Death by Design

Copyright © 2010 Barbara Nadel

The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 0 7553 8644 4

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Table of Contents

To my son Alex and all his friends from John Cass – explorers of old Mark Lane and witnesses to its secrets. Also to Mike Wilkinson, one of the Mark Lane Two.

Cast of Characters

Çetin İkmen
– middle aged İstanbul police inspector

Mehmet Suleyman
– İstanbul police inspector – İkmen’s protégé

Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu
– İkmen’s deputy

Sergeant İzzet Melik
– Süleyman’s deputy

Dr Arto Sarkissian
– İstanbul police pathologist

Commissioner Ardıç
– İkmen and Süleyman’s boss

Fatma İkmen
– Çetin İkmen’s wife

Tariq
– an Afghan boy working illegally in İstanbul

Abdurrahman Iqbal
– a Pakistani migrant passing through the city

Wolfgang
– a German people trafficker

Ahmet Ulker
– a businessman

Maxine Ulker
– his wife

Derek Harrison
– Ahmet Ülker’s right hand man

Ali Reza Hajizadeh
– an Iranian, Ahmet Ülker’s driver

Mustafa Kermani
– security guard at Ahmet Ülker’s Hackney Wick factory

Hadi Nourazar
– an Iranian cleric

Abdullah Yigit
– owner of the Rize Guest House, Stoke Newington

Wesley Simpson
– getaway driver

Haluk Uner
– Mayor of London

Acting Commissioner Dee
– of the Metropolitan Police

Superintendent Wyre Williams
– Metropolitan Police

Detective Inspector Patrick Riley
– Metropolitan Police

Inspector Carla Fratelli
– Metropolitan Police

Detective Inspector Roman
– Metropolitan Police

Detective Inspector Hogarth
– Metropolitan Police

Detective Constable Ball
– Metropolitan Police

Sergeant Terry Springer
– İkmen’s undercover handler

Sergeant Ayşe Kudu
– Greater Manchester Police, seconded to the Metropolitan Police

John Richards
– London Underground employee

Fatima Khan
– young pregnant mother

Sınan İkmen
– Çetin’s eldest son, a GP in London\

Fasika
– an Ethiopian illegal immigrant

‘Don’t!’

Inspector Çetin İkmen fixed the trembling figure in front of him with the most penetrating stare that he could muster and then, calmly, he repeated himself. ‘Don’t.’

The figure, a male not much older than a boy, clutched the hand grenade he was holding to his chest and began to cry. Tears, heated up by the adrenaline raging inside his thin, spotty cheeks, fell down into the wispy beard that was just about noticeable on his chin.

‘Son, there’s no need for anyone to die for the sake of a few fake Prada handbags,’ İkmen said as he stepped just slightly forward towards the boy.

‘You don’t understand!’

‘Counterfeit designer goods are big business,’ İkmen said. ‘I know that. Where are you from, son? You’re a long way from home. What accent is that?’

He wasn’t dressed like a Turk. Not even the country people dressed like this boy. A long white shirt over thin white trousers trimmed with gold thread at the ankles. He looked, to Çetin İkmen, rather more like a Pakistani or an Afghan than a local person. There was also his weird grammar and his accent which was clearly not that of a citizen of the Republic.

Noticing now that the policeman had moved forward slightly the boy shouted, ‘Go back!’

İkmen, raising his hands in a gesture of submission, moved one pace backwards. ‘Whatever you say.’

The crying continued. The shaking, if anything, became even more intense. İkmen noticed that behind the boy, on the wall of what appeared to be the office for this illegal factory, was a map of some sort. At the time he didn’t register what it was, just as he didn’t really take in anything else about the scene before him apart from the trembling boy.

‘Son,’ İkmen continued, ‘don’t harm yourself. There’s no need. We can—’

‘I will end in the hell!’ The weeping eyes snapped open and he looked into the policeman’s face with what could only be described as raw hatred. ‘I must be rid of you or my soul is damned!’

Surrounded by fake Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton handbags, religious fundamentalism was not something İkmen had expected. But then he supposed that the slave labour that was used to make these things included all sorts of individuals.

‘I—’

‘Allahu Akbar!’

İkmen saw the boy’s left hand remove the pin. He flung himself backwards just before the boy, and the little office he had been in, exploded.

Everyone in İstanbul had a fake something or other. Inspector Çetin İkmen himself had been given a counterfeit Rolex watch by his youngest son for his last, his fifty-seventh, birthday. The child, Kemal, had purchased it from one of the many scruffy-looking vendors of such things who plied their trade underneath the Galata Bridge. As was typical of such purchases, the watch had worked for a week, died and then been put into the drawer of İkmen’s office desk. There it would probably languish until the policeman either retired or the watch itself met with some sort of accident. At the other end of the scale, his daughters paid not inconsiderable amounts of money for their fake Prada handbags and his son Bülent felt himself very dashing in his almost perfect replica Police sunglasses. Forgeries, not least because the tourists loved them, were a fact of life. Many young men and women from the poorer suburbs of all the major cities, including İstanbul, worked in the ‘knock off’ trade. They did so of their own volition.

But in recent years things had changed. Not only in Turkey, but across the world, the trade in forged goods had become a multibillion-dollar industry. Controlled largely by criminal gangs known loosely as ‘mafias’ (some could indeed be traced back to the original Sicilian Cosa Nostra), these counterfeit businesses were known to run sidelines in prostitution, money laundering, drug dealing and contract killing. Many had dispensed with local cheap-ish labour in favour of slaves from poor former Warsaw Pact countries, South-east Asia or Africa. Illegal immigrants, desperate to escape the poverty of their own countries, would readily agree to work for nothing in return for a route into a country, like Turkey, on the doorstep of the European Union. What these people rarely knew was how long and hard they would be forced to work in order to pay off their ‘debt’.

It had been an unseasonably stifling day in April when the İstanbul Police Department, via one of İkmen’s colleagues, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman, had been tipped off about a possible slave factory in the rundown district of Tarlabaşı. Just seconds from the bright lights of the fashionable district of Beyoğlu, Tarlabaşı was a rabbit warren of tenements, illegal brothels and small-time drug dealing operations. It was also home to many, many migrants from the country as well as people from places very far from Turkey. Süleyman who, like İkmen, was principally concerned with the crime of murder, had met with his informant, as arranged, aboard one of the commuter ferries that shuttled people back and forth between the European and Asian sides of the city. The informant, a man known only as ‘George’, told the handsome policeman that the Tarlabaşı factory had been operating for some time. It produced mainly handbags and, although George didn’t actually own up to having any sort of personal connection with the place, it was obvious to Süleyman that he had at some time worked there. Why George was talking to the police about the Tarlabaşı factory was because people were, he claimed, dying in there now. Mention was made of a young African girl who had died from exhaustion. Her body had apparently been disposed of in a fire up in the equally dodgy district of Edirnekapı. The bosses, Turkish mafiosi, George reckoned, were bringing people into the country to work for them in record numbers.

‘Like tissues, they use them to do one job and then they throw them away,’ George said as the ferry passed beneath the pointed roofs and green gardens of the Topkapı Palace. ‘I make things, Mr Süleyman. I make things that are not real or honest, but I do not kill people. I won’t have anything to do with that. Not now, not ever.’

Süleyman nodded gravely, put his hand inside his elegant jacket pocket, took out his mobile phone and called Police Headquarters. By six o’clock that evening Süleyman, together with İkmen and a team of rather more junior officers, listened intently as their superior, Commissioner Ardıç, outlined how the operation against the illegal factory in Tarlabaşı was going to work.

It was just after dawn the following morning when they went in.

‘Stay where you are and put your hands in the air!’

Even a cursory glance around the hot, seething factory floor was enough to convince İkmen that very few of those he was addressing could actually understand him. African, South-east Asian and what appeared to be Indian or Pakistani faces looked up at the squad of armed police officers who had just burst in upon them with confused and fearful expressions. Only two men, standing up between a couple of the rows of now silent sewing machines, looked as if they might be local. Clean, by the look of them, and pale in comparison to the others, these were probably the foremen of this terrible, sweating, stinking crew.

‘You!’ İkmen said, pointing to the closer of the two. ‘Tell them to put their hands in the air!’

Everyone in the building had stopped working. Even those İkmen could now see were actually chained to their work benches had done that. But he and his colleagues needed to see exactly where all their hands were. After all, whether they were slaves or not, these workers would not welcome the police and what they represented, which was almost certain deportation back to their countries of origin.