The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  A short silence, in which the pop singer produced more strange gargling sounds and Dobie put his glasses back on.

  ‘I can see what you’re gettin’ at,’ Ozzie said, and snorted. ‘But I don’t agree. Look, like you say, I been in that position meself, I had a few up-an’-downers with my wife when she was here so I know what it’s like and what you just said, it’s a load of cobblers. Derya might’ve acted like she thought she was Aphrodite but she didn’t think that really. No danger. Had her head screwed on real tight if you ask me.’

  ‘No, no, no. That’s not what I meant at all. I wasn’t commenting on her behaviour; it wouldn’t be right for me to comment on her behaviour.’ This was the first time Dobie had seen Cem Arkin even remotely discomfited and he hitched up his eyelids about an eighth of an inch in mild surprise. ‘Of course she had that rather … oncoming manner that a lot of people here would tend to misconstrue. And I heard things, of course. We all did. Nasty remarks. But nothing to my knowledge was ever definitely … But there we are. Back where we started from. Rumours. That’s all they were.’

  ‘Mebbe. But all the same he croaked her.’

  This remark provoked another disconcerted silence, this time less surprisingly. It was Dobie who broke it, though unobtrusively. ‘Did anybody see them? Earlier that evening?’ The others looked at him. Taken aback.

  ‘I mean, I gather you were all around. I wondered if any of you had seen them. Or either of them. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Cem said. ‘I saw them leaving together. In the car. But that was much earlier. Maybe four o’clock.’

  ‘They didn’t say where they were going?’

  ‘No. We didn’t speak. She waved to me, that’s all. She was driving. And that was the last I ever saw of her, come to think of it. I didn’t see him again, either.’

  ‘Not when he got back?’

  ‘Well, I went out myself shortly after that. I saw the lights were on in their house that night but I never … Why do you ask?’

  ‘People say different things,’ Dobie said naively. ‘I was curious. I mean, you say that they went out together but then he must have come back a long time before she did and—’

  ‘Nothin’ unusual about that.’

  Kaya’s glasses were jumping up and down again. ‘I must say this sort of thing annoys me. Nobody knows where Derya went and nobody cares … and it’s her business and nobody else’s, except maybe her husband’s and we’ve no right to poke our noses into that side of things. Well, have we? All the rest is rumour, as Cem says, and I’ve got no time for it. It’s just gossip. Gossip.’

  ‘With no mathematical basis,’ Ozzie said.

  No one laughed.

  After the others had departed Dobie hung around for a while, slumped in the chair with his hat tilted forwards over his eyes. He felt that he was running short of ideas, if he’d ever had any; but then he would have expected to feel that way after a half-bottle of wine and was it three or four brandies? It was quiet there under the pergola, anyway, very quiet indeed; hardly any cars seemed to pass by along the road just behind him, but then the road didn’t really go anywhere, other than to that deserted village and the army camp. Of course there wasn’t any mystery about the car; Derya had driven it back that night, as he had proved earlier that morning, at least to his own satisfaction. But she’d driven it out with Seymour, according to Cem. It wasn’t strange that Cem was apparently the only witness of this event; Cem occupied the house directly opposite and facing the compound entrance, the other houses – including Hillyer’s – being placed much further back. The question was, though, how had Seymour got back? It was a question that could be resolved fairly easily, but to do so Dobie would have to put himself to the considerable effort of straightening his knees and standing up. Frankly, it hardly seemed worth the trouble.

  Some fifteen minutes later, however, he accomplished this feat and wandered through into the lokanta kitchen, where Ali was sitting in the corner reading that morning’s Bügun, flipping the pages over expertly one-handed, and where Zeynep was standing by the sink drying the dishes, a perfectly normal and equitable division of labour. ‘Oh ’ullo, Derby. Enjoy your murl?’

  ‘My what? Oh, yes. My murl was excellent, thanks.’

  She turned away from the sink towards him, vigorously wiping her dampened hands. ‘Can I get you anyfink else?’

  ‘Oh, no. Nothing else. It was just that I wanted to ask you something. You told me that you saw Mr Seymour come back that night, you know, the night of the … The night when he …’

  ‘So I did then. Quite distinkly. It wasn’t all that dark.’

  ‘Well, how did he get back?’

  ‘In a turksey.’

  Yes. Well, he would have. How else?

  ‘One of the university turkseys it woz. Old Raif’s turksey lark I told ’em.’

  ‘So he’d have come back here from the university?’

  ‘Bound to’ve done.’

  Ali-in-the-corner continued to read his newspaper throughout this exchange, ignoring it completely. He wasn’t sulking. He didn’t speak English.

  Dobie lowered his tone respectfully all the same when he asked, ‘How did your husband come to lose his arm, Zeynep? In the war?’

  ‘The war? Him? Not bloody larkly. No, he use to work in the docks, see, when this fragging great packing case come slarding down on top of him. Lucky escape, the doctor said.’

  That was one way of looking at it. ‘All the same, it must have given him a bit of a frart.’

  ‘Yes, scared him shitless, the pore old bugger. Put him off work for the rest of his laugh, he says.’

  ‘Well, we all feel that way sometimes,’ Dobie said.

  It was, he thought, evidence of a kind. Zeynep seemed after all to be a truthful person and one incapable of doing serious harm to anyone or anything, except the English language. Otherwise, all that he had to work with was rumour. Gossip. What people said. The nice lady should have known better than to ask him to look for evidence in a place like this. Everything you built here had to be built on sand. On the sound of voices, talking in the shade, circling round to return to the point they’d started from.

  A pleasant way, though, to spend a hot afternoon. Eating a good murl and knocking back the wine and brandy. Listening to what people had to say. His future colleagues. He hadn’t found any of them unlikeable. Just the little agile-nosed chap, the Professor of Archaeology, Kaya, had once or twice seemed inclined to get somewhat stroppy. Perhaps because the conversation at that point had impinged on his special field in a way that he’d disapproved of. And perhaps not. ‘You don’t want to take too much notice of Kaya,’ Cem Arkin had told Dobie later, sotto voce. ‘He’s from Ankara.’ Which didn’t seem to explain very much. Unless he’d meant to imply that Kaya, too, was a visitor. Like Dobie. Like Seymour. Perhaps in a way like Derya …

  Dobie was now in his late forties and, like most others in his age-group, was disposed to accept male dominance in academic life as a simple fact of everyday existence especially on the professorial level. You didn’t think of this as being either good or bad; you took it for granted, maybe as a part of that British tradition that Tolga Arkin went on about. Academic wives – Berry Berry’s, for instance – had their place in it. But Derya had been an academic in her own right. That was different. And what I have to imagine, Dobie thought, is the effect she’d have had here in this virtually all-male enclave, upon all these affable but serious, maybe even rather portentous gentlemen … a cockatoo, let’s say, in a cage of jackdaws. Showing off its stunning legs in bright-coloured miniskirts and on occasion, if Hillyer were to be believed, showing off a great deal more. Never mind the Turkish officers that Zeynep talked about. What kind of inner turmoils and commotions mightn’t she have instigated right here?

  Where she hadn’t any business to have been, really. Professors everywhere, in Dobie’s experience, get pretty uptight about things like status and incidental perks. The Tuzla Gardens houses were professorial acc
ommodation. Derya was only an Assistant Professor; the scum of the earth. So she had to have wangled it, somehow. And perhaps it wouldn’t be very prudent to enquire too closely into her methods. Even those who didn’t enquire, though, might well still feel free to resent them. And Seymour, of course, as an academic husband …

  Not what you’d call a privileged position to be in. And not really happy for Derya, either. No balance, Cem Arkin had said. Probably not. She’d jumped on to an obviously unstable stepping-stone. Maybe with a little more time, things would have settled down. Though more likely not.

  Dobie wasn’t finding it altogether easy. He still found it hard to get rid of the feeling that he was living in someone else’s house, but that wasn’t it. He’d settled down almost at once in Klaus Schindler’s flat in Vienna on the European Cultural Centre’s exchange arrangement, though it was true he’d been a trifle disconcerted to discover that Klaus’s girlfriend had decided to include herself in on the deal. Vienna, after all, was notoriously a civilised city. Not like Cyprus. But that wasn’t it, either. It was …

  Yes. He was feeling lonely. That was it.

  Of course this was a nice house, he couldn’t deny it. Reasonably well appointed. Well worth wangling, maybe even worth the guessed-at spot of discreet sexual blackmail. But somehow it didn’t add up to the cosy little kitchen in Ludlow Road and the clatter of the breakfast things as Kate laid the table. Dobie, the exile, pined for the known and familiar. He, personally, would take Kate in preference to those long Cypriot legs any day of the week. Kate was good value. That was why. Maybe she could even come up with something in London. He hoped so …

  And meanwhile there was one other little thing that he could try, in pursuance of a stray thought that had that moment entered his mind. There was nothing unusual about that; Dobie’s mind was normally a crowded thoroughfare jostling with reflections about almost anything other than the subject he imagined himself to be at that moment thinking about, and this particular waif was no different. Except in that it might be possibly acted upon. Dobie rose from his chair and went upstairs, his hat still tilted forwards over his eyes. He had forgotten to take it off.

  Upstairs, and into my lady’s chamber. Where it had happened. My lady’s wardrobe stood where, presumably, it had always stood, to one side of the room beside the bed, and Dobie stood for a few moments where Seymour, according to his narrative, had stood quietly at the threshold, before clumping heavily across the room to pull open the wardrobe door. My lady’s shoes were arranged, not very tidily but at least in pairs, on a metal rack at the bottom. Dobie took them out, one pair at a time, to examine them.

  They all seemed to be lightweight summer shoes, as might have been expected, flimsy little creations with high narrow heels, though one pair had much lower heels and seemed to be considerably stouter than the others. Kate, Dobie thought, would probably have designated them as walking shoes, though they were in fact more or less the kind of shoe she wore all the time. Except in bed; of course. Kate’s shoes, though, were invariably spotless. These weren’t. Clods of grey mud had been caught and held in the space between heel and sole on both shoes and there were dark mud splashes across the insteps. The mud had long since been converted by the dry heat within the wardrobe into lumps of solid dust which powdered and flaked at the touch of Dobie’s fingers, but the shoes were muddy all right, although a clear patch on the right sole showed where fragments had been scraped or rubbed away on the pedals of the Renault. Black shoes with neat grey plastic buckles. The shoes she’d been wearing the night she’d been killed, then, if Seymour’s story could be believed. And it was beginning to look as though on certain points of detail it could be.

  Of course she hadn’t been wearing them at the moment she was killed. She wouldn’t have worn shoes in bed, any more than Kate did. Or anyone else. Dobie turned to look at the stripped-down bed. Probably the police had tidied up in here; it wouldn’t have been Zeynep. Berry Berry had been right about that: Zeynep was a vigorous and conscientious cleaner but she wouldn’t touch anything of Derya’s. Or even of Seymour’s. Perhaps one of the investigating policemen had put the shoes away, had folded and hung up Derya’s discarded clothes; perhaps she’d done those things herself, before going to bed; it didn’t matter, did it? Not unless …

  He looked down again at the shoes he was holding, one in each hand. There was something else unusual about them, or at any rate something that made them different to all the others. It looked as though she’d put in fitted cushion soles, either because she’d found them a little too big or else to make them more comfortable for … walking, of course. What else? Dobie’s fidgety fingers, moving instinctively rather than in pursuit of anything concrete, (which in fact they weren’t), picked contemplatively at one of the loose soles, freeing it, pulling it out, finally encountering beneath it … What?

  A slip of paper. Folded.

  Great Scot, Dobie thought. It has to be a clue. Just like in the … But how incredible. It had never occurred to him that these mildly ridiculous Sherlock Holmes caperings might actually uncover anything substantial. No, of course they hadn’t. A scrap of folded paper, that was all, she must have put in there to give a little extra support to her instep … or something. All the same, his fingers moved slowly and carefully as he unfolded the paper; it was dry as the mud had been and set in its creases and might very easily disintegrate if he … Ah. It had been folded up like that for a long, long time, that was obvious. Which was strange if Derya … Ah, again. Yes. Yes. There …

  Bloody hell. All in Turkish.

  As might after all have been expected.

  Some kind of an official document, though. Or at least it appeared to be. With a black and white photograph stapled to the top of it, though the staple had long since rusted and fallen away and the photograph itself was badly faded. It showed the face of a woman and that was about all you could say for sure. Maybe in a better light, or with a magnifying glass … The document, whatever it was, was typewritten and a name, most probably the name of the woman in the photograph, had been entered in ink on the top line, opposite the heading Isim. Black printed capital letters. It was legible all right but it wasn’t a name Dobie had ever heard of. SABIHA METTI.

  Dobie switched on the bedside lamp and moved the photograph into the circle of light. A name he was sure he’d never heard of, and a photograph of a woman he was quite sure he’d never seen. All very disappointing. Clues were supposed to mean something, dammit. This one didn’t, although the bright light from the bulb was showing up the face on the photograph much more clearly, picking out the over-all contours rather than any detail. The line of mouth, chin and neck had gone for ever, but enough remained to show that the original had been a very good-looking woman. Say in her middle thirties, at a wild guess. With fine dark eyes, Dobie thought, under attractively curved eyebrows, though something in their expression was … well, was hard to define. A passport-size photograph, head and shoulders only. Some kind of a fringed shawl had been drawn across the shoulders that otherwise might have been bare, and under the folds of the shawl she seemed to be wearing a necklace, maybe a silver necklace as it had caught the light of the photographer’s flash; wide silver or maybe metal links supporting a curious pendant emblem that hung at the base of the woman’s throat and that looked like a capital letter V but more probably … No. I’ll need a magnifying lens for this, Dobie thought, and I doubt if it’ll help much even if I can find one somewhere. The photograph was old and the tones had faded and only those dark searching eyes were still bold and clear. There was something about their level gaze that—

  The open wardrobe door emitted a groaning creak, causing Dobie to look round in sudden alarm. It had given him a frart. And it also made him aware that he was now inexplicably, well, no, not worried, not exactly worried, but filled for no reason with what if you wanted to be melodramatic you might have called a sense of foreboding, as though he had unthinkingly stepped – as Derya apparently had – into muddy waters, a dark and om
inous pool that might reach up in a matter of moments to close chokingly over his head, leaving nothing but his hat floating on its clotted surface. His hat? What was he … Dobie clicked his tongue and took his hat off and then, having nowhere to put it, slipped it back on again.

  Dark, he thought. That’s the operative word. Dark eyes, dark eyebrows, dark hair. Shadows in the sun. That was what the photograph showed. A darkness. But not a quiet or a peaceful darkness: a darkness full of furtive movements, quick tapping footsteps, the sound of voices whispering in the night. Oh, God, Dobie thought, I’m a visitor here. A visitor by definition. A Visiting Professor. I’ve got no business to be poking my nose into other people’s affairs, into other people’s secrets, Seymour, Derya, Sabiha Metti whoever she is …

  Or whoever she was.

  Because looking down at the paper again he saw that it was dated. Down there in the bottom comer: 22.7.74. How long had Derya been keeping it, then? Because she’d only come to Cyprus herself three years ago and she certainly hadn’t been keeping this paper under the sole of her shoe for anything like that length of time. It would surely have been worn to fragments there in three months, let alone three years. No, the shoe had to have been a temporary hiding-place; most probably she’d have slipped the paper in there under the sole as soon as she’d returned from … wherever it was she’d been that night. And got her shoes muddy.

  Got something else, too. Got myself laid, she’d told Seymour. That part of it might well be true, too. She hadn’t said who by. Probably it didn’t matter. I am a hot-tempered but not a jealous person. And I did it, anyway. So there’s no need to go into all that. No need to stir up any … mud.

  But mud. In mid-July. In Cyprus. It just wasn’t possible.