Death by Design (3 page)

He looked up into the heavily moustachioed face of his sergeant, İzzet Melik. He was holding his notebook, the top of which he was tapping with a pen.

İzzet?’

‘Seems, sir, that the actual owner of this site is, or was, a Serkis Yacoubian.’

‘An Armenian.’

‘Went to America sometime in the nineteen twenties,’ İzzet said.

‘And so this building . . .’

‘On this site there was once a considerable house belonging to the Yacoubian family. But according to the local authority, it began to degrade badly in the fifties and then one day it just burnt down.’

‘Mmm.’ Something similar had happened to a house that had once belonged to Süleyman’s own aristocratic forebears up in Nişantaşı. Just after his great-aunt, the Princess Gözde, had died back in 1959, her once great palace had burnt to the ground. Back then the city had been badly neglected and seemingly in inexorable decline.

‘The site was used as a makeshift car park for some years after that,’ İzzet continued. ‘Then, sometime in the seventies, this place was put up.’

The factory was a large structure. It was also makeshift in the same way that the old gecekondu or slum dwellings on the outskirts of the city were. Basically the law used to state that provided a man could erect four corner posts and a roof within one night the land beneath that structure was his. That legislation, however, only applied to unregistered land. In this case the land, not the building, was still owned by the Yacoubian family. The factory, made up as it had been out of odd-shaped pieces of corrugated iron, splintered wooden timbers and fractured glass and plastic panels, had been thrown together like a gecekondu structure without actually being one.

‘It was used as a car workshop until the nineties when it fell into disrepair yet again,’ İzzet went on. ‘The workshop was operated by a Mr Alpozen. Now nearly eighty and ill with cancer, he let the place out to someone called Ahmet Ülker who has apparently been there ever since.’

‘Nothing in writing, I suppose?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Of course not. This Ülker, if indeed that is his name, doesn’t rent his place from Alpozen legally. Alpozen doesn’t even know where he lives. The land, legally speaking, still belongs to the Yacoubian family.’

Over the centuries many people – Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Levantines – had left the city of İstanbul. They hadn’t always sold their properties before they set off for their new lives in America, Australia or Argentina. Sometimes they and their families had just gone, leaving their properties and considerable legal headaches behind them.

‘I take it none of the people who worked here have named this Ülker?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No.’ İzzet shook his head wearily and then equally wearily he lit up a cigarette. ‘Poor bastards don’t know anything much beyond the fact that we’ve shattered their dreams of a new life in Europe. That said, a couple of them have spoken, through their interpreters, about a boss. Some indistinct figure who occasionally comes by . . . A Turk, most seem to think. But no description.’

Süleyman, equally depressed by what seemed to be evolving into a familiar picture of a chimerical and untraceable people-trafficking operation, sighed and then also lit a cigarette. He was just about to give voice to his misgivings when the forensic scientist he had been watching turned towards him and said, ‘Inspector Süleyman, do you have any idea what the letters E, P, P, I, N, G might mean?’

‘No.’ Süleyman walked over to see for himself exactly what the scientist was looking at. The paper upon which this word was printed was very much a fragment. The blast had ripped away the top layer of what had once been a poster, except for this word and the small red line that ran alongside it. ‘I haven’t a clue,’ Süleyman said.

‘Sir?’ İzzet was looking impatient and was probably in need of some kind of direction.

‘Right, İzzet,’ Süleyman said. ‘I take it this elderly man, this Mr Alpozen, hasn’t been actually visited as yet.’

‘No, sir, I’ve only spoken to him on the phone,’ his deputy said.

‘Take one of the uniformed officers and get over and see him. Try to determine whether or not he’s telling the truth and see if he can give us some sort of description of this Ülker character. Where, by the way, does this Mr Alpozen live?’

‘In Yeniköy,’ İzzet replied, naming one of the more fashionable villages that line the Bosphorus strait as it wends its way up towards the Black Sea.

‘Very nice,’ Süleyman responded. ‘Obviously good money in car repairs.’ His eyes glittered. ‘Or something.’

His deputy smiled. ‘I’ll see what the man has to say for himself,’ he said and then he left.

The forensic scientist very gently peeled the little fragment of paper he’d been working on away from the wall and put it into an evidence bag. E, P, P, I, N, G? Süleyman wondered what it meant and whether it was actually a word at all. He didn’t even know what language it was in. He doubted it was relevant to anything much. However, if he’d learned anything since joining the police force, it was that things, even very small things, were rarely if ever of no significance at all.

Moments later his mobile phone rang. It was İkmen, still relentlessly working from his hospital bed. He wanted to know whether anything more had come to light about Tariq. It hadn’t and so Süleyman told him about Mr Alpozen and the possible existence of Mr Ülker. Only when he’d finished the call did he remember the strange word on the fragment of paper and wonder whether he should have passed that by İkmen too.

It wasn’t until later on that evening that the small fragment of paper from the back wall of the handbag factory found its way on to Commissioner Ardıç’s desk. Someone at the Forensic Institute had recognised what the word was. Now, in light of that, İkmen and Süleyman’s superior was talking to a Mr Nightingale from the British Consulate. A thin, dark man whose command of the Turkish language was second only to that of his command of Arabic, Mr Nightingale didn’t actually have a job title at the consulate. But Commissioner Ardıç knew what he was even if he didn’t really know
who
he was.

‘Epping is a suburb of London,’ Nightingale said without even bothering to look at the fragment. ‘Your forensic man visited it at some time, did he?’

‘She,’ Commissioner Ardıç corrected. ‘Apparently studied in London.’

‘Epping’s at the far eastern end of the Central Line, where the underground system hits the edge of the countryside.’ He leaned over and looked at the fragment through its polythene bag. ‘Looks like it’s been torn from a tube map.’

‘It was pinned up on the wall of the illegal factory we discovered in Tarlabaşı,’ Ardıç said breathlessly as he attempted to lean forward over his immense stomach in order to tap the ash off the end of his cigar. Eventually, under the somewhat scornful gaze of the Englishman, he made it. ‘The one with your passports in the safe.’

‘Hardly my passports,’ Nightingale responded acidly. But then he smiled and said, ‘But I know what you mean. This was the place where the boy detonated himself after full jihadi battle cry, wasn’t it?’

The question was rhetorical, he knew what the answer was only too well. But his tone made Ardıç smart. Though very far from being a fundamentalist, he was nevertheless a Muslim and he felt the contempt in the other man’s voice sharply.

‘One of my officers was wounded,’ he said.

‘Lucky not to be killed,’ Nightingale said. ‘But anyway, in light of this I will have to contact London again and it may well be that someone might want to come out and speak to your team.’

Ardıç shrugged. Cooperation between British and Turkish police forces was nothing new and of course the Europeans would be accommodated.

‘On the face of it, a copy of the London Underground map on the wall of a factory transporting illegals into the EU would seem fairly innocuous,’ the Englishman continued. ‘One could argue that it would be very useful for them to memorise it in case they fetched up in London all on their own. Except that of course that is highly unlikely. As you and I both know, Commissioner, illegals only ever really go out alone once they’ve managed to escape those who have enslaved them to work in brothels, factories producing counterfeit goods or lap-dancing clubs.’

Ardıç nodded his agreement.

‘The passports bother me,’ Nightingale said. ‘There is a discreet investigation underway across all of our UK offices as we speak. But what really concerns me,’ he picked up the bagged fragment and looked at it again, ‘is this.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, call me a ghastly pessimist if you must but when I put together the concept of a young man shouting “Allahu Akbar” with a map of the London Underground, I tend to feel my blood freeze.’

Ardıç took a long drag on his cigar and then nodded his head in agreement. On 7 July 2005 a group of fundamentalist suicide bombers had brought London Underground to a standstill. More importantly, they had killed not only themselves but a lot of innocent bystanders too. Like İstanbul, London bore the battle scars of numerous terrorist attacks.

At length, Ardıç said, ‘I understand.’ Then with a sigh of resignation he added, ‘Get back to your people in London, Mr Nightingale. You will have the full assistance and cooperation of my department.’

Mr Nightingale smiled one of his thin, dark smiles and then left without another word.

The following Monday morning, Çetin İkmen went to work as usual. He was still sore in places and he wore a large plaster to cover the wound to his cheek. But apart from that, physically he was fine. And once he was outside his apartment, things improved psychologically too. Not that he could entirely forget how cold his wife was to him, but at least at work he could distract himself with other things.

On his way to the police station he gave his present domestic situation some thought. It had been six months since his son Bekir had died. It still hurt to think about; it always would. Within the İkmen family, Bekir had been the one who got away. Instilled from an early age, mainly by their father, with the idea that a person’s goals can be achieved, albeit usually with some difficulty, the İkmen children were generally successful. Among them were doctors, flight attendants, A-grade students and a young parent, Hulya, who struggled to support her child and her disabled husband. At much cost to herself, Hulya did what she did well and her parents were immensely proud of her. Bekir had been quite different from the others. Bekir, his father now recalled, had been a lovely and loving child who had grown into a nightmare of a teenager. Some of his other boys had experimented with drugs and Bülent in particular had not had an easy adolescence. But Bekir had been on a different level. Not only had he taken drugs as a youngster, he’d also stolen from shops and even his own family in order to get cash for his habit. At fifteen and with the tacit agreement of his exasperated father, Bekir had left home. And although Fatma had cried for her absent son, everyone else in the İkmen apartment had breathed a sigh of relief.

But then, after seventeen years without any contact or news of him, Bekir İkmen returned. His mother cried, and his brothers and sisters listened awestruck – and with some scepticism – to his stories about begging, fighting with gypsies and battling drug dealers and his own heroin addiction. Only Çetin had totally distrusted Bekir. And Çetin had been right. Bekir had come home in order to hide from his father’s colleagues, the police. Not only had he helped to spring a convicted murderer and drug dealer, Yusuf Kaya, from prison, Bekir had also been involved in large-scale dealing himself. Almost the last act Bekir İkmen performed on earth was to kill an entirely innocent man who opposed him. That was why the Jandarmes in the eastern town of Birecik, to where Bekir and his fellow criminals had been tracked by İkmen’s colleague Süleyman, had shot him. For some reason that Çetin İkmen could not fathom, his son Bekir had gone wrong. To Çetin’s recollection, he had never treated Bekir any differently from his other children – at least not until the drug taking and stealing began when he was a teenager. His wife Fatma disagreed.

‘You always treated him badly,’ she would say whenever the rein by which she held in her emotions snapped. ‘You hated him and he knew it!’

Fatma blamed her husband entirely for what had happened and when she did not berate him, she was silent and broodingly resentful of his every breath. Their children, with the exception of the youngest Kemal who had been somewhat glamoured by his bad-boy older brother, supported their father’s point of view with regard to Bekir. But they could do nothing to move their mother who now, or so it seemed, hated their father with the same passion with which she had once loved him. Not even nearly getting blown to pieces in an illegal handbag factory in Tarlabaşı had, apparently, moved İkmen’s wife to even a little sympathy for him. She did not visit him in hospital and when he came home, it had not been Fatma but her daughter Gül who had attended to Çetin’s wounds and cooked special food for him. It was as if Fatma’s love for her husband had died along with their son.

İkmen entered the station in dour mood and failed to acknowledge either of the two young constables who saluted him as he mounted the stairs up to his office. He knew that once he started working again he would become totally absorbed in his job and would be able to distract himself from his personal problems. But the walk up to his office was tiring and tedious and it made him painfully aware of how weak he still was from his injuries. He eventually arrived at his office door, aching and breathless. When he stepped inside, however, his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, was not at her desk. Instead he found his superior, Commissioner Ardıç, in conference with a tall, blond, foreign man.

‘Ah, excuse me, please,’ he heard Ardıç say in English to the foreigner. Then struggling up from İkmen’s own chair, Ardıç waddled across the office towards him and said, ‘This is Inspector Riley from Scotland Yard in London. He wants to talk to you.’