The Light of the Day - Eric Ambler [36]
“Yes.”
“You should be here in about forty minutes. Right?”
“I will leave now.”
Sariyer is a small fishing port at the other end of the Bosphorus where it widens out to the Black Sea, and the road to it from Istanbul runs along the European shore. I wondered if I should try to contact Tufan before I left and report the address I had been given, then decided against it. Almost certainly, he had had Harper followed from the airport, and in any case I would be followed to the villa. There would be no point in reporting.
I went to the garage, paid the bill, and got the car. The early-evening traffic was heavy and it took me twenty minutes to get out of the city. It was a quarter to six when I reached Yeniköy. The same Peugeot which had followed me down from Edirne was following me again. I slowed for a moment to check the mileage and then pushed on.
The villas of the Bosphorus vary from small waterfront holiday places, with window boxes and little boathouses, to things like palaces. Quite of lot of them were palaces once; and before the capital was moved from Istanbul to Ankara the diplomatic corps used to have summer embassy buildings out along the Bosphorus, where there are cool Black Sea breezes even when the city is sweltering. The Kösk Sardunya looked as if it had started out in some such way.
The entrance to the drive was flanked by huge stone pillars with wrought-iron gates. The drive itself was several hundred yards long and wound up the hillside through an avenue of big trees which also served to screen the place from the road below. Finally, it left the trees and swept into the gravel courtyard in front of the villa.
It was one of those white stucco wedding-cake buildings of the kind you see in the older parts of Nice and Monte Carlo. Some French or Italian architect must have been imported around the turn of the century to do the job. It had everything—a terrace with pillars and balustrades, balconies, marble steps up to the front portico, a fountain in the courtyard, statuary, a wonderful view out over the Bosphorus—and it was huge. It was also run down. The stucco was peeling in places and some of the cornice moldings had crumbled or broken away. The fountain basin had no water in it. The courtyard was fringed with weeds.
As I drove in, I saw Fischer get up from a chair on the terrace and go through a french window into the house. So I just pulled up at the foot of the marble steps and waited. After a moment or two, Harper appeared under the portico and I got out of the car. He came down the steps.
“What took you so long?”
“They had to make out a bill at the garage, and then there was the evening traffic.”
“Well …” He broke off as he noticed me looking past him and over his shoulder.
A woman was coming down the steps.
He smiled slightly. “Ah yes. I was forgetting. You haven’t met your employer. Honey, this is Arthur Simpson. Arthur, this is Miss Lipp.”
5
Some men can make a good guess at a woman’s age just by looking at her face and figure. I never can. I think that this may be because, in spite of Mum, I fundamentally respect women. Yes, it must be that. If she is very attractive, but obviously not a young girl, I always think of twenty-eight. If she has let herself go a bit, but is obviously not elderly, I think of forty-five. For some reason I never think of any ages in between those—or outside them, for that matter—except my own, that is.
Miss Lipp made me think of twenty-eight. In fact she was thirty-six; but I only found that out later. She looked twenty-eight to me. She was tall with short brownish-blond hair, and the kind of figure that you have to notice, no matter what dress covers it. She also had the sort of eyes, insolent, sleepy, and amused, and the full good-humored mouth which tell you that she knows you can’t help watching the way her body moves, and that she doesn’t give a damn whether you do so or not; watching is not going to get you anywhere anyway. She wasn’t wearing