‘Isn’t there one you’ve used before?’
‘No. If I go to Stephen and Gaby’s I take him with me. Since I’ve been in Fethering I haven’t been away and had to leave him.’
This brought home to Jude what a big deal going away was for Carole. And made her feel a little more forgiving of her neighbour’s vacillation. ‘So what suddenly made you decide?’ she asked.
‘Decide what?’
‘Decide that you would go to Turkey with me?’
‘Oh,’ said Carole airily, ‘I’d decided that as soon as the idea was mentioned.’
Something snapped in Jude. Uncharacteristically splenetic, she demanded, ‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell me?’
The two women’s preparations during the next week were very different. Jude, who didn’t really need any holiday planning, was kept busy with work. Because of going away at short notice there were appointments for her healing services that had to be postponed or, in more cases, fitted in before she left. She was a soft touch with her regular clients and soon found that she was booked up right through to the end of the Sunday. She would certainly need the break by the time they left for Dalaman on the Monday morning.
Carole’s approach was, of course, different and involved a lot of time researching on her laptop. (Having for a long time resisted the allure of computers, she now spent hours a day googling. Never for trivial things though. Carole Seddon didn’t believe in time-wasting.)
Her first task was, as she’d said, to find suitable accommodation for Gulliver. Though she wasn’t one to be soppy about animals, she felt a strong sense of duty towards her Labrador and wanted to ensure that he was put up in a reputable establishment. So she assiduously googled ‘Dog Boarding Kennels’, eliminating some on grounds of distance and others on details that she didn’t like on their websites, until she came up with a shortlist of four. These she contacted, but rather than making the choice and immediately booking online, being Carole Seddon, she arranged to visit all four – with Gulliver – before reaching her decision.
If she’d hoped the dog might express some preference, she was disappointed. But he clearly knew something upsetting was about to happen, and at each of the four kennels he fixed her with the same expression of betrayed reproach.
When they returned to High Tor, after trying to assuage her guilt by giving Gulliver a dog biscuit, Carole went straight up to the spare bedroom where her computer lived. (Though she was aware that one of the advantages of a laptop was its mobility, guided by some Calvinist proscription of mixing business with pleasure, she never worked on it anywhere else in the house.) Online, she made the booking at the kennels she had selected (with no help from Gulliver). Having never before made a comparable transaction, she was a little shocked by how much it cost. Though they were getting the use of Morning Glory for nothing, Carole still felt a little guilt at how much the additional costs of the holiday might be. Paying for the flights on her credit card had taken a substantial sum, and Jude hadn’t yet given her the promised cheque for her share. She had a Carole Seddon moment (and she would have more before their departure) of wondering whether the trip to Turkey was such a good idea after all.
Then there was the matter of clothes. Carole didn’t enjoy any kind of clothes shopping, though in recent years, since Lily had been born, she had derived a lot of pleasure from buying garments for her granddaughter. But as a general rule, Carole reckoned buying clothes for herself was self-indulgent. It was not an experience she enjoyed, and her aim in what she wore was to be as anonymous as possible. She favoured light browns and white and navy (she remembered her mother saying, ‘You’ll never go wrong with white and navy.’). During her working life at the Home Office she had worn a lot of black, but since then black had got dangerously trendy and made too much of a statement for Carole Seddon. So she didn’t wear it any more.
But one thing that she knew from her online reading was that Turkey could be very hot, possibly too hot for Carole’s existing summer wardrobe. She might have to purchase some cotton tops (definitely not T-shirts) and trousers (definitely not jeans).
And then there was the terrifying matter of a bathing costume. Though she had lived a good few years in Fethering and walked daily on the beach with Gulliver, Carole had never actually been in the sea there, not even to paddle. But she did nonetheless have a bathing costume. It had been bought one summer when she had rented a beach hut at the nearby village of Smalting. The aim of the exercise had been to have somewhere in which to entertain her granddaughter Lily and, after the distractions of a murder investigation, the two of them had had a very successful week together.
But the costume she had bought then had been a one-piece in, to Carole’s mind, a rather daring red, and from some of the things she had read online she wondered whether it was suitable apparel for a Muslim country. Maybe something less flamboyant would be more appropriate.
Having reached this conclusion, Carole Seddon set off in her Renault, without enthusiasm, for the Marks & Spencer’s in Chichester.
The navy-blue swimming costume she bought was of the kind that a nun would not have felt out of place on a beach in. She also, rather daringly, purchased a pair of beige cotton shorts, though she thought it extremely unlikely she would wear them. It was many years since Carole Seddon’s legs had last been seen in public.
Because she would be in Chichester, Carole had also taken a carefully prepared list for a major shopping raid on Boots. Although she had no intention of baring much flesh in Kayaköy, she purchased suntan lotions of various strengths from Factor Fifty downwards. Also after-sun and cold cream. Plasters in various sizes, cotton wool, insect repellent, Anthisan, Savlon, Nurofen and paracetamol (just to be sure). And, of course, Imodium. (One of the online sites said there were a lot of kebabs likely to be served up in Turkey, and Carole Seddon had a deep mistrust of kebabs.)
Boots was followed by an electrical gadgetry shop, where she bought adaptor plugs that would fit Turkish sockets. Once in there, a pure victim of marketing, she also bought a ‘universal all-in-one mobile phone charger’ – though her firm intention was, despite taking her phone with her, not to use it except in the direst emergencies. She’d heard terrible stories about the draconian ‘roaming charges’ that could be incurred by incautious mobile phone users abroad.
As well, although she had already done a lot of research online, she went to Waterstones and bought the Rough Guide to Turkey along with a large map of the Turkish coast. And then she devoted all her spare time to finding out more about the country.
She concentrated first on Turkey’s history and, being Carole Seddon, approached it like someone mugging up their Specialist Subject for an appearance on Mastermind. By the time she and Jude left for Dalaman, Carole could have answered questions on the Hittites and the First Anatolian empire, the funerary monuments of the Lycians, the Battle of Kadesh, Cyrus the Great, Roman domination, the Macedonian Dynasty, the Janissaries, Süleyman the Magnificent and the modernizing achievements of Kemal Atatürk.
Carole Seddon had always had qualities of a completist.
On Friday evening the phone rang in Woodside Cottage. Jude was exhausted after a day of back-to-back healing sessions. The effort of concentration always left her drained.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh, it’s Barney.’
Jude wondered why he was ringing. They’d had a fairly exhaustive conversation earlier in the week about the practical details of the forthcoming fortnight at Morning Glory – keys, the electrical system, numbers for the pool man and the plumber, advice on the best supermarket in Kayaköy. Still, maybe there was some minor item he had forgotten to mention.