The one thing that never occurred to Jude was to question Carole’s report of what she had seen. There were women of her acquaintance prone to hysteria, women quite capable of convincing themselves they’d seen things that were never there, but Carole Seddon was not one of them. If Carole said she had seen Nita Davies’s body in the Lycian tomb where they stood, then that was exactly what had happened.
So they were certain of two things. One, that the body had been there. And two, that in the course of the last four hours someone had removed it.
There was little more they could do at the empty scene of the crime. Carole was confused between guilt and relief. If she had tried to report her discovery to the police they might have got there in time to capture the body snatcher (who, quite possibly, was also the murderer). But now, since there was no body to report, she had probably saved herself a whole lot of aggravation.
With that thought, however, came another one. There was no doubt that a murder had been committed. And Carole knew that she shared with Jude an overpowering instinct to find out who had perpetrated the crime.
They checked the adjacent tombs – or, at least, the ones they could get into – but the only signs there of human habitation were the odd Efes can and crisp packet. As they began to trail disconsolately into the woods on their way back towards the car park, though, Jude caught sight of something bright trapped against some trailing twigs in the stream.
Clumsily, she lowered herself down to pick up the object. It was a mobile: an iPhone in a light-blue case with a dark-blue fish design.
‘Nita’s!’ exclaimed Carole as it was held up for her inspection. ‘I recognize that from when she used it at Morning Glory. It must have slipped out of her pocket when her body was being moved.’ The discovery gave her a warm glow. It was a kind of proof that, though she had subsequently been relocated, Nita had definitely passed that way. The mobile linked her to the scene of the crime.
Jude was already tapping at the screen to check for messages. But all she found was a ten-number keyboard and an invitation to ‘Enter Passcode’.
‘Damn,’ she said.
As Carole negotiated the traffic of Fethiye like someone who’d been doing it all her life, the sun was sinking in the sky. ‘Be dark in half an hour,’ said Jude. ‘What I’d really like to do is have a look at the Kayaköy ghost town while it’s still light.’
‘Should we be doing that?’ asked Carole.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, having just seen a body …’
‘Having just not seen a body, in my case.’
‘What I mean is: shouldn’t we be doing something other than just sightseeing?’
‘Like what? Contacting the police?’
But no, that was not what Carole had in mind. She had once before summoned the police to a place where she had discovered a body, only to find that all traces had disappeared, and she hadn’t forgotten the patronizing scepticism with which they had treated her. That incident had occurred on Fethering Beach, but she didn’t think she’d encounter any less disbelief from the police in Turkey. So she turned down Jude’s suggestion.
‘Well what else do you want to do? Talk to Barney? See if we can track down Erkan?’
‘Good heavens, no. You and I just need to talk through what’s happened.’
‘Seems to me a ghost town is just as good a place to talk as anywhere else.’
In the dusty flat area at the foot of the ghost town were a cluster of fairly primitive looking restaurants, one graffitied over with fluorescent symbols which gave it a sixties hippy feel. And, incongruously, there was a man with three camels. Presumably, during the high tourist season he peddled rides on the beasts to tourists, but that Tuesday evening he wasn’t getting much trade. The camels, tethered to trees, chomped away, showing no interest in anything.
Carole parked the Bravo in a space outside one of the restaur-ants, but nobody came out to dragoon them into its vine-ceilinged open space to have a meal. Having been warned by her guidebooks that it was impossible to pause for a moment on a street in Istanbul without being immediately approached by men trying to sell you carpets or get you into their restaurants, she found Kayaköy mercifully free of aggressive marketing.
They walked round the edge of the furthest restaurant and found the entrance to the ghost town site. There was a small ticket booth there, but it was empty. Presumably, few people visited in the twilight. But, as at Pinara, there were no gates, nothing to stop them entering if they wished to.
A small sign in English pointed right towards a small church, but the two friends went left up the worn stone steps into the ghost town itself. Above them, the buildings climbed the hillside in neat tiers. The houses were stone-built and solid. Their roofs had all fallen in long ago, but only a few dwellings had collapsed completely, and there was no sign of vandalism. The evening air was perfumed by pine and thyme. Wild flowers grew up in the crevices between the stones.
Carole once again reaped the benefit of her guidebook homework. ‘It all goes back to 1923. The people who lived here up till then were Anatolian Greek Orthodox Christians …’
‘Right,’ said Jude, feeling as if she was back at school and undergoing a history lesson. ‘Didn’t Henry Willingdon tell us most of this stuff when we were at Chantry House?’
‘Not all the detail,’ said Carole in her most severe schoolmistress mode. ‘It was part of the settlement that came about after the end of the Greco-Turkish War.’
‘I didn’t know there was a Greco-Turkish War.’
‘You see? Henry didn’t tell us about that, did she? The Greco-Turkish War lasted from 1919 to 1922. Rather nasty war, many atrocities. But though the Greeks took over lots of bits of the old Ottoman Empire during the war, when they admitted defeat all the territory went back to the Turks. And very soon after that the Ottoman Empire was abolished and the Turkish Republic was created, under Kemal Atatürk. Then the “Convention concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations” was signed in Lausanne in Switzerland, which made—’
‘Which made,’ Jude interrupted, ‘the Greek and the Turkish populations of the territories go back, respectively, to Greece and Turkey?’
‘Well,’ said Carole, a little miffed at having her lecture curtailed, ‘that’s rather a simplification of what happened, but it’s more or less right.’
‘Except that none of the Muslims who’d been living in Greek territories ever came back here to Kayaköy?’
‘No, they didn’t.’
‘Which is why this place is a ghost town?’
‘Yes,’ Carole conceded grudgingly, regretting that her neighbour had been treated to only a small amount of the detail that she had at her fingertips.
They walked for a while in silence on the stone paths between the houses, looking in at fireplaces, interior doorways and collapsed rafters. The evacuation of the town seemed somehow much more recent than 1923. Carole was, for a moment, almost in danger of once again experiencing the feeling that she had undergone at Pinara, an empathy with the people who had once inhabited these stone houses, the sense that the ghost town had an ‘aura’.
She quickly suppressed such foolishness and said, as if it had been Jude who’d initiated the history lecture, ‘Anyway, I thought we were having this walk to discuss Nita’s murder.’
Jude grinned, not for the first time, at the Caroleness of Carole. ‘Yes. I’m with you about not going to the police. Do you think we should talk to Barney?’
Carole shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Because you believe he might be a suspect?’
‘No, not really. Though he has got dubious secrets in his past.’