Perhaps James had gone there, too. She asked in various shops for the way to the tower. Most did not speak English, but at last a woman in a small dress shop pointed the way down a long main street. Agatha blundered along dizzily in the heat until she came to a square, and there, wonder of wonders, was a large tourist map. She breathed a sigh of relief until she realized the map was all in Turkish and there was no arrow saying YOU ARE HERE. Cursing, she looked around for a street sign but could not see any. She peered at the map again and finally located the tower. It was by the sea, that much she could make out. She could see some old walls at the end of the street leading out of the square. She ploughed on in that direction. She asked at a café at the corner and was told Othello’s Tower was along on the left, and finally she saw it.

She paid for a ticket and entered. A guide was escorting a mixed party of tourists around and had no time for her. He was speaking in English and, by listening in, she learned that the Othello Tower was a moated Lusignan citadel built to protect the harbour and reconstructed by the Venetians in 1492. The name may derive from Cristofero Moro, who was the Venetian Lieutenant Governor from 1505 to 1508-and who apparently returned to Venice without his wife-but Shakespeare’s play simply mentions “a seaport in Cyprus” and there is no evidence that it was based on any historical occurrence. The entrance is surmounted by a Venetian lion and an inscription recording the prefecture of Niccolo Foscarini, under whom the remodelling of the citadel began.

Agatha finally left the group and wandered in the shadow of the thirty-foot walls and up steps to the top of the citadel and looked bleakly out at a boring view of the harbour.

She felt she would have been better off to have stayed in Kyrenia and tried to find that villa. She strolled moodily around the top of the walls, feeling the sun beating down on her, feeling sticky and old and unwanted. She looked down the street along which she had come to reach the tower…and saw James!