The Approach

The man came back on a Thursday.

Martin was at the harbour when the ferry came in — he had developed a mild habit of watching it, the way one watches anything that represents the outside world arriving into a closed one — and he saw him among the four passengers who disembarked: late forties, dark coat, a small hard-sided case of the kind that suggested a single overnight stay had been planned for and not exceeded. He moved with the unhurried confidence of someone who had been here before and found it smaller than he remembered. He did not look around the way tourists did. He looked at specific things: the tavernas along the waterfront, the streets leading up from the harbour, the faces of the two men mending nets near the dock, who did not look back.

Martin watched him from the café terrace. The man walked to the far end of the harbour front, consulted his phone briefly, and then walked back and up into the town, taking the street that led past Kostas's.

He told himself it could be anyone. A businessman, a property developer — there were a few half-finished buildings on the eastern side of the island, stalled projects from the previous decade. A man visiting family. He had no particular reason to connect this man to Leonard's story except that Leonard's story had made him connect everything, which was, he reminded himself, not the same as evidence.

He said nothing to Leonard that afternoon. Leonard was in good spirits, the Vermont property having found a tenant, and talked at length about the relief of a decision that had made itself, and Martin listened and drank his poor coffee and watched the street behind Leonard's shoulder, and no one passed who resembled the man from the ferry.

At dinner he watched Yusuf. This was now simply what he did at dinner — he watched him, and calibrated, and waited for something that would tell him whether the thing he felt was instinct or anxiety performing as instinct. Tonight Yusuf was quieter than usual. Not different in any way that would have been legible to someone not paying attention. The same economy of movement, the same calibrated presence. But twice Martin saw him glance toward the window that faced the street, and both times the glance was brief and controlled and both times he looked away before Martin could decide whether he had seen anything.

The taverna emptied by nine. The French photographers had left that morning and the remaining guests were two Dutch couples who ate quickly and without much conversation, and by half past the room was just the three of them and Kostas moving between the kitchen and the bar. Martin had drunk more than usual, he noticed, without entirely meaning to. The wine had gone down in the way it does when you are not paying attention to it because you are paying attention to something else.

Leonard excused himself early — a phone call, he said, his tenant had questions. He put on his coat with the slightly apologetic air of a man who is not actually apologetic, and was gone.

Martin sat. Diane was finishing her wine and reading a message on her phone with the small focused frown she used for things that required a response. He had a last glass he did not need. From the kitchen came the sound of water running, then stopping, then the quiet that followed closing.

Yusuf came out to collect the last glasses from the empty tables. He moved around the room in his usual circuit. When he reached the table nearest Martin's he paused — not visibly, not in a way Diane would have noticed — and said, without looking at him directly, "The ferry today. You were watching it."

It was not a question.

Martin looked at him. Up close, in the candlelight, he could see what the distance of the serving hatch had not allowed: that Yusuf was tired in a specific way, the tiredness of sustained alertness, of a body that had been held in readiness for a long time. His eyes were dark and clear and they rested on Martin with an attention that was nothing like the professional attention of a man clearing tables.

"I watch it most days," Martin said.

A pause. Yusuf stacked two glasses. "The man with the dark coat," he said. "He came before. In October."

"I don't know who you mean," Martin said.

It was a reflex. He heard it as he said it — its flatness, its inadequacy — and something in Yusuf's expression received it without surprise. He nodded once, the smallest possible acknowledgment, and picked up the glasses and went back to the kitchen.

Diane looked up from her phone. "Ready?"

"Yes," Martin said.

He put on his coat. He helped Diane with her chair. He said goodnight to Kostas, who was wiping the bar with a cloth and who nodded without particular warmth, as he always did, his expression giving nothing, as it never did. Outside the wind had dropped and the air was very cold and clear and from somewhere up in the town came the sound of a television through an open window, a laugh track briefly audible and then gone.

They walked up through the dark streets and Diane took his arm and said something about the Dutch couples, about how unhappy the woman had seemed, and Martin agreed that she had seemed unhappy, and they climbed the last steps to the villa and went inside. He rinsed his glass. He checked the terrace door was latched against the wind.

In bed he lay on his back and looked at the ceiling and heard Yusuf's voice again with its precise, book-learned English and its single, terribly reasonable observation. The man with the dark coat. He came before.

He had said: I don't know who you mean.

He had the number. Leonard had given it to him on a folded piece of paper three nights ago, written in Leonard's large looping hand, with the quiet casualness of a man completing an administrative task he would prefer not to think about. Martin had put it in the inside pocket of his jacket. He had not looked at it since.

He turned on his side. Diane was already asleep, her breathing slow and even. The wind had come back up outside and he could hear it finding the gaps in the shutters, testing them, moving on.