Free A Dead Man in Istanbul by Michael Pearce Page B

speed it up, could you?’
    Seymour went over to Felicity.
    ‘Miss Singleton-Mainwaring –’
    Felicity flinched.
    ‘Don’t call me that,’ she said. ‘It sounds so awful.’
    ‘What shall I call you?’
    ‘Felicity will do. That’s pretty awful, too, but –’
    ‘I wonder if you could help me?’
    The next morning, early, she took him down to the Yacht Club and began to get her boat ready. Seymour stood and watched her. Sailing a boat was not among the skills of the Whitechapel police.
    But it evidently was among Felicity’s. The boat lay in a little slipway and in a moment she had pulled it down towards the open water, untied the straps and the rolled-up sail, and hoisted a little sail on the front. Then she held the boat while Seymour clambered in, cast off and let the little sail in front carry the boat out. Then she wedged the tiller between her knees and hoisted the mainsail. In another moment they were heading briskly out into the main channel and then were turning west towards the Dardanelles.
    And then she undressed. Well, not completely.
    ‘Can’t manage in all this rig-out,’ she said.
    She took off her jacket and then her skirt. Beneath the jacket she was wearing a short-sleeved singlet. Under the skirt she was wearing pantaloon-like trousers.
    ‘Much better for sailing in,’ she explained. ‘Although, of course, I have to make myself decent, by their standards, before coming in.’
    The trousers came down to her calves and at some point she had slipped off her shoes, so that she was barefoot. It made her look more Eastern. In England, reflected Seymour, at least, in Victorian England, women showed their faces and were all coy about their ankles. In Turkey it was the other way round.
    They were leaving Istanbul behind them. First to go were the boats, the caiques, dhows and feluccas. Next were the white houses scattered along the waterfront. Last of all were the domes and minarets which rose up above the city and gave it a cast very different from any city that Seymour was familiar with. The domes and minarets lingered for a long time but there was a moment at which he could see them all, both the foreign-looking boats and the unusual houses and the domes, and it was then that the Easternness of Istanbul came home to him.
    The sun, once they were out on the sea, was brilliant. Literally; it flashed blindingly off the water and he began to regret that he had not purchased one of the ridiculous green eye-shades that he had seen people in the hotel wearing. The waves broke up in sparkles and the heat shimmered off the cliffs and above the barren, desert-like brown on the other side of the Straits. Earlier it had been fresh and green with little white houses poking out of it but that had given way to an unremitting brown.
    He took off his jacket and tie and watched Felicity do the work.
    ‘You’re pretty good,’ he said.
    ‘It was either this or horses,’ said Felicity.
    ‘Horses?’
    ‘For my family it was always horses. But I didn’t like horses, and I didn’t, actually, like my family much, so when we moved to Cornwall, I took up sailing. The good thing about sailing is that you can do it on your own and don’t always have to have your family breathing down your neck.’
    ‘Was that why you came out here? To Istanbul?’
    ‘That and Gervase.’
    ‘Gervase?’
    ‘My family wanted me to marry him.’
    ‘And you didn’t?’
    ‘I fled.’
    ‘Why here?’
    ‘Peter – he’s my cousin, you know – was already out here. At the Embassy. And he said, “Why don’t you come out here? No one in the family will have heard of Istanbul so they won’t know where to find you. And none of our set will be out here, which will be a relief.” But what clinched it was that there was good sailing. I was a little keen on Peter, too, of course, but that didn’t last long, not when I actually got out here. A little of Peter goes a long way.’
    Seymour wondered what she did for money. But maybe