The Tomb in Turkey

FIFTEEN

They looked for any signs to prove that the body had been there, but found nothing. No tell-tale snagged thread of fabric, no stain of bodily fluid. Perhaps a properly equipped police forensic team could have found something, but to their amateur eyes no traces revealed themselves.

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.’

‘Like exactly what happened to his first wife, Zoë?’

‘Yes.’ Carole grimaced. ‘No, my view is, frustrating though it may be, that at this moment we should just do nothing.’

‘Not tell anyone what you saw?’

Another shake of the head. ‘Not yet, no. If we meet Barney or Erkan or Henry we can certainly keep an eye on their behaviour, but—’

‘Henry? I thought Henry was safely back in Chantry House in Sussex.’

‘No.’ And Carole proceeded to tell Jude about her sighting of Barney’s wife in Fethiye. But her description of Henry’s male companion was too vague for Jude to identify him as Fergus McNally. ‘I think all we can do,’ Carole concluded, ‘is to keep a watching brief on any of them we do meet. It won’t be for long.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Jude.

‘Nita’s been murdered. Soon, her body’s going to be found. And even if it’s been successfully hidden away somewhere, people are pretty soon going to realize that she’s missing. Her husband, Erkan, apart from anyone else.’

It was nearly dark when the two women got back down to the car and the camels. Carole showed only token resistance when Jude suggested they have a drink – and, come to that, eat dinner – in one of the restaurants. They chose one called Antik.

Inside, they could have sprawled on one of the circular rug- and cushion-covered platforms, the modern equivalent of the old Turkish divan, but Carole resolutely steered them towards a four-seater table. There were quite a few people around, but more seemed to be the management’s family members than diners. In spite of the outside temperature, a wood fire burned, and in front of it knelt a couple of women in traditional patterned trousers and headscarves. They poured batter on to circular hotplates, then shaped the fluid with wooden spatulas until it crisped into pancakes.

‘Gözleme,’ said Carole authoritatively.

‘Bless you,’ said Jude, misunderstanding.

‘No, they’re making gözleme. “Village pancakes.” Don’t you remember? Nita told us about them when we were driving over.’

‘Oh, yes, they look rather good.’

A smiling, casually dressed man in his forties wandered over to their table. Carole tried desperately to summon up some of the phrase-book sentences she had learned for ‘In The Restaurant’. Before she had time to speak, though, the man had said, ‘Good evening,’ in accented but perfect English and asked what they would like to drink.

To Carole’s surprise, Jude asked for a large Efes beer.

‘Draught?’

‘Yes, please. We’ve just walked up to the ghost town. Hot work.’ And, indeed, Jude’s round red face gleamed with sweat.

‘You chose a good time to do it. In the middle of the day, too hot. So, one large beer. And for you, madam?’

‘A glass of white wine, please. Do you have a Chardonnay?’ asked Carole instinctively.

‘No, madam. We have local white wine. Very good. It’s from a Turkish grape you would not know, but it tastes very like Sauvignon Blanc.’

‘Oh, I’ll try that, thank you.’

‘Just a glass or a small carafe?’

‘Just a glass, thank you.’

‘Oh, let’s go for a large carafe,’ said Jude. ‘I’ll be moving on to the wine once I’ve finished my beer.’

‘But I don’t think—’

Carole’s words seemed to be unheard. ‘Very good, a large carafe of local white wine. And will you be eating as well?’

‘Oh, yes, you bet,’ said Jude.

‘I will bring you menus. But let me say I have some very good lamb cutlets in today, if you like them, and some fresh sea bass.’

‘And gözleme.’ Carole, pleased to show off her Turkish, gestured towards the women at the fire.

‘And, of course, gözleme. These can be filled with cheese and spinach or ground beef or roasted eggplant.’ His use of the last word, instead of ‘aubergine’, demonstrated that some of his tourist customers were American as well as English.

He barked out a command in Turkish, and a fourteen-year-old boy with short-cropped black hair who’d been squatting by the fireplace immediately brought across two menus. The likeness was so striking that he had to be the owner’s son. The menus, they found, were in Turkish, English and German, indicating the range of expected visitors.

‘I will get your drinks,’ said his owner, ‘and then take your order for food.’ An instruction went out to another short-haired, but slightly older son, who immediately came across with a basket of cutlery and condiments and fitted a paper tablecloth over the table’s wooden surface. He secured it under elastic strings which ran beneath the tabletop.

By the time he had finished, his father had returned with the drinks. Both beer glass and wine carafe sparkled with condensation from the fridge.

‘Ooh, that looks so wonderful,’ said Jude, taking a long slurp of the pale yellow beer. ‘Aah, bliss …’

Carole found the first sip of wine that the man had poured for her equally welcome. Again, it was a change from the buttery Chardonnay she so often drank in the Crown and Anchor. But not an unwelcome change.

The man took their orders. Carole liked the sound of the gözleme with cheese and spinach, while Jude opted for the lamb cutlets.

‘Pirzola,’ said the owner. ‘Very good.’

‘We ought to have some starters too,’ said Jude. ‘What do you fancy, Carole?’

‘Oh, I don’t really know whether I actually need—’

‘Let’s have the cacik and some dolma.’

‘Very good,’ said the man. ‘And please, you are the ladies from Morning Glory – yes?’

As they admitted they were, Carole and Jude exchanged looks. There certainly were no secrets in Kayaköy.

After the owner was out of earshot, Carole whispered, ‘I didn’t know you spoke Turkish.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You just ordered those starters without looking at the menu.’

‘That hardly qualifies as “speaking Turkish”.’

‘So does this mean you’ve been to Turkey before?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You didn’t ask.’