An Inch of Time (11 page)

‘Derringer is missing.'

‘Oh no, he's not. He's run away to Greece. As a stowaway.'

‘The little swine! Everyone's on holiday except me.'

‘Are you coming down, then?'

‘I might. Only not yet, hon, not until I've finished this painting. But go on, tempt me. What's the weather like?'

‘Warm, dazzling sunshine. What's yours like?'

‘Hard to tell with this fog.'

‘I'm so glad.'

I paid for the call and a pair of cheap sunglasses that had taken my fancy. ‘Foggy in England?' the kiosk owner asked. It was a rhetorical question. If you were in the habit of using the village phone, then presumably the entire village got to share your happy news.

Dodging potholes and constantly stopping to guess the way meant I made slow progress. Someone harbouring an anti-Anglo grudge had used a spray-can to obscure the English translations on road signs for miles around, and one thing you don't learn while listening to language tapes is how to read a foreign alphabet. Fortunately, some of it was sufficiently similar for me to make an educated guess, enough to get me eventually on to the main road south.

Spring was well advanced wherever I looked. The hard heat of summer had not yet arrived to burn the grasses crisp and turn the road verges to dust, allowing me to drive through a lush, subtropical fantasy land where everything but the road itself had some kind of plant growing from it. I crossed a narrow river with improbably green water and passed countless houses half obscured by spring blossom. The traffic was a stream of lorries, scooters, mopeds, pick-ups, ancient three-wheeled trucks (all with green cabs) and buses. Buses had a habit of cornering at speed, using most of the road and a lot of air horn, which apparently made that all right. I quickly learnt to listen as well as look as I drove, feeling small and squashable in Morva's tiny underpowered car. And yet after a while I began to relax into it, windows open, elbow on the sill, driving more slowly, breathing more deeply. The further south I went, the more the traffic thinned out.

I braked. If Morva's description was accurate, then this had to be it. The place where Kyla Biggs's car had been found abandoned was right in front of a long wall of cactus by the side of the road before the turn-off to a place called Chlomós. Morva had mentioned the cactus – it had formed the backdrop to the photo of the car, published in the local paper. I pulled off on to a narrow unmade road leading into the hills and walked across to the cacti. They were the prickly pear type, taller than myself and already bearing small flowers. There were no houses on this bit of road, just a blind stone hut that looked as though it was trying to shrink into the ground. Further along stood a rusted metal shrine. I walked over to it. It had a lopsided pointed roof and a glass front. Inside were the picture of a saint, a bottle of olive oil, an oil lamp, a box of matches and four dead flies.

What I had hoped to find at this place I couldn't have said. I hadn't expected the car to still be here, nor was I hoping to find an explanatory note pinned to a tree. Only, somehow, it seemed like the right place to start looking, since it was the only one I knew of that Kyla had been.

Or did I? Thinking about it, I realized I knew no such thing. Just because her hire car had been here didn't mean she had been in it at the time. I circled the wall of cactus, a couple of car lengths of it. There were cigarette butts and bits of paper rubbish at its base. Here and there, carvings had been made in the cactus, a pentangle, a swastika, a lightning bolt, some initials, the letters K and X inside a badly executed heart pierced by an arrow. This had been carved recently – I could tell by the lighter colour of the scabbing over the deep wounds in the plant's skin. Kyla and Mr X? Was I looking at Kyla Biggs's cactaceous declaration of her love for a mysterious stranger for whom she abandoned her former life, job and hire car? Possibly not. The cool black-and-white look in her photograph kept telling me that infatuation of the type that carves love hearts wasn't behind her disappearance.

The road had fallen quiet. I could smell cigarette smoke on the air but saw nobody. One more time for luck, I circled the cactus, and when I turned back towards my car, I found myself faced by a man who had to have sprung from the stone hut that very second. Either that or he had grown out of the ground. He stood motionless in the road, a couple of feet from the verge, a mattock over his left shoulder and a cigarette in the right corner of his mouth for balance. He was watching me with dark yet wide-awake eyes.

I said ‘hello' and remarked on the warm weather with my bit of Greek, which he accepted as unremarkable. He made a dismissive gesture with a work-scarred hand: no, this wasn't hot, not hot at all. Then he startled me with a question that sounded just a little gruff to my unseasoned ear: ‘What are you doing here?'

I shrugged. ‘I'm on holiday.' Then, making a nonsense out of my statement, I pulled Kyla's photograph from my pocket and held it out for him to peruse and asked, with equal directness, ‘Where is she?'

He lifted both eyebrows and nodded his head back in that tiny gesture that I was quickly learning had many meanings, from ‘no' to ‘impossible' to ‘mind your own business'. The ash on his cigarette had grown long and curved downwards but survived the gesture. He added some rapid-fire Greek in which the only word I understood was
amáxi
– car – and walked off into the olive groves behind me.

I had paid no heed to the approaching engine noise until I saw the twinkle of blue rounding the corner. I ducked back behind the cactus and spied out between two close-growing lobes. The Toyota was being driven at speed, unfortunately on the opposite side of the road. Its right-hand steering wheel put the driver too far away to make out through the tinted glass, yet again I got the impression of white hair as the car flashed past, braked for the next corner and disappeared round it. It looked like the same British number plate, but I hadn't managed to memorize all of it. Next time I saw it, I'd take a photo. Even considering the fact that it was the main route to the south of the island, this was one sighting too many. Whoever was following me had not been put off my scent by my spending the night in Morva's hideaway, but it looked as if my car in the side road had not been spotted. If I was wrong about that, I would soon find out.

I took the turn to Chlomós. I'd been able to admire the village from miles away. It had been superglued to the top of the mountain at a time when the land between its base and the sea was still a mosquito-infested zone where malaria bred at night. The narrow road rose immediately up in a tightly twisting serpentine through the silver green of the olive groves. This was what car horns were made for, warning of your approach as you urged your underpowered engine to heave you through the next bend, but I didn't feel like advertising my whereabouts. Coming to an unsignposted turn-off, I hesitated for a moment. Should I slip down there and wait for something blue to turn up? I decided height might give me an advantage and carried on. I was halfway up when the mountain road opened into a lay-by, a tiny green hire car already parked there. I squeezed the Fiesta behind it and got out. Nearby stood a man in khaki shorts and a flak jacket with heavy binoculars supported on a monopod which he swung about like a Bren gun. It was the birdwatcher from Neo Makriá. For a moment I stood at the edge of the lay-by pretending to admire the view. It wasn't long before I
did
admire the view. Below us stretched the dense forest of olive trees, seemingly uninterrupted by other plantations, with here and there a collection of roofs or a spiral of rising smoke. Further away, I saw what looked like a lake or lagoon, quicksilver below a cloudless sky, and beyond that the hazy shimmer of the Mediterranean. I could imagine how in the days before proper roads this height made people feel safe, allowing ample warning of anyone approaching.

Not so in these days of tarmac roads, of course. The Toyota was back. Now and then I could see a flicker of blue below as my pursuer negotiated the switchback mountain, much faster than I could manage with Morva's clapped-out Fiesta.

The birder looked at me with the disinterest of the specialist – I was entirely the wrong species. I still gave him my finest smile. ‘Amazing bins you've got there. Would you mind if I had a look through them?'

He shrugged. ‘I've lost him now, anyway. I thought I saw an Egyptian vulture as I drove up and pulled in immediately, though I may have been mistaken. He moved off north, I thought. I only caught a glimpse while I was driving.'

‘Ta.' I took the heavy binoculars from him – more Zeiss hardware – and pointed them down the mountain, trying to bring my blue quarry closer. What was I thinking? It was I who was the quarry.

‘You won't see anything down there; north of the lake is where you should be looking. Over
there
,' he said, tapping me on the arm, exasperated.

‘Oh, I don't know. It's more the performance of your binoculars I'd like to check out.'

‘Yes, you said you had no interest in ornithology.'

‘That's not what I said. I said I didn't come here for the birds. These bins are brilliant; mine are rubbish.' I meant it. The magnification was such that when I found the Toyota zooming up the hill I had to take my eyes away from the glasses to reassure myself that its arrival wasn't imminent.

‘What kind of glasses have you got?' the twitcher asked, more friendly now that I had acknowledged his superiority in the bins department.

Below me, the Toyota had reached the unsignposted turn-off, slowed and come to a stop. I had a good view of it now below a rocky outcrop devoid of trees. The driver's door opened and my silver-haired pursuer got out.

She was dressed entirely in black: black trainers, jeans, vest top and gloves. She was about mid-thirties, her hair was bleached – her darker roots were showing – and a nose-ring or stud glittered by her left nostril. It was the gloves that worried me. ‘Mm? Erm, I have no idea what make they are, to be honest. I bought them at a jumble sale.'

The woman stood with her hands on her hips, staring down the turn-off. Then she suddenly swung round. Had the sun reflected off the binoculars? She seemed to look straight at me for a couple of seconds, then swung herself back into the driver's seat.

‘Well, small wonder,' the twitcher said. ‘You always get what you pay for.'

I handed back the binoculars. ‘Oh, I don't know. Sometimes you get more than you bargained for. Must dash.'

The Fiesta's wheels spun as I drove off past the twitcher, whose puzzled look clearly spelled ‘never talk to strangers' across his face. I laboured at the wheel and tormented the little engine, but there really was no point: the Toyota had probably four times the horsepower. At every bend I could see it below me, getting closer. I should just stop, I told myself, and have it out with the woman. But perhaps not on an empty road on the mountainside. It wasn't the fact I was being followed that worried me; I myself had followed people many times and some of them were still alive.
It was the gloves
. Only seriously weird people drive with gloves on. Avoid them at all costs.

The Toyota was getting very close – I could catch glimpses of it in my mirrors now. A few houses began to appear, then at last I heaved the car into the village proper.
Which way, which way?
These streets were narrow, some not made for cars at all. What if I got stuck somewhere? The Toyota was now just a street corner behind. A small lorry, loaded to the gills with propane gas bottles, was in the process of pulling out of a yard and into the road. It would take up all the available space. I parped my horn as I squeezed past, then looked back. The lorry lumbered into the middle of the narrow street. An angry Toyota car horn blared behind me. I chose the quickest way out, back towards the north. I calculated that I had bought myself no more than three minutes' head start before the Toyota would again be eating up the distance between us. Where horsepower was lacking, bravado would have to do.

In a Ford Fiesta no one can hear you scream. I flung the car down the mountain, past some astonished sightseers who had pulled up at a beauty spot. I had no time for the views; the bends arrived at alarming speeds and the car cornered like a crateful of fish. Not once did I dare look in my mirrors. For all I knew, the Toyota could be nudging the rear bumper. I flung the thing about on the potholed road that seemed to go on for ever, then at last I made it to the coast and slipped the car among a healthy amount of traffic and felt a whole lot better for it. There was no sign of my pursuer. With any luck, I had given her the slip.

For a while I just bumbled along the coast road, with the sea glittering to my right and the land rising on my left. I knew I was going in the wrong direction, but just now I didn't really care. When I got to a place called Benitses, I stopped, slid the car between a couple of tourist jeeps and sat down at a cafe table within commando-roll distance of the driver's door. An Australian waitress served me iced coffee; a boy tried to sell me a pair of sunglasses, despite the fact that I had a pair on my nose; half-naked British tourists studied the menu boards promising all-day English breakfasts. All the clichés appeared to be intact and all seemed well with the world. I leant back in my plastic chair, stretched out my legs and tried to relax. The narrow strip of beach was dotted with bodies sizzling in the unusual spring heat, and the predominant smell in the air, even with the road between us, was of factor eight. Benitses was obviously built to cater for a large number of summer visitors, yet right now its cafes and restaurants looked impatiently unfrequented. The place had an eager, expectant air I wanted to lose myself in. I felt like skiving. For a while I tried to imagine myself at the beginning of a carefree few weeks of holiday, with nothing much to do apart from rattling ice cubes in my drinks and reading bilingual menus by the dazzling sea.