‘Ah.’
His brow furrows and he shifts in his chair. He is not as comforted by my words as I expect.
‘I wonder, you see,’ he continues, ‘whether the police may be overreacting.’
‘Overreacting? To the murder of a student?’
‘No - to the possibility that there may be some criminal activity behind it.’
‘Well murder is a criminal activity, isn’t it?’
He gives me a hard look and I realise that, though his eyes don’t actually spin £ signs, they are quite scarily sharp.
‘I’m sure you know what I mean, Gina. This chap Yilmaz was an employee of the Turkish government, and so are several of the other Turks we have here. I gather that two of them have been questioned by the police already. The Turkish government is very unhappy about that. I’ve had their Education Minister on to me personally this morning: apparently, one of the students telephoned his office complaining about the aggressive interrogation of his wife.’
‘Aggressive interrogation? Compared with the methods the Turkish police use? Well, I think you’ll find the students and their wives have still got all their fingernails.’
He clenches and unclenches a hairy fist. Possibly he would like to slap me. I can see this interview isn’t going as he hoped it would. Suddenly he bares his teeth in an approximation to a smile and says,‘I’m sorry. You must be missing your lunch. I’ll get Janet to bring us some coffee and sandwiches.’
He strides to the door, issues some instructions and then ushers me down to the other end of the room where, he assures me, we shall be more comfortable, though I was actually quite comfortable where I was. This isn’t so good. It’s difficult for a small woman to be assertive from the depths of an easy chair: sit forward and you look ill at ease; sit back and your feet don’t touch the ground. He makes small talk – the latest building development – and reflects on how pleasant it would be for me and my staff to have a purpose-built language unit to work in. I begin to lose my grip on the situation. Am I about to be offered a bribe of some sort? To do what?
Lunch arrives and I have not been served such a daintily presented sandwich lunch since the days when my husband, Andrew, inveigled me into joining the Board of Visitors at the prison. There, we used to get lunch in the Governor’s office: sandwiches - minus crusts – served on rose-patterned china on a tray with an embroidered cloth, carried in by a ‘trusty’ in a vest with tattoos down both arms. Today, we don’t have the tray cloth, and Janet, of course, doesn’t have the tattoos, but the sandwiches look sumptuous. We dive in and as he deals with the mayonnaise running down his chin, Norman Street says, ‘I try to get over to the SCR for lunch – it’s a good time to have a chat to folk – but I often end up eating at my desk, I’m afraid. You eat in the SCR often, do you?’
As my mouth is full of prawns at that moment, I waggle my head ambiguously.
‘I notice you’ve been having lunch with Detective Chief Inspector Scott. Friend of yours, is he?’
‘No,’ I reply blandly.
‘I thought perhaps -’
‘No.’
Oh go on, Gina. Tell him.
‘He’s a former student of mine, actually.’
‘Oh, I see.’ He gives an odd laugh. ‘I must say, you don’t look old enough. Ah, well, mm…’
He eats in silence, thinking hard, I would say, then he wipes his mouth, puts down his napkin and says, ‘The thing is, Gina, I was wondering if you and this chap Scott might be close.’
‘Close?’
‘Yes. I thought you might have some influence with him.’
‘Influence?’
‘I don’t want to interfere – seem to be uncooperative – but if you know him could you perhaps get him to steer clear?’
‘Steer clear?’
‘Yes. Of the Turks. Pursue other avenues.’
‘Other avenues?’
I can keep this up for hours.
‘Well he keeps saying they’re pursuing several avenues of enquiry. Can’t he pursue one of the others for a bit and lay off the Turks?’
‘I imagine DCI Scott will go down whichever avenue he thinks will lead most directly to Ekrem’s killer. We wouldn’t want him to do anything else, would we, Norman?’
I get another of those sharp looks.
‘Gina, I think we need to understand one another. The link we have with the Turkish government is crucial to our operation and to your department. Your job and those of your staff are highly sensitive to any downturn in overseas student numbers. At the moment, the Turkish government sends us an average of fifteen students a year. £150,000 in fees – just about the salary bill for your department. In our conversation this morning, the Minister of Education made it clear that unless their students are protected from police harassment, they will order them all home and will terminate their contract with us. So, what have you got to say now?’
I have so many things to say that it’s difficult to marshal them all at once. They may not come out in the perfect order, but I tick them off on my fingers.
‘Well, first I’d say that the ELTD pays for itself over and over again, though we don’t see the benefits of the money we make for the college, and it would be grossly unfair to penalise us if overseas student numbers took a temporary dip. And anyway you’d simply be killing the golden goose. Secondly, the Turkish government can’t take their students home if they’re part of a police investigation – they’d be stopped at Heathrow. Thirdly, if we lose the Turks, we’ll have to find some more students from somewhere else. Fourthly, David Scott is a good policeman who’s not going to throw up a murder case and risk his career just to keep us happy. And lastly – no, please let me finish – there is such a thing as justice and the rule of law, whatever the Turkish government may think. This is the English not the Turkish court -
‘What?’
I pick up the coffee pot.
‘Henry IV Part Two. The new king, Henry V, assures the court that he’s not going to be a despot and that under him England will be ruled fairly and justly. Turkey was a byword for corruption at the end of the sixteenth century. Can I give you some more coffee?’
He brushes the coffee aside, gets up and paces about, looking out of his picture window. His is the only office on the campus that still has a view.
‘I’m sorry you’re taking this attitude, Gina. I can only say that there will be repercussions, especially as I gather you’ve lost another student now.’
‘Well, I didn’t lose him personally. I mean, it wasn’t like letting a dog off its lead and then having it run off. He’s –‘
‘Do you really think this is something to be flippant about?’
I stand up, brushing down sandwich crumbs.
‘No. No I don’t. I take finding Laurent very seriously, as I do finding Ekrem’s killer. Which is why I intend to give DCI Scott every possible assistance. Thank you for lunch.’
And I’m out of there fast before I find myself offering my resignation.
12
WEDNESDAY: Investigation Day Seven
Scott was in the Incident Room long before anyone else. He’d not slept well: the need to give a clear message to the team had made his mind churn with confusion. He couldn’t get a proper foothold yet; every step so far had opened up alternative routes. In the darkest reaches of the night he’d got up and made some notes but now they looked like nonsense, the product of a waking dream. He found a fresh sheet on the flip chart and started to write. There were three aspects of Ekrem Yilmaz’s sordid life that might have got him killed and differentiating them would be a good start. There was the drug dealing, there was the informing and there was the sex. On the sex he had some good news from forensics, at least enough to make his theory of the ten-minute murder still a goer – and Clive Davies had thrown him a life-line too; on the drugs he’d got something and nothing from his interviews with the guys Denis had named; on the informing he had got somewhere, eventually, once fear of police interrogation began to bite. He ha
d interviewed Ahmet Kurtal and Asil Yurekli for a second time and then three other Turks who featured both in Yilmaz’s phone records and on de Longueville’s list of customers for Yilmaz’s drug supplies. These three were younger men, in the UK without wives or children. He couldn’t crack any of them on the drugs but two of them looked in a bad way: they’d lost their supplier, he reckoned, and hadn’t yet found an alternative. Which made it unlikely that they’d killed Yilmaz, of course – who would want to cut off the supply of golden eggs? On the informing, Yurekli had broken first, in a wail of outrage:
‘It is hard for us make life in UK. There is my wife very sad. English people have suspect us because we Muslims. She is being lonely and needing make friend. The children doing fine. Making friend, learning good English than me. But my wife speaking only little English. Then some mother from school inviting her to home, she very happy with this and making new friend – many friend, other mother. I was being proud to her, approving she go. All very good. Then there is Ekrem coming to me and saying this not good. These people not being good. One mother not marry to father. Not moral people. He must be informing to Education Department in Turkey unless she is stopping. Now she is being sad again and wanting take children, going back to Turkey. This is all being Ekrem’s fault. There is bad man.’
Armed with this, he had been able to tackle Kurtal and the stories had begun to pour out – not just of their own persecution but of others too. Often it was the wives who had been Yilmaz’s target: one had been prevented from joining the school PTA, another had been stopped from working in a charity shop, another threatened because she swam at the local pool. He felt the men’s fury, their damaged pride, their gut loathing of this man who spied on and threatened their stressed and lonely wives. Would it have been enough to drive them to murder? Two men, he thought, had done it, and here were two – friends and fellow sufferers, humiliated and harassed, desperate to protect their wives and hold their families together. Was it enough?
He had just finished writing up his flip chart headings when the team started trickling in. Paula Powell came first. She greeted him cheerfully. He had to say this for Powell: she might be a pain in the arse sometimes with her pc stuff on sexism, but she was cheerful with it. Nice smile. Pretty altogether. She looked around the room.
‘Dirty slobs,’ she said, picking up empty plastic coffee cups and slinging them in a bin.
‘I thought you’d expect them to clear up their own mess, not leave it to the only woman in the team, Paula.’
‘I’d be expecting forever, wouldn’t I, boss? They don’t even notice the mess. I’m the only one who minds it, so I get to clear it up.’
‘Is it like that at home too?’
‘I live on my own, and that’s the way I like it. I make my own mess and I clear it up. You won’t see me running round after a man.’
Boxer and Kerr caught her last words as they came into the room.
‘What’s that, Paula?’ asked Boxer. ‘You never run after a man? That’s not what I heard.’
He sniggered and Kerr joined in. Powell smiled sweetly.
‘Well hearing is all you’ll do, Steve. You won’t find me running after you. I never could stand a man with a beer belly.’
‘Whoo,’ carolled Kerr, shifting adroitly to the winning side. ‘You go girl!’
Scott cut them off as the rest of the team came into the room.
‘Enough, people! Keep this for playtime will you? This is a murder inquiry.’
As they settled, he went on,
‘First of all, what have we got on Laurent Amiel? Any phone activity? Any withdrawals on the credit card?’
Kerr answered. ‘Last calls on his mobile were made on Friday. Two short ones, both to other students.’
‘And?’
‘And we checked them out. Both say it was just social stuff.’
‘Nationality?’
‘One Turkish, one French.’
‘Check those numbers against Yilmaz’s calls, will you? And with de Longueville’s list of Yilmaz’s customers?’
‘Have done.’ Kerr flushed with self-satisfaction. ‘The Turk is on both. The French guy is on de Longueville’s list.’
‘So, we can assume he was after drugs. He’d lost his supplier and was checking to see if anyone had found a new one.’
‘Seems like he thought he’d found one. Friday afternoon he cleared his current account. Just over £400. But that’s all. No credit card activity.’
‘So what do we think the possibilities are?’
‘The new supplier didn’t like him.’
‘He bought crap stuff and it’s killed him’
‘We’ve checked all the hospitals, I assume?’
‘Yep. Several O.D.s but none French-speaking.’
‘All right. We’ll need to step up the search. Bring in the two he spoke to on Friday. Let’s see what we can get out of them.’
He turned to his first sheet on the flip chart.
‘Let’s move on to Yilmaz. Drug dealing, informing, sex. Any one of these may have got him killed. I’ll start with the sex.’
He rode the inevitable snigger without comment.
‘Yilmaz’s semen was found on the floor near where he died. Our first hypothesis had to be that he was killed by whoever he had sex with. However, the forensic results show that the semen had been there at least twenty-four hours when Yilmaz died, and the autopsy showed that he hadn’t had sex immediately before his death.’
‘So what was his spunk doing there then, sir?’
‘We don’t know, but we can assume that he was in the habit of spending time in that part of the library. The SOCOs are still in. going over the rest of the place.’
He paused and flipped to a page which was headed ‘Opportunity: Ten Minutes’.
‘The fact that Yilmaz didn’t have sex gives us a possible modus for the killers. Bear in mind, the duty porter says the library doors were all locked when he checked them at about ten thirty, and they were locked in the morning when the librarian came in. It doesn’t seem possible that anyone could have got hold of a key: they’re security protected and can’t be copied. But the girl on duty in the library that night, Yukiko Iwaki, cleared the students out and locked the main door just before ten, then spent ten minutes in the staff cloakroom getting ready for a night out. There’s the library office and a corridor between the library and the cloakroom. If she went to the toilet there’d have been four closed doors between her and whatever was going on in the library. She didn’t go back into the library – just went out of the staff exit and locked the door.’
‘So you think the killer got in and out through the staff door, sir?’
‘Killers plural, almost certainly. But I’ll get onto that in a minute. I think they may have been in the library already. Yilmaz was seen there earlier and they could have been there too. There are plenty of places to hide in among those stacks and the girl on duty wouldn’t have thought she needed to go round looking for people who might want to spend the night in there. But they would have had to go out by the staff door and that raises two problems. One, they’d have gone right past the cloakroom door and you’d expect Iwaki to hear them and two, the porter in the foyer would have seen them come out that way. On number one, Iwaki says she had water running some of the time and she was singing to herself – getting geared up for her evening; on two, Clive Davies, the porter, took a phone call at ten o’clock. It was a query from someone who’d booked rooms on the campus for a conference and he had to check things on the computer. It was quite complicated stuff about disabled access, he says, and he was fully occupied. He might not have noticed people leaving by the library door.’
There was a silence. Mark Tyler raised a hand.
‘That’s a lot of coincidence, isn’t it sir. How could they know the girl would conveniently go and shut herself in the cloakroom? And how would they know the porter would get a phone call?’
‘The phone call could have been a set-up,’ Paula Powell
suggested.
‘Yes, it could. Get the number and check it out will you? As for Iwaki, I’d guess the killers expected to have to deal with her – hit her over the head, tie her up, whatever. Maybe she was just lucky – in a hurry to get off, straight into the cloakroom, so they decided not to bother with her. She’s a tiny little girl – they could have dealt with her any time they needed to.’
‘It’s only guesswork at the moment though, isn’t it, sir?’
‘Yes, it is. It’s a best guess for the moment, but we don’t have anything better. All those locked doors cut down our options.’
‘You said killers plural, sir. Why’s that?’ Kerr asked.
‘We’ve tried rolling those stacks. They can’t be rolled together so fast that Yilmaz couldn’t have got out. He wasn’t drunk or drugged, so someone else kept him in there. The pathologist found cuts on his right arm and the right side of his face. Someone kept him in there at knife point.’
Powell chipped in again.
‘So if the phone call was a set-up, we’re talking about three people involved.’
‘Yes. But there’s no shortage of people who were glad to see the back of him. His informing activities had seriously riled the other Turks. He’d been spying on their wives and that really got to them. And then there’s his dealing.’
‘Can I say something on that, sir?’
‘Boxer?’
‘When I put Yilmaz through the computer, I found he’s got form. He was prosecuted for dealing in Turkey in 2003. Another guy was tried with him – a Russian, name of Mikhail Belenki. They were both acquitted. The judge ruled some of the evidence inadmissible. The thing is –‘ Boxer was almost stammering with excitement, ‘thing is, I checked out Valery Tarasov’s father – the guy who’s supposed to have been killed in a mafia revenge shooting. Anton Tarasov was a witness in a big drugs trial in Russia in 2006 – and one of the defendants was Mikhail Belenki.’
Scott let out a long whistle of surprise.
‘Were they convicted?’
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