‘Why’s it wrong?’ Stratton asked.
‘There aren’t any people.’
‘It’s out of season,’ Stratton reminded him.
‘What I mean is I saw hundreds and hundreds of houses, more than a thousand maybe, but no people. Just a few. The houses are nearly all empty.’
‘Like this,’ Stratton pointed out, holding on to his frustration.
‘No. The houses in my viewing have been empty for a long time.’
‘Was it an ancient town like Pompeii?’ Stratton asked.
‘No. That’s too far back. The houses still stand but many are in ruin. Walls collapsed. No windows or doors. Overgrown.’
Stratton tried to think of any town destroyed by a natural disaster, or chemical or radiation attack which was still empty but nothing came to mind.
‘I wish I could draw it for you,’ Gabriel sighed, ‘But I can’t. All I can say is this place doesn’t fit what I saw.’ He looked away as if he did not want to think about it any more.
Stratton thought about reporting back to Sumners. Perhaps the boffins could draw up a list of possible towns for them to check out, or at least get pictures of to show Gabriel and save some travelling. He wondered why they had not done that in the first place.
‘You hungry?’ Stratton asked him, trying to think of something to help ease the tension he could feel rising in Gabriel.
‘I haven’t been very hungry lately . . . I don’t think you realise how serious this is.’
Gabriel was right. Stratton did not.
‘We’re running out of time. Each day he gets closer to his goal, whatever or wherever that is; he pushes relentlessly towards it.’
He could feel the change in Gabriel. Back in London and Thetford he was tired and frustrated, but now he looked more drawn, weaker and sounded much more desperate.
A man sipping a hot drink from a mug stepped from a shop nearby and looked at them.
‘Hello,’ he said in a charming manner. ‘Can I help you?’
Stratton turned to him. He was middle-aged, small, comfortably dressed and as harmless looking as he sounded.
‘You are English,’ he said confidently, then, when Stratton did not answer immediately, he looked unsure. ‘Françoise? German? My Dutch is not so good.’
‘English,’ Stratton said.
‘Ah. I thought so. I am rarely wrong. I am Cristos,’ he continued, remaining in his doorway with his free hand casually in his pocket. ‘This is my travel shop. If you need anything: car, boat, flight, hotel, I can help you.’
Stratton thought about asking him for a hotel, but he was habitually untrusting of strangers and liked to find his own accommodation, especially when on the ground himself. ‘We’re fine, thanks.’
‘Looks like a storm is coming,’ Cristos said.‘Maybe tonight. A good time to find a cosy restaurant with a log fire and a nice bottle of wine.’
Stratton could go along with that suggestion, although he doubted it was what Gabriel had in mind.
‘You look like you have just arrived . . . Would you like some tea or coffee?’
Stratton considered the offer. A cuppa would be nice and there wasn’t a café open in the immediate area. He looked over at Gabriel who was staring at the battlements and the rooftops, shaking his head, compounding his belief this was not the place.
‘Gabriel? Cup of tea? We need to take a moment to consider our next move.’
Gabriel looked at him, thought on it a few seconds and nodded his head.
Stratton looked back at Cristos with a smile. ‘Tea would be great, thanks.’
Cristos beamed. ‘Come in, come in,’ he beckoned and stepped inside his shop.
The travel shop was long and narrow, and covered with posters displaying inviting beaches, advertisements for boat trips, maps, charts and souvenirs. Cristos was standing by a little table where there were half a dozen mugs and an electric kettle.
‘Come in,’ Cristos said.‘How do you like your tea?’
‘Milk, one sugar,’ Stratton said.
‘And you?’ he said to Gabriel.
‘Black no sugar.’
‘Ah. American, no?’
Gabriel acknowledged it with a forced smile.
‘Please. Sit,’ Cristos said.
A row of chairs extended from the door to the back of the shop, intended for people waiting to make bookings.
Stratton and Gabriel studied the premises. One wall was practically covered with postcards from satisfied customers from all over the world.
‘If you don’t mind me saying, you looked a bit lost outside.’
‘Not lost.We were expecting to meet some friends but it seems no one else has turned up.’
Cristos nodded understandingly as he handed them a hot mug each. ‘Are you planning on staying long?’
‘No. Just passing through,’ Stratton said as he sipped his tea. It tasted good. ‘Nice cuppa.’
‘Where are you off to next?’
‘Not sure.’
‘If you need transport, you are in the right place.’
‘We certainly are,’ Stratton said, smiling politely.
Gabriel sat down and nursed his tea as he stared into space.
‘We don’t get many tourists this time of year. Usually the ones more interested in the island’s ancient and medieval history prefer to come when the crowds of holiday makers have gone.’
‘That’s us.’
‘Are you interested in anything in particular? This city was built in the fourteenth century, but we have places dating much further back.’
Stratton stared at Cristos as he considered something. ‘You probably know the Mediterranean pretty well.’
‘I am second-generation travel shop. My father and mother had this place forty-eight years ago. There’s not much I don’t know about this part of the world.’
‘If I were to describe a town that had a horseshoe-shaped harbour, that once had a large population - several thousand people, a thousand houses say - but only a few people now lived in it, where would you think I was talking about?’
Cristos grinned.‘Kastellorizo,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Have you been there?’
‘No.’
‘Well you have just described it as if you have seen it for yourself.’
‘Kasta . . .?’
‘Kastellorizo. It’s an island. Kastellorizo means red castle.’
‘It has a castle too?’
‘Yes. The same knights who built this place built it. The soil is red so they called it
château roux
, which in bad Greek means Kastellorizo.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Off the coast of Turkey, about seven hours from here by boat and forty minutes by plane.’
‘And this place is practically deserted?’
‘Before the First World War it had seventeen thousand people on it. It was . . . how you say . . . when people are taken from a sinking ship?’
‘Rescued?’ Stratton offered.
‘Yes, but . . . evak . . .’
‘Evacuated.’
‘Yes. It was evacuated during the Second World War by the British Navy before the Germans came. Then it was mostly burned down. Some say it was the Germans who looted it, some say the British. Who knows? Someone does, I suppose.Then, after the war, everyone was happy in their new countries, and so only a few people went back there. There was not much to go back to. There’s a ferry every few days and not many people go or come from there.’ Cristos smelt the potential business. ‘You want me to check on flights or ferries for you?’ he asked.
Stratton looked around at Gabriel who was staring at Cristos.
‘Could you?’ Stratton asked, looking back at Cristos.
‘That’s what I do for a living,’ Cristos said, pulling a book from a stack on his desk and flicking through the pages. ‘When do you want to go?’
‘Today, if we can,’ Stratton said, always preferring movement to stagnation.
Cristos paused to look at the two men, shrugged and carried on thumbing through the book. ‘We will do our best,’ he said.
Half an hour later, Stratton and Gabriel were heading out of the old city and along the waterfront towards the harbour. There were no flights scheduled from Rhodes to Kastellorizo for the next five days and even then there was no certainty it wouldn’t be cancelled, but there happened to be a ferry leaving for the island late that morning.The boat’s advertised departure and arrival times were not to be taken seriously, Cristos had advised, listing several factors that included unreliable engines and machinery as well as captain and crew lethargy. If all went well, bearing in mind the likely storm, it was expected to arrive at around seven in the evening, give or take an hour, which posed one other problem for them. Accommodation. The phone cable from the mainland was over eighty years old and for unexplained reasons foul weather affected transmissions, which was why, according to Cristos, he could not contact any one of the handful of faxes or phones on the island to book rooms for them, although he promised to continue trying.
As they approached the harbour and identified their ferry, the only large boat in the harbour, Stratton phoned Sumners to tell him about their move and to set in motion his idea about getting as many photographs of similar harbours for Gabriel to take a look at if Kastellorizo was a dead end. As they rounded the corner of the mole, the poor condition of their boat became apparent. Rusty streaks from the rails on the main deck covered it from front to back, a stream of hot, dirty water spurted from a hole just above the waterline and the hum and rattle of the ancient engines grew louder the closer they got.
As Stratton and Gabriel approached the rear ramp, a crewman appeared - an older man with a roll-up stuck to his bottom lip - took their tickets, said something unintelligible while indicating inside the boat and walked away. They took it as an invitation to board and entered the ship, which smelt of a mixture of gasoline and sewage. On the other side of the vehicle deck they climbed a stairway that led to the upper deck, then pushed through a door into a large room filled with what looked like old aircraft seats. There were a hundred or so, all bolted to the floor in neat rows as in a cinema, except in this case they faced a long, grey, drab, metal bulkhead.
‘The passenger lounge I would guess,’ Stratton said as he dumped his bag on the floor.
Gabriel wearily took a seat as Stratton went back into the hallway and found a door that led out on to the deck.
The crew were preparing to cast the lines although no one appeared to be in any kind of a rush. Half an hour later, a tug arrived to pull the ship into the middle of the harbour after which it slowly made its own way out to sea.
Stratton remained on deck until Rhodes disappeared behind a dark-grey sky which descended like a curtain around the ship. The storm that had threatened to hit all day had finally arrived, and the rain began to fall in heavy sheets.
Stratton moved inside before he got soaked and went back into the lounge, which was empty except for Gabriel who was asleep in his chair. Stratton took off his wet jacket, sat a few seats away, dug his Knights Templar book out of his bag and settled in.
The journey took longer than expected, no doubt due to the storm. They were served a pot of coffee and a pair of suspicious-looking pies a couple of hours after leaving, which Gabriel avoided and Stratton ate after inspecting carefully. At around nine o’clock there was a distinct change in the engine revs. Stratton had been dozing easily with his book on his lap and opened his eyes. Either the ship was breaking down or they were slowing to approach a port.
He grabbed his jacket and went out on deck to find the sea on the starboard side replaced by a mass of land. Mountains loomed high in the background, cupping the town as if in the palms of a pair of hands. There were lights inside the houses near the water; the rest, creeping up the hillside, although in darkness were just about discernible. The harbour was as horseshoe-shaped as it could be and at one of its points were several official-looking buildings, a minaret and a medieval castle, not huge but large enough to hold a company of men, positioned to defend the entrance to the harbour.
The ferry began a slow, graceful turn to position its aft end facing the quay. The engines accelerated in reverse stopping all headway and the boat began to move slowly backwards, reducing speed to an absolute crawl until the back end bumped gently against the quay.
Gabriel came out to join Stratton and look at the island. Stratton waited for any sign that might suggest Gabriel thought this was the place, but he was to be disappointed.
‘It’s very pretty,’ Gabriel said.
‘Yeah,’ Stratton agreed, suddenly wondering what the hell they were doing coming all the way here.
A loud metallic squeal came from the back of the boat as the ramp was lowered, followed by a thump as it hit the concrete quay.
A minute later they were walking down the ramp along with a handful of islanders who had been shopping in Rhodes for essentials, then stepped on to the gravel-covered quay.
Both men walked to the water’s edge to look out over the harbour where lights twinkled in many of the houses that were packed tightly shoulder-to-shoulder all around it. The night was chilly but with barely a cloud in the sky, all sign of the storm had gone and the water rippled gently, lapping the stone quay several feet below the lip.
‘I suggest we look for somewhere to get a bite to eat, which might also be a good place to ask about a hotel,’ Stratton said.
Gabriel was staring out across the water and did not appear to hear him.
‘Gabriel?’
Gabriel slipped out of his reverie and looked at Stratton tiredly. ‘I could eat something, I s’pose,’ he said.
Stratton wondered if Gabriel might ‘recognise’ this was the place come daylight and then sighed to himself. He was acting as if he had no doubts about Gabriel when in all honesty he did. His hope was only a response to the game of it all. He felt that even if Gabriel did announce that this was the island he had seen in his viewing, it would be like winning a stage of a board game: it meant nothing. The incident in Thetford Forest was already beginning to seem to him like little more than a strange coincidence.