Deadline (18 page)

Slowly, her ears straining for any sound, Ay
ş
e began to ascend. Ardiç had called her when Ersu Bey had arrived and told her that as far as he could tell there was no one on either the concierge or the reception desks in the front lobby. The front doors could be operated electronically from inside the hotel. If she could get into the lobby she could, if necessary, do this. But she had to get up to the ground floor first. She put a hand on the
banister that ran around the barrier that enclosed the lift shaft. Above she heard voices more distinctly now. She couldn’t make out words but she could hear the sharp edge of panic in their tones and the unmistakable sound of weeping.

Now alone for the first time since she’d become involved with this situation, she tried to find reasons for what was happening. The gunmen were playing what was effectively a game with all these people, some of whom were police. The rewards would have to be considerable to be worth such a high-risk strategy. But what rewards? And who was providing them?

‘Nobody really liked Söner Erkan, as far as I can see,’ Süleyman said. ‘The leader of the company, Alp, found him dictatorial, a financial drain and arrogant.’

‘That just about goes for all the people involved in Bowstrings,’ Arto Sarkissian said.

‘And I’ve just discovered something else,’ Cetin
İ
kmen said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Ceyda Ümit, Alp’s girlfriend, slept with Söner,’ he said. ‘She says that Söner coerced her into it by threatening to get his parents to withdraw their funding for Bowstrings. Alp, according to Ceyda, doesn’t know.’

‘She thinks.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Then there’s the discovery of the
body,’ Krikor said.

‘I think that maybe you should talk about that without me,’ Lale Aktar said.

Süleyman frowned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You were there, you—’

‘I’ve told you everything I did, everything I know,’ she said. ‘I can’t do any more. You need to talk about the scene on your own and I need to go to the lavatory.’

İ
kmen remembered that Lale Aktar had a period. He smiled. ‘All right.’

She called one of the masked men over and asked to be taken down to the toilets. She stood up, put her handbag on her chair and left with him. For a moment,
İ
kmen stared at the bag and then he said, ‘Söner Erkan also “tried it on”, as Metin Martini put it, with another member of the company, Esma. But unlike Ceyda she was not vulnerable and she rejected him.’ He turned to Krikor Sarkissian, while at the same time keeping half an eye on their captors. ‘We know why you engaged the Bowstrings, Krikor,’ he said. ‘Basically via Burak Fisekçi. But did you make them change their name?’

‘Change their name? Oh, you mean from “Lions in Iron Cages”? I’d almost forgotten about that. No,’ he said. ‘That was a decision they made.’

‘They?’

‘Alp and Söner, as far as I know,’ he said. ‘They came to see me and said
that they’d thought about the name and decided it was too political. How and why they came up with Bowstrings, I don’t know. I accepted it because I thought that it was really quite good.’

‘Very Ottoman,’ Hovsep Pars said. He was rather more relaxed since he’d been drinking his absinthe.

‘Metin Martini reckons that Söner’s parents made them change it,’
İ
kmen said.

He looked at their captors again and saw that, while they were still watching them, they were having their own conversation too and the leader was actually on his phone. He took his chance and lowered his voice, ‘Listen and don’t react,’ he said. ‘One of the gunmen is on our side and there’s a police officer in the building too.’ He looked at Süleyman. ‘Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu.’

‘Ay
ş
e!’

‘Keep your voice down! Our police colleagues outside know and they are working with Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu who has apparently impressed upon them the need for restraint.’

‘How do you know this?’ Süleyman asked.

‘You know when I went to the bathroom in room four eleven? The man who took me is working with Ay
ş
e. I don’t know why or how and . . . Yes, bathroom, I have to tell you about bathrooms . . .’

‘What are you talking about?’ They all looked up as the leader came towards them. ‘No whispering!’

For a moment, until he
walked away again, they all sat in silence. Then
İ
kmen said to Süleyman, ‘We should see Alp again.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Well, I think we’re getting too involved in details.’ They all looked at Krikor Sarkissian. ‘We have very limited time to come to a decision and we only have one shot at it.’

‘Which is exactly why we have to get it right,’
İ
kmen said. ‘And that involves looking into details.’

‘But it’s taking so much time!’

İ
kmen lowered his voice. ‘Krikor, did you actually hear what I was saying a few moments ago?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Then you’ll know that—’

‘
I
know precisely who did it!’

Hovsep Pars, and his absinthe glass, were sitting at the head of the table nearest the door. All the other men at the table looked at him.

‘Muhammed Ersoy!’ the old man said with a smile. ‘He killed the young prince. He killed everyone!’

Muhammed Ersoy, the man who had killed his nephew and who, Hovsep believed, was responsible for all his family’s ills. None of them spoke. Ersoy had been in psychiatric hospitals and prisons for over a decade. As the old man began to laugh, all the other men tried not to look at him. Çetin
İ
kmen fixed his gaze just above Hovsep Pars’s head, on a point just
in front of the old wooden lift. It was as he was doing this that he saw the figure of a familiar woman run past the opening. Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu.

Tick-tock went
the clock in what could have been an annoying fashion, but wasn’t. What would be, would be. Kismet – except that in this case fate was being given a helping hand.

But the excitement of finding out who
İ
kmen and Süleyman were going to accuse was growing and it was exquisite. It was just past two fifteen and the policemen and their little band of others were lost in a maze of dead ends, details and the madness of old Hovsep Pars. It was going to be a lot of fun finding out whether they would manage to identify who in their midst had been telling little lies.

‘That was Söner, Inspector,’ Alp said. ‘He came to me and said we couldn’t use the name “Lions in Iron Cages” any more.’

‘Did he say why?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No.’

‘This wasn’t some edict from his parents?’

‘I’ve no
idea,’ Alp said. ‘He didn’t say. It’s possible.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Söner just told me we were changing the name before one of the early meetings with Dr Sarkissian and his team,’ Alp said. ‘No one seemed to be too bothered by it. In fact, Burak Bey said that he actually liked it better.’

‘Thank you, Alp,’ Süleyman said. He walked back through the ranks of the anxious guests. Now that he knew that Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu was somewhere in the hotel, he looked for her everywhere. But he didn’t see her.

He passed in front of the door to the bar where a small group of masked men were talking in low tones among themselves. One of them laughed. How could they do that! There were dead bodies in that bar although he couldn’t actually see them. Whoever was laughing was probably the kind of sociopath who could kill and then go off, have a laugh and eat a full meal. Süleyman had met a few and that was what sociopaths did.

The most prominent one he’d ever come across had been the man Hovsep Pars had named, Muhammed Ersoy. He’d killed his own younger brother and his lover, Hovsep Pars’s nephew, Avram Avedykian. Unable to carry on after their son’s death, both Sevan Avedykian and his wife Akabi had committed suicide. Hovsep Pars, Akabi’s only sibling, saw
the aristocratic Muhammed Ersoy as the Devil. Everything bad in life he attributed to that man and he still bitterly resented Çetin
İ
kmen for having helped to save his life. Süleyman shot Ersoy to stop him from killing Arto Sarkissian. Ersoy could have died but
İ
kmen had been determined that he stand trial for his crimes. And he had done. Death would have been an easy and, for Ersoy, very desirable way out.

Süleyman walked back into the Kubbeli Saloon and made his way over to Çetin
İ
kmen and Krikor Sarkissian who were murmuring together. Then the doctor rubbed what looked like a bloodied tissue on the bottom of his shoe and held it up to
İ
kmen’s nose. ‘Do you see what I mean?’ he said.

İ
kmen, frowning, nodded his head.

Süleyman sat down between Krikor Sarkissian and Lale Aktar. ‘Alp says that Söner chose the new name for the troupe,’ he said. ‘He’s no idea whether this was done under pressure from Söner’s parents or not.’ Then he asked
İ
kmen, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I think we need to speak to our captors,’
İ
kmen said. ‘We need to know whether or not actively misleading us is permissible in this game of theirs.’

Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu had managed to get herself underneath the hotel concierge’s desk. If she put her head out from behind the left-hand
side, she could see the front entrance to the hotel, the metal detector arch and the electronic control panel. She called Ardiç to tell him where she was and that
İ
kmen and Süleyman were alive and appeared to be unharmed. It was two forty-five. According to Ersu Bey, the day staff didn’t come on until six and so this gave Ardiç and the police and military teams a clear two hours before they had to prepare to storm the building.

Now that she was in the hotel lobby, Ay
ş
e found herself at a loss as to what she could do. Every so often masked men passed through the area and so getting to the front door would be difficult. Even if she did make it to the front door, what could she do then? She couldn’t get anybody out, they were all under guard. Only Nar could possibly be spirited away but Ay
ş
e didn’t know where she was. If only she’d brought her phone with her! If she’d done that she’d be able to speak to Nar. As it was, Nar was alone and basically clueless. Ay
ş
e heard footsteps and ducked as far as she could underneath the desk.

She heard a male voice say, ‘They’ve just found out.’ Then a silent pause. ‘Yes.’

He had to be on the phone.

Then he said, ‘Really well.
Really
well. Good.’

She heard him walk somewhere across the marble floor until the sound of his footsteps disappeared. Ay
ş
e put her head around
the side of the desk again and looked at the front door.
İ
zzet, Ardıç and the others were based at that bar opposite. She couldn’t see them or even really the front of the building but she knew it was there. She also knew that they probably already had officers actually outside the hotel and they had to have closed the road. Soon, surely, the gunmen would realise that they couldn’t keep everyone captive in the hotel without the outside world noticing. Unless of course a siege was what they wanted . . .

‘Where are they?’
İ
kmen asked the leader.

‘Where are who?’

Everyone except Hovsep Pars was standing, Süleyman directly behind
İ
kmen, the two doctors and Lale Aktar behind them. The lights from the Kubbeli Saloon’s Christmas tree lit up what looked like amusement in the leader’s eyes.

‘The people you “killed”,’
İ
kmen said.

‘I imagine they’re dead,’ the leader replied. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Frankly, no,’
İ
kmen said.

‘And why is that?’

‘Because earlier, as you know, Dr Krikor Sarkissian went into the bar where you placed the bodies, in order to get a drink for Hovsep Bey,’
İ
kmen said. ‘The carpet was covered in blood.’

‘It would be.’

‘Some of which Dr Sarkissian
got on his shoes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Or rather he would have done, had the substance on the carpet been blood,’
İ
kmen said. ‘But what oozed up on to Dr Sarkissian’s shoes wasn’t blood.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘You know full well it wasn’t,’
İ
kmen said. He maintained control of his voice but with some difficulty. He was furious. ‘It is some sort of red liquid. Fake, theatrical blood, I imagine, although I don’t have a lot of experience of that so I can’t say for certain what it is. But it isn’t real blood. Both Dr Sarkissian and myself have had enough contact with that over the years to know exactly what it feels, smells and tastes like. What’s on his shoes isn’t blood.’

There was a pause and then
İ
kmen said, ‘You want us to tell you who killed Söner Erkan and yet you are misleading us and concealing information from us. How can we have even a fighting chance if you do that? If you want to kill us all anyway, why not just get on and do it?’

Another pause, a longer one.

‘I’m led to the conclusion that the people you “shot” are still alive,’
İ
kmen went on. ‘Where are they? Are they now wearing the uniform you all wear? I thought that maybe you were bringing more people in from outside to swell your
numbers when I noticed there were more of you earlier. But that isn’t the case, is it? You already had people on the inside. I was going to ask why you aren’t playing fair with us, but I think I know the answer to that question anyway.’ He took a step forward, towards the leader. All around them, the sound of Kalashnikovs being prepared for firing made the two doctors and the crime writer move a few steps back. ‘So shoot me.’
İ
kmen shrugged. ‘You’re going to do it anyway.’

Süleyman put a hand on
İ
kmen’s shoulder. ‘Çetin . . .’

Ignoring him,
İ
kmen continued, ‘But you’ll get caught. Not by me, I know. But if you think that what is going on here won’t eventually attract attention, then you’re living in a fantasy. You’re not going to get away with this!’ He laughed. ‘Kill us all now and you might just get away . . .’ From somewhere behind him, somebody gasped. ‘Leave it and you don’t stand a hope.’ Yet another pause came and went while he looked into the still, amused eyes of the leader. ‘But you won’t do that, will you?’ he said. ‘Because this is a game. It’s a game you refuse to play in a fair and equitable way, but it’s still a game.’