The Tomb in Turkey

SIX

Carole Seddon spent the Sunday before they left ticking things off the many lists she had made. Her tasks included taking Gulliver to the kennels she had chosen for him. The look of reproach he cast upon her as they parted made her feel as if she had been solely responsible for the Massacre of the Innocents.

Back at High Tor, Carole faced the decision of whether or not to take her laptop with her to Turkey. It was heavy, it was a potential target for thieves and it never under normal circumstances strayed from the spare room. But then again she was sometimes shocked by how much she relied on the machine. So many things were so easily googleable. And she wouldn’t like to be out of email contact with Stephen, Gaby and Lily. She decided she would take it. Besides, Barney had said that Morning Glory had broadband connectivity. The laptop would go in her hand baggage. So another item was ticked off a list.

And in between her packing and panicking, Carole brushed up on the handy phrases in Turkish which she had found online. She didn’t bother with how the words were written, concentrating instead on the phonetic pronunciations that were listed. Carole cracked ‘yes’ and ‘no’ first. They were respectively ‘ev-et’ and ‘hi-ear’. She felt fairly confident of greeting people with ‘mare-ha-ba’ which meant ‘hello’, but found that saying goodbye was more complicated. It depended on whether you were the person leaving or the person being left. The former said ‘hosh-ch-kal’, while the latter had to say ‘guu-leh guu-leh’. ‘Please’ was ‘lut-fen’, and ‘thank you’ ‘te-sh-qu-err ed-err-im’. More useful, Carole reckoned, would be ‘I don’t speak Turkish’ (‘turk-jeh bill-mi-yor-um’), ‘Do you speak English?’ (‘inn-gliz-je con-nush-or mus-un-us’) and, most useful of all, ‘I don’t understand’ (‘si-zi ann-la-ma-yor-um’).

But, search as she might, she couldn’t find the Turkish for the vital question, ‘Do you sell Imodium?’

Carole’s bags had been packed and repacked many hours before Jude started to think what she was going to take to Morning Glory. For her, the Sunday was a day of back-to-back healing sessions, which left her completely wiped out. When she said goodbye to her last client it was seven thirty in the evening. Before pouring herself a large drink and getting something to eat (she hadn’t had time for lunch), she checked for messages on her mobile phone. There was one, from Henry Willingdon, asking her to ring back.

Some final housekeeping detail about the villa, Jude supposed. She was wrong.

As soon as she got through, Henry said very directly, ‘I just wanted to warn you. Don’t get involved with Barney.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to. Getting involved with Barney is the last thing on my mind.’

‘He flew out to Turkey this morning. He’s going there because of you.’ There was a lot of tension behind the upper-class vowels.

‘He’s not going there because of me. I assume he’s got business out there.’

‘That’s just a smokescreen. It’s you he wants to see.’

‘I’m sure that’s not the case,’ said Jude, feeling rather wretched.

‘It is. I know Barney. I saw the way he looked at you when you came to the house. He thinks picking up with a girlfriend from long ago will make him feel young again.’

‘I would have thought it would have the reverse effect, make him even more aware of the passage of the years, seeing how much we’ve both changed.’

‘So you’re admitting the two of you might pick up again?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Jude wearily, wishing she hadn’t got into the position of owing any kind of favour to Barney Willingdon.

‘If anything does happen while you’re out in Kayaköy, I’ll hear about it! I have contacts out there.’

‘Henry, your contacts can watch me twenty-four/seven. They will not see anything inappropriate happening between me and Barney.’

‘I know that he phoned you on Friday.’

‘I’m not about to deny it.’

‘And he wasn’t just phoning you about practical details for your stay at Morning Glory.’

‘I don’t deny that either.’

‘He said that he wanted to pick up your relationship, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, he did. And I told him there was no chance of that happening.’

‘Hm. Barney can be very persistent.’

‘I know he can. But over the years I’ve got quite good at dealing with persistent men. I’m strong enough and grown-up enough to resist any advances Barney might make to me,’ said Jude, hoping her words were true.

‘Just be careful,’ said Henry. ‘He likes getting his own way.’

‘Yes, I remember that.’

‘And he’s also very good at getting his own way.’

‘Not with me he won’t be.’

‘And when Barney doesn’t get his own way, he can turn very nasty indeed.’

‘I remember that too. It was one of the many reasons why I had to break off our relationship.’

‘Don’t forget what happened to Zoë.’

‘His first wife?’

‘Yes. That was in Turkey. So, Jude, you just be very careful.’

‘What actually did happen to Zoë?’ Jude asked.

But Henry Willingdon had rung off.