Deadline Read online

  DEADLINE

  BARBARA NADEL

  Copyright © 2013 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.

  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.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013

  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 8891 2

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also By

  Dedication

  Cast List

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  By Barbara Nadel and available from Headline

  The Inspector İkmen series:

  Belshazzar’s Daughter

  A Chemical Prison

  Arabesk

  Deep Waters

  Harem

  Petrified

  Deadly Web

  Dance with Death

  A Passion for Killing

  Pretty Dead Things

  River of the Dead

  Death by Design

  A Noble Killing

  Dead of Night

  Deadline

  The Hancock series:

  Last Rights

  After the Mourning

  Ashes to Ashes

  Sure and Certain Death

  This book is dedicated to my wonderful ‘other family’ in Turkey. You’re brilliant and I love you.

  Cast List

  Police

  Inspector Çetin İkmen – middle-aged İstanbul police detective

  Inspector Mehmet Süleyman – İkmen’s protégé

  Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu – İkmen’s sergeant

  Sergeant İzzet Melik – Süleyman’s sergeant

  Commissioner Ardiç – İkmen and Süleyman’s superior

  Dr Arto Sarkissian – police pathologist

  Commander İpek – Special Forces

  Bowstrings Theatre Group

  Alp İlhan/İzzedin Effendi – founder of theatre group

  Ceyda Ümit/Nuray Hanımefendi – Alp’s girlfriend

  Söner Erkan/Yusuf Effendi – theatre group member

  Kenan Oz/Avram Bey – theatre group member

  Metin Martini/Dr Enzo Garibaldi – theatre group member

  Esma/Sarah – theatre group member

  Deniz/Sofia Hanım – theatre group member

  Other Characters

  Lale Aktar – crime writer

  Dr Krikor Sarkissian – Arto’s brother, an addiction specialist

  Caroun Sarkissian – Krikor’s wife

  Burak Fisekçi – Krikor’s assistant

  Hovsep Pars – an elderly Armenian

  Samsun Bajraktar – İkmen’s cousin

  Ersu Nadir – maître d’hôtel at the Pera Palas

  Saffet Güler – concierge at the Pera Palas

  Ali Farsakoğlu – Ayşe Farsakoğlu’s brother

  Nar Sözen – a transsexual

  David Bonomo – official at the office of the Chief Rabbi

  Nurettin Akdeniz – ex-convict

  Muhammed Ersoy – inmate of Silivri Prison, İstanbul

  Kemal Aslanlı – Muhammed Ersoy’s cousin

  Nicos Bey – theatre group member

  In spite of the pain, Çetin İkmen found his surroundings fascinating. Lying on a narrow, metal beam, he had one arm and one leg one side, one arm and one leg the other. Underneath him and illuminated from below, somehow, was a dome. Studded with star-shaped holes and jewelled with exquisite stained glass, it looked like the sort of dome one sometimes saw in a hamam.

  However, lack of steam and/or the smell of soap, shampoo and cologne seemed to suggest that he wasn’t hanging over the roof of a Turkish bath. In fact he wasn’t actually outside in the open air at all. He was inside a building, a vast one, and his ribs and his lungs hurt as he tried to hold his position on the beam without crashing through the dome below. It wasn’t easy.

  In spite of a certain woolliness about the brain, a single thought did keep on presenting itself to him and that was the one about what would happen if there was an earthquake. The city of İstanbul was certainly due another large quake, everyone, including geologists, said so. The last really big one had happened back in 1999. İkmen tried to recall, without at first any success, what today’s date was. The year 2010 was in there, but when in 2010?

  He looked at the dome, lit from below, underneath him and tried to breathe as normally as he could, but without much success. His chest was being crushed by the beam; slowly but surely he felt it killing him. If a quake came, it could be a mercy, in a way.

  How had he come to be in such a position? He was in mortal danger and, as far as he could tell, he was entirely alone in, if he strained his neck from side to side to look around, some sort of big, luxurious palace. What was someone like him doing in such a place? And then he remembered. Oh, yes, it was 12 December. It was his birthday. Nothing good ever really came of those, in İkmen’s experience. And true to form, someone had just tried to kill him.

  Chapter 1

  Thirteen Days Before

  ‘You know I can’t stomach that sort of thing, why do you insist on putting me through it?’ Çetin İkmen asked his friend Arto Sarkissian.

  The light was fading quickly over the Bosphorus and the two men were the last customers remaining outside on the İstanbul Modern Café terrace. But then İkmen, at least, nearly always took his food and drink al fresco these days. Since 2009 it had been illegal to smoke in enclosed public spaces anywhere in Turkey. It was a law that, even as a serving police inspector, he hated.

  His friend, a small, round Armenian, like İkmen of a ‘certain age’, smiled. ‘It’s all for charity,’ he said. ‘Think of it as a duty, if that helps.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s “fun” too, isn’t it?’ İkmen growled. He put his cigarette out in the ashtray in front of him and lit up another.

  ‘You make it sound like abdominal surgery,’ Arto said. ‘Fun is supposed to be a good thing.’

  ‘Huh!’

  One of the waiters appeared and automatically gave Arto the bill for their coffee and glasses of wine. İkmen wasn’t surprised that he didn’t so much as give him a second look. His suit was crumpled and he reeked of tobacco. He was an old-fashioned Turk, an anachronism amid a race of people who were rapidly, at least in İstanbul, becoming very glossy. Even Arto, his oldest and dearest friend, had a sort of groomed patina. But then he was a doctor, albeit a pathologist, and so maybe he was taking something to make himself look that way. Some wonder drug.

  ‘I don’t like organised fun,’ İkmen continued. ‘It makes me anxious.’

  ‘It’s supposed to relax you,’ Arto said. Then looking at him narrowly, he said, ‘Would it help if I said it would be good if we had a representative from the police department at the event?’

  ‘Mehmet Süleyman’s going, he can do that.’

  Arto looked at the bill and then placed a 50 Turkish lire note down on the table to cover it. The waiter, who had been hovering, whipped it away immediately.

  ‘I know for a fact that Fatma is going to stay with her aunt in Bursa that week,’ the Armenian said. ‘She goes away that week every year.’

  ‘For which I am always grateful. My wife is a very understanding woman.’

  ‘You’ll be alone, you can’t cook . . .’

  ‘I’ll be alone as I always am!’ İkmen said. ‘I like it like that, you—’

  ‘You invite Krikor and myself to some dreary bar in Sultanahmet – if you remember,’ Arto interjected. ‘If it crosses your mind to invite your own brother it’s a miracle and I’m not sure that any of your more recent friends even know when your birthday is. As far as they’re concerned you age in one long, unregarded and continuous stream of time.’

  ‘Which is how I like it.’

  ‘It isn’t normal.’

  ‘Whoever said that normal equals good?’

  ‘You should at least allow your children to celebrate your birthday,’ Arto said. ‘They’re your children! They love you. I’m sure they’d like to, at the
very least, take you out for a meal.’ Then he looked at the skinny, smoking figure across the table from him and added, ‘Not that eating is really what you do.’

  İkmen smiled. They’d spent a happy day together until the subject of Arto’s brother Krikor’s latest fundraising event had arisen. Ambling around the İstanbul Modern gallery had been exhilarating for İkmen. Not that he understood what all the pictures, photographs and installations were really about. But in a country that in recent years had been ruled by a government with Islamic roots, an avowed secularist like İkmen felt cheered by the sight of artworks depicting things like sex, sexuality and dissent.

  ‘If Krikor’s project is to provide facilities to immigrant as well as Turkish addicts then it needs more money,’ Arto said.

  ‘Five thousand Turkish lire each, at least,’ İkmen said. ‘That’s what this “fun” of yours will cost.’ Then he shook his head.

  Arto leaned across the table. Out on the Bosphorus the sound of a single ferry foghorn signalled that the night was destined to be one of dampness, mist and coughs. ‘I said I’d pay for you and I will!’ Arto snapped. ‘It is my birthday and Christmas present to you!’

  ‘But Arto, I’m not a Christian, I don’t—’

  ‘Oh, yes, and I’m in church all the time myself!’ Arto leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Christians give presents to each other and to non-Christian friends because it is one of our traditions,’ he said. ‘As well you know.’

  ‘Yes, well . . .’

  ‘Çetin, it will be amazing,’ Arto said. ‘Krikor and his staff have engaged a professional acting troupe. Lale Aktar will be there. Lale Aktar!’

  ‘So if Lale Aktar is there, I won’t need to be,’ İkmen said. ‘Let the great novelist do her stuff.’

  ‘Oh, Çetin, don’t be childish!’

  ‘Arto, why would I want to go to some play about murder? On my birthday? I deal with the real thing.’

  Arto Sarkissian looked across at the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, now just very gently softened by sea mist. Both he and Çetin had been born over there, a long time ago. He turned back to his friend and said, ‘It’s for all the people who walk around this city with untreated sores from infected needles. For the kids from Romanian orphanages who sniff glue, for the girls who sell themselves for the price of a fix. Krikor never turns anyone away from his clinic. All they have to do is want to get clean. Money isn’t an issue.’

  ‘Except that it is.’

  ‘If he’s to carry on helping people with their addictions, yes, it is for Krikor,’ Arto said. ‘He doesn’t have any more capital.’ His brother, an addiction specialist, had already ploughed most of his own considerable fortune into his substance abuse clinic in the İstanbul district of Beyazıt. ‘This city’s population grows every day and so, unfortunately, do the number of addicts on the streets. Çetin?’

  İkmen looked up and breathed in the dank, moisture-soaked air deeply. He believed in everything that Krikor Sarkissian was doing. Of course he did! He just didn’t want to go to his extravagant fund-raising event. As well as being really not at all his kind of thing, the last time he had attended one of Krikor’s fund-raisers it had led him, albeit coincidentally, into the life of a murderer whose crimes still, sometimes, haunted his sleep. But that had been nothing at all to do with Krikor Sarkissian or his very worthy project.

  İkmen pulled a grumpy face (mainly because he knew that Arto would expect it of him) and said, ‘OK, I’ll come.’

  Arto Sarkissian smiled as the evening call to prayer wound itself around them from every part of the city.

  Inspector Mehmet Süleyman looked through the open door into Çetin İkmen’s office and stared at the elegant woman looking intently at her computer screen. She appeared completely calm, absorbed and at peace with herself.

  It stunned him. How could she be like that? In just over three weeks’ time she, Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu, was going to marry a man who looked like a 1970s Arabesk crooner – all moustache, jutting stomach and machismo. Why?

  ‘Er, Sergeant Farsakoğlu . . .’

  She turned round and smiled. ‘Sir?’

  Why he’d spoken at all, Süleyman didn’t know. Maybe it was just to see her face. But that was ridiculous. He’d got over his brief affair with Ayşe Farsakoğlu years ago. But now he’d caught her attention, he had to find something to say.

  ‘Where is Inspector İkmen?’ he asked. He could just as easily have called or emailed and he knew she knew that.

  ‘It’s the first of December, sir,’ she replied.

  ‘Ah.’ He felt stupid. If he could, Çetin İkmen always took 1 December as leave. Everyone knew that. It was World Aids Day and he liked to spend time with one of his cousins who had apparently lost someone or other to the disease. Nobody, including İkmen, ever really spoke about it.

  ‘Can I help you with anything, Mehmet Bey?’ Ayşe asked.

  For a moment he’d almost forgotten she was there. Slightly flustered, he said, ‘Er, no. No thank you.’

  She turned her beautiful face back to her computer screen and resumed whatever it was she had been doing.

  The reason behind his agitation over her fiancé was, Süleyman acknowledged, a source of shame. Since the collapse of his second marriage, Süleyman himself had been single and he had harboured some idle fantasies that Ayşe Farsakoğlu might throw herself at him again as she had years before. Not that he actually wanted a relationship with her. But she hadn’t come anywhere near him. She’d gone to his sergeant, İzzet Melik, who was ugly and poor – and kind. Much as he tried to convince himself otherwise, Mehmet Süleyman knew that İzzet, in spite of his unappealing outward appearance, was also educated and had a deep appreciation of culture, especially Italian culture. Originally from the coastal city of İzmir, İzzet had been tutored in all things Latin by an elderly Italian Jew.

  When they’d had their brief relationship, over a decade ago, Ayşe had been the one who had mourned its demise, not him. But now Süleyman wondered. He wondered what life would have been like had he stayed with Ayşe instead of marrying the volatile half-Irish psychiatrist, Zelfa Halman. But if he’d done that, his son, Yusuf, would never have been born and there was no way he would wish that boy away. He, if nothing else, was the light of his existence.

  But his pride was still bruised. If Ayşe Farsakoğlu had wanted a man, why had she not come to him? He was good-looking, successful and he came from a well-connected if admittedly impoverished Ottoman family. But then he remembered how his Ottoman roots had frightened Ayşe all those years ago. Whether she had felt unworthy of him or just alarmed by his noble pedigree, he could no longer recall. But he’d been with his first wife back then, his cousin, Zuleika, who very shortly afterwards had divorced him. At the time there had also been an awful case involving a man who had been to his school. A lot had been going on. His recollections of that time were hazy. None of that, however, shed any light on why Ayşe was choosing to marry a man who looked like a particularly unkempt rural taxi driver. Could it possibly be that, even after all these years, it was to spite him?

  There was a march down İstiklal Street and then a rally in Taksim Square, but Samsun Bajraktar didn’t want to go.

  ‘Why should I share my grief with a load of young people and politicos?’ she said bitterly as she sat down on her tattered leather sofa and lit a cigarette. ‘Anyway, I can’t walk any sort of distance in my new boots.’

  ‘World Aids Day is a time you should get out there, Samsun,’ İkmen said.

  ‘And get beaten up by the police?’ she sneered.

  İkmen drew hard on his cigarette and smiled. ‘You think I’d let that happen?’

  ‘It happens all the time to people like me! Even now! Even in lovely, fluffy democratising Turkey!’ She threw him a look that could probably have severely wounded a lesser man. ‘If we’re lucky we just get laughed at!’

  A long time ago, pre some very expensive Italian surgery, Samsun had been a man called Mustafa. The son of Çetin İkmen’s maternal uncle Ahmet, like the rest of that family she was originally Albanian. Now in her early sixties and living just opposite the Grand Bazaar in a small, lately rather down-at-heel flat, Samsun existed as a lone transsexual without her deceased lover, the leather merchant, Abdurrahman. He had died of an Aids-related illness five years before. Every 1 December, World Aids Day, Çetin İkmen spent time with Samsun, drinking, smoking and remembering her one true love, who had ultimately betrayed her.