M Beaton: Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist

Lunch was pleasant: complimentary glasses of wine, good chicken, crisp salad. Pleased as any tourist might be to find she had not been ripped off, Agatha mellowed enough to join Rose, her husband and friend. She noticed, however, that Olivia’s husband, George, kept looking over at Rose from his place at the bar. He said something to his wife in an undertone and she answered loudly, “I don’t feel like slumming today.”

When the young meet up on an outing abroad, they exchange addresses at the end of it or arrange to meet in the evening. The middle-aged and elderly, by silent consent, simply part with a nod and a smile. Agatha had enjoyed herself on the sail back, for she had told them all about her detective work and entertained them with highly embroidered stories about how clever she had been.

But she, too, after the yacht had slid into Kyrenia Harbour under the shadow of the old castle, simply said goodbye and walked away. Olivia, her husband and friend were all residing at the Dome Hotel. With luck, she would be able to avoid them. She had more important work to do.

She had to find James.

She was reluctant to dine in the hotel that evening, so she checked her guidebook and selected a restaurant called The Grapevine which looked hopeful, and took a taxi the short distance there, not wanting to bother driving. It was a good choice, the restaurant being in the garden of an old Ottoman house. Agatha ordered wine and swordfish kebab and tried not to feel lonely.

The garden was heavy with the scent of jasmine and full of the sound of British voices. It was a great favourite with the British residents, a blonde woman called Carol who served her meal, told her. There were evidently a great number of British residents in north Cyprus: they even had their own village outside Kyrenia called Karaman, complete with houses called things like Cobblers, and a British library, and a pub called The Crow’s Nest.

Agatha had brought a paperback with her and was trying to read by candle-light when Carol brought her a note. It said simply, “Come and join us.”

She looked across the restaurant. Just taking their seats at a centre table were Rose, husband and friend, and Olivia, husband and friend. They were smiling and waving in her direction.

Intrigued that such an unlikely combination should get together, Agatha picked up her plate and wine and went to join them.

“Isn’t this a surprise?” said Rose. “There we was, just walking down the street, when my Trevor, he says, he says to me, ‘Isn’t that Olivia?’” Agatha noticed Olivia wince. “And Georgie says, ‘Come and join us,’ so here we all are! Innit fun!”

To Agatha’s amazement, Olivia seemed to be making an effort to be polite to Rose, Trevor and Angus. It transpired that her husband, George, had recently retired from the Foreign Office, friend Harry Tembleton was a farmer, and that Olivia herself had heard of Agatha, for the Debenhams had a manor-house in Lower Cramber in the Cotswolds.

The wine circulated and Rose grew more animated. It seemed she was a specialist in the double entendre. She had a really filthy laugh, a bar-room laugh, a gin-and-sixty-cigarettes-a-day laugh, which sounded around the restaurant. George crossed his legs under the table and his foot brushed against Rose’s leg. He apologized and Rose shrieked with laughter. “Go on,” she said, giving him a nudge with one thin, pointed elbow. “I know what you’re after!”

Agatha did not think anyone could eat kebab off its skewer in a suggestive manner, but Rose did. Then she, it seemed deliberately, misunderstood the simplest remarks. George said he hoped there wouldn’t be another tube strike in London when they got back because he had some business in the City to attend to. “A boob strike,” cried Rose gleefully. “Has Olivia stopped your jollies?”

Agatha gave her a bored look and Rose mouthed at her, “Like Lysistrata.” So vulgar Rose knew her Greek classics, thought Agatha, who had only recently boned up on them herself. And somehow Rose knew that Agatha had rumbled her act.

What was an intelligent woman doing being tied to the brutish Trevor and a dreary retired shopkeeper like Angus?

Angus was a man of few words and those that he had were delivered in a slow portentous manner. “Scottish education is the finest in the world, yes,” he said, apropos of nothing. Things like that.

Olivia had a bright smile pinned on her face as she tried to “draw” everyone out, and did it very well, thought Agatha, although noticing that Olivia could not quite mask that she detested Rose and thought Trevor a boor. She entertained them with a funny story about how the man in the hotel room upstairs had let his bath over-run so that it had seeped down into the ceiling of their room and he refused to admit he was guilty and said they must have let the windows open and let the rain in.

To Agatha’s surprise, they all decided to go on an expedition to the Othello Tower in Famagusta the next day and she was urged to join them. They would hire cars. She refused. Tomorrow was James Lacey-hunting day. They had been going to spend their honeymoon at a rented villa outside Kyrenia. She would try to find it.

Trevor insisted on paying the bill, joking that it would be the first time in his life he was a millionaire as he pulled out wads and wads of Turkish lira. Agatha refused a lift, deciding to walk back to the hotel. She was streetwise enough to know that she was safe, and Rose, who had arrived a week before her, had told her with a tinge of regret in her voice that there was no danger of getting your bottom pinched. Rose had also said that there was also no danger of getting your handbag snatched, or of being cheated by shopkeepers. So Agatha strolled down past the town hall and down Kyrenia’s main street.

And then she saw James.

He was ahead of her, walking with that achingly familiar long, easy, loping stride of his. She let out a strangled cry and began to run on her high heels. He turned a corner next to a supermarket. She ran ahead, calling his name, but when she, too, turned the corner, he had disappeared. She had once seen the French film, Les Enfants Du Paradis, and this felt like the last scene where the hero desperately tries to catch up with his beloved.

A Turkish soldier blocked her way and asked her anxiously in broken English if he could help her.

“My friend. I saw my friend,” babbled Agatha, staring up the side street. “Is there a hotel along there?”

“No, that is Little Turkey. Ironmongers, cafés, no hotel. Sorry.”

But Agatha ploughed on, peering at deserted shops, stumbling over potholes. Then she saw a light shining out from a laundry called White Rose, Beyaz Gül in Turkish. A man in shirt-sleeves was working at a dry-cleaning machine. Agatha pushed open the door and went in.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

He was a small man with a clever, attractive face.

“You speak English?”

“Yes, I worked in England for some time as a nurse. My wife, Jackie, is English.”

“Oh, good. Look, I saw this friend of mine come along here a moment ago, but he’s disappeared.

“I don’t know where he could have been going. Sit down. I’m called Bilal.”

“I’m Agatha.”

“Would you like a coffee? I’m working late because it’s cooler at night. Trying to get as much done as I can when lean.”

Agatha felt suddenly tired, weepy and disappointed.

“No, think I’ll go back to the hotel.”

“ North Cyprus is very small,” he said sympathetically. “You’re bound to run into your friend sooner or later. Do you know The Grapevine?”

“Yes, I had dinner there this evening.”

“You should ask there. All the British end up there sooner or later.”

For some reason, Bilal, although probably somewhere in his mid-forties, reminded her of Bill Wong.