I answered her questions as best I could. I was exhausted. I realised in that moment that the last few days had caught up with me.
Soon, our first customer came in to collect her prescription sunglasses: Porsche Design with an 18 carat gold frame. She was a new client, with an accent I didn’t recognise. Tall, severe blonde bob, sharp fringe, dressed all in black. She’d first visited the shop a couple of weeks earlier when I’d given her an eye test. She put the glasses on now, and stared at herself in the mirror for a while, then she popped the case into her handbag, paid the rest of the money – she had left a deposit of 250 euros – and went out into the rain wearing her new sunglasses.
Keti would normally have had a great deal to say about a customer like this. She would have mused about who she was, where she might have come from. She would have come up with ludicrous and yet at the same time almost plausible stories about why she needed to wear such an expensive pair of sunglasses in the middle of a storm. But today she was quiet, and she looked over at me from the back of the store, where she was checking the stock, and I could see that she was concerned.
The morning proceeded with a few more appointments, some cancellations due to the weather, and just one or two browsers, but it was a mercifully quiet day. Keti went out at lunch and came back with warm haloumi and tomato sandwiches for us both; she closed the shop and brewed coffee. We sat in the kitchen to eat, while the rain continued to fall outside.
‘So, let’s examine this,’ she said, placing one hand on the table, opening it, palm facing up, as if she was holding an eyeball that she was about to dissect.
I nodded.
‘She decided to waste her one day off to spend it with you and Aliki in the mountains?’
I nodded again, ignoring Keti’s little embellishments, which I had been expecting anyway.
‘And while you were there, she asked if she could take the evening off – seeing as she had spent the day practically looking after Aliki – in order to visit—？’
I nodded.
‘To visit whom?’ Keti prompted.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and added reluctantly, ‘I interrupted her before she could finish her sentence.’
‘So, you told her, quite clearly, that she couldn’t go.’
‘I didn’t say no, as such. But it was clear that I disapproved.’
‘And you have no idea whom she might have wanted to visit?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘So, you went back home, she made dinner, you all sat together to eat, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then I went to bed. I was tired, I wanted an early night. I left Nisha to put Aliki to bed and ready her things for school in the morning.’
‘And then in the morning . . .’
‘In the morning she was gone. She left her passport and a number of other things that are very special to her. I also found a gold ring, like an engagement ring, on her dresser, that I’d never seen before.’
Keti nodded now, presumably at a loss.
‘It’s Thursday today,’ she said. ‘You’ve been to the police?’
‘Yesterday.’
I told her about the whole sorry encounter at the station: what the officer had said, and how I had finally walked out of his office, stepping on his paperwork. But as I relayed the story, I felt a dull ache in my stomach, like something was amiss, something I didn’t understand. And it was then that I realised the officer’s voice had sounded somehow familiar, as if I had been hearing an echo of something that was coming from inside me.
I couldn’t say this to Keti, but I felt a bloom of guilt at this acknowledgement. Blushing self-consciously, I focused on her.
‘You’ve got to search for her yourself,’ she said, slapping her hand meaningfully on the table between us.
‘How? I don’t even know where to begin.’
‘You’ll figure it out. You can’t leave it like this! You can’t let a woman who has lived with you and helped you for so many years just vanish, as if she was meaningless.’
I nodded. She was right.
‘And your instinct tells you something is wrong?’
‘Yes. Absolutely.’
‘And this is out of character?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, then. You have no other choice.’ And that was the last thing she said, before looking at her watch and informing me that lunch was over and our next client would be arriving in about three minutes.
*
That evening it continued to rain. The boat was brimming over with water. Water fell through the trees in the garden; it saturated the soil and made the patio glisten like a lake. Aliki stalked around the house, holding onto the black cat as if it was her salvation. Sometimes the cat obliged, purring and rubbing its nose on her ear; other times, it pushed her face away with its paw, scrambled out of her arms with a hiss, and dashed for the window.