Again noisy applause on landing. Agatha peered out. It had been raining. She shuffled off the back of the plane onto the staircase, which had not been properly attached to the plane and bobbed and dipped and swayed dangerously.

I’ll swim home, thought Agatha.

Having successfully reached the tarmac, she realized the heat was suffocating. It was like moving through warm soup. Wearily she walked into the airport buildings. It looked more like a military airport than a civilian one. It had actually been an RAF airfield up until 1975, and not much had been done to it since then.

She waited in a long line at passport control, a great number of the Turkish Cypriots having British passports. Her friend of the aeroplane said behind her, “Ask them for a form. Don’t let them stamp your passport.”

“Why?” asked Agatha, swinging around.

“Because if you want to go to Greece, they won’t let you in there if you’ve got one of our stamps on your passport, but they’ll give you a form and stamp that and then you can take it out of your passport, luv, and throw it away afterwards.”

Agatha thanked her, got her form, filled it in and went to wait for her luggage.

And waited.

“What the hell’s going on here?” she demanded angrily.

No one replied, although a few smiled at her cheerfully. They talked, they smoked, they hugged each other.

Agatha Raisin, pushy and domineering, had landed among the most laid-back people in the world.

By the time the luggage arrived and she had arranged her two large suitcases onto a trolley and got through customs, she was soaking with sweat and trembling with fatigue.

She had booked into the Dome Hotel in Kyrenia and had told them by telephone before she left England to have a taxi waiting for her.

At first, as she scanned the crowd of waiting faces at the airport, she thought no one was there to meet her. Then she saw a man holding up a card which said, “Mrs. Rashin.”