Deadline (12 page)

‘Would you say that Söner’s parents basically own Bowstrings?’
İ
kmen said. Alp was a good-looking boy but now that
İ
kmen regarded him closely he could see that for all his beauty he was just a rather ordinary lower-middle-class
İ
stanbul lad. He was the type of kid whose dad probably had a middle management job in a bank and whose mum stayed at home and wore a headscarf. Not unlike
İ
kmen’s own children.

Alp looked down at the floor. ‘Yeah.’

‘And is that a happy arrangement?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Yeah. Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘They pay all our bills but . . .’ After casting a glance at their captors over one shoulder, he leaned forward in his chair and said, ‘Söner could kind of hold that over everyone’s head from time to time. Like, if we didn’t want to do what he wanted to do he could say he was going to tell his dad . . .’

‘Who would cut
off your money?’

‘Maybe.’

İ
kmen looked at the boy, who was obviously frightened for all sorts of reasons, and then he said, ‘Did you like Söner, Alp?’

He had to think about it for a moment but then he said, ‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

The black-clad ghoul with the camera on his helmet moved in closer and
İ
kmen lost his temper. He glared into the man’s eyes and said, ‘What are you filming for? Posterity? Your own amusement?’

The man moved in even closer and Hovsep Pars put a hand up to his chest in a vain attempt to still his wildly beating heart.

‘What kind of sick—’

‘Your job, Inspector
İ
kmen, is to question suspects and then make a judgement,’ the leader of the masked gunmen interjected. ‘Don’t speculate about me or my team. Get it right and you’ll never hear from us again.’

‘Yes, but what do you want?’ Krikor Sarkissian burst out. His face was red with tension and even
İ
kmen, across the other side of the room, could see the veins in his neck pulsating. ‘You come here—’

‘Shut up.’ The leader said it quietly but with an insistence that carried with it a definite layer of menace. ‘Your job is not
to ask questions. Your job is to watch Inspectors
İ
kmen and Süleyman go about their work and then help them with their judgement at the end.’ Then he turned to look at
İ
kmen. ‘Time is ticking, Inspector. Do you have many more questions for this witness?’

‘A few.’
İ
kmen returned his gaze to Alp’s face. ‘I get the impression that your liking for Söner was not exactly wholehearted.’

‘I didn’t kill him, Inspector. You have to believe me.’

Carefully sidestepping the issue,
İ
kmen said, ‘What didn’t you like about him?’

‘Oh.’ Alp flung his arms in the air in a gesture of exasperation. ‘He was bossy, lazy and he was terrible with money. Always borrowing cash or Akbils or cigarettes from everyone else. Kenan, he plays the Armenian Avram Bey, he’s even paid Söner’s rent in the past.’

‘And yet Söner has rich parents?’

‘Yes, but he has – had – rich tastes too,’ Alp said. Then his features grimaced and he began to cry. Arto Sarkissian, who was sitting next to the boy, put a fatherly arm around his shoulders.

Under cover of the sound of Alp’s crying, Süleyman whispered to
İ
kmen, ‘There’s an old telephone over by the Christmas tree. I don’t know if it works. But if I can get close enough maybe I can find out.’

‘What are you talking about?’

They both looked
up just in time to see the leader walking towards them.

‘Oh, just the case . . .’

He struck
İ
kmen on the cheek with one hard, open hand. It hurt. ‘Discussion will come after you’ve finished all your interviews,’ the leader said quietly. ‘It’s the way Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple would have done it. And if that method was good enough for them then it is most certainly good enough for you.’

‘Do you remember seeing film of Beslan?’ Ceyda Ümit said to the plump, middle-aged man at her side.

‘Was that where Chechen terrorists took over a school somewhere in Russia?’ Burak Fisekçi asked.

‘Yes.’ Ceyda looked around the ballroom with wide, frightened 1920s-style eyes. There were, she counted, eight black-clad masked men silently watching their every move. ‘They were Muslim fundamentalists.’

‘Do you think that these people might be fundamentalists too?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But whoever they are, I wasn’t expecting them. I didn’t sign up for this, Burak Bey.’

‘None of us did,’ he said. And then he smiled at her. ‘If I’d known this was going to happen I would never have asked you and your friends to come and perform for us tonight, Ceyda.’

‘And Söner
is
dead
. How can that be?’ she said. ‘He was supposed to be the victim in the drama, yes, but not in real life.’

‘Why was he the victim in your murder mystery entertainment?’ Burak Fisekçi asked.

‘No one told you?’

‘No. Once we’d set the basic plot, it was decided that it was best that only the actors, you, knew all the details, in case I inadvertently gave something away. Remember?’

‘Yes, sort of. I . . . I killed young Yusuf Effendi because he was blackmailing me,’ she said. ‘I’d been having an affair with Signor Garibaldi which Yusuf got to know about.’

Burak raised a small smile. ‘How exotic.’

‘Well, it would have been.’ She looked around the room and then she said, ‘Alp is a long time.’ She frowned.

‘He’s with Dr Sarkissian and his brother and the policemen. I shouldn’t worry.’

‘He’s also with more of these
people
,’ Ceyda said. ‘Burak Bey, can you think of a reason, any reason, why this is happening to us?’

‘I can’t.’ He took one of her small, dry hands in one of his large, damp mitts and he smiled at her again. ‘But I’m sure it will all be all right in the end. I’m sure it will.’

Ceyda forced herself
to raise a smile. She’d known Burak Bey all her life and had always found him truthful and reliable. So his words were a comfort even though she knew that there was no way even Burak Fisekçi could predict what was going to happen.

Bowstrings had got the gig through Ceyda Ümit.

‘Burak Fisekçi, my assistant, lives in the same apartment block as Ceyda Ümit’s family,’ Krikor Sarkissian told Çetin
İ
kmen. ‘When we were first considering the idea of a murder mystery event, Burak told me that he knew a young girl who was part of a theatrical troupe. They came along to the clinic. They had some good ideas and, more crucially, they’d already performed a murder mystery event at the Four Seasons. That had been very successful. I thought it would be nice to give a group of young actors a chance – not to mention some money.’

‘Whose idea was it to have a murder mystery evening?’
İ
kmen asked. The fact that the guests had been too absorbed in the fictional mystery to notice anything that might have been going awry in real life could point to some sort of connection between the play and subsequent events. But then it might not.
İ
kmen hadn’t noticed anything suspicious, with the exception of the strange man who had visited the concierge earlier. He wondered if that concierge was still in the hotel or had already gone home.

‘We had a
brainstorming session,’ Krikor Sarkissian said. ‘We do that a lot when we have a problem.’

‘We?’

‘Myself, Burak, our nurses, Selma Hanım, our receptionist. It was a long time ago, Çetin, eighteen months or so.’

‘Do you remember who came up with the idea for a murder mystery evening?’

‘We all did really,’ Krikor said. ‘My first thought on it was to just have a straightforward dinner somewhere with maybe some circus acts performing after the meal. We talked for hours. But because Burak knew Ceyda and her actor friends and what they did, the murder mystery evening was ultimately his idea.’

‘Are any of the other participants in that meeting here tonight?’

‘No, Selma Hanım didn’t want to come and our nursing staff has completely changed since that time.’

‘Did anyone take any notes during the meeting?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Burak always takes notes during meetings, that is part of his function. Although I doubt very much whether he’ll have those notes on him tonight.’

İ
kmen looked at their captors. ‘I don’t suppose it will be possible to leave the hotel to search for evidence, will it?’

No one
spoke until the leader said, ‘What do you think, Çetin Bey?’

İ
kmen looked him in the eyes. ‘What do I think? I don’t know. But I can say what worries me.’

‘And what is that?’ the leader asked.

‘What worries me most is if Inspector Süleyman and I successfully identify who killed Söner Erkan but you choose to disagree with us.’

The eyes underneath the balaclava helmet crinkled a little as the leader’s brows came together. ‘But why would I do that?’

Out of the corner of his eye,
İ
kmen saw Süleyman move a few centimetres to his left, closer to the telephone.

‘Because you want to kill us,’
İ
kmen said.

Now the eyes relaxed. ‘And why would I want to do that, Inspector
İ
kmen?’

‘I have no idea,’
İ
kmen replied. ‘So far, sir, you and your colleagues represent something that is outside my experience.’ Then he looked down at his notes. ‘I’d like to see the crime scene,’ he said. ‘My first view of it was truncated by your invasion or whatever one might call it.’

‘If you wish to see the crime scene again,’ the leader said, ‘then that can be arranged. Mr Söner Erkan hasn’t gone anywhere.’

It took Ersu Bey
just over a minute to realise that he was not the only man in the fridge. There was an attractive woman in her thirties and a very tall and glamorous figure who had the breasts of a woman and the feet and throat of a man. A transsexual. Ersu Bey didn’t know how to feel. On one level he was repulsed while on the other he was grateful for the company of anyone in that awful, cold and confined space. However what the real woman said to him was disturbing.

‘It seems some people, we don’t know who, have taken over the hotel,’ she said. ‘We know they’re armed and we suspect they’ve killed but—’

‘Who
are
you?’ Ersu Bey said. ‘What are you doing here?’

The transsexual, who had one heavily lacquered fingernail keeping the door open just a crack, hissed, ‘Keep it down! They’ll hear you!’

Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu put her hand in her pocket but didn’t find her police badge. She shrugged. ‘I’m a police officer,’ she whispered. ‘My name is Sergeant Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu.’ Then she pointed at the transsexual. ‘She is Nar. I can’t explain exactly who she is, it would take too long. Who are you?’

‘Me?’

‘Sssh!’ Nar hissed again. ‘Keep it down, I said!’

‘I am Ersu Nadir,’ he whispered. ‘I am the maître d’hôtel. Why are you and this, er, person in my refrigerator?’

‘Why were you
locked in your own refrigerator, Ersu Bey?’ Ay
ş
e said.

‘I asked—’

‘It doesn’t matter who asked what or why!’ Ay
ş
e was exasperated. She hadn’t expected to find herself hiding in a fridge, never mind a fridge occupied by a man she got the impression was something of a martinet. ‘At the moment one of the gunmen is outside the kitchen door having a smoke,’ she said. ‘When he comes back in and returns to the kitchen, maybe we can move out into the hotel. It depends what he and his colleagues do. Who locked you in here?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ He still didn’t know whether to believe her story about being a police officer, but if she and the transsexual were going to get him out of the fridge, did it really matter too much? Not that he
really
cared . . . ‘I was putting butter away and then the door closed. I didn’t see who did it. Some of our kitchen staff are not as bright as they might be. Tonight they’re mainly casuals.’

‘You don’t think that you were locked in deliberately?’

‘Who knows?’

‘He’s coming back!’ Nar took her index finger out of the crack in the door and replaced it with her little finger. The corridor from the kitchen to the back door was dingy and she wanted to cut down any light coming from the fridge as much as possible. Fortunately the fridge door
opened towards the inner door of the hotel, so with any luck the man would only see the light from the crack if he looked back before he went into the kitchen. None of them breathed as they heard his footsteps pass along the corridor outside.

Arto Sarkissian hadn’t had
any latex gloves on him when he came to the Pera Palas and so he asked the anonymous men if one of them might bring him some washing-up gloves from the hotel kitchens. The leader duly called someone and after about ten minutes a pair of yellow plastic gloves were delivered to room 411. Getting the gloves was one thing but using them was quite another. Compared to the thin latex gloves he generally used in his work, these were horribly unwieldy.

Arto examined what was a very deep wound in Söner Erkan’s throat. There were other wounds to his chest but they were not, he believed, the cause of the young man’s death. Like Çetin
İ
kmen, Arto Sarkissian believed that it was the thrust to the neck that had killed him.

‘Looks like a straight blade severed the carotid artery,’ he said.

‘Was I right? Was he still alive when it happened?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ the pathologist said.

‘What about
the other wounds?’

‘Window dressing.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Either the assailant wanted to mislead us with the chest wounds for some reason, or he or she attacked the corpse post mortem, maybe because they didn’t realise he was already dead.’ Arto Sarkissian looked at the masked leader and said, ‘Can we look for the murder weapon?’

‘Of course.’

İ
kmen, Arto Sarkissian and Mehmet Süleyman began to search the room. Apparently only one pair of gloves had been found in the kitchen and so
İ
kmen and Süleyman were reduced to wrapping handkerchiefs around their hands as they opened drawers and looked underneath the bed and in the bathroom. With luck, at some point in the future, a properly appointed police team would gain access to 411 to conduct a systematic search. But for the moment they just had to do what they could. In terms of fingerprints and/or footprints, only those of Lale Aktar were obvious. Her shoes were distinctive. Little, high-heeled Jimmy Choos which had left bloody stiletto and pointed toe marks across the bedroom floor and out into the corridor. But they found no weapon.