“He could have woken up,” the girl said quietly, “believe me. They had been drinking all night. The alcohol interfered.”
During the afternoon Carissa slept in her old room and Naomi went down to the port to shop for her. The old friend of her father’s, meanwhile, was leaving messages every hour, asking for dinner, and sooner or later she would have to accommodate him. It was better to do it once and get it over and done with, since avoidance on her part would merely serve to make her look suspicious.
When she had returned to the house she answered the last message from Rockhold and told him that she would meet him at the Sunset for dinner at eight. She had prepared her story meticulously over the previous days, and she felt confident she could pull off a credible performance for a seventy-year-old still open, she thought, to the charm of women.
EIGHTEEN
“In those days we were quite different, your father and I. Jimmie was all for jaunts to Malaga and even Tangiers. He had energy. He was friends with David Beaufort, even then. He went all over the Med in his Spanish beret and this wonderful red necktie he had. We used to call him Tally-ho. It was the Hemingway thing. You wouldn’t understand. I was rather in awe of him then. He was a splendid pilot too—it takes something special to be a pilot that good.”
“He never talked about being a pilot.”
Rockhold held up a shrimp by its tail and shook it slightly as if it was still alive and something could be shaken out of it.
“The thing is, one gets tired of one’s own stories. It happens by the time you turn fifty. You’ve heard them all a thousand times, and they get worse with each retelling. Finally, they become nauseating.”
“Maybe he was ashamed of something.”
“Shame? That would be a big emotion for Jimmie. I think not. Fatigue, more likely. He was a terrible gambler too.”
Naomi didn’t even raise her carefully tended eyebrows.
“Did he break the bank at Monte Carlo too?”
“I’m sure it was on his CV somewhere. I always wondered about him being a father, though. Did he ever take you on holiday aside from coming here?”
“Never. He was a terrible dad.”
Neither of them was quite serious: summers on Hydra were hardly negligible as holidays.
“I’m sorry to hear it. I rather gathered—”
“Terrible dads always lie about being terrible dads. It’s the icing on the cake of being a terrible dad.”
“You mean, he is a terrible dad.”
“Childhood’s always in the past tense, Mr. Rockhold.”
Rockhold’s head slipped to one side and his smile was off-center, too. The daughter was prickly. It was better to tread carefully.
“Do you think they’ve driven back to Italy?” she asked.
“Well, it looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Do you know they did?”
“I do have to come clean a bit, Naomi. I look after some of your father’s business interests. Not all of them all the time. But some of his financial and security concerns. We are normally in close contact. While he does sometimes go off on a spree with Funny, it’s unusual for him to be gone more than a few days. On the way over I took the trouble to stop in at the car park at Metochi where they keep their car. It’s not there.”
“You know about Metochi?”
“Jimmie thought of it as a secretive little place.”
“So they did take the car?”
“I don’t know. As I say, it rather looks that way.”
“That was very sly of them.”
She felt that she was holding him at bay quite well, and she began to feel more confident.
He said, “May I ask, were they having rows lately?”
Seeing an opening, Naomi took some trouble to appear surprised.
“Come to think of it,” she said, “they had been fighting more than usual. Not that that’s any of my business. I don’t know what goes on between them.”
“It had occurred to me that they went off to solve some romantic problem. Couples do that, I hear.”
“Do they?”
“Seems rather exaggerated to me.”
“So the car is gone.” She sighed.
“A bit rum, that.” Rockhold poured wine into her glass. “Maybe they went on a tour of classical sites.”
“Extraordinarily unlikely.”
“I always thought he was an Ancient Greece buff. Maybe I misunderstood.”
“They had a few arguments about the houses,” Naomi went on, not wanting to get onto the subject of Ancient Greece. “But I never listened in on them. I think Phaine wanted to sell the place in Italy. But Daddy is very fond of that house.”
“So they might have gone there?”
“I really can’t say. It’s possible.”
They talked on for a while, Rockhold ordering one bottle after another. He did most of the drinking, and it seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever. It was a different generation, and they drank in a way that was now incomprehensible to younger people. For them it was like showering or taking out the dog.
“About that maid,” he said eventually. “Is she here or did she leave as well? Maybe Jimmie gave her some time off since they would be gone.”
“Carissa?”
“That’s her name, isn’t it?”
“She’s not at the house. So she must have gone home for a while.”
He asked her what she looked like, and for the first time Naomi stumbled over her words as she tried to think them out. She tried to be vague, to mislead a little.
“Either way, I think she might be of help,” Rockhold said affably.
“I doubt it, Mr. Rockhold. She’s a bit dim and she doesn’t know anything about Jimmie and Phaine. My father keeps her on out of loyalty.”
“That’s very decent of him.”
“It’s very stingy of him, actually.”
“Do you have a number for her?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t. It’s my stepmother who deals with that sort of thing.”
He accepted this and let it go. Should they move on to whiskey? She declined, and he ordered for himself. He remarked that it was a special spot, this Sunset, and that the toy cannons put him at ease. He asked about her childhood on the island. Did she have many Greek friends from those days? The ex-pats seemed to be a tightly knit group, as such people always were. The island English were bookish, socially privileged, keenly interested in the culture around them. But lately, the Russians and the Emirati seemed to be displacing them. He had met quite a few of the English in the few days he’d been there. They were uniformly delightful. They all had good things to say about Jimmie and Phaine.
At that moment his phone began ringing and, glancing down at the incoming number, he told Naomi that this was a call he could not ignore. He got up and walked to the path above the restaurant. The call was from his assistant in London, a woman called Susan who was also on the Codrington payroll, though Jimmie barely knew of her existence. His own wife barely knew of her existence. Susan tracked credit-card transactions and the various movements of Jimmie’s operatives. She was calling him about some new transactions in Italy.
“Mr. Codrington used his card a short while ago in a town called Fasano. It’s in southern Italy.”
“Fasano?”
“At a shoe shop.”
“He bought some shoes?”
“Apparently.”
“Where is this Fasano?”
“I’ll send you a map.”