"Yes."
"Yes, what?" he said.
"Yes, I promise that neither I nor any of the members of the tour presently here will leave the country before the tour is over without telling you about it," I said, choosing my words very carefully.
"Why do I feel that your words are--what is the word I am looking for in English?--is it "˜elusive'?"
""˜Evasive' might be better," I said. "Or even "˜misleading.'"
"Now why would you wish to mislead me, Madame McClintoch?" he said, with a slight smile.
"I'm not trying to do that. I'm attempting to be absolutely accurate. In the first place, the tour ends in six days. I have absolutely no control over these people after that, if I have any control over them now. What would I say? The tour is over, but you can't leave, and by the way, you're on your own for your expenses after this? At the end of the tour, if you don't want them to leave, you're going to have to tell them, not me." We stared across the desk at each other for a few moments.
"You said in the first place. Is there a second place?" he asked, breaking the silence.
"There is a small problem. One of our party is gone. I think she has left for home already."
"And she is?" he said, checking the list again.
"Catherine Anderson."
"Not the one with the croquet mallet!" he exclaimed.
"I'm afraid so."
"Then where is she?" he said. "When did she leave?" He looked annoyed now.
"I don't really know. She checked out of the hotel very early this morning, paid her incidental charges, and asked them to call her a taxi. They tried to reach me, but I guess I was in the shower when they called, because I didn't hear the phone. By the time they got me, she was gone. She was very upset last night. She said that the problem with her clothes, you know, someone moving her belongings around and so on, had started again, even though we'd changed her room, and that she wanted my help to go home immediately. I was in a bad mood yesterday, and although I told her I'd help her today, I know I didn't sound sympathetic enough. She was genuinely frightened, I realized later. She was moving furniture to block her door. In any event, she seems to have taken matters into her own hands, and taken off."
"Did she leave a note for you or anything?"
"No."
"What do you think she would do?"
"Assuming she was serious about wanting to go home, I think she'd go straight to the airport. Either Monastir, to get a flight to Tunis or even somewhere in Europe, or by taxi right to the international airport in Tunis. I think she'd try and get on the first flight out of here that was going anywhere that would get her home. My guess would be, since she has a return ticket on Lufthansa via Frankfurt, that she would exchange that ticket, pay whatever penalty there is, and if there was a seat on the flight out early this afternoon, she'd be on it."
Ben Osman picked up the telephone, spoke rapidly in Arabic, then slammed the receiver down. "We'll see about that," he said.
I looked at my watch. "She may be on her way, by now."
"Then we'll have to get her back."
"I wouldn't worry about it," I said. "I don't think she killed anybody."
"That may or may not be the case, but she's the closest thing to a suspect we have. This is damned inconvenient," he said. "Let me make one thing very clear to you, madame. I will solve this case. The Ministry of Tourism has also expressed an interest in this matter. Needless to say, they do not wish this investigation to harm the tourism industry in this country in any way. Quite frankly, we would all prefer that M. Reynolds' death was an accident, due to his own negligence. However, I am determined that if he met his death as a result of foul play, then the perpetrator will be brought to justice. If that requires keeping your group here after the tour is over and antagonizing the Ministry of Tourism, then so be it."
"Who's going to pay for their expenses, hotel bills and everything in that case?"
"We are not," he said firmly. "You may go now."
"W HAT ARE YOU trying to tell me, Lara?" Clive bellowed.
"You don't have to shout, Clive. The line is quite clear. What I'm saying is that if the police don't find out who killed Rick Reynolds in six days, then our group is going to find itself under house arrest, so to speak. We won't be able to leave the country."
"This is a disaster!" he exclaimed. "Our worst nightmare. We'll be ruined. We'll be on every newscast. Everybody in the whole world will know about the catastrophe called the McClintoch and Swain tour."
"I thought you told me there's no such thing as bad publicity, Clive," I reminded him.
"That is unkind, Lara," he said.
"You're right. I'm sorry."
"Who'll pay their expenses if they have to stay longer?"
"The police have made it pretty clear they won't."
"This is even worse than I thought," he said. "A financial disaster as well."
"Yes," I said. "It may well be."
"Six days!" Clive repeated.
"I'm afraid so."
"Do something, Lara," he said, as he hung up the phone.
Do something, I muttered over and over to myself. Six days, I told myself: Think, and think fast. Irritating though Clive might be--and who could know better than I what self-reproach and regret lay beneath his peremptory tone?--I knew he was right. I had to do something. Nobody else would, or could. Focus, I said. That, I decided, meant putting Briars and the shipwreck and the terrible events associated with them, totally out of my mind. There was no reason that I could think of, other than that I rather liked Briars, to get myself involved in what appeared to be, whatever the truth of the matter, a fight to the death, literally, over a two-thousand-year-old shipwreck. Let the police seesaw back and forth between Briars and Groves, questioning each about what had happened to the other one's boat. I had McClintoch Swain to worry about.
For a minute or two I tried to convince myself that some outside menace was responsible for what had happened to Rick and possibly Kristi, but it didn't work. There were no other guests in the hotel; the staff had not shown any previous inclination to kill off the tourists, and I couldn't think of any reason why they'd start with my troop; and there was no question that at least one or two of our team members had been behaving in a manner that was peculiar at best.
Given that, after a period of reasonably quiet contemplation I reached one conclusion, which was that I perhaps had been a little too much the shopkeeper, of late. It's difficult to make a good living in the antiques business. You really have to work at it. I've moved mountains to deliver purchases where and when I said I would. I try to call as many of my customers as I can by name, and not only remember what they collect, but keep my eyes open on their behalf when I'm on buying trips or at auctions. Now that I find myself, much to my surprise, in my forties, and my memory does not seem to be quite as sharp as it used to be, I keep index cards on my customers' likes and dislikes. And most of all, I keep in mind the cardinal rule of customer service: The customer is always right. When someone returns a purchase that is damaged in some way, do I say something like "any idiot can see you dropped this and then backed your sport utility vehicle over it"? I do not, even when I personally inspected the object, and wrapped it, before it left the store. What I do say is that I want to make it right, either by repairing it, replacing it, or refunding their money.
As much as I wish the various plumbers, appliance salesmen, air-conditioning repair people, and others of that ilk I am forced to deal with, would espouse this philosophy when I am the customer, it seemed to me that this attitude had put me at something of a disadvantage in the situation in which I now found myself.