by Simon Brett
‘And this was before Barney got married to Zoë?’
‘Oh yes. Barney was a bit of a Jack the lad back then. Kept quite a few women on a string, so far as I can gather.’ Yes, he did, thought Jude ruefully. ‘But out here it was just him and Nita.’
‘So,’ said Carole, ‘she must have been pretty put out when he suddenly announced he was marrying Zoë?’
‘I would assume so. I wasn’t here when that news broke.’ His face darkened. ‘That’s when I was starting to get involved in Barney’s projects in Northern Cyprus.’
‘One thing …’ Jude began. ‘You said Barney wasn’t to know that you’re in Turkey. Presumably, he knows that Henry’s here?’
‘No,’ Fergus replied with some force. ‘And she very much doesn’t want him to.’
‘That’s not going to be easy, is it?’ asked Carole. ‘With her only being in Fethiye, and Barney seeming to be best mates with everyone in the area. We’re very quickly discovering that there are no secrets in Kayaköy.’
‘Henry’s staying in the hotel most of the time. She wants to choose for herself the moment when she makes contact with Barney.’
‘When she confronts him?’ suggested Carole.
‘I didn’t use that word.’ Fergus McNally was becoming very guarded.
‘When,’ intuited Jude, ‘you’ve reported back to her on how her predecessor, Zoë, died?’
But he wasn’t going to be drawn on that either. Something one of them had said had made him clam up. They exchanged mobile numbers, and no one suggested staying for a second drink.
TWENTY
On the way back from Ölüdeniz they stopped at the Kayaköy supermarket to load up with essentials. And to Carole’s mind, seeing the amount of wine and beer Jude loaded into their basket, some non-essentials too. They were served this time by a smiling woman, presumably the wife of the owner, wearing traditional baggy trousers and headscarf. But she, too, knew both their names and the fact that they were staying at Morning Glory.
As soon as they were back there, Jude pounced on the drawer where they had left the iPhone found at Pinara. ‘Funny, isn’t it? The two phone cases with reversed colours. It does suggest to me that they might be owned by the same person.’
‘Well, we’ll know that’s true if “1066” works, won’t we?’
Jude tried switching the phone on, and an expression of predictable disgust came across her face. ‘Out of bloody power. How is it that they can get so much battery life on a tablet and still so little on a phone?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Carole, feeling suddenly empowered by her prescience. Serenely moving towards the stairs, she announced, ‘I have a “universal all-in-one mobile phone charger”. And an adaptor for Turkish sockets.’
‘Ooh, get you,’ said Jude, half under her breath. ‘Think of everything.’
Carole plugged the lead into the adaptor and then, with a bit of hard pushing, the adaptor into the socket. She switched the iPhone on. It immediately told her that the charger she was using was not the official Apple product and might not be supported.
But it was. The home screen appeared and, as instructed, she slid to unlock. A grid of ten numbers appeared. Tensely, she entered ‘1066’.
It worked.
‘Brilliant,’ said Jude. ‘So it did belong to Nita!’
But accessing the phone only worked in the sense that a new screen opened up. It showed a weather forecast for Fethiye. How to move from that to some other function, Carole did not have a clue. Rather disappointed that she couldn’t complete the revelation, she reluctantly asked Jude if she had any idea about the interior workings of an iPhone.
‘I’ve got a friend with an iPad, and I think the basics are much the same.’ She took the mobile from Carole and pressed the indented white square at the bottom of the screen. Immediately, a grid of different icons appeared. ‘Let’s try the phone first – see if there are any messages, or at least a list of recent callers.’
Jude showed sufficient dexterity with the options to get where she wanted to. She checked the screen. ‘Well, that’s very odd.’
‘What’s very odd?’ asked Carole, a little tetchy at having become the sidekick in this part of the investigation. Since finally coming round to computers, she had always rather prided herself on her technological know-how.
‘No voicemails. And no record of any recent calls.’ Jude touched the screen a few more times. ‘And only one number in the contacts list.’
‘What does that suggest?’
‘Well, either that the owner had very few friends … or that she – or perhaps he – had only recently got the phone and hadn’t got round to putting in their contacts list.’
‘But the one contact that is there, Jude – is that name significant? One you recognize?’
‘It’s just a single letter.’
‘“B”?’ asked Carole excitedly.
‘That’d be too much to hope for. No, it’s “L”.’
‘Most peculiar.’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t there anything else we can try?’
‘Texts – maybe they sent each other texts?’ Jude’s fingers worked away on the screen, and a smile of satisfaction appeared on her well-rounded face. ‘Yes, much more promising.’
She showed her findings to Carole. The last text received on the iPhone read: ‘See you tomorrow 11 am. Old place. Old purpose. Let’s recapture the moment. L’
The text was dated two days before. The Monday, the day Carole and Jude had arrived in Kayaköy. And the day before Carole had found Nita’s body.
Were they jumping to conclusions to think that ‘the old place’ could be the tomb at Pinara? And that the text was setting up an assignation between Nita and someone else? But who? The obvious candidate for the job would be Barney. But so far they had nothing except circumstance to connect the text message to him.
‘I reckon this must have been a dedicated phone,’ said Jude.
‘What do you mean?’
‘A phone line only used by two people. That’s why there’s only the one contact in it. If it rings then the other person immediately knows who’s calling and can answer or not according to what circumstances or company they are in. It’s quite a popular cover method used by people having an affair.’
‘Is it?’ Carole sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’
‘Well, there’s one thing we can try to see if the other person is Barney.’ As she spoke, Jude deftly pressed the screen to make the call. She could hear the ringing tone from the other end, but no one picked up. Nor did the answering service click in.
‘Well, he wouldn’t answer, would be?’ said Carole.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he told us that thing about Nita having been called away to England because her mother’s ill. We now know her mother died when she was twelve, which must mean Barney knew Nita was dead. So he knows it can’t be her making the call.’
‘Possibly, but not necessarily.’
‘I can’t see any alternative.’
‘The alternative possibility is that Barney was merely reporting what he had been told. That someone else told him Nita had gone to England.’
‘I suppose it’s just possible,’ Carole said grudgingly. ‘But unlikely … I mean, they’d had this long relationship … surely, at some point Nita would have mentioned her mother’s early death?’
‘Who knows?’ asked Jude in a manner Carole didn’t find helpful. ‘Still,’ she went on, ‘perhaps they never used the dedicated mobile for phoning – that’s why there’s no record of recent calls. Perhaps they only used it for texting.’
‘Hm,’ mumbled Carole, unwilling to admit that this was actually quite a good idea. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘I don’t think we can put it off any longer. We contact Barney.’
‘What, text him on this phone?’
‘No, he’ll smell a rat if we do that. I’ll just call him on his mobile.’
‘Do you want to do th
at on your own?’
‘Why should I?’ But Jude could feel herself blushing. She didn’t think she could keep from Carole’s beady scrutiny that there was a history between her and Barney Willingdon for much longer.
So she made the call right there in the main room of Morning Glory. And there was no reply from Barney’s mobile.
Though it was only the previous evening that they’d seen him at Antik, Jude still got the feeling that he was deliberately not picking up the phone. She left him a message, though without much hope of its being returned.
Every possible advance they could make on their investigation seemed to involve talking to Barney. And both of them wanted very much to get on with the investigation.
Jude stripped down to a bikini and lay on a lounger, but was still clearly distracted. She couldn’t get comfortable and kept moving towels and shifting her position. Her trashy novel was unable to reassert its tenuous hold on her attention. Eventually, she said, ‘There is one person we could ask where Barney might be.’
‘Who? And don’t say “Erkan” because we’ve—’
‘Not Erkan. Our neighbour.’
‘You mean,’ said Carole with an involuntary shudder, ‘Travers Hughes-Swann.’
‘Yes. He said he’d watched Barney building every one of his villas. He might well know which one he’s likely to be in.’
Carole harrumphed but was forced to admit Travers was their only lead. She looked disapprovingly at her friend’s bikini décolletage. ‘If we go and see him, I hope you’re going to be wearing rather more than that.’
‘You bet I am,’ came the reply. ‘I’ve heard of roving eyes. His eyes don’t rove, they remain firmly fixed on the point between the breasts.’
Both of them were wearing high-necked cotton tops as they walked down the track towards Brighton House. As they turned off the track towards the open railed gates, Travers Hughes-Swann stepped forward from the house to greet them. ‘Well, hello. How very nice to see you lovely ladies. And you’ve timed it very well; I’ve just put the kettle on.’
His words again gave them the uncomfortable feeling that they had been spied on, that he had heard them planning the visit and put the kettle on in anticipation of their arrival. Though both knew they were probably being paranoid.
Travers was dressed as he had been when each of them had met him, in khaki shorts and thick leather sandals over beige woollen socks. With an expansive gesture which somehow didn’t suit him, he said, ‘Welcome to Brighton House!’
Jude was intrigued to see the building he had so vaunted over Morning Glory, and her first impressions were not great. Travers’s idea of keeping the authenticity of Turkish tradition seemed to involve the minimum of modernization. He’d said that Brighton House had been converted from old farm buildings, and that was exactly what they still looked like. A low-pitched roof of red clay tiles seemed to be the only improvement he had made. If he’d perhaps aimed to create rustic charm, then all he had achieved was an aura of scruffiness.
But if he had done little to adapt the house itself, he’d clearly focused his building ambitions on the garden. With, in the view of both women, mixed success. If this was what Travers Hughes-Swann reckoned to be traditional Turkish style, then he’d read different guidebooks from Carole’s.
Certainly, he’d used the authentic local stone, but what he’d done with it was more in keeping with an eighteenth-century Gothic folly than a Turkish garden. The rockeries were kind of all right – it was hard to go wrong with the resplendent plant life available in Turkey – but even they had a rather dated fifties feel. The other structures, however, were the worst kind of garden-centre kitsch – elaborate water-features, pointless grottoes, free-standing unfinished walls. And, to compound the tastelessness, set into the hillside was a kind of stone arbour, inexpertly modelled on a Lycian tomb.
Given Travers’s apparent pride in it, his garden was surprisingly ill-tended. Though some of the plants were neatly fixed to bamboos with plastic ties, weeds flourished amid the shrubs and flowers. The hedges were shaggy. Wheelbarrows and the apparatus for mixing cement lay untidily on the paths. An ancient battered Land Rover stood on the drive.
One mild surprise was the absence of a pool, which showed the villa was somewhere to live in, rather than to be let out to well-heeled tourists.
Carole and Jude would rather not have been forced to comment on what they saw, but Travers Hughes-Swann’s next words, ‘Well, what do you think of it?’ rather cut off that escape route.
‘Well,’ said Jude. ‘It must’ve taken hours.’
‘Certainly did,’ he replied with satisfaction.
‘And did you do it all on your own?’ asked Carole.
‘Oh yes. All my own work. I don’t believe in paying people to execute work which has all been my own conception. I’m not like your mate Barney.’
‘Talking of our mate Barney—’
‘But, as I say, the kettle’s on. Now what would you like – tea or coffee? Or,’ he asked suspiciously, ‘are you the kind of English tourists who spend all your time in foreign countries knocking back the cheap booze?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Carole, and Jude, who would quite have fancied a beer or a glass of wine, mumbled some similar sentiment. Both agreed that coffee would be nice – Jude’s with milk, Carole’s without.
‘Good. I’m not a drinker myself. I don’t like anything that makes me feel out of control. It’s lack of control, you know, that makes today’s youngsters behave so appallingly. Their parents spent more time trying to understand them than discip-line them. Since the last war, England has lost its backbone, you know …’ He must have read something in the women’s faces that made him cut short his diatribe. ‘Right, well, you just relax in my little suntrap—’ he gestured up towards his faux-tomb – ‘and I’ll sort out the beverages.’
The ‘suntrap’ was the tidiest part of the garden. No weeds grew between the square stones of its floor, and a broom propped against the wall suggested that it had been recently swept. The idea that Travers might have done it in anticipation of their arrival was slightly unsettling.
Carole and Jude exchanged looks but, feeling that their host might be eavesdropping, didn’t say anything. They just sat, slightly awkwardly, on the hard metal chairs in the tomb-like structure, waiting for him to reappear with the tray of coffee.
The mugs which he brought out were chipped and didn’t look very hygienic, but it wasn’t the moment to comment. Instead, Carole asked, ‘And you say your wife is bedridden?’
‘Yes, very sad. Totally immobilized by a stroke some years back.’
Jude thought this was rather odd. The previous day Travers had spoken of going out for lunch near Pinara with Phyllis and implied that a sudden deterioration in her condition had made him change his plans. But if his wife was permanently bedridden, then he had just used her as an excuse to ask Jude out for lunch. Which didn’t endear him to her.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Carole. ‘And do you do all the caring yourself?’
‘Oh yes. I wouldn’t want anyone else involved. You know, I like to feel Phyllis still has her dignity.’
‘Of course.’
‘Actually, the reason we dropped by,’ said Jude, ‘is that we wanted to contact Barney, and he doesn’t seem to be answering his phone.’
‘Oh? Well, why don’t you contact Nita? She’ll know where he is, for sure.’
Carole didn’t want to explain why they didn’t try to contact Nita, so she just said, ‘She doesn’t seem to be answering her phone either.’
‘But, Travers,’ said Jude, ‘you told me you knew all the villas Barney’s built round here. I wondered if you might know which one he’s likely to be staying in.’
‘Well, he doesn’t really have a pattern about that. It depends which one’s empty … you know, hasn’t got any holidaymakers in it.’
‘Ah, I see.’ Jude felt a little dejected. Were they back to the position of waiting until Barney chose to contact
them?
‘For choice he usually stays in Morning Glory, but of course he won’t be doing that with you there.’
‘No.’
‘As a matter of fact, though, I do happen to know which of his other villas are occupied at the moment.’ He winked one wrinkle-surrounded eye. ‘I like to keep my ear to the ground, you know. With the right contacts, you can find out everything that goes on in Kayaköy.’
‘I’m sure you can.’
‘And I’d put money on the fact that Barney’s staying in a villa called Tulip Cottage.’
‘Oh well, we might drive down and see if Barney’s in,’ said Carole. ‘Where is the villa exactly?’
‘Just further along the hillside towards the village. You don’t need to take the car. It’s easily walkable.’
‘Well, thank you.’ Jude downed the contents of her coffee mug, trying to avoid the chip on its rim. ‘No time like the present. We’ll go and see if he’s in.’
They both left Brighton House with some relief.
The security at Tulip Cottage was at a considerably higher level than at Morning Glory. Solid metal gates were the only break in a high stone wall surrounding the property. Set in cement to either side of the gates were old clay amphorae. Carole and Jude could not see any of the villa itself except for the terracotta-coloured tiles of its roof.
There was an entryphone with a keypad by the side of the gates. But pressing the call button elicited no response.
TWENTY-ONE
When they got back to Morning Glory, they found they had a visitor. Though they had shut up the villa itself, the main gates were not locked, and sitting on a lounger by the pool was Kemal. He still looked scruffy in jeans and grubby T-shirt, but when he began to speak he was a lot more coherent than when they had last seen him at Cin Bal.
‘I thought if I wait you come back here,’ he said.
‘I was just about to get us a drink,’ said Jude as she went across to unlock the front door. ‘Can I get you something?’
He shook his head firmly. ‘No, today I do not drink.’
‘Fine. Not even something non-alcoholic?’