Into the Blue

by Robert Goddard

  It was the following Monday before Harry was allowed to leave the hospital. Kostas came to collect him in his ramshackle van and, as they drove out of Rhodes, he tossed Harry a morning paper to read on the journey to Lindos. The headline H EΞAΦANIΣH TOY XEΔEP MAΛΛENTEP – the Disappearance of Heather Mallender – was still present on the front page, but in smaller print, jostling for space in a corner with a discotheque advertisement. The sub-heading was what held, however, the bleakest tidings. H AΣTYNOMIA EГKATAΛEIΠEI TIN ANAZHTHΣH: the Police Abandon the Search.

  9

  OPENING THE GATE to let her in was the last Harry had hoped to see of Mrs Ioanides that day; she could, after all, let herself out easily enough. Yet within the hour she was back, banging a broom on the flat door and demanding guidance on a domestic matter. Was she or was she not to clean Miss Mallender’s room and should she or should she not remove Miss Mallender’s belongings?

  Till now, Harry had not thought about Heather’s effects. They were still there, he assumed, in the small south-facing bedroom she had occupied in preference to two other larger rooms, probably left in disorder by the police and rightfully the property, he supposed, of the Mallender family. He did not like to think of Mrs loanides adding her unfeeling attentions to them, so insisted on dealing with the matter himself. Inevitably, Mrs loanides took this amiss and accused him, in the light of his earlier complaints about painful ribs and aching head, of being enas psevthomarteeras. Fortunately, Harry did not know what the word meant and refrained from asking. He managed to shake the woman off in the hallway of the villa and went upstairs alone.

  As soon as he entered the room, he realized why he had been reluctant to do so. Rush matting covered the floorboards and the whitewashed walls were bare save for one Lindian plate. The furniture was stolidly functional: a brass-steaded bed, a small bedside cabinet, a wardrobe, a dressing-table, one upright wooden chair. There were no lamps to supplement the central light, just a candle in a holder on the bedside cabinet. The view through the window was of the barren slopes leading up towards the acropolis and a triangular stretch of intensely blue sea. For all its plainness, this room was where Heather had slept and woken every day she had spent in Lindos. This was where her presence still seemed close at hand and where her absence was hardest to bear.

  Harry walked across to the wardrobe and opened the door. There were her clothes, hanging in line on the central rail. That skirt she had been wearing when he first met her at the acropolis, that dress she had worn on the one occasion she had dined with him in the flat; he had cooked moussaka because it was the only thing he knew how to cook and she had pretended to enjoy it. At the bottom of the wardrobe was stowed her rucksack, in which, he supposed, he would have to pack her belongings. Perhaps the Consulate would arrange to send it on. At the very thought of undertaking this task, his emotions rebelled. He closed the door and leaned his head against it, waiting till the absurd and sudden desire to cry had abated, then turned away.

  On the dressing-table stood the usual array of feminine toiletries – hair-brush, mirror, powders, lotions, creams, shampoo, perfume, mascara, lip-gloss – and all were as charged with memories of Heather as were the clothes she had worn. There were traces of flaxen hair still caught between the bristles of the brush. And when Harry absent-mindedly opened the small tub of lip-gloss, there was a fragment of her fingerprint still preserved in the waxy surface.

  He moved across to the bedside table, on which a travelling alarm clock stood open beside the stump of candle. Tilting the clockface towards him, he was almost relieved to find that it had stopped. Then something caught his eye beneath the pillow on the bed. When he pushed the pillow aside to see what it was, a sudden rush of grief came upon him. It was her nightdress, lace-hemmed and patterned with tiny forget-me-nots. He slumped down on the coverlet and put his hand to his face. This was too much, too awful, too hideously reminiscent. Better to have left it to Mrs Ioanides, better to have locked this room and never entered it again.

  He uncovered his face. Nothing had altered. Beyond the window sunlight still fell with stark indifference on the scrub-strewn landscape. Below him Mrs Ioanides’ vacuum cleaner moaned and spluttered away. Automatically, with no sense of purpose, he reached forward and slid open the drawer of the bedside cabinet. Inside, he could see a box of matches, a Greek phrase book, a packet of tissues and a well-thumbed paperback: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, by Sigmund Freud. He lifted it out, weighed it in his hand and stared at the cover, struggling to come to terms with a feeling of remoteness from his own actions, resisting as best he could the insistent notion that some overlooked significance attached itself to what he was doing. The book fell open on his palm at a selected page: the piece of paper that had marked the place fluttered to the floor.

  Harry drew the book closer. The passage he was looking at must have been read by Heather shortly before, possibly the very night before, her disappearance on Profitis Ilias. It was not a chapter end, but part of some lengthy, closely argued disquisition. Harry’s knowledge of Freudian theory was that of the average sceptic who had never read any and did not intend to start. His eye ranged over the paragraphs randomly, alighting on phrases with no appreciation of their context. ‘The “remarkable coincidence” of meeting a person we were at that very moment thinking about is a familiar one.’ ‘A meeting at a particular place, which has been expected beforehand, amounts in fact to a rendezvous.’ None of this meant anything to Harry, yet he was reluctant to abandon the hope that it might hold a clue to Heather’s state of mind. He would study it later, when he had more energy for the task: that seemed the obvious course to follow. He stopped to retrieve the slip of paper so that he might mark the place. And found himself staring at a numbered receipt, on which a name and address had been stamped and date recorded. Δ. ψαμβκης, Φωτoγρφoς, Πλατ. Kπρου, Pδoς, 7/11188: D. Psambikis, Photographer, Platia Kiprou, Rhodes, 7 November 1988. Suddenly his memory found a gear and lurched forward. An unredeemed photographer’s receipt, dated four days prior to Heather’s disappearance. That was Monday. She had gone into Rhodes on the ten-thirty bus; he could remember her asking if there was anything he wanted. And the previous day, Sunday, had been warm, sunny and lethargic. And she had cooked lunch for him. And they had eaten it in the garden. And she had taken a picture of him. And he of her. ‘To use up the film,’ she had said. ‘I’ll take it in tomorrow. I can’t wait to get it back. There’s ever such a lot on it. And now there’s you as well.’

  ‘Ever such a lot on it.’ Two hours later, Harry was sitting on a bench near the post office in Rhodes Town. Mr Psambikis had handed over the wallet of photographs without demur and now Harry was about to look at them. Twenty-four colour photographs taken with Heather’s camera. The camera and its owner had vanished. But the photographs remained. Innocent and inconsequential – or perhaps not. Harry opened the wallet.

  They were not holiday snaps. Not, at any rate, just holiday snaps. They had been returned printed in reverse order and the last picture – Heather in the garden of the villa, toasting Harry with a glass of retsina in one hand and a coil of fried octopus in the other, smiling and aproned, slightly blurred as if already fading from existence – took him by surprise even though he had been responsible for it himself. He stared at it for a long time, trying to remember just how carefree he had felt at the moment he had opened and closed the shutter, then looked at the next. It was the same occasion, but this time Harry was the subject, caught with precision against a backdrop of pink geranium, slightly drunk to judge by the broad, crumpled grin, his own glass of retsina cradled against an ample stomach, his free hand half-raised in a mocking gesture. This was the idle, indulgent Harry who thought his defences impregnable: this was the Harry he no longer was and could never be again.

  There followed three predictable shots of Lindian vistas. The harbour as it appeared from the front of the villa: two or three boats standing at anchor on its ultramarine surface, with the bare, rocky promonto
ry behind. Then the villa seen from the beach, cactus blossom peeping over the white garden wall, sunlight catching an open window in Harry’s flat, the terracotta tiles of the villa roof clearly visible against a background of white-faced dwellings, the rocky slope climbing behind them through stately cypresses towards the high fortress walls. Lastly the harbour, promontory and bare wrinkled coastline stretching away to the north, seen from the acropolis itself, from the top of the great staircase in fact, for its lower treads were visible in the bottom left-hand corner and the crumbling pillars arrayed in the foreground were certainly the columns of the Doric stoa. This could have been taken on Heather’s first afternoon in Lindos, from the very spot where he had found her waiting for him. Indeed, as he peered closer, a figure disclosed itself to his eye, obscured by the shadow of the ruined Byzantine chapel lower down the slope, a stumbling, white-clad figure moving towards the camera who could only be Harry himself, captured on film minutes before Heather would have known who he was. This sudden perception induced in Harry a curious, queasy response. He found himself reciting dates under his breath. ‘The sixth of November’: when they had lunched together at the villa. ‘The eighteenth of October’: when they had met for the first time. The photographs had begun to assume a magnetic quality of their own, drawing him further and further into the past. Before Heather had disappeared. Before they had met. Before she had come to Lindos. Before …

  Profitis Ilias. The dreaded name. The still more dreaded place. He knew she had been there once before, of course, yet still he was not prepared to find its familiar colours and contours awaiting him in the next picture: its summit of jagged white rocks, scantily clothed in lichen, grass and dead bracken, patched and shaded by stunted cedars, with the coast and sea below impossibly distant, out of focus and out of reach. Here he had searched for her in vain. And here she had raised the viewfinder to her eye and seized, for reasons of her own, this paper image of a place. For reasons of her own, which he could neither ask nor guess.

  Then the photographs reverted to tourist type. The windmills of Mandraki Harbour. The castellated outline of the Grand Masters’ Palace. The picture-postcard dullness of these scenes came as a shock after the tantalizing ambiguity of what had gone before. They were followed by more of the same, taken, Harry surmised, during Heather’s two-day stopover in Athens on her way to Rhodes. He had never visited the capital – other than to change planes – but a standard view of the Parthenon and a cityscape from the summit of Lycabettos, despoiled by other visitors, were instantly recognizable. He was nearly halfway through the film and beginning to lose interest.

  Suddenly, he was in England. There could be no mistaking that grey, moist, reproachful light, nor the trimmed Anglican propriety of the grave which filled the next picture. The ostentatious black marble stone was engraved in gold: FRANCIS DESMOND HOLLINRAKE. BORN 19TH SEPTEMBER 1915. DIED 14TH APRIL 1973. Francis Desmond Hollinrake. The name meant nothing to Harry, and yet … Hollinrake: surely he had, however long ago, heard the name before. When or why he could not say, but somewhere his memory still held a trace of its meaning.

  Next came buildings of various sizes and purposes, all English, all rural, and none familiar to Harry. An elegant L-shaped slate and cob farmhouse, with what looked like stabling running away to the rear; a large turreted and gabled red-brick Victorian mansion set in well-tended grounds, with enough signposts and parked cars in sight to suggest an institution of some kind; a gloomy ivy-shanked stone house overshadowed by trees at the end of a curving drive; a typical country church dwarfed by its own pinnacled and battlemented tower in what Harry dimly recognized as the Perpendicular style; an assortment of Victorian red-brick structures climbing away up a wooded hillside, with grand steps and entrances suggestive, thanks to the distant white H of rugby goalposts, of a school or college; and a large Tudor-style country house, with too many cars on view to be a private dwelling and croquet hoops arranged rather too conspicuously on the lawn. If there was a theme running through the selection, Harry could not discern what it might be.

  A country lane seemed all that the next photograph held. Tarmac shining after rain, green fields to either side, dry stone walls flanking the route, a junction with a wider road visible at the bottom of the hill down which the lane curved. It was unlocatable and indecipherable. Next came a mellow old village inn, all sun-warmed stone and bright-bloomed windowboxes. The angle of the inn sign, suspended from a bracket above the main entrance, meant that Harry could not read the name. Nor could he place the austere, grey-stone courtyard in the picture that followed it. There was an academic feel about the rows of windows looking down on the quadrangle of grass which put him in mind of Oxford or Cambridge, but he could claim no certainty on the point. The flagstones were wet with rain, as if, it occurred to him, this photograph and that of the lane, along therefore with that of the pub, had been taken on the same day. But such supposition took him nowhere. Only Heather could tell him why and when she had been to these places – and what in the scenes she had wished to preserve.

  There were only four photographs left now and the first of them was of another building. It was a white-rendered, slate-roofed cottage with black shutters, set in a hedged and wooded garden, with a newer-looking garage at the rear. For all that the sun was shining brightly, there was a weather-beaten, lop-sided look about the trees that suggested a coastal setting. Once again, the place was unknown to Harry. But unfamiliarity ended with the very next photograph.

  Nigel Mossop had joined Mallender Marine straight from school and Harry had originally thought him a poor choice compared with other applicants. Well-intentioned and eager to please, he was also timid, slow-witted and profoundly dull; Harry could not deny having sometimes made life hell for him. Only when Roy Mallender had begun to victimize the lad had Harry warmed to him, though his efforts to help had come to very little. Mossop must be thirty-odd now and looked more, soberly bespectacled and sombrely dressed, grinning nervously as if uncertain what pose to strike for the camera. Heather had never mentioned knowing him, yet there he unquestionably was, standing by some broad, anonymous sweep of a river estuary, the fields and woods on the farther bank looking lush enough for high summer, a sea-going yacht passing by in the stream. Harry could not say where it might be, but, as he scanned the picture for clues, a white speck that was surely a house caught his eye: it could easily be the cottage from the previous photograph, peeping out from a thicket of trees on the other side of the river. This at least, then, with Mossop’s help, he should be able to locate.

  The penultimate photograph was of another gravestone, or rather a memorial, for no grave as such was visible and the other stones around it were so closely packed as to suggest a garden of remembrance at a crematorium. There was, in this case, no doubt or mystery about Heather’s interest in the subject: it was her own sister. CLARE THOMASINA MALLENDER, 1959–1987. That was all: no biblical text, no touching sentiment, no allusion of any kind to how she had met her death. All Harry knew of the circumstances was what he had read in the newspapers at the time. On becoming an MP, Dysart had bought a cottage in his constituency. It was beside the river Beaulieu in Hampshire and was ideal as a mooring for the Artemis, thus permitting him to combine business and pleasure during constituency weekends. The fact that he was something of a war hero on account of his conduct as a frigate commander in the Falklands and the fact that he had subsequently become a junior Defence minister made him, by the twisted logic of the IRA, a legitimate target. A speech he had given, confidently anticipating the IRA’s military defeat, had evidently sealed the issue. But it was Clare Mallender, not Alan Dysart, who had stepped aboard the Artemis that fateful day and detonated the bomb. How the MP felt about his assistant’s death and his own narrow escape Harry hardly knew, for Dysart’s visits to Rhodes since then had been few and fleeting. How Heather felt about it he was also uncertain. She had implied that Clare’s death had been the cause of her psychiatric problems and Harry had shied clear of the subject since clum
sily referring to it at their first meeting.

  Looking back at the two photographs that had gone before, Harry was tempted to conclude that the river behind Mossop was the Beaulieu and that the white-rendered cottage was Dysart’s constituency hideaway. If so, Heather’s reasons for taking these three pictures were easily imaginable. They could have been by way of commemoration, by way of coming to terms with her loss. The only puzzle they left was her choice of Mossop as a companion.

  The last photograph – the first she had taken – was of Mallender Marine. At sight of it, Harry was taken aback to discover how keenly he still resented the circumstances of his departure from that low, grey, nondescript building ten years ago. There was the door through which he had stormed and there the forecourt across which he had marched in high and final dudgeon one dismal afternoon in October 1978. It had been the end of his last illusion: that he could succeed at something.

  But the end, in this case, was also the beginning. As Harry assembled the photographs in their correct chronological order and leafed through them again, he was struck by how they seemed to hint at a message concealed beneath their unconnected scenes. ‘Ever such a lot on it’, Heather had said, and Harry found the temptation to believe that there was irresistible. Yet how to prove it? There was no evidence worthy of the name to be derived from these pictures, unless …

  Profitis Ilias. As soon as he saw it again, he realized what he should have noticed at once. It was a photograph of the summit. Not the hotel, or the lower slopes, or even the fallen tree, but the summit. Heather had told him she had not had time to ascend it. Yet this picture proved that she had. She had not been venturing into the unknown that day. She had been retracing her own steps all the way. And had been lying when she claimed otherwise.