by Desmond Cory
The name, thus earnestly repeated, did indeed seem to ring some sort of a bell in the hollow echoing fastnesses of Dobie’s mind. ‘Oh. I mean, ah! That Tolga Arkin.’ Lights were now going on and off the length of the cabin and with a soft grunt of satisfaction Dobie grabbed for his cigarette packet. Maybe after all Kate was right. His nerves weren’t steady, not steady at all. Having lit up and exhaled, he risked another glance out of the porthole. Nothing to be seen out there but thick grey cloud. That was better …
‘Well, you ought to know something about him, as he’s your boss.’
‘He is?’
‘And mine, of course. Indirectly. He’s the Minister of Education. President’s appointment. And,’ Ozzie said, warming to his theme, ‘his son’s the Vice-Rector of the university. Big tall bloke. Not a bad sort. You’ll be meeting him soon enough.’
‘I’ll have to get all these names sorted out. They seem a bit … you know … strange, at first.’
‘Cem Arkin. He’s a good lad. Bit of a hot shot, too. Professor of Information Technology or something like that before he was thirty: Lancaster I think it was or mebbe Leicester. Anyway he went back to Cyprus for the same reason as I did though he’s more of a real Cypriot than me; I mean he was born there and so forth. An’ I’m not sayin’ I’m in that class myself. I’m not what you’d call an intellectual. Just an ’ardnosed engineerin’ consultant, really, but then we need engineers, too. An’ plenty of them.’
‘And mathematicians, I suppose.’
‘Goes without saying. Basis of everything nowadays, isn’t it? But they’re not so easy to find, y’know – mathematics professors aren’t. That’s why Berry Berry’s invited you along to the party an’ you’ll be made very welcome, don’t have any worries on that score.’
Dobie’s worries were in fact of a much more immediate nature but now and at last they were being slightly eased. The aircraft hadn’t actually crashed, or not as yet, and the cabin crew, he saw, were indeed commencing to serve the passengers with strengthening beverages, an encouraging development. ‘But what,’ he asked, ‘happened to that girl?’
‘What girl? The air-hostess? Look, if I was you—’
‘No, no, the girl, or young lady, perhaps I should have … The one who had the job before me. She used to be one of my graduate students, you see, and that’s why I … Derya, her name was. In fact she married another student called Seymour—’
‘Ah, Derya. Yes.’
Dobie waited for further comment, but Ozzie’s streak of garrulity seemed to have fizzled out. He was looking down now at the folded newspaper he held across his lap and might indeed have been glancing through the headlines, though he obviously wasn’t. Dobie tried again. ‘I understand she … well … died. And that’s why I was sent for, in a manner of speaking. Not very pleasant circumstances, really, in which to take up a post. But of course it happens sometimes and life must go on, I quite see that.’
‘You’re right about the circumstances. Not very pleasant, no, not pleasant at all.’
‘Oh dear. A painful illness, was it?’
‘Did you ever meet her husband?’
‘Yes. Before they were married. Why?’
‘Cos it looks very much,’ Ozzie said, ‘as if he went an’ croaked her.’
‘Croakter?’ Dobie was flabbergasted.
‘Shouldn’t really prejudge the bloke. The case hasn’t come up yet. But there ain’t very much doubt about it, far as I can see. I mean, they say he’s confessed to it an’ all. Bit of a bloomin’ tragedy all the same.’ Ozzie sucked in his lower lip and released it with a little plopping sound. ‘Nice little bit of stuff like that, an’ intelligent with it. Very popular girl, Derya was. Mebbe a bit too popular but that’s by the way.’
Dobie’s flabbergastification had now turned to something like petrifaction. ‘My God, if I’d known that, I’d never have taken the job.’
‘Oh, no need to look at it like that. Life has to go on, like you said, students have to be given leckchers an’ so on. No one’s goin’ to resent it because you … I mean, we may be a bit thick in Cyprus but we ain’t that stupid.’
‘It isn’t that,’ Dobie said ‘It’s … Oh, well. Never mind.’
Ozzie wouldn’t understand. Naturally not. Nobody would understand, except Kate. Dobie tried to check that line of thought, though, as soon as it occurred to him. Fifteen minutes into the flight, and he was missing Kate already. It was ridiculous.
2
Dear Kate, Dobie wrote. Subsequently pausing. Oddly enough, this was the first letter he had ever written to Kate … or perhaps not oddly at all, since they’d been living in the same house virtually from the time of their first meeting … and he wondered if perhaps this opening might not be better rephrased a little more effusively. Having considered various alternatives, however, he let the heading stand. Kate wasn’t, after all, an effusive person. Neither was he.
How’s the medical profession? The teaching profession seems to be doing all right. At least I haven’t fallen over anything yet, not even off the aeroplane, though I had a perfectly terrible trip and my companion, the chap who spoke to you on the phone that time, wasn’t at all reassuring. Never mind, I’m here now and quite low down on the ground I’m happy to say, indeed just about at sea level which is the way I like it. In fact the house they’ve given me is very close to the sea, though right behind me there’s an uncommonly precipitous slope called in Turkish, and I hope without ironic intent, the Two-Finger Mountain. The university is some five miles distant. Also located in the same general area are about 150,000 prickly-looking bushes interspersed with bare patches and beyond this outbreak of luxuriant vegetation a rather barren plain extends into what most people would call infinity (though I wouldn’t). On the left this flat expanse changes abruptly to acres and acres of rather nice blue sea, in fact to the Bay of Salamis, where I can see various hotels and suchlike structures and, in the far distance, Famagusta. I’m afraid I’m not much good at describing places but I hope this is the sort of thing you wanted to know. So there it is. They’ve given me a car on loan and three free days to settle in with and there’s a restaurant bar sort of place round the corner where I can get nosh so you don’t have to worry about that; I’m being fed all right. Mutton chops, mostly. Of course the house has a kitchen and a fridge and all that so I’ll be able to do some cooking when I feel like getting down to it. There’s also a telephone on which I plan to give you a ring quite soon: 90-357-31962 for when you reciprocate. You can also call me at the U during office hours but as we don’t kick off for another couple of weeks yet I’ll only be checking in there in the mornings. Or so I should think. It’s pretty damned hot here in the afternoons.
Dobie chewed the end of his felt-tip reflectively and after a while spat, also reflectively. He’d been chewing the wrong end. It tasted awful. His somewhat hazy concepts of the rules of prose composition suggested to him that the commencement of a new paragraph might well be desirable some way back. Oh, well. Better late than never. Sucking the other end of his pen, he stared out of the window in search of inspiration. Since it was now night, the views he had just endeavoured to describe were no longer visible. Nothing out there at all. Only a star-roofed night, a velvety blackness. Anyway it was time, he felt, to move on to some other topic. The human element, perhaps. Though he wasn’t particularly at ease with that subject either.
I haven’t met many of my colleagues yet, except for Ozturk on the plane (you know about) and Prof Berry who met us at the airport and brought me here, I mean to this house. His first name is Bernard so he’s known here as Berry Berry, so Ozzie tells me. Sounds more like your field than mine. In fact he did look rather sleepy but as the bloody plane got in at two o’clock in the morning (three hours late) I suppose that was to be expected.
There are six houses here in this sort of compound: Ozturk, Berry, me and obviously three other chaps I haven’t met yet. The house is OK like I said, but apparently it belonged to my predecessor, that ex-student
of mine I told you about, and her husband. Well, it’s a bit embarrassing or rather awkward as there’s lots of their stuff all over the place and I don’t know what to do with it. I suppose I’ll have to leave it where it is for the time being. He murdered her by the way. I mean I’m only going by what I’ve been told so far but I’m inclined to believe it because there are smears of fingerprint powder all over the place as well and as you must know I’ve had just about all I want of that sort of thing and if I’d known about it I certainly wouldn’t have taken on the job which I’ll be bound is why nobody saw fit to mention it …
Paragraphs, Dobie. Paragraphs. We’re in danger of getting carried away on a wave of emotion, aren’t we? Conduct that ill becomes a mathematician. All the same …
until I got here. But it’s a bit bloody much. Don’t you think?
There. And conveniently enough at the end of the page. Dobie tore the sheet off the pad and crouched, pen poised, ready to continue.
Well? What next?
Writer’s block, wasn’t that what they called it? Nowhere to go. Not to be compared with the dreaded mathematician’s block, but an uncomfortable state of affairs all the same, especially when a chatty letter to your lady friend was all you were supposed to be writing. Ridiculous, really. Maybe in his present nervous state … Only he didn’t have anything much to be nervous about now, did he?
Dobie stared for a while at the virgin sheet on the table in front of him and then reluctantly put his pen down. All you did was sit back and relax. Something would come.
He did. Only it didn’t. Or wouldn’t.
A remarkable thing. A simple letter to a close personal friend shouldn’t be beyond the capacities of your average university professor, assuming your a.u.p. to have any personal friends, close or otherwise. Dobie knew of quite a few who didn’t. He looked with his usual mildly beneficent air around the room, looking no longer for inspiration but for something else. What?
An explanation, maybe? For this sudden choking-up of his far from exuberant epistolary flow? Although it hadn’t been going badly just then. The felt-tip had been fairly whizzing across that last page. Yet now, confronted with a clean and unmarked sheet …
He picked up his pen once more.
For all I know she could have been killed in here, I mean right where I’m sitting. Mind you, I’ve no reason to think so. The walls aren’t exuding evil at me or anything like that. They’re just holding the ceiling up as usual. All the same I can’t help feeling …
No.
Kate wasn’t into psychic phenomena and neither was he. Whatever it was that he was feeling at this moment, it was something that couldn’t be very easily described and might in any case be attributed to the effects of residual jet lag. Dobie tore off the page and crumpled it up and threw it into the wastepaper-basket.
Yes. Jet lag, probably. Even now in the stillness of the Mediterranean night he was sometimes conscious of the sullen, whining roar of aircraft engines. Indeed, listening carefully he thought he could hear them now, though the sound had to exist only in his imagination since underneath that constant thrumming crepitation he could also hear a voice, a low yet confident voice with an underlying cockney whine. ‘Bit of a bloomin’ tragedy all the same … Nice little bit of stuff like that …’
A tragedy, yes, you could call it that and even consider it appropriate – she’d been an actress, hadn’t she? as well as a mathematician … and a nice little bit of stuff, if you thought in such terms. A talented girl, anyway. And popular. Maybe too popular – hadn’t he said that? Yes. He had. Dobie wondered what he’d meant by it. Probably not very much.
He got to his feet and wandered aimlessly across the sitting-room towards the bookshelf.
There were quite a few mathematical textbooks there, including – as he’d already noticed – one of his own. Dobie on Paradox. Not exactly a textbook, of course, but something of a standard work and not yet completely outdated, like so much else in that particular field. Twenty years old, though. One of the sad things about being a mathematician is that if you haven’t done your best work before you’re thirty, the chances are you’ll never come to anything. So Derya wouldn’t have. Not that the statistical evidence had ever been properly worked out …
He took the book down from the shelf and looked at the flyleaf, observing his own scrawly signature there with some surprise. All best wishes for the future. John Dobie. A relic of her postgraduate course, no doubt. He hadn’t been notably effusive in those days, either. He couldn’t remember having ever signed the copy for her, but that in itself was hardly surprising. And around the room were other reminders of a colder, wetter and windier existence a few years back in the past, of a time that after all she must have enjoyed or she wouldn’t have … Those framed photographs, for instance, pegged to the wall beside the bookshelf. Student groups. The acting casts of university productions, by the look of them, with herself invariably positioned at or near the centre. Or was that female vanity?
A harmless form of vanity, if so, and as such forgivable. Unlike the academic kind. Not in the least surprising, either; she’d been an inordinately attractive young woman, as the photographs made clear. Nice little bit of stuff, indeed; Ozzie had to have picked up the notorious British passion for understatement. The last thing you’d have guessed from those rather over-formalised studio shots was that … Dobie looked like a professor of mathematics. He knew it. Inasmuch as he looked like anything. Derya certainly didn’t, or hadn’t. She looked like …
Well …
Especially in that very low-cut and diaphanous tunic thing. It really didn’t … But yes, Dobie thought, a recent memory interlocking with a considerably older one somewhere within the little grey cells, we did go to that performance. Some mythical rubbish or other. Parts of it highly indecent. A Restoration comedy, didn’t they call it? A comedy, and now a tragedy. A terrible thing, of course, but …
But I don’t want to know anything about it, Dobie told himself firmly. I don’t want to be concerned in any way. That was how the other thing had started, with Sammy Cantwell killing himself, only he hadn’t; Gwyn Merrick had used that very word, a tragedy, talking about it. Another ex-student …
‘There ain’t very much doubt about it … They say he’s confessed to it an’ all.’
There hadn’t been much doubt about how Sammy had met his death, either. Not at first. But this, too, was ridiculous. There wasn’t the slightest reason to suppose …
Almost with relief, Dobie heard the doorbell. He pushed the book back on the shelf and went to answer it.
‘You shouldn’t have been put here,’ Cem Arkin said. ‘Nothing personal, of course. Delightful to have you with us. You shouldn’t have been put in here is all.’
Quite a sizable fellow, Cem Arkin. His hefty body completely filled one of the sitting-room armchairs and his legs seemed to stretch a preposterous distance across the carpet. Dobie, six foot two in his Argyle socks, was maybe slightly taller but didn’t begin to match the other’s impressive bulk.
He didn’t have a heavy blond Zapata moustache on top of a jutting Kirk Douglas chin, either. But then he lacked charisma. Cem Arkin seemed to have it, in abundance.
‘I understood,’ Dobie said, with a diffidence that in the circumstances he felt was becoming, ‘that there wasn’t anything else immediately available. If it’s inconvenient, I expect I can find a hotel —’
‘It’s the inconvenience to you I’m thinking of.’
‘Oh.’
‘The place hasn’t been properly cleaned out, let alone tidied up.’ Arkin cast piercing glances to left and right, as though assuming command of a Viking ship and finding the scuppers to be devoid of running blood and the state of the starboard gunwales equally unsatisfactory. ‘It’s a bit of a pigsty, in fact. Had the police in, you see. I suppose they’ll have told you about that?’
‘I gather there was a … tragedy, yes.’
‘A crime, if we’re to call a spade a spade.’
‘Er,
yes.’
Arkin, Dobie thought, was probably in reality more of a bloody shovel man, accustomed to saying what he thought and being, no doubt, in a position to be able to do so. Whatever it was he said, however, he said it in excellent English, insofar as anyone can be held to speak excellent English with a sharply clipped public school accent. ‘Which is all the more reason for you to have been put somewhere else. Not a very pleasant place to be, if you’re the imaginative type.’
Dobie wasn’t. ‘You don’t have to worry on that account. I’m not.’
‘Seymour was, to put it mildly.’
‘A writer, wasn’t he?’
‘He claimed to be. Well, yes, he was. Highly thought of, I believe, in some circles. But …’
But not, it would appear, in this locality. Arkin probably had the usual scientist’s opinion of arty-farty literary types. Dobie shared that opinion up to a point. He didn’t recall Seymour all that clearly, but he wouldn’t have used the word imaginative to describe him. Obstreperous, more like. Somewhat of a berk, to be frank. His attention, for some reason, had again been taken up by that photograph over by the bookshelf and Arkin had noted the direction of his gaze.
‘Taken in England, that photograph?’
‘Yes,’ Dobie said. ‘In fact I … Some kind of university production. I saw it myself.’
Arkin’s formidable eyebrows rocketed upwards like Patriot missiles and then descended again. ‘Was she any good?’
‘I don’t really know. I mean, I’m not much of a judge of acting and anyway I was somewhat pissed at the time. But her performance seemed to be well enough received.’
‘If she was wearing that outfit,’ Arkin said, ‘I’m not surprised.’
‘She was. Did she take part in any amateur theatricals while she was here?’