Death by Design (13 page)

‘I can do that.’

‘With no English?’

‘He can! He can!’ Mr Yigit said on İkmen’s behalf. ‘Mr Ülker, almost none of the people who work for you speak English!’

‘In the factory that doesn’t matter,’ Ülker said, ‘but out here—’

‘But Mr Ülker, the other man that you have, he can speak English, can’t he?’

‘Mustafa? Yes,’ Ülker said. ‘I have taken him on to guard the other building. But—’

‘Mr Ülker, you said that you would give my friend here a try,’ Yigit said. ‘Maybe when deliveries come, Mr Ertegrul can ask Mustafa to help him with that.’

Ülker frowned.

‘It’s a fucking ridiculous idea!’ Harrison persisted. ‘It’ll be like employing a retard!’

For a moment no one said anything. But then Yigit, who had been thinking rather rapidly about how he might save his precious £250, said in English, ‘Mr Ülker, there can I think be benefit to Mr Ertegrul no speaking English.’

‘Oh?’

‘What fucking shit are you talking now, Yigit?’ Harrison said.

‘All suppliers speak only English,’ Yigit said. ‘Everyone speak English! You do not know Mr Ertegrul, I do not know him either. He is uncle to Ayşe at the beauty shop, but who is she? He say he is guard in İstanbul. But . . .’ Yigit shrugged. ‘Try him, Mr Ülker. All I say. Then get rid of him if he no good. He see things but he understand nothing. He tell nobody nothing. You say whatever you want in front of him.’

Again, no one spoke. Ülker put his fingers up to his lips while he regarded İkmen closely. For his part, İkmen lowered his eyes. Maybe he feared that Ülker would see in them the light of comprehension and intelligence. The man from Diyarbakır wanted a thick, mindless peasant with no education. That was what İkmen hoped he was giving him.

‘All right,’ he said after a while. Then he said it again in Turkish and added, to İkmen, ‘I will give you a try.’

‘Christ!’ Derek Harrison pulled Ülker towards him and hissed, ‘What the fuck will our partners—’

‘Derek, go and get Mustafa,’ Ülker interrupted angrily. ‘He can show this man the ropes.’

‘Ahmet!’ Harrison tugged on Ülker’s arm once more.

‘Just do it!’ Ülker shrieked. Reluctantly, Harrison left. Then Ülker looked at İkmen again and said, ‘Let me down, try to cheat me or fail in your job in any way and I’ll break your legs. Understand?’

İkmen, his eyes still lowered, said, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ll pay you two pounds an hour for a twelve-hour shift,’ Ülker said.

‘Two pounds an hour is twenty-four pounds for just one night’s work, that is very good money,’ Yigit told İkmen. ‘You will very soon have paid me back my two hundred and fifty. It will go in a heartbeat, Mr Ertegrul.’

Ülker looked sourly at Yigit and said, ‘That and whatever you owe to whoever trafficked you into this country will mean you’ll be able to send maybe five pounds home every week. Not that that is any of my concern.’

İkmen didn’t answer. Ülker said, ‘Your niece told Mr Yigit you came in from Germany.’

‘Yes, sir. An old Jewish man, he—’

‘Yes, I know of an old Jewish man in Germany,’ Ülker said. ‘Ah well.’

He was well-informed. But then he would have to be, given what he did for a living, given what had just happened to his previous two guards. Obviously Wolfgang back in Berlin passed some sort of test.

Harrison returned with a tall, thick-set young man who looked like a particularly vicious grease wrestler.

‘This is Mustafa,’ Yigit told İkmen. ‘He will look after you.’

Ayşe Kudu woke up to find a very gratifying message on her phone from Çetin İkmen. Ahmet Ülker was apparently trying him out for a job as a security guard at one of his factories. He had been recommended by Mr Yigit. This, together with the news that Ülker could apparently be involved with some other people, namely business partners, was progress. She would have to ask İkmen just how much Yigit had charged him for his ‘services’ as a fixer, she thought with a smile. A second message told her she should call her ‘Father’, in other words Scotland Yard. News from that quarter was sobering. Apparently the police in İstanbul had discovered that someone had been grooming Tariq, the boy who had blown himself up at Ahmet Ülker’s Tarlabaşı factory, to be a suicide bomber in London. But apparently Tariq had had doubts; in reality he didn’t want to kill anyone.

‘Whether or not the attempt to radicalise the boy involved Ülker himself, we know that people connected to him are radicalising kids,’ Riley said. ‘Tariq failed. But if they really want to bomb London, a little setback like this won’t stop them.’

‘No.’

‘Tell your Uncle Çetin to keep his ear to the ground when you see him, won’t you?’ Riley said.

Ayşe said that she would. Shortly afterwards she received another text from İkmen which said, ‘Ülker has a man called Derek Harrison. Please check.’

Derek Harrison knew all about Maxine Ülker and that barking mad Persian of hers. As Ahmet’s assistant he sometimes had to go up to his house on The Bishops Avenue to pick stuff up his boss couldn’t be bothered to get for himself. The lazy bastard was half Derek’s age, but then that was how it was, how it had been for a very long time.

About a year back he’d caught them. In one of the many spare bedrooms. Maxine had been on top, eyes closed, licking her lips as she moved up and down on the Iranian’s cock. Later, Derek had stuck around, he was good at that, he’d watched her suck him off, and the Persian had talked dirty to her as she did it. So much for Ali Reza’s supposed piety. Obviously sinning for him did not include shafting his boss’s wife or having her give him a blow job. Not that Derek gave a shit.

Ahmet Ülker was just one in a long line of nasty and unscrupulous employers he’d had since the late seventies. Unskilled and with a whole host of health problems that were not his fault, Derek Harrison had been forced to seek such employers, forced to become the kind of thing that tortures, grasses and maims. No firm with any standards wanted people like him. Derek had only one foot, he was diabetic and his ticker was more than a little dicky. The government said that people with all sorts of disabilities could get and were entitled to jobs, just like everyone else. But in practice that didn’t happen, certainly not in the line of work Derek had wanted to do. They didn’t let you drive a train with a dodgy heart and only one foot. And because he didn’t want to become some sort of poof behind an office desk or a grunt on a building site, Derek had become an enforcer for people like Ahmet. He was bitter, and pulling out people’s fingernails or burning them with cigarettes didn’t cause him stress. His heart didn’t even race when he did things like that. What did make his heart race was when he considered what he had wanted to be and why he hadn’t been able to do it. That was what stopped him shopping Maxine and Ali Reza to his employer. Ahmet was putting things in hand to right the wrong that had been done to Derek all those years ago. Ahmet was doing it for his own reasons, to increase his standing with people he was in the process of getting into partnership with, but Derek was glad. Derek also knew that what his boss didn’t need as he brought his wonderful, terrible plan to fruition was the distraction of an unfaithful wife and the bother of having to kill and then dispose of some bloody mad Iranian. The Iranian wouldn’t be around for much longer anyway, not if everything went to plan.

‘It isn’t a lot to show for a life, even a short one like Tariq’s,’ Abdurrahman Iqbal said as he showed Süleyman the few poor things the boy had possessed. They were back at the house opposite the Taksim Hospital, now cordoned off by police tape and guarded by two constables. Abdurrahman had had his blood and skin tests for tuberculosis, all that remained was the X-ray, which Dr Sarkissian had arranged to take place later at the hospital.

Süleyman looked down at the pathetic bedroll, the few tattered jumpers and the thick leather satchel. This latter item he picked up and opened. ‘So, Mr Iqbal,’ he said, ‘why were you on your way to London? Do you have family there?’

The old man sighed. ‘I don’t have family anywhere,’ he said.

‘Then . . .’

‘Inspector, I was born in a country that is on hostile terms with the country that I live in now. I am an Indian. I was born in Calcutta, my first language is not Urdu as in Pakistan, but Hindi as in India. I speak Hindi first, English second and Urdu third.’

Süleyman was frowning as he looked through the satchel. ‘So you feel rootless.’

‘Yes. I cannot go back to India because Pakistan and India do not enjoy good relations. I would not be welcome there. But many years ago, before partition, I worked as a driver to an English army captain. He was called Captain Jackson and he said to me that if I was ever in England I should regard his home as my home. I do not feel comfortable in my country of Pakistan any more and so it is my very sincere wish to visit Captain Jackson in England and stay with him.’

Süleyman found a pen, some paper tissues, an Afghan passport and a notebook in the bag. ‘So why didn’t you just visit this captain as a tourist?’ he asked the old man.

‘Because I am not a tourist!’ Abdurrahman said. ‘I want to stay in England.’

At first Süleyman opened the notebook the wrong way round. Then he remembered that Afghans wrote using the Arabic script and so read from right to left. He turned the book round. At the top of every page were some printed characters he thought just might be dates. ‘Mr Iqbal,’ he said, ‘can you tell me anything about this book, please?’

He handed it over to the old man who took a pair of spectacles out of his pocket, put them on and then looked at the item.

‘His diary,’ he said. ‘Tariq’s.’

‘You saw him write in it?’

‘Yes, although I can’t understand it, if that is what you were hoping. The Afghans speak Dari. I do not. Or rather I can read the letters while not understanding the words, if you know what I mean.’

‘So you cannot tell which month is which or—’

‘Oh, I know that this word here is equivalent to this month, April, this year,’ the old man said as he pointed to a selection of marks at the top of one of the pages. Only since the coming of Atatürk’s Republic back in the 1920s had Turks been using the Latin alphabet. Before that people like Süleyman would have been familiar with Arabic characters. But so thoroughly had the new alphabet taken hold in the country that only the very old and Ottoman scholars could still decipher Arabic script in the twenty-first century.

‘Mmm. We will have to get it translated,’ Süleyman said and he held his hand out to take the book back.

But Abdurrahman didn’t give it back immediately. ‘I am just wondering,’ he said, ‘whether he wrote down any details about the journey to London his employers had promised him.’

He flicked through the pages rather heavy-handedly. Süleyman frowned. ‘Yes, but if—’

‘Ah, here is something,’ the old man said. ‘May the third.’

‘That is in five days’ time.’

The old man squinted at the page. ‘The problem with Dari, and with Arabic and Urdu for that matter, is that one must know the context. This says either Merk or Mark and then the other word could be Lene or Lana or Lena. I don’t know. But there is something here in your Latin script.’

Süleyman leaned over his shoulder. ‘EC3?’

‘Yes.’ The old man looked grave now. ‘My friend Captain Jackson, the address I have for him from nineteen forty-seven is WC2. It means west city two. There are also east city codes. I think that EC3 is a district of London.’

When Çetin İkmen returned to the Rize after half a night over at Hackney Wick, Mr Yigit was the first person to ask him how it went.

‘Mr Ülker has not yet offered me the job,’ İkmen said as the pansiyon owner barrelled towards him, his hands outstretched in anticipation.

In fact neither Ülker nor Harrison had stuck around long after İkmen had been given over into the care of the thuggish Mustafa. Rough and boorish, this creature had told him all about ‘the ropes’, which seemed to consist solely of walking around the factory all night long and beating any people inside who tried to get out. Deliveries of unspecified things would happen from time to time and İkmen would be required to carry goods into the factories. But he wouldn’t be able to talk to any of those making the deliveries and if he saw any police he was to call Mustafa immediately. He’d been given a mobile phone just for this purpose. It was similar to the one the police had given him.

İkmen went to his room, sat on his bed and called his handler, Terry.

‘Well, with any luck Ülker will give the nod for you to carry on,’ the policeman said. ‘Have you told Ayşe yet?’

İkmen said that he had sent her a text to that effect. He then went on to tell Terry about his co-worker Mustafa.

‘You don’t have a surname?’

‘No,’ İkmen said. ‘But he looks to me as if he might be a professional thug. I don’t think he’s a UK national though. From what I heard, his English is adequate only.’

‘OK.’

‘If I get the job I will apparently be working seven nights a week,’ İkmen said. ‘I think Ülker maybe finds it difficult to fill these security positions.’

‘They’re out in the open,’ Terry said. ‘He can’t put a Somali or someone from Cambodia on it, they’d stick out too much. Brits would be ideal, but he can’t get them, and so Turks, preferably who can speak English, are the next best thing. But if, like Çetin Ertegrul, they can’t – well, he just has to make do, doesn’t he?’

‘There is one Englishman working for Ülker,’ İkmen said. ‘Derek Harrison. I asked Ayşe, by text, to check him out.’

Terry cleared his throat. ‘Oh, I can tell you about Derek. Got a record stretching back to the late seventies. Robbery, robbery with violence, aggravated burglary.’

‘I first saw Mr Harrison with the owner of this pansiyon, Mr Yigit,’ İkmen said. ‘It seemed from what Yigit said that Ahmet Ülker had done Harrison a favour in giving him a job.’