by Simon Brett
As she approached the structure, she encountered the bus-load of tourists weaving their sweaty way back towards the car park. Once within earshot she quickly recognized that they were English and bridled accordingly. Though there were no Union Jack T-shirts or tattoos in evidence – in fact, this appeared to be a rather genteel, mature and well-heeled selection of her countrymen – Carole felt no urgency to engage in conversation with them. All they got was a tight smile and a ‘Fethering nod’ – a small inclination of the head, the most minimal anonymous form of acknowledgement possible.
The group was led by a Turkish man wearing white trousers and a pale-blue polo shirt bearing the logo of some travel company. ‘But where’s she gone to?’ Carole heard a woman asking him as she walked by. The accent was unappealingly Midlands. This must be the group from Kidderminster that Nita had referred to.
‘I am sure she has not gone far,’ the guide replied in good English. ‘We will meet her at the bus. If not there, she will be back at the hotel.’
‘Well, it’s rather important because I wanted to ask her about the toilet in our bathroom which has got blocked, which is …’ And the woman’s voice drifted past into inaudibility.
The Amphitheatre was impressive and in a surprisingly good state of preservation. From her memorized guidebook notes, Carole knew that it was probably of Roman construction though built in the Greek horseshoe style, and it could seat over three thousand. She marvelled at its design and durability as she climbed up to the back row. It was a place that encouraged conjectures about the people who might have come there, the entertainments they might have seen, but it didn’t prompt in Carole any of the mystical sensation that she had felt by the temple. Thank goodness.
From her vantage point she looked across at the huge cylinder of rock opposite. Its sheer size made her glad she had not tried to climb any further than the Lower Acropolis. She could see the honeycomb of tombs carved into the sheer cliff and comforted herself that they were not accessible to tourists. For a moment she wondered whether she should have brought a camera, but she quickly comforted herself with the recollection that she always took rubbish photographs and never looked at the ones she had taken on her return from a holiday. The only photographs that interested her now were of her granddaughter. And thinking of Lily made her wonder how things were back in Fulham. She hadn’t set up her laptop yet at Morning Glory, but she must email Stephen that evening.
Carole was now distinctly peckish and feeling a little dazed by the bright sunlight. She felt she had done enough sightseeing to justify a return to the car park and her modest rations of bread, salami and tomatoes. Whether she would explore more of Pinara after lunch she rather doubted.
But, trudging along the track, she had a slightly guilty feeling that there was one more feature of the site she should visit. Though the cliff-side tombs could only be explored from a distance with binoculars, the Rough Guide had told her that there were some on the west side of a small stream quite near the site entrance. These included what was called the ‘Royal Tomb’, whose elaborate carvings were well worth seeing.
Being so close, Carole decided to put her hunger pangs on hold a little longer and investigate.
Arrows on metal signs pointed the way. The area around the tiny stream was overgrown with trees which provided a pleasant dappled relief from the sun, now so hot that it almost stung Carole’s arms. Some of the trees had fallen to provide a precarious bridge over the water, but in fact it was so shallow that she could have waded through.
As she stepped forward on to a horizontal branch, she was aware of a slight movement in the undergrowth beneath her feet. She looked down to see a tortoise making its laborious but determined way through the scrub. A tortoise in its natural environment, nobody’s pet (indeed, they were no longer allowed to be kept as pets in England, she recalled). It made her feel that she was really abroad.
Carole climbed up the rocks on the other side of the stream and suddenly emerged into sunlight. And there, just one level up on the rock face, was a row of carved-out Lycian tombs. She clambered up the uneven path until she was standing in front of one.
It looked remarkably solid, like a small house carved out of the pale, vanilla-coloured stone. There were pillars at each end, one somewhat battered, and a series of carved frames on the building’s double frontage. One side was walled in, though a hole had at some point (maybe by grave robbers or vandals) been smashed into it. The other side was open like a doorway.
Carole had to stoop to get under the stone lintel. There was enough light for her to see that she was in an austere rectangular cell. Along the far wall ran a rectangular stone slab almost like a bench or a bed. The image was exactly like the pictures of Lycian tombs in the guidebooks Carole had been so assiduously reading.
Except that there was someone lying on the slab. A woman, the red and blue lanyard of whose identity card had been twisted around her neck until she died.
It was Nita.
FOURTEEN
By the time Carole got back to the Fiat Bravo she had forgotten all about being hungry. She had been unsure whether she should immediately report her discovery to the man who had sold her the ticket, but that decision was made for her. The shed from which he’d operated was closed up, and the motor scooter beside it had disappeared.
The purple bus had gone from the car park too. Apart from the Fiat only two cars remained. Their owners were presumably somewhere on the site, but Carole could see no sign of them. Maybe they were among the brave and fit ones who had climbed all the way to the Upper Acropolis.
Carole was in a dilemma. Her training in the Home Office and every other instinct within her said that any murder should be reported to the police as soon as possible. And had the ticket man been there in his shed she would have gone straight to him and set the necessary process in motion. But he wasn’t there and that had given her time to think.
So what should she do? Contacting the police should not be too difficult. She had her mobile with her and though she didn’t think 999 was going to work, she felt sure there was some equivalent number to ring which she could find out when she got to some less remote part of the country.
But did she actually want to get involved in the laborious business of waiting around for the police, of leading them back to Nita’s body, and then no doubt undergoing long questioning, probably made even longer by the necessity of an interpreter? It all seemed too much.
And then she didn’t really feel sure about the authorities that she’d be up against. Although she had never actually seen the film Midnight Express, Carole had gathered that it wasn’t the most enthusiastic commercial ever for the Turkish police force. (And she didn’t know of the subsequent international row about the portrayal of Turks in the movie which even led to an apology from the screenwriter.) But such ignorant prejudices go deep with people like Carole Seddon, and the dominant question that arose in her mind was: did she really want to get involved?
She would have felt very differently if Jude had been with her when she discovered the body. Then they could have discussed the situation and worked out their next step together. But, on her own in the car park at Pinara, she felt desperately isolated.
Yes, she definitely needed Jude’s input.
Had she thought about it, Carole would have been impressed with the way she drove back to Kayaköy, like someone who’d been on Turkish roads all her life. The fact was, she was so preoccupied by what she’d found in the tomb at Pinara that she couldn’t think about anything else. Her driving was purely instinctive.
She found Jude more or less exactly as she had left her, spread over a lounger in a bikini with a trashy novel at her side. The book had already taken on those qualities of heat-crinkled paper and suncream stains which distinguish a holiday read.
It took a minute or two for the seriousness of Carole’s news to permeate Jude’s torpor. But once she’d taken it on board, she had no hesitation in agreeing to her friend’s proposal that they should return
immediately to the scene of the crime. And, as Carole had anticipated, Jude didn’t go for any of that nonsense about informing the police first.
The morning expedition from Kayaköy to Pinara had taken nearly an hour and a half, as Carole had driven with extreme caution, rarely aspiring beyond second gear, but on the second journey she couldn’t help being rather proud of her proficiency, almost showing it off. As a result, they reached their destination in little more than an hour.
It was after five when they arrived, and the car park was empty. The intrepid souls who had possibly climbed to the Higher Acropolis had returned to their hotels or villas to shower off the day’s dust.
No one arriving at Pinara for the first time could fail to be struck by the beauty of the site, but Jude made no comment on the vista before her. Their mission was too serious for such pleasantries.
Carole had no hesitation about the path they had to take. The sun was still bright, but it had lost some of its midday intensity. The shade of the trees by the little stream was nonetheless welcome.
Carole led the way along the tree-trunk bridge. This time there was no tortoise to distract her. She pointed out to Jude the tombs above them and scrambled over the time-polished stones to reach them.
She gestured to the doorway of the relevant tomb, indicating that Jude should enter first.
Which she did. But she was taken aback by what she saw in there.
The stone slab was empty. Nita’s body had disappeared.
FIFTEEN
They looked for any signs to prove that the body had been there, but found nothing. No tell-tale snagged thread of fabric, no stain of bodily fluid. Perhaps a properly equipped police forensic team could have found something, but to their amateur eyes no traces revealed themselves.
The one thing that never occurred to Jude was to question Carole’s report of what she had seen. There were women of her acquaintance prone to hysteria, women quite capable of convincing themselves they’d seen things that were never there, but Carole Seddon was not one of them. If Carole said she had seen Nita Davies’s body in the Lycian tomb where they stood, then that was exactly what had happened.
So they were certain of two things. One, that the body had been there. And two, that in the course of the last four hours someone had removed it.
There was little more they could do at the empty scene of the crime. Carole was confused between guilt and relief. If she had tried to report her discovery to the police they might have got there in time to capture the body snatcher (who, quite possibly, was also the murderer). But now, since there was no body to report, she had probably saved herself a whole lot of aggravation.
With that thought, however, came another one. There was no doubt that a murder had been committed. And Carole knew that she shared with Jude an overpowering instinct to find out who had perpetrated the crime.
They checked the adjacent tombs – or, at least, the ones they could get into – but the only signs there of human habitation were the odd Efes can and crisp packet. As they began to trail disconsolately into the woods on their way back towards the car park, though, Jude caught sight of something bright trapped against some trailing twigs in the stream.
Clumsily, she lowered herself down to pick up the object. It was a mobile: an iPhone in a light-blue case with a dark-blue fish design.
‘Nita’s!’ exclaimed Carole as it was held up for her inspection. ‘I recognize that from when she used it at Morning Glory. It must have slipped out of her pocket when her body was being moved.’ The discovery gave her a warm glow. It was a kind of proof that, though she had subsequently been relocated, Nita had definitely passed that way. The mobile linked her to the scene of the crime.
Jude was already tapping at the screen to check for messages. But all she found was a ten-number keyboard and an invitation to ‘Enter Passcode’.
‘Damn,’ she said.
As Carole negotiated the traffic of Fethiye like someone who’d been doing it all her life, the sun was sinking in the sky. ‘Be dark in half an hour,’ said Jude. ‘What I’d really like to do is have a look at the Kayaköy ghost town while it’s still light.’
‘Should we be doing that?’ asked Carole.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, having just seen a body …’
‘Having just not seen a body, in my case.’
‘What I mean is: shouldn’t we be doing something other than just sightseeing?’
‘Like what? Contacting the police?’
But no, that was not what Carole had in mind. She had once before summoned the police to a place where she had discovered a body, only to find that all traces had disappeared, and she hadn’t forgotten the patronizing scepticism with which they had treated her. That incident had occurred on Fethering Beach, but she didn’t think she’d encounter any less disbelief from the police in Turkey. So she turned down Jude’s suggestion.
‘Well what else do you want to do? Talk to Barney? See if we can track down Erkan?’
‘Good heavens, no. You and I just need to talk through what’s happened.’
‘Seems to me a ghost town is just as good a place to talk as anywhere else.’
In the dusty flat area at the foot of the ghost town were a cluster of fairly primitive looking restaurants, one graffitied over with fluorescent symbols which gave it a sixties hippy feel. And, incongruously, there was a man with three camels. Presumably, during the high tourist season he peddled rides on the beasts to tourists, but that Tuesday evening he wasn’t getting much trade. The camels, tethered to trees, chomped away, showing no interest in anything.
Carole parked the Bravo in a space outside one of the restaur-ants, but nobody came out to dragoon them into its vine-ceilinged open space to have a meal. Having been warned by her guidebooks that it was impossible to pause for a moment on a street in Istanbul without being immediately approached by men trying to sell you carpets or get you into their restaurants, she found Kayaköy mercifully free of aggressive marketing.
They walked round the edge of the furthest restaurant and found the entrance to the ghost town site. There was a small ticket booth there, but it was empty. Presumably, few people visited in the twilight. But, as at Pinara, there were no gates, nothing to stop them entering if they wished to.
A small sign in English pointed right towards a small church, but the two friends went left up the worn stone steps into the ghost town itself. Above them, the buildings climbed the hillside in neat tiers. The houses were stone-built and solid. Their roofs had all fallen in long ago, but only a few dwellings had collapsed completely, and there was no sign of vandalism. The evening air was perfumed by pine and thyme. Wild flowers grew up in the crevices between the stones.
Carole once again reaped the benefit of her guidebook homework. ‘It all goes back to 1923. The people who lived here up till then were Anatolian Greek Orthodox Christians …’
‘Right,’ said Jude, feeling as if she was back at school and undergoing a history lesson. ‘Didn’t Henry Willingdon tell us most of this stuff when we were at Chantry House?’
‘Not all the detail,’ said Carole in her most severe schoolmistress mode. ‘It was part of the settlement that came about after the end of the Greco-Turkish War.’
‘I didn’t know there was a Greco-Turkish War.’
‘You see? Henry didn’t tell us about that, did she? The Greco-Turkish War lasted from 1919 to 1922. Rather nasty war, many atrocities. But though the Greeks took over lots of bits of the old Ottoman Empire during the war, when they admitted defeat all the territory went back to the Turks. And very soon after that the Ottoman Empire was abolished and the Turkish Republic was created, under Kemal Atatürk. Then the “Convention concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations” was signed in Lausanne in Switzerland, which made—’
‘Which made,’ Jude interrupted, ‘the Greek and the Turkish populations of the territories go back, respectively, to Greece and Turkey?’
‘Well,’ said Carole, a lit
tle miffed at having her lecture curtailed, ‘that’s rather a simplification of what happened, but it’s more or less right.’
‘Except that none of the Muslims who’d been living in Greek territories ever came back here to Kayaköy?’
‘No, they didn’t.’
‘Which is why this place is a ghost town?’
‘Yes,’ Carole conceded grudgingly, regretting that her neighbour had been treated to only a small amount of the detail that she had at her fingertips.
They walked for a while in silence on the stone paths between the houses, looking in at fireplaces, interior doorways and collapsed rafters. The evacuation of the town seemed somehow much more recent than 1923. Carole was, for a moment, almost in danger of once again experiencing the feeling that she had undergone at Pinara, an empathy with the people who had once inhabited these stone houses, the sense that the ghost town had an ‘aura’.
She quickly suppressed such foolishness and said, as if it had been Jude who’d initiated the history lecture, ‘Anyway, I thought we were having this walk to discuss Nita’s murder.’
Jude grinned, not for the first time, at the Caroleness of Carole. ‘Yes. I’m with you about not going to the police. Do you think we should talk to Barney?’
Carole shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Because you believe he might be a suspect?’
‘No, not really. Though he has got dubious secrets in his past.’
‘Like exactly what happened to his first wife, Zoë?’
‘Yes.’ Carole grimaced. ‘No, my view is, frustrating though it may be, that at this moment we should just do nothing.’
‘Not tell anyone what you saw?’
Another shake of the head. ‘Not yet, no. If we meet Barney or Erkan or Henry we can certainly keep an eye on their behaviour, but—’
