An Inch of Time

by Peter Helton

  ‘I can’t believe you rented this death trap – it’s terrible.’

  ‘It’s a bit ancient.’

  ‘It was crap when it was new.’

  ‘The steering’s a bit vague, but I’m getting used to it.’ I demonstrated by skilfully wallowing all over the road when a pothole came up. I hit it with a back wheel on the rebound.

  ‘I hope you realize that the number plates don’t match.’

  ‘Match what?’

  ‘Each other. I noticed it earlier.’

  ‘It’s the next best thing to having James-Bond-style revolving number plates. Should keep the police guessing, anyway.’

  ‘Start the police wondering, more like.’

  We were driving towards Corfu Town, wearing our best clobber, trying not to look as if we had travelled all the way from the eighteenth century. ‘Is it posh, then? Your restaurant?’ I asked. I worried, since even my best efforts at dressing up had produced only rumpled results.

  ‘No, not posh. Posh is boring. Just civilized. The view is brilliant, too.’

  ‘It’s not in town, then?’

  ‘Lord, no. Just north of it.’ She unfolded the map, ran a finger over it, flicked her nail at it. ‘Turn left at the next junction.’

  I turned left at the next junction and drove.

  And drove.

  ‘It’s further away than I remembered it,’ she admitted as she measured out distances on the map.

  I pulled into a petrol station at the edge of a large village. They still had service at the pumps, a reminder of a more civilized age and something I hadn’t experienced for years. ‘Yemáto, parakaló – fill her up, please,’ I told the man suavely (cassette two). Annis was impressed. (Less impressed when it turned out I didn’t have the money to pay for the yemáto.) While the man was still feeding the tank, Gloves shot by in her blue Toyota. Our tiny Citroën was partially hidden behind a sagging old van that had pulled in beside us, so she probably didn’t see us. ‘Looks like changing vehicles hasn’t made much difference,’ I observed.

  Annis consulted the map. ‘Next time we see her we’ll grab her, but right now I’m not in the mood. Tonight I want to eat under the stars. We’ll go by a different route. Turn back the way we came, then left at the first opportunity.’

  It appeared to work since we didn’t see the Toyota again and Annis’s map reading eventually dropped us via a tortured little track into exactly the right place, the road above Barbati beach. Villas, restaurants and cafes punctured the densely verdant slope between the road and the long curve of the bay. We left the car by the side of the road and walked back a few hundred yards to Annis’s chosen restaurant, the Lord Byron. It occupied several terraces above the road and commanded five-star touristic views across the bay. It was fairly busy for the time of year. We managed to grab a table on the lowest terrace and sighed in unison as we drank in the view.

  ‘Worth the drive?’ Annis asked.

  ‘Even if they only have bacon butties left.’

  It was picture-postcard stuff. Beyond the bay, lights began to twinkle as darkness fell and the first stars appeared in the east. The Lord Byron’s menu managed to match the view without being distractingly brilliant; it was simple Corfiot fare. It arrived in its own good time, allowing me to sample the beer and Annis, my designated driver for the evening, to slurp a few colourful fruit-juice cocktails. Just as Annis was assessing the doneness of her lamb and I was about to break into the enormous cube of pastitsio on my plate, I was distracted by the arrival of a new guest. Skipping lightly up the stairs, without his Zeiss binoculars, was the man I had met on the ferry from Brindisi. As he walked past our table, I raised a hand in greeting, but his eyes travelled over me without betraying recognition and by the time I’d remembered his name he had skipped further up the stairs.

  ‘Kladders. Got it!’

  ‘Kladders got what?’ asked a mystified Annis.

  ‘The chap who just walked by. I met him on the boat from Brindisi. He’d clocked that Gloves was following me before I did. He seemed to know the island extremely well, too. I think I’ll go and pick his brain.’ I put down my fork.

  ‘After you have finished your food in a leisurely and companionable manner. Unless you want to walk home,’ she said sweetly.

  ‘Naturally,’ I agreed and picked up my fork.

  Annis reminisced at length about the last time she’d been on the island.

  ‘You make it sound as though it was all a long, long time ago.’

  She paused, fork poised in mid-air, ready to skewer her next thought. ‘Do I? It was, in a way. That was before college. Before painting, before Tim. And you, of course,’ she added quickly in answer to something I did with my eyebrows. ‘A different era. Years don’t come into it, really; it’s a bit like having a baby. Nine months, give or take, and you live in a totally different world and you’d better like it because there’s no way back.’

  ‘You’ve given it some thought, then.’

  ‘My mother never lets me forget what a sacrifice having me has been, how I’m single-handedly responsible for her having missed out, career, opportunities, best years of her life, etcetera, etcetera.’

  ‘Is that why you decided not to have children?’

  She stabbed a few times at the remnants of lamb on her plate. ‘Is that what I decided, then?’

  Hadn’t she? ‘Well, I thought . . . you always said . . .’

  ‘Ha! Your face! Priceless. Yeah, hon, don’t fret. I’m far too selfish, and you don’t exactly make ideal dad-material. And Tim . . . Tim would give a baby five minutes, then lose interest and look for the off switch.’

  ‘Talking of Tim, I must see if he’s mailed me another picture of Kyla. Actually, while I’m there, I might call him and ask him to check on one or two other things that would be useful to know. I’ll do it first thing tomorrow. It’s the weekend; he’ll be at home.’

  ‘Actually, he won’t be. He’s still at Mill House. Looking after the place while we’re both away.’

  Still. ‘Was he at Mill House all the time, then?’ This didn’t come out as casually as planned; a sudden, illogical stab of jealousy seemed to have punctured my voice.

  ‘Mm? Yeah. Does it matter?’

  I hesitated. I shouldn’t have hesitated.

  ‘I really don’t see why it should,’ she said. ‘Mill House or Northampton Street – what’s the difference? It’s not as if we’re sleeping together in our bed.’

  ‘No, sure, I mean . . .’

  ‘And it made perfect sense because that way I could get a lot more work done than if I had bombed across to his place every day. I’d still be working on the painting now if I had, I’m sure.’

  ‘True. It’s no problem; it’s just different from what I had imagined.’

  ‘Your mouth is saying one thing and your eyes are saying something else. You’re not jealous? Please say you’re not jealous. And after how many years? It’s you I live with. And if I preferred Tim’s company, why am I here? I didn’t have to come out here where I’m being shadowed by weird Toyota drivers, gassed in the kitchen and given evil killer looks by that Helen woman all day.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I am. Did you make a rash promise of marriage or something? She constantly asks me a million questions and all the time I feel like she’s pointing a gun at me under the table.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Of course not, Mr Detective. Anyway, I’m here with you, not there with him, so be a happy Honeypot or I’ll fly home.’

  ‘I’m happy,’ I promised.

  ‘You’d better be,’ she said. She shut her mouth around the straw and noisily vacuumed the dregs of fruit juice from the bottom of her glass. ‘Why don’t you go and talk to the ferry man you saw and order us some more drinks while you’re in there.’

  ‘Good idea. Same again?’

  ‘Hell, no, get me a beer. I can drive perfectly after a couple of bottles of this Amstel stuff. I remember it well . . .’

 
; After delivering my drinks order at the bar, I looked around for Kladders. It took me a while to spot him at the head of a crowded table right at the back of the restaurant. Two waiters were busy depositing a multitude of dishes in front of the diners, which is why I was halfway to his table before I noticed who he was eating with. All of his companions looked alarmingly familiar. I made a hasty ninety-degree turn away which attracted Kladders’s attention. He gave the tiniest sideways jerk with the head while he semaphored ‘Scram!’ with his eyebrows. No need: I was making myself scarce at the double, hoping the rest of the company had been too busy looking at the food to take any notice of my odd manoeuvre.

  ‘Cheers, hon.’ Annis clinked her glass against my fresh bottle of beer. ‘Did you catch up with your man?’

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  I took a long draught of beer from the bottle while I realized I had no idea what it all meant. ‘I didn’t speak to him. He had company. A lot of company. He pulled a face at me that said “Not now, you fool”, but I didn’t really need the hint. Right next to him was the police officer who had pretended he’d never seen Niko’s Taverna when I showed him the postcard.’

  ‘Perhaps he hadn’t?’

  ‘I doubt it. He was sitting opposite the bloke who runs it. And he is the one who pretended not to recognize Kyla, even though he had her photo on his picture wall.’

  ‘Ah. Recognize anyone else?’

  ‘Most of them. One of them, I’m sure of it, is the Italian bloke I told you about – the one with the big dusty Mercedes. He gave me petrol for the bike, but I thought even then he was also threatening me. Now I’m certain of it. Opposite him sat the bloke who runs the kiosk in the village and . . .’

  ‘Margarita’s dad.’

  ‘What? Is he? How do you know that?’

  ‘Morva mentioned it.’

  ‘In what context?’

  ‘Apropos of nothing. It’s the kind of stuff women talk about, who begat whom, relationships, connections. You know . . .’

  ‘Yeah. Ta. Anyway. Next to Margarita’s dad . . .’

  ‘Thanassis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His name. Her dad’s name is Thanassis.’

  ‘Anyway, next to Thanassis sat a couple of chaps I saw at the olive oil co-operative. One was an older guy in the passenger seat who kept looking at his watch while his driver told me to get lost.’

  ‘And now they’re all having a meal with the bloke from the ferry.’

  ‘Yes. It’s kind of spooky because that’s most of the people I’ve met here so far and now I don’t trust any of them for some reason.’

  ‘Then what about your ferry man?’

  ‘Kladders . . . I don’t know. He pointed Gloves out to me.’

  ‘But afterwards your notebook with Morva’s old address in it had disappeared.’

  ‘True, but then he gave me pretty good directions to her place. And just now he seemed to be on my side when he signalled me. I really don’t want to meet that policeman at his table again; I feel happier with him thinking I’ve left the island.’

  ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t hang around, then.’

  ‘On the contrary, we definitely should, but somewhere they can’t see us.’ I called the waiter over, asked for the bill (cassette one, part two) and pointed at my watch to show we were in a hurry.

  While we waited, Annis finished her half-litre of Amstel, then relieved me of my bottle and drained that one, too. ‘It’s only fair if I’m missing the sweet course,’ she declared. There was no arguing with that. This hadn’t quite turned out to be the romantic starlit dining experience it was billed as.

  Back on street level, I hesitated for a moment. The road was quite busy now with people strolling about and a row of cars parked on one side. ‘I don’t remember – could we see the entrance to the restaurant from our car?’

  ‘Don’t know. Let’s try it.’

  We were walking towards the Citroën when I saw them. ‘Stop, turn round.’

  ‘Wassamatter?’ she asked as she turned on a sixpence.

  ‘Back there, right in front of ours, are the cars of the guys from Kladders’s table – the Merc and the BMW – and there’s two guys leaning against the bonnets chatting. One of them is the BMW driver who told me to get away from the Thalassa Oil Co-op. He might well recognize me and I have the distinct feeling I don’t want him to. We’ll look for somewhere else.’

  Not far beyond the entrance to the Lord Byron, we found a bar with a few seats by the roadside from where we could keep an eye on things. I was too busy to take much notice of the fact that both of us were drinking beer now and my designated driver was on her third half-litre in less than an hour. We hadn’t been there long when the two drivers came up the road towards us, walking quickly. They weren’t chatting now and had a look of determination about them.

  ‘That’s the chauffeurs coming right at us; could mean trouble.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘We’ll act stupid.’

  ‘How hard can it be?’

  The two determined-looking men never slowed down. They marched straight past us through the open door to the bar and demanded two large brandies which they instantly chucked down their throats. A minute later, and without having wasted a glance on the tourist couple at the table outside, they were walking quickly back towards their cars, talking animatedly now and lighting cigarettes, underling boredom temporarily relieved.

  Just when the sentence ‘We could be sitting here all night’ began to form on my lips, Kladders’s party tumbled into the road. We heard them before we saw them. A heated argument was under way and all of them were talking at once. I obviously had no hope of deciphering any of it, but I distinctly heard more than one language being abused. It appeared that in the heat of the argument everyone had resorted to shouting in their respective mother tongues, except Kladders who appeared to be trying to pour oil on troubled waters in both Greek and Italian, interspersed with English exhortations such as ‘Calm down, everybody’. When the policeman and the Italian started pushing and shoving, Kladders threw up his hands in a gesture of mock despair and walked away from the brawl towards where we were sitting. Behind him, both the BMW and the Mercedes had pulled up to the entrance of the restaurant.

  ‘There he is.’ I got up from my chair and walked towards Kladders.

  While looking in a different direction, Kladders said urgently, ‘Go away.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Not now, Mr Honeysett; ignore me and walk past.’

  ‘OK, but I want to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Another time.’

  ‘Where can I find you?’

  ‘You can’t; I’ll find you.’

  Typical. Everyone was always confident they could find me on this island; so why did I have such trouble finding Kyla? We had passed each other by now and I stooped and picked an imaginary coin out of the grit by the side of the road, then turned round while studying it in the palm of my hand. I had come quite close to the brawl, which was now breaking up, and I was being overtaken by the police officer with the neon skin and walrus moustache. He crossed the road in an angry strut and got into a large and shiny red Nissan parked in the drive of a villa. He performed a hectic U-turn, which brought him close enough to our table outside the bar to make me think he might drive through it. He was frowning straight at me as he scrunched past, then accelerated away towards town. A couple of minutes later, first the BMW and then the Mercedes roared past in the same direction. Kladders had disappeared.

  ‘Did you see where he went?’

  ‘He got into a green Citroën – one of those hire cars.’

  ‘Great, there must be a thousand of them.’

  ‘Only one with this number plate,’ she said, pointing at the table top. She had written it out in Amstel beer. She shrugged. ‘It’s all I had. Better get a pen before it runs.’

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Sorry, I gave my last Alka-Seltzer to C
harlie the other day,’ Helen said cheerfully. Then she clattered around with her portable easel for a bit before noisily setting off into the glaring sunshine for her painting session. I was convinced everyone was making a lot more noise than necessary this morning and I was sure the sorry apparition in the shape of Annis Jordan hunched beside me at the long table would have agreed had it been capable of coherent speech.

  By the time we had got back to Ano Makriá from the Lord Byron the previous night, we had convinced ourselves that we had utterly and tragically sobered up. And for no reason at all, except that there was no beer in the cooler, we had started on a two-litre bottle of the local red. Each.

  The planned trip into town to check emails and get in touch with Tim was postponed for obvious reasons: one pothole and my head was going to break open like a Chocolate Orange.

  One by one, the ghost-village inmates had expressed their sympathy or amusement and gone their own way to paint, and eventually Morva had gingerly hobbled after them on two sticks to check on their progress. Charlie, who was now working on the room next to ours, had promised to find something quiet to do, clearing the place of rubbish and levelling the hard earth floor, but by noon he had run out of quiet pursuits. Without warning, he fired up the petrol engine of the ancient cement mixer in the yard to make concrete for the floor.

  ‘Morva’s beautiful sound,’ groaned Annis.

  ‘Let’s get away from here.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere. Just away from that noise.’

  ‘Into the bright stuff out there? I don’t know what’s worse.’ We slunk away into the grove behind the house.

  ‘We’re a pathetic pair,’ I concluded.

  Annis looked back over her shoulder. ‘Margarita seems to think so. Did you see the look she gave us from the doorway?’

  ‘She always looks at me like that. Let’s keep under the olive trees – not so bright here. I think I know how vampires feel now.’

  We clambered up several crumbling terraces into the overgrown olive grove until the noise of the cement mixer had receded like a toothache numbed by codeine, then slowly picked our way around the slopes on the edge of the village. The place was still lush from the recent rains, but already the fierce heat was trying to bake it into submission. The borders between sun and shade were hard-edged; the light shimmered painfully on the stones, reflecting blindingly on the bits of whitewash remaining on the back of the deserted church. Beyond the churchyard with its untended graves and waist-high grasses, I could see Rob dabbing methodically at his little canvas. Here the olive terraces came to an end and the shoulder of the hill sloped back towards the village. We clambered downwards on a stony goat track that took us in the direction of the holly oaks where the motorhome was parked. Every time my foot slipped on a loose stone, the juddering movement translated into a circle-dance of headache around my skull.