Death by Design

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Tariq was in the final stages of tuberculosis,’ the doctor said. ‘That’s why we need to find everyone he came into contact with. I will need to X-ray your chest and do blood and skin tests. Tuberculosis is a notifiable disease. We have to protect the public.’

  The old man smiled. ‘I have no problem with your tests, doctor,’ he said. ‘If I could find the Afghans for you I would but . . .’ He shrugged. ‘You know, in my life I have known various people who make fake goods for their living. But I have never ever come across any who do that and are also involved in jihad. It’s a very strange combination, don’t you think?’

  The knock on the door burst into İkmen’s dream as someone hammering on the entrance to his apartment back in İstanbul. In his dream it was his son Bekir, back from the dead, shot and bleeding. In reality it was Mr Yigit.

  ‘Mr Ertegrul,’ he said. ‘You must get up!’

  ‘Get up?’

  İkmen looked at the small travel clock he kept beside his bed and saw that it was 2 a.m.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Mr Ertegrul,’ Yigit said excitedly, ‘I have secured you a job interview! That stupid Mr Harrison was wrong and I was right. Of course Mr Ülker would want to see you for a job at his factory! He needs security guards! You are a security guard. Get your clothes on and come now.’

  İkmen sat up and blinked at the harsh light that Yigit had let in from the corridor. ‘Now?’

  ‘Of course now!’ Yigit replied. ‘You must work at night. It is night now! Come along, Mr Ülker is waiting!’

  Ten minutes later İkmen found himself inside an old Ford Escort with Yigit leaning heavily across the steering wheel and squinting so that he could see the road ahead. It was neither raining nor snowing and so İkmen could only conclude that Yigit’s eyesight was not all that it could be. It didn’t take them long to get to some scrubby wasteland that was just beyond a railway station called Hackney Wick. The area, which was criss-crossed by dirt tracks and pot-holed roads, was semi-derelict. There were buildings everywhere but most of them were little more than skeletons and those that were not were generally leaning at crazy and unsafe angles. This was not the shining landscape of Canary Wharf or the City. No, this was like the old London of the seventies that he had known when he was young. Dark and dirty, reeking of poverty and despair. And not just figuratively either. İkmen wrinkled up his nose and said, ‘What on earth is that smell?’

  ‘Oh, many apologies,’ Yigit said. ‘That, Mr Ertegrul, is a farm. A pig farm, I am afraid. But it is a way from here, over the other side. I promise you faithfully you will never so much as have to look at the filthy animals. No.’

  ‘Right. OK.’ It was faintly touching the way that Mr Yigit was so concerned for İkmen and any possible contact between himself and forbidden pigs. Looking out for his soul. İkmen smiled. But then his landlord changed tack and was much more upbeat.

  ‘This area is where we will have the Olympics in a few years’ time,’ Yigit said as he pulled up beside a very long, very scruffy-looking wooden building. ‘An Olympic village! I think it will be most spectacular.’

  Between his own tiredness and the down-at-heel hopelessness of wherever they were, İkmen couldn’t imagine how anyone could clear the place up, much less build an Olympic village on the site. Outside the wooden building İkmen could see two men. One of them was clearly the Englishman he had seen with Yigit earlier, Harrison. The other was shorter and darker, seemingly rather better dressed, and İkmen recognised him immediately. It was Ahmet Ülker. Before either of them got out of the car, Yigit leaned across to İkmen and said, ‘Now look, brother, that is Mr Ülker there. If he does give you the job you will owe me two hundred and fifty pounds. That’s one hundred and fifty Turkish lire. Job-finder’s fee. But Mr Ülker is a good employer. You will make good money. And don’t worry, I won’t take my fee until you have been paid.’ He smiled.

  They got out of the car and walked over to the two men. İkmen could see light coming through the various cracks in the wooden boards the building was made of. There was noise, too, the sound of many industrial sewing machines. The sound that had greeted him just before he had broken into the illegal factory in Tarlabaşı.

  ‘Mr Ertegrul?’ That spiky haircut Ahmet Ülker had didn’t look any better now than it had done in the lobby of the Rize.

  ‘Yes.’

  Ülker didn’t smile which was probably just as well. Doughy faces like Ülker’s did not, İkmen had always felt, suit levity very well.

  Ülker pointed at the building behind him. ‘This is one of my businesses,’ he said in English. ‘The other one is behind it.’

  ‘Eh?’

  İkmen heard the sound of a deep sigh, which came from Mr Harrison. ‘Ahmet, I told you he doesn’t speak any English!’ he said angrily. ‘God Almighty, this is such a waste of fucking time!’

  ‘Oh, but Mr Ülker, my friend Mr Ertegrul is very willing to work and . . .’ Mr Yigit looked at İkmen and said in Turkish, ‘You will learn English, won’t you, Mr Ertegrul?’

  ‘As soon as I am able,’ İkmen said. ‘Yes.’

  Ahmet Ülker frowned. ‘This job doesn’t just involve guarding this place,’ he said in Turkish now. ‘You have to take deliveries and you have to make sure that the workers inside do their shifts and don’t call attention to themselves. In other words, you have to keep them all inside.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘With no English?’

  ‘He can! He can!’ Mr Yigit said on İkmen’s behalf. ‘Mr Ülker, almost none of the people who work for you speak English!’

  ‘In the factory that doesn’t matter,’ Ülker said, ‘but out here—’

  ‘But Mr Ülker, the other man that you have, he can speak English, can’t he?’

  ‘Mustafa? Yes,’ Ülker said. ‘I have taken him on to guard the other building. But—’

  ‘Mr Ülker, you said that you would give my friend here a try,’ Yigit said. ‘Maybe when deliveries come, Mr Ertegrul can ask Mustafa to help him with that.’

  Ülker frowned.

  ‘It’s a fucking ridiculous idea!’ Harrison persisted. ‘It’ll be like employing a retard!’

  For a moment no one said anything. But then Yigit, who had been thinking rather rapidly about how he might save his precious £250, said in English, ‘Mr Ülker, there can I think be benefit to Mr Ertegrul no speaking English.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘What fucking shit are you talking now, Yigit?’ Harrison said.

  ‘All suppliers speak only English,’ Yigit said. ‘Everyone speak English! You do not know Mr Ertegrul, I do not know him either. He is uncle to Ayşe at the beauty shop, but who is she? He say he is guard in İstanbul. But . . .’ Yigit shrugged. ‘Try him, Mr Ülker. All I say. Then get rid of him if he no good. He see things but he understand nothing. He tell nobody nothing. You say whatever you want in front of him.’

  Again, no one spoke. Ülker put his fingers up to his lips while he regarded İkmen closely. For his part, İkmen lowered his eyes. Maybe he feared that Ülker would see in them the light of comprehension and intelligence. The man from Diyarbakır wanted a thick, mindless peasant with no education. That was what İkmen hoped he was giving him.

  ‘All right,’ he said after a while. Then he said it again in Turkish and added, to İkmen, ‘I will give you a try.’

  ‘Christ!’ Derek Harrison pulled Ülker towards him and hissed, ‘What the fuck will our partners—’

  ‘Derek, go and get Mustafa,’ Ülker interrupted angrily. ‘He can show this man the ropes.’

  ‘Ahmet!’ Harrison tugged on Ülker’s arm once more.

  ‘Just do it!’ Ülker shrieked. Reluctantly, Harrison left. Then Ülker looked at İkmen again and said, ‘Let me down, try to cheat me or fail in your job in any way and I’ll break your legs. Understand?’

  İkmen, his eyes still lowered, said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’ll pay you two pounds an hour for a twelve-hour shift,’ Ülker said.
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  ‘Two pounds an hour is twenty-four pounds for just one night’s work, that is very good money,’ Yigit told İkmen. ‘You will very soon have paid me back my two hundred and fifty. It will go in a heartbeat, Mr Ertegrul.’

  Ülker looked sourly at Yigit and said, ‘That and whatever you owe to whoever trafficked you into this country will mean you’ll be able to send maybe five pounds home every week. Not that that is any of my concern.’

  İkmen didn’t answer. Ülker said, ‘Your niece told Mr Yigit you came in from Germany.’

  ‘Yes, sir. An old Jewish man, he—’

  ‘Yes, I know of an old Jewish man in Germany,’ Ülker said. ‘Ah well.’

  He was well-informed. But then he would have to be, given what he did for a living, given what had just happened to his previous two guards. Obviously Wolfgang back in Berlin passed some sort of test.

  Harrison returned with a tall, thick-set young man who looked like a particularly vicious grease wrestler.

  ‘This is Mustafa,’ Yigit told İkmen. ‘He will look after you.’

  Ayşe Kudu woke up to find a very gratifying message on her phone from Çetin İkmen. Ahmet Ülker was apparently trying him out for a job as a security guard at one of his factories. He had been recommended by Mr Yigit. This, together with the news that Ülker could apparently be involved with some other people, namely business partners, was progress. She would have to ask İkmen just how much Yigit had charged him for his ‘services’ as a fixer, she thought with a smile. A second message told her she should call her ‘Father’, in other words Scotland Yard. News from that quarter was sobering. Apparently the police in İstanbul had discovered that someone had been grooming Tariq, the boy who had blown himself up at Ahmet Ülker’s Tarlabaşı factory, to be a suicide bomber in London. But apparently Tariq had had doubts; in reality he didn’t want to kill anyone.

  ‘Whether or not the attempt to radicalise the boy involved Ülker himself, we know that people connected to him are radicalising kids,’ Riley said. ‘Tariq failed. But if they really want to bomb London, a little setback like this won’t stop them.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell your Uncle Çetin to keep his ear to the ground when you see him, won’t you?’ Riley said.

  Ayşe said that she would. Shortly afterwards she received another text from İkmen which said, ‘Ülker has a man called Derek Harrison. Please check.’

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  Derek Harrison knew all about Maxine Ülker and that barking mad Persian of hers. As Ahmet’s assistant he sometimes had to go up to his house on The Bishops Avenue to pick stuff up his boss couldn’t be bothered to get for himself. The lazy bastard was half Derek’s age, but then that was how it was, how it had been for a very long time.

  About a year back he’d caught them. In one of the many spare bedrooms. Maxine had been on top, eyes closed, licking her lips as she moved up and down on the Iranian’s cock. Later, Derek had stuck around, he was good at that, he’d watched her suck him off, and the Persian had talked dirty to her as she did it. So much for Ali Reza’s supposed piety. Obviously sinning for him did not include shafting his boss’s wife or having her give him a blow job. Not that Derek gave a shit.

  Ahmet Ülker was just one in a long line of nasty and unscrupulous employers he’d had since the late seventies. Unskilled and with a whole host of health problems that were not his fault, Derek Harrison had been forced to seek such employers, forced to become the kind of thing that tortures, grasses and maims. No firm with any standards wanted people like him. Derek had only one foot, he was diabetic and his ticker was more than a little dicky. The government said that people with all sorts of disabilities could get and were entitled to jobs, just like everyone else. But in practice that didn’t happen, certainly not in the line of work Derek had wanted to do. They didn’t let you drive a train with a dodgy heart and only one foot. And because he didn’t want to become some sort of poof behind an office desk or a grunt on a building site, Derek had become an enforcer for people like Ahmet. He was bitter, and pulling out people’s fingernails or burning them with cigarettes didn’t cause him stress. His heart didn’t even race when he did things like that. What did make his heart race was when he considered what he had wanted to be and why he hadn’t been able to do it. That was what stopped him shopping Maxine and Ali Reza to his employer. Ahmet was putting things in hand to right the wrong that had been done to Derek all those years ago. Ahmet was doing it for his own reasons, to increase his standing with people he was in the process of getting into partnership with, but Derek was glad. Derek also knew that what his boss didn’t need as he brought his wonderful, terrible plan to fruition was the distraction of an unfaithful wife and the bother of having to kill and then dispose of some bloody mad Iranian. The Iranian wouldn’t be around for much longer anyway, not if everything went to plan.

  ‘It isn’t a lot to show for a life, even a short one like Tariq’s,’ Abdurrahman Iqbal said as he showed Süleyman the few poor things the boy had possessed. They were back at the house opposite the Taksim Hospital, now cordoned off by police tape and guarded by two constables. Abdurrahman had had his blood and skin tests for tuberculosis, all that remained was the X-ray, which Dr Sarkissian had arranged to take place later at the hospital.

  Süleyman looked down at the pathetic bedroll, the few tattered jumpers and the thick leather satchel. This latter item he picked up and opened. ‘So, Mr Iqbal,’ he said, ‘why were you on your way to London? Do you have family there?’

  The old man sighed. ‘I don’t have family anywhere,’ he said.

  ‘Then . . .’

  ‘Inspector, I was born in a country that is on hostile terms with the country that I live in now. I am an Indian. I was born in Calcutta, my first language is not Urdu as in Pakistan, but Hindi as in India. I speak Hindi first, English second and Urdu third.’

  Süleyman was frowning as he looked through the satchel. ‘So you feel rootless.’

  ‘Yes. I cannot go back to India because Pakistan and India do not enjoy good relations. I would not be welcome there. But many years ago, before partition, I worked as a driver to an English army captain. He was called Captain Jackson and he said to me that if I was ever in England I should regard his home as my home. I do not feel comfortable in my country of Pakistan any more and so it is my very sincere wish to visit Captain Jackson in England and stay with him.’

  Süleyman found a pen, some paper tissues, an Afghan passport and a notebook in the bag. ‘So why didn’t you just visit this captain as a tourist?’ he asked the old man.

  ‘Because I am not a tourist!’ Abdurrahman said. ‘I want to stay in England.’

  At first Süleyman opened the notebook the wrong way round. Then he remembered that Afghans wrote using the Arabic script and so read from right to left. He turned the book round. At the top of every page were some printed characters he thought just might be dates. ‘Mr Iqbal,’ he said, ‘can you tell me anything about this book, please?’

  He handed it over to the old man who took a pair of spectacles out of his pocket, put them on and then looked at the item.

  ‘His diary,’ he said. ‘Tariq’s.’

  ‘You saw him write in it?’

  ‘Yes, although I can’t understand it, if that is what you were hoping. The Afghans speak Dari. I do not. Or rather I can read the letters while not understanding the words, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘So you cannot tell which month is which or—’

  ‘Oh, I know that this word here is equivalent to this month, April, this year,’ the old man said as he pointed to a selection of marks at the top of one of the pages. Only since the coming of Atatürk’s Republic back in the 1920s had Turks been using the Latin alphabet. Before that people like Süleyman would have been familiar with Arabic characters. But so thoroughly had the new alphabet taken hold in the country that only the very old and Ottoman scholars could still decipher Arabic script in the twenty-first century.

 
‘Mmm. We will have to get it translated,’ Süleyman said and he held his hand out to take the book back.

  But Abdurrahman didn’t give it back immediately. ‘I am just wondering,’ he said, ‘whether he wrote down any details about the journey to London his employers had promised him.’

  He flicked through the pages rather heavy-handedly. Süleyman frowned. ‘Yes, but if—’

  ‘Ah, here is something,’ the old man said. ‘May the third.’

  ‘That is in five days’ time.’

  The old man squinted at the page. ‘The problem with Dari, and with Arabic and Urdu for that matter, is that one must know the context. This says either Merk or Mark and then the other word could be Lene or Lana or Lena. I don’t know. But there is something here in your Latin script.’

  Süleyman leaned over his shoulder. ‘EC3?’

  ‘Yes.’ The old man looked grave now. ‘My friend Captain Jackson, the address I have for him from nineteen forty-seven is WC2. It means west city two. There are also east city codes. I think that EC3 is a district of London.’

  When Çetin İkmen returned to the Rize after half a night over at Hackney Wick, Mr Yigit was the first person to ask him how it went.

  ‘Mr Ülker has not yet offered me the job,’ İkmen said as the pansiyon owner barrelled towards him, his hands outstretched in anticipation.

  In fact neither Ülker nor Harrison had stuck around long after İkmen had been given over into the care of the thuggish Mustafa. Rough and boorish, this creature had told him all about ‘the ropes’, which seemed to consist solely of walking around the factory all night long and beating any people inside who tried to get out. Deliveries of unspecified things would happen from time to time and İkmen would be required to carry goods into the factories. But he wouldn’t be able to talk to any of those making the deliveries and if he saw any police he was to call Mustafa immediately. He’d been given a mobile phone just for this purpose. It was similar to the one the police had given him.