Deadline (13 page)

Arto Sarkissian looked down at the body again. ‘I think he was lying on the bed on his back when he was stabbed,’ he said.

Çetin
İ
kmen frowned. ‘But Mrs Aktar
turned him on to his back.’

‘Did she?’

‘She saw an apparently lifeless body on her bed and wanted to see who it was,’
İ
kmen said. ‘He was on his stomach and so she turned him over. As a writer of crime fiction one would have thought she should have known better but . . .’

‘So the killer must have killed him and then rolled him on to to his stomach,’ Arto said. ‘Odd. As for Mrs Aktar, she is neither a police officer nor a pathologist. Intellectually she may know that tampering with a crime scene is wrong, but on the level of instinct she may well react quite differently. Which indeed she did.’ He looked at the leader and he said, ‘Is the murder weapon in this room?’

There was a pause and then the man said, ‘It’s in this hotel – probably.’

The pathologist sighed. ‘I don’t suppose you could be more specific?’

‘Now where would the fun be in that?’ the leader said.

İ
kmen, who found the presence of the camera on one of the men’s helmets sinister and disturbing, said, ‘Nothing juicy to film if you tell us too much, eh?’

But no one answered him. Arto Sarkissian looked back at the dead man on the bed again and then down at the floor.

There had been
a telephone call, some activity in the kitchen and then two of the men had left to go somewhere else while the other one went upstairs to the lavatory. When he left, he locked the door from the kitchen into the hotel.

Ay
ş
e, Nar and Ersu Nadir tiptoed out of the fridge and entered a world of tiles, cookers and bains-maries.

‘So what now?’ Nar said to Ay
ş
e as she waved her mobile phone in the air. ‘What are we supposed to do locked in another fucking room?’

Ay
ş
e took the slim iPhone out of Nar’s hand and said, ‘We need to get help. In some form.’

Back in the fridge she’d been itching to phone the station, but now she wasn’t so sure. If the full weight of the
İ
stanbul police force came down on these people, whoever they were, it could end badly. Sieges often did. But she was aware that she had to phone someone because they needed help. Apart from the small penknife Nar always carried to frighten away violent punters, they were unarmed. Ay
ş
e called
İ
zzet. If she could explain the situation to him then maybe he could at least try to control what might become a dangerously violent response. She had no idea who these heavily armed people were or what they wanted. Negotiation rather than force seemed to Ay
ş
e to be the way forward, but she couldn’t do it. She, like the maître d’hôtel and Nar, was entirely at the mercy of whoever these people were.

The phone went
straight to voicemail which meant that
İ
zzet was probably in the shower. Even when he slept he always left his phone on but in the shower he insisted upon being on his own.

She left a message. ‘
İ
zzet, it’s me,’ she said. ‘Call me back on this number as soon as you can.’

He’d be alarmed that she was calling from an unrecognised phone but then maybe that would make him ring back more quickly. ‘I need to keep your phone,’ she said to Nar.

Nar shrugged. ‘OK. But that didn’t sound exactly urgent to me.’

Ay
ş
e ignored her. ‘I’ll put it on silent vibrate. Are you expecting any calls?’

Nar raised an eyebrow.

‘OK, I won’t ask.’ Ay
ş
e put the phone in her pocket. Then she turned towards Ersu Bey. ‘Now you need to tell me everything you can about this murder mystery evening,’ she said.

‘We have to weigh up the need to find the murder weapon against the value it will have for us when coming to a decision about this event,’ Süleyman said. ‘The concierge told us there are one hundred and fifteen rooms in this hotel and that is quite apart from the public rooms, the kitchens and the linen cupboards. It could take us days. We only have hours.’

One o’clock was
looming already and Çetin
İ
kmen and Arto Sarkissian were as well aware of the passage of time as Mehmet Süleyman. ‘I think we need to get back downstairs and question everyone we haven’t spoken to yet who knew Söner Erkan,’ Süleyman continued. ‘Somebody killed him for a reason.’

‘Unless this lot did it,’
İ
kmen said as he looked across room 411 at the four heavily armed men who were watching them. He said to them, ‘You set this up, didn’t you?’

None of them said a word.

‘You must have done. You did. Whoever killed Söner Erkan is in league with you. He or she has to be.’ He shrugged. ‘You know.’

‘Yes, we do,’ the leader said. Even through the thick wool of his balaclava helmet, his voice was, if not cultured, then assured. He wasn’t just some street thug. ‘But the boy died for a reason quite separate from our involvement. I give you my word of honour on that point.’

İ
kmen laughed. ‘And that’s supposed to reassure me?’

‘Söner Erkan died because someone in this hotel had a problem with him,’ the leader said. ‘Someone wanted him out of the way for a reason which has nothing to do with me or my team.’

‘But you knew it was going to happen, didn’t you?’

The leader did not reply.

İ
kmen turned back to face Süleyman and Arto Sarkissian. ‘Whoever
killed Erkan knows this team and so he or she knew that all this was going to happen,’ he said.

‘But if we don’t know who these people are, how can we even begin to find a connection between them and the people downstairs?’ Arto said.

İ
kmen lowered his voice. ‘There has to be some sort of link between one or more of the guests or the hotel staff and these people.’

‘Yes, but what?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘Isn’t there some sort of police mythology that states that whoever finds a dead body is the one most likely to be its killer?’ Arto said.

For a moment they all became silent and then
İ
kmen said, ‘There is some truth in that, Arto, yes.’ He waited to see whether Süleyman, a man clearly attracted to Lale Aktar, would jump in with a robust rebuttal. But he didn’t. ‘Mrs Aktar is a very successful and wealthy novelist,’
İ
kmen continued. ‘She is married to an equally successful and wealthy man who is nevertheless thirty years her senior.’

‘Söner Erkan was over ten years younger than Mrs Aktar,’ Süleyman said. ‘What would she want with a boy?’

İ
kmen gave him the kind of look that needed no explanation.

‘All right, why
this
boy then?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Beyond the fact
that he had the face of an angel and the body of a Greek god?’ Arto Sarkissian said.

İ
kmen smiled. ‘I think we should get back downstairs now,’ he said. He turned to their captors, ‘We’re leaving.’

‘Very well.’

İ
kmen began to walk towards the vestibule, but just before he left the bedroom he stopped. To his left was a large photograph of Agatha Christie. He looked up at it and then he smiled. ‘I know that you both wrote and lived mystery, Mrs Christie,’ he said. ‘If there is such a thing as the afterlife, I’d be obliged if you’d come through and send us some of your inspiration now.’

One of the masked men laughed. Arto Sarkissian turned back to look at him with some disapproval, but as he did so he found himself looking at the body on the bed once again. Then he looked at the blood on the walls and Lale Aktar’s footprints on the floor.

The old man took one of Krikor Sarkissian’s hands in his and said, ‘I don’t know why I’m here.’

‘Because you’ve been selected to stay with us?’ Krikor asked.

‘Yes. Why?’ Hovsep Pars said. ‘The policemen I can understand. You, Krikor, because this was your event, and Mrs Aktar is a crime writer. But me? I am an old man. What possible
use can I be to you or to anyone? What is the significance of me?’

Krikor shrugged. ‘I don’t know, my friend.’

The old man shook his head. ‘A lifetime of trouble and now this! You know, sometimes, Krikor, I wonder whether my family is cursed.’

‘No, it’s—’

‘The tragedy of my sister and her husband? Of young Avram? My fiancée Nargiz dead before I could marry her? And my parents . . .’

‘Your parents?’ Krikor knew quite a lot about the Pars family but he had always believed that Hovsep’s parents had been very fortunate people. They had certainly always been rich.

Hovsep lowered his voice so that neither their captors nor Lale Aktar could hear him. ‘My mother’s family came from Anatolia, the city of Diyarbakır,’ he said. ‘She left in nineteen fifteen . . . just her, alone . . . you know . . .’

‘Yes,’ Krikor cut in quickly. The events of 1915 had always been difficult for both Armenians and Turks. The Ottoman Empire had been at war with, amongst other nations, the Russians at the time. And the Russians had promised the Armenians their own homeland if they fought for them. Atrocities had been committed on all sides but questions still remained over the role and the fate of the Armenian population of Anatolia in 1915. Some people had
accused the Turks of genocide, others said that what had happened were individual acts of revenge or self-defence.

‘My parents did not have a normal marriage,’ the old man said. ‘Because of my mother’s . . . because of those formative experiences . . . She had my sister and myself very quickly after she married but I never knew my parents to share a room. My mother was . . .’

‘So many Anatolians were traumatised at the end of that war,’ Krikor said. ‘Especially the women.’

As Turkish, Russian, Kurdish and Armenian forces had raged across Anatolia during the Great War, casualties had been massive. Even non-combatants like women and children had suffered terribly. Some women had been raped by soldiers of the enemy as well as by their own troops. The madness of war had overwhelmed everything and everyone in its path.

‘Only the women and the children were innocent in that insanity,’ Krikor said. ‘But Hovsep, you are not cursed. There’s no such thing.’

The old man smiled. ‘You are a man of science, Krikor. Your life is ruled by logic.’

‘It’s a way of coping.’ He smiled. ‘And I believe it to be the truth. Forgive me, Hovsep, but curses and bad luck and everything like that make no sense to me.’

‘And yet your old friend Çetin
İ
kmen, the son of a witch, is a man whose
opinion you and Arto lay great store by.’

‘True. But his mother, our Auntie Ay
ş
e, she was, well, she was an extraordinary woman. Maybe my logical atheism can’t explain her. But Çetin, whether or not he has second sight or magic or whatever you wish to call it, is a clever man with a keen sense of justice and I trust him.’

‘Do you?’ And then Hovsep Pars’s face changed. It became something bitter that Krikor Sarkissian didn’t like. ‘You trust a man who was not brave enough to kill the creature who murdered our Avram, who caused my own sister and her husband to take their own lives? Clever your
İ
kmen may be, Krikor, but I would question his keen sense of justice. If there had been a scrap of justice in his soul he would have let that creature die when he had the chance.’

Arto Sarkissian had estimated the time of Söner Erkan’s death to be within two hours of his examination of the corpse. The young man had been seen alive half an hour at the most before Lale Aktar had found him in her hotel room.

‘In the script, Söner, the young Prince Yusuf, was going to be found in the old wooden lift,’ Ceyda Ümit told
İ
kmen and Süleyman.

Kenan Oz, who had played the Armenian Avram Bey, said, ‘Ceyda, the princess,
she killed him because he was blackmailing her over an affair she’d had years ago with her Italian tutor.’

‘Signor Garibaldi?’

‘Yeah, or Metin Martini, which is his real name,’ Kenan said. ‘His dad really is Italian but his mum’s Turkish.’

‘So the body . . .’

‘We were all based on the fourth floor,’ Kenan said. ‘We were going to put some fake blood on Söner’s shirt and then he was going to get into the lift and go down to the ground floor where you, the guests, would “discover” him.’

‘What time was this?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Eleven,’ Ceyda said.

‘I knocked on Söner’s hotel room door at ten forty-five or thereabouts,’ Kenan said. ‘But he didn’t answer. I looked for him. I went to Ceyda’s room, Alp’s, Deniz’s—’

‘Deniz?’

‘She plays Sofia, the Greek housekeeper. But I couldn’t find him.’

‘You had no idea he was in Mrs Aktar’s room?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No. Why would I?’

‘Söner Erkan had no connection to Mrs Aktar, as far as you are aware?’

‘No.’

‘No,’ Ceyda
echoed her colleague. ‘Söner was . . .’ She looked up at Kenan before she carried on. ‘Söner was a pain, to be totally truthful. He was rich and spoilt and I never ever saw him with a girl, much less a sophisticated woman. He could only buy people, you know. And yet he was hopeless with money. Always borrowing from other people. You, Kenan, even paid his rent, didn’t you?’

‘Once.’

They’d heard much of this before from Ceyda’s boyfriend, Alp.

‘But obviously you weren’t with Söner Erkan all the time,’
İ
kmen said.

‘No.’ Ceyda looked at Kenan again. ‘But I don’t know what he used to do outside of university and Bowstrings, do you?’

Kenan shrugged. ‘No.’

‘But he did get involved in the development of the script for this event?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Ceyda said. ‘We all got involved in that.’

‘So you came to group decisions about who did what, why and when?’

‘Mostly, yes, sometimes together with the client,’ Kenan said.

‘Dr Krikor Sarkissian.’

‘At the beginning,’ Ceyda said. ‘But he’s so busy, he handed it over to his assistant, Burak
Bey. Burak Bey also liaised with the hotel.’