Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage

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-swat. His black eyes ranged brightly around the room. Then he swiped hard with the fly-swat.
    ‘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 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.
    She settled down in the air-conditioning to read about Kyrenia instead. Although it was called Girne by the Turks, most still used its old name. In the same way Nicosia had become Lefkosa, but was often still called Nicosia. Kyrenia, she read, is a small northern port and tourist centre with a famously pretty harbour dominated by a castle; founded (as Kyrenia) in the tenth century BC by Achaeans and renamed Corineum by the Romans. It was later walled against pirates and became a centre for the carob trade but fell largely into ruin in 1631 and by 1814 had become home to only a dozen families. It was revived under the British, who improved the harbour and built the road to Nicosia. Prior to the partition of the island after 1974, when the Turks landed to save their own people from being killed