Deadline (2 page)

‘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,’
İ
kmen 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
İ
stanbul district of Beyazıt. ‘This city’s population grows every day and so, unfortunately, do the number of addicts on the streets. Çetin?’

İ
kmen 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.

İ
kmen
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
İ
kmen’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 Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu, was going to marry a man who looked like a 1970s Arabesk crooner – all moustache, jutting stomach and machismo. Why?

‘Er, Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu . . .’

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 Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu years ago. But now he’d caught her attention, he had to find something to say.

‘Where
is Inspector
İ
kmen?’ 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
İ
kmen 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
İ
kmen, ever really spoke about it.

‘Can I help you with anything, Mehmet Bey?’ Ay
ş
e 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 Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu 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,
İ
zzet Melik, who was ugly and poor – and kind. Much as he tried to convince himself otherwise, Mehmet Süleyman knew that
İ
zzet, 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
İ
zmir,
İ
zzet had been tutored in all things Latin by an elderly Italian Jew.

When they’d
had their brief relationship, over a decade ago, Ay
ş
e 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 Ay
ş
e 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 Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu 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 Ay
ş
e 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 Ay
ş
e 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
İ
stiklal 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,’
İ
kmen said.

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

İ
kmen 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
İ
kmen’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
İ
kmen spent time with Samsun, drinking, smoking and remembering her one true love, who had ultimately betrayed her.

‘I’d
walk with you,’
İ
kmen said.

Samsun ignored him. The first of December was difficult because of what Abdurrahman had brought into their lives. The Aids virus had been hard for her. That she had not contracted it from him had seemed like a miracle for a long time – until she had read more about the disease and come to realise just how difficult it could be to catch. How Abdurrahman had caught it and from whom was still a mystery and that was a big part of Samsun’s problem.

‘How could he have done that to me, Çetin?’ she said as she raised a large glass of brandy to her lips and then drank.

İ
kmen, who heard the same thing from Samsun every December, shook his head. He didn’t know any more than she did. But Abdurrahman had been a big, good-looking and well-off man – many years Samsun’s junior – and so temptation would have been put in his way. A popular leather merchant and former grease wrestler, he had never been shy about either his bisexuality or his legendary prowess in bed. But he’d made a commitment to Samsun, which he had broken even if he had left her all his worldly goods, which included this small flat. But then she, and only she, had nursed him through his final illness.
İ
kmen hardly dared to imagine what she had seen and experienced. It was part of the reason why he always made time to see her on this day. He admired her courage and he loved her.

As usual,
he said, ‘I don’t know.’ And as usual she didn’t listen.

‘We were in love! Why did he need anyone else? I didn’t.’

There was no answer. Samsun began to ramble on about how she had tried to stop Abdurrahman straying with spells and charms. Like
İ
kmen’s late mother, she practised witchcraft even though, a lot of the time and especially with Abdurrahman, it had appeared to be useless. Now, at least in her own mind, she was old and past her best and faced a future of unwanted singledom, alone in her little flat opposite the Grand Bazaar.

İ
kmen, as he always did, attempted to nod his head and shake it in all the right places. She was set to get roaring drunk and go on for hours and he’d support her through that. But
İ
kmen actually had other things on his mind. This coming birthday took him up to fifty-nine. Just one year before sixty when, according to his brother Halıl, he would no longer be able to claim to be middle-aged any more. He’d be old. He’d qualified for his pension years before but had chosen to carry on working. How would his employment play out when he was sixty? He didn’t know and so he thought about other things. Then his actual birthday and what it was going to consist of this year crashed back into his consciousness again and he felt himself begin to get angry.

In the normal
course of events he would have spent his birthday alone, or with friends, getting quietly drunk while Fatma and their youngest child, Kemal, visited Fatma’s ancient aunt in Bursa. Revelling in lonely misery was something that
İ
kmen actively looked forward to. But not this year. This year his best friend had paid for him to have a treat. A gourmet meal and a night in one of
İ
stanbul’s most prestigious hotels. Oh, and something called a ‘murder mystery’ was going to happen too – all under the gaze of Turkey’s youngest and most sensational crime writer, Lale Aktar. He’d seen her on TV a few times and she came across quite well, if rather flirtatiously. All he could hope for was that the great and the good who went to the event gave generously to Krikor Sarkissian’s free drug and alcohol clinic in nearby Beyazıt. That, after all, was the point of the whole sorry affair.

He looked up at Samsun who was still drinking, smoking and going on about Abdurrahman. The last time Krikor had organised a fund-raising event of this magnitude, Samsun had only just met her now dead beau. Then the event had been held in a palace on the Bosphorus. This time another
type of palace was involved.

Eleven Hours Before

Getting
out of the taxi, she tried to look cool – as if she had been going to such places all her life – and she achieved her aim. But try as she might, when she looked up at the historic and magnificent façade, she knew that this hotel was just about as far as anyone could get from her old village back home in Anatolia. This was the Pera Palas, where people arriving in
İ
stanbul via the Orient Express would stay back in the first half of the twentieth century. It was the hotel where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Republic, liked to stay, where King Edward VIII of England had slept, as well as Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway, Mata Hari and Jackie Onassis. But most importantly for crime novelist Lale Aktar, the great English crime fiction writer, Agatha Christie had stayed here too. And she, Lale Aktar, a woman from the back end of nowhere, was going to spend a night in what had been her room.

As Lale
walked underneath the brightly lit canopy towards the gleaming, art nouveau entrance, the door into the hotel quietly and seemingly automatically opened in front of her. A young man, wearing the smart grey Pera Palas uniform, said, ‘Good morning, madam. Welcome to the Pera Palas. May I take your bag?’

Lale gave her small, lightweight suitcase to him without a word. She looked at her surroundings – exquisite marble flooring, doors and fittings of highly polished oak and mahogany, even a brightly decorated Christmas tree – and she thought,
I’ve arrived
. Even though she was Turkey’s bestselling crime author and she was married to one of the country’s most wealthy men, only now, here, did she feel she had
actually
arrived. It was just a pity her stay at the hotel was going to be so short.

A woman called Canan from the hotel’s publicity department was waiting for her in the lobby and, together with the young porter, they all got into the creaking wood and wrought-iron lift. An original artefact from way before the recent hotel refit, it dated back to 1895 and had been used by everyone who had ever stayed here. Canan urged Lale to sit on the velvet seat at the back of the lift and then the porter closed the wrought-iron gates and they began to ascend.