by Peter Helton
It wasn’t just his driving that got to me; this interrogation was beginning to make me uneasy, too. ‘Just a friend who needs a break from the British weather,’ I told him. I decided to forestall further questions by posing a few of my own. ‘Neo Makriá seems a strange little village.’
‘Does it?’
‘It looks fairly prosperous, though.’
‘People are surviving.’
‘A lot of people seem to own cars,’ I mused. ‘And a lot of satellite dishes. And all that stone paving everywhere must have cost a bit.’
‘Probably. I wasn’t here when that was done.’
‘Very well done, though. Not like some villages.’ Most I had seen appeared to make do with tarmac or ancient paving, much repaired with concrete. ‘It doesn’t seem to get many tourists, though. None at all, in fact, as far as I can make out.’ Apart from one stray birdwatcher, of course.
Dr K sighed. ‘No, not many tourists make it to Neo Makriá. Or if they do, they’ll soon leave. Nothing to do there, you see.’
‘Most people on the island seem to make money from the tourist business, yet in Neo Makriá there are big groups of working-age men just hanging about at street corners or in the ouzeria. And they’re all quite well dressed. Doing nothing except play with their worry beads. Shouldn’t they be working in bars and hotels at this time of year?’
Kalogeropoulos shuffled closer to the steering wheel and squinted into the thickening traffic; we were getting close to the airport. ‘Sorry, I have to concentrate now. Lots of cars,’ he said as though cars were the last thing he’d expected to find on the roads. I couldn’t tell whether he was simply avoiding my question or really did need to concentrate, though perhaps he had a point; the way he was driving when he was concentrating made distracting him seem like a bad idea. He got us to the airport with minutes to spare, which he decided to spend in the car with the seat reclined and his eyes closed.
I stood in arrivals watching the gate. I hadn’t really forgotten how beautiful Annis was, but the sight of her in shorts and tee shirt pushing her luggage trolley still electrified me. We did the airport scene of reunion properly, with greedy kisses and tangled limbs, oblivious to our surroundings. ‘We’ll have to catch up on things real soon . . .’ I started, but Annis disentangled herself.
‘You’ve met Charlie, haven’t you?’
I’d forgotten about Charlie the builder. So she’d managed to persuade him to come.
‘You came – how brilliant.’
‘Didn’t have nothing else on, so I scraped together enough for a one-way ticket. Bloody hot here, though, isn’t it?’
‘Wait till we get outside,’ I promised. What I had forgotten was how curiously good-looking he was. Six foot tall, without any sign of a builder’s beer gut, and darkly bloody handsome. I suppose the only time I’d seen him he was covered in dust and muck and standing halfway up a ladder at Jake’s. He scrubbed up extremely well.
Charlie travelled light, which was just as well or we’d never have got all the bags into the back of the doctor’s car. Since she’s fearless, I let Annis sit in the passenger seat, while I folded myself into the back next to Charlie. Then I regretted it. The doctor was obviously instantly and utterly smitten by his passenger and seemed barely able to keep his eyes on the road. Annis turned round in her seat so as to be better able to talk to me, unconcerned about the good doctor’s jerky driving. ‘You haven’t found her, then?’
‘Not a sign.’
‘Not a single lead?’
‘Not a one,’ I lied. I semaphored Annis to change the subject and she did so seamlessly. ‘Have you at least been to any good restaurants?’
I shook my head with genuine sadness. ‘I’ve been trying to save my money. I might not have enough to get home as it is.’
‘Snap,’ said Charlie. ‘Perhaps we should go into business together. I’ll do the building stuff; you can do the painting bit. Just say the word.’
‘I will.’ I already knew exactly what that word would be.
‘Well, I’ll take us all to a brilliant restaurant I went to last time I was here,’ Annis promised, ‘if it’s still there. And if I’ll remember how to find it. You see, you’re not the only one to have had a cheque in the post. Glasshouse Gallery paid up, so you can all stop worrying.’
‘Blimey. Now that’s a notion I haven’t entertained for a while. Stop worrying about money. I’m not sure it can be done.’
‘I can’t get used to it, either,’ she agreed. ‘But I still think you should call your supermarket chap Morton and ask him for more money.’
I wasn’t imagining it: the good doctor’s hands tensed on the steering wheel and his back stiffened at the mention of Morton. I semaphored Annis some more and she pulled an apologetic face and started rattling on about her last painting, how freezing the studio had been, how hard it had been to get the Glasshouse Gallery to cough up for the three huge paintings of hers they’d sold, but her eyes frequently drifted away from mine. Not towards the handsome builder next to me, as I had first thought, but out through the rear window.
I didn’t bother turning around. ‘Blue?’ I asked.
‘Blue,’ Annis confirmed.
FOURTEEN
I had kept the possibility of importing Charlie the builder to myself, not wanting to raise Morva’s hopes. She greeted his unexpected arrival like the second coming, casting away her crutches and commanding Margarita to produce a loaves-and-fishes miracle in his honour. But first I took him on a tour of the promised land.
‘Only the first of these rooms is finished; Annis and I will sleep in there. Until you get another one fixed up, it’s the motorhome for you, I’m afraid.’
‘No sweat.’
‘Well, actually, yes sweat. It gets pretty hot in there.’
‘I just spent the winter in a damp bungalow with night-storage heaters; it’ll be a while before you’ll hear me complain about the heat.’
‘That’s OK, then. Morva will want to see these rooms done because without them she can’t really continue running her painting school. But before you get stuck in there, I’d be grateful if you’d put your mind to constructing a communal shower, which would greatly enhance the hygienic arrangement round here. At the moment it consists of a zinc tub and buckets of water.’
‘Sure. Where does your water supply come in?’ he asked, looking around for pipe work.
‘Ah. Well, it doesn’t – that’s the problem. Let me show you . . .’ I walked him up the hill. He didn’t seem in the least put-out when I showed him the cistern that supplied all our non-drinking needs.
‘Yeah, right, bit of a distance. But I’ll think of something. What kind of a budget have we got?’
‘No idea. None to speak of, probably.’
‘No leccy, no water. No gas, I expect?’
‘Nope. Not unless lugged up the hill in bottles.’
‘Wind power?’
‘Look around you.’
‘Solar?’
‘Maybe next year.’
‘Bit of a challenge, I don’t mind telling you, but then I do like a challenge.’
‘There’s loads of material, though, from when the last lot of builders walked out; use up what’s there and then scream for more.’
‘Good system. How come she had problems finding anyone to finish the rooms? I don’t see the problem.’
Good. I was hoping he’d get them finished before he did see. The last two lots had either been paid off or warned off by whoever didn’t want Morva to succeed up here. ‘No idea, Charlie. Too hot? Too much hassle? Better offers?’
He looked about him from our uphill vantage point, surveying the decaying houses. ‘What a spot. Looks just like a film set. Are they fixing up the other houses?’
‘Nope, just Morva’s place.’
‘Shame; they should.’
‘No one wants to live here. You’ll soon see why, once you get your eye in.’
But I’d lost his attention; he was getting his eye in elsewher
e. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked in a suddenly soft tone.
Following his gaze, I saw Sophie staggering through the tall grass in front of a ruin some fifty yards away, wearing a gloomy-coloured top and jeans, swinging a wine bottle on one finger and apparently talking to herself. I presumed what Charlie saw was a more romantic version of the same: a wild-haired female with gothic ruins and a churchyard in a wild corner of a foreign country – that kind of thing. He probably imagined she was reciting poetry.
‘That’s Sophie. Needs cheering up.’
‘Really? If she needs help with that bottle of wine, I’m her man.’
‘Go introduce yourself, then.’
‘I think I will, ta.’ He strode off after her through the tall grass in the softening evening light. I could see he was going to fit right in up here.
When I got back to the house, I could hear raised female voices from the kitchen. Already? They belonged to Morva and Margarita, arguing in torrents of Greek.
Annis, sipping coffee at the courtyard table with her feet up on her pile of luggage, shrugged her shoulders. ‘A wage dispute, I think. The Greek girl wants more money for the extra work our arrival brings.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said and meant it. Shopping and cooking for that many people was quite a job. Especially if you were as erratic as Margarita. I’d asked Morva why she had hired someone so unenthusiastic about cooking and was told she was the only one she could find. So I thought I already knew the outcome of the argument.
‘I’m willing to help out, of course,’ Annis offered. ‘Though I’m surprised they haven’t put you in charge of the kitchen; that’s what normally happens wherever you turn up.’
‘I can’t be expected to do everything around here. Morva already has me giving lessons to her three charges. I’m supposed to find the Kyla girl and someone round here is trying to spook Morva and her students out of this place.’
‘How?’
I gave an account of the strange happenings. ‘Some of it could be coincidence or accidents or children’s pranks, but the thing with the tortoises certainly wasn’t and it really was freaky. Not to mention dangerous.’
‘And the out-of-control car that could have killed Morva. Any possibility it could have been meant for you?’
‘You really know how to cheer a man up. I never thought about that. I just assumed . . . But no, I doubt it. I was already off the track and climbing down towards the beach. Unless the car took longer to gather momentum than whoever pushed it downhill thought it would.’
‘There’s that. And did whoever let the car roll downhill know you were going to leave the track?’
‘Ah. That’s a point.’ I ran through the events in my mind. ‘No, I still think it’s aimed at Morva. Someone wants her to leave this place. People from the village. There’s something odd about the place and the people there.’
‘But, then, why did they sell her the property in the first place?’ she asked, not unreasonably.
‘Ah, but they didn’t. I don’t think they’d ever have sold her a house up here, however ruined. She bought it off a Greek-American from New York who had inherited it but had no use for it.’
‘Mm. But it somehow doesn’t suit the locals. Could it be just simple xenophobia? It’s a Greek word, after all.’
‘Is it? You’ve been at the books again. But endangering the lives of everyone up here by setting fire to the place? Getting Morva run over? It’s all a bit extreme.’
‘That’s why racists are called extremists.’
‘There is that thing about Neo Makriá not catering for tourists; only I don’t see how a whole village can be totally anti-foreigners when the rest of the island depends on them for a living.’
She mulled this over for a bit. ‘If someone contemplates murder – if we ignore the common or garden psychopath for a moment – then the stakes are usually high. There’s something going on around here that we can’t see. Perhaps quite literally. You obviously don’t trust the doctor, I noticed.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t trust anyone at the moment. He’s very evasive when I ask him about what goes on here. But he’s very helpful otherwise.’
‘Being helpful means he gets to be around to see what goes on. Though I’m not sure he can see very well through those specs of his.’
‘He saw you well enough. He doesn’t half fancy you.’
‘You think everyone fancies me. Face it, Chris, it’s just you.’
‘There’s Tim.’
‘There is,’ she admitted and changed the subject: ‘Blimey, can those two argue.’ The voices from inside the house still rose and fell in Greek argument. ‘Come on.’ Annis drained her coffee. ‘Show me to our bed.’
‘Oh sure, sorry. You must be tired from the journey.’
‘Eh? Who said anything about tired, hon?’
Sweaty, hot and close, breathless and sweaty. Did I mention sweaty? While Annis and I were busy getting reacquainted in the cloistered austerity of my room, thick billows of oppressive, dirty umber had crept over the rim of the hill like smoke from a burning tyre. The evening had grown prematurely dark. Lamps were lit and the table was being laid for our evening meal as Annis and I slipped off for a wash by the cistern.
‘I swear I’d forgotten what clouds look like,’ I told her.
‘Well, I haven’t. In fact, I seem to recognize that one over there. Looks suspiciously like the sky I left behind. Except in England they put oxygen in the air. I came here for the sunshine,’ she grumbled.
‘Tough luck.’ I poured a pitcher of cold water over her head and ignored her sputtering protests. ‘The problem with living in the picturesque past is that weather forecasting is pretty rudimentary. I’d say them’s rain clouds up there and I wish they’d get on with things. Ready for another pitcher?’
‘I suppose,’ said the soapy girl. I poured. She blared. ‘Waaah! The sooner Charlie gets to work on a shower, the better. You never mentioned it was quite so basic here.’
‘I forgot.’
‘What about the shower in the van?’
‘A dribble. And by the time you’ve fought your way out of the cubicle you’re bathed in sweat again.’
‘Pour away, then . . .’
When we got back to the house, we were the last to sit down to the meal Margarita had prepared, apparently still under protest and with dark Greek mutterings even Morva had trouble decoding. But apparently Helen had helped in the kitchen, with the result that not a single item of food had been incinerated. Everyone praised the dishes and Morva translated every compliment until Margarita was visibly struggling to keep her scowl from slipping. But she said she was far too busy to join us and swept back into the house, a happier grump.
Morva, had her ankles not prevented her, would have hopped around Charlie like a fussy hen; instead, she got everyone else to do it (‘See if Charlie wants another . . . has Charlie got enough . . . pass that to Charlie . . .’). He accepted it all graciously, though right now would probably have eaten a dish of spiders without noticing. He only had eyes for Sophie, who in turn was hardly eating at all. She had occupied a chair at the end of the long table, leaving her usual gap between herself and the rest of us; only Charlie had moved his place setting from across the table and had filled the gap and was chatting away at her relentlessly. Good.
Helen was quizzing Annis, who hated discussing her work, about her paintings, while pretending that I was invisible. Rob was sitting quietly, never speaking unless spoken to and even then starting every sentence with ‘Hm? Oh, erm . . .’ as though startled from deepest thought. He might as well have been invisible, a quality I had noticed about him before. One tended to forget he was around at all. Left to his own devices, he would fold in on himself and shrink a little, but once you had his attention he was quite capable of holding down a conversation, like a voice-activated automaton.
Margarita left for the village earlier than usual, saying she wanted to avoid getting caught in the downpour we were expecting. Those who had had
enough of the heat were positively willing it to rain, but Morva wasn’t one of them. ‘Be careful what you wish for. Corfu rain isn’t like normal rain,’ she complained. ‘It’s more like a monsoon. A watered-down version of a monsoon. But it’s good for the water table, so I shouldn’t complain.’
The weather still hadn’t broken when we all went to our beds and bunks, lighting our way with an assortment of candles, oil lamps and wind-up torches. But when it did break a few hours later, we all knew about it. If there had been distant rumbles to give warning, then I had certainly slept through them, since the first thing I knew about it was when a thunderclap detonated right above the house. It practically lifted me out of bed. I opened the door to the courtyard and Derringer flew in, wet, muddy and complaining that he’d never liked thunderstorms anyway. Thunder and lightning followed each other closely, the lightning giving a short-lived ghostly substance to the ruined village beyond the courtyard walls, then the thunder rolling around the stony hills like a shipload of empty oil drums. The rain hit the ground with such force that it bounced upwards again before feeding the muddy tide that was already sloshing towards the door. Then the scene went almost white and the thunderclap that crashed above seemed to crush all the oxygen from the air around me. Someone screamed and the hairs on my forearms mysteriously straightened.
‘Blimey, I felt that,’ said Annis.
‘It struck somewhere close, on the hill behind the house.’
‘Close the door quickly and come into bed.’
I did. ‘OK, now what?’
She drew the bed sheet over our heads, with a damp Derringer between us. ‘The best defence against lightning strikes,’ she assured me, ‘is hiding under the blankets until it’s all over. Everyone knows that.’
‘I didn’t. But I’m so glad you’re here to tell me these things.’
‘It was the smell of Greek coffee that woke me up,’ Annis said, ‘so I thought it might work on you.’ She held out the tiny cup she had wafted under my nose to bring me round.
