The Tomb in Turkey

THIRTY-ONE

Carole, in a state of some confusion, was just leaving the front door of Brighton House when she saw the outline of its owner coming through the main gates.

‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘Funny, I hadn’t got you down as the burglarious sort.’

‘No, I’m not. I came in because I smelt burning and …’ She indicated the pile of dampened-down ash. ‘I think a bit of charcoal must have fallen out of the barbecue and set it alight. I was afraid the house might have caught fire, so I came to put it out.’

‘Well, that was very public-spirited of you. Thank you very much. What a good person you are to have as a neighbour – and not only because of your pulchritude.’

Carole suppressed a shudder. ‘Well, I’d better get back to Morning Glory. Jude went out for a walk, I think, but she’s probably back now and I—’

‘No, she’s not back yet. I’ve just taken her to see Barney Willingdon.’

Carole was too tense to worry that Jude was progressing on their investigation in a major way without her. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘How on earth did you know where he was?’

‘Oh, I make it my business to know about everything that goes on in Kayaköy.’

‘Good. Well, I’d better get back and …’

But Travers Hughes-Swann was still standing in her way, firmly in the middle of the two open gates. ‘While, as I say, I’m very grateful to your public spirit in coming to put out the fire, I do find myself faced by a small niggling question.’

‘And what’s that?’ asked Carole, trying to sound casual.

‘It’s simply: in what way did your coming to put out the fire necessitate your entering my house?’

There was no way of avoiding the direct question. ‘To be quite honest, I was worried about your wife.’

‘Ah. “Her Indoors”,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Or should it be “Her Not Indoors”?’

Her second, ‘Yes,’ was almost inaudible.

‘I think we need to talk about this, Carole,’ said Travers Hughes-Swann.

The discussion of murder in the ghost town seemed to have transmuted into a kind of therapy session. Jude told Barney the content of their conversation with Henry that morning, and he admitted his terrible fear of impotence. And, yes, he had tried to pick up again with Nita – because he wanted to recapture the past, to go back to the days when sex had been instinctive and natural.

‘I think you need to talk to Henry,’ said Jude.

‘I have talked to her till I’m blue in the face. It doesn’t make any difference.’

‘Talk to her about the problem. The sex problem. You need professional help.’

‘What, you mean I need to go to some smug eleven-year-old doctor,’ he asked scornfully, ‘and tell her I can’t get it up?’

‘It needn’t be like that.’ Instinctively, Jude had started talking in her healer’s voice. ‘There are medical specialists in that kind of area.’

He snorted contempt.

‘Anyway, apart from that, why don’t you ring Henry?’

‘Why?’

‘Well, she’s here. She’s only in Fethiye. She can rescue you, take you to the Hotel Osman for the rest of the night, and you can get a flight back to England tomorrow.’

‘I don’t know. If it was Henry who organized Nita’s death, then—’

‘It was not Henry who organized the death. You killed her!’

They both looked up at the sound, to see a figure framed in the rotting doorway. The bandage round his head looked like a turban in the moonlight. In his hand was a gun.

It was Erkan.

‘Your friend gave you away,’ said Travers Hughes-Swann.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘The lovely Jude. She told me about you finding the body.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘Everyone seems to think that Barney killed Nita. That’s the logical thing to think. And once Erkan has killed Barney, the whole affair will be neatly sewn up without any involvement of the police … well, except when they arrest Erkan.’

‘Erkan’s in hospital in Fethiye. He can’t do much harm to Barney at the moment.’

‘Don’t you believe it. I phoned him as soon as your friend Jude told me about you discovering the body. I told him all the details, and I told him that Barney must have killed Nita. As a result, he discharged himself from hospital and got a cousin of his to drive him back to Kayaköy.’ Travers looked at his watch. ‘Barney is probably already dead.’

‘But does anyone know where Barney is? How’s Erkan going to find him?’

‘I know where Barney is. In the ghost town. I’ve told Erkan where to find him.’

‘Why on earth did you do that?’

‘I told you. So that the whole business is neatly sewn up. Erkan kills Barney for strangling Nita. The police arrest Erkan.’ He spread his hands wide. ‘How tidy is that?’

‘It won’t be so tidy,’ said Carole, ‘if I tell the police about finding the body.’

‘No, I agree, it won’t.’

And suddenly he had grabbed her, enveloping her in his body odour. Carole tried to fight back, but there was amazing strength in his wiry tanned arms. He must have had the plastic garden ties ready, because soon she was pinned down in an upright chair, wrists and ankles strapped to its arms and legs.

‘Which is why,’ said Travers, as if there had been no interruption to their conversation, ‘I have to ensure that you don’t go to the police.’

‘Are you threatening to murder me?’

He smiled ruefully in the moonlight. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see any other viable alternative.’

‘Suppose I were to promise you that I won’t go to the police, that I will forget what I saw at Pinara?’

‘Oh, if only one could trust people’s promises,’ he said almost wistfully.

‘So did you actually strangle Nita?’ asked Carole.

‘Yes,’ he replied with something approaching satisfaction.

‘But why? Why were you at Pinara, anyway?’

‘Ooh, there’s a long history of me going to Pinara, you know, Carole.’

‘What, as a sightseer?’

This seemed to amuse him. ‘No, not as a sightseer … more to see the sights.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That Lycian tomb where Nita died has seen a lot of action over the years.’

‘You mean sexual action between her and Barney?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. How did you find out about that?’ Carole clearly didn’t think it was the moment for long explanations, so he went on, ‘I first came across them by accident. I was there sightseeing, with Phyllis. Just before we got to the car park on our way back, I needed to nip into the woods to have a pee. I saw the little stream, and then through the trees I could see into the tomb.’ He chuckled again. ‘And see what was going on in the tomb. I didn’t have any of my equipment with me then, but I still found what I saw very exciting. So the next time the two of them were there I saw to it that I was properly equipped.’

‘But how did you know when they were going to be there?’

‘Not too difficult to work out. As I may have said, there are no secrets in Kayaköy, so everyone would know when Barney Willingdon was going to be over here. And the schedules of the tours Nita organized were easy enough to access – from holiday companies’ brochures at first, and later on their websites.

‘And Barney and Nita were very regular in their assignations. Eleven o’clock in the morning. Nita would send her tour party off to look at the amphitheatre with the junior guide, then she’d go to the tomb to meet Barney. And I’d be ready waiting with my equipment.’

‘When you say “equipment”,’ asked Carole with distaste, ‘what do you mean?’

‘Binoculars, cameras – particularly cameras.’ He sniggered. ‘With telephoto lenses, of course.’

‘So you mean you’ve got a whole archive of …?’

‘Yes,’ he said complacently.

It was at that moment Carole realized just how unhinged Travers Hughes-Swann was. And how little hope she had of avoiding the fate he had lined up for her.

‘For some years,’ he continued, ‘there wasn’t any activity at the tomb. If Barney came over with his wife – the first one or the second one – he wouldn’t make his assignations at Pinara. But this time I knew he’d come over on his own, and then I heard Nita say that she was going to Pinara on Tuesday.’

Fairly sure she wouldn’t like the answer, Carole asked, ‘When you said you “heard Nita”, where were you when you heard her?’

‘Right here,’ he said smugly. ‘I have microphones set up in Morning Glory. I like to know what’s going on.’

Carole felt physically sick at the thought that this pervert could have been listening to every word she and Jude uttered when they were at the villa. She was grateful that none of their poolside conjectures had featured him as a possible murderer. Otherwise the schedule for her execution might have been moved forward a bit.

Still, she might as well go to her death knowing the solution to the murder mystery she’d become involved in, so she asked bluntly, ‘Why did you kill Nita?’

‘Ah.’ He sounded almost apologetic as he said, ‘Bit of a cock-up on my efficiency front, I’m afraid. There’s an optimum position in the woods near that Lycian tomb, just over the little stream, where I always set up my equipment, but some trees had fallen down there, so it wasn’t terribly safe underfoot. And I’m afraid, just after Nita had got to the tomb, I slipped, and she heard the noise and came out. Then she saw me. And once she’d seen me …’ He spread his hands wide in a gesture of inevitability. ‘Well, there was only one thing I could do, wasn’t there?’

Carole could think of a wide choice of things that could have been done by someone less insane than Travers Hughes-Swann, but she didn’t enumerate them. Instead, boldly, she asked, ‘And did you kill your wife Phyllis too?’

‘Oh, you’re very quick, Carole. Yes, I’m afraid again I had to.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, she found my archive.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘She was looking at my laptop – which I’d many times told her she shouldn’t do – and she came across the archive of photographs.’

‘The ones you’d shot at Pinara?’

‘Amongst others. Amongst many others. You’d be surprised how many people leave their bedroom windows open at night when they’re in a hot country like Turkey. And I have very good telephoto lenses on my cameras and video cameras.’ He giggled at his own cleverness.

‘And did you strangle your wife too?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s the easiest way.’ Then, to Carole’s horror, he reached into the pocket of his grubby shorts and produced something she recognized. It was the lanyard from which Nita Davies’s ID card used to hang.

‘And you maintained that your wife was still alive so that there’d be no enquiry into her death?’

‘Well, that was part of the reason,’ he admitted. ‘But also the state pension is rather more generous for a married couple than it is for a single person.’ He spoke as if all of his behaviour had been prompted by pure mathematical logic.

‘And it was you, Travers, who removed Nita’s body from the tomb?’

‘Yes. Well, I had to, didn’t I? Can’t leave dead bodies in Lycian tombs, can you?’ He seemed to find this very funny. ‘I brought her back in the Land Rover.’

‘And where did you dispose of the body?’

‘Well, obviously, in the same place as I disposed of Phyllis’s. And—’ he smiled – ‘where you will be very shortly joining them.’ He looked across at his home-built travesty of a Lycian tomb. ‘Very fitting, don’t you think?’

And Carole understood why the stone blocks that floored Travers Hughes-Swann’s ‘suntrap’ had been so much less dusty and weed-covered than the rest of the garden. They had just been moved to accommodate Nita’s body beneath them.

He had now unclipped the plastic catch which made the lanyard into a necklace and was wrapping the free ends around his strong thin hands. ‘Now, obviously, it’s going to be easier for me, Carole, if you don’t struggle, but it won’t make a lot of difference either way. I’m still going to kill you.’

Carole began to scream. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of screaming before. But the nylon lanyard was so quickly round her neck, and so tightly round her neck that the screaming sound ended abruptly in a choke. She found her mind turning to her granddaughter Lily – and the brother or sister for Lily whom she would never meet.

Carole Seddon felt her consciousness draining away. She was only half-aware of a commotion at the gates of Brighton House, then a shout and the sound of a gun firing.

She didn’t see Travers Hughes-Swann stagger, slacken his hold on the lanyard as his strength deserted him, and drop to the ground, dead.