‘Perhaps she was registered as somebody else’s patient.’
‘Mr Barnett! I have done my best to assist you, but you are now becoming unreasonable. You must accept that your niece is not here.’
‘She’ll have arrived on the twelth of November. All you have to do is check who you admitted that day.’
‘You specified no date before.’ A tone of suspicion had now been added to the frown.
‘It didn’t seem necessary.’
‘Had you done so, I could have saved us both a good deal of time. Lucy, Juliet and Maureen have all been here several years.’
‘I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have mentioned it. But now I have, couldn’t you check the point?’ Harry had no need to simulate the desperation in his voice. ‘I appeal to you: what harm can it do?’
Junod’s expression grew stern. ‘I have done all that Dr Kingdom asked. Your niece is not here.’
’If there’s just a chance—’
‘There is no chance!’
‘Then why not prove it?’
Junod seemed to engage in a brief inner debate. Then impatience turned to exasperation. ‘Very well. If you insist, Mr Barnett, so be it. Come with me.’
They returned to the château and walked swiftly along a sequence of corridors, Junod’s shoes clicking angrily on the marble floor. He said nothing and nor did Harry. They entered a room occupied by four middle-aged women, each tapping busily at word processors. One of the women looked up and smiled, but Junod paid her no heed. He headed straight for a door on the farther side of the room, paused long enough to rap once with his knuckle, then went straight in. Harry followed.
A tall grey-suited man with short-cropped silver hair and steel-rimmed spectacles looked up from an orderly desk. He and Junod exchanged a few words. The man frowned, shrugged, unlocked a drawer beside him, took out a large leather-bound book and handed it to Junod.
‘Our day-book, Mr Barnett,’ said Junod testily. ‘It represents an independent record of all admissions.’ He laid it open on the desk and turned to the current page. ‘November, you said? Last November?’
‘Yes. The twelfth.’
Junod’s finger ran down the margin to the date. 3 November. 7 November. 15 November. He looked up at Harry. ‘There was no admission on the twelfth, Mr Barnett.’
‘None at all?’
‘This is not a hotel. Patients do not arrive and depart daily. I tell you: there was no admission on the twelfth.’
‘Later, then. What about the fifteenth?’
Junod glanced back at the book. ‘A male patient.’
‘The next female, whenever it was.’
‘November twenty-fourth. Ah yes. She is forty-eight years old, Mr Barnett: a widow from Munich.’
‘The next, then.’
Junod took a deep breath, then slammed the book shut. ‘Enough.’ He glared at Harry. ‘I know for a fact, Mr Barnett, that no female patient of your niece’s age has been admitted to this hospital on or since the twelfth of November. I think your enquiries have come to an end, don’t you?’
‘No. There has to be some mistake. You—’
‘There is no mistake! Your niece is not here. Your niece has never been here. I must ask you to leave.’
‘I can’t. Not without—’
‘If you refuse I shall summon the police.’ Junod’s expression left no doubt of his seriousness. ‘Do you want me to do that?’
‘No. Of course not. But—’
‘Then, please Mr Barnett, go. You must, you know, you really must.’
Harry looked from Junod – set and inflexible – to his companion – blank and impervious – to the day-book – closed and uncompromising – and back to Junod. He was right. Harry had no choice. He had played his trump and won the hand, but the hand was empty. Heather was not there. Perhaps, the bleaker trend of his thoughts suggested, she was nowhere. Perhaps she was lost forever. Perhaps she always had been. Without a word, he turned towards the door.
‘I am sorry we could not help you, Mr Barnett,’ said Junod.
Harry did not reply. He was dimly aware of the women in the outer office pausing from their work to stare at him as he passed, then he was in the corridor, hurrying towards the exit. It was the end, he suddenly realized. There were no other clues to follow, no other hopes to cling to. The forged letter, the faked story, the fraudulent visit: they had all been for nothing. He was as far from Heather as when he had run up the slope of Profitis Ilias in search of her. And she was as far from him.
50
‘ALAN DYSART IS not in,’ said Alan Dysart’s recorded voice. ‘If you wish to leave a message, please speak after the tone.’
‘Alan, this is Harry Barnett. Heather isn’t at the Versorelli Institute. I don’t think she ever has been. We’ve been wrong all along. I don’t know how or why, but there it is. There’s no point staying here now, so I’ll be returning to England straightaway. I’ll be in touch when I get home.’
Harry put the phone down, raised his feet onto the bed and leaned slowly back against the pillows. His brain felt as weary and drained as his body. He could neither accept his fate nor resist it. He emptied the whisky miniature on the bedside cabinet into a glass and took a sip, toasting as he did so the futility and failure of his search for Heather. This, he assumed, was how it ended: talking to a machine from a hotel-room in Geneva. He swallowed some more whisky and gazed up at the ceiling, watching the darkness compete with the spokes and circle of light cast by the bedside lamp.
‘Goodbye, Heather,’ he muttered to himself.
He put the glass down and picked up the two items that lay beside it: the envelope of postcards and the wallet of photographs. He slid the postcards out into his lap and stared down at them. Aphrodite, soft and pliant, face averted. Silenus, erect and shameless, hand raised. And Anthony Sedley, Prisoner, a last plea scratched in stone. The goddess, the satyr and the betrayed: they made a pattern be did not understand.
‘Goodbye,’ he murmured.
He slipped the photographs from their wallet and began leafing through them. Mallender Marine. Clare’s memorial. Nigel Mossop. Tyler’s Hard. Breakspear College. The Lamb Inn. The Cotswold lane. The Skein of Geese. Hurstdown Abbey. Flaxford Church. Flaxford Rectory. Challenbrooke Hospital. Strete Barton. Frank Hollinrake’s grave. He had followed the sequence faithfully, clinging to the thread that led from one to the other. And now it was over, the sequence ended, the thread broken. All that remained was what he already knew. Athens. Rhodes. Profitis Ilias. Lindos. The Villa ton Navarkhon. Himself drunk. Heather laughing. The end of the film. The end of the search.
Wait though. Wait one moment. What if he had abandoned the photographs too soon? He did not know all the rest, not every one. He leafed through them again, came, as he had before, to the full stop of the fourteenth photograph, then turned slowly to the next, ridding his mind as he did so of all the suspicions that had formed in it since leaving Rhodes. Back in Lindos he had believed in the photographs and nothing but the photographs. They were the only trail that Heather had left.
‘Trust them,’ he said aloud. ‘Trust them and nothing else.’
Athens: the fifteenth photograph. Not Geneva. Not England. Not Rhodes. Of course. It was so obvious, so simple he could have cried. He had not yet reached the end. He had not yet reached the limit of hope. All he had to do was what he had done before: follow in Heather’s footsteps.
He sprang from the bed, grabbed the telephone directory, scrabbled through it for the number be wanted, then snatched up the receiver and dialled.
‘Bonsoir. Swissair.’
‘Bonsoir. Parlez-vous Anglais?’
‘Yes sir, of course. How may I help you?’
‘I want to book a flight.’
‘To go where, sir?’
‘Athens. As soon as possible.’
51
IT WAS COLD on the summit of Lycabettos. Not as cold as on Profitis Ilias, Harry would readily have agreed, but still a distant travesty of
the shimmering heat in which the Greek capital was supposed to bathe. He had no grounds for complaint, of course: nobody had asked him to come to Athens in early January. He followed the steps up from the funicular platform, turned up his raincoat collar and squinted out across a panorama of endless grey suburbs. Nobody had asked him, it was true, and now, alone on Lycabettos’s island of barren rock amidst the poisoned ocean of modern Athens, he was far from sure why he had come.
His doubts had set in the previous evening. Arriving from Geneva in mid-afternoon, he had accepted the taxi-driver’s recommendation of his uncle’s Hotel Ekonomical near Omonia Square without quibble. One run-down cheapskate out-of-season hotel would do, he had reckoned, as well as another. With night falling rapidly, he had passed what remained of the day in ill-lit local bars, growing even more morbid than ouzo normally made him and concluding in the end that his journey to Athens had been a mistake.
Daylight had helped a little. But not much, Harry thought, as he followed the path round the small hilltop chapel to a paved viewing platform and gazed out across the serried concrete and congested tarmac of contemporary thrown-together Athens. The Acropolis looked forlorn and isolated, rather, it struck him, as Stonehenge might in the middle of New York. The sky was clear but the sun weak, too weak to burn away the yellow haze of pollution that hung over the city like a perpetual atmospheric reproach. ‘The birthplace of democracy, boys,’ Cameron-Hyde had called it; ‘the cradle of civilization.’ And Cameron-Hyde had lost an eye in the Battle of Crete to prove his devotion. But Cameron-Hyde had never been to Lycabettos.
There was work to be done, Harry reminded himself: delay would not make its futility more bearable. He drew the wallet of photographs from his pocket and leafed through them to the one he wanted. Number fifteen: Lycabettos, snapped during Heather’s stop-over in Athens, therefore some time over the weekend of 14/15 October. He held it up, took six paces back, checked again, then settled on the spot. He was standing exactly where Heather had stood all those weeks ago, looking at exactly the same view on which she had trained her camera.
What made him suddenly glance over his shoulder he did not know. He cursed his own nervousness and heard his heart pounding in his chest. There was nobody there, nobody at all. He wished at least a few other visitors were on hand to stave off his solitude. He remembered that Heather had certainly not had the summit to herself and looked at the photograph to confirm the point. In it, the blurred cityscape was framed by people sitting on the low stone wall of the viewing platform: a woman in a green dress at the left, a mother and fretful child at the right. Stare at them as long and hard as he liked, Harry could find nothing significant in their poses or expressions: the child grimacing, the mother frowning, the woman gazing out across the city. He turned instinctively to the sixteenth photograph and found there more of the same. The Parthenon at close quarters, sunlight falling starkly on its crumbling pillars and rocky surrounds. The Parthenon on a Sunday afternoon, aswarm with tourists, and Heather one of them. In her picture there were three Japanese weighed down by video recorders, a group of baseball-capped Americans, a Teutonic husband and wife, a stray youth, a pair of nondescript women and a glum Greek labourer. They, like the trio on Lycabettos, had just happened to be there when Heather pressed the shutter.
Harry subsided onto a bench and held the photographs before him, one in either hand. Antique sites, chance groupings: they told him nothing, absolutely nothing. Looking at them on Lycabettos, with the Acropolis visible in the background, made no difference. Why he had ever thought it might he could not imagine. Lycabettos; the Parthenon; the places; the faces; the dates; the details. As his eyes switched from one photograph to the other, then back again, his mind scanned their contents, searching and sifting for the clue he could only pray was there. A woman in a green dress; a mother and child; three Japanese; four Americans; two Germans (probably); an Australian (possibly); two women, nationality indeterminate; one Greek looking …
Suddenly, the components stirred fractionally and for long enough to reveal their camouflage. Suddenly, for no more than the instant it took Harry to see it, the answer showed itself, then made to withdraw once more, but too late: he had it and he would not let go.
The two women walking away from the Parthenon towards the camera were not together. At least, there was nothing to prove they were together. And one of them had about her something which was unmistakeably familiar. The tee-shirt and jeans were different, it was true, but the build, the hairstyle, the sandals and the sunglasses, they were all the same. There was no doubt about it. Indeed, he could not think why he had not seen it before: she was the woman in the green dress on Lycabettos.
The same woman, in both photographs. Harry stared at her dual representation, letting the scale of its significance disclose itself to his mind. It could not be a coincidence: that was too preposterous to believe. Therefore Heather must have known her. A chance acquaintance? Surely not. A friend, then? Yes. That had to be it. She was a friend of Heather’s, a friend perhaps of long standing and some intimacy. But who was she? He could not recall anybody mentioning her existence. All had implied, indeed, that Heather had no friends. That was one of her problems. According to Kingdom, it had—
According to Kingdom. Of course. A phrase from his secret file notes. Something about the lack of a close friend. Something about a colleague at Hollisdane School. What was it? Precision eluded him. But that did not matter. He had left the notes at the hotel. He had only to return there to discover what Kingdom had said. He had only to read the good doctor’s words to grasp what they and the photographs meant. Out of the blue had come his answer.
* * *
23 August … ‘She has had, it seems, no close friend outside the family circle since a colleague at Hollisdane School with whom she was on excellent terms left to teach abroad last summer.’
Kingdom’s phrase was more than Harry could have hoped for. He could have shouted with joy when he read it. ‘Left to teach abroad last summer.’ He did not doubt that her destination had been Athens. He did not doubt that to see her had been the real purpose of Heather’s visit to the city.
He picked up the telephone, cajoled the hotel operator into giving him an outside line, then dialled England. The reply came clear and crisp, as if from the next room.
‘Directory Enquiries. Which town please?’
‘Wellingborough.’
‘And the name of the person?’
‘Hollisdane Primary School.’
‘Hold on, please … Hollisdane, did you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘The number is 0933 – the code for Wellingborough – 28765.’
‘Thank you.’
Another curt exchange with the hotel operator, then a telephone was ringing in a distant English school. Harry closed his eyes and prayed when he realized the Christmas holiday might still be in progress. Then somebody answered.
‘Hollisdane Primary School. Can I help you?’ A male voice, measured and authoritative.
‘Ah, hello. Could I— Who is that please?’
‘I’m the Headmaster. How can I help you?’ Thank God for a conscientious headmaster, thought Harry: he must be working during his holiday.
‘Ah, good. You don’t know me, of course, but I was— Well, the fact is, I’m trying to trace somebody who used to teach at your school. She left in the summer of 1987 to teach abroad.’
‘Oh yes. I remember her. You mean Sheila Cox.’
‘Yes. That’s her.’
‘Well, you’re right, Mr …?’
‘Barnes. Horace Barnes.’
‘Well, Mr Barnes, Miss Cox did leave us to teach abroad, but I’m afraid I’ve not heard from her since. At least … Remind me: which country did she go to?’
Was this a trap? If so, it was also a risk Harry had to take. ‘Greece,’ he said, crossing his fingers.
‘No, surely not. I think you’re mistaken. Spain or Portugal: I’m almost certain.’
‘Isn’t there any wa
y you could check?’
‘I don’t believe there is. My secretary’s on holiday, you see, and— Oh, hold on. There might be a way. Can you hang on for a minute?’
‘Yes. No problem.’
There was a clunk, a rustle of papers, what sounded like a drawer slamming, more rustling, then: ‘We’re in luck, Mr Barnes. As I thought, she left us to teach in Lisbon.’ Harry swore under his breath. ‘Sorry?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh, right. Well, you had the correct date – July 1987 – but not the destination. It seems— Wait a minute: what’s this? Oh, I see.’
‘’What is it?’
‘I owe you an apology, Mr Barnes. It seems we’re both right. Miss Cox only stayed in Portugal for a year. Then she moved on to Greece. Athens, to be precise. I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing. It’s a bad line.’
‘I see. Well, her new school wrote asking for a reference last spring when she applied to them. I’ve a copy of it here in front of me.’
‘A school in Athens?’
‘Yes, Athens, that’s right.’
‘Could you give me the name and address?’
‘Certainly. Nothing simpler, Mr Barnes. Nothing simpler in the world.’
Shelley College was set discreetly amidst the walled and gated villas of Kifissia, one of Athens’ most exclusive suburbs. Harry took the metro north to its terminus at Kifissia, then begged directions from a newsvendor. The college, it transpired, was not far away, along a quiet tree-lined avenue. Harry found himself hurrying needlessly, rushing breathlessly towards his destination. He was torn between a wish to know the truth and a fear of learning it, a desire to end his search and a dread of having nothing left to search for.
Only the sign on the gates distinguished the college from its residential neighbours. It was a large stone-faced terracotta-tiled house with Byzantine conceits to its architecture: arched windows, dog-toothed crenellations. Around it fir and palm trees swayed demurely. There was a glimpse of a more modern structure to the rear, an empty car park, a flagstaff, a cycle-shed, a brushed and scrubbed air of expensive education. Harry traversed the forecourt cautiously, listening for the sounds of children’s voices but hearing none.
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