‘Which is?’
‘Indifference, Mr Barnett. A few months from now, most of Miss Mallender’s friends will have forgotten her. A year from now, they will all have forgotten her.’
‘I can’t believe that.’
‘Then wait and see. I speak from experience. Have you ever heard of Eirene Kapsalis?’
‘No.’
‘Then the point is made. Eirene Kapsalis was married to the shipping magnate, Andreas Kapsalis. She disappeared without trace seven years ago. She is now a forgotten woman.’
‘You remember her.’
‘That is because my failure to find Mrs Kapsalis led to my being transferred here from the Athens force. In that case, you see, I was made to bear the guilt of others.’ Nothing in Miltiades’ voice conveyed the resentment he evidently still felt, seven years on, at his demotion. Heather’s disappearance, Harry suddenly realized, must have held unpleasant reminders for him. ‘Shortly before leaving Athens,’ he went on, ‘I saw Mr Kapsalis being driven along a street. His mistress was with him. They were laughing and drinking. I did not receive the impression that they were thinking of Eirene.’
‘Perhaps not, but—’
‘Miss Mallender’s brother reminds me of Kapsalis. There is a physical and, I suspect, moral resemblance.’ His thoughts seemed to dwell on the past for a moment, then he said: ‘You will be glad to know that Mr Dysart has been here to speak on your behalf. A politician is always a valuable ally, is he not?’
‘What did he say?’
‘Simply that we are wrong to suspect you of murdering Miss Mallender.’
‘Do you still suspect me?’
‘Let us say that other possibilities have assumed greater significance.’
Be cautious, Harry told himself. This may all be an elaborate method of undermining your defences. ‘What possibilities?’ he asked neutrally.
‘There are several. Firstly, there are the innocent explanations. Miss Mallender may have fallen, hit her head, lost her memory and wandered off the mountain in a concussed state. But, on an island as small as this, she would surely have been found by now. She could, of course, have fallen and killed herself, or been badly injured and died subsequently. But the search would, I think, have uncovered her body in that event. Secondly, we have the criminal explanations. A madman chanced upon her and murdered her, or tried to rape or rob her and, in the process, killed her. He then hid the body. But madmen are somewhat conspicuous among the villages and vineyards of the island’s interior. I think we can rule that out. You may have murdered her, of course: I have not dismissed the idea. But frankly, Mr Barnett, I doubt your ability to have hidden the body effectively. If I underestimate you, you will have an apology when I arrest you. She may have been murdered by somebody else for some reason of which we have no knowledge. But that would require planning and we know that the visit to Profitis Ilias was not planned. Besides, who would this person be? There appear to be no obvious candidates. Something of the same objection applies to the theory that she was abducted. The only plausible motive for abduction would be to demand ransom. But Miss Mallender’s family, though wealthy, is scarcely wealthy enough to make that likely and, besides, no demand for ransom has been forthcoming. This brings us to the possibility that Miss Mallender staged her own disappearance. Since she has recently undergone psychiatric treatment, it is at least conceivable that she was so disillusioned with her life as to want to escape from it. This too, of course, would require planning, in the way of an escape route. Islands are the most difficult of places to leave unnoticed. In her position, I would have disappeared anywhere but on Rhodes. If she acted on the spur of the moment, without prior planning, she would encounter the same difficulty. She knows nobody here who would shelter her. Yet there is no sign of her having boarded a plane or ferry. If she had hired a fisherman to take her to the Turkish coast, for instance, he would surely have come forward by now. And why, if such was her intention, should she put that tantalizing phrase in a postcard to her mother – “something not quite right”?’
Harry waited for him to continue, but he did not. Yet there had to be more. Every possibility he had listed he had convincingly excluded. ‘Well? what else is there?’
Miltiades sighed. ‘Ah, now we enter dangerous territory. Mr Mallender gave me some photographs of his sister. Look at one.’ He reached into a drawer of the desk, took out a photograph and handed it to Harry. It was a picture of Heather, certainly, yet not the Heather Harry felt he knew. She was a few years younger when it was taken, with slightly shorter hair and a marginally fuller face, smiling conventionally at the camera with the unaffected, clear-eyed amiability of a well-balanced, unremarkable young woman. ‘Do you recognize her?’ said Miltiades.
‘Yes, of course. Except …’
‘There is something wrong?’
‘This is Heather, Inspector. Obviously it is. But it must pre-date her sister’s death. When she arrived here a month ago, she wasn’t like this. She’s changed.’
‘In what way?’
‘In every way. Life had thrown her its first major challenge. It had shaken her, certainly, but it had also extended her. It had made her more vulnerable, of course, but also less complacent. This picture is of the girl she was, not the woman she’d become.’
Miltiades reached across the desk and retrieved the photograph. ‘Would it surprise you to learn,’ he said ‘that thousands of people disappear all over Europe every year? Not vagrants, you understand, but respectable, financially secure, contented people: husbands, wives, sons, daughters, lovers, friends. One day’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘they simply vanish. Where do they go? What happens to them? A certain number die, or are murdered, and are never found. A certain number kill themselves and are never identified. A certain number run away and begin a new life under a different name. But how many? How many does that account for and how many does it leave still unexplained?
‘I don’t know.’
‘There is a residue of all such cases, Mr Barnett, a small, stubborn fraction, for which there is no explanation. One moment they are with us, the next they are gone. It is death without a corpse. Mrs Kapsalis, it seemed to me, was one of those. Perhaps Miss Mallender is also.’
‘Death without a corpse? What way is that for a policeman to be talking?’
Miltiades smiled. ‘No way at all. You are correct to reproach me. The search will resume as soon as the weather permits.’ He looked round at the window, where rain was still washing across the glass. ‘But water, alas, is a great destroyer of evidence.’ He shook his head dolefully. ‘I am not optimistic.’
Harry waited for Miltiades to turn back and face him, but, for a minute or more, he continued to stare at the window. He raised his left hand to his mouth and began to tap the band of a signet ring against his teeth. Then, as if it were no more than an afterthought, he said: ‘You may go now, Mr Barnett.’
‘You’ve finished with me?
At that, Miltiades turned to look at him with the slightly puzzled expression of a man surprised not to find himself alone. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘For the moment.’
7
THE RAIN WAS beginning to ease and dusk to fall when Harry left Police Headquarters. He felt overwhelmingly reluctant to return to Lindos, where only an empty villa and sundry reminders of Heather awaited him. Instead he made his way down to the harbour and walked out along the eastern mole till he had reached its far end. It was deserted, as he had hoped. He sat at the base of the column on which the statue of a doe stood guard over the harbour entrance and gazed out at the darkening blend of sea and sky, taking comfort from the chill wind tugging at his hair and the rain spitting at his face.
Then, when night had irrefutably closed upon the scene, he walked slowly back towards the floodlit walls of the medieval Old Town, tired and cold enough by now to think that human company might be bearable. Entering by Freedom Gate, he wandered into the Knights’ Quarter of the ancient city, letting the silence and emptiness of the cobbled stre
ets ease his self-pity. Halfway along Odos Ipoton, he heard a piano being played in an upper room and, finding the sound hauntingly beautiful, lingered for twenty minutes or more beneath the window, listening to the notes rise and fall against the sputtering backdrop of water draining from roofs and gutters. He had no ear for music, but Heather had sometimes played the piano in the villa; he had heard her from the gatehouse flat. It was impossible, it seemed, not to think of her at every turn, and on the whole, he did not object, for to do so was less painful than the effort of forgetting.
At length, he found himself in the Turkish Quarter, where the shops were still open and light and music beckoned. Down a side-turning off Odos Sokratous, he spotted a bar which looked dowdy and quiet enough to deter any English tourists. There he installed himself at a corner table with a bottle of mavro and a packet of cigarettes and began to make determined inroads on both, slipping, as he did so, into a misanthropic mood which excused him, for a while, from confronting any failings of his own.
How long he had sat there when it happened he had no way of telling, time having ceased to seem of consequence. He had thought the alley on which the bar was located to be a cul-de-sac – certainly few passers-by had come or gone along it – and that assumption made what occurred all the more startling. He had just drained the bottle of wine into his glass and begun to consider the merits of ordering another when his eye was taken by a young woman walking past in the alley, heading down it and hence away from what he had taken to be a block end. Not that this was what took him aback when he saw her glance towards him through the open doorway. His astonished reaction had quite another origin.
It was Heather. Surely to God it was Heather. She was dressed as she had been that last day at Profitis Ilias, in a black jacket and tartan skirt. She flicked back her hair – her shoulder-length, flaxen hair – with one hand as she passed by and cast so brief and piercing a look in his direction that he could not doubt it was her, nor that she had seen and recognized him. But she did not stop. While he sat in his chair, too amazed for the moment to move, she walked steadily on and vanished from sight beyond the angle of the next building.
Breaking free of his momentary paralysis, Harry lunged for the door. He would have gained the alley at her very heels had not the barkeeper, who had been eyeing him suspiciously, adroitly intercepted. Valuable seconds were thus lost searching his pockets for enough drachmas to appease the wretched man. When he did emerge, it was to see her already turning into Odos Sokratous. A desperate fear that she might disappear among the shoppers drove his legs like pistons and left him no time to consider why she should not have stopped of her own accord.
He reached the corner. There she was, on the other side of the street, just turning into another alley. ‘Dear Christ,’ he almost cried aloud, ‘don’t let me lose her now.’ He flung himself after her, only to collide with a small man built like a barrel who hurled invective after him as he plunged on towards the mouth of the alley. It swallowed him instantly in its dark, over-arched world, blanking off the commerce of the street. Within thirty yards there were two side-turnings to the left and one to the right, before the alley described a sharp right angle of its own. Why here? his racing mind thought. Why choose this maze of passages and courtyards in which to show herself? Unless … No. That was unthinkable.
Each turning was the same and each was empty. Nothing but reflected light in standing water met his gaze, nothing but the distant shifting shapes of scurrying cats in the dark shadows of ancient buttresses.
He kept to what seemed the major route. It dog-legged to right and left and there, once more, halfway along a straight, uninterrupted stretch, he saw her. He shouted her name, heard it magnified and multiplied by the walls around, then judged, by some movement of her head, that she had looked back and seen him. But she did not stop. Still, as he ran towards her, feet beating a mad tattoo on the cobbled alley floor, she did not stop. Instead, without seeming to quicken her pace, she drew ahead, then vanished abruptly down a turning to the right.
His chest was heaving, his breath straining to the limit, when he swerved into the side-alley. He had almost expected another disappointment, another bewildering choice of wrong turnings. But not this time. The alley was straight, and better lit than most by the windows of habitations set high in its flanking walls. Nor was she hurrying. She had almost come to a halt indeed, moving slowly and distractedly from one pool of light to the next.
‘Heather!’
She stopped, but did not turn. He saw her shoulders hunch at the sound of her name, as if in expectation of some blow or shock, but still she did not turn. He walked towards her, resisting the temptation to run, or to speak again until she had looked him in the face. As he reached out to touch her, his mind had already begun to frame the questions he would put, but his hand never made contact, because, at the last moment, she turned round to confront him in the full glare of an uncurtained window and, at that, his arm fell back to his side.
It was not Heather. The face was different, harsher, older, overly made-up. She was of similar height and weight, no doubt, but so unlike her in the indefinable sum of features and impressions as to render his mistake absurd, if not grotesque.
They stared at each other in stupefaction for a moment, then she spoke and, to crown his error, she spoke in Greek. ‘Tee thelete?’
Harry was dumbfounded. He did not know what to do or say, whether to apologize for accosting her or accuse her of misleading him. Greeks with flaxen hair were rare indeed. This, taken together with the clothes she was wearing, seemed to add a hint of deliberate deceit.
‘Then sas ksero!’ The tone of her voice as she protested that she did not know him suggested that she was becoming annoyed and possibly nervous. For this – if she were innocent – he could scarcely blame her.
‘Lipame,’ he apologized lamely. ‘Ena lathos.’ A mistake? Yes, it was certainly that. But whose? He could not believe that this walking, talking simulacrum of Heather was a freak of nature, yet neither could he bring himself to put the matter to the proof.
‘Poo eenai Heather?’ she said with a frown. Who is Heather? It was a question Harry could no longer answer with both honesty and certainty.
‘Then pirazi.’ Harry shook his head. He could bear their exchanges no longer. Costume and disguise or pure, outrageous chance, it made no difference: she was both too alike and too unalike for peace of mind. The suggestion of sympathy in her last remark had, moreover, revolted him in a way he could not understand. Muttering a last apology – ‘Signomi’ – he turned and hurried away along the alley.
He headed back towards Odos Sokratous, trying and failing to put the experience out of his mind. It must all have been wishful thinking on his part, he supposed, a wild hope founded on a chance resemblance; perhaps she had not really looked at him as she passed the bar at all. Either way, a stiff drink in convivial surroundings might repair the damage. He entered the first bar he came to, a noisy, smokey, low-ceilinged drinking den, and ordered a brandy.
A figure who had been leaning against the counter whirled round at the sound of Harry’s voice. It was Roy Mallender and the sight of his flushed, scowling face told Harry that he had just made his second mistake of the evening.
‘Barnett!’ The man’s voice was thick with drink and animosity.
‘I don’t want any trouble, Roy. You were here first. I’ll leave, OK?’
‘No, it’s not OK. I want a word with you.’
‘Some other time.’
Harry moved towards the door, but Roy intercepted and grabbed him by the arm. ‘If the police can’t get the truth out of you, maybe I can,’ he rasped. ‘Why the hell should you be free to wander in and out of here when my sister’s lying out there dead somewhere?’
‘We don’t know she’s dead.’
‘You know, all right. You know because you murdered her.’
‘Why exactly do you think I should have done that?’
‘There’s no need for me to spell it out. We all
know what kind of man you are.’
They were not discussing Heather. Intuitively, Harry realized that what was between them was what had always been between them: the animal loathing that two humans sometimes feel for each other without the need of a cause, even a good one. In former times, Roy had cunningly constructed pretexts for venting his hatred of Harry; now, when the opportunity was ready-made, he was not about to let it slip. ‘Let go of me,’ Harry said, suppressing his own instincts beneath an attempt at softly-spoken reason.
‘Make me.’ Roy’s face was twisted in some kind of triumphant leer; drink had robbed him of every pretence. ‘If you think you can.’
Harry had intended merely to shake the fellow off. Instead, he jerked his arm free so violently that Roy, caught off balance, was sent reeling into a table-load of backgammon players. Board, dice, counters, drinks and ashtrays fell in all directions as Roy crashed down between two cursing men. Harry did not wait for him to pick himself up, but rushed straight out into the street.
It was cool and damp and mercifully quiet. Behind him were raised voices and canned bouzouki music, ahead only the black, blanketing anonymity of the Old Town, in which he might yet contrive to lose himself. Why he did not hurry he could not clearly tell, for Roy Mallender was not the man to leave a slight unavenged, never mind a vendetta unpursued. Nevertheless, Harry merely ambled across the street and began to make his way westwards with no sense of urgency at all. He had reached the railed-off perimeter of a mosque, whose soaring, domed shape he could just make out in the gloom, and was about to turn down a flight of steps between the railings and the blank wall of the next building, when Roy caught up with him. In the circumstances, Harry should not have been surprised. Yet, strangely, he was.
‘Barnett, you bastard!’ Roy shouted, grasping him by the shoulder and swinging him round. ‘You don’t get out of it that easily. ‘
Into the Blue Page 6
