An Inch of Time

by Peter Helton

  ‘Words do make things happen. But not magically. Words are real; they can become things. Facts, anyway. It’s called civilization.’

  They were getting deep quickly over their cups of coffee. ‘Any chance of a hand with peeling these onions? There’s millions of them.’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’ They put down their cups and armed themselves with knives.

  ‘Great, that means I can prepare the lamb.’ Words do make things happen. It’s called delegation.

  Louise still hadn’t taken off her soft black leather gloves. As she watched her pick up an onion and begin to peel it, Annis asked, ‘Do you ever take those off?’

  Louise stopped, sighed. Deliberately, she put down the onion and knife and tugged off one of her gloves. ‘Only if I’m lecturing people on what not to do in the event of a chip-pan fire.’

  ‘No wonder . . . no, I mean . . . that looks painful.’

  ‘I was lucky. By a miracle, it somehow missed my face. But it didn’t miss much else.’

  ‘Could they do something with plastic surgery?’

  ‘This is after plastic surgery.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Easy mistake to make, don’t worry. But hey, at least I’m only “Gloves”, not “The girl in the leather mask”.’ She pulled her glove back on and picked up her knife and onion.

  After the meat had been browned, the cinnamon, cloves, onions and tomato added and the big dish shoved in a slow oven, I cleared up the mess. I picked up the photograph to put back in my jacket. Wait a minute. So far I had only ever looked at Kyla, the other faces simply filed away as ‘other supermarket employees’. I took the photo next door into the studio where I had seen a large magnifying glass on a stand. I took it off the shelf and shoved the picture under it. No doubt about it: the face next to Kyla belonged to the bored-looking man in the back of the BMW. He’d been at the Lord Byron restaurant, too. I took it outside where Annis and Louise were watching the students struggle with Charlie’s naked form. Metaphorically speaking. Though I suspected one or two of them also had a more literal interest. I put the picture in front of Louise on the table and tapped the figure next to Kyla. ‘Who is he?’

  She barely gave it another glance. ‘That’s Sanders. He was then her boss; she took over from him last year.’

  ‘And what’s Mr Sanders do now, do you know?’

  ‘Why are you interested in him? He quit. Left the company. I don’t know where he went next.’

  ‘I do. He went here. I saw him leave the olive oil co-op and I saw him again at a restaurant along with a load of shady characters, like your oily Sotiris and Niko from the other photograph.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘More than interesting. I don’t know whether Annis has told you, but we paid the oil co-op a visit and one of several curious things we found was—’ But I didn’t manage to finish the sentence as two things happened at the same time: the drawing session finished and Tim Bigwood turned up.

  Woolly of hair, though certainly not of mind, Tim had had no problem finding us, just as he had predicted. ‘Finding space to leave the car was the tricky bit. Quite a collection of automotive junk you have up here, to go with the tottering architecture, I presume. Toyotas excluded, naturally,’ he said with a nod to Louise, whom he recognized as its driver from my description.

  We spent a while bringing Tim up to speed, though he made it quite clear that he had come here for sun, sea and sand. ‘The coldest and wettest spring since records began, pretty much everywhere except down here. Expect an invasion round Easter. Is that your cooking I can smell, Chris? I’m starving.’

  Naturally, Louise was asked to stay. After another hour bashing around in the kitchen I managed to produce a convincing feast for Morva with the lamb stifado as a centrepiece, and just before sunset nine of us sat down to supper at the long table in the courtyard. Margarita, of course, would have thrown a medium-sized fit being asked to cook for this many people. Since I had turned up less than two weeks ago, the population of the ghost village had more than doubled, a fact that couldn’t have escaped Morva’s enemies at the village. I raised my beer glass in a silent toast to Margarita and wondered when the next ghost-village resident would turn up. As it happened, I didn’t have long to wait before I found out.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I’d have preferred Charlie in naked quietude, but it was the din of half-naked cement mixing that made me jump out of bed late next morning, surprisingly unencumbered by any hangover. One look at the groaning dehydrated form I had left behind under the sheets reminded me that, unlike her, I had avoided the local wine that apparently went so well with lamb.

  Apart from Charlie toiling at the other end of the courtyard, there was no one to be seen, so, after taking the Desiccated One a glass of orange juice to help with her reconstitution, I prepared Turkish breakfast. Well, there were today no Greeks to offend, who, by their own admission, didn’t go in for breakfast much anyway. I had no idea where everyone else was, but I was one hundred per cent certain that Tim was still asleep in the finished room next to ours. I am, of course, quite often one hundred per cent wrong about things, but I could hear Tim snore – and nobody snores like Tim.

  ‘What’s Turkish breakfast?’ he asked suspiciously, not quite admitting to being awake.

  ‘Tea, orange juice, boiled eggs, olives, feta cheese, sliced tomatoes, butter, honey, jam and, sadly in our case, yesterday’s bread.’

  He opened one eye. ‘Real orange juice?’

  ‘Carton.’

  He opened the other eye. ‘Still . . .’

  Charlie was levelling the cement floor on the last room, two doors down from Tim’s. ‘Fancy a second breakfast? It’s on the table.’

  ‘In a minute. I have to finish this before it sets.’

  ‘You’re really getting them done quickly.’ In fact, I could have sworn he had only just finished the room Tim was in. I laid a hand on the door handle of the third room. ‘Has this one got a bed in it yet? We could have offered it to Louise; save her driving back to her pensión last night.’

  ‘No, we couldn’t! I mean, no, it hasn’t.’ Charlie backed out of the room he had been working on. ‘I haven’t done the floor in that one yet.’

  I opened the door on the third room.

  ‘See, still a mess,’ Charlie said. ‘Breakfast, did you say? Lead me to it.’ It was the worst impression of unconcerned-builder talk I had ever heard.

  The room was full of junk. Strange junk. A lot more junk than I seemed to remember from when I first looked at the place. Some of it I had definitely seen before, probably by the ruined house with the cistern.

  I dropped an octave down to my schoolmaster’s voice. ‘Charlie . . .?’

  ‘Yes, Chris.’

  ‘This is the most arty pile of junk I have ever seen.’

  He shrugged apologetically. ‘Yes, Chris.’

  ‘It’s an amateur-dramatics barricade, Charlie.’

  ‘I know, Chris.’

  ‘Who built it?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it; Morva did it.’ This primary school thing was catching.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s only until everybody has left, she said.’

  ‘Why?’

  Tim emerged from next door. ‘I’m ready for your Turkish breakfast.’

  ‘Go ahead; it’s on the table. We’ll join you in a minute. I think. You were saying, Charlie?’

  He lowered his voice to a murmur. ‘I found something. When I started preparing the floor. I thought it was a bag of rubbish at first but it wasn’t. It’s a body, Chris. There’s someone buried in there.’

  ‘And you piled junk . . . What kind of a body?’

  ‘A really dead one.’

  ‘Charlie . . .’

  ‘It’s not her. It’s not that woman you were looking for. I’m pretty sure it’s a bloke. Definitely a bloke, actually.’

  ‘Let me get this straight: you found a dead body in there, but you thought it was really quite a good pla
ce for him? Best to just leave him there? No point bothering the police with trivial stuff?’

  ‘Hey, first she wanted me to simply put the cement floor over him, but I refused.’

  ‘Heroic stuff.’

  ‘She said she’ll call the police once everyone’s gone home. Morva doesn’t want the police here while her students are around. Bad for business. Too much to explain.’

  ‘I’d say.’

  ‘She hasn’t really . . . registered the business as such. Tax-wise. Or the building for business use. Couldn’t really, with the sanitary arrangements being what they are . . .’

  ‘Crap. I don’t care. Dead bodies don’t simply appear; there’s usually blunt instruments involved. Or pointy ones. With thoroughly unpleasant people at the other end of them.’

  ‘He must have been there for ages.’

  ‘You’re an expert on human decomposition now.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a very fresh corpse – like, it didn’t smell or anything. Must have been there a few years.’

  ‘He is right, you know.’

  I whirled round. Dr Kalogeropoulos was giving me a thoroughly unprofessional look through his bottle-glass spectacles. ‘You knew about this?’ I just hate it when everyone seems to know more than me. Although I should be used to it by now.

  ‘Not all along. But I have taken an interest lately. For Morva’s sake.’

  ‘Who is he? Was he?’

  ‘Petros Grapsas.’

  ‘Ah, well, that explains everything. I’ll get some more junk to pile on top of him, shall I?’

  ‘He was a kind of tax inspector. Investigating fraud. Killed by accident. Apparently.’

  ‘By accident.’

  ‘A scuffle. He fell, hit his head on something.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Indeed. They panicked and hid the body. It happened before I came back here, so he’s been in there a while.’

  ‘And, of course, they thought a deserted village was a good place to stash him. What a disappointment. Why didn’t they just stick him in the graveyard?’

  ‘Probably too scared; you know how superstitious people are around here.’

  ‘No wonder they weren’t keen on Morva moving in and doing the place up.’

  ‘A couple of villagers came up one night, during the last thunderstorm, to try to move the body, but they couldn’t remember where exactly they’d put him in the first place and gave up.’

  ‘I think I saw them as they came past the motorhome,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Did you? The villagers were hoping that if they made sure she didn’t find a builder willing to do the job, Morva would give up. But then Mr Honeysett here turned up.’

  ‘I knew it would turn out to be my fault.’

  ‘You brought Charlie here.’

  Charlie crossed his arms in front of his chest and nodded in agreement: all your fault.

  ‘Well, we can’t just forget about him, even if he was a tax inspector,’ I said loudly for the benefit of Morva who had just entered the courtyard.

  She had the decency to put on a sheepish expression. ‘It’s only until tomorrow; then I’ll call the police. Honestly,’ she said. ‘Did you come up to see me, doctor?’

  ‘No, not you.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ she said and beat a hasty retreat towards the other end of the courtyard to join Tim at the table.

  ‘Well, that’s all sorted, then,’ Charlie said cheerfully and went the same way.

  That left the doctor and me looking at one another for a few heartbeats. ‘You’ve come to see me, then,’ I concluded.

  He sighed heavily. ‘Perhaps we could take a little walk.’

  Making Turkish breakfast in Greece had, of course, been tempting fate. Reluctantly, I followed the doctor out of the courtyard. He struck out at a surprising pace into the heart of the ruined village. We passed Helen who was sketching another ruin from a respectful distance. The doctor squinted in the direction of my wave. ‘Is there somebody?’

  ‘Helen, over there, in the shade under the walnut.’

  ‘I’ll have to take your word for it.’

  ‘Your eyesight is really quite bad, isn’t it? I noticed that before.’

  ‘Failing. Failing fast, in fact. A year or two and I’ll be practically blind.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Can’t they . . . operate or something?’

  ‘No. It’s congenital; there’s no way of stopping it. I shouldn’t be driving, really; I only get away with it because I’ve known the roads around here all my life.’

  ‘What will you do when . . . you know? Can you go on practising? As a doctor?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  We had reached a squat deserted farm building and its skeleton crew of outbuildings. He halted by a convoluted fig tree. ‘Is there anyone close by?’

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  ‘Well, there is something you can do. Go away. If you don’t, the local police will soon find a way to get you off the island, anyway.’

  ‘Has this to do with Kyla Biggs?’

  ‘You’ve been sniffing around the olive oil co-op.’

  ‘The one that mysteriously changes its name?’

  ‘The village has a lot invested in that business. My mother has. I have – everything I had. I wasn’t entirely sure what I let myself in for then, but it’s too late now. The income will be important once my eyesight goes completely. Not just for me and my mother; many people in the village rely on the co-op.’

  ‘Where is Kyla?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘She’s alive?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. Yes, she is. Look, they are not bad people, but they’ve got themselves mixed up with mafia types and they are quite ruthless, I assure you. Kyla suspected something was not right and decided to do a bit of investigating. And got caught doing it. They were supposed to get rid of her, but they didn’t. They’re not murderers.’

  ‘Tell that to Mr Junkman down at Morva’s place. So where is she?’

  ‘They’ve pretended to the mafia lot that they got rid of her. They didn’t want to harm her, but they couldn’t just let her go, so they’re keeping her hidden somewhere. She’s fine. But unless they find a way to make sure she doesn’t expose the scheme, they can’t really let her go home. No one knows what to do about it.’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘No, I’m not that involved. It’s best not to get too . . . close.’

  ‘So there’s obviously fraud involved. How does it work?’

  ‘It all started quite small, the usual thing – EU subsidies. There’s never been a real survey of who owns which trees. So, to get maximum EU subsidies, everyone registered the same huge number of trees. From the aerial pictures, one tree looks much like another. No one bothered to count them, so everyone got subsidies for the same trees. Then the subsidies got phased out. So the co-op was formed. A few oil samples were faked and the supermarket deal came.’

  ‘It’s not really organic, then?’

  ‘Oh no, far from it. That would mean real work. No, they get sprayed a lot. For Dacus fly and other pests.’

  ‘And the name changing?’

  ‘It worked once; so why not twice? Another name, another supermarket, another exclusive deal.’

  ‘So that’s where the Moroccan oil comes in.’

  ‘Moroccan oil is good oil and still quite cheap. In a bottle with a label from an organic Greek estate, it suddenly becomes very expensive.’

  ‘I know, I bought some of it. And the supermarkets – don’t they know this is going on? Don’t they visit sometimes to see how it’s all going?’

  ‘The supermarkets try not to know. They all want the business. Were you sent to find out about the oil or to find the woman?’

  ‘I think I was sent to see how well the secret was kept.’

  ‘Then finding out might well put you in danger. You and your friends . . .’

  ‘Is that why you are telling me
? To make it too dangerous for me?’

  A faint smile, a waggle of the head. ‘If you’ve been inside the plantation, then you already know.’ He avoided my eyes, looking vaguely across the narrow valley. ‘My eyesight may be going, but I still know every stone in this village. We used to play here a lot as children. There was only one old couple left up here then, eking out an existence. Keeping a goat, growing some vegetables, keeping chickens. Some winters, they must have been near starvation. Yet they couldn’t bear to leave this place. You don’t belong here, Mr Honeysett. None of you does. You can easily leave and go back to your life in England. This is a poor country and the supermarkets are very rich.’ I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut across me. ‘Have you tried the oil?’

  ‘I bought some in England.’

  ‘And did you like it? Of course you did. Perhaps you think you are a connoisseur but really you know very little about olive oil. And so it was good enough for you.’

  ‘How about Turkish hazelnut oil, then?’

  ‘You found that out, too? Then you really must go home, Mr Honeysett.’

  ‘What about it?’

  He looked at me for a moment, shrugged: what the hell. ‘That’s a separate venture. Hazelnut oil doesn’t taste of much. With a bit of deodorizing and mixing with strong cheap extra virgin, it makes a passable olive oil. Everyone does it; the Italians did it first. Everyone knows they’re exporting twice as much oil as they produce. It has to come from somewhere, you know.’

  ‘So it’s all rubbish? None of it is real? Where do you go for real olive oil?’

  He pushed himself off from the tree he’d been leaning against and walked off without looking back. ‘Your olive trees. Your own olive trees. Go home and plant some, Mr Honeysett. And take your friends with you. Soon?’

  I watched him walk away until he disappeared behind a building near the church.

  When I returned to the long table in the courtyard, I found Annis in a less than chatty mood. Louise chased the last olive round her plate with a morsel of bread. ‘Nice lunch; every bit as good as last night’s supper.’

  ‘It was breakfast.’

  ‘You have lavish breakfasts.’

  ‘Trying to.’ There was stale bread and some honey left. I drowned the former in the latter and stuffed it in my mouth before Tim could snaffle it. Everyone except the students was here.