Into the Blue

by Robert Goddard

  Suddenly, the odds had shifted. Until this moment, Heather had simply vanished. Now, for the first time, it was possible to believe that she had planned what had happened. Until his discovery of the photographs, Harry had found the mystery impenetrable. Now it seemed that there might be a solution, if he could but penetrate the meaning of the scenes she had recorded.

  During the jolting bus-ride back to Lindos, Harry forced himself to consider the possibility that the photographs meant nothing, or at any rate had no bearing on Heather’s disappearance. After all, if they had been important to her and if she had known what was to happen on Profitis Ilias, why would she have left the film with a photographer for Harry – or anyone else – to collect? Why not collect it first herself? Because, of course, it was not ready, in which case the pictures were either less important to her than she had implied or she had not planned to disappear at all.

  An alternative to these explanations came to him about halfway through the journey. She may have had no intention of vanishing when she took the film into Rhodes on Monday the seventh, but by Wednesday the ninth, when she hired the car and first proposed the farewell tour, the plan must have been formed. If that were so, every action from then on was a charade and Harry was merely her dupe, a tame witness to be taken to Profitis Ilias so that he could report the baffling circumstances to others and thus encourage the belief that she was dead.

  But why? Why should she have wanted or needed not simply to disappear but to do so in a way suggestive of foul play? And why, moreover, should this desire or need have arisen so suddenly? Reviewing in his mind the days during which Heather had presumably reached her decision, he could recall nothing abnormal, nothing which, even in hindsight, seemed to support his theory.

  Back at the villa, he was glad to find that Mrs Ioanides had gone. Alone in the gatehouse flat, he laid the photographs out on the kitchen table and carefully re-examined each of them in search of clues he might have overlooked. The early pictures seemed to have been taken in the summer, yet in the last English one, that of Francis Hollinrake’s grave, the brown leaves of autumn were evident, which suggested it had been taken shortly before Heather left for Rhodes. The later pictures he could date independently and the film could therefore be assumed to cover not less than three months. Without going to England himself, he really could glean no more.

  Then the significance of his conclusion dawned on him. He could not turn his back on the possibilities raised by his discovery. He could not pretend he had neither found the photographs nor begun to speculate on what they meant. As far as they would take him, even if no further, he would have to go. Pride and curiosity would drive him where, till now, they had always held him back. England. Home. The last place on Earth.

  10

  INSPECTOR MILTIADES WAS not available when Harry called at Police Headquarters the following morning. But at the British Consulate it was a different story. Mr Osborne consented to a ten-minute audience and listened patiently to Harry’s request, regarding him with fixed languor over the top of a miniature Union flag mounted in a cork plinth on his desk.

  When Harry had finished, Osborne consumed nearly a minute in unresponsive silence, then said: ‘Why are you so anxious to retrieve your passport, Mr Barnett?’

  ‘Because I wish to leave Rhodes as soon as possible.’

  ‘To go where, may I ask?’

  ‘England.’

  Osborne raised one eyebrow. ‘A curious choice.’

  ‘I am English.’

  ‘When were you last there?’

  ‘Apart from a couple of flying visits, ten years ago.’

  ‘But this wouldn’t be a flying visit?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  Osborne rubbed his chin doubtfully. ‘I believe Miltiades wanted to keep you on hand in case there were any developments in the Mallender business.’

  ‘But according to Monday’s Rhodian, the Police have given up looking for Heather.’

  ‘Yes. Well, strictly entre nous, Mr Barnett, security for next month’s European Summit is probably taking up all their time now.’

  ‘So what’s the problem? After all’ – Harry lowered his voice – ‘you wouldn’t want me making a nuisance of myself when all those reporters show up for the Summit, would you?’

  Some kind of weary smile flickered around Osborne’s lips, then was snuffed out. ‘I’ll see what I can do for you, Mr Barnett.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Harry made to rise.

  ‘Ten years, you said?’

  ‘Away from England? Yes, good as.’

  ‘You’ll notice lots of changes.’

  ‘For the better?’

  ‘I doubt you’ll think so.’ Now the smile was rekindled. ‘I doubt it very much.’

  For the rest of that day and all of the next, Harry remained at the villa, determined not to antagonize Osborne by demanding results too soon. Nobody knew why he should suddenly be so eager to leave Rhodes and he intended to keep it that way. Whether in a spirit of cautious prudence, or from some less laudable motive, he had resolved to keep the photographs as a secret between himself and Heather, as sacred ground on which nobody else could trespass.

  With time hanging heavy on his hands, he fell to studying the book in which he had found the photographer’s receipt. The passage Heather had been reading was about halfway through a chapter entitled Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition. At first, he made little progress, stumbling over terminology and floundering amidst case histories. At length, however, having resorted to the editor’s introduction, he began to grasp the argument and found himself largely subscribing to it. Every lapse of memory, it seemed, every slip of the tongue or the pen, every error or bungled action, might reveal a psychological secret. He attempted to apply the theory to Heather’s oversight in leaving the receipt where it could be found. This suggested a repressed desire on her part that it should be found. But this only held true, he realized, if she had planned her disappearance. If not, it was merely bedtime reading of no significance.

  Except, of course, that it showed what she had, however distractedly, been thinking about. The section she had been reading dealt with superstition, which Freud defined as ‘in large part the expectation of trouble.’ Since trouble had indeed followed, the coincidence was suggestive. ‘A person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without.’ Had Heather felt threatened, then? Had she referred to this passage to reassure herself that the feeling was psychologically explicable, only to find that it also implied subconscious malice on her part? If so, malice against whom?

  It occurred to Harry at this point that, if Heather had followed such a line of thought, it could have been fatally misleading. It might have encouraged her to ignore certain warnings, only for the warnings to prove horribly well-founded. It was, after all, just the sort of mistake somebody uncertain of their psychological well being might make. But what warnings? What signs could she have been prompted to disregard? None that he had noticed, that was certain.

  He returned, time and again, to the actual pages she had marked. These dealt with prophetic dreams and coincidental meetings. Freud demonstrated convincingly that such experiences were generally illusory, that prophetic dreams were either unfulfilled or not recalled until they had been fulfilled, and that meeting somebody whilst thinking about them was never truly coincidental: one was prompted to think about them by already being subconsciously aware of their presence.

  A dream, then, or a meeting, whose significance these pages had called into question: was that the warning which Heather had resolved to ignore? If so, it would be necessary to believe she had foreseen what would happen on Profitis Ilias but had nevertheless gone there, determined to prove it was no more than a delusion. That would explain her wish to be accompanied so far but no farther and the lie s
he had told to persuade Harry to let her go on alone: he had been taken there to bear witness, not to intervene. In that case, Heather was as brave and selfless as he wanted to believe; her only mistake was to think, because some Freud-soaked psychiatrist had told her so, that she had imagined the threats against her.

  Harry took heart from his conclusion, for all its obvious unreliability. It was so much preferable to his other hypotheses, from which Heather had emerged as a liar and Harry as a fool, that he clung to it as would a drowning man to a raft. This, he felt sure, would carry him through. And maybe Heather too, for he had begun to entertain the hope that she might not, despite all that had happened and all that he feared, be lost to him forever.

  Early on Saturday morning, Harry had a visitor. When he heard the knocking at the gate, he assumed it must be the postman with a parcel. But when he had stumbled down and opened up, it was to find Inspector Miltiades standing on the doorstep, looking as dapper and supercilious as ever.

  ‘Kalimera, Mr Barnett. You look surprised to see me.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You should not be. Mr Osborne has communicated your request.’

  ‘I could have come to Rhodes to collect my passport. There was no need to deliver it.’

  ‘Do not assume that I am delivering it. First, I will need to be persuaded that its return is justified.’

  Harry had hoped to avoid explaining himself to Miltiades, but plainly it was not to be. He invited him up to the flat, where the Inspector cast a fastidious look around before declining all offers of refreshment. Harry then embarked on a hastily prepared statement of his reasons for wishing to return to England: since Heather’s disappearance, he had felt ostracized in Lindos (true); he had become homesick (false); his mother wanted to see him again before she died (true, but she enjoyed the best of health).

  When Harry had finished, Miltiades regarded him calmly for a moment, then said: ‘You are a liar, Mr Barnett. You are, moreover, a poor liar, which has counted in your favour in my investigation of this case. I suspect you are also a neglectful son. And it is a strange form of homesickness which only exhibits itself after nine years.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘I believe you wish to return to England. The question is: why?’

  ‘I don’t have any other reasons to give you.’

  ‘Then I will give you one. You hope to learn the truth about Miss Mallender’s disappearance.’

  At that, Harry decided to abandon the pretence. ‘What if I do? I gather you’ve given the case up.’

  ‘Our efforts have been directed elsewhere, certainly.’

  ‘Then what’s the point of holding me here?’

  Miltiades smiled. ‘None, Mr Barnett.’ He slipped a British passport from his tunic pocket and passed it to Harry. ‘You are free to go.’

  Harry noticed at once that something had been slipped inside the cover of the passport. When he opened it, he found himself staring at the postcards of Aphrodite and Silenus they had found in the car.

  ‘I have been thinking about those postcards,’ Miltiades went on. ‘Your explanation of why Miss Mallender should have bought them was adequate, but it did not account for them being left in the glove compartment of the car. That action suggests deliberation to my mind. It implies that they were meant to convey a message.’

  Harry had thought the same himself, but it had led him nowhere. ‘What message, Inspector?’

  ‘I do not know, but you and she were together here – a pair, that is. As are the cards a pair. It is suggestive, is it not? The goddess and the satyr. Commonplace emblems, but emblems of what? I was originally inclined to interpret them as precisely what they seem. Female beauty and male desire. Youth and age. Temptation and lust.’ He paused and Harry was about to speak, but he held up his hand to silence him. ‘Let me continue. I visited the Archaeological Museum recently to remind myself of how fine the original Aphrodite of Rhodes is. Have you ever seen it?’

  ‘No. I’m not much of a museum-goer.’

  ‘As I suspected. One of the distinguishing features of the statue is that it dates from a period when anatomical accuracy was sacrificed to visual satisfaction. It is thus physically perfect, but spiritually dead. It is an object only. It tells us nothing.’

  ‘What should it tell us?’

  ‘Only this. That people are not statues. That what we see of them is only the outward form. Beautiful or ugly, it is irrelevant. Aphrodite or Silenus, it makes no difference. I think the message is meant for you, Mr Barnett, but I am not sure what it is. So, take the postcards with you. Maybe you will understand them in the end.’

  A few minutes later, Harry was saying goodbye to Miltiades at the gate of the villa. He felt a perverse liking for this aloof and thoughtful man, born of a sudden, unaccountable suspicion that they would never meet again. ‘Have you really closed your file on Heather, Inspector?’ he said, as Miltiades stepped out into the alley.

  ‘Officially no, Mr Barnett. But unofficially …’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘One thing before I leave you. Are you familiar with the place of Silenus in Greek mythology?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was tutor to Dionysus, before Dionysus was elevated to divine status. It is something of an achievement, you might think, to train a God, yet none of the sources speak well of him. According to Euripedes, he was incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. A profound handicap, would you not agree?’

  Was that the message? Harry wondered. Was that what Heather had intended the postcards to tell him? That he was blind to what she really was and that he did not know the difference between fact and fiction? If so, it was a bleak message indeed. But to understand it was, in a sense, to disprove it.

  ‘Pathima, mathima, Mr Barnett. Something suffered, something learned.’ Miltiades smiled, as if he had read Harry’s thoughts. ‘When will you leave?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘Then I wish you luck.’ With that, he turned and walked away. There was no handshake, no salute, no formal farewell. Yet, for all that, Harry could not resist the feeling that Miltiades had, at the last, entrusted him with something. Both of them, it seemed to him, understood now that the investigation had not been closed at all. It had merely changed hands.

  11

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Harry caught the workmen’s bus into Rhodes, drew out the meagre balance of his account at the Commercial Bank of Greece and proceeded to spend a woundingly large proportion of it on an Olympic Airways single ticket to London. Leaving at short notice was evidently an expensive undertaking, but it could not be helped. In two days’ time, he would be on his way.

  A short walk took him to the OTE office, where he telephoned his mother in Swindon to warn her of his imminent homecoming. Apart from a telegram two weeks previously telling her ‘not to worry’, he had failed to make contact since Heather’s disappearance, despite knowing full well what a dim view she would take of his silence. He had calculated that a call-box would enable him to claim lack of coinage before she could berate him overmuch, but he had forgotten that Greenwich Mean Time was two hours behind Greece, a fact which blighted their brief conversation from the outset.

  ‘It’s Harold, Mother.’ (His mother had never believed in diminutives.)

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your son.’

  ‘Harold?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of time do you call this? It’s not yet seven o’clock.’

  ‘Ah … Sorry.’

  ‘So you should be. All these weeks without a word, then you call at this ungodly hour.’

  ‘I am sorry. But listen: I’m coming home.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Coming home. On Wednesday.’

  ‘Wednesday?’

  ‘I should be with you late afternoon.’

  ‘You mean to say—’ The pips intervened.

  ‘I’ve no money left, Mother. Wednesday afternoon: is that all right?’

>   ‘It’d be all the same if it wasn’t, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t cook any—’ They were cut off.

  Depressed by his own ineptitude, Harry adjourned to a nearby bar, ordered some coffee and glumly surveyed a newspaper. Heather’s name had vanished from the headlines, which were now preoccupied with the forthcoming European Summit. It was as Miltiades had predicted: she had been forgotten.

  But not by Harry. When the Archaeological Museum opened its doors at nine-thirty, he was its first visitor. There was only one exhibit he wanted to see: the Aphrodite of Rhodes.

  It was smaller than he had expected, glass-cased and ornamental, strangely bland, as Miltiades had implied, by contrast with the rougher-hewn statues around it. They declared themselves boldly, while the Aphrodite seemed to preen and simper behind its protective barrier. Now he had seen it, he did not like it. As a picture it was beautiful; as an object distasteful. The polished marble imparted a plasticity to the flesh and the lack of definition a pliancy to the limbs that simulated too well the appeal of what it depicted. Part peep-show, part sensual display, the goddess surprised in her ablutions was both sublime and obscene, both unattainably desirable and blatantly available. What she represented was one with the priapism of Silenus. The message and the meaning were the same: image was all.

  As soon as he was back in Lindos, Harry let himself into the villa, went up to Heather’s room and packed her belongings in the rucksack as neatly as he could. Do it quickly but do it well, he told himself: do not pause to think what this might also symbolize. He tried to telephone Dysart to warn him of his departure, but ran into an answering machine at his London flat and decided to try again tomorrow. Then he went back to the gatehouse flat and commenced his own packing. Such were the necessary acts and practical tasks of the penultimate day of an exile he had thought might last forever.