Doctors Wear Scarlet

by Raven, Simon

  “Come, come, Mr Clarence. And you a classical man. Crete may not be large but it is mountainous and easy to hide in. You may recall that during the war a handful of men captured and concealed a German general for some considerable time, and then took him off by boat – without anyone at all knowing when they left or in what direction.”

  Roddy gave Tyrrel a look of speculative interest.

  “So what do you suggest, Inspector?” he said.

  “I’m asking Mr Clarence, Major. True, he’s much engaged with his salmon. But he must not allow crapulity to dull his wits.”

  Roddy laughed. Piers, stung, put down his knife and fork with a clatter.

  “You forget, Inspector,” Piers said. “It seems he is accompanied by a woman. This will make it much harder for him to hide or to leave the island unobserved. Two people take up more than twice the room of one. And women like being seen, not hidden, so that sooner or later, without quite knowing whether they meant to be or not, they are seen.”

  “Better, Mr Clarence, much better… But if he can change his mind about meeting all of you – old friends – then he can certainly change his mind and get rid of a recently acquired woman.”

  “In which case, if we can get hold of her, she’ll be very ready to help us if only out of spite.”

  “Not bad, sir. But suppose, just suppose, that no one knows where Mr Fountain is and no one knows where his woman is. That they haven’t, as far as is known, left the island, but that is all you have to go on. What are you going to do then, Mr Clarence? Sit on your bottom and eat smoked salmon – which, by the way, you won’t be able to get?”

  “I should go,” said Piers rather crossly, “to Cnossos, where Richard says he has been working. Something might…transpire there.”

  “It might indeed. And if not?”

  Piers shrugged and looked petulantly away.

  “And you, Major Longbow?” said Tyrrel, half laughing towards Piers and then turning to Roddy.

  “I suppose,” said Roddy, “that all we could do would be to cast about a bit and trust to luck.”

  “Mr Seymour?” persisted Tyrrel.

  “As Major Longbow says. If there’s nothing better to go on we shall have to trust to luck. But you mustn’t forget that I may hear from Richard tomorrow morning before we leave. And I’ve given an address in Venice to which any message that comes in the next four days will be wired immediately.”

  “I’ll just bet my soul,” said Tyrrel, “that you will not hear from Mr Fountain tomorrow or any other morning. I’ve had one report, gentlemen – if you’ll kindly pay attention, Mr Clarence – since I saw Mr Seymour last. And this report says that Mr Fountain has vanished. He and his woman both. They went to Cnossos, as Mr Clarence says, they went here and they went there – and then they vanished. It is believed that they are still on the island. People were interested enough, you see, to take note of what Mr Fountain did. And now that he’s given them the slip, they are looking for him and his woman, and looking for them hard. Because if they were interested when he first got there, then they’re very interested now: since it seems that something else has happened, gentlemen, or rather something has been found near Corinth, that suggests, among other things, that women in particular ought to be very careful in the company of Richard Fountain just now. Which gives them two reasons for wanting to find him: to save – yes, save – his companion, and to ask a great many awkward questions of himself.”

  “They want to arrest him?” Roddy said.

  “Not quite, Major. They still don’t really know, you see – they only suspect. But they suspect enough to be more than anxious about his girl friend and more than hostile to Mr Fountain himself. And what do you deduce from all this – Mr Clarence?”

  “That we shall have competitors – who know the island.”

  “And who, even so, have so far failed to find him. Very good, Mr Clarence. So you do see, sir, that there will be limited time for amusements when you arrive?”

  “And do you suggest,” I said, “that we compete with our rivals – or get their help?”

  “God knows you may need help, sir. But you might do better to get it indirectly, by watching rather than asking. Because, sir, it is very important that when he is found it’s you that takes him away and not them.”

  “I thought,” said Roddy gently, “that you were a policeman, Tyrrel. In which case the Greek Police are, in a sense, your colleagues. It is hardly for you to encourage us to cross them?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that, sir,” said Tyrrel. “As yet they have no charges to prefer – only questions to ask. If you could get him away before they asked them, then there would be no actual infringement… Anyway, sir, England is what Mr Fountain needs. England and his friends. Once back here, he may be entirely…all right again. So no point leaving him there, getting worse, as you might put it, in a climate that doesn’t suit him, and possibly having to face a trial under alien laws. Not much justice in that, Major; or wouldn’t you agree?”

  “More or less,” said Roddy with a smile.

  “And besides, sir, I’ve heard so much about Mr Fountain since all this started that I almost think of him as my friend too. If anything had…happened…in this country, I might have had to take a different view. But as it is, he merely seems to me to be someone very valuable who is in danger. A good soldier, a fine scholar…a poet… They don’t grow on every bush…”

  For a while he was silent. Then he lifted a large glass of burgundy from the table and drank it down in one.

  “And there’s good luck to you,” he said. “Mr Seymour, Major Longbow, and you, Mr Clarence.” He bowed his head to each one of us in turn. “And now, since I’ve told you all I can, gentlemen, there’s no point in spoiling a pleasant evening… Mr Seymour,” he said, producing from somewhere about him my copy of Cavafis, “I am now going to return this with many thanks. But first, sir, there are one or two things I wanted to ask, and no time like the present. This poem about the brothels of Beirut…”

  Very late that night, long after Roddy had left us to sleep in his club and Piers had gone to bed in my spare room, and as I myself was sitting at my desk doing a last minute check of the tickets and my own correspondence, the telephone rang.

  “Mr Seymour?”

  It was a woman’s voice, faint with distance and in itself uncertain.

  “Yes.”

  “It is Penelope here. Penelope Goodrich. I’m sorry for ringing up so late.”

  “Penelope… What can I do for you?”

  “I’m sorry for ringing up so late, Anthony,” she said again. “But Piers – he said he’d tell me what day you were leaving, but he hasn’t. And I woke up just now and thought, ‘Suppose they’re going tomorrow, I shan’t be able’…”

  Her voice tailed away.

  “Able to do what, Penelope?”

  “Tell you that I hope…whatever you’re going to do…turns out well.”

  “Thank you, my dear. Because we are going tomorrow and I’m glad of your wishes.”

  But I said it indifferently. I cared nothing for Penelope’s wishes, only for the journey that was to come, the long roads between the poplars, the green plain of Lombardy, the sea…thinking so much of these things that I often forgot even Richard, for whose sake the whole enterprise had been conceived… For a while, as if she sensed my indifference, Penelope was silent. Then the three pips sounded, definitive and fierce, and seemed to rouse her.

  “Don’t ring off,” she said, “don’t ring off, Anthony.”

  “Of course not, Penelope. But what–?”

  “–I know you don’t want me there,” she said, hurriedly and as if on the verge of tears, “and I know he doesn’t want me. I won’t try to come. You needn’t worry. I won’t try to interfere. But if you could tell me…anything at all?”

  But what could one tell Penelope? That the man she loved was in trouble, in danger, with another woman, that no one knew what he might do next, that we had no idea where to find him, l
et alone how to help him?

  “Oh, I don’t want to pry,” she went on bitterly. “I don’t want to know where he is, what’s he’s doing. I know something’s badly wrong and that is enough. But do you think you can help him, Anthony? You and Piers? I’ve given Piers money, you know. I don’t mind that, I’d give him all I’ve got if it would help. But will it, Anthony? Is there anything that you will be able…?”

  Once again her voice trailed away.

  “We’ll do our best,” I said uselessly.

  “I suppose so.” For one moment she sounded almost sharp. Then, “Give him my love, Anthony. And tell him that… I don’t mind what he’s done or what he’s felt, that if ever he wants me then…he’s only got to come.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said, slightly ashamed for a second, but no less aware of the keen pleasure that was filling my bowels as dawn and departure drew nearer.

  “Yes, tell him, Anthony,” she said softly. “Oh, I know you want to sleep now… That you only care for Richard, you and Piers, not for me… But don’t forget to tell him that, in the middle of everything else. Take him my blessing.”

  “Indeed I will.” It was hollowly said.

  “And God bless you too, Anthony, you and Piers, for going like this.”

  And then at last I felt kind towards this woman whom I had for so long respected but never really liked. For one moment I tried to conjure up some word of love or comfort, of gratitude or reassurance or hope; but it was too late. No words came to me, other than such as would have expressed only my pleasure at what was to come, and I remained silent until Penelope said again, “God bless you, Anthony. And bless poor Richard too,” and the line went dead.

  This was the last word of farewell we had from anybody. For now the blue dawn was showing, and in a few hours it would be time to be away.

  Part Two

  The White Mountains

  VI

  In Heraclion there is a sea front which in some curious fashion seems to turn a blind eye to the sea, although all along it are to be found forts and custom houses erected by the Venetians. Perhaps it is because most of these are now derelict, save for one which has been turned into a tavern, that one has the impression that the sea is being spurned and ignored by a town which is largely dependent on it. However this may be, in the summer the Cretans at least do the sea the occasional courtesy of walking along this front and sitting at outside tables which are served from the tavern; and here, on July 4, having arrived in Heraclion the previous evening, walked Piers and Roddy and myself, holding a rather disjointed discussion as to the next step in our search for Richard Fountain.

  For there had been no word from him the morning we left London, nor had any message been relayed to Venice. Furthermore, and consistently with the mood of pleasure in which we had left England, we had spoken little of Richard by the way, had ignored the problems that would shortly confront us. Nor was this entirely due to mere selfish preoccupation with the delights or petty discomforts of the drive and the sea voyage from Venice: it was rather that after what Tyrrel had said the evening before we left there was a general and justifiable feeling among us that much would depend on sheer luck and that there was therefore little point in laying plans for which we had no data to meet contingencies which we could not foretell. So at Sens we ate quenelles, at Aix Piers lost £25 at roulette, in Milan we paid an evening visit to the nightmare cathedral, and in Venice Piers retrieved his £25 at chemin-de-fer; and in all this time you might have thought, to hear and look at us, that we were simply a carefree little bachelor party with cargo of lotus and in summer mood. But now at last we were in Crete; we were at journey’s end and must put away the pleasures of the interlude; and on the blank sea front of Heraclion we sat down to drink Turkish coffee and take council.

  “The thing is,” said Roddy, “that in his letter he talked of going to Cnossos as though it had been an expedition. But Cnossos is barely five miles from where we’re sitting, and apart from King Minos’ Palace there are, so my guidebook tells me, only three dirty cafés and a collection of hovels. So that even if he wanted to research there, he surely would have slept in Heraclion.”

  “Wrong,” said Piers with satisfaction. “Above the main palace there is another, much smaller, known as the Little Palace. And on the hillside above that is a villa which once belonged to Sir Arthur Evans. He left it in his will for the use of visiting scholars and provided for a caretaker to look after them. Richard might have stayed there!”

  “Who told you all this?” I asked.

  “The manager of our hotel.”

  One of Piers’ assets was turning out to be a very capable command of modern Greek. Roddy had none, and I myself, for all my lengthy classical education, had little more, for I have a slow ear for spoken languages and I was finding that modern demotic usage bore little resemblance to the pages of Plato. But Piers, agile as ever, had somehow made the transition from the Attic of the lecture room to the demotic of the market place (he had read a lot of modern Greek poetry, he said, and had had a bilingual Greek friend, son of anglophile parents, at school); and from the hour of our arrival he was to prove indispensable as our source of all local information from trifle to tragedy.

  “So the manager of our hotel told you there was a villa for archaeologists,” said Roddy. “And did he go on to explain just how welcome to the shade of Sir Arthur Evans Richard’s woman would have been?”

  “I didn’t go into that. But I did ask if anyone called Fountain had stayed at his hotel.”

  “And had he?”

  Piers picked at a thumbnail.

  “The man behaved very oddly. It was clear from his look that the name meant something to him. But he said very curtly that he had heard of no such person, and then just left me without another word. Very rude behaviour – for a Greek.”

  “It rather looks as if he’s heard something of what Tyrrel was telling us,” I said: “that the police want Richard for a variety of unpleasant reasons and he’s given them the slip. I dare say a lot of people know about it by now.”

  For a while we sat in silence. The deserted island of Dia hovered in the heat while the tideless sea sucked steadily at the stone beneath us.

  “He may go off and tell the police we’ve been making enquiries,” Roddy said.

  “In which case we’ll just say we’re friends of Richard’s who had a vague idea he might be in Crete. Which commits us to nothing. In fact,” I said, “it might be interesting to make an apparently innocent enquiry along those lines from the Tourist Police and see how they react. What sort of story they fob us off with.”

  “No point in drawing attention to ourselves,” said Roddy. I had a brief vision of the three of us sitting for weeks on the blind, sunny waterfront, talking listlessly on and on and doing nothing.

  “Then what do you suggest?” I said irritably.

  “Calm, Anthony, calm,” Roddy said.

  “If,” said Piers, “we go to Cnossos, then somebody may well be willing to tell us something. But presumably whatever they know there has already been told to the Police, and little good it has done them. Richard just went on to other places and then disappeared. Why go to Cnossos just to hear that?”

  “Why do anything?” I said. “Why go anywhere?”

  My vision of our discussion creaking interminably on in the heat was becoming more insistent.

  “Let’s just sit here,” I said, “drinking Turkish coffee till the sun goes down. We are near enough the East, God knows. Let us all be oriental and fatalistic. If we sit here long enough the world may come to an end and all our problems will be solved.”

  Roddy Longbow grinned.

  “You have a liver,” he said, “and you need exercise. So we will go to Cnossos and exercise you by walking you round the Palace of King Minos. Such places are best seen in a romantic light, and dusk is the time when men whisper of matters about which they remain silent in the full light of the sun. So we will go to Cnossos in the early evening. At the very least, it
is a sight which no tourist should miss.”

  “The buses,” remarked Piers, “run twice in every hour.”

  “They say,” said Piers, “that the mythical labyrinth was in fact the palace itself. So many passages and stairways and odd little chambers…”

  The bus turned and rattled off. The sun was well below the hills now. A small boy stared at us from in front of a flyblown café.

  “This is the entrance to the main palace,” Piers went on. “The little palace is on either side of the road – about 200 yards back the way we came on the bus. I couldn’t see the villa. It must be in the trees.”

  As we went through the entrance and paid for admission, the man behind the counter muttered something.

  “Closes in half an hour,” said Piers.

  Roddy and I nodded. We all went down a slope through some pine trees, to where we could see a low rampart of stone: this was surmounted by an obviously recent structure, a prominent feature of which was a row of garish red pillars.

  “Sir Arthur’s work,” said Piers. “Impressive but hardly convincing! His materials strike a wrong note. Yet he selected them with great care…”

  We climbed some steps, passed between two of the red pillars, then down some more steps, along a corridor, and into a room with a crude throne against one wall.

  “Hardly a throne for a great king,” said Roddy.

  “It was not the throne of a great king,” said a voice from the shadows.

  A small, ferrety, bearded man came into the chamber, straight through the wall as it seemed at first, but in fact from a narrow recess, which was concealed behind a stone screen.

  “It was not the throne of a great king,” repeated the little man, shuffling forward slowly and gesturing towards the stone seat. “It was for one of his noblemen. The steward of the bull ring. This is the room in which he instructed the dancers – the bullfighters I suppose you would call them.”

  Roddy consulted a plan in his guide book.