by Peter Helton
‘But why? What’s up here? It’s just ruins, and Morva does own her house. It’s not as if she’s a squatter – she has every right to be here.’
‘True. It could all just be one xenophobic villager having decided to try to drive her out, perhaps fearing an invasion of foreigners in her wake.’
‘That would be us, then. A handful of painting students hardly constitutes an invasion. And it would benefit the village – people spend money there. Or would if the place was friendlier. There certainly aren’t any other foreigners around here, and apart from one birdwatcher I’ve not seen a single tourist in that village.’
‘No, neither have I. Every other village is fighting for every last tourist euro, but in Ano Makriá they couldn’t care less.’
‘Perhaps they’ve seen how tourism can destroy traditional village life and decided against it. After all, that’s what we’re doing here, isn’t it? Escaping from the tourism on the rest of the island. Whatever, they’re a queer bunch down there. I’m starving. Isn’t it time for one of Margarita’s surprise suppers?’ Helen stuffed her paintbox, watercolour pad and underwear into her little rucksack. ‘Be a dear and carry my easel for me . . .’
TWELVE
Stick my nose in and see where it isn’t wanted. That’s always been my operating system when all the obvious avenues lead nowhere. Sooner or later it will get someone rattled and the sound of their rattle might tell us something. That it’s time to run, for instance.
Loitering, preferably near a source of good food or at least coffee, is not the speediest or most efficient way to collect information, but it’s certainly the least odious part of detective work and it’s very me.
Dimitris’s cafe, shaded by vines and overlooking most of the village square in Neo Makriá, was where I thought I’d start. The three old boys were there, or three others looking remarkably like them. With their backs against the peeling pink plaster of the wall, they took hours over tiny cups of coffee and practised synchronized smoking while watching the world. I turned the tables on them by installing myself in a shady spot where I in turn could keep an eye on them as well as all that went on in the square.
It was slow work. It would have helped if I had felt pleasantly relaxed and drowsy from the heat, but Dimitris’s cups of Greek coffee, diminutive or not, kept my mind hyper-alert and ready to pounce on the smallest event. Had there been one.
Mid-morning. The old boys commented in mumbled Greek on anyone passing or crossing the square, like a sleepy team of secret service veterans on autopilot. For a while nothing at all happened. This was followed by a long period of very little happening quite slowly. People moved things from A to B. A young girl in a bright yellow dress yanked an unenthusiastic goat on a rope past the cafe. Women carried circular roasting trays of meat and vegetables to the baker’s oven at the end of the square, from where they would collect them done to a turn later in the day. The barefoot village idiot made the rounds, begging for coins, and was skilfully avoided by the young and loudly chided by the old. He avoided the small groups of young men who were sitting astride shiny scooters, smoking and chatting, and those drinking in the shadowy ouzeria opposite the grill. Earlier, I had ambled across to the kiosk and chosen a dozen postcards from those on offer. All were slightly faded from the sun and none showed views of Ano Makriá. Writing these in super-slow motion with a leaky biro had given me a legitimate excuse for hanging around, but eventually I ran out of inane things to scribble. Another single customer arrived, a man in his fifties with narrow, fashionable glasses. He ordered coffee and lit a cigarette. His arrival meant that Dimitris, who spent long stretches of time standing in his own doorway scratching at mosquito bites, had sold his seventh Greek coffee in two hours, leaving him plenty of time to worry about his finances, I imagined.
I had shown several people, including Dimitris, the black-and-white photo of Kyla Biggs with no result. Now, scraping together my few words of Greek, I accosted the newcomer with it. He studied me for a moment with a deep frown before taking the print and scrutinizing it. ‘You looking for this woman?’
‘Oh good, you speak English.’
‘A little.’ He returned his attention to the picture, sliding his glasses towards the tip of his nose. ‘Why you look for this woman?’
‘She’s a friend. We got separated. I thought she might have come through here.’
‘Separated. Mm. I think maybe I see before here but I am not sure. Is OK I show my wife? She is better with remembering. One minute only. You sit.’
While he walked off, I allowed myself a tiny amount of hope. It was the first time anyone had even thought he’d seen the woman. I stuck the stamps I had bought at the kiosk on the postcards and looked around for a postbox but couldn’t see one. I finished my coffee and sipped some water. I smoked another Karelia. I drummed my fingers on the table. I smoked another cigarette. Then I went inside to find Dimitris who was rearranging saucers on a shelf. ‘That man with the glasses . . .’
‘Yes?’ He looked past me through the door.
‘He walked off with the picture of Kyla that I showed you earlier.’
‘Yes? Why you give him?’
‘He said he’d go and show his wife, but that was fifteen minutes ago. Where does he live?’
‘I don’t know where he live. Not this village.’
‘Damn. Who was he?’
‘I don’t know, Chris. I never seen him before.’
I followed him outside where he looked up and down the street, then barked a question at the old boys who merely raised their chins and eyebrows a fraction.
‘No one know,’ Dimitris translated and cleared the man’s coffee cup and water glass away. ‘You talk with lot of people you don’t know – maybe will bring trouble. If girl was here, I would know. I said “no”, so is end of story, OK? No more asking people. They don’t like.’ His eyes refused to meet mine. ‘Is good advice, Chris.’ He swiped the postcards from my hand. ‘I give these to postman when he comes tomorrow.’ He marched off inside where he flung the postcards on to a small pile of other mail to be collected.
For a moment I considered asking him to give them back – I’d been pretty rude about his village on some of them and thought he might be offended if he read them, but since my handwriting has always been inscrutable, even to myself, I didn’t bother.
Instead, I went for a walk in the general direction Fashion Specs had taken with Kyla’s picture, turning into the first paved alley by the corner which gently sloped away. It was narrow and shaded, undulating between houses shuttered against the heat. I ignored even narrower alleys leading off, not having a good memory for turnings. I found small shady courtyards, dogs that slunk away as I approached, for which I was grateful, and eventually came to the last house and the end of the crazy paving, of which I was equally glad. Here and there I had heard the odd voice behind closed shutters and barred courtyards, but I had seen no one. So there was nobody to ask for permission as I squeezed along a runnel between the last houses into the groves of olive trees beyond. I had seen many olive plantations around the Med, but the trees in Corfu seemed much larger and older than most. Here was terrace after terrace of ancient-looking trees, some so old their boughs had been propped up with stout pieces of timber to stop them from snapping under their own weight. I passed several specimens that were hollow at the base yet thriving further up, and some of these had been partially filled with concrete to prevent them from collapsing. I walked gratefully in their shade until I was no longer sure of which direction the village lay, so dense and large was the plantation. When I found a rutted dirt road, I followed the hard-baked mud of the tyre tracks, telling myself that they had to lead somewhere eventually.
Naturally, I had hoped the track might join a road or lead back towards the village, but it landed me against a broad aluminium gate set between concrete posts. Eight-foot-high chain-link fencing stretched away through the groves to either side. Above the gate, a large sign told me where I was: Thalassa Organic Olive
Oil Co-operative. I pushed the gate – it was locked. There was no bell or intercom, so it didn’t look as if they were hoping to attract passing trade. On the other side of the gate, the track continued and curved away into a hollow from where I could just make out the roofs of a few buildings. The faint smell of food cooked over charcoal made me turn away with a rumbling stomach. Nothing but coffee in there; time for lunch soon, surely. I retraced my steps along the rutted track, but I hadn’t gone far when I heard engine noise behind me. From inside the co-operative two cars approached the gate. It was being opened now by a spiky-haired man in jeans and tee shirt and a single-barrel shotgun slung over his shoulder. The first car was a black BMW convertible with the top down, with three occupants I hadn’t seen before. I recognized the second car with mixed feelings: it was the dusty Italian Mercedes that had stopped so that a man in mirror shades could give me petrol and advice. Something about sticking to lying on the beach. Everyone on this island seemed to volunteer advice I had no intention of taking.
As the leading car drove up to me, the driver, a pale young man in a short-sleeved white shirt, stretched out a hairy arm as though wanting to scoop me up, talking rapid-fire Greek at me. He made impatient get-away-from-here gestures towards the village, and when he didn’t get an answer, he suddenly stopped and switched languages. ‘Yermanos? English?’
‘English,’ I confirmed.
‘This no for tourist. Is private. Go away. That way.’ He gestured impatiently again. ‘Holiday that way.’
I apologized. ‘I went for a walk and got myself lost. Which is the quickest way to the road?’
He threw up his hands. ‘No road, is no road, is private! Back to village that way.’ He pointed behind me, away from the drivable track.
‘OK, thank you. Sorry if I trespassed.’
‘OK, go, quick now.’
Through all of this his passengers had sat without seemingly taking any notice of me. The man in the back was a dark-haired, bored-looking man in his forties. The front-seat passenger, somewhere in his sixties and grumpy with it, had remained motionless apart from tiny movements of his arm as he checked his wristwatch several times. I walked away quickly as I had been told, feeling distinctly unwanted, and soon the cars moved off. The deeply tinted windows of the Italian Mercedes had prevented me from seeing whoever was driving or being driven in it. The man at the gate stared after me for a while, then turned away and soon disappeared from view.
When the cars had vanished too, I checked all around. I could see nobody, so I stopped. Just in case I was still being watched, I pretended to have a stone in my shoe. Leaning against the trunk of a tree, I took my time taking off my shoe, shaking it, peering inside it. I could still see the gate and the fence that ran away into the distance on either side. It was something about the way that man had checked his watch and his driver had insisted I go quickly that made me want to hang around. Funny that. It was very quiet now, apart from hissing cicadas and the distant crowing of a cockerel. I tied my shoelaces, walked on a few paces, then stopped again. There was a faint drone in the air now. It was difficult to make out where it was coming from, but it was getting louder. For the benefit of hypothetical onlookers, I struggled with my plastic lighter to get a cigarette going. Now I could clearly make out the whine and rhythmic beat of a helicopter engine and blades, and soon I glimpsed the crop-duster at work above the treetops beyond the fence, gliding first left, then further away on a reciprocating course. I lit my cigarette and puffed back to the village.
Dimitris’s cafe was closed. It was siesta time and all sensible folk were dozing indoors or lying around on hammocks in shady courtyards, sipping cool drinks. The ubiquitous tourist business was eroding such practices in many places, but here, away from the demands of foreigners, the village had fallen ghostly silent. Who was I to argue with thousands of years of local custom? A short bike ride up and round the hill and twenty minutes later I was lying on the bed in my room at Morva’s place. Staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. Too many Greek coffees.
Yet I did doze off eventually and woke late in the afternoon, ravenously hungry. Today I would dodge Margarita’s fare (which could be excellent one day and inedible the next) and instead hunt for Niko’s elusive taverna with the help of Kyla’s postcard. I’d try to remember not to let this scrap of a clue out of my hand, having still not quite got over the embarrassment of having lost Kyla’s picture to what I had now come to think of as the opposition. Well, Morva had warned me. Dimitris had warned me. So had an Italian with a petrol can. Yet somehow I always suspected that it wasn’t curiosity that did for the cat, but someone with a blunt instrument and something to hide.
Ablutions at Morva’s place were a decidedly retro affair, consisting of what was basically a tin bath by the side of the house and a few enamelled ewers of water. Morva had always made sure there were at least three of cool water drawn from the well, with Margarita supplying a pitcher of scalding hot water on demand. Now that Morva was laid low, it was every detective for himself. Her current students had been sweet-talked into putting up with it, but I doubted that would work on everybody.
Dispensing with Margarita’s offices, I drew water from the well and gratefully poured the cold stuff over myself, which left me extremely awake and gaspingly refreshed. Since Morva’s ‘accident’, Sophie had elected to stay at the house all the time, sleeping it off each night in Morva’s room. She shrugged when I asked to borrow the bike again. ‘Be my guest.’
Sometimes, astride a motorbike is the only place to be. When the heat becomes oppressive and the air is still and stagnant, there is noting better than a blast down country roads on a motorcycle. Here, even the uncertain horsepower (ten? fifteen?) of Sophie’s rattling Honda brought instant relief and a fragile smile to a hungry and frustrated private eye on his way south. I had no idea where I was going, having deliberately left the map behind. Somehow, today I didn’t care. Had I thought about it, I would probably have said that I no longer believed I could find out anything at all about Kyla Biggs’s disappearance. Perhaps Sophie was right: everyone had to be somewhere, and so she was either dead or alive somewhere, just not wherever I was. Corfu was not a huge island, but trying to find someone here was still like looking for a penny on a football pitch. A penny that had turned green with verdigris at that. It would be pure chance if I found a trace of her and chances aren’t marked on a map.
Where the hell was I? I’d already forgotten the name of the village I was driving through – another two-donkey affair, low houses dribbled along a narrow tarmac road that looked as if it was still a novelty to the kids on bicycles and the scooting chickens. One cafe-cum-cornershop, no Niko’s Taverna and no stretch of water. There was water and the masts of boats in the picture postcard, so perhaps I ought to head for the coast. Well, nowhere was far from the coast – that was the whole point of being an island – so I simply carried on. My stomach growled louder than the engine as I rode through two more villages with otherwise perfectly good tavernas, restaurants and cafes that didn’t fit the bill. I carried on south until I was sure I’d keel off the bike if I didn’t get my teeth into something edible very soon.
Lefkimmi appeared to be a small town with quite a sizeable population if the number of churches – all yellow, white and pink – was anything to go by. There was little evidence of tourism here. As I tootled slowly downhill through its streets, I saw several women – mostly over sixty, granted – in traditional costume that included a headdress apparently devised from checked tablecloths.
Unexpectedly, I arrived at a bridge over what looked like a canal, which was not only home to a long row of fishing boats but also lined with trees and tavernas. Journey’s end for my stomach and willpower. I left the bike under a tree and walked into the first little taverna to my left that had tables by the edge of the water, pointed at the first thing on the menu that looked good and was soon settled with a large bottle of beer in dappled sunlight at a table by the canal. Thankfully, only a few minutes later I was twirlin
g thick spaghetti and chasing bits of octopus with my fork through a thick, fuliginous sauce. Had this been a holiday, then I’d have considered myself truly arrived at last. The clientele at this and the other two tavernas I could glimpse was a mix of tourists and locals and the menu had shown a refreshing absence of moussaka or chicken and chips.
I never think well on an empty stomach and a certain amount of drink always seems to help lubricate the cogs of my mind. Having vacuumed up my last strands of spaghetti and replenished my glass with beer, I took out Kyla’s postcard. Stretch of water, masts of boats, trees, taverna. I was there. Niko’s Taverna was one of these restaurants – had to be. All I had to do was match the postcard to the view.
After crossing the canal via the narrow bridge, I turned left along the row of low houses. Niko’s Taverna was only the fourth one along. Despite the noisy Greek bouzouki – which sounded uncannily like the music played in all the other establishments – the place was nearly empty. Or perhaps because of it. I matched the spot from which the image on the postcard had been taken and felt as if at last I had come to the end of a long journey that had started in Mrs Walden’s icy flat in a distant season.
Only two tables were taken under the strings of coloured lights festooning the awning and unfortunately none of the diners was Kyla Biggs. The man behind the bar beamed at me. ‘Welcome, you are alone?’ He craned his neck to see behind me.
‘Yes, it’s just me,’ I confirmed. ‘So this is Niko’s Taverna. And you are Niko?’
‘I am he.’ He opened his arms in an expansive gesture of surrender.
Did he remember a woman called Kyla?
‘Kylie? Kylie Minogue!’ He beamed as though he’d found the winning answer to a quiz question.
‘No, no, Kyla – different name.’ I wished I’d still had her picture as I struggled to describe to him a woman I knew only in black and white.
Niko was apologetic. ‘Every year so many tourist, so many names. Is quiet now, but in two, three weeks, very busy.’ He swept a hand towards the many snapshots of happy- and drunk-looking punters that covered half the wall behind the bar.
