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He squeezed her hands with his but didn’t reply.

‘I wish I knew where Alp was,’ Ceyda said.

The last time she’d seen him had been just before they’d blindfolded her. He’d been across the other side of the ballroom with Kenan and Metin. Had they made him take his clothes off too?

‘I’m sure that Alp is OK,’ Burak Fisekçi said.

‘But you don’t know that.’

‘No, I don’t but . . .’

‘Burak Bey,
we’re going to die!’ she said. And then she began to cry. She couldn’t help herself. Together with Alp she had hoped to be part of a theatrical movement and hopefully a dynasty that would take the country by storm. Bowstrings had only ever been a means towards achieving a future in serious, political theatre. But now that was never going to happen because Bowstrings, albeit indirectly, was going to kill them.

Ceyda felt her tears stick her blindfold to her closed eyelids like wallpaper paste. Her nose ran with snot and she felt ugly, humiliated and sick. ‘Oh, Burak Bey,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry. I should be stronger than this. But I’m just not.’

Burak Fisekçi said nothing. But then after she’d been crying for some minutes, Ceyda Ümit felt Burak Bey’s hands suddenly free themselves from hers and from whatever had tied them.

No one had moved Söner Erkan’s body. It still lay on Agatha Christie’s bed, its dead eyes seemingly fixed on nothing for all time. Çetin
İ
kmen and Mehmet Süleyman stood on the side of the bed nearest the door, while the doctors, the old man and the novelist stood opposite, nearest the window. The gunmen ranged themselves in front of Agatha Christie’s books and her portrait on the wall.
İ
kmen looked down at the body on the bed.

The leader said, ‘Well?’

İ
kmen looked
up. ‘Well what?’

‘Who do you think, in your professional opinion and after your investigation, killed this man?’ the leader asked.

Çetin
İ
kmen shrugged.

‘Is that it?’

There was a tense moment. The two doctors and Mehmet Süleyman visibly started to sweat.
İ
kmen looked slowly around the room until he was looking at the leader again. He said, ‘What do you want me to say? That Mrs Aktar did it?’

‘I didn’t kill him!’ Lale Aktar said. ‘I—’

‘You probably watched – or helped or something,’
İ
kmen said.

‘I—’

‘Oh, please save your breath, Mrs Aktar,’
İ
kmen said. ‘You lied about why you came back to this room when you “found” the body. I don’t know why and quite honestly I don’t much care. The fact that you made up a load of rubbish about wanting sanitary protection tells me you were not in this room with benign intent. It points my nose in the direction of you being in with these people in some way. But then I think that whoever set this up would know I’d find you out and so you’re just too obvious to be our killer.’

The man with the camera looked at his watch and then nudged the leader.

‘So if
Mrs Aktar didn’t kill Söner Erkan, who did?’ the leader asked. ‘You know what depends on this, don’t you?’

‘I do.’
İ
kmen looked at the Sarkissian brothers, at Hovsep Pars and at Mehmet Süleyman and he said, ‘Any ideas?’ No one said a word. Then he looked back at the leader again and smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We have no ideas.’

He heard the three men in front of them take the safety catches off their weapons.

‘I could hazard a guess, though.’

The three masked men leaned forward slightly.

‘To be honest with you,’
İ
kmen said, ‘I think that Mr Pars here was probably more correct than anyone else in his assessment of this situation. Putting that together with what this poor dead boy told us all about his fictional princely life, that he was an orphan in the care of his older brother, his mother had committed suicide . . . Of course that still doesn’t bring us any closer to who actually stuck a knife into his throat. But if you’re looking at the concept of killing by proxy—’

‘Get to the point, Inspector.’

İ
kmen saw Hovsep Pars nod at him. The old man said, ‘So now you know.’

‘Yes.’

‘For sure?’

‘Nothing is certain in this life, Hovsep Bey, but I have come, shall we say, via a certain golden samovar, to see the merit in your words.’

Lale Aktar, still
standing beside Krikor Sarkissian, began to shake. Krikor put his arms round her but he didn’t speak.

‘For me, it was the intricacy of the operation, the slow planning that had to have been involved – years – and the camera,’
İ
kmen said. ‘A camera implies a watcher, either by a direct feed or later on a disk. One hears of such “facilities” in prisons, for “special” prisoners. Unofficial of course.’

‘We need a name,’ the leader said. ‘Of the actual killer. Take a guess.’

‘Take a guess?’
İ
kmen laughed. ‘You’re going to kill us anyway. Except Mrs Aktar, of course.’ He looked over at her. ‘Why don’t you go and stand with your friends, Lale Hanım?’

But the novelist neither moved nor spoke.

‘All those good works you do,’
İ
kmen said to her. ‘Just like Aysel Ökte. Feeding the poor, espousing the cause of the dispossessed, visiting prisons. Couldn’t visit your own father in his prison, could you? Too close to home? But then
he
was so different, wasn’t he? Not like your father, not like your old husband.
He
was charming and handsome and so romantic—’

‘Stop it!’ she shouted. Her face screwed up with anger and tears and she screamed, ‘How would someone like you ever understand?’

‘Ah, so
I was right,’
İ
kmen said. ‘But then I knew Mr Ersoy really quite well . . .’

The first shot, which came from somewhere below them, was followed by the sound of screaming and then more shots. Everyone in room 411 looked at the door, including the gunmen.
İ
kmen pulled at Süleyman’s sleeve and together they took their one small chance.

They were shooting the hostages! Other men in black were bursting through every door and window into the ballroom. Ceyda looked for Alp but she couldn’t see him through the smoke. They’d flung tear gas into the room and everything was hazy and evil-smelling and awful. Why were they shooting the hostages? A woman in a dress that looked like one great glittering peacock feather fell to the ground clutching her stomach.

Someone had taken her blindfold off. Ceyda thought it had been Burak Bey. But when she’d looked for him he’d gone. Now frantically trying to untie the wire that held her legs together, Ceyda cried and shook and screamed whenever she saw a dark figure wearing a gas mask loom out of the smoke. If these people were the police or the army, they were making a terrible mistake.

Ceyda cut her fingers on the wire. Getting it off so that she could run was the only thing she could think about. Every part of her body trembled. She was almost naked but she didn’t care, she had to get out before these people killed her. She threw the bloodied wire to one side and stood up. She couldn’t see any of the figures who had been her captors anywhere. Just these ‘things’ in gas masks, shooting everyone.

Her eyes felt
blinded by blood and pain and tears but she stumbled forward to where she thought she remembered one of the doors from the Kubbeli Saloon into the ballroom was. All around her, people screamed and fell to the floor, either because they had been shot or because they were trying not to be shot. Ceyda came to what seemed to be a wall. She felt her way along it, tripping over chairs, tables and people as she went. She wanted Alp and her parents and she wanted Söner to still be alive even though she’d hated him. If she survived she was never going to take part in a murder mystery evening ever again.

Ceyda tried to open one of her eyes but it was far too painful to do so. With a little whimper she shut it again and continued to move forward, blindly. Eventually and inevitably she fell over something and her body hit the floor full length. Ceyda thought that this was the end of her. But then she felt two arms encircle her body and lift her to her feet.

‘Come with me,’ she heard Burak Fisekçi say.

Çetin
İ
kmen flung
himself at the leader. Distracted by what was happening downstairs, the man was taken completely by surprise. While his two colleagues fired wildly at anything that moved, his Kalashnikov skittered across the floor until it landed at the feet of Arto Sarkissian. Together with his brother and Lale Aktar, Arto hit the floor. From over the other side of the bed he heard a voice shout, ‘Throw it to me!’

There was blood coming from somewhere and bullets everywhere but Arto Sarkissian made himself rise on to his haunches to throw the rifle across the bed towards Mehmet Süleyman. Had the doctor known how to use it he would have done so, but his military service was a lifetime away and he hadn’t touched a firearm since.

While
İ
kmen wrestled with the unarmed leader on the floor, Süleyman shot the man without a camera on his helmet. He smashed against Agatha Christie’s typewriter which had been behind him and then sank to the floor like a puppet. The cameraman looked down at
İ
kmen struggling with his leader on the floor and trained his gun on him, but then Süleyman fired at him, missed, and the cameraman made a break for the door.

Although his first instinct was to follow the cameraman, Süleyman could see that
İ
kmen was struggling to subdue the leader and so he ran over and smashed the man’s head against the floor until he lost consciousness. Slowly,
İ
kmen stood up. ‘I am far too old for this,’ he panted.

‘Hovsep Bey
is hit!’

Both
İ
kmen and Süleyman turned to see Arto Sarkissian cradling Hovsep Pars in his arms.

‘Where?’

‘Shoulder,’ Arto replied. Krikor Sarkissian was applying compression while Lale Aktar cried into the thick velvet curtains. She seemed to be unhurt.

İ
kmen picked up the rifle that Süleyman had dropped on the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ the younger policeman asked.

‘Going to get help.’
İ
kmen moved towards the door of room 411.

‘Don’t you think it would be better if I—’

‘Stay here and don’t open this door until you hear my voice,’
İ
kmen said. And then he opened the door, walked through it and shut it behind him. Out on the fourth-floor gallery he could hear the shooting from down in the public rooms more clearly. He also felt that itch behind the eyes that signalled the presence of tear gas.

He jogged along the gallery, looking down at the tops of the domes in the ceiling of the Kubbeli Saloon. Now he could hear screaming too. He increased his pace even though his chest was aching and the sound of his heart was deafening.

When he saw
Krikor’s assistant Burak Fisekçi and a half-naked girl with one hand over her face coming towards him, he was both relieved and disturbed. Burak had been one of the few people who had been out of the ballroom when Söner Erkan was killed. But he was also Krikor Sarkissian’s trusted lieutenant.

‘Inspector
İ
kmen, what on earth has happened?’ Burak Fisekçi said. He looked at the Kalashnikov.

İ
kmen said, ‘They tried to kill us in room four eleven. Did you see the man with the camera on his helmet come past?’

‘No.’

‘Burak Bey,’ the girl said, ‘someone—’

İ
kmen should have let her speak but instead he cut her off. He had other considerations. ‘Hovsep Bey has been shot,’ he said. ‘We need to get him out of here.’

‘Of course.’ Burak Fisekçi put his hands on
İ
kmen’s shoulders and smiled.

Çetin
İ
kmen allowed himself a brief moment to draw breath. It was in this fleeting hiatus that Burak Fisekçi took hold of the much smaller and lighter man and threw him over the ornate gallery banister into the great void above the Kubbeli Saloon. As he tried to grab on to the banister,
İ
kmen let the Kalashnikov go. He heard it clatter down on to something somewhere below him.

It was odd but
not entirely unexpected that Çetin
İ
kmen’s first thought upon almost being flung to his death was about earthquakes. As far as he was concerned, if an earthquake erupted while he was hanging like a rag doll from one of the joists that kept the vast space in the centre of the hotel stable, that would be just typical. It was his birthday, when awful things always happened; something even more ghastly was bound to occur soon. But then
İ
kmen remembered something that made him think slightly differently about this. It wasn’t his birthday any more. It was now 13 December and even with his heart hammering like a road drill and his chest feeling as if it had been skinned, the knowledge made him feel better.

He still thought that he was going to die but his senses began to work properly again and he heard what sounded like a struggle up on the fourth-floor gallery. He raised his head as far as he was able and he saw an arm, probably Burak’s, grab hold of the half-naked girl.
İ
kmen was just about to yell something about not throwing the poor child into the void too when he heard Burak say, ‘Ceyda, it has to be this way!’

‘You’ve killed
Inspector
İ
kmen!’ he heard Ceyda Ümit say.

‘He was going to mess it all up!’ Burak said.

‘He would have got us out of here!’ the girl said.

‘Yes, but not together,’ Burak said. ‘The only people who can do that are in room four eleven.’

‘Who’s in room four eleven?’ Ceyda said. ‘Söner! Oh, my—’

‘No, my colleagues are in there,’ Burak said. ‘Now that the police are here, we’ll need help to get out.’

‘No.’ There was a pause. Then the girl said, ‘The police were . . .’ And then she stopped again as if trying and failing to work something out in her head. ‘The police were killing people, hostages . . .’

‘Exactly!’ Burak said. ‘Now come on!’