Death by Design (2 page)

‘Tell them!’ İkmen reiterated to the man who was now visibly trembling.

‘I don’t know what languages they speak!’ he answered. ‘They speak all sorts, they—’

‘And you?’ İkmen said as he turned his attention to the other pale man with his arms in the air.

‘I don’t know!’ he said. Not obviously as frightened as his colleague, he added, ‘How should we know? We just work here.’

‘OK.’ İkmen instructed his officers to go around the stinking shop floor and raise the arms of the workers themselves. As the uniformed men and women moved amongst the splintered wooden benches upon which the sewing machines stood, rats and mice scuttled towards the safety of the world outside.

‘Who is in charge here?’ İkmen asked as he watched a slow Mexican wave of raised hands begin in front of him. He looked at the two clearly Turkish foremen again and said, ‘Well?’

‘Sir!’

İkmen looked over towards one of his younger constables, Yıldız. ‘Constable?’

‘Sir, these people have been shitting where they sit,’ the young man said with a disgusted look on his face.

İkmen sighed and then lit a cigarette in an attempt to calm his nerves. ‘That’s what happens when you chain people to their stations,’ he said.

A female officer added that some of the women appeared to be bleeding.

‘Allah!’ He turned again to the Turkish foremen and said, ‘Who’s in charge? Who runs this concentration camp?’

The second man, the one with rather more courage than the other, said, ‘I don’t know. I needed a job. I heard there were jobs here. I got one.’

‘Yes, but who gave you the job?’ asked Süleyman, who along with İkmen was getting impatient with these men now.

There was silence.

‘Well?’

Both of the foremen very pointedly looked away. İkmen turned to Süleyman and said, ‘We’ll just have to take the whole lot in.’

‘Yes.’

Then addressing the two men once again, İkmen said, ‘You know we will find out who you work for. If you don’t tell us yourselves then these poor creatures you have exploited will give us descriptions that will eventually lead us to who is responsible for this outrage.’

Again there was a silence. This time it was broken by the sound of a pile of fake Prada handbags dropping from one of the benches and hitting the floor. After that a woman, somewhere, began to weep.

‘Allah!’

İkmen was just about to give his officers the order to take everyone in the whole place into custody when the first foreman suddenly blurted, ‘There’s Tariq! He’s in the office!’

He pointed to somewhere at the back of the factory floor. İkmen left Süleyman in charge while he and his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, went to take a look.

Neither of them saw the grenade at first. There was just this thin, foreign-looking boy sitting on a swivel chair in front of a desk heaped with paper, pens and pictures of handbags and watches. When İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu opened the door and stepped into the office, he looked up, but otherwise he didn’t move or look afraid initially.

‘Tariq?’

He didn’t answer. After a moment he looked down at something he was holding in his lap. It was Ayşe who first recognised what it was.

‘Sir, he’s holding a grenade,’ she whispered nervously into her superior’s ear.

İkmen took a big gulp of air in order to steady his nerves and then moved his head the better to see what the young man was holding. When he’d done that he turned towards Ayşe and said, ‘Evacuate the building, Sergeant Farsakoğlu. Get those people off those machines. We have bolt cutters.’

Although the sight of workers chained, slave-like, to their machines had shocked İkmen, he had made sure that his team had come equipped for just that eventuality. This wasn’t, after all, the first time that such a hellish factory had been discovered in the city.

‘Sir.’ Farsakoğlu left and İkmen watched for what seemed like an eternity as the boy rolled the grenade over and over in his hands. Out on the factory floor he heard Süleyman give the order to evacuate, followed by the sound of people moving from their seats and then the sharp snapping noise of bolt cutters biting through metal. Some were still crying and some cried in either fear or pain or both as the officers took hold of them and began to drag, pull or carry them out of the building.

The fact was, however, that there were probably in excess of a hundred people in that stinking space and it wasn’t going to take just five minutes to move them out. İkmen had no way of knowing whether or not this boy now idly playing with a hand grenade was actually capable of using it. He had no way of knowing at that time whether or not the lad even spoke his language. What he did know, however, was that he had to find some sort of way to engage with him if his officers were to stand any chance of getting themselves and the slaves they had taken into custody out in one piece.

‘Tariq.’

The boy looked up. İkmen smiled.

‘Tariq, I don’t know what part you have to play in this organisation. But I can see that you are a young man and so I can’t imagine that you are actually running this place.’

The boy didn’t respond, although İkmen did notice that his cheeks became flushed.

‘We can help you,’ İkmen continued. ‘I know that we—’

‘Shut up.’ It wasn’t shouted or said in any way aggressively. But by its tone and by virtue of what the boy was holding as he said it, it was clear that he brooked no argument. İkmen duly became silent. The boy was handling the grenade slowly and did not at that point seem to be unduly agitated. Meanwhile there was a lot of activity on the factory floor and people were clearly being moved out with alacrity. When negotiating with armed opponents, like this boy, it was as much about knowing when to be silent as it was about knowing when to speak and to act. There was also an element, İkmen knew, of recklessness on his part at this time too. Provided his officers and their poor broken-down charges got out, there was part of him that didn’t care too much what happened then. Life had not been good in recent months; in fact life had been downright awful.

‘I should have been dead months ago,’ Tariq said. ‘Then I would not be in this problem situation.’

At that moment, İkmen simply registered the foreign accent.

‘We can help you,’ İkmen reiterated. ‘Those who have been exploiting you, and the others, will be punished.’

Tariq stood up and it was then that he began to tremble.

‘Don’t do this, son.’

The boy cried. The sounds from down on the factory floor were much reduced now. İkmen took a moment to sigh with relief about that. But then he looked at the boy’s weeping face again and said, ‘Don’t!’

It was then that the final exchanges took place between them. Tariq pulled the pin out of the grenade, İkmen threw himself backwards and then, for İkmen, everything went black.

The doctor held up what looked like a piece of bone in front of İkmen’s face. The inspector, still groggy from his latest shot of morphine, remarked upon it.

‘It looks like bone because that is exactly what it is,’ Dr Arto Sarkissian replied. ‘To be exact, Çetin, it is the distal phalanx of an index finger. We think, your surgeon Dr Türkmenoğlu and myself, that it came from the boy who detonated the grenade.’

‘Tariq?’

‘If that was what his name was, yes,’ Arto said.

‘And that was what was lodged in my cheek?’ İkmen asked as he automatically raised a hand up to the large dressing that now covered the right side of his face.

‘People don’t realise that when these characters decide to explode themselves, their bodily parts have to go somewhere,’ Arto said. ‘The force of the blast throws bits of face, leg, pelvis and whatever all over the place – sometimes into people unfortunate enough to be nearby.’

Police pathologist Arto Sarkissian had been friends with Çetin İkmen since they were both small children. Although very different in terms of income, the Sarkissian and the İkmen families had always been close. Arto and his brother Krikor had both followed their father into the medical profession, but neither of the İkmen boys had taken the road into academia as travelled by their father, though both Çetin and his brother Halıl were clever. Halıl had done well with his accountancy practice, but Çetin, although a high-ranking police officer, had only ever just got by. But then unlike either the Sarkissian boys or his own brother, Çetin had children – eight; it had been nine but one of his older sons had very recently died.

‘Has Fatma been to visit?’ Arto asked as casually as the cringing embarrassment he felt at asking this question allowed. İkmen lowered his gaze for a moment. The child who had died, Bekir, had done so as a result of a police operation against drug dealers in the south-east. Mehmet Süleyman had been one of the officers involved and, although Fatma knew that her son Bekir had been implicated in the drug running and had indeed killed an innocent man because of it, she could not forgive either Süleyman or her husband. It had been Çetin, after all, who had finally deduced Bekir’s whereabouts and who had, according to Fatma, killed their son by revealing where he was to the authorities.

‘Çiçek came yesterday with Bülent, Orhan, Kemal and Gül,’ İkmen said as he attempted to turn his Armenian friend’s attention away from his wife and on to his children – all of whom completely supported their father. ‘Then in the evening,’ he smiled, ‘Hulya came with Berekiah and they brought my dear little grandson.’

‘That’s nice.’ But Arto knew that even the arrival of İkmen’s grandson hardly made up for the obvious absence of his wife. ‘Sınan phoned.’ İkmen’s eldest son was a doctor who had just taken up a new job in London.

‘Çetin . . .’

‘Dr Türkmenoğlu says I’ll probably be able to go home tomorrow,’ İkmen said. It was obvious that he wanted, at all costs, to avoid any more talk about his wife. ‘Back to work next week.’

Arto frowned. ‘Do you think that’s wise?’ he asked. ‘I mean, as well as the injury to your face, your legs are still badly bruised and then there is the shock—’

‘I’ll be OK.’ İkmen looked up and smiled. ‘So what news from the front? Do we know any more about our handbag factory in Tarlabaşı?’

‘You’d have to ask your colleagues about that, Çetin,’ Arto replied. ‘But the young man who blew himself up appears to me to have been from either the Indian subcontinent or Afghanistan. When the DNA tests are complete we will know more. But by eye that is what I think. One thing I do know, however, is that he was suffering from tuberculosis.’

İkmen frowned.

‘Yes,’ the Armenian confirmed, ‘seems strange these days, doesn’t it? But then out in places like Afghanistan and even, to be truthful, in the wilder reaches of eastern Turkey not everyone is vaccinated as we have been, not even youngsters. The young man in the handbag factory was quite far on in his disease, he must have been very sick.’

‘He said just before he blew himself up that he should have died some time before. I assumed at the time that he meant he should have martyred himself,’ İkmen said. ‘But maybe if he was sick he meant that his illness should, by that time, have taken him.’

‘Possibly,’ Arto said. ‘Mehmet Süleyman will know more than I do about this case. Ask him.’

İkmen had already seen him, the man who had once, long ago, been his sergeant. But Süleyman, rather like his old friend Arto, hadn’t been particularly forthcoming with regard to what was happening outside the confines of the Taksim Hospital. Everyone knew that what İkmen needed most now was rest. Everyone, that is, except Çetin İkmen himself.

‘Yes, I will ask him,’ İkmen said as he pulled his mobile phone out of the jacket that hung on the back of Arto’s chair. ‘In fact, my dear Arto, if you’d be so kind as to ask the nurses for a wheelchair, you can take me outside and I can do that right now.’

Arto Sarkissian sighed deeply and then went out to do as he was told.

Mehmet Süleyman watched the white boiler-suited forensic scientist gently tease away at one corner of what looked as if it might have been a poster. On the wall behind the ramshackle bench that had once served the illegal factory as an office desk, various pieces of paper, some of them documents, had been pinned. But it wasn’t an easy site to investigate. The grenade that had blown the young boy apart in front of Çetin İkmen’s eyes had also inflicted severe damage upon the surrounding area. Süleyman again thought about İkmen and how very lucky he was to be alive. By accident or design, İkmen had somehow managed to hurl himself to the far side of the great iron safe that now stood open in the middle of the charred floor. Built at the end of the nineteenth century, obviously to last, this massive box had taken most of the blast that in all probability would have eviscerated his friend. But luckily İkmen was alive and the safe itself, once opened, had yielded some very interesting finds.

Twenty blank United Kingdom passports were what they had found. They were not, according to the British authorities at the consulate in Beyoğlu, fakes. Issued out of the Passport Office at a place called Peterborough, these documents had somehow gone missing. And they had not been reported as missing. This seemed to imply that at least some of the Senegalese, Nigerian, Pakistani and Vietnamese refugees who had been found working in the Tarlabaşı factory were to be given the chance to go to Britain. If Süleyman’s dealings with illegals and the gangs who trafficked them in the past were anything to go by, the passports and the transportation into Europe would not come cheap. Once in Britain the women would be handed over to gangs who would press them into prostitution, while the men would either have to work in dangerous or illegal industries, or pimp their own wives. Whatever they had come from, and he was the first to admit that he could probably not even imagine what poverty was like in a place like Senegal, a life of slavery in Turkey or Italy or Great Britain couldn’t possibly be better? Could it?

‘Sir.’