An Inch of Time

by Peter Helton

  After I’d worked the kick-starter a dozen times without effect, I unscrewed the filler cap and peered with foreboding into the tank. Shaking the bike from side to side did not produce the desired sloshing sound. I bent down to turn the tap to reserve. Ah, already on. I had come down the hill on nothing but fumes and was now entirely fumeless.

  A minute ago I had wished for a helmet. Another minute and I was wishing for a hat. No sea breeze reached here to cool my troubled brow. Nor any other parts, troubled or otherwise. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and not a village or petrol station in sight. After pushing the squeaking bike for half a mile in the heat, I was already thoroughly tired of cars zipping past me with their horns blaring. I lit a cigarette to dangle in the corner of my mouth while I pushed my nag along, trying to remember the words to the Lonesome Cowboy song and wondering why I had hated teaching art. Surely it had to be easier than this malarkey. Now I’d have both to do and it hardly seemed fair.

  Pushing the bike in the heat was sweaty work. Wasn’t there a single kind soul on this island with some spare petrol in the boot who’d stop and sell me some?

  A large silver Mercedes passed uncomfortably close, then stopped in front of me. Mind readers? The passenger door opened and a man in white shirt, black trousers and shiny black shoes climbed out and walked to the back of the car without seeming to notice me. The boot appeared to open magically without his assistance. I was about to wheel past this obstacle when he extracted a petrol can from the boot and laid a hairy hand on my handlebars.

  ‘Oh, how kind of you. I drove around on reserve without noticing. Just a splash will get me to the next petrol station, I’m sure. You wouldn’t know where to find one, would you?’ Something about the man made me prattle on like that. Was it the expressionless face? Or the fact that he appeared to look straight past me through mirrored sunglasses? As he glugged petrol from his plastic can into my tank, I thought I could feel the cold he had brought with him from the air-conditioned interior of the car. He was about forty, I guessed, and he looked Mediterranean. I checked the number plate – it was Italian. The expensive car was covered in grey dust and looked as though it had been driven non-stop for a thousand miles.

  I was thinking he would never open his mouth when at last he spoke in heavily accented English. ‘Perhaps you are a careless man? Driving all over island alone, on little bike . . . Easy to have accident. Big truck on roads, Greek truck, Italian truck . . .’

  ‘Yes, I noticed.’

  ‘Easy to have little accident on little bike.’ Mirrorshades deemed me sufficiently fuelled up and carefully replaced the filler cap on the tank. ‘My advice – you listen good: no drive around villages any more. Go lie on beach and enjoy life.’ He turned away, replaced the petrol can in the boot and climbed back into the car without a further word. The Merc quickly scrunched away on the gritty tarmac while the boot was still closing by itself.

  I was left talking to an empty space. ‘Thanks for the advice, Mirrors. Bye. Have a nice . . . whatever it is you’re having.’ Somehow I didn’t think it was a holiday.

  Enjoy life. Had I just been warned or been warned off? If it was just a friendly warning, then why the mention of Italian trucks? Was I getting paranoid?

  I turned the valve on the tank to ‘normal’, took a deep breath and stood on the kick-starter. The little engine fired first time.

  There was no point in bumbling around in the sun with the vague hope of running into Gloves and Co. when I had Kyla Biggs to find, students to keep happy and Morva to look after, though I wasn’t entirely sure yet what that would entail. The sooner Annis got here, the better.

  At the first petrol station I came across I topped up the tank, then followed the signs into town. If anything, Corfu Town had turned hotter and dustier since my first arrival. It was also busier with tourists. The bike had no lock, so I relied on the scratched and dented rat-bike look to keep it safe from any self-respecting bike thieves.

  Morva had asked me to buy a few things Margarita couldn’t find locally, such as something resembling Cheddar cheese for Rob who wasn’t keen on the local varieties. For me, shopping was difficult only because whenever I find myself abroad I want to buy everything I see. Even the most mundane things become interesting in a foreign country, with their invariably better-looking packaging and strange writing. I make a point of never taking much with me, buying things like toiletries when I get there. It allows you to imagine you have started a new life as you try out the unfamiliar toothpaste and the curiously coloured shampoo. A new life in a fresh place. A place where nobody knows your inglorious past, your chequered history. Wiping the slate clean, starting afresh, starting over. A second chance, perhaps a new name, too. Was that what Kyla Biggs had done? Was that why I had been sent after her, to make sure she couldn’t shed her past like a snakeskin that had grown too tight? Was she that valued an employee?

  I stopped at a hole-in-the-wall souvlaki grill and bought two of the seductive little skewers of meat, fragrant with oregano and lemon juice and each presented with a small morsel of bread. Munching these at the street corner opposite a colourful greengrocer’s display, trying to remember where I had left Sophie’s battered bike, an unflattering thought occurred to me. If John Morton’s secretary was right and he’d have no trouble getting in touch with me – or rather ‘find me’, as she put it – I couldn’t see what trouble he could have finding Kyla Biggs. And if he had, why didn’t he hire someone more competent than Chris Honeysett, the private eye painter? I had few illusions about the efficiency of Aqua Investigations, since all its operatives preferred drinking beer around the barbecue to doing an honest day’s work, and unfortunately that included the boss. So why let an incompetent like me amble down here in a campervan with very little hope of finding her, rather than engage some large hotshot agency like Bentons of Bristol who’d have flown a couple of sharp ex-police officers down here to do some methodical searching?

  I dropped the denuded skewers into a waste bin and walked back to the bike, carrying my shopping and a vague feeling of foreboding. It was quite possible, then, that I was not supposed to find Kyla Biggs, that I had merely been sent here so that Morton could say he had tried. But why? There was something missing in that train of thought and the whole thing was beginning to give me a headache. I decided to forget all about it until the sharp-eyed Annis Jordan turned up, when we could pull it apart over a few bottles of Henninger and a good meal, preferably not one cooked by a distracted Margarita.

  I rode back to Ano Makriá, wishing there was more than one way to approach it. If anyone wanted to keep an eye on my coming and going, then it was all too easily done. Everyone in Neo Makriá would know who was or wasn’t further round the mountain in the old ghost village, and if Greek villagers were anything like their Turkish counterparts, then foreigners and their queer ways were a favourite topic. As I rolled past the square in Neo Makriá, I noticed another thing that made this place so strange and decided to ask someone about it at the next opportunity.

  I found Morva on the sofa in a worse mood than when I had left her, propped up against several pillows and moving only her eyes, which did not look kindly upon me. By now, the ice pack had long melted and the pain in her ankles was probably worse than ever. The little bottle of Dimitris’s tonic was empty by her side. It turned out that the flip-side of its painkilling magic was that it gave you a correspondingly vicious hangover unless you kept drinking it.

  ‘You look worse than when I left you.’

  The brandy had scoured her voice to a croak. ‘Thanks a bunch. My ankles feel like someone cut them off and loosely stitched them back on with barbed wire. And unless I hold my head very still, it will explode into tiny fragments.’

  ‘That’s bad news.’

  ‘Yes. If I find the bastard who took the handbrake off my car, I’ll lock him in the boot and push the thing over the cliff just as soon as I can walk again.’ She gave me a dark look through narrow eyes, as though her suspicion that I was somehow r
esponsible had made a return in my absence.

  ‘OK, good plan. In the meantime, can I do anything for you?’

  ‘Yes, find a brick or something and render me unconscious with it. Then have a look at my students’ work and teach them to paint properly.’

  Rob had chosen his spot well. His painting camp by the churchyard was conveniently shaded by a large olive tree, while his subject, the little bell tower, remained in sun for most of the day. He had worked steadily – Rob did everything steadily – on his new painting. His method was to draw in pencil on the canvas, then fill it all in with paint, starting in the centre of the painting and working outwards, not stopping until he hit the four corners. I had never seen anything so strange in my life. There was little point in challenging this eccentric method since it (sort of) worked for him. In fact, I’d have paid money for a time-lapse film of him painting an entire canvas. Instead, I tried to discuss some of the muddy mixtures of paint he produced which I thought weren’t doing the subject justice, but, just as Morva had feared, Rob seemed much more concerned with the security of the place.

  ‘It all appeared so idyllic at first, but since my last painting was stolen I don’t trust this place any more. I know it’s probably nonsense, but I feel as though someone is watching, just waiting for me to leave the painting on the easel so they can pinch it. Needless to say, I no longer let it out of my sight now.’

  I tried to reassure him, though after the past events I sounded unconvincing even to myself. ‘Let’s hope it was a one-off occurrence.’

  ‘A one-off? You never know what will happen next around here.’ He looked pointedly over his spectacles towards a large patch of burnt grass nearby. ‘And then there’s Morva’s accident. Who ever heard of someone being run over by their own car? That has to be foul play. I think the police should be called and I told Morva so, but she won’t hear of it; says they are more trouble than they are worth. Well, I strongly disagree. Something is not right here and someone has to do something about it.’

  I agreed. And as I walked among the ruins on the lookout for the other two students, I realized that by someone he probably meant me. Typical. This only happens to very few professions, and private detective is one of them. A binman on holiday won’t feel obliged to shift any rubbish he might encounter on his travels, and no one expects an anaesthetist to put everyone around the pool to sleep. But, then, I wasn’t really on holiday. Just wished I was.

  Sophie did more than just hint at it. ‘You’re a private eye, aren’t you? Well, then.’ She lifted a half-empty litre bottle of local red and toasted me with it before taking a long draught. ‘Damn, the stuff’s getting more’n a bit warm. Want some?’ She held it out to me.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Don’t blame you. I realized here that drinking red wine at room temperature is a very British delusion. It doesn’t really apply if your room’s baking at ninety degrees. Of course, no bloody fridge here. But to get back to where we were. Where were we? Oh, yes. If Morva doesn’t want the police round here, then it’ll have to be you. Go sluicing. I mean, sleuthing. Surely more important than your missing person thing.’

  ‘Possibly. But it’s the missing person thing someone hired me for, so I can’t just let it go.’

  ‘Oh, piffle, just tell ’em there’s no sign of her – end of story. What’s “missing” mean, after all? She either fell down a well or she’s around here somewhere. Everybody’s somewhere. Has to be. Ergo not missing. Just in an unexpected place, and it’s not their fault no one expected it, is it?’ She took another sip of wine and pulled a face in disgust. ‘Missing is neither here nor there. In fact, only if you are neither here nor there. See? My son, now, he is missing, they say. Out there.’ Sophie pointed past my ear to the north-east. ‘’S’rubbish, of course. He’s either dead or he is out there. Only I don’t feel it. If he was dead, I should feel it and I’m not feeling his death.’

  ‘I heard of the diving accident. You think he’s still alive?’

  Balancing the bottle loosely across the palm of her right hand, she looked past me as though choosing a place to throw it, then her hand slipped around the neck of the bottle and her gaze shifted back to my face. ‘Think it? No, I don’t think he’s still alive. But I feel he is, and while I feel he’s around I’ll stay on the island, because if I left, then it would be like abandoning him here. Him, his spirit, my love for him, whatever. I can’t see why people find that so hard to understand.’

  I offered her a cigarette from my pack of Karelia. She accepted wordlessly and I lit both our cigarettes. ‘I think I do understand.’

  Sophie blew cigarette smoke skywards. ‘Do you, fuck. Until you’ve had a child of yours disappear in front of your eyes, you’ll understand fuck-all.’

  ‘You’re probably right. But I’m trying to. Perhaps I’ll have some of that wine, after all.’

  She put the bottle out of my reach. ‘There’s not enough to go around. There’s never enough to go around. Of most things, I find. And why would you want to understand in the first place? It won’t change anything. Not for me. Go find your own missing person.’

  ‘I really came up here to talk about your work.’

  ‘My work. Well, I wouldn’t quite call it that.’ She pushed herself off the overgrown mound of rubble where we’d been sitting and took the few steps to where a small watercolour pad was resting on a low wall. ‘It’s a mess. I wet the paper but in this heat it dries straight away. I either get big pools of paint that run everywhere or all these hard, darker edges when the paint dries.’

  ‘In this weather, wet only small areas at a time. Mix stronger colours and use less water. Then soften the edges with a damp brush, not a wet one. A wet brush will push the pigment to the sides, which is what gives you the hard edges you don’t want.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah, try to hate it a bit less. As you said, it’s not your work.’

  ‘Smart-arse.’

  I went to look for Helen. The houses were widely scattered, and trees and shrubby growth restricted the view. I could have called her name as I walked, but I did have things to think about, so just wandered aimlessly in the cricket-sawn heat. Someone was trying to scare Morva off this patch, and whoever that was had to have a fairly strong motive if they thought running her over or setting fire to an entire mountainside was warranted.

  The abandoned village was cracking and creaking. Every rock, crumbling wall or fallen stone was radiating heat, and the cloudless sky was pumping more of it down on me. Sunlight bounced so harshly off every surface that I thought I should be able to hear it. What I did hear was very little. The crickets, so incessant only a moment ago, had slowed their rasping in this unseasonal heat to the occasional, half-hearted chirrup. There was no wind. Not a breath stirred, and I seemed to keep drawing the same deep-fried air in and out of my lungs. For me, feelings of spookiness had always been linked to the dark, to fogs and gothically driven rain and the dripping dankness of ill-lit places, but I felt that Greek ghosts would choose to walk now, in this wavering, over-lit, ticking silence of a Corfu heatwave.

  After fifteen minutes of walking aimlessly among the groves and houses, I was ready to give up looking for Helen when I caught her fragrance, though the air was so still it might have been hanging here immobile since yesterday. I turned into what had once been the courtyard of a horseshoe of single-storey buildings and there, under an ancient, sickly looking vine, stood Helen’s portable easel and her little rucksack. A set of watercolours and a tub of water stood balanced on an old plastic oil barrel. No sign of Helen. The horseshoe of buildings stood low and with shuttered windows, though their doors were open to the darkness inside. On the easel stood a watercolour pad with an elaborate pencil sketch of the yard, the vegetation within and the trees beyond it.

  ‘What do you think?’

  I turned around towards Helen’s voice. What I thought was that she had a remarkable figure for a woman her age. She was wearing leather sandals, a straw hat and
perfume as she stepped out of the dark doorway of the centre house. She walked up and stood beside me while I turned what attention I had left to the pad on the easel. ‘It’s . . . erm . . . yes, erm . . . not at all bad.’

  Helen stood very close. ‘Am I embarrassing you?’

  ‘You’re certainly doing your best.’

  ‘And you’re being terribly English about it, pretending not to notice that I’m naked.’

  ‘Good Lord, so you are.’

  ‘It’s so bloody hot today, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone: cool down and get a seamless tan. Though I’m sure I don’t know what for.’ She stepped past me to where her clothes lay folded across a bare arm of the vine and, after tossing me her straw hat, pulled her loose floral dress over her head. ‘There, you’re quite safe now.’ She took up her place beside me at the easel again. ‘More or less. Well?’

  ‘I think you’re overdoing the drawing a little. It’s OK for a pencil sketch, but as a preliminary for a watercolour it’s too much, too detailed. Keep it light and to a minimum.’

  ‘Good advice, I’m sure, but I’m more interested in who is trying to frighten us away from this place. That runaway car was no accident. And the fire certainly wasn’t. And I’m beginning to think the snake in my bed may not have found its own way there, either.’

  ‘I’ve no idea. It’s bound to be people from the village.’