‘Nothing that you should hear, Mr Barnett.’ He paused, then added: ‘Mr Mallender does not like you, does he?’
‘He never has.’
‘How long have you known each other?’
‘Since he joined the family firm – Mallender Marine – in 1971. That was the year before I was “caught with my hand in the till”.’
‘Regrettably, I am not familiar with the phrase.’
‘In this case, it means I was accused of over-paying a sub-contractor and taking a share of his excess profit.’
‘Justly accused?’
‘Roy assembled enough evidence to convince the auditors – and his father.’
‘But were you guilty?’
‘Believe it or not, no. I wouldn’t have had the nerve for it, or the ingenuity. I was stitched up. Framed.’
‘By Mr Mallender?’
‘Who else? It doesn’t pay to antagonize the boss’s son, Inspector. They’re an unattractive species, like you said.’
‘And unpredictable, Mr Barnett. I had expected Mr Mallender to be extremely worried about his sister. Instead, he seemed merely extremely angry with you. I had expected him to imply that we Greeks are incapable of mounting an efficient search operation. Instead, he seemed unconcerned about how we are conducting it. I found his attitude puzzling in every respect.’
Harry gazed down the road after the vanished car. He was less surprised than Miltiades by Roy Mallender’s apparent indifference to Heather’s fate. Family ties would mean more to an upright Greek than a self-centred Englishman. Roy, he suspected, had come to Rhodes either at his father’s insistence or because others expected it of him. Seen in that light, his flood of accusations made perfect sense. The truth – that Heather’s disappearance was a total, unfathomable mystery – would seem to Roy at best inconvenient, at worst embarrassing. To fend it off, what better fall guy could there be than Harry Barnett of the blasted reputation and tattered credentials?
‘It won’t happen again,’ Harry muttered under his breath. ‘I won’t come quietly this time.’
‘What was that, Mr Barnett?’
‘Nothing, Inspector.’ Harry smiled grimly. ‘Just a promise to myself.’
4
HARRY FLUNG BACK the sheet, lowered his legs to the floor and pushed himself up into a sitting position. He was shivering, but not because he was cold. The explanation was the empty bottle of metaxa he could see standing on the table in the adjoining room. Draining it had seemed, last night, not merely the best but the only thing to do. Permitted at last by Miltiades to come home – brought home indeed, by speeding police car – he had confronted solitude for the first time since Heather’s disappearance and had found it scarcely more bearable in Lindos than he had on Profitis Ilias. Why had she not returned? For a while at least, alcohol had kept the question at bay.
From the bedside cabinet, Harry picked up his wristwatch and peered at the face. It had stopped in the small hours, but not before the day-and-date panel had clicked round to Monday the fourteenth and so prepared for him their unnecessary reminder that a third night had passed without news of Heather. Time’s reputed qualities as a healer did not apply in this case, he reflected: its slow, wearing passage only wound the ratchet ever tighter on the anticipation of a dreadful discovery.
Somewhere, on the other side of the island, beneath a tree or a rock, in a ruined goat-pen or a dried stream-bed, the ghastly truth was surely waiting. All the alternatives – the bizarre, the improbable, the downright impossible – were merely games the mind consoled itself by playing.
Rising to his feet, he paused to let the throbbing in his head subside, then hauled on a dressing gown, stepped into a pair of espadrilles and shuffled into the bathroom. It was another sunny day, he noticed: the lattice-work shutters were casting sharp dog-toothed shadows on the white-washed walls. He ran cold water into the basin, douched some onto his face, then risked a first glance in the mirror. No worse than he had expected, though worse than he had hoped, a puffy, unshaven, grey-haired likeness of himself stared back through red-rimmed, dark-socketed eyes and pronounced its silent judgement. ‘This is the worst, Harry, the least and lowest, the nadir of your never-soaring life.’
Why had she not returned? By that one abstention, Heather had laid waste his refuge. With each of the nine years he had spent in Lindos, he had grown less and less concerned about the futility of his existence there and more and more content with the comforts and compensations it offered. Every year, every season, every day was much the same amidst the bleached sand and winding alleys of this picture-postcard town. A little money, a little laughter, a little food and drink: these had been the staples of an unashamed pointlessness. Now they had become the components of an insufferable helplessness.
Recoiling from the mirror, Harry pushed open the shutters and squinted out at the familiar, harshly lit view. A cobbled path led down from the front gate of the villa beneath his window towards the clustered white-faced houses of Lindos, whose every occupant and alleyway he knew from long proximity. The sky was a deep and cloudless blue. Only a suggestion of haze that hovered over the orange groves and softened the bare slopes of Marmari south of the town told him that he had slept later than he had thought. Leaning out, he glanced down at the harbour, empty at this season of sunbathers and pleasure craft, and felt, like a stab of pain, his own indifference to the perfection of its setting. A few days ago, he would have been appalled by the very notion of leaving this place. Now he sensed that turning his back on it would cause him not a moment’s regret. It was, he supposed, the true measure of how deeply Heather’s disappearance had affected him.
It was less than a month since he had ambled back from the Taverna Silenou for his siesta and found Heather’s note wedged under the knocker on the gate, explaining that she was a friend of Alan Dysart’s come to stay in the villa and that, having found nobody in, she had gone to visit the acropolis; if he should return in the interim, could he come and fetch her? Cursing this girl he did not know for forcing such an ascent on him in the heat of the afternoon, he had climbed the steps to the old castle where it loomed above the town, talked his way past the ticket barrier without paying and finally arrived, panting for breath and bathed in sweat, at the ancient ruined temple enclosed by the castle walls. Normally immune to the fabled attractions of Lindos’s crowning glory, he had detected, on this occasion, something unaccountably eerie about its crumbling walls and worn columns, something windless and hushed which, reinterpreted in the light of his experience on Profitis Ilias, he was tempted now to call expectant.
He identified her at once by the paleness of her skin: a slim, solitary figure sitting on the very top step of the great staircase that led to the propylaea, a little hunched, it struck him as he laboured up towards her, as if afraid of something, her face in shadow, but the sun falling brightly on her shoulder-length hair, her shoulder-length flaxen hair.
‘You must be Heather,’ he said breathlessly, as he reached the top, for thus had she signed the note.
‘And you must be Harry,’ she replied, smiling up at him. He felt absurdly abashed as they shook hands, suddenly conscious of not having shaved or put on a clean shirt that morning. ‘I’m sorry to drag you up here.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ he said, flopping down on the step beside her and trying to admire the view of the shimmering blue bay far below, by which, in his experience, newcomers were usually enraptured.
‘I didn’t know whether Alan had forewarned you of my visit.’
‘No, I’ve not heard from him recently. But don’t worry. It’s no problem as far as I’m concemed. Late holiday, is it?’
‘More of a rest cure, actually.’ Then she added, as if eager to change the subject: ‘Tell me, where does Alan moor his yacht when he’s here?’
The strangeness of the question should have alerted Harry, but it did not. ‘Down there in the harbour. At least, he used to, but I’m not sure he’s bought a replacement for the Artemis yet. She was a beau
tiful boat.’
‘Was she?’
‘Didn’t you ever see her? I thought—’
‘I’ve only got to know Alan recently – since he lost the Artemis, that is. Only, I suppose because he lost the Artemis.
‘I don’t follow.’
Her chin dipped slightly as she replied: ‘Clare Mallender was my sister.’
‘Oh,’ Harry said lamely, instantly regretting his clumsiness.
‘Yes. The girl who was aboard the Artemis when the IRA blew it up.’
Harry stared down at the canopy of bougainvillea that trailed over the gate beneath his window and sought, in its dazzling blood-red blossom, a sanctuary from the associations every corner of Lindos seemed now to hold for him. From that inauspicious beginning on the summit of the acropolis, he and Heather had felt their way towards the kind of genuine friendship he thought he had long outlived. Now she was gone, the easy comforts of the Villa ton Navarkhon were merely bitter reminders of what he was in no danger of forgetting: that he could not rest until he had learned the truth.
SuddenJy, some movement on the very edge of his vision caught his eye. Glancing to his left, he could see down into the flagged courtyard which separated the gatehouse from the western frontage of the villa. At first, all seemed as he would have expected, the flower-urns, the lemon trees, the terrscotta roof-tiles and the whitewashed walls composing their familiar pattem. Then he saw it: a mobile shadow in one of the rooms of the villa that told him he was no longer alone. It was not Wednesday, so it could scarcely be Mrs Ioanides on one of her housekeeping calls. Besides, she had no key. If not her, then … He ran back into the bedroom, pulled on some clothes and raced towards the stairs, banging his knee painfully on a table in the process. Not that he cared about that. Not if there was the slightest chance … Heather had a key. He kept one for visitors and Heather still had it.
He ran headlong across the courtyard, his heart pounding madly, from hope as much as exertion. The door was ajar, a window stood open. It was true, then: it must be true. She had come back: there could be no other explanation. He was almost laughing aloud as he charged into the hall and turned towards the room where he had seen the shadow.
‘Hello, Harry.’
It was Alan Dysart, not Heather Mallender, who turned to greet Harry as he burst into the room. Alan Dysart, of the flashing smile and perpetually boyish good looks, of the fair almost golden hair which had so aided his political career and seemed no thinner now than when Harry had first met him. Alan Dysart, Member of Parliament, government minister and owner of the Villa ton Navarkhon: the one visitor Harry should have expected, but not the one he had hoped to find.
‘I gather you’re in a spot of bother,’ Dysart said. ‘I hope I can help.’ It was typical of the man to minimize the gravity of the situation. A relaxed approach to crises had been his trademark, both in the Navy and in politics. It had been, indeed, the key to his success. What in others might have seemed like negligence, Dysart had always contrived to present as an un-flappability bordering on courage; he was, according to at least one newspaper editorial, the only hope for gallantry in an ungallant generation. ‘I looked in on you when I arrived, but you were sleeping like a babe. I imagine you’ve had a bastard of a time. Want a drink?’
Harry, who had pulled up in the doorway, moved unsteadily across the room, telling himself to hide any disappointment he felt in the light of all he owed this man, not least an apology for inadvertently setting the Greek police on his trail. ‘A drink?’ he said bemusedly. ‘Yes, I could do with one.’
Dysart clapped him on the shoulder and grinned. ‘Well, sit down before you fall down and I’ll pour us both something reviving.’ Harry subsided obediently onto the couch, whilst Dysart went on talking to him from the drinks cabinet behind him. ‘You seemed surprised to see me.’
‘I was.’
‘Didn’t Heather tell you I was coming out today?’
‘No.’
‘That’s strange.’ Dysart reappeared with two glasses, handed Harry one and sat down opposite him. ‘I phoned her last Tuesday and asked her to let you know.’
‘You were planning to come before … all this happened, then?’
‘Yes. Preparatory work for next month’s European summit.’
‘She said nothing to me about it.’
‘It must have slipped her mind, then.’
They both sipped their drinks in silence for a moment, then Dysart glanced around the room and said: ‘Everything here seems shipshape, I’m glad to say.’
So it did, though Harry could claim no credit for the fact. Since going into politics, and especially since losing his yacht, Dysart had visited the villa less and less often. He would, in all probability, have found the rooms poorly aired and the furniture somewhat dusty on this occasion, had it not been for Heather’s long stay, during which she had made Mrs Ioanides virtually redundant by her zeal in household matters. The thought was yet another reminder for Harry of a subject which Dysart seemed to be shying clear of. ‘I’m sorry to have involved you in all this,’ he said abruptly. ‘It must be … embarrassing.’
‘A little,’ Dysart replied, smiling ruefully. ‘The English papers have made more of it than they otherwise might because Heather was my guest here. But that’s hardly your fault. You weren’t to know she was going to vanish, were you?’
‘The police think I know more than I’m telling them.’
‘But you don’t, of course.’ The remark, as Dysart had phrased it, sounded strangely like a question. ‘I imagine you know her no better than I do. I only felt obliged to try and help her because of what happened to Clare.’
‘Of course.’
‘Do they know you once worked for the Mallenders?’
‘Yes.’
‘That must strike them as odd.’
‘It does.’ And me too, Harry thought: me too.
‘So, what exactly happened?’
Dysart was clearly entitled to an explanation and Harry embarked upon one willingly. With Miltiades, it had been question-and-answer tainted by continual suspicion. In his own thoughts, recollection had been spasmodic and disorderly. This was therefore the first time since Heather’s disappearance that he had imposed a logical sequence on the events leading up to it: her arrival, his liking for her, their growing confidence in each other, her invitation to join her in a farewell tour of the island, their visit to Profitis Ilias – and the total inexplicability of what had occurred there. It came to him as freshly as it must have done to Dysart and, with it, came also the certainty that, from the very start, he had missed something, perhaps even everything, that was truly important.
As Harry spoke, Dysart left his chair and began to walk around the room, his glass cradled in his hand, pausing as he went to raise and replace the lid of a decorated pot or straighten with his toe the lie of a woven rug. Mobility, Harry recalled, had always been his preferred state: at the helm of his yacht, or the wheel of a fast car. Even when confined by four walls, he lapsed into it to aid concentration. Never hurrying but never still, never evasive but never easy to know, this man had proved his staunchest ally more than once, yet Harry was not sure he could claim to understand him any better now than when he had first strolled so obligingly into his life.
It was a hot afternoon in June, 1966. Harry was at his desk in the small rear office of Barnchase Motors, Marlborough Road, Swindon, reading, though scarcely bothering to follow, a letter of complaint from a customer. He had drunk too much in the Railway Inn at lunchtime and the sun on the back of his neck was beginning to bring on a headache. He was about to get up and take a stroll round the cars on the forecourt in the hope of reviving himself when he suddenly became aware of a figure standing just inside the open door.
‘Mr Barnett?’
The newcomer was a tall, slim, well-bred young man of about twenty, dressed casually, but too expensively to be the average Swindon youth. Besides, he had spoken in a cultivated accent with hints of public school about it. What he want
ed Harry could not imagine. ‘Yes?’ he said defensively.
‘Harry Barnett?’
‘That’s me.’
‘The proprietor?’
‘One of the proprietors, yes.’
‘But you hire and fire?’
‘I suppose you could say that.’
‘Good. I’d like to apply for the temporary job you’re advertising. I’m a student in need of summer employment. My name’s Alan Dysart.’
Harry had finished his account. He had related every event of that fateful day at Profitis Ilias and many events of the days before it, whilst Dysart had walked slowly round and round the room, concentration apparent in every detail of his expression, just as, Harry recalled, it had been during their first desultory interview in Swindon all those years ago.
‘I stopped off at the Consulate on my way here,’ he said, after a lengthy pause. ‘They told me the police suspect foul play.’
‘They do. They suspect it of me.’
‘Have they any explanation for the face you saw at the window?’
‘None. They’re satisfied the building was empty at the time.’
‘And the whistle?’
‘Army manoeuvres, perhaps. Or a goatherd. The sound could have carried a long way. If there was a sound. They don’t believe there was.’
‘But you heard it.’
‘Yes, I heard it.’
‘The postcards in the glove compartment?’
‘They don’t believe my explanations of them either.’
‘And there was nothing – absolutely nothing – Heather said or did to make you suspect she might have planned this?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘So you think she was abducted – or murdered?’
‘What else can I think?’
‘But the villagers in Salakos saw no car heading for the mountain that afternoon apart from yours.’
‘I know.’
‘And nobody could have known you were going there, because you didn’t decide to do so until Heather suggested it over lunch.’
Into the Blue Page 4