Death by Design Page 2

  ‘I should have been dead months ago,’ Tariq said. ‘Then I would not be in this problem situation.’

  At that moment, İkmen simply registered the foreign accent.

  ‘We can help you,’ İkmen reiterated. ‘Those who have been exploiting you, and the others, will be punished.’

  Tariq stood up and it was then that he began to tremble.

  ‘Don’t do this, son.’

  The boy cried. The sounds from down on the factory floor were much reduced now. İkmen took a moment to sigh with relief about that. But then he looked at the boy’s weeping face again and said, ‘Don’t!’

  It was then that the final exchanges took place between them. Tariq pulled the pin out of the grenade, İkmen threw himself backwards and then, for İkmen, everything went black.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  The doctor held up what looked like a piece of bone in front of İkmen’s face. The inspector, still groggy from his latest shot of morphine, remarked upon it.

  ‘It looks like bone because that is exactly what it is,’ Dr Arto Sarkissian replied. ‘To be exact, Çetin, it is the distal phalanx of an index finger. We think, your surgeon Dr Türkmenoğlu and myself, that it came from the boy who detonated the grenade.’

  ‘Tariq?’

  ‘If that was what his name was, yes,’ Arto said.

  ‘And that was what was lodged in my cheek?’ İkmen asked as he automatically raised a hand up to the large dressing that now covered the right side of his face.

  ‘People don’t realise that when these characters decide to explode themselves, their bodily parts have to go somewhere,’ Arto said. ‘The force of the blast throws bits of face, leg, pelvis and whatever all over the place – sometimes into people unfortunate enough to be nearby.’

  Police pathologist Arto Sarkissian had been friends with Çetin İkmen since they were both small children. Although very different in terms of income, the Sarkissian and the İkmen families had always been close. Arto and his brother Krikor had both followed their father into the medical profession, but neither of the İkmen boys had taken the road into academia as travelled by their father, though both Çetin and his brother Halıl were clever. Halıl had done well with his accountancy practice, but Çetin, although a high-ranking police officer, had only ever just got by. But then unlike either the Sarkissian boys or his own brother, Çetin had children – eight; it had been nine but one of his older sons had very recently died.

  ‘Has Fatma been to visit?’ Arto asked as casually as the cringing embarrassment he felt at asking this question allowed. İkmen lowered his gaze for a moment. The child who had died, Bekir, had done so as a result of a police operation against drug dealers in the south-east. Mehmet Süleyman had been one of the officers involved and, although Fatma knew that her son Bekir had been implicated in the drug running and had indeed killed an innocent man because of it, she could not forgive either Süleyman or her husband. It had been Çetin, after all, who had finally deduced Bekir’s whereabouts and who had, according to Fatma, killed their son by revealing where he was to the authorities.

  ‘Çiçek came yesterday with Bülent, Orhan, Kemal and Gül,’ İkmen said as he attempted to turn his Armenian friend’s attention away from his wife and on to his children – all of whom completely supported their father. ‘Then in the evening,’ he smiled, ‘Hulya came with Berekiah and they brought my dear little grandson.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ But Arto knew that even the arrival of İkmen’s grandson hardly made up for the obvious absence of his wife. ‘Sınan phoned.’ İkmen’s eldest son was a doctor who had just taken up a new job in London.

  ‘Çetin . . .’

  ‘Dr Türkmenoğlu says I’ll probably be able to go home tomorrow,’ İkmen said. It was obvious that he wanted, at all costs, to avoid any more talk about his wife. ‘Back to work next week.’

  Arto frowned. ‘Do you think that’s wise?’ he asked. ‘I mean, as well as the injury to your face, your legs are still badly bruised and then there is the shock—’

  ‘I’ll be OK.’ İkmen looked up and smiled. ‘So what news from the front? Do we know any more about our handbag factory in Tarlabaşı?’

  ‘You’d have to ask your colleagues about that, Çetin,’ Arto replied. ‘But the young man who blew himself up appears to me to have been from either the Indian subcontinent or Afghanistan. When the DNA tests are complete we will know more. But by eye that is what I think. One thing I do know, however, is that he was suffering from tuberculosis.’

  İkmen frowned.

  ‘Yes,’ the Armenian confirmed, ‘seems strange these days, doesn’t it? But then out in places like Afghanistan and even, to be truthful, in the wilder reaches of eastern Turkey not everyone is vaccinated as we have been, not even youngsters. The young man in the handbag factory was quite far on in his disease, he must have been very sick.’

  ‘He said just before he blew himself up that he should have died some time before. I assumed at the time that he meant he should have martyred himself,’ İkmen said. ‘But maybe if he was sick he meant that his illness should, by that time, have taken him.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Arto said. ‘Mehmet Süleyman will know more than I do about this case. Ask him.’

  İkmen had already seen him, the man who had once, long ago, been his sergeant. But Süleyman, rather like his old friend Arto, hadn’t been particularly forthcoming with regard to what was happening outside the confines of the Taksim Hospital. Everyone knew that what İkmen needed most now was rest. Everyone, that is, except Çetin İkmen himself.

  ‘Yes, I will ask him,’ İkmen said as he pulled his mobile phone out of the jacket that hung on the back of Arto’s chair. ‘In fact, my dear Arto, if you’d be so kind as to ask the nurses for a wheelchair, you can take me outside and I can do that right now.’

  Arto Sarkissian sighed deeply and then went out to do as he was told.

  Mehmet Süleyman watched the white boiler-suited forensic scientist gently tease away at one corner of what looked as if it might have been a poster. On the wall behind the ramshackle bench that had once served the illegal factory as an office desk, various pieces of paper, some of them documents, had been pinned. But it wasn’t an easy site to investigate. The grenade that had blown the young boy apart in front of Çetin İkmen’s eyes had also inflicted severe damage upon the surrounding area. Süleyman again thought about İkmen and how very lucky he was to be alive. By accident or design, İkmen had somehow managed to hurl himself to the far side of the great iron safe that now stood open in the middle of the charred floor. Built at the end of the nineteenth century, obviously to last, this massive box had taken most of the blast that in all probability would have eviscerated his friend. But luckily İkmen was alive and the safe itself, once opened, had yielded some very interesting finds.

  Twenty blank United Kingdom passports were what they had found. They were not, according to the British authorities at the consulate in Beyoğlu, fakes. Issued out of the Passport Office at a place called Peterborough, these documents had somehow gone missing. And they had not been reported as missing. This seemed to imply that at least some of the Senegalese, Nigerian, Pakistani and Vietnamese refugees who had been found working in the Tarlabaşı factory were to be given the chance to go to Britain. If Süleyman’s dealings with illegals and the gangs who trafficked them in the past were anything to go by, the passports and the transportation into Europe would not come cheap. Once in Britain the women would be handed over to gangs who would press them into prostitution, while the men would either have to work in dangerous or illegal industries, or pimp their own wives. Whatever they had come from, and he was the first to admit that he could probably not even imagine what poverty was like in a place like Senegal, a life of slavery in Turkey or Italy or Great Britain couldn’t possibly be better? Could it?

  ‘Sir.’

  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 t
hey’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.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  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.