Into the Blue

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Had Mr Dysart warned you to expect her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was that unusual?’

  ‘No. I’m completely self-contained in the gatehouse flat. There’s no need for me to know if he’s coming – or if a friend of his is either.’

  ‘She came for what – a holiday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Recuperation, I suppose you’d say.’

  ‘Recuperation from what? Had she been ill?’

  ‘She told me she’d been suffering from depression. Her sister died in tragic circumstances last year. Her psychiatrist recommended—’

  ‘Ah! She had a psychiatrist?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘We may therefore assume her depression was not … trivial?’

  ‘I never said it was.’

  ‘No. You did not. So, Miss Mallender came to Rhodes to recuperate, courtesy of Mr Dysart. And you made her acquaintance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Befriended her, in fact?’

  ‘I’d like to think so.’

  ‘You remained in the gatehouse flat. She stayed in the villa.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you offered to show her the island?’

  ‘No. That was her own idea. She’d hired a car soon after her arrival and spent a few days seeing the sights. On Wednesday, she hired a car again, for a farewell tour of the island. She was going home next week. She invited me along for the ride.’

  ‘And you thought the opportunity was too good to miss. You thought that out in the car, away from prying eyes in Lindos, you would have her all to yourself.’

  In a sense, he had thought precisely that, but it was a sense which Miltiades was clearly unable or unwilling to envisage. ‘I accepted her invitation. That’s all.’

  ‘Very well. Miss Mallender hired the car here in Rhodes Town on Wednesday afternoon, according to the rental company’s records. Were you with her when she did so?’

  ‘No. I didn’t even know then what she was planning. The first I heard of it was when she got back to the villa that evening. That’s when she asked me along.’

  ‘And when did the “farewell tour” commence?’

  ‘The following day.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Katavia and Monolithos.’

  ‘And yesterday?’

  ‘We visited Ancient Kamiros in the morning. After lunch—’

  ‘You went to Profitis Ilias.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Heather had been there before, but hadn’t had time to climb to the summit. She wanted to put that right.’

  ‘No other reason?’

  ‘She said the atmosphere appealed to her.’

  ‘Did it appeal to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The hotel was closed, all the villas shut up. There wasn’t a soul anywhere. And the silence was … unsettling.’

  ‘But Miss Mallender did not find it so?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even when you thought you saw somebody in the hotel?’

  ‘I didn’t mention it to her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t be sure they were really there.’

  ‘In that case, you will be interested to know that we could find no sign of anybody having been on the premises.’

  ‘Perhaps I did imagine it, then.’

  ‘Perhaps you did.’ Miltiades paused, then went on: ‘You both started to climb to the summit, then you stopped and Miss Mallender went on alone. Why?’

  ‘I was tired. Heather wasn’t.’

  ‘And that was the last you saw of her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You merely sat on a tree trunk waiting – for nearly an hour – until you became concerned for her safety.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Suddenly, Miltiades brought the flat of his right hand down hard on the tabletop. The impact made Harry jump; even the constable at the door looked startled. ‘You are lying, Mr Barnett,’ Miltiades said, in a harshly raised voice, ‘lying with every word.’

  For a moment, Harry was too shocked to respond. His numbed brain told him to cling to one thought: that this abrupt change of tempo was merely an interrogator’s device, a show of aggression designed to unsettle him after the subdued exchange of question and answer.

  ‘You made sexual advances to Miss Mallender, which she resisted. Then you tried to rape her. But something went wrong and you ended by strangling her with her own scarf.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You then staged the car crash so as to give yourself an excuse for not raising the alarm before nightfall.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You murdered her and left her half-naked body on the mountainside for us to discover.’

  There it was again. The picture his mind could not keep at bay. Heather’s bruised, gashed, lifeless body, sightless eyes staring, speechless mouth sagging … They had found her. There was no hope left anymore. She was dead and they had found her.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Harry.’ Miltiades’ voice had struck a different note now: a gentle, insistent note of invitation. Unburden your conscience, it urged him, share the load with me. ‘You did not mean to kill her, I know. It was her fault as much as yours. Is that not right? Is that not how it was?’

  ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘Where you left her, Harry. Where else? Have a cigarette and tell me all about it.’

  Miltiades was holding a packet open for him and Harry reached out automatically to take one. It was when he noticed the brand – Karelia Sertika, the brand he had himself been smoking on Profitis Ilias – that he hesitated. Miltiades’ smile was too broad, his sympathy too blatant. Harry looked down at the tape recorder. It was no longer running. In some moment when his attention had been diverted, the machine had been switched off. But why? There could only be one reason: because Miltiades did not want the lie he had just told preserved on tape. They had not found Heather. They had not found anything, except four cigarette butts by a fallen tree trunk. ‘I’ve already told you all I know,’ Harry said slowly. ‘And I don’t know any more.’

  Miltitades leaned back in his chair and sighed. Then he stretched out his hand and switched the tape recorder back on. He said nothing, but his expression conveyed the message clearly enough: the game of bluff was at an end.

  ‘Do you know where Heather is, Inspector?’

  ‘No, Mr Barnett, I do not. Our search of Profitis Ilias yielded many traces of your presence – but none of hers. Not even the scarf you claim to have chanced upon.’

  Harry did not know whether to feel glad or sorry. Glad she might still be alive, or sorry they had not found her at all. ‘What happens next?’ he said eventually, certain of little but that something always did happen next.

  ‘The search will resume at dawn tomorrow. This time, you will participate in it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Until then you will be held here.’

  ‘On what charge?’

  ‘None. But one can be devised if you insist. Dangerous driving, perhaps. You may, however, prefer to seem to be cooperating with us, in which case …’

  ‘I’ll stay – voluntarily.’

  ‘I felt sure you would.’ Miltiades leaned forward and switched off the tape recorder. He gave Harry one last, scornful stare, then said: ‘Is there anybody you wish to telephone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A lawyer perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘Very well.’ Miltiades rose from his chair. ‘This interview, Mr Barnett, is at an end.’

  But there was no end. No end, through the long, sleepless night that followed, to the futile convolutions of his thoughts. No end, in all his conjectures, to the fear of what her continued absence meant. Why had she not returned? He was no nearer an answer now than when he had first started up the slope after her.


  With his paltry breakfast in the morning, they gave him a newspaper and he found on its front page the headline he had dreaded. H EΞAΦANIΣH TOϒ XEΔEP MAΛΛENTEP: the Disappearance of Heather Mallender. H AΣTYNOMIA ΔIEPΩTATAI: the Police are Mystified. He did not read on. He did not need to. For he knew more than anyone. And even he knew nothing.

  3

  HARRY LOOKED DOWN the rutted track and frowned. All his senses told him what only geography said was false: this was not Profitis Ilias. Not, at any rate, the Profitis Ilias he knew and feared, the still, silent, wooded mountaintop that had terrified and entrapped him. Human voices and the yelping of bloodhounds filled the forest with sound, a helicopter droned overhead and static crackled from a nearby radio. What he had prayed for two days before – noise, movement, company – were his, but in circumstances he had prayed since to avoid.

  Army conscripts had been drafted in to aid the search. Harry could see their stooped, camouflage-clad figures moving slowly through the trees bordering the track, keeping in pace with each other as they sifted the undergrowth, looking, it struck him, rather like beaters in a grouse shoot. He did not expect them to find anything. Heather’s scarf had been recovered more than an hour ago – a young policeman had come rushing up to Miltiades shouting excitedly ‘To mantili! To mantili!’ – but it had been a false dawn. The conviction was growing stronger within Harry all the time that no other evidence of Heather’s presence on the mountain was there to be found. The police had meticulously retraced every step she was known to have taken, they had followed every route that might have led her away from the summit, they had searched the woods yard by yard. And they had found nothing. True, the forest was vast, the search area ill-defined: they could go on looking for a week and still not be able to say their task was complete. But in Harry’s mind it already was. He did not expect Miltiades to understand let alone believe it. He was not, for that matter, eager to believe it himself. Yet the conclusion could no longer be resisted. Not merely Heather, but every sign and circumstance of that day, had vanished with the coming of men and dogs. Their diligence and their energy had banished the secrets as well as the silence of Profitis Ilias. And, in so doing, had sealed its mystery.

  ‘We will return to the hotel now,’ said Miltiades, touching Harry on the arm. ‘There is nothing more that we can accomplish here.’

  Harry did not reply. They began to walk down the track, retracing his headlong flight of forty-eight hours before.

  ‘The scarf will, of course, be subjected to forensic scrutiny. It may tell us something.’ But Miltiades’ voice conveyed no confidence in his words. He had expected to find more, that was clear, and, now he had not, he did not know what to think. He had suspected Harry of murder, but not of being capable of concealing the crime.

  ‘Heather could be anywhere by now,’ said Harry, ‘She could be off the island altogether.’ But he too lacked faith in what he was suggesting.

  ‘Strange as it may seem,’ replied Miltiades, ‘I had thought of that.’ He shot Harry a sarcastic glare. ‘If Miss Mallender had left the country, she would have been obliged to show her passport and a record of her journey would therefore exist. None does exist. The airport and harbour authorities have been placed on the alert, however, so, if she should still attempt to leave, it will not go unnoticed. I cannot say, however, that I believe it to be any more than a remote possibility. Do you know any reason, Mr Barnett, why I should take it more seriously than that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there something else, perhaps, that you are not telling me?’

  ‘What do you mean by something else?’

  ‘Merely that you might have told me about the death of Miss Mallender’s sister, rather than leave me to hear it from your Consulate.’

  ‘I did tell you about it.’

  ‘You chose not to mention that she was employed by your landlord, Mr Dysart – and that she was killed by a terrorist bomb meant for him.’

  So Miltiades had wasted no time in digging out another coincidence. But coincidence, Harry knew, was all it amounted to. He had not even been aware that Clare Mallender was Dysart’s personal assistant, until the English newspapers were suddenly full of how a botched IRA attempt on Dysart’s life had claimed her as its victim instead. Anyway, it was irrelevant. It had happened seventeen months ago and the whole of Europe away. ‘Why should I have mentioned it?’ Harry snapped. ‘It has no bearing—’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that, Mr Barnett. It at least sheds light on Miss Mallender’s mental state.’

  ‘She’d got over it long ago, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Had she? You said she came here for the purpose of recuperation.’

  ‘So she did, but—’

  ‘And it is more puzzling than that. Mr Dysart evidently has close links with the Mallender family, yet he asked you to act as caretaker of his holiday home here on Rhodes.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Why choose for such a role a man whom his friend had recently dismissed for taking bribes?’

  Old wounds, it seemed, were to be re-opened in the search for new clues. ‘Because I’d been a friend of his longer than Charlie Mallender had. And because he didn’t believe I had been taking bribes.’ Was that the real reason? Harry wondered. Or had Dysart felt some measure of guilt for recommending him to Mallender Marine in the first place? It mattered now, he supposed, hardly at all.

  ‘It will be interesting to hear if Miss Mallender’s brother agrees with your interpretation.’

  Since the interrogation, Harry had forgotten that Roy Mallender was on his way to Rhodes. Yet how could he have done? He never wanted to meet the man again under any circumstances, let alone those which now seemed to be drawing them together. It was doubtful if ten years had improved his odious character; once a swine, in Harry’s experience, always a swine. ‘When’s he due to arrive?’

  ‘He already has arrived, Mr Barnett. There he is, waiting for us by the hotel.’

  Miltiades had planned it this way, of course. He had been alerted to Roy Mallender’s arrival, but had decided that Harry should have no warning of it, no chance to prepare himself for the encounter. There, in sight already, standing with a constable and another man by a car just beyond the Profitis llias signpost, was his old rival. As they drew closer, Harry took stock of him. He had put on weight since their last meeting and looked older than Harry’s estimate of his age. He was still loathsome, of course, if not more so, yet he was not quite the man against whom Harry had once sworn futile oaths of vengeance, the man who had taken him for a fool and proved him to be just that.

  ‘O yos too afenteekoo,’ murmured Miltiades.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The boss’s son, Mr Barnett. Is that not what we see before us? An unattractive species, I think you will agree.’

  Harry did agree, but he refrained from saying so. In a sense, he owed it to Heather to be as conciliatory as he could. He and Roy were both there, after all, on her account; what did an old quarrel and past disgrace matter by comparison with her safety?

  As they approached, Roy stopped talking to the man beside him and turned to meet them. His eyes narrowed as he looked at Harry and his lower lip protruded in a familiar sign of looming anger. For once, Harry supposed, he could scarcely blame him; he braced himself for the outburst that must surely follow. But it did not follow. Instead, Miltiades stepped between them and offered Roy his hand; he smiled, introduced himself and politely proffered his sympathy. Roy did not so much as glance at him; his gaze remained fixed on Harry.

  ‘What have you found?’ he said gruffly. His voice was as brusque and impatient as ever.

  ‘As yet,’ Miltiades replied, ‘only your sister’s scarf has—’

  ‘Is this man under arrest?’

  ‘Mr Barnett is assisting our enquiries. Did Mr Osborne not explain the circumstances to you?’

  The man standing beside Roy – a sandy-haired, slack-faced fellow whom Harry took to be a representative of the British
Consul – signalled with his eyes that explaining anything to his companion had been, to say the least, difficult.

  ‘He didn’t have to,’ barked Roy. ‘You don’t know this man like I do, Inspector. If my sister’s come to any harm—’

  ‘We do not yet know that she has, Mr Mallender. I am investigating a disappearance, nothing more.’

  ‘Nothing more? How can you say that when it’s obvious he’s lying through his teeth?’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ Harry put in. ‘I don’t know where Heather is, Roy. I wish I did, but I don’t. I’m sorry, but there it is.’

  Roy took a step towards him. ‘Are you trying to get back at us, Barnett? Is that what it is? Is this your revenge for being caught with your hand in the till ten years ago?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t. Talk sense, man. I like Heather, for God’s sake. I didn’t want this to happen.’

  ‘You didn’t want to be found out, you mean – then or now. Sorry? You don’t know the meaning of the word. But you will. Believe me, you will.’

  There was something wrong in all this, Harry felt, something false to itself. It was not that Roy’s accusations were groundless – that was only to be expected. It was that they were too sudden, too all-encompassing, even for such an impetuous man.

  ‘That you should be upset is understandable,’ said Miltiades, his voice striking a calming note. ‘But rancour will achieve nothing. All efforts that can be made to find your sister, Mr Mallender, are being made. I would therefore recommend that you return to Rhodes and await further developments.’

  ‘That would probably be best,’ added Osborne.

  Roy glared at both of them in turn. He seemed about to protest. Then the idea palled. ‘All right. I suppose there’s nothing else for it. But I want to be kept in regular touch.’

  ‘You will be,’ said Miltiades.

  Roy grunted. ‘I’d better be.’ He turned to Osborne. ‘Come on. I’ve seen enough.’ Then with a parting scowl at Harry, he climbed into the car and slammed the door. Shaking his head, apparently in self-pity, Osborne made his way round to the driver’s side. Miltiades murmured something to himself in Greek, then the engine started and they moved off.

  ‘What did you say, Inspector?’ Harry asked, as the car faded from view.