But she wasn’t. She appeared to be in her white bedroom at the Hotel Nausica in Agios Nikitas. And so far as she could tell, she was wide awake. She pinched herself. Her flesh felt plumply and reassuringly solid.
Slipping out from the single sheet under which she had slept, Mrs Pargeter went on to the balcony. The tranquil beauty of the morning greeted her, and for a moment she thought it really must have been a dream from which she had just woken. But, even as she had the thought, she became aware of a distant humming.
It grew in intensity. The sound was unmistakably that of an aeroplane, which built in volume until confirmed by the sight of an old heavy-bodied transport appearing in the sky low above the hotel roof. The engine noise reached a crescendo, then diminished as the plane changed direction and vanished round the contour of a headland.
As she put on a beige cotton dress and fixed a brightly coloured scarf at her neck, Mrs Pargeter tried to find a rational explanation for what was going on. Albania hadn’t suddenly declared war on Greece, had it?
No, perhaps someone was making a film or a television series…? Yes, that was much more likely. So many bizarre phenomena these days could be put down to the excesses of the entertainment industry.
She got the true explanation when she was outside under the hotel’s awning having breakfast. Just as Maria was serving her with coffee and a bowl of yoghurt and honey, the plane – or perhaps another plane, it was hard to tell how many of them there were – repeated its impression of strafing the Hotel Nausica.
“What is it?” asked Mrs Pargeter. “Someone making a movie?”
Maria grinned. “No, no, they’re fire-fighting.”
“What do you mean?”
“We get lots of fires out here – particularly when there’s as little rain as there has been this year. Much of the island is difficult to reach for fire-engines, but the planes can get there.”
“So what do they do? Do they have big water-tanks?”
“That kind of idea, yes. They fly out over the sea, land on the water to fill up the tanks and then fly back to drop it on the fire.”
“Good heavens,” said Mrs Pargeter.
Maria shrugged. “Don’t knock it. It works.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure it does. It’s just an unusual idea – well, unusual for someone used to the good old British fire-engine. What starts the fires, though? Is it tourists throwing away cigarettes, lighting barbecues, that kind of thing?”
“Some of it, yes.” The girl seemed for a moment undecided as to whether to continue, but went on, “And there’s a certain amount of arson.”
“Arson? By the tourists?”
“No, by people on the island.”
“Why? What for?”
“Feuds, that kind of thing. Or the people from one village will get jealous because another village is doing better out of the tourist industry.”
“Really?”
“It’s happened quite a lot in the last few years, since the number of tourists has been going down. Look over there.” She pointed to the scrub-covered hillside, through which the dusty track from the main road wound down to the village. An area of perhaps half an acre in the middle of it was dark grey, bare of greenery, with only a few gnarled and blackened sticks left standing. “That happened a couple of months back. Agios Nikitas did well for tourists last summer – compared to the rest of the island. Somebody tried to ensure that it wouldn’t do so well this year.”
“And does anyone here know who did it?”
Maria nodded enigmatically. “Oh, I should think so. These feuds go back a long way. No, the problem is not usually deciding who did it, but deciding what revenge should be taken against them.”
“So what kind of revenge is likely to be taken?”
“I don’t know,” said Maria shortly, deciding she had perhaps already given away too much, and went back into the hotel.
Mrs Pargeter was once again struck by the gulf between the bright smiling ‘No Problem’ tourist image of Corfu and the realities of life on the island.
♦
She had almost given up when he answered the phone. He sounded drowsy and Mrs Pargeter couldn’t quite remove from her mind the image of Larry lingering deliciously in bed with his shy-smiling Greek woman.
“Good morning, Mrs P. What can I do for you on this bright and sunny?”
“Well, first, thank you very much for your hospitality last night. It was a lovely evening.”
“My pleasure.”
“And, second, I wondered if you knew anyone on the island who could do a bit of chemical analysis for me?”
“What?”
She filled him in on what she had found out about Joyce’s ouzo bottle. “So I was wondering if you knew anyone who might be able to tell, me what’s in it?”
“I think you’d better let me have a look at it.”
“Oh?”
“Fact is, in my line of work – documents, passports, that kind of stuff – I deal with quite a lot of chemicals. Always possible I’d be able to recognise it straight away, or, failing that, I could run a few tests and find out what it is for you.”
“That’d be great. As I say, it doesn’t smell of anything. I haven’t actually tasted it yet, but –”
“And don’t you try, Mrs Pargeter!”
“What, tasting it?”
“Right.”
“Why not?”
“Look, Joyce Dover was murdered. We don’t know why, but one quite common motive for committing murder is to stop oneself from being murdered. Maybe what she’d got in that bottle was intended to help someone on his or her way to the undertaker.”
“Poison, you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Mrs Pargeter.”
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧
Eighteen
With all her lines played out, Mrs Pargeter felt there was little she could do but wait for bites, so after breakfast she decided she would investigate the local beach. The bay of Agios Nikitas itself was just a harbour, but over the next headland, she had been assured, was the delightful beach of Keratria.
Mrs Pargeter bought herself a large straw hat for the expedition, and felt like an intrepid Victorian tracking down the source of the Nile as she set off up the little track out of the village. Although it was not yet eleven o’clock, the sun seemed already to have been turned up to ‘full’, and she was glad of the protective tracery of olive branches above her head.
She enjoyed the walk. Though undeniably overweight for her height, Mrs Pargeter was not unfit. Indeed, she was in better condition than most women in their late sixties. This state had not been achieved, however, by the indignities of calorie-counting or prancing in leotards. Its provenance was good eating, good drinking and, it must be admitted, a degree of pampering. But the main source of her well-being was the fact that Mrs Pargeter felt at home – and even at peace – in her own body.
Keratria proved, as promised, a beautiful beach. At one end a simple concrete taverna offered bamboo-covered shade and refreshment, and a few villas spotted the shoreline woods. Under a beach umbrella a mahogany-skinned young man kept a desultory eye on piles of blue fabric-covered loungers, a line of orange pedalos and a stack of sailboards, whose vivid sails splashed the pebbles behind him. He’d done all right with the loungers, there were a couple of pedalos circling lazily out in the bay, but nobody seemed interested in hiring the sailboards. Too much like hard work, as the sun spread its hazy lethargy. The young man didn’t appear to be troubled by his lack of business.