4. That tell you anything?’
‘No such designation in the filing system.’
‘Forgot to enter it, perhaps.’
‘Very likely,’ Dobie said. He didn’t, in fact, think it was.
‘Could be it’s K for Kaya. She was working out some programs for him, I seem to remember. That might account for it.’
Indeed it might. ‘Indeed it might. Because if the symbols express an orientation function, then the references are simple co-ordinates. That’s what was puzzling me.’
‘I should ask him about it,’ Berry Berry said.
Dobie did no such thing. He had put in a full morning’s work and it was now one o’clock. He went round to the staff cafeteria and ate a shish kebab and afterwards drank Turkish coffee. While he was drinking it two of the maths instructors he hadn’t met before came over to introduce themselves and to talk about this and that and after a while Dobie, who was unused to maths instructors with honey-blonde hair and cornflower-blue eyes, ordered another coffee and began to wax quite eloquent on the topic of the concept of the integer. Towards the end of this impromptu tutorial the solution of the problem of the K4 mini-disc came to him quite naturally but he dismissed it at once from his mind as a matter of relatively little importance. It was in any case nearly two o’clock and time for his interview with the Vice-Rector.
Cem Arkin’s office, as befitted its owner’s status and overall bulk, was considerably more palatial than Dobie’s or Berry Berry’s and very much more elaborately accoutred; on the wall directly behind the desk hung black and white portraits of Kemal Ataturk, of the President of the Assembly, of Tolga and Uktu Arkin and of various other unrecognised dignitaries whose penetrating gazes transfixed Dobie as he sat down in the armchair opposite. He was a little relieved to find that the armchair cushion emitted the same wheezing sound as that in the office of his own much-loved rector; it enabled him to feel rather more comfortably at home, though the crossed flags of Turkey and of the North Cyprus Republic angled over Cem’s own chair might have dissipated any such impression.
‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Cem Arkin said, waving one hand disparagingly. ‘But one has to put on a show, of course, of patriotism and whatnot.’ His own chair didn’t wheeze when he seated himself upon it but instead sent forth admonitory creaks. ‘Well, now. This is where you tell me about the problems you’ve encountered and I explain why I can’t do anything about them. Or, more probably, don’t intend to. The usual thing. My secretary should be bringing us in some coffee in a moment and that will be the high point of my day. How about yours?’
Dobie said that his day had passed very pleasantly so far and that only routine problems had presented themselves. ‘I’m having no difficulties at all, really. Everyone’s being most co-operative.’
‘I know,’ Cem Arkin said. ‘I saw you getting some excellent co-operation just now in the cafeteria. Good-looking girls, those two. I hope you formed a favourable opinion of their abilities.’
‘Oh, yes, I did.’
‘Maths is compulsory here for the first year, as you know. It isn’t a very popular subject, to be frank. But we get pretty good attendance figures with those two around.’
‘And Derya, too. I’m afraid I’m not a very effective substitute from that point of view.’
‘Nobody’s perfect,’ Cem said.
‘True.’
‘And she had a very high opinion of you. As a supervisor.’
‘Really?’ Dobie was flattered. ‘That’s nice to know.’
‘She tho
ught you were one of the best theoretical mathematicians in the UK and that your seminar expositions were absolutely brilliant. I mention this because I’m afraid your fourth-year students will be coming to your classes with very high expectations. Not that I suppose for a moment they’ll be defrauded.’
‘They may well be. Most teaching in my particular field is nine-tenths bluff. The students do the work and you take the credit.’
‘Yes, she said that, too. But put it rather differently. She said your mind operated on such a level of abstraction you were always worried that the students might think you completely inhuman, so you tried to convince them and people in general of the contrary by showing off your inadequacies in other directions and bumbling round about the place like an academic Bertie Wooster. She thought in fact you were a very lonely person, intellectually speaking. Ah. Here’s the coffee.’
Its arrival was opportune in that it obviated any immediate need for Dobie to reply to this absurd attempt at amateur psychoanalysis. He? Dobie? Inadequate? Perish the thought. ‘Derya,’ he said, spilling a dollop of coffee over his trousers in his pardonable agitation, ‘had enormous potential as a mathematician, certainly. A natural gift. But she had no qualifications that I’m aware of as a psychiatrist. Any remarks she may have made of that nature,’ he said, smearing spilt coffee over his jacket with a handkerchief, ‘I would most certainly take with a pinch of salt.’
‘But talking about psychiatrists,’ Cem Arkin said, frowning thoughtfully, ‘I gather you’ve been to see Adrian Seymour.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘You know, I’ve made several efforts in that direction myself. But I was told he was refusing to see all visitors and that in any case they might have had a disturbing effect upon him. So I’m a little puzzled—’
‘I was told he wanted to see me, but I was never told why and he didn’t tell me why, either. He may have been feeling intellectually lonely, too.’
‘What was your impression?’
‘He certainly seemed to be in some … distress. He talked to me fluently enough, but what he said didn’t seem to make an awful lot of sense. However, I don’t know anything about psychology, either.’
‘But you knew him quite well in Cardiff?’
‘Hardly at all. Perhaps he felt he could talk to me just because I wasn’t in any way involved with … what had happened here. A neutral, so to speak. I suppose that’s possible.’
‘Very possible.’ Cem heaved himself upright and turned to stare out of the window. As always, the admin boys had copped themselves the best location: Cem’s fourth-floor window offered a magnificent view of the long curve of Salamis Bay, of the marble columns of Salamis itself and of the maquis scrub surrounding them, and finally of the upreared peaks of the Karpaz Mountains, blue-grey in the distant heat haze. ‘You know,’ Cem said, ‘I went to school and university in England, I’ve worked up to now in the UK. I’m a Cypriot but I’ve got to say that when I came back here it seemed like a very strange place. Even the mainland Turks, the students, the girls you were chatting up just now … they often get a kind of culture shock when they arrive. Ozzie’s wife went back to England. She didn’t like it here. And though you’ve always been very polite, I’m quite sure that you yourself must feel it. The atmosphere. The tension. Whatever it is. You’ll feel it even more strongly after a while. It’s a very small island, after all. Maybe claustrophobia comes into it. I don’t know.’
‘It’s certainly very hot,’ Dobie admitted.
‘Yes. In the summer. Maybe the climate, too. Anyway,’ Cem said, turning back again, ‘people seem to react to the overall situation in one of two ways. Either they think of their stint here as a kind of working holiday and see themselves as what you might call academic tourists; or they try to assimilate the place, to come to terms with it, and find themselves being dragged in. Sucked down, as it were, by the undertow. Two thousand years of history makes for quite a maelstrom, you know, and it’s a very violent history. Perhaps Seymour was a little over-sensitive, a little too easily … or perhaps he simply brought too many problems with him. As Horace says, what exile ever fled his own mind? But I think you told me that you weren’t a very imaginative man. So you should be all right. Unless of course that’s just a part of what Derya called your bluff, as I rather suspect …’
‘I suppose,’ Dobie said, ‘you could say that I’m fleeing my own mind. And to that extent I can sympathise with Seymour. Though he’s doing it in rather a different way.’
‘Yes. That’s obvious. He dramatised things, you see. I think he saw himself as a kind of T. E. Lawrence amongst the Arabs, and the trouble is we’re not Arabs. And we’re not Turks and we’re not Westerners, either. We’re not anything. Except maybe mongrels. A bit of everything. So Seymour was like a chameleon sitting on a tartan kilt, if you see what I mean. It was all a bit too much for him, really.’
‘Mrs Berry’s English but she seems to manage all right. Of course, she may not be very imaginative, either.’
Cem smiled. ‘No, I don’t think she is.’
‘Though she seems to have got the idea into her head that Derya was after her husband’s job. As Head of Department. Is there anything in that? It really seems very—’
‘Oh, no. I don’t think so. I’d have said Derya’s ambitions lay in other directions. In the States, maybe, or the UK. I never thought she’d stay with us very long.’ His coffee was still on his desk, untouched. He sat down again and sipped at it pensively. If it had grown cold, he didn’t seem to notice.
‘And you?’
‘What?’
‘What are your ambitions, Cem?’
‘Well, I suppose I have ambitions, yes, but they tend to be outweighed by responsibilities. I expect everyone’s told you that I’ll be the next Rector when old Ibrahim goes back to Turkey. And that’s very likely. I don’t want the job. But I can do it. And it won’t be easy for me to refuse.’
‘Because you’re expected to take over the family business.’
Cem didn’t laugh. ‘In a way. And the catch is that it won’t be just my father’s business. It’ll be my uncle’s business as well. Every damned business in Cyprus leads you into politics sooner or later. My father’s been drawn into it already. Ten years from now, it’ll be my turn. No, I don’t look forward to it.’
‘But you really can’t avoid it?’
‘I don’t see how. As a Moslem, I have to be persuaded that it’s my destiny. Well, I don’t mind that so much … It’s fulfilling other people’s destinies that I object to. When I was a boy, I thought my Uncle Uktu’s destiny was to be President of a united Cyprus. My admiration for him was quite unbounded. But all it took was a few machine-gun bullets to change all that. Then suddenly he was nothing but a dead body lying at the side of a road just outside Nicosia. As for my father, he was a schoolteacher. Did you know that? With his nose always buried in a book. No one ever thought of him as a national hero. I certainly didn’t. But now it seems very probable that he’ll be our next President and whether he is or isn’t, he’ll still be an international hero, which is something that Uktu could never have hoped to be. I’ve always thought it strange,’ Cem said, ‘that twin brothers could be so different, and yet somehow have interchanged roles in such an unexpected way. You can only suppose that destiny does indeed have something to do with it.’
‘Or genes, perhaps.’
‘I hope not. I like to think I’m different again, or at least have been shaped by events in a different way.’ Cem was leaning forwards now over his desk, staring down into the depths of his coffee-cup as into the embers of a sinking fire. ‘One can’t attribute everything to the workings of DNA molecules, the double helix or whatever it’s called. No, I’m not a materialist. Not in that sense.’
Dobie’s own gaze was now directed towards the sepia-toned portraits on the wall: Tolga Arkin, Uktu, looking down at him with similar expressions of stern impassivity. ‘And besides, your mother …’
‘What about my mother?’ As
though conscious of having spoken more sharply than he had intended, Cem sat back again with an abrupt shifting of his weight that made the chair beneath him again squeak plaintively. ‘Sorry. It’s just that we never speak of her, my father and I. She was killed too, you know, at the time of the intervention.’
‘Yes. But she’d have had some influence upon you before that. I mean, when you were a child. All mothers do.’
‘Of course, and I remember her very well. That’s not why we … I can’t really explain it. But when my father came to England after she and Uktu were killed and visited me at Oxford, I was shocked. More than that. I was terrified. He was in a state of complete mental collapse … much as I imagine Seymour to be today, but in all probability worse, much worse. It took him many months, perhaps years, to recover. Indeed I sometimes wonder if he ever has.’
‘It’s understandable.’
‘Of course. And I was greatly shaken myself. She was only thirty-four when she died, my mother, and over the last four years of her life, I never got to see her. Not once. Working for my Oxford scholarship and then … I regret it deeply now. Of course I do. And she never wanted me to go to school in England, it was my father who insisted. Arguably, if I’d stayed the chances are high that I’d have been killed as well. But if I’d known what was going to happen, I’d certainly have taken the risk. And then I’d probably have been killed with her, because I’d have been with her if I could.’
‘To protect her?’
‘I like to think I’d have tried. But in any case it wasn’t to be.’ For a few moments the deep-set eyes under the heavy eyebrows looked at Dobie searchingly. ‘Shall I tell you something else? It’s good to be able to talk to you about these things. I can only do it because you’re a stranger. In Cyprus, we never talk about such matters amongst ourselves. Again, you’ll say that’s understandable. But it isn’t good.’
‘Did you talk about these things to Seymour?’
‘Oh, no. I don’t think he’d have … You’re an older man, after all. Or … I don’t know what it is but I’m sure people do talk to you, don’t they? As you say, you’re not a psychiatrist and yet people confide in you. I’ve noticed it. Seymour wasn’t like that at all. He argued too much. Maybe in England we could have talked about those things. But not here.’
