Deadline (30 page)

‘We know that Yiannis Istefanopoulos bought it,’ Ardıç said.

‘Yes, I asked him to do that,’ Ersoy said. ‘At the time I wasn’t sure how I was going to make my plan to have fun in the Pera Palas work but I promised Yiannis that I’d have Mert killed somehow if he got the samovar for me.’

‘So you could “see me with the samovar”? Why?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘The money shot of course!’ Ersoy said. ‘My samovar was so much a part of the whole adventure last time we met, Inspector, it had to be present too. You’d say who you thought had killed that silly boy Söner and hopefully get it wrong. But whether you got it wrong or not, Nurettin would kill you – he’d shoot you while you held the samovar. And in Agatha Christie’s old room
too! A murder to be savoured! And Nurettin would have killed you too, young Süleyman, as well as Avram’s uncle – he never liked me – the Sarkissians and Mrs Aktar.’

‘Mrs Aktar? I thought she was on your side.’

‘She is.’

‘She thinks she’s in love with you,’ Süleyman said.

‘Does she?’ Ersoy shook his head and laughed. ‘Silly girl! Pretty in a peasanty sort of a way, I suppose, and useful of course. But there was never any future in our relationship, was there?’

‘I don’t suppose you told her that,’
İ
kmen said.

‘I imagine you wish you’d let me die all those years ago when you had the chance,’ Ersoy said.

İ
kmen didn’t respond.

Ersoy laughed again. ‘I may be many things, but I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘Lale wanted to please me and so I let her. As a crime fiction writer she fitted in very well with my design for the evening. A mystery writer in the midst of a real-life murder! A Shakespearean play within a play featuring Ottoman brothers, Armenian lovers and even an Italian. Remember that when the mother of my little brother heard he might be dead she committed suicide in Italy? Just like the mother of the “young prince”. It’s the details that mean so much, isn’t it? But Lale? What can one say? She was greedy for my cock, the little tart. Maybe she’ll learn
something from the experience. Good Muslim girls don’t put out.’

‘You really are a classic psychopath, aren’t you, Ersoy?’ Süleyman said.

‘And you really are a man who was once married to a psychiatrist,’ Ersoy replied. ‘You just can’t make your marriages last, can you?’

‘Stick to the point, Ersoy,’ Ardıç said coldly.

‘I am sticking to the point. Everything is about greed,’ Ersoy said. ‘Love, marriage, consumerism, work, play, everything. Everyone who was part of my plan was brought into it via greed. Not my fault, theirs. It was marvellous. You know, even in my wildest imaginings I never dreamed that there were so many people out in the world just like me. Lale wanted me – greed; Yiannis wanted Haluk Mert dead – greed; Burak wanted to kill that awful boy who had forced Ceyda Ümit to have sex with him—’

‘How did he know about that?’
İ
kmen asked.

Ersoy shrugged. ‘How should I know? Maybe she told him. She and her actor boyfriend were greedy for success. That dried-up old maid Aysel Ökte was greedy for a life of crime and adventure which she achieved using the pretext of being oh so worried about prisoners. I gave her her moment just like I gave Ra
ş
it Demir the example of perfect psychopathic behaviour he had always wanted to write a paper about.’

Ardıç
looked down at the list of names that Ersoy had given him again and said, ‘So what about Mr Akdeniz?’

‘Nurettin, my leading man, I met in Silivri,’ he said. ‘I left it up to him to pick his crew.’

‘So you don’t know who he engaged?’

‘I was just the money,’ Ersoy said. ‘They would each get ten thousand lire for taking part and Nurettin would get to keep the samovar. I think Ra
ş
it Demir coveted it but I never liked him so that wasn’t going to happen. I told Nurettin specifically to employ only scum. The dispossessed, the mindlessly violent, that avaricious day concierge at the hotel, religious fanatics. They’re expendable and they don’t cost too much. They’ll also do as they’re told and the pious ones will happily die for the privilege of killing those who like a drink.’

‘So you had no contact with the Bowstrings acting troupe?’

‘Beyond telling Burak to get them to change their silly original name – so left wing – and making a few little tweaks, again via Burak, to their plot, no.’ Then he leaned forward and said to Süleyman, ‘Did you like all the Ottoman characters? The way the plot revolved around two brothers of good family? Did you like the name Bowstrings? I put them all in, you know, just for you.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.
’ He puckered his lips up and blew a very ostentatious kiss. ‘But then again, no, I actually did it for my own amusement.’

Çetin
İ
kmen had been thinking. ‘But what about Dr Demir, Mr Istefanopoulos and Miss Ökte? Why pretend to shoot them? What was the point?’

‘They all wanted to join in,’ Ersoy said.

‘They wanted to join your group of masked gunmen?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what about when it was all over? People had seen them die. How were they ever going to . . .’ And then he stopped and looked into Muhammed Ersoy’s eyes which were, as ever, smiling. A thought so terrible had crawled into his head he couldn’t give voice to it.

‘What people?’ Ersoy said.

‘What . . .’

‘What people?’ he repeated. ‘Honestly, Çetin, you don’t think I’d have been able to get any of these people on board if I’d given them the slightest notion that any of you would survive, do you?’

‘What, you mean the ordinary guests and . . .’

‘Oh, when I say all of you, I mean all of you,’ Ersoy said. ‘Even that little girl Burak Fisekçi was so keen on. I would have had Nurettin shoot her and Burak too if he raised any sort of objection. Not that he knew that. He thought I was going to give him money so that he could run away with her. Ridiculous. But it is a shame it
didn’t happen the way I had ideally envisaged. But then I was always prepared for the fact that it might not. I don’t actually mind either way.’

And everyone in that room knew that he meant every word.

Ceyda never wanted to
leave Alp’s side again. She clung to him so hard her knuckles were white. Her mother brought tea and cakes and asked Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu if she’d like an ashtray. Ay
ş
e said that she would. It wasn’t going to be easy interviewing Ceyda Ümit and Alp
İ
lhan, they’d been through such a lot. And Ay
ş
e had her own feelings to deal with too.
İ
zzet had called off their wedding and she was mentally in fragments.

Luckily Ceyda opened the proceedings with, ‘Burak Bey wanted to kidnap me.’ Her eyes teared up. She said, ‘I trusted him! I told Burak Bey things I didn’t feel I could tell anyone else.’

Ay
ş
e had already been told by
İ
kmen that Burak Fisekçi had killed Söner Erkan and why.

‘You should have come to me,’ Alp said to her. ‘Why did you tell Burak Bey about what you’d done with Söner?’

‘He’d always been like the kindest uncle one could imagine to me,’ Ceyda said. ‘I could tell him anything. And I had to tell someone or I would have gone mad!’

‘If you’d told me what Söner had done to you I would have dealt with him. If I’d known he was threatening you using me and my career, I would have told
him to go to hell and take his parents’ money with him.’

It was nice to see how much in love they were. A lot of younger, educated men like Alp didn’t see women as objects or insist on virginity so much any more, which Ay
ş
e felt had to be a good thing. But it also made her want to weep.
İ
zzet, for all his gentleness, couldn’t even forgive her a crime of the mind. But then maybe a crime of the mind was more insidious. And although she didn’t think about Mehmet Süleyman all the time, she thought about him every day. She looked at him whenever she could and there were fantasies too. There were, and always had been, a lot of fantasies.

‘You say, Ceyda, that Burak Fisekçi wanted to kidnap you,’ Ay
ş
e said.

‘Yes.’ The girl swallowed hard. ‘I didn’t know until all the shooting started.’

‘When the Special Forces officers broke into the hotel?’

‘One of the gunmen had made me take off my clothes and so I was just in my underwear,’ she said. ‘Burak Bey and I were tied together by our hands. But then he managed to get free. My hands were free too but I didn’t know what to do. Then when the shooting started I knew I had to get away. I pulled the wire they’d tied my ankles together with off and then suddenly there was Burak Bey.’

‘He came to—’

‘Rescue me, yes,’ she said. ‘We ran upstairs. I didn’t know why at the time, I just held on to Burak
Bey’s hands as hard as I could but then we met Inspector
İ
kmen.’

Ay
ş
e, writing in her notebook, said, ‘And what happened then, Ceyda?’

The girl put a hand up to her head and she said, ‘Then he just threw the inspector over that banister and into that hole in the middle of the hotel.’

‘The void above the Kubbeli Saloon?’

‘I guess.’ She looked at Alp and he nodded at her. ‘I couldn’t believe that he did that. I didn’t understand why.’

‘Do you know why now, Ceyda?’ Ay
ş
e asked.

The girl shook her head as if she still couldn’t quite believe what had happened and then she said, ‘He was with them, the gunmen.’

‘Why was he with them?’ Ay
ş
e knew but she had to get this from Ceyda.

‘Because he wanted to kill Söner. He thought he was doing it for me. That I’d be pleased in some way. I was just horrified.’ She shook her head again. ‘And then he wanted to take me away. Said that we were meant to be together and he tried to kiss me. It was horrible.’

Ceyda had been Burak Fisekçi’s prize, his reward for helping Muhammed Ersoy put his terrible plan
into operation – but only in Burak’s head. From what
İ
kmen had told Ay
ş
e, it seemed that Ersoy’s gunmen had been given orders to kill all the hostages, including Ceyda. Had Burak Fisekçi tried to save her, he would almost certainly have been killed too.

‘It was terrible when the Special Forces officer killed Burak Bey.’ Ceyda’s eyes teared up again. ‘I will never get it out of my mind! But I knew that it had to be that way. That other policeman was trying to reason with him, but he just wouldn’t let me go. He put a knife to my neck.’ Alp drew her close and kissed her hair. ‘You know, I think he wanted us to be together so much he was prepared to kill me!’

Fanaticism was like that. Mehmet Süleyman had, apparently, tried to reason with Burak Fisekçi, but he had failed. Once, ten years before, he had failed to reason with Muhammed Ersoy too. Ay
ş
e remembered it well. When she’d heard the shot that had wounded Ersoy, she imagined that it was Süleyman and that he had been killed. She’d almost died of horror.

Ceyda Ümit brought her back to the present. ‘Is it true, Sergeant,’ she asked, ‘that a criminal in prison was behind what happened last night?’

‘Yes,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘It’s true.’

‘But how can that be?’ Ceyda said. ‘Prisoners are surely stopped from doing anything much because they’re in prison. Aren’t they?’

‘Most of the time, yes,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘But Ceyda, this is a very particular prisoner. He’s very clever and he has access to a lot of money. Put those two together and
a lot of things that are normally impossible become possible.’

She remembered Muhammed’s cousin, Kemal. She’d met him once out at Silivri. She’d just been leaving while he was arriving to see her ‘best love’. They’d had sex, she and Muhammed Ersoy. The guards had given them a room with a clean bed in it and then they’d dirtied everything. He liked to perform anal sex on her and she had no objection. She would have let him kill her and eat her flesh if that was what he had wanted. The heat that came off him was so intense – it was such a contrast to her husband, Faruk. When she spoke to Çetin
İ
kmen and Mehmet Süleyman, it was in a very matter-of-fact way.

‘I started going to Silivri Prison with Aysel Ökte,’ Lale said. ‘She knows – knew Krikor Sarkissian.’

‘Who is a friend to your husband, Faruk Aktar?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you go and visit your own father in, where is it, Kayseri jail?’
İ
kmen asked. ‘If you were so interested in prison reform? If you wanted closure of some sort?’

She changed the subject immediately. ‘Are you going to arrest Muhammed’s cousin?’ she asked.

‘I take it your father is a subject that you don’t want to talk about,’
İ
kmen said. It was late, almost 5 p.m., and he still hadn’t been home – he was still wearing his tuxedo, underneath which his ribs were bandaged
up and hurt like hell – but he’d made the time to find out about Lale Aktar’s father. ‘Convicted of murder,’ he said. ‘Your sister. He raped her, made her beg forgiveness of him for losing her virginity and then he killed her.’ He looked down at the paperwork on the table in front of him. The words on it looked a little fuzzy around the edges, he was on a lot of codeine, but he ignored this. ‘We know that he made your sister beg for forgiveness because we have testimony from a witness,’
İ
kmen continued. Then he looked up at her. ‘You, Mrs Aktar.’

She put her head down. ‘I wasn’t there when he killed her . . .’

‘And he didn’t rape you at any time, according to your statement,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Mrs Aktar, I am truly puzzled as to how you could do the right thing and alert the police about your own father when you were just a child and then get involved with someone like Muhammed Ersoy. What were all those books you wrote about murder and revenge in Turkish villages if not your own rage at the helplessness of women and the injustice inherent in that? Ersoy used you, just as surely as the evil men in your books use and abuse their women, just like your father.’