The Tomb in Turkey

SEVENTEEN

The air conditioning did the trick, and Carole slept much better. When she woke at seven she almost felt too cold, but she was fully prepared to forget for the next fortnight her mother’s diktat that she ‘should never go to sleep without at least one window open’. Now she was awake, though, she switched off the air conditioning and opened up everything. Heat soon replaced the chill, and the long net curtains swayed in a light breeze. Curling round the window frames, she saw the delicate blue of the Morning Glory.

Carole moved out on to the balcony. The sky was unbroken blue with the promise of another perfect day. As she looked down over the pool she thought she saw a sudden movement in the trees that edged the track down to the village, but it wasn’t repeated. Just a bird, probably. Or a local cat. Or the latter chasing the former.

There was no sound from Jude’s room, and Carole had the daring thought that she might put on her costume and try the delights of the pool. Why not? She was on holiday. So she took off her nightdress and slipped on the Marks & Spencer dark-blue number, careful all the while not to see any reflections of her body in the bedroom’s generous mirrors. Then she anointed every uncovered bit of skin with the Factor Fifty before, stepping into her flip-flops and picking up a bright bathing towel, she made her way downstairs.

Carole Seddon couldn’t begin to remember how long it was since she had last swum. There were hardy residents who regularly braved the cement-coloured waters of Fethering Beach, but she had never been of their number. She had paddled around in the shallows when she’d spent a week with her granddaughter Lily at nearby Smalting, but when had she last undergone total immersion? No, the memory had gone (though the memory remained of shivering round the municipal pool for school swimming lessons with the overpowering smell of chlorine in her nose).

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.

Knowing from what she’d read in a guidebook that parking in the centre of Hisarönü could be a problem, Carole found an empty space on the outskirts. Having checked for line markings on the road and parking permits in other vehicles, she concluded that they were safe to park there.

They were beside the high rectangular block of a hotel. A board outside advertised its evening entertainments in coloured chalks. Monday: Bingo. Tuesday: Quiz Night. Wednesday: Belly Dancer. Thursday: Country & Western. Friday: Karaoke. Saturday: Barn Dance.

Carole looked at the list with distaste.

‘Well, that’s Saturday night sorted,’ said Jude.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ll go to the Barn Dance.’

‘What! The idea of going to a Barn Dance under any circumstances is appalling. Going to one in a foreign country where one does not know anyone else is …’ Her words trickled away as she took in the expression on her friend’s face. Carole Seddon was not always very good at recognizing when people were making jokes.

‘Hm,’ she said and they walked in silence into Hisarönü.

The silence didn’t last long. Every step they took revealed more evidence of the way the entire town was geared to the demands of British holidaymakers. And not, to Carole’s mind, the nicest kind of British holidaymakers.

Every restaurant they passed offered competitive prices (in Turkish lira or pounds) on full English breakfasts – many with the additional incentive of HP sauce and Tetley tea. Roast Sunday dinners with Yorkshire pudding also featured strongly. There were pubs called the Queen Vic and the Rovers Return. Restaurant names included Rumble-Tums, The Bee’s Knees, Robin Hood and Delboy’s. The theme of the Only Fools and Horses sitcom was continued in a retail outlet called Trotter’s Independent Trading Shop. Amongst its goods on offer were bottle openers shaped like penises, along with watches and sunglasses actually advertised as ‘Genuine Fake’. It was only one of many shops and stalls selling tourist tat. Between them, hairdressers, nail bars and tattoo parlours abounded. A soundtrack of English 70s pop music blared from every doorway.

Carole Seddon was in a state of perpetual shudder, which was not improved by the sight of the tourists who thronged the streets. As feared, there were a plethora of tattoos and Union Jack T-shirts. Obese women with their hair pulled tightly back into scrunchies had far too much glitter on their eyelids and their denim shorts. Too many for Carole’s taste wore nothing more than a bikini. And far too many of the voices she heard came from the Midlands or the North. Which, in Carole Seddon’s lexicon, meant they were ‘common’.

What made this transplanted British enclave even odder was the number of Turkish elements which still remained. Women in traditional dress of baggy trousers and headscarves swept the pavements in front of the shops. Their menfolk sat around outside cafés smoking and sipping at sweet tea in gilded glasses. Young men with cropped black hair buzzed about on their scooters like lazy insects.

The whole set-up prompted uncomfortable thoughts in Carole. She was against the idea of foreign destinations being converted into outposts of Britain, but equally she never felt quite relaxed when abroad. And she suspected that her reaction against Hisarönü was basically social. What she objected to was the idea of transplanting Blackpool to Turkey. While if the place being transplanted was somewhere more genteel … say, Fethering perhaps … well, that might be a lot more acceptable. And then she reflected that in some ways Kayaköy was perhaps not a million miles from Fethering transplanted to Turkey.

They couldn’t miss the Dirty Duck. The whole frontage of the two-storey building was painted a virulent, almost fluorescent, yellow. The pillars of the vine-covered front terrace were also yellow, and outside hung a pub sign of a cartoon duck looking lasciviously through binoculars at distant bikini-clad girls on a beach. The menus, the mats, the coasters and everything else on which there was room to fit it carried the same logo.

They sat down at one of the terrace tables and were greeted instantly by a bonhomous young man in a Dirty Duck polo shirt. It clearly never occurred to him to address them in anything but English. ‘Hello, pretty ladies,’ he said. ‘Could I get you something to drink?’

Jude opted again for a large Efes. ‘It’s so refreshing in this heat,’ she said, ‘but I must stop drinking it soon or I’ll just swell up like a balloon.’

Though conscious that she was going to have to drive, Carole reckoned one glass of white wine would be all right.

‘A dry one you like, madam? We have very good – it’s like a Sauvignon Blanc.’

‘Yes, that’ll be fine, thank you.’

‘Large or small?’

‘Large,’ Jude answered for her.

While the man went for their drinks, they studied the menu. It was all predictable English pub fare (or ‘Pubbe Grubbe’ as the menu insisted on calling it). As well as the inevitable full English breakfast, there were fish and chips, steak and ale pie, hunter’s chicken, sausage and mash and so on. ‘Goodness,’ said Carole, ‘that all looks so filling.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jude. ‘I’m feeling quite peckish.’

Carole looked into the interior. There, the fierce yellow paint had given way to a dark wood effect with coloured glass lampshades and a perfect replica of an English pub bar. She was hoping to see Donna Lucas, but there was no sign of her. Carole wondered – and indeed worried – about the best way of finding out if she was on the premises.

By the time their drinks arrived, she had, to her relief, found a part of the menu featuring some lighter dishes, and when asked she ordered a cheese omelette. Jude went for the sausage and mash.

‘Very good choice,’ said the waiter. ‘Wall’s sausages shipped over specially from England. Not spicy like Turkish sausage.’

‘Sounds great,’ said Jude. ‘Oh, by the way, is Donna Lucas around?’

‘Donna? Yes.’

‘It’s just, we met her briefly at Dalaman Airport, and she said if we came here we’d get special rates.’

‘Of course. I’ll tell her you are here.’