“So will you?” he pressed.
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Outside the hotel he made a groping, haphazard search through the pockets of his jacket and then the glove compartment and withdrew triumphantly from there with a crumpled and bent piece of pasteboard in his hand. “Knew I had one somewhere!” he said, offering her the visiting card with his number printed upon it. “And this!” he added, snatching into the carton and proffering the wrapped pastille. “It’s strawberry flavored, the best. I always save it until last.”
She laughed openly, unoffended by the flirtation. She was enjoying herself and it hadn’t happened for a long time: not since before John had been snatched. “All I seem to do is thank you.”
“Will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Come out to dinner with me some other time?”
Janet felt herself coloring and hoped he wouldn’t notice in the fading light. She said: “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“When?”
“I said maybe!” said Janet, as unoffended by his persistence as she had been by the earlier flirtation.
“Can I call?”
“Of course you can.”
“And you’ll get in touch with me, if there are any more approaches?”
“I promised I would. So I will.”
Baxeter did not call the following day. Janet sat around the pool in the morning and went into the city in the afternoon and checked her messages when she got back, acknowledging the disappointment and becoming unhappy at feeling it. That night, eating a solitary dinner, she kept remonstrating with herself and was convinced by the time she went to bed that her attitude was in no way unfaithful to John. After so much hostility and rejection and drama, what could be more normal than responding-properly responding-to a gesture of friendship? And that was all it amounted to, Janet was equally convinced: a gesture of friendship, nothing more. Certainly nothing more on her part.
The next day Zarpas gave her the date of the first hearing against the Fettal family, cautioning her it was only a remand appearance but warning her that the magistrates would expect her to attend. And within an hour Partington telephoned to say the borrowed clothes had been returned to Beirut and ask if she had changed her mind about his offer to help, which she hadn’t. She caught a reflection of herself leaving the by-now-familiar pool, abruptly aware just how deeply tanned she had become. And at this rate, she guessed, she would become more so.
Janet tried to suppress the sound of any pleasure in her voice when Baxeter called on the Friday and was sure she had succeeded, but a brief and unsettling feeling, a kind of numbness, briefly swept her body.
When he invited her to dinner, she managed, too, to seem unsure in advance of accepting it and felt after replacing the receiver that the conversation had been maintained on precisely the necessary level of friendship. He assured her the Orangery at the Hilton was good for nouvelle cuisine, and it was, and afterwards they went to a bar on the Famagusta Road where there was good bouzouki music. He said the article and photographs had worked out very well and that his Vancouver office was pleased. She told him about the initial court appearance of the Fettals, and he at once offered to accompany her if she would like him to. Janet, surprised, accepted. Baxeter asked what she was doing on the weekend, and Janet blurted “nothing” before thinking what she was saying, so he invited her to Paphos, and she accepted. Baxeter made no attempt to kiss her-no attempt at any physical contact at all-when he took her back to the hotel and neither did he the following day, which she enjoyed as much as she had their first trip to the Troodos Mountains.
There were three outings in the succeeding week, one lunch and two dinners, and that weekend he suggested going through the Turkish-held area in one of the United Nations-escorted convoys to Kyrenia, which he assured her was possible.
Janet made the journey curiously, saddened by the occasional protest sign and the indications of squalor, compared to the Greek-held sections which were all she had previously encountered.
Janet thought Kyrenia was one of the most attractive cities she had visited on the island and Baxeter, as usual, was an enthusiastic guide. He made her climb all over the ochre and yellow castle and in one comparatively small room pointed to a small circle in the middle of the floor.
“This was the officers’ mess hall,” he explained. “In medieval times prisoners were sentenced to be pushed down that hole: it opens into something like the shape of an upside down light bulb. There’s one in the ordinary soldiers’ mess, as well. They’re called oubliette holes because once put in there the prisoners never got out: they were forgotten. All they had to eat, apart from themselves, were the scraps that the officers and men used to throw them, for amusement…” Baxeter’s voice trailed off, at the look on Janet’s face. “Oh Christ!” he said. “Oh Christ, I’m sorry…! What the… oh shit!”
“It’s all right,” she said, stiffly.
“It’s not,” he contradicted. “I don’t know what to say! Jesus Christ!”
“Just don’t say anything.”
23
M ustafa Fettal died without recovering consciousness early on the day of the remand hearing, three hours before the court convened, and it was not until she arrived at the magistrates’ building that Janet learned of the death.
Chief Inspector Zarpas was waiting anxiously on the court steps when she arrived with Baxeter, looking with passing curiosity at the journalist when Janet got from the car. The steps were jammed with reporters and cameramen and there was an abrupt flare of lights: there were a lot of shouted questions, too, which at the time Janet did not understand. Zarpas said: “Don’t say anything: there’s something you’ve got to know,” and started to hurry her away. Janet looked around for Baxeter but couldn’t see him. Zarpas took her into a side office, off the main courtroom corridor, and told her there.
“Dead?” she said, disbelieving.
“I warned you it might happen.”
“Somehow I just never imagined it would.”
“Well, it has,” the policeman said harshly. He had probably the most important court hearing of his career about to begin, and he wanted to break the mood into which he believed she was retreating.
“What must I do now?” asked Janet, numbly. I’ve killed a man, she thought: taken a life.
“Do…?” frowned Zarpas and then understood the question. “I’ve already told you that I don’t intend to recommend any proceedings, because of the circumstances of the stabbing. But you’ve made a confession, so I must officially inform the Lebanese authorities, because of their jurisdiction. But as you already told them and they released you once, I don’t imagine they’ll want to proceed either.”
That wasn’t right, thought Janet: it wasn’t right to be able to kill somebody and escape any penalty whatsoever, irrespective of how extenuating the circumstances might be. She said: “How will it affect today’s hearing?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Zarpas. “The other two have been in conference with their lawyers for over an hour now, ever since I told them.”
“I didn’t mean him to die, I just wanted…”
“Stop it!” Zarpas said, harsher still. “Stop it right now! It happened and we know how it happened and no action is going to be taken. What you did was justified. Don’t collapse into a lot of unnecessary recrimination. Let’s try to make sure the other two don’t walk away.”
Janet nodded but didn’t speak.
“Sure you’re all right?” demanded the man.
“I think so,” Janet managed, although it wasn’t true. She didn’t think she was all right: at that moment she didn’t know what she was.
“You won’t be required to give evidence today,” Zarpas assured her formally. “I just wanted you here for any eventuality.”
“When?” asked Janet.
“That depends on whatever the defense say today. And then what the court decides.”