Death by Design Read online

  Copyright © 2010 Barbara Nadel

  The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 8644 4

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  To my son Alex and all his friends from John Cass – explorers of old Mark Lane and witnesses to its secrets. Also to Mike Wilkinson, one of the Mark Lane Two.

  Cast of Characters

  * * *

  İstanbul

  Çetin İkmen – middle aged İstanbul police inspector

  Mehmet Suleyman – İstanbul police inspector – İkmen’s protégé

  Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu – İkmen’s deputy

  Sergeant İzzet Melik – Süleyman’s deputy

  Dr Arto Sarkissian – İstanbul police pathologist

  Commissioner Ardıç – İkmen and Süleyman’s boss

  Fatma İkmen – Çetin İkmen’s wife

  Tariq – an Afghan boy working illegally in İstanbul

  Abdurrahman Iqbal – a Pakistani migrant passing through the city

  Berlin

  Wolfgang – a German people trafficker

  London

  Ahmet Ulker – a businessman

  Maxine Ulker – his wife

  Derek Harrison – Ahmet Ülker’s right hand man

  Ali Reza Hajizadeh – an Iranian, Ahmet Ülker’s driver

  Mustafa Kermani – security guard at Ahmet Ülker’s Hackney Wick factory

  Hadi Nourazar – an Iranian cleric

  Abdullah Yigit – owner of the Rize Guest House, Stoke Newington

  Wesley Simpson – getaway driver

  Haluk Uner – Mayor of London

  Acting Commissioner Dee – of the Metropolitan Police

  Superintendent Wyre Williams – Metropolitan Police

  Detective Inspector Patrick Riley – Metropolitan Police

  Inspector Carla Fratelli – Metropolitan Police

  Detective Inspector Roman – Metropolitan Police

  Detective Inspector Hogarth – Metropolitan Police

  Detective Constable Ball – Metropolitan Police

  Sergeant Terry Springer – İkmen’s undercover handler

  Sergeant Ayşe Kudu – Greater Manchester Police, seconded to the Metropolitan Police

  John Richards – London Underground employee

  Fatima Khan – young pregnant mother

  Sınan İkmen – Çetin’s eldest son, a GP in London

  Fasika – an Ethiopian illegal immigrant

  Prelude

  * * *

  Tarlabaşı District, İstanbul

  ‘Don’t!’

  Inspector Çetin İkmen fixed the trembling figure in front of him with the most penetrating stare that he could muster and then, calmly, he repeated himself. ‘Don’t.’

  The figure, a male not much older than a boy, clutched the hand grenade he was holding to his chest and began to cry. Tears, heated up by the adrenaline raging inside his thin, spotty cheeks, fell down into the wispy beard that was just about noticeable on his chin.

  ‘Son, there’s no need for anyone to die for the sake of a few fake Prada handbags,’ İkmen said as he stepped just slightly forward towards the boy.

  ‘You don’t understand!’

  ‘Counterfeit designer goods are big business,’ İkmen said. ‘I know that. Where are you from, son? You’re a long way from home. What accent is that?’

  He wasn’t dressed like a Turk. Not even the country people dressed like this boy. A long white shirt over thin white trousers trimmed with gold thread at the ankles. He looked, to Çetin İkmen, rather more like a Pakistani or an Afghan than a local person. There was also his weird grammar and his accent which was clearly not that of a citizen of the Republic.

  Noticing now that the policeman had moved forward slightly the boy shouted, ‘Go back!’

  İkmen, raising his hands in a gesture of submission, moved one pace backwards. ‘Whatever you say.’

  The crying continued. The shaking, if anything, became even more intense. İkmen noticed that behind the boy, on the wall of what appeared to be the office for this illegal factory, was a map of some sort. At the time he didn’t register what it was, just as he didn’t really take in anything else about the scene before him apart from the trembling boy.

  ‘Son,’ İkmen continued, ‘don’t harm yourself. There’s no need. We can—’

  ‘I will end in the hell!’ The weeping eyes snapped open and he looked into the policeman’s face with what could only be described as raw hatred. ‘I must be rid of you or my soul is damned!’

  Surrounded by fake Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton handbags, religious fundamentalism was not something İkmen had expected. But then he supposed that the slave labour that was used to make these things included all sorts of individuals.

  ‘I—’

  ‘Allahu Akbar!’

  İkmen saw the boy’s left hand remove the pin. He flung himself backwards just before the boy, and the little office he had been in, exploded.

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  Everyone in İstanbul had a fake something or other. Inspector Çetin İkmen himself had been given a counterfeit Rolex watch by his youngest son for his last, his fifty-seventh, birthday. The child, Kemal, had purchased it from one of the many scruffy-looking vendors of such things who plied their trade underneath the Galata Bridge. As was typical of such purchases, the watch had worked for a week, died and then been put into the drawer of İkmen’s office desk. There it would probably languish until the policeman either retired or the watch itself met with some sort of accident. At the other end of the scale, his daughters paid not inconsiderable amounts of money for their fake Prada handbags and his son Bülent felt himself very dashing in his almost perfect replica Police sunglasses. Forgeries, not least because the tourists loved them, were a fact of life. Many young men and women from the poorer suburbs of
all the major cities, including İstanbul, worked in the ‘knock off’ trade. They did so of their own volition.

  But in recent years things had changed. Not only in Turkey, but across the world, the trade in forged goods had become a multibillion-dollar industry. Controlled largely by criminal gangs known loosely as ‘mafias’ (some could indeed be traced back to the original Sicilian Cosa Nostra), these counterfeit businesses were known to run sidelines in prostitution, money laundering, drug dealing and contract killing. Many had dispensed with local cheap-ish labour in favour of slaves from poor former Warsaw Pact countries, South-east Asia or Africa. Illegal immigrants, desperate to escape the poverty of their own countries, would readily agree to work for nothing in return for a route into a country, like Turkey, on the doorstep of the European Union. What these people rarely knew was how long and hard they would be forced to work in order to pay off their ‘debt’.

  It had been an unseasonably stifling day in April when the İstanbul Police Department, via one of İkmen’s colleagues, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman, had been tipped off about a possible slave factory in the rundown district of Tarlabaşı. Just seconds from the bright lights of the fashionable district of Beyoğlu, Tarlabaşı was a rabbit warren of tenements, illegal brothels and small-time drug dealing operations. It was also home to many, many migrants from the country as well as people from places very far from Turkey. Süleyman who, like İkmen, was principally concerned with the crime of murder, had met with his informant, as arranged, aboard one of the commuter ferries that shuttled people back and forth between the European and Asian sides of the city. The informant, a man known only as ‘George’, told the handsome policeman that the Tarlabaşı factory had been operating for some time. It produced mainly handbags and, although George didn’t actually own up to having any sort of personal connection with the place, it was obvious to Süleyman that he had at some time worked there. Why George was talking to the police about the Tarlabaşı factory was because people were, he claimed, dying in there now. Mention was made of a young African girl who had died from exhaustion. Her body had apparently been disposed of in a fire up in the equally dodgy district of Edirnekapı. The bosses, Turkish mafiosi, George reckoned, were bringing people into the country to work for them in record numbers.

  ‘Like tissues, they use them to do one job and then they throw them away,’ George said as the ferry passed beneath the pointed roofs and green gardens of the Topkapı Palace. ‘I make things, Mr Süleyman. I make things that are not real or honest, but I do not kill people. I won’t have anything to do with that. Not now, not ever.’

  Süleyman nodded gravely, put his hand inside his elegant jacket pocket, took out his mobile phone and called Police Headquarters. By six o’clock that evening Süleyman, together with İkmen and a team of rather more junior officers, listened intently as their superior, Commissioner Ardıç, outlined how the operation against the illegal factory in Tarlabaşı was going to work.

  It was just after dawn the following morning when they went in.

  ‘Stay where you are and put your hands in the air!’

  Even a cursory glance around the hot, seething factory floor was enough to convince İkmen that very few of those he was addressing could actually understand him. African, South-east Asian and what appeared to be Indian or Pakistani faces looked up at the squad of armed police officers who had just burst in upon them with confused and fearful expressions. Only two men, standing up between a couple of the rows of now silent sewing machines, looked as if they might be local. Clean, by the look of them, and pale in comparison to the others, these were probably the foremen of this terrible, sweating, stinking crew.

  ‘You!’ İkmen said, pointing to the closer of the two. ‘Tell them to put their hands in the air!’

  Everyone in the building had stopped working. Even those İkmen could now see were actually chained to their work benches had done that. But he and his colleagues needed to see exactly where all their hands were. After all, whether they were slaves or not, these workers would not welcome the police and what they represented, which was almost certain deportation back to their countries of origin.

  ‘Tell them!’ İkmen reiterated to the man who was now visibly trembling.

  ‘I don’t know what languages they speak!’ he answered. ‘They speak all sorts, they—’

  ‘And you?’ İkmen said as he turned his attention to the other pale man with his arms in the air.

  ‘I don’t know!’ he said. Not obviously as frightened as his colleague, he added, ‘How should we know? We just work here.’

  ‘OK.’ İkmen instructed his officers to go around the stinking shop floor and raise the arms of the workers themselves. As the uniformed men and women moved amongst the splintered wooden benches upon which the sewing machines stood, rats and mice scuttled towards the safety of the world outside.

  ‘Who is in charge here?’ İkmen asked as he watched a slow Mexican wave of raised hands begin in front of him. He looked at the two clearly Turkish foremen again and said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Sir!’

  İkmen looked over towards one of his younger constables, Yıldız. ‘Constable?’

  ‘Sir, these people have been shitting where they sit,’ the young man said with a disgusted look on his face.

  İkmen sighed and then lit a cigarette in an attempt to calm his nerves. ‘That’s what happens when you chain people to their stations,’ he said.

  A female officer added that some of the women appeared to be bleeding.

  ‘Allah!’ He turned again to the Turkish foremen and said, ‘Who’s in charge? Who runs this concentration camp?’

  The second man, the one with rather more courage than the other, said, ‘I don’t know. I needed a job. I heard there were jobs here. I got one.’

  ‘Yes, but who gave you the job?’ asked Süleyman, who along with İkmen was getting impatient with these men now.

  There was silence.

  ‘Well?’

  Both of the foremen very pointedly looked away. İkmen turned to Süleyman and said, ‘We’ll just have to take the whole lot in.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then addressing the two men once again, İkmen said, ‘You know we will find out who you work for. If you don’t tell us yourselves then these poor creatures you have exploited will give us descriptions that will eventually lead us to who is responsible for this outrage.’

  Again there was a silence. This time it was broken by the sound of a pile of fake Prada handbags dropping from one of the benches and hitting the floor. After that a woman, somewhere, began to weep.

  ‘Allah!’

  İkmen was just about to give his officers the order to take everyone in the whole place into custody when the first foreman suddenly blurted, ‘There’s Tariq! He’s in the office!’

  He pointed to somewhere at the back of the factory floor. İkmen left Süleyman in charge while he and his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, went to take a look.

  Neither of them saw the grenade at first. There was just this thin, foreign-looking boy sitting on a swivel chair in front of a desk heaped with paper, pens and pictures of handbags and watches. When İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu opened the door and stepped into the office, he looked up, but otherwise he didn’t move or look afraid initially.

  ‘Tariq?’

  He didn’t answer. After a moment he looked down at something he was holding in his lap. It was Ayşe who first recognised what it was.

  ‘Sir, he’s holding a grenade,’ she whispered nervously into her superior’s ear.

  İkmen took a big gulp of air in order to steady his nerves and then moved his head the better to see what the young man was holding. When he’d done that he turned towards Ayşe and said, ‘Evacuate the building, Sergeant Farsakoğlu. Get those people off those machines. We have bolt cutters.’

  Although the sight of workers chained, slave-like, to their machines had shocked İkmen, he had made sure that his team had come equipped for just that eventuality. This wasn’
t, after all, the first time that such a hellish factory had been discovered in the city.

  ‘Sir.’ Farsakoğlu left and İkmen watched for what seemed like an eternity as the boy rolled the grenade over and over in his hands. Out on the factory floor he heard Süleyman give the order to evacuate, followed by the sound of people moving from their seats and then the sharp snapping noise of bolt cutters biting through metal. Some were still crying and some cried in either fear or pain or both as the officers took hold of them and began to drag, pull or carry them out of the building.

  The fact was, however, that there were probably in excess of a hundred people in that stinking space and it wasn’t going to take just five minutes to move them out. İkmen had no way of knowing whether or not this boy now idly playing with a hand grenade was actually capable of using it. He had no way of knowing at that time whether or not the lad even spoke his language. What he did know, however, was that he had to find some sort of way to engage with him if his officers were to stand any chance of getting themselves and the slaves they had taken into custody out in one piece.

  ‘Tariq.’

  The boy looked up. İkmen smiled.

  ‘Tariq, I don’t know what part you have to play in this organisation. But I can see that you are a young man and so I can’t imagine that you are actually running this place.’

  The boy didn’t respond, although İkmen did notice that his cheeks became flushed.

  ‘We can help you,’ İkmen continued. ‘I know that we—’

  ‘Shut up.’ It wasn’t shouted or said in any way aggressively. But by its tone and by virtue of what the boy was holding as he said it, it was clear that he brooked no argument. İkmen duly became silent. The boy was handling the grenade slowly and did not at that point seem to be unduly agitated. Meanwhile there was a lot of activity on the factory floor and people were clearly being moved out with alacrity. When negotiating with armed opponents, like this boy, it was as much about knowing when to be silent as it was about knowing when to speak and to act. There was also an element, İkmen knew, of recklessness on his part at this time too. Provided his officers and their poor broken-down charges got out, there was part of him that didn’t care too much what happened then. Life had not been good in recent months; in fact life had been downright awful.