M Beaton: Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist

Again noisy applause on landing. Agatha peered out. It had been raining. She shuffled off the back of the plane onto 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 onto 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 onto 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-swuat. His black eyes ranged brightly around the room. Then he swiped hard with the fly-swaut.

“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 as 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.