The arrangements took longer than Daniel expected and less time than Mara feared.
Her manager granted an extension to her leave, though the conversation left her in no doubt that he would remember doing so. Her mother required a second call, a telephone number and an assurance that Jonathan was still with them. Jonathan, meanwhile, informed the museum that the markings had proved more interesting than anticipated. It was an accurate description that omitted almost everything.
Vale dealt with Istanbul. By the time they left Johannesburg, rooms were waiting for them and someone had agreed to meet their flight.
The journey passed in a succession of queues, meals and uncomfortable attempts at sleep. Jonathan kept his document case close and checked the contents of his canvas bag whenever they moved. Lindiwe slept when her shoulder allowed it. Mara woke once to find Daniel holding a cup of water for her, though he looked scarcely more awake than she felt.
There were fewer questions now. They had exhausted the answers available to them and, for the moment, were content to be travelling towards people who might have more.
At the airport in Istanbul, Vale found their driver before Jonathan could begin looking for a name on a sign.
The two men shook hands and spoke in Turkish.
Mara had expected a greeting, perhaps a few practised phrases. Instead, Vale continued easily, listening to a reply, asking something else and making the driver laugh. His voice had changed with the language. The clipped precision she associated with him had softened.
Daniel noticed it too.
“You speak Turkish.”
Vale turned back to them.
“Yes.”
Jonathan adjusted the bag on his shoulder.
“I suspect we’ve considerably underestimated your usefulness at airports.”
The driver took Lindiwe’s suitcase and led them outside.
They travelled into the city in a large car whose rear seat accommodated three people more comfortably than the one they had used in South Africa. Mara sat beside the window, watching apartment buildings and busy roads give way to streets where shops opened directly onto the pavement. Men carried trays of tea between doorways. A woman waited beneath an awning with shopping bags at her feet, apparently unmoved by the driver attempting to persuade a delivery van to leave her corner.
Vale spoke to him again. This time, Daniel caught the ease between them rather than the words.
He had spent much of the past few days regarding Vale as a man who arrived wherever something unusual happened. Here, other people seemed pleased to see him.
The road narrowed as they entered an older quarter above the Golden Horn. Through a gap between buildings, Mara caught sight of the water and the opposite shore before the car turned uphill. They passed a small square, then stopped in a street too confined to suggest anything important might be hidden there.
Their destination stood behind a high wall, its upper windows projecting over a pale stone ground floor. The woodwork was painted a faded green. There was no sign, only a brass bell beside a heavy door and a climbing plant that had grown far enough to trouble the gutter.
Jonathan looked up at the house.
Vale was already out of the car.
Inside the gate, the street gave way to a shaded courtyard.
A fig tree grew beside one wall. Beneath it stood a bench with a newspaper folded over the back, while a hose lay coiled near pots of herbs. Someone had left a pair of gardening gloves on the windowsill.
Daniel had imagined something more guarded.
There were signs of precautions if he looked for them: the man who opened the gate studied each visitor before stepping aside, and a second door remained locked until Vale spoke to him. But beyond that, the place looked like a house where people had been living and working for a long time.
A woman came through the inner doorway.
“Adem.”
She said it warmly, as though he had been delayed on an errand.
Vale smiled.
Mara realised she had never seen him do that without some restraint behind it.
The woman took his hands and spoke to him in Turkish. Her silver-grey hair had been swept into a loose bun, with a few strands escaping near her temples. She wore a cream blouse and dark trousers, and an old gold ring caught the light as she reached up to touch his cheek.
He answered quietly. Whatever she said next made him glance towards his companions. Then she released him and turned to them.
“You must be tired. Come inside before he keeps you standing here.”
Vale introduced Leyla Demir.
Jonathan had begun to offer his hand when she took the document case from him instead.
“Someone will carry this.”
“I’d prefer—”
“You can watch them carry it.”
She handed it to the man at the door, who remained beside Jonathan until he was ready to follow.
Daniel liked her almost immediately.
The entrance hall was cool and dim after the courtyard. Rugs lay over worn boards, and a broad staircase curved upwards beside a wall of framed photographs. Mara noticed groups gathered on terraces, formal portraits and one faded picture of children standing beneath the fig tree. There were no captions she could read.
An open doorway revealed a room with desks, filing cabinets and a telephone ringing beside an unattended chair. Farther along, someone was carrying books towards another staircase. A faint smell of cooking reached them from the rear of the house.
Leyla guided Lindiwe to a seat before continuing the introductions.
She had been told about the injured shoulder and arranged for someone to check the dressing once Lindiwe had rested. She asked whether they had eaten, listened to the unenthusiastic account of their last meal and decided that tea should come first.
People appeared to know when she needed something without being summoned. Daniel could not identify the moment when hospitality became instruction, only that rooms were being prepared and their luggage was moving upstairs.
Vale remained beside her while she made sure everyone was settled.
“Leyla runs things here,” he said.
She glanced at him.
“That is a modest description of the inconvenience.”
Mara smiled.
From the hall, Jonathan had noticed a short flight of stone steps descending beneath the staircase. The wall beside them differed from the rest of the house: pale blocks above, smaller bricks arranged around a low arch below.
Leyla followed his attention.
“The house has several ages.”
“How old is that part?”
“The chamber beneath it is Byzantine. Some of the masonry below that is older.”
Jonathan moved closer, keeping his hands behind his back.
“You’ve built over it.”
“More than once,” she said. “And repaired what previous owners thought they had repaired.”
Vale offered to show him another day. Jonathan accepted with the expression of someone already wondering how much of that day would be available.
For now, Leyla sent them upstairs.
Mara’s room overlooked the courtyard. The bed was narrow, the wardrobe old and the window fitted with a latch that needed lifting before it would close. A jug of water stood beside a glass on the bedside table.
She set down her suitcase and listened. Somewhere below, Vale was still speaking Turkish. She found Daniel in the corridor, looking at one of the photographs.
“Adem,” she said.
“I heard.”
“Do you think we’re allowed to ask?”
He glanced towards the stairs.
“I think she might tell us whether he wants her to or not.”
Mara leaned beside him to look at the picture. It showed a group of people outside the house, some seated and others standing behind them. The edges had faded, leaving the faces clearer than the garden around them.
Before either could examine it properly, Jonathan emerged from his room carrying a clean shirt.
“There’s dinner this evening,” he said. “Apparently in our honour.”
Mara looked at the shirt.
“Are we expected to dress?”
“I thought I’d remove the cave.”
Daniel glanced down at his own clothes.
“That seems reasonable.”
By evening, the long dining room had filled with conversation.
The windows stood open above the courtyard, and a table had been laid beneath lamps that gave the walls a warm, uneven light. Platters of food occupied almost every available space: stuffed vine leaves, roasted peppers, bowls of yoghurt, bread still warm enough to steam when it was torn apart.
Mara had expected a formal welcome and was relieved to find people making room for one another, moving glasses and asking who had taken the serving spoon. There were others from the house at the table, all introduced by Leyla, but nobody required the visitors to give an account of themselves before they could eat.
Lindiwe sat where she could rest her injured arm comfortably. Jonathan accepted a second helping while insisting he had not realised the first had been quite so substantial.
Vale sat beside Leyla.
Watching them, Daniel could see the habits of a long acquaintance. She passed him a dish without asking whether he wanted it; he moved her glass before she reached across the table. Once, she corrected something he said in Turkish and he accepted it with a brief inclination of his head.
The conversation turned gradually towards the journey. Someone asked whether they had visited Istanbul before. Jonathan began explaining the museum connection, careful to keep the account separate from what they had found in the caves.
When there was a pause, Mara looked towards Vale.
“Should we still call you Adrian?”
Leyla smiled into her glass.
He set down his fork.
“Yes. Unless you prefer Adem.”
“Which came first?”
“Adem Veli.”
He said the name without the hesitation she had expected.
Leyla turned towards him.
“They’ve travelled all this way with you and you haven’t told them?”
“There were other things to discuss.”
“There usually are when you want to avoid this one.”
A little laughter passed around the table. Vale did not look offended, but Daniel noticed how carefully he folded his napkin beside his plate.
“I was born in Cyprus,” he said. “My family spoke Turkish. Adem was the name my parents gave me.”
Mara waited. Across the table, Jonathan had stopped reaching for the bread.
“My father worked as an interpreter. He spoke several languages, which made him useful to people who could afford to move him about. In 1922, he accepted work in Constantinople.”
Daniel looked at him.
Vale continued before the question could form.
“We travelled to join him. He arranged passage through people he knew. I was ten.”
The sounds from the courtyard seemed clearer for a moment. Somewhere outside, a door closed.
Jonathan put down his glass.
“1922?”
Vale nodded.
Mara looked towards Leyla, half expecting to find that he had made a joke.
She was watching him quietly.
“How old are you?” Daniel asked.
“Eighty-two.”
Nobody at their end of the table moved.
Lindiwe studied his face. She had spent days trying to understand what he knew and what he had chosen to withhold, but she had never considered that the man checking her bandage might have been born before her grandparents.
Vale glanced at Leyla.
“This is why I tend to leave it until after people have eaten.”
She shook her head.
“He taught me when I was young,” she told them. “I am sixty-eight now. You can see who has had the easier arrangement.”
The humour gave Mara something to do with her surprise. She smiled, then looked at Vale again. The dark hair, the face she had taken to be about fifty, the composure that had sometimes seemed excessively practised—all of it remained the same.
Only the time behind it had changed.
The ship’s name was Vinh-Long.
Jonathan recognised it after Vale mentioned the fire, though he could not immediately place where he had read about it. Vale remembered less of the ship than of particular moments aboard it: his mother fastening his coat, people moving towards the wrong passage, an argument about a bag someone wanted to collect.
“I kept asking her to come away.”
“From the fire?” Mara asked.
“Before we could see it.”
He rested his hand beside his plate.
“I couldn’t have explained what I knew. I wanted us somewhere else. Then, when people began to panic, I knew which way we should go.”
The fire spread. Explosions followed, and an American destroyer, Bainbridge, came alongside to take off survivors. Vale spoke of that part briefly. There were things he remembered with uncomfortable clarity and stretches that remained confused even now.
His mother wanted to return for their belongings.
He would not let her.
“I was crying by then,” he said. “I think she listened because she didn’t know what else to do with me.”
Leyla had stopped eating.
Daniel could picture the boy more easily than he could reconcile him with the man at the table. Ten years old, frightened and certain of something the adults around him could not see. He thought of Hargreaves watching him rebuild the model, trying to decide what sort of child he had in front of him.
“Someone heard about you,” he said.
Vale nodded.
“One of the people helping the survivors knew what to listen for. My parents were approached afterwards. At first, it was described as an opportunity for my education.”
“And they agreed?”
“Not immediately.”
The answer came with a small smile.
“My father asked a great many questions. He wanted to see where I would be taught, who would teach me, whether they expected him to send me away. We stayed nearby. He made certain of that.”
His training began the following year. He learned to recognise the difference between anxiety and the impressions that sometimes preceded an event. Some came clearly; others contradicted one another. Being frightened made them harder to sort through.
“You weren’t seeing one future,” Jonathan said.
“No. Possibilities. Some more likely than others.”
Daniel looked at the notebook beside Jonathan’s chair and was grateful that he had left it closed.
Vale described the training without making it sound easy. There had been patient teachers and others who expected understanding to follow an instruction. He learned to slow himself down, to look again, to accept that knowing something might happen did not always tell him what to do about it.
The house had been part of that life.
He glanced towards the windows.
“Not exactly as it is now.”
“The kitchen was worse,” Leyla said.
“Considerably.”
“And he was stricter.”
“I had reason.”
“You always had reason.”
The exchange brought the table back around them. Someone offered Lindiwe another dish; Jonathan finally took the bread he had been considering when the year 1922 entered the conversation.
Mara waited until Vale had taken a sip of water.
“When did you become Adrian?”
“Later. After it became difficult to explain why everyone around me was growing older and I wasn’t.”
He had moved more often, then begun using another name. Britain became somewhere he could work without carrying every part of his history into each introduction.
It explained something Daniel had not known he was trying to understand. Vale could arrive at a school, speak to a headmaster and leave behind the impression of an official visit. Adrian Vale belonged comfortably to that encounter.
Adem Veli belonged to the house in which they were sitting.
“Arthur knew?” Daniel asked.
“Some of it.”
Daniel looked down at his plate. Hargreaves had carried more of that afternoon than he had ever told the child at its centre.
This time, Daniel felt no immediate need to challenge Vale about it.
The meal continued long after Mara thought they must have reached its end.
More dishes arrived, then fruit and small cups of coffee. Leyla drew Jonathan into a conversation about the house, and Lindiwe listened while someone described a part of the city she might enjoy once her shoulder was easier.
There was still much they had not been told. But the questions no longer stood between strangers.
When Leyla finally rose, the others began gathering glasses and moving chairs. She came to Lindiwe first, checking that she had not become too tired, then rested a hand on Vale’s shoulder.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll look at what you’ve brought.”
“And the other two?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes. The other two as well.”
He nodded, making an effort to conceal how much he wanted morning to arrive.
Mara found Daniel beside the courtyard door. Cool air moved through the hall, carrying the sound of someone washing dishes in the kitchen.
“Eighty-two,” she said quietly.
Daniel looked across the room. Vale was listening to Leyla, his head inclined towards her as she spoke.
“I’m reconsidering how rude I’ve been.”
Mara slipped her hand into his.
“He’ll have had practice.”
Daniel smiled.
Beyond them, Leyla said something in Turkish. Vale laughed, and for a moment Mara could imagine the boy who had once arrived in this house, still frightened by what he knew.
She hoped he had been welcomed as warmly.