Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage (24 page)

Then, just as they were starting to descend to Izmir in western Turkey, where she knew they would have to wait for an hour before taking off again, the plane was hit by the most awful
turbulence. The hostesses clung on to the trolleys, which lurched dangerously from side to side. Agatha began to pray under her breath. No one else seemed in the slightest fazed. They fastened
their seat-belts and chattered amiably away in Turkish. The expats seemed used to it, and the few tourists like Agatha were frightened to let down the British side by showing fear.

Just when she thought the plane would shake itself apart, the lights of Izmir appeared below and soon they landed. Again, everyone applauded, this time Agatha joining in.

‘That was scary,’ said Agatha to the woman next to her.

‘It was a bit o’ fun, love,’ said the Turkish Cypriot woman speaking English in the accents of London’s East End. ‘I mean, you’d pay for somethin’ like
that at Disney World.’

After an hour, the plane took off again. Between Turkey and Cyprus they were served with a hard square of bread and goat cheese which looked as if it had been stamped out of a machine, washed
down with sour-cherry juice.

Agatha felt the plane beginning to descend again. More turbulence, this time a thunderstorm. The plane lurched and bucked like a wild thing and, looking out of the window, Agatha saw to her
dismay that the whole plane appeared to be covered in sheets of blue lightning. Again, the passengers smiled and chatted and smoked.

Agatha could not keep quiet any longer. ‘He shouldn’t try to land in this weather,’ she said to the woman next to her.

‘Oh, they can land in anything, luv. Pilot’s Turkish. They’re good.’

‘Ladies and gentles,’ said a soothing voice. ‘We are shortly about to land at Erçan airport.’

Again noisy applause on landing. Agatha peered out. It had been raining. She shuffled off the back of the plane on to the staircase, which had not been properly attached to the plane and bobbed
and dipped and swayed dangerously.

I’ll swim home, thought Agatha.

Having successfully reached the tarmac, she realized the heat was suffocating. It was like moving through warm soup. Wearily she walked into the airport buildings. It looked more like a military
airport than a civilian one. It had actually been an RAF airfield up until 1975, and not much had been done to it since then.

She waited in a long line at passport control, a great number of the Turkish Cypriots having British passports. Her friend of the aeroplane said behind her, ‘Ask them for a form.
Don’t let them stamp your passport.’

‘Why?’ asked Agatha, swinging around.

‘Because if you want to go to Greece, they won’t let you in there if you’ve got one of our stamps on your passport, but they’ll give you a form and stamp that and then
you can take it out of your passport, luv, and throw it away afterwards.’

Agatha thanked her, got her form, filled it in and went to wait for her luggage.

And waited.

‘What the hell’s going on here?’ she demanded angrily.

No one replied, although a few smiled at her cheerfully. They talked, they smoked, they hugged each other.

Agatha Raisin, pushy and domineering, had landed among the most laid-back people in the world.

By the time the luggage arrived and she had arranged her two large suitcases on to a trolley and got through customs, she was soaking with sweat and trembling with fatigue.

She had booked into the Dome Hotel in Kyrenia and had told them by telephone before she left England to have a taxi waiting for her.

At first, as she scanned the crowd of waiting faces at the airport, she thought no one was there to meet her. Then she saw a man holding up a card which said, ‘Mrs Rashin.’

‘Dome Hotel?’ asked Agatha without much hope.

‘Sure,’ said the taxi driver. ‘No problem.’

Agatha wondered if there might be some Mrs Rashin looking for a taxi, but she was too tired to care.

She sank thankfully into the back seat. The black night swirled past her beyond the steamy windows. The taxi swung off a dual carriageway, through some army chicanes and then began to climb up a
precipitous mountain road. Jagged mountains stood up against the night sky.

Then the driver said, ‘Kyrenia,’ and far below on her right Agatha could see the twinkling lights of a town – and somewhere down there was James Lacey.

The Dome Hotel is a large building on the waterfront of Kyrenia, Turkish name Girne, which has seen better days and has a certain battered colonial grandeur. There is something
endearing about the Dome. Agatha checked in and had her bags carried up to her room. She switched on the air-conditioning, bathed and got ready for bed, too tired to unpack her suitcases.

She stretched out on the bed. But exhausted as she was, sleep would not come. She tossed and turned and then got out of bed again.

She fumbled with the curtains, drew them back, opened the windows and then the shutters.

She walked out on to a small balcony, her anger draining away. The Mediterranean, silvered by moonlight, stretched out before her, calm and peaceful. The air smelt of jasmine and the salt tang
of the sea. She leaned her hands on the iron railing at the edge of the balcony and took deep breaths of warm air. The waves of the sea crashed on the rocks below and to her left was a sea-water
swimming pool carved out of the rock.

When she returned to her room, she found she was beginning to scratch at painful bites on her neck and arms. Mosquitoes! She found a tube of insect-bite cream in her luggage and applied it
generously. Then she lay down on the bed again after having closed the windows and shutters.

She dialled reception.

‘Effendim?’
said a weary voice on the phone.

‘There is a mosquito in my room,’ snapped Agatha.

‘Effendim?’

‘Oh, never mind,’ growled Agatha.

Despite the buzzing of the mosquito and her fear of getting more bites – for if she did meet James and they went swimming she did not want to be covered in unsightly lumps – her eyes
began to close.

There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ she called.

A hotel servant came in carrying a fly-swat. His black eyes ranged brightly around the room. Then he swiped hard with the fly-swat.

‘Gone now,’ he said cheerfully.

Agatha thanked him and tipped him.

Her eyes closed again and she plunged into a nightmare where she was trying and trying to get to north Cyprus but the plane had been diverted to Hong Kong.

When she awoke in the morning, gladness flooded her. She was here in Cyprus and somewhere out in that jasmine-scented world was James.

She put on a smart flowered cotton dress and sandals and went downstairs for breakfast. The dining-room overlooked the sea.

There were a number of Israeli tourists, which puzzled Agatha, who knew this to be a Muslim country, and did not know that Turkish Muslims have a great admiration for Judaism. There were also
mainland Turkish tourists – that too, she found out later, when she began to be able to tell the difference between Turk and Turkish Cypriot. But the British tourists were immediately
recognizable by their clothes, their white sheepish faces, that odd irresolute look of the British abroad.

The air-conditioning was working in the restaurant. Agatha helped herself from an odd buffet selection which included black olives and goat cheese, and then, anxious to begin the hunt, walked
out of the hotel.

She let out a whimper as the full force of the heat struck her. British to the core, Agatha just had to complain to someone. She marched back in and up to the reception desk.

‘Is it always as hot as this?’ she snarled. ‘I mean, it’s September. Summer’s over.’

‘It’s the hottest September for fifty years,’ said the receptionist.

‘I can’t move in this heat.’

He gave an indifferent shrug. Agatha was to find that the receptionist was Turkish and that Turkish hotel servants have had a servility bypass.

‘Why don’t you go for a sail?’ he said. ‘You’ll get one of the boats round at the harbour. Cooler on the water.’

‘I don’t want to waste time,’ said Agatha. ‘I’m looking for someone. A Mr James Lacey. Is he staying here?’

The receptionist checked the records.

‘No.’

‘Then can you give me a list of hotels in north Cyprus?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘We haven’t got one.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Can I hire a car?’

‘Next door to the hotel. Atlantic Cars.’

Grumbling under her breath, Agatha went out and into a small car-hire office next door to the hotel. Yes, she was told, she could hire a car and pay with a British bank cheque if she wanted.
‘We drive on the British side of the road,’ said the car-hire man in perfect English.

Agatha signed the forms, paid for the car hire, and soon she was behind the wheel of a Renault and edging through the crowded streets of Kyrenia. The other drivers were slow but erratic. No one
seemed to bother signalling to the right or the left. She pulled into a parking place on the main street, remembering she had a guide to north Cyprus in her handbag, which she had bought in
Dillon’s bookshop in Oxford before she left. It would surely have a list of hotels. The guidebook,
Northern Cyprus
by John and Margaret Goulding, she noticed for the first time, was
actually published by The Windrush Press, Moreton-in-Marsh in the Cotswolds. That seemed to her like a lucky sign. Sure enough, the hotels in Kyrenia were listed. She returned to her room at the
Dome and called one after the other, but none had heard of James Lacey.

She settled down in the air-conditioning to read about Kyrenia instead. Although it was called Girne by the Turks, most still used its old name. In the same way Nicosia had become Lefkosa, but
was often still called Nicosia. Kyrenia, she read, is a small northern port and tourist centre with a famously pretty harbour dominated by a castle; founded (as Kyrenia) in the tenth century BC by
Achaeans and renamed Corineum by the Romans. It was later walled against pirates and became a centre for the carob trade but fell largely into ruin in 1631 and by 1814 had become home to only a
dozen families. It was revived under the British, who improved the harbour and built the road to Nicosia. Prior to the partition of the island after 1974, when the Turks landed to save their own
people from being killed by the Greeks, Kyrenia was a popular retirement town for British expatriates. After 1974 it was settled by refugees from Limassol in the south of the island and once again
resumed its role as a genteel resort, with a new harbour to the east of the town.

Agatha put down the guidebook. The mention of the new harbour had reminded her of the receptionist’s suggestion of a sail.

She went out again and walked dizzily in the blinding heat round to the harbour, wandering among the basket chairs of the fish restaurants until she saw a board advertising a cruise. It was a
yacht called the
Mary Jane.
The skipper saw her studying the board and came along the gangplank and hailed her. He said the cruise cost twenty pounds and included a buffet lunch. They sailed
in half an hour and she would have time to go back to the hotel and fetch her swimsuit.

Agatha bought a ticket and said she would be back. She was now too hot to even think of James. The idea of sailing in a sea breeze was too tempting. Let James wait.

Somehow, perhaps because the heat was affecting her brain, she had imagined she would be the only passenger. But there were eight others, and all English.

There were three upper-class ones sporting expensive clothes and loud braying voices, two men and a woman. One man was elderly with a yellowish-white moustache, glasses and a pink scalp where
the sun had scorched his bald spot. The other man was tall and thin and sallow and appeared to be married to the woman, who was also tall and thin and sallow but with a deep bosom and a hard air of
sexiness about her. They belonged to that stratum which has adopted the very worst manners of the aristocracy and none of the better ones. They shouted at each other rather than spoke and they
stared at the other passengers with a sort of ‘my God’ look in their eyes. Their contemptuous gaze focused in particular on a woman named Rose, middle-aged, blonde-haired with black
roots, diamond rings on her long, tapering fingers, who was also accompanied by two men, one quite elderly and the other middle-aged. The three were in their way a sort of mirror image of the
upper-class ones, Rose having a sexy appeal, the middle-aged man appearing to be her husband, and the elderly one a friend.

Agatha wished she had brought a book or newspaper to barricade herself behind. The skipper made the introductions. The upper-class ones were Olivia Debenham and her husband George and their
friend, Harry Tembleton; the lower-class were the aforementioned Rose, surname Wilcox, her husband Trevor and their friend Angus King. Trevor had a beer belly and a truculent look, cropped fair
hair and thick lips. Angus was an old Scotsman with sagging breasts revealed by his open-necked shirt. Like Rose and Trevor, he appeared to be pretty rich. In fact, thought Agatha, they probably
belonged to the new rich class of Essex man and woman, risen to prosperity during the Thatcher years, and they could probably buy and sell the upper-class ones who were gazing at them with such
contempt. Then there was a dreary couple who said in whispers that they were Alice and Bert Turpham-Jones, and Olivia sniggered and said in a loud aside that having a double-barrelled name these
days was no longer what it had been.

Agatha would have been accepted by Olivia, George and Harry, who were monopolizing the small bar, but she had taken a dislike to them and so allied herself with the less distinguished, who were
sitting in the bow.

Rose had a silly laugh and the glottal-stop speech of what has come to be known as Estuary English, but Agatha began to become interested in her. Despite the fact that Rose was probably
somewhere in her fifties, she had cultivated a baby-doll appearance. She pouted; her eyelashes, though false, were good; her breasts revealed by a low frilly sundress were excellent; and her long
thin legs ending in high-heeled strapped sandals were brown and smooth. She had wrinkles on her neck and round her mouth and eyes, but every movement, every bit of body language seemed to scream
out the promise of Good in Bed.