She poured some into a glass, and filled another glass from the washbasin tap. Gently she trickled water in to dilute the contents.
The liquid remained transparent. She poured in more water to make sure, but still there was not the slightest evidence of clouding.
Whatever Joyce Dover had brought to Corfu in that bottle, it wasn’t ouzo.
? Mrs Pargeter’s Package ?
Seventeen
Mrs Pargeter thought she was dreaming. The sound of aeroplanes filled her dream. World War Two aeroplanes. They hummed in the distance, throbbed as they drew closer, screamed as they came overhead, then screeched away into the distance. A few minutes later the pattern would be repeated; another aeroplane would roar past. She felt she should be standing on the bridge of a ship next to a duffel-coated Kenneth More.
But she wasn’t. She appeared to be in her white bedroom at the Hotel Nausica in Agios Nikitas. And so far as she could tell, she was wide awake. She pinched herself. Her flesh felt plumply and reassuringly solid.
Slipping out from the single sheet under which she had slept, Mrs Pargeter went on to the balcony. The tranquil beauty of the morning greeted her, and for a moment she thought it really must have been a dream from which she had just woken. But, even as she had the thought, she became aware of a distant humming.
It grew in intensity. The sound was unmistakably that of an aeroplane, which built in volume until confirmed by the sight of an old heavy-bodied transport appearing in the sky low above the hotel roof. The engine noise reached a crescendo, then diminished as the plane changed direction and vanished round the contour of a headland.
As she put on a beige cotton dress and fixed a brightly coloured scarf at her neck, Mrs Pargeter tried to find a rational explanation for what was going on. Albania hadn’t suddenly declared war on Greece, had it?
No, perhaps someone was making a film or a television series…? Yes, that was much more likely. So many bizarre phenomena these days could be put down to the excesses of the entertainment industry.
She got the true explanation when she was outside under the hotel’s awning having breakfast. Just as Maria was serving her with coffee and a bowl of yoghurt and honey, the plane – or perhaps another plane, it was hard to tell how many of them there were – repeated its impression of strafing the Hotel Nausica.
“What is it?” asked Mrs Pargeter. “Someone making a movie?”
Maria grinned. “No, no, they’re fire-fighting.”
“What do you mean?”
“We get lots of fires out here – particularly when there’s as little rain as there has been this year. Much of the island is difficult to reach for fire-engines, but the planes can get there.”
“So what do they do? Do they have big water-tanks?”
“That kind of idea, yes. They fly out over the sea, land on the water to fill up the tanks and then fly back to drop it on the fire.”
“Good heavens,” said Mrs Pargeter.
Maria shrugged. “Don’t knock it. It works.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure it does. It’s just an unusual idea – well, unusual for someone used to the good old British fire-engine. What starts the fires, though? Is it tourists throwing away cigarettes, lighting barbecues, that kind of thing?”
“Some of it, yes.” The girl seemed for a moment undecided as to whether to continue, but went on, “And there’s a certain amount of arson.”
“Arson? By the tourists?”
“No, by people on the island.”
“Why? What for?”
“Feuds, that kind of thing. Or the people from one village will get jealous because another village is doing better out of the tourist industry.”
“Really?”
“It’s happened quite a lot in the last few years, since the number of tourists has been going down. Look over there.” She pointed to the scrub-covered hillside, through which the dusty track from the main road wound down to the village. An area of perhaps half an acre in the middle of it was dark grey, bare of greenery, with only a few gnarled and blackened sticks left standing. “That happened a couple of months back. Agios Nikitas did well for tourists last summer – compared to the rest of the island. Somebody tried to ensure that it wouldn’t do so well this year.”
“And does anyone here know who did it?”
Maria nodded enigmatically. “Oh, I should think so. These feuds go back a long way. No, the problem is not usually deciding who did it, but deciding what revenge should be taken against them.”
“So what kind of revenge is likely to be taken?”
“I don’t know,” said Maria shortly, deciding she had perhaps already given away too much, and went back into the hotel.
Mrs Pargeter was once again struck by the gulf between the bright smiling ‘No Problem’ tourist image of Corfu and the realities of life on the island.
¦
She had almost given up when he answered the phone. He sounded drowsy and Mrs Pargeter couldn’t quite remove from her mind the image of Larry lingering deliciously in bed with his shy-smiling Greek woman.
“Good morning, Mrs P. What can I do for you on this bright and sunny?”
“Well, first, thank you very much for your hospitality last night. It was a lovely evening.”
“My pleasure.”
“And, second, I wondered if you knew anyone on the island who could do a bit of chemical analysis for me?”
“What?”
She filled him in on what she had found out about Joyce’s ouzo bottle. “So I was wondering if you knew anyone who might be able to tell, me what’s in it?”
“I think you’d better let me have a look at it.”
“Oh?”
“Fact is, in my line of work – documents, passports, that kind of stuff – I deal with quite a lot of chemicals. Always possible I’d be able to recognise it straight away, or, failing that, I could run a few tests and find out what it is for you.”
“That’d be great. As I say, it doesn’t smell of anything. I haven’t actually tasted it yet, but –”
“And don’t you try, Mrs Pargeter!”
“What, tasting it?”
“Right.”
“Why not?”
“Look, Joyce Dover was murdered. We don’t know why, but one quite common motive for committing murder is to stop oneself from being murdered. Maybe what she’d got in that bottle was intended to help someone on his or her way to the undertaker.”
“Poison, you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Mrs Pargeter.”
? Mrs Pargeter’s Package ?
Eighteen
With all her lines played out, Mrs Pargeter felt there was little she could do but wait for bites, so after breakfast she decided she would investigate the local beach. The bay of Agios Nikitas itself was just a harbour, but over the next headland, she had been assured, was the delightful beach of Keratria.
