Deadline (15 page)

But what if
they did actually solve the mystery of who killed Söner Erkan? Well, that had all been taken account of in the plan. That was no more of a problem than if they got it wrong. It was just that if they did get it wrong, that would be a lot more satisfying.

‘I hated the
sight of him.’

Just to be sure,
İ
kmen asked, ‘Söner Erkan?’

‘He was a little prick!’ Metin Martini, the half-Italian boy who had played the dashing Dr Enzo Garibaldi, was very sure of his feelings. ‘Whatever he said went, because his mummy and daddy gave Bowstrings some money to get started. Or rather they gave their ill-gotten gains to Lions in Iron Cages.’

İ
kmen frowned.

‘Lions in Iron Cages was the original name of Bowstrings,’ the young man said. ‘Alp came up with it and we all thought it was brilliant.’

‘Is this a reference to the “Lion in an Iron Cage” poem?’
İ
kmen said.

‘Yes. By Nazim Hikmet, our greatest poet. He likens the lion in the cage to the untameable and uncrushable spirit of freedom. He went to prison for saying things like that. Well, Söner’s parents didn’t like that. They wanted something Ottoman. Arseholes!’

Out of the corner
of his eye,
İ
kmen saw the ‘Ottoman’ Mehmet Süleyman smile. ‘So what did they say?’
İ
kmen asked.

Metin Martini shrugged. ‘I dunno. We get this job with Dr Sarkissian and the next thing I know we’re not Lions any more but bloody Bowstrings!’

‘At the suggestion of Söner Erkan’s parents?’

‘Söner told us,’ he said. ‘He and Alp went to a meeting with Dr Sarkissian, we got the gig, and then suddenly it’s like, “We’re Bowstrings now!” I was, like,
No!
But then he’s all, “This is just the way it is!” and Alp doesn’t say a word. We were going to be a political company, you know? There are things going on in this country that need to be challenged. I accept we needed to do this kind of gig to get some money together but me and Alp and Ceyda, we had plans.’

‘Could Dr Sarkissian and not Söner Erkan’s parents have made the suggestion to change the company’s name?’

‘Why would he do that?’

İ
kmen didn’t know. Nazim Hikmet’s work had remained contentious since his death back in the 1960s right up to his official rehabilitation by the state in 2009. It was possible that Krikor Sarkissian didn’t want his charity event to be associated with the work of a long-dead communist but it wasn’t that likely.

‘Söner’s father owns a construction company,’ Metin said. ‘He was just like
a builder out in Anatolia until he started doing “good works”.’

‘What good works?’

‘Putting mosques back together in Bosnia after the war.’ Metin pulled a face. ‘Not exactly putting food on people’s tables or giving them hospitals, but he did the whole good religious man thing and so he got in with a load of people who like all that. They put work his way.’

İ
kmen hadn’t got the impression that Söner Erkan’s family were religious people. The boy himself appeared to have been very far away from being a modest Muslim lad.

‘I shouldn’t be saying any of this to you, I suppose, in case you’re one of them too.’ Metin Martini looked down his long nose at
İ
kmen.

‘One of whom?’
İ
kmen asked.

The boy waved a hand in the air and said, ‘Religious people.’

‘I have nothing to do with any organisation either secular or religious,’
İ
kmen said. ‘I serve my country, Mr Martini. That’s all. And at the moment my only concern is to discover who killed Söner Erkan and why. If my colleague and I can’t do that, then we have a very serious situation on our hands.’

‘They’ll kill us.’

İ
kmen looked over at the masked men who were watching him and said, ‘So they say.’

Metin Martini,
following
İ
kmen and Süleyman’s example, lit a cigarette. ‘Well, I didn’t kill Söner, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I hated him and I’ll be honest, I wished him dead more than once, but I didn’t kill him. Why would I serve prison time for that arsehole?’

‘Any idea who might have killed him?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No.’ He shrugged again. ‘Söner was an annoying nonentity, nothing more. None of us liked him.’

‘Did anyone dislike him more than perhaps the rest?’

Metin thought for a moment and then he said, ‘He tried it on with Esma. She was horrified.’

İ
kmen looked down at his notebook and said, ‘Esma is . . .’

‘She played the American governess, Sarah,’ Metin said.

She was the tall, blonde girl.

‘Do you have any idea what happened when Söner “tried it on” with Esma, Metin?’

‘She told him to fuck off,’ he said. ‘Probably called him a little creep into the bargain.’

İ
kmen looked at Süleyman who raised his eyebrows and said, ‘So are you having a relationship with Esma yourself?’

‘Me?’ He laughed. ‘No!’

‘You make it sound as if the idea of that is either ridiculous or appalling to you,’ Süleyman said.

The boy averted his
eyes, then he said, ‘I like Esma, don’t get me wrong, but . . . Esma?’ He leaned forward then and looked Süleyman straight in the eye. ‘I like European girls, you know? Italians, Spaniards. I can’t do with all this Turkish stuff where you don’t know whether a girl is going to put out or not. It’s bullshit.’

Metin Martini was a very forthright young man and so
İ
kmen thought he’d try to shock him. ‘You want to know if a girl is going to let you fuck her?’

Hovsep Pars gasped audibly.

Metin Martini was completely unmoved. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s it in a nutshell.’

İ
zzet rang Ay
ş
e’s mobile and home landline once each but nobody answered either of them. Perhaps she had been calling from her brother’s phone. He called that number again but no one answered.
İ
zzet wondered what to do. If she didn’t want to speak to him, why had she called?

The past few months hadn’t been easy. After the euphoria of their engagement had passed, the reality of the wedding hit and, with it, a host of problems. Money was only one of them.
İ
zzet wanted his children from his first marriage to come to his wedding but their mother was not keen for them to come without her. Theoretically his daughter was too young to travel on her own but he knew that his ex-wife was also making mischief. Then there
was his great-aunt Lutza, the last surviving sibling of his grandfather, Fortune.
İ
zzet hadn’t told Ay
ş
e anything about her. He certainly hadn’t told her that Aunt Lutza was, as his grandfather had been, a Jew. In itself it didn’t matter, Ay
ş
e wasn’t the sort of woman who indulged in mindless prejudices. But the fact that he had concealed it from her would make her angry.
İ
zzet himself didn’t know why he’d done it.

He wasn’t a ‘full’ Turk, he couldn’t marry her in opulent, Ottoman splendour, he was rather less attractive than George Clooney. But so what? She was marrying him because she wanted to. Or did she? He looked down at the phone in his hands and contemplated the biggest obstacle to his happiness. Mehmet Süleyman.

She still had feelings for him,
İ
zzet knew that. Every time she looked at him, it was as clear as day. Ay
ş
e thought that
İ
zzet couldn’t see but he could. It was what all the ‘wedding nerves’ had been about. She was nervous because she didn’t know whether she was doing the right thing by marrying him. And yet
İ
zzet knew that if he challenged her about it she would deny everything. She was totally committed to their marriage but was that as a way of escape more than anything else? Did she want to run away from her own foolish passion for a man who was fickle and unreliable? And did he want to take her on under those circumstances? Or was it now far too late
in the day to change his mind? After all, he had known about Ay
ş
e and her boss for a very long time and for the last few months he had continually talked himself into believing that it didn’t matter.

Esma cried. She shook too. She was so frightened of what was happening, her whole body was cold with terror and her hands were blue. But she hadn’t hated Söner Erkan, or so she said. She’d found him silly, sometimes annoying and not very talented, but she hadn’t hated him even after he had tried, and failed, to chat her up. He hadn’t, she claimed, even attempted to borrow any money from her.

‘It makes you realise just how much we rely upon forensic evidence these days,’
İ
kmen said to Süleyman and Arto Sarkissian as they conferred about the people they’d interviewed so far.

Süleyman was only half listening. He still wanted to get as close to the telephone in the Kubbeli Saloon as he could. It was unlikely any of them would be able to plug 155 into it and then leave the handset off the hook without being seen – their captors were watching them all the time – but they had to try.

‘We only have our naked eyes and ears to work with and it just isn’t enough,’
İ
kmen continued. ‘I for one feel inadequate in the extreme.’

‘Only Mrs Aktar has any visible bloodstains on her clothes,’ Arto said. ‘Although . . .’ He bit
his lip, deep in thought, before he spoke again. ‘I consulted my brother about the footprints in room four eleven.’

‘Mrs Aktar’s?’

‘Yes.’ He blinked through his spectacles, his eyes were tired. ‘They worried me.’

‘In what way?’
İ
kmen asked.

For just a moment their captors talked among themselves and Süleyman was able to inspect the telephone and the wire going into it. He clicked his tongue impatiently.

İ
kmen looked at him. ‘Wires cut?’

Tight-lipped, Süleyman said, ‘Yes.’

İ
kmen turned back to Arto Sarkissian. ‘In what way?’ he repeated.

The Armenian sighed. ‘The bed the boy was found on has a very deep mattress and a lot of thick covers, especially now in the winter,’ he said. ‘Blood spatter on the headboard and even Mrs Aktar’s handprints on the wall I can understand. When she rolled him over she would have got blood on her dress. But even a severed carotid artery will not produce enough blood to soak through all those bedclothes, then the mattress and on to the floor.’

‘What if the mattress has a protector on it?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Mmm, Krikor brought that up.’

‘It’s likely. This is
a hotel,’
İ
kmen said. ‘And accidents do happen.’

‘But I don’t remember seeing a pool of blood on the floor and so I fail to see how Mrs Aktar could have managed to get blood on her shoes,’ Arto said. Then he added, ‘Unless she climbed on to the bed for some reason.’

Lale Aktar was only just over the other side of the Kubbeli Saloon and so
İ
kmen lowered his voice. ‘So are you saying that you suspect Mrs Aktar, Arto?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But as it stands I can’t see why she should have had any blood on her shoes if she just went into that room, discovered the body, rolled it over and ran out again.’

‘Do you want to go and have a look at the room again?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘I think we have to, don’t you?’

The only people that Nar recognised when she entered the Kubbeli Saloon were the police officers,
İ
kmen and Süleyman. But they, of course, didn’t recognise her. It had been a very long time since Nar had either dressed as a man or carried a gun and it felt really odd. The roughness of the balaclava helmet against her face wasn’t pleasant either. She’d had to take her make-up and false eyelashes off with kitchen washing-up liquid which had left her skin feeling as if it had been scrubbed with a house broom. If she
did manage to survive the night, her skin would need some serious pampering.

No one spoke a word to her, but not far from her about six men and one, to Nar, very obvious woman were saying that ‘they’ wanted to go ‘upstairs’ again. The thickset man who appeared to be their leader looked at his watch and then said, ‘That works.’ He pointed to three figures, one of which was Nar, and said, ‘You take them.’ He didn’t address anybody by name and communication between all these people was clearly kept to a minimum. The man standing next to Nar tapped her elbow to move her towards the police officers. She wondered if either
İ
kmen or Süleyman would recognise her just by her eyes. Probably not. They didn’t know her that well, she’d made sure of that.

‘Dr Sarkissian has to come too,’
İ
kmen said to the group leader.

The thickset man shrugged. Nar noticed that the man next to her was wearing a helmet that had a camera fitted to it. That was odd and, she felt, a little bit kinky. She knew men who liked to film things that other, sick people would pay to watch.

Her colleagues, the police officers, some fat Armenian doctor she didn’t know and Nar herself began to walk towards the sweeping Pera Palas staircase. When and how she was going to be able to transmit who she was to the officers she didn’t know. Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu had been a bit vague about
what was going to happen next. All she’d said was that Nar should find out as much as she could and make contact with
İ
kmen and Süleyman if she could. In the meantime, the sergeant was going to call
İ
zzet Melik. Nar had heard on the grapevine that Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu was due to marry that dour old maganda. Unbelievable! Everyone knew she was still in love with Mehmet Süleyman.

She walked upstairs directly behind Çetin
İ
kmen, listening to the sound of his cigaretty, laboured breathing. What was she doing helping the police and putting her life at risk like this? What had they ever done for her? What had anyone? Her father had deserted her by dying just after she was born and so as soon as she could walk she’d had to look after her mother who was disabled by arthritis. A hideous spell in the army as her former male self, Semih, had been followed by the death of her mother and then a merciful flight from her village to
İ
stanbul. There she’d become Nar and had quickly established herself as champion and protector of a whole sisterhood of younger, smaller and less feisty transsexuals. She’d also started hormone therapy and had breast augmentation. Squashed down underneath the clothes she’d taken off the unconscious man in the fridge, her boobs felt distinctly uncomfortable.