deduction that the ouzo bottle had been smashed against the wall there.
Mrs Pargeter stood still, obscurely troubled. She looked across at the inanimate heap on the bed and thought for a moment.
Then she left the bedroom and went into the kitchen. She sniffed round the sink, but there was nothing to arouse her suspicions. She opened a drawer and found it to be well-stocked with cutlery, including two substantial and very sharp kitchen knives.
She closed the drawer and moved on to the bathroom. The ceramic base of the shower and its drainage outlet were completely dry. So was the washbasin, but from its plughole emanated the faint, unmistakable whiff of ouzo.
Mrs Pargeter stopped for a moment to assess this information and work out a possible scenario of events during the night.
The deceased had woken in the small hours, depressed and suicidal in the emptiness of her bereavement. She had drunk more ouzo to try and shift the mood, but the alcohol had only deepened her despair. She had decided to kill herself.
Up until that point the scenario was just about credible. The next bit of reconstruction, however, made it less convincing.
In her drunken and self-destructive state, the deceased had looked for a suitable means of suicide. Rejecting – or perhaps unaware of – the possibilities of the kitchen knives, she had decided to use glass from the broken bottle to cut her wrist.
But there was still some ouzo left. Rather than drinking it up or just letting it spill over the floor when she broke the bottle, the deceased had gone to the bathroom and emptied the residue into the wash basin. She had then gone back into her bedroom and smashed the bottle against the wall, considerately ensuring that most of the glass would fall into the wastepaper basket. Her suicide weapon thus neatly created, the deceased had meekly got back into bed, slashed her wrist with the vicious spike of glass, and slipped quietly out of existence.
Mrs Pargeter’s credulity felt strained.
Any other scenario, though, did have considerable ramifications.
Like, for instance, the involvement of another person.
Suppose, Mrs Pargeter conjectured, another person had been involved…? Suppose the deceased had not moved from her bed, but the other person had drained the ouzo bottle, smashed it and slashed the deceased’s wrist…?
A lot more details fitted into that scenario.
It raised certain new problems, though. Chief among them was why the deceased had not resisted the attack on her. She might have been asleep at the moment of assault, but the cutting of her wrist must have wakened her. Surely she would have screamed or…? Surely Mrs Pargeter would have heard something…?
But Mrs Pargeter had heard nothing. She had slept very deeply. Quite exceptionally deeply.
A new thought struck her, a thought which might explain both her own exceptionally deep sleep and the passivity of the deceased.
She moved quickly from the bathroom to the kitchen. She opened the fridge. Almost everything that had been there the night before was still there. Bread, cheese, jam, ham, sausage, long-life milk, the bottles of white wine. Only two items were missing.
She knew what had happened to the bottle of ouzo.
But where was the square plastic bottle of mineral water?
She searched through the kitchen. She looked in the waste-bin outside the kitchen door. She searched her own room. Keeping her eyes averted from the sheet-shrouded body, she searched the other bedroom. She searched the living-room and the bathroom.
The bottle of mineral water had disappeared. Its contents could not be checked for the powerful soporific she now felt sure it had contained. In just the same way that it would be hard to trace the drug in the ouzo which had rendered Joyce so pathetically unresistant to her fate.
Joyce. For the first time since seeing the body she had let herself think of her friend once again as a person. Mrs Pargeter caught sight of her face in the bathroom mirror and saw the tears begin to flow.
And she determined from that moment that she would find out who was responsible for this ultimate depersonalisation of her friend.
Because Mrs Pargeter knew now that she was dealing, not with a suicide, but a murder.
? Mrs Pargeter’s Package ?
Ten
In the confusion of the night before, Mrs Pargeter had not unpacked her suitcases, but that morning the minute she opened the first one she knew that someone had been through them. Everyone has their own style of packing and, although her possessions had been punctiliously replaced, tiny details – a silk sleeve folded too tight on its tissue paper, a pair of sandals too accurately aligned – betrayed the intervention of an alien hand.
So while Mrs Pargeter had been unconscious, someone, confident of the sleeping drug’s efficacy, had calmly searched her belongings. The knowledge gave her an unwholesome, tainted feeling, almost as disturbing as the shock of what had happened to Joyce.
Mrs Pargeter went through to the other bedroom and checked the suitcases. Her friend, she knew, was an untidy packer, but the neatness with which her clothes had been laid out confirmed the unsurprising truth that Joyce’s possessions had also been examined.
For a moment Mrs Pargeter wondered whether the search might have been the main purpose of their nocturnal visitation. Was it possible that Joyce had woken, seen a stranger going through her belongings, and been killed merely to prevent her from identifying the intruder…?
But no, that didn’t work. The circumstances of the murder, its disguise as suicide, suggested a degree of premeditation which was at odds with that scenario.
Mrs Pargeter felt certain that whoever had entered the Villa Eleni during the night had intended to kill Joyce. And also to find something that Joyce had brought with her to Corfu. Whether the murderer had been successful in the second part of his or her mission, there was no way of knowing.
Mrs Pargeter was grimly thoughtful as she dressed. She would have liked to take a shower, but didn’t want to risk disturbing any evidence. Though uncertain how sophisticated forensic investigation would prove to be on Corfu, she knew that the less she touched the better. It went against her notions of hygiene, particularly after the sweatiness of the long day before, but, in the cause of criminal investigation, she confined her toilette to copious applications of deodorant and Obsession.
She couldn’t even use mineral water to clean her teeth, so she forced the toothpaste round with her tongue. Fortunately, she always kept a little breath-spray in her handbag, and a couple of puffs from that gave her the confidence to go out and speak to people.
She did one more slow circuit of the villa, to check that she hadn’t missed anything. She gazed for a long, sad moment at Joyce’s body, which seemed distanced and shrunken in death. Then she looked outside at the front and back for signs of the murderer. Entering the premises would have presented no problem – in a climate like that, French windows were almost always left open at night – so she had no hopes for signs of forcible entry, but there was a distant possibility of a footprint in the dust or sand.
Nothing. Whoever had tended the garden had swept the cement paths too diligently for any trace to remain. That of course raised the question of who the careful gardener was. Had the watering and sweeping been part of some regular daily routine, or were they done that morning on special orders? As he or she swept, had the gardener been aware of the horror that lay a few yards away, hidden only by flimsy net curtains?
Such questions would have to be asked. And answered. But, Mrs Pargeter told herself firmly, they were questions for the Corfiot police. Though the tragedy came so close, there was no reason for her to become involved in its investigation.
She tried to clamp a lid firmly down on the seething broth of inconsistencies and possibilities that boiled inside her mind, and set off to report a death.
Almost directly overhead now, the midday sun was ferocious and enervating, but the direct track to Spiro’s
