An Inch of Time

by Peter Helton

  Four . . . five. Don’t be such a coward. I reached forward, saw my hand tremble, took a deep breath and grabbed the snake. It came alive with all its writhing and wriggling powers intact. Its mouth gaped open, its curved, glistening fangs mesmerizing. The snake’s body writhed and curled up my forearm.

  ‘I’ve got it – get out of the way!’ I carried the struggling reptile downstairs past the ‘well dones’ and ‘yuks’ of the three women and out into the forecourt. My next worry was how to disengage myself from the disgruntled beastie without it biting me in revenge.

  Morva and Sophie followed me outside. ‘Don’t let it go here; it might come straight back in,’ Morva warned.

  ‘Oh, OK, you want me to take it for a walk, do you?’

  ‘Well, chuck it somewhere under that clump of olive trees over there.’

  Just then Rob appeared from the afternoon shadows under that very clump of trees. ‘What have you got there?’ he asked as he walked up.

  ‘Snake,’ I said. ‘Found it in Helen’s bed.’

  Rob’s eyebrows shot up.

  ‘I mean Helen did. Not sure how to let it go now.’

  ‘Ah yes, a four-lined snake. Just put it down and it’ll disappear into the grass.’

  ‘Is it dangerous?’

  ‘What? No. Totally harmless. I’m parched. Any chance of a cup of tea, Morva?’

  I put the snake down and let go. The treacherous thing disappeared into the shadows, taking my new-found hero status with it.

  That evening I learnt some more of what living in the eighteenth century entailed. Water had to be drawn for cooking and washing. There was a well with a wooden cover in the courtyard for drinking water, and a dark and ancient cistern fifty yards away at the back of the shuttered ruin of a farmhouse which yielded water for washing and laundry. After three trips to the cistern, each time lugging back a big yellow container of water, eighteenth-century Greece was in danger of losing some of its romance.

  Yet in the courtyard at dusk, as Margarita served supper, with paraffin lamps, candle lanterns and mosquito coils lit and the wine flowing once more, it all began to make sense again, feeding some deep-rooted yearning for a simpler life that never was. The enthusiasm of Morva’s three students for talking about the afternoon’s work, of artists they admired and paintings they had seen seemed inexhaustible. After a few glasses of rough local red and a meal of pot-roast lamb, I felt that the past was perhaps not such a bad place to be.

  I had withdrawn to my monkish cell just after midnight and fallen asleep the moment I dropped on to the bed. What woke me in the middle of the night I couldn’t tell; my brain was too busy trying to work out where it was. I was glad when I remembered. Unfortunately, as I sat up in the dark, my brain also remembered all the wine I had drunk. Sensing more than seeing them, I found the matches and lit the paraffin lamp by the bed, then opened the door to the night. In the courtyard, I found nothing but starlight and the clean fragrance of the night.

  I was about to turn back when I saw it, on the far side of the ghostly hamlet: a light. For less than a second it illuminated the side of a ruined building, then vanished, leaving nothing but a doubtful trace on my retina. Behind me the house stood dark apart from the light falling from my door. For a few minutes I stood at the entrance of the courtyard, staring into the darkness, listening. All I heard was the call of a distant owl, and when no more light appeared, I began to think I had imagined it.

  I turned around to go back to bed and stopped in my tracks. Through the half-open door of my room I saw a distorted shadow move across the wall. I had a visitor. Walking carefully beside the narrow shaft of light that fell across the ground, I managed to get to the house without making too much noise. Breathing as quietly as I could, I stopped by the door and listened. All I could see through the narrow opening were my bags against the bare wall opposite the bed, but I thought I could hear tiny noises. I swung the door wide and stepped inside. Briefly, Derringer looked up from the patch of the bed I had vacated, sighed and closed his eyes again. It took me a long while to get back to sleep.

  SEVEN

  I was glad to see that Derringer ignored Morva’s chickens, since I was enjoying my breakfast eggs and didn’t want the supply interrupted. The chickens in turn seemed to have delegated a black hen to keep an eye on him while the rest scratched in the yard. The students had trooped off to their easels, leaving Morva and me alone at the long table.

  ‘Am I making more coffee?’ she offered.

  ‘No, it’s time I started to work for my money.’ Before it runs out completely, I added mentally.

  ‘How are you planning to go about it?’

  I shrugged. ‘The usual way. I’ll stick my nose in where it isn’t wanted, ask a lot of questions and make a nuisance of myself. Except I’ve never had to do it in a foreign language before.’

  I could hear the laboured prattle of a moped engine in the distance. A couple of minutes later Margarita arrived, carrying more shopping bags. Morva exchanged a few words with her, among which I recognized my name. For a long second Margarita looked at me with something like horror, an expression Morva missed as just then Derringer jumped on her lap. Margarita muttered a few words, lifted her shopping bags off the table and disappeared inside.

  ‘What did you just tell her?’ I asked Morva who had turned her attention to the cat.

  ‘Mm? Oh, I told her you weren’t just a painter but a private detective as well. She’ll be chuffed; she watches all the cop shows on telly.’

  Chuffed was not how I would have described Margarita’s expression. ‘She gave me a very strange look. What’s private detective in Greek, then?’

  ‘Astinomikós idiotikós.’

  ‘Really?’ It didn’t sound all that clever.

  A minute later Margarita reappeared, rushing past us, calling something over her shoulder.

  Morva shrugged. ‘Says she forgot the garlic; she’s popping back to the village. I could have sworn we had strings of the stuff. But Margarita is so superstitious, I don’t think she’d feel quite safe without a crate of the stuff.’

  ‘Vampires?’

  ‘Vampires. Also water spirits by the wells, imps in the kitchen, goblins in the groves, ghosts in the churchyard and the evil eye. The list is endless. Her moped is encrusted with amulets for protection. But, of course, she wouldn’t dream of wearing a helmet.’

  Eventually, Morva walked me to her car, which she had offered to lend me. A rust-red Ford Fiesta from the last century, it looked only marginally better appointed than the van but would be a lot easier to drive around the island’s twisting roads. Not to mention cheaper. On closer inspection, the colour of the thing had been an inspired choice. I stuck my finger through a rusted hole in the door.

  ‘You’ve no idea how wet Corfu gets in winter,’ she said guiltily. ‘Now, a word of warning, Mr Shamus: be discreet. And stay away from the police.’

  ‘I usually try to. But I was hoping they might be able to tell me at least what the timescale was. And perhaps they’ve found out by now where she stayed.’

  ‘Read my lips, Chris. Stay away from them. In fact, if you see one, scram. They don’t like competition from PIs anyway, that’s well known, but if they find a foreigner asking people questions, they can get downright nasty.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘The police here are famous for being corrupt. Unless you have a lot of money to spend on bribes, don’t get into a situation where you might have to. You’d better have some kind of cover story, just in case.’

  ‘I’m just looking for a friend, that’s all.’ Who could possibly object to that?

  ‘I hope you’re a good liar.’ Morva waved me off with a doubtful look on her face. ‘Drive carefully – the roads are crap.’

  I had noticed. Though a crap road would have been a definite improvement on the track connecting old and new Makriá. In the village I parked as before by the palm tree. The grill that had been so busy before was shut. Dimitris’s kafénion wa
s open, however, and I was being keenly eyed by the three characters sitting with their backs against the wall at the little tables outside. They watched my every move as though they were expected to sit an exam on the subject. I made a mental note to ask Morva if there was some arcane rule in Corfu that all kafénions had to have three old geezers sitting with their backs against the wall.

  It was the yellow kiosk at the edge of the square I was after. I had noticed these in town. Fulfilling the functions of a corner shop combined with post office and telephone exchange, they seemed to cram an extraordinary variety of goods into the tiny space, leaving just enough room for one surly proprietor to sit on a stool in the centre and mop his cabin-fevered brow. Whatever didn’t fit inside the hut hung from the outside: scarves, hats, sunglasses, kitchen utensils, plastic toys. A fridge and an ice cream freezer completed the set-up.

  As I walked towards it, I noticed just how quiet the village was. My footsteps on the hard ground seemed the noisiest event around. It wasn’t that there was nothing happening here – two boys were straining to load half a pig into the back of a van, a woman was sweeping her doorstep, an old man was checking a burden of sacks on a donkey – only it was all happening very quietly. The pace also appeared wrong, like a film run on slightly reduced speed, or as though everyone in the village had his mind on other things.

  The man inside the kiosk looked soft-skinned and pale against a backdrop of cigarette packets and Greek paperbacks. I butchered sufficient Greek to make myself understood and was told to go round the side, where, on a waist-high shelf, sat a large red telephone from which I called Annis at Mill House.

  ‘Rubbish, you’re in a lay-by off the A2 – admit it.’ Her voice sounded very far away.

  ‘No, I’m actually standing in the square of a . . .’ I nearly said ‘strange Greek village’, but since I wanted her to join me here, left it at ‘Greek village’.

  ‘You haven’t found her yet?’

  ‘Kyla Biggs? Give me a break, I only got here yesterday. I found Morva, though; it’s where I’m staying.’ I gave her a quick description of the place. ‘Did the cheque arrive?’

  ‘Yesterday. I banked it. That’s the good news. I have some rather bad news, though.’

  ‘Out with it, then.’

  ‘Derringer is missing.’

  ‘Oh no, he’s not. He’s run away to Greece. As a stowaway.’

  ‘The little swine! Everyone’s on holiday except me.’

  ‘Are you coming down, then?’

  ‘I might. Only not yet, hon, not until I’ve finished this painting. But go on, tempt me. What’s the weather like?’

  ‘Warm, dazzling sunshine. What’s yours like?’

  ‘Hard to tell with this fog.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  I paid for the call and a pair of cheap sunglasses that had taken my fancy. ‘Foggy in England?’ the kiosk owner asked. It was a rhetorical question. If you were in the habit of using the village phone, then presumably the entire village got to share your happy news.

  Dodging potholes and constantly stopping to guess the way meant I made slow progress. Someone harbouring an anti-Anglo grudge had used a spray-can to obscure the English translations on road signs for miles around, and one thing you don’t learn while listening to language tapes is how to read a foreign alphabet. Fortunately, some of it was sufficiently similar for me to make an educated guess, enough to get me eventually on to the main road south.

  Spring was well advanced wherever I looked. The hard heat of summer had not yet arrived to burn the grasses crisp and turn the road verges to dust, allowing me to drive through a lush, subtropical fantasy land where everything but the road itself had some kind of plant growing from it. I crossed a narrow river with improbably green water and passed countless houses half obscured by spring blossom. The traffic was a stream of lorries, scooters, mopeds, pick-ups, ancient three-wheeled trucks (all with green cabs) and buses. Buses had a habit of cornering at speed, using most of the road and a lot of air horn, which apparently made that all right. I quickly learnt to listen as well as look as I drove, feeling small and squashable in Morva’s tiny underpowered car. And yet after a while I began to relax into it, windows open, elbow on the sill, driving more slowly, breathing more deeply. The further south I went, the more the traffic thinned out.

  I braked. If Morva’s description was accurate, then this had to be it. The place where Kyla Biggs’s car had been found abandoned was right in front of a long wall of cactus by the side of the road before the turn-off to a place called Chlomós. Morva had mentioned the cactus – it had formed the backdrop to the photo of the car, published in the local paper. I pulled off on to a narrow unmade road leading into the hills and walked across to the cacti. They were the prickly pear type, taller than myself and already bearing small flowers. There were no houses on this bit of road, just a blind stone hut that looked as though it was trying to shrink into the ground. Further along stood a rusted metal shrine. I walked over to it. It had a lopsided pointed roof and a glass front. Inside were the picture of a saint, a bottle of olive oil, an oil lamp, a box of matches and four dead flies.

  What I had hoped to find at this place I couldn’t have said. I hadn’t expected the car to still be here, nor was I hoping to find an explanatory note pinned to a tree. Only, somehow, it seemed like the right place to start looking, since it was the only one I knew of that Kyla had been.

  Or did I? Thinking about it, I realized I knew no such thing. Just because her hire car had been here didn’t mean she had been in it at the time. I circled the wall of cactus, a couple of car lengths of it. There were cigarette butts and bits of paper rubbish at its base. Here and there, carvings had been made in the cactus, a pentangle, a swastika, a lightning bolt, some initials, the letters K and X inside a badly executed heart pierced by an arrow. This had been carved recently – I could tell by the lighter colour of the scabbing over the deep wounds in the plant’s skin. Kyla and Mr X? Was I looking at Kyla Biggs’s cactaceous declaration of her love for a mysterious stranger for whom she abandoned her former life, job and hire car? Possibly not. The cool black-and-white look in her photograph kept telling me that infatuation of the type that carves love hearts wasn’t behind her disappearance.

  The road had fallen quiet. I could smell cigarette smoke on the air but saw nobody. One more time for luck, I circled the cactus, and when I turned back towards my car, I found myself faced by a man who had to have sprung from the stone hut that very second. Either that or he had grown out of the ground. He stood motionless in the road, a couple of feet from the verge, a mattock over his left shoulder and a cigarette in the right corner of his mouth for balance. He was watching me with dark yet wide-awake eyes.

  I said ‘hello’ and remarked on the warm weather with my bit of Greek, which he accepted as unremarkable. He made a dismissive gesture with a work-scarred hand: no, this wasn’t hot, not hot at all. Then he startled me with a question that sounded just a little gruff to my unseasoned ear: ‘What are you doing here?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m on holiday.’ Then, making a nonsense out of my statement, I pulled Kyla’s photograph from my pocket and held it out for him to peruse and asked, with equal directness, ‘Where is she?’

  He lifted both eyebrows and nodded his head back in that tiny gesture that I was quickly learning had many meanings, from ‘no’ to ‘impossible’ to ‘mind your own business’. The ash on his cigarette had grown long and curved downwards but survived the gesture. He added some rapid-fire Greek in which the only word I understood was amáxi – car – and walked off into the olive groves behind me.

  I had paid no heed to the approaching engine noise until I saw the twinkle of blue rounding the corner. I ducked back behind the cactus and spied out between two close-growing lobes. The Toyota was being driven at speed, unfortunately on the opposite side of the road. Its right-hand steering wheel put the driver too far away to make out through the tinted glass, yet again I got the impression of white hair as the
car flashed past, braked for the next corner and disappeared round it. It looked like the same British number plate, but I hadn’t managed to memorize all of it. Next time I saw it, I’d take a photo. Even considering the fact that it was the main route to the south of the island, this was one sighting too many. Whoever was following me had not been put off my scent by my spending the night in Morva’s hideaway, but it looked as if my car in the side road had not been spotted. If I was wrong about that, I would soon find out.

  I took the turn to Chlomós. I’d been able to admire the village from miles away. It had been superglued to the top of the mountain at a time when the land between its base and the sea was still a mosquito-infested zone where malaria bred at night. The narrow road rose immediately up in a tightly twisting serpentine through the silver green of the olive groves. This was what car horns were made for, warning of your approach as you urged your underpowered engine to heave you through the next bend, but I didn’t feel like advertising my whereabouts. Coming to an unsignposted turn-off, I hesitated for a moment. Should I slip down there and wait for something blue to turn up? I decided height might give me an advantage and carried on. I was halfway up when the mountain road opened into a lay-by, a tiny green hire car already parked there. I squeezed the Fiesta behind it and got out. Nearby stood a man in khaki shorts and a flak jacket with heavy binoculars supported on a monopod which he swung about like a Bren gun. It was the birdwatcher from Neo Makriá. For a moment I stood at the edge of the lay-by pretending to admire the view. It wasn’t long before I did admire the view. Below us stretched the dense forest of olive trees, seemingly uninterrupted by other plantations, with here and there a collection of roofs or a spiral of rising smoke. Further away, I saw what looked like a lake or lagoon, quicksilver below a cloudless sky, and beyond that the hazy shimmer of the Mediterranean. I could imagine how in the days before proper roads this height made people feel safe, allowing ample warning of anyone approaching.