By comparison, she was surprised how pleasant the experience was in Kayaköy. Unheated but exposed daily to the Turkish sun, the water was as warm as a bath, and the setting was heavenly. Blue sky overhead, the villa swamped by the paler blue of the Morning Glory and the infinite horizon at the edge of the pool. But for the troubling consciousness of Nita Davies’s murder, everything was perfect. And to someone of Carole Seddon’s mindset even the murder was a kind of positive – a puzzle to be solved.
Whereas Jude had spent most of the previous day just lolling in the pool, taking the occasional desultory few strokes, Carole had immediately started swimming lengths – and counting them. She even counted the number of strokes each length took and started multiplying the totals. When she had done five hundred in her earnest, childlike breaststroke she got out of the pool and reached for her towel. At that point Jude – and most other human beings, to be quite honest – would have laid down on a lounger for the sun to complete the natural drying process. But Carole’s first instinct was to dry herself off with the towel – so that she didn’t drip over the inside of Morning Glory – and go straight indoors to change out of her costume.
She was, however, prevented from achieving this by the appearance of Travers Hughes-Swann, whom she had observed from her bedroom window accosting Jude on their first afternoon at the villa. He was wearing exactly the same clothes as he had been on that occasion. The leathery skin of his chest and arms made him look like some prehistoric man excavated from a Danish bog.
‘You must be the missing Carole,’ he said.
She was slightly unnerved by the promptness of his appearance. It was almost as if he’d been waiting till she got out of the pool to come and introduce himself. Surely, the movement in the trees she’d seen from her balcony hadn’t been Travers lurking, keeping Morning Glory under surveillance? It was an uncomfortable thought.
She admitted that she was indeed Carole.
‘I met your friend Jude.’
‘Yes, she mentioned that.’
‘And I gather you went off yesterday to enjoy the delights of Pinara.’
How the hell did he know that? But Carole didn’t voice the thought. Not knowing that Jude had told him, she thought it was just more evidence that there were no secrets in Kayaköy.
‘How did you like the place?’
‘Very striking.’
‘And what struck you in particular?’
‘Well, I suppose, the tombs.’
‘Which ones?’
‘The ones carved out of the sheer mountain face, the ones you can’t get to. Not the kind of sight we’re used to in England.’
‘No. Whereabouts is it in England you hail from? Jude didn’t say.’
‘Little village called Fethering. On the South Coast.’
‘Fethering, yes. Never been there, but I’ve seen signs for it.’
‘Oh?’
‘Phyllis and I used to live in Southampton. Phyllis, I should have said, is “Her Indoors” – very much so, I’m afraid, these days. Bedridden.’
Carole murmured some mumble of condolence.
‘So she’s “Her Indoors” and I’m “Him Outdoors”. Spend all my time gardening.’
Carole didn’t recognize this, but it was a half-joke everyone who met Travers had to undergo.
‘Yes, we used to see signs to Fethering when we drove along the A27 towards Brighton.’
‘Ah.’ Carole was beginning to feel extremely uncomfortable. The man was apparently quite happy to stand by the pool maundering away all morning. And he was openly looking at legs that had been very rarely seen in the last decade. Not to mention her cleavage, of which her bathing costume offered a more generous allocation than allowed by the rest of her wardrobe.
Purposely, she picked up her bathing towel. ‘I must go in and get dressed.’
‘Yes, of course. I won’t stop you. Just to say, if there’s anything I can do to help, I’m only next door.’
‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’
‘And maybe we could meet up for a drink and a chat at some point …?’
Carole’s reaction to the proposal exactly mirrored Jude’s of the previous morning. Over my dead body.
‘I think we should go to Hisarönü,’ announced Jude. They were breakfasting together on an area of the patio shaded by a network of vines and Morning Glory. Jude had appeared in yet another bikini just after Travers left. They’d finished up the fruit from the fridge and toasted the remains of the bread. Whatever else they did during the day, a visit to the supermarket to stock up on essentials would have to be fitted in.
‘Why Hisarönü?’ asked Carole, prejudiced by what her guidebooks and Nita had said about the place. Unwelcome images of Union Jack T-shirts and tattoos invaded her mind.
‘Because we need to find out anything we can about Nita Davies, and we happen to know that her friend works there.’
‘Ah, the Dirty Duck.’
‘Exactly. Nita’s friend Donna who we met briefly at Dalaman Airport.’
‘I think the flyer she gave us is still in my bag upstairs.’
‘If it isn’t, we still should be able to find the place. There aren’t going to be two restaurants called the Dirty Duck in a Turkish village.’
‘From what I’ve read about Hisarönü,’ said Carole beadily, ‘I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. And, of course, the other person who should be able to tell us lots about Nita is her husband.’
‘Erkan?’
‘Right. She said there was something about his diving school in the villa’s welcome pack.’
‘And that’s in Ölüdeniz, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Carole, confident of the local maps that she had memorized. ‘So we’d better take the details with us because Ölüdeniz is only a few miles beyond Hisarönü.’ She piled up their two toast plates. ‘Right, we’d better be off then.’
‘No, let’s spend the morning by the pool. The Dirty Duck won’t be open yet.’
‘Donna said it did full English breakfasts. I’m sure it’ll be open.’
‘Oh, it’ll be nicer to have the morning by the pool. Then we can go and have lunch at the Dirty Duck.’
Carole would have liked to be up and doing straight away, but she graciously didn’t argue. Instead, she spent the morning in cotton top and trousers sitting rather stiffly on a lounger and working on one of her Times crosswords, while Jude alternated between sploshing in the pool and reading her trashy novel.
Eventually (for Carole – Jude hadn’t noticed the passage of time), twelve o’clock came round. ‘Well, I think we could think about being on our way,’ announced Carole.
‘Yes, sure.’ There was a silence. Jude didn’t move from her lounger.
‘And we could go and stock up at the supermarket on our way back, rather than leaving the food in a hot car.’
‘Mm.’ Still no movement, and another silence.
‘Well, if we are about to go, perhaps you ought to think about changing your clothes.’
Jude looked down mischievously at her bikini and the rolling curves it failed to control. ‘Oh, I thought I could go like this.’ Carole’s mouth opened, but Jude came in quickly enough to stem the flow of outrage before it started. ‘I’ll go and change,’ she said humbly. And then giggled as she went into the villa.
The incongruous thing about Hisarönü is that it is so close to the well-tended rustic simplicity of Kayaköy. A visitor only had to drive a few miles out of the village and up a pine-forested hillside, but once in Hisarönü they could have been on another planet.
Carole drove, which was what always happened in Fethering. Though Jude could drive, she didn’t own a car, so most of their mutual excursions were in Carole’s Renault. And it seemed natural for the same pattern to repeat itself with the Fiat Bravo in Turkey.