‘They just pulled the last of the bodies out,’ he reported. ‘Ten in total. All drowned. The divers found them floating around in the mess. The hatch had been dogged shut with a piece of steel shoved in the mechanism.’
‘A great way to clean house – flood it,’ I said. ‘How’d they sink her?’
‘According to some expert that Karli and Iyaz have dug up, it could have been done any number of ways. Until the divers have completed their survey, the general consensus is that someone blew off the engine cooling ducts.’
‘Have you informed Turkish homicide we were looking into the Onur as part of the Portman investigation?’ Masters asked.
‘Yeah. They’re not happy about the connection, but I told them it wasn’t exactly our fault. I think they just want the whole show to catch a flight home to the States, us included.’
‘No survivors, no witnesses,’ I said. ‘A person or persons on board met Portman’s killers – maybe even handed them towels when they came back on board. Let’s at least see how much they paid the ship’s master for the pick-up and delivery service.’
‘I’ll get the master’s bank records pulled,’ said Cain.
‘Has anyone seen or heard from Portman’s manservant yet – this Adem Fedai?’ Masters enquired.
‘No. And while I’m on the subject of bank accounts, Fedai’s hasn’t been touched. I checked yesterday. I’m starting to think that more than likely he’s out there somewhere,’ Cain said, gesturing at the rusting expanse of the port and the cold grey sea beyond it, ‘dusting Davy Jones’s locker.’
‘I’d like to take the afternoon off, if that’s okay with you,’ said Masters as we walked back towards Emir, who, as usual, was waving at us like he was stranded on a rooftop and we were a couple of rescue choppers.
‘Again. To do . . . what?’
‘It’s personal,’ she replied.
‘We don’t have any more time for personal crap, Anna.’
‘And I don’t know why I even asked, Vin. I don’t need your okay and you know it.’
I did know it, but I also knew a lot of people were dying well before they were supposed to and that Masters and I were the best chance any future victims had of not becoming them. Or, I allowed myself to admit, was there another reason I didn’t want to let her go?
Masters told Emir to take us back to the Hotel Charisma. Half an hour later, I watched her step out of the car and into the arms of that other reason – Colonel Wad – who was waiting for her in the foyer.
Emir drove off slow. I stopped him around the corner, got out of the car, and gave him the rest of the month off. He wasn’t happy about it, so I told him to take it up with Special Agent Masters. I needed to walk, get a few things straight. I had paperwork to write up – the happenings down at Incirlik and a progress report on the case – but I put it all off. I wanted some time to consider how I felt about Anna ending up with someone other than me. I also had a new thought on this hit-squad theory, and walking, I believed, might help me work it all through.
I walked for thirty-five minutes, past the Blue Mosque, the Aya Sophia, down the hill, past two more mosques, across the bridge and up the other side. At least, that’s the route I must have walked. There was no other way I could have taken to end up outside Doctor Merkit’s house. But that’s exactly where I found myself when I finally looked up from the rolling patch of sidewalk in front of my feet.
I could have walked up the steps to the front door, could have rung the bell, could have discussed the latest theories on the case with her, could have ended up naked for some skin-on-skin action . . . But instead, I hailed a cab and went to the scene of the original crime – Colonel Portman’s place in Bebek.
Investigating crime can have the effect of altering the investigator’s perspective on time. A week can compress itself into a space that feels like a day, while a day can stretch on and feel like a week. So it was that I had to think about how many days or weeks had passed since Masters and I had taken a look around the Portman place. I believed it was four days ago, but I could have been wrong. It could also have been months. But then I saw the familiar green van belonging to the cleaners parked out front, which swung the odds in favour of days.
They should have finished the clean-up job well and truly by now. Perhaps business was slow in Istanbul at the moment and they were squeezing the job dry. The police still had a guard on the place, but only one uniform now and not a guy I recognised. The portable bulletproof shields were also gone but the uniform was still conspicuously armed, an FN FAL rifle slung over his shoulder, the stock and bluing worn enough for it to have been a family heirloom.
I took the handful of steps to the front door and showed the guard my shield. He smiled in return, showing me a set of teeth held in place by wire thick enough to hang a coat on. He opened the door. I went in and heard the door close behind me.
The hallway was still dark, but the heating had been turned on and the place felt almost cosy. The smell of fresh paint was in the air, reminding me that Portman’s blood had been impossible to clean off, a realisation that had the effect of taking that cosy feeling away. I noticed an antique wood table by the front door, which wasn’t there the first time I visited the place. A large and expensive ornate glass vase sat on it, filled with imported irises and poppies, the leasing agents doing what they could to fill the place with cheer for any prospects they could muster.
I went for a lap around the ground floor to get my bearings. The door through which the courtyard and drain were accessed had a new lock fitted. The key was in the lock. The smashed windowpane had also been replaced and the fingerprint dust removed. I unlocked the door, opened it, and took the steps down to the courtyard. It was cold and damp, the area in shadow. I walked to the drain cover and looked down at it, hoping some new insight would pop. It didn’t. A couple of birds circled overhead, keening, disappointed. Perhaps because the waterbed was dry.
I walked back towards the door but something crunched underfoot. I ignored it and it crunched again. Lifting up my boot, I saw that a wedge of glass was caught between the blocks of rubber. I pulled it out. It was about the right thickness – a sliver from the broken windowpane. My boot must have picked it up from a gap between the flagstones. What’s it doing all the way over here? I wondered. I flicked it at the courtyard wall and it landed in a corner.
I then went back inside the house, climbed the steps to the first storey and kept going up to the second. Halfway up the stairs one of the women I’d met when Masters and I had inspected this place – the one who’d dissolved my T-shirt with her miracle cleaning fluid – appeared on the top step. She was carrying a bucket, a mop, a couple of brooms and a plastic trash bag. She said hello and followed up with a little Turkish, all delivered in a friendly manner, as we passed each other mid-flight. I gathered her job here was finished at last, and that she was off to freshly bloodied pastures.
I reached the top floor and made my way to where Portman met his end. I’d read the forensic report on the crime scene so many times it was tattooed on my brain. I walked into the smallish room with the gilt chair upholstered in red velvet; it wasn’t quite in the same position it had previously occupied, but it was no longer upended, the claw feet pressing into the Turkish rug. Beneath the chair and rug, I knew, was the removable tile in the carpet and, beneath that, the floor safe, the one Portman had had secretly installed.
There was a small antique table in front of the chair. The room smelt of fresh paint and the chemicals released by new carpet. The oriental faces that hung on the wall gazed out inscrutably, giving away nothing of the horror they’d witnessed here a week ago.
I had no conscious reason for returning to Portman’s house. The Turkish forensic team had been as thorough as any I’d worked with in the past. They’d done a great job, missed nothing that I could point to, and yet I had a feeling that something had to have slipped through our collective fingers.
I walked into the adjoining room, the one with the wall safe.
I pulled back the painting with the guys in turbans bringing down the elephant. The original door had been destroyed in the explosion. This one was new, the combination dial gleaming with black and silver enamel, the handle a scratch-free matt black. I pulled on it and the door swung open. There was nothing inside, as expected. I closed it up, replaced the painting and wandered back to where the Air Attaché had been sitting on his last night on earth.
I shifted the chair and then the table, moving them back into their original positions, the ones they’d been in on that bloody night. Then I stood back and regarded the chair. Portman had been sitting right here when a pad doused in chloroform had been pressed over his mouth and nose. Would he have seen the faces of his killers before he’d gone under, the chemical searing away the flesh in the back of his nose and throat?
I sat in the chair and tried to imagine the way it had gone down. We knew the killers had been wearing coveralls and drysuits. They would also have been wearing diving-style facemasks. But were those masks pulled over their faces the entire time, or just while they cut Portman up, to ensure that his blood didn’t splatter into their eyes?
I glanced behind the chair to the set of wide double doors on the far side of the larger adjoining room. It made sense that the killers would have crept up behind their victim. The murder took place sometime after 2 am – maybe Portman was asleep or resting, his head already tilted back. I relaxed, attempted to get comfortable in the chair. I put my head back and looked up at the ceiling, allowing my eyes to follow the maze of intricate painted patterns, and tried to think what that elusive something we’d missed might be . . . Did it have anything to do with the two safes? Or the use of chloroform? My thoughts drifted to the moment when the killers appeared in Portman’s view – hoods over their heads, goggled up like bugs, one of them brandishing a jigsaw, perhaps? How long had the Attaché’s terror lasted before he’d slipped away on the chemical carpet ride?
The room was quiet and still, the only sound my own breathing. The top of the chair had a hard wooden knob that dug into the back of my skull, and the cushion was firm. Finding a comfortable position in this rack wasn’t easy. That told me it was unlikely that Portman had sat down to rest – not in this chair. The forensic report stated that at the time of his murder, he’d been fully dressed, wearing suit pants, leather shoes, a white shirt and a loosened tie. The realisation made me sit upright.
There was no sound system in the room, no books on shelves, no view – nothing. And, as I was experiencing first-hand, this chair was no place to come to relax. So the question I was suddenly asking myself was: what was the Attaché doing when he was sitting in this chair at the time he was killed? Who just sits in a chair and does nothing, anyway? Was he working through a crossword? Picking his nose? What? Something had to have been occupying the guy’s time. Was he reviewing notes? Crafting correspondence? Portman might well have been doing one, some or all of these activities, or something else entirely. Only, according to the forensic report, there was nothing of that nature (or any nature) found with the guy’s remains. It could therefore be interpreted that Colonel Portman had just been sitting in this gilt chair, twiddling his thumbs, waiting to be made into chop suey. If I didn’t believe that, which I didn’t, it meant a person or persons – possibly the killers, but also possibly someone else entirely – had removed articles from the crime scene. If so, what? And who? Maybe the elusive, or equally possibly very dead, Adem Fedai?
I got out of the chair, tipped it back the way the Turkish police had found it and rolled away the rug. The carpet tile was in place. I removed it and the floor safe was revealed, its door ajar. I opened it: empty. I had no idea what I might be looking for. But having no idea when I returned here to Portman’s place had revealed something, even if only in the way of insight, so maybe I could mine a little more of that luck.
I closed the safe, replaced the square and the rug, and sat the chair back on its feet. The carpet was new and freshly nailed into the floor at the skirting boards. A small antique cabinet was placed hard up against one wall. I opened the doors to the cabinet – two shelves on each side, all empty. I leaned it back so that I could look under, behind and beneath it. There was wicker bracing between the legs, which could double as a kind of shelf. Again, empty.
What had I been thinking? Forensics wouldn’t have missed anything.
I stood up, hands on hips. The picture of a plastic trash bag came to mind . . . Where had I seen it? And what was the significance? And then it slapped me. Goddamn it – the cleaners!
I ran to the other side of the house, where I knew I’d get a view down into the street. The woman was talking to the uniform, bag and bucket in hand, but disengaging, saying goodbye, her other hand on the door handle of the van. I called out, but she didn’t hear. I tried opening the window, but it had been painted shut. I ran for the staircase and took the steps three and four at a time, all the way down.
I hit the front door, fumbled with the lock, pushed it open and jumped past the uniform and onto the sidewalk. Just in time to see the back of the van as it disappeared around a corner, a hundred yards down the road, in a cloud of exhaust smoke. ‘Damn it!’ I swore, maybe a little too loud.
The uniform frowned. I gave him a wave and fumbled for my cell.
‘Captain Cain,’ said the voice down the line.
‘It’s Cooper,’ I said.
‘Hey, Cooper, what’s –’
‘I’m over at Portman’s place, Rodney. Can you give me a number for the cleaners here?’
‘Yep, what’s the problem?
‘No problem – I just passed one of them on the way out of here. She was carrying a plastic trash bag. I want to know what she was taking out.’
‘Okay. Call you back soonest.’
I rang off and stood there on the roadside, hoping for a cab to happen along so that I could give chase, but the street was empty of traffic. An icy windblast blew a handful of grit into my eyes. I took a seat on the front steps and waited. A minute later, my cell rang.
‘It’s Cain. Okay, I got hold of the woman from the cleaning company. She’s on her way back to you at the house.’
‘You tell her why I wanted to see her?’
‘No.’
‘Thanks, Rodney,’ I said, just as her van ambled around the corner down the far end of the street. ‘Can you hold?’ I asked Cain. ‘I might need your language skills.’
‘Sure,’ came the reply.
I put the phone on speaker as the van pulled up. The woman opened the door and wheezed as she got out.
‘Hi,’ I said.
She replied in Turkish.
‘What’d she say?’ I asked Cain.
‘You don’t want to know.’
I could tell the woman wasn’t happy. Plus, she had a way with chemical agents that I wasn’t prepared to tangle with a second time.
‘Tell her I want to have a look inside the trash she just removed from Portman’s place.’
‘Okay,’ he said before again breaking into Turkish.
The woman threw her hands up and spoke to someone above, and then turned and lumbered over to the van’s sliding door.
Digging into a pocket, she fished out a pair of surgical gloves and handed them to me. She then tipped the contents of the orange garbage bag out onto the floor of the van. I picked through the heap with a bent wire coat hanger.
‘What’s going on?’ Cain enquired, hearing a bunch of random sounds punctuated with silence.
‘Just practising for when my retirement benefits run out.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind . . . So, in the bag we’ve got some half-eaten tomatoes, a bunch of soiled rags, five or so empty water bottles, a couple of Mars Bar wrappers, and what looks like – yeah, pages from a local newspaper used to clean the windows.’
‘So, altogether nothing much,’ he summed up.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I missed lunch and those tomatoes look pretty appealing.’ I prised open the balls of newsprint, being
thorough. Nothing.
The woman’s arms were folded and her face looked like a pair of old sneakers. She said something.
‘She wants to go,’ Cain translated.
‘Okay. Can you thank her for me? Tell her I think she has a camel’s eyelashes or something – something nice.’ I smiled at her, nodding.
Cain took over. The woman grunted, turned her back and heaved a butt cheek back onto the driver’s seat. A few moments later she drove off, the exhaust blowing smoke like a good Turkish vehicle should.
I turned and almost collided with an old guy wearing an official but well-worn uniform. He pushed past. He had the determined walk of someone who did a lot of it all day every day. The old man then stepped up to the front door of Portman’s place, where the police officer raised a cordial finger in his direction like the two were chums. Next, the old-timer reached into the faded cloth sack hanging over his shoulder, pulled out a couple of envelopes and pushed them through the slot in the door. He then trudged back down the steps, off to the next house down the street.
I pulled out my cell again and hit the redial button.
‘Captain Cain.’
‘Rodney, did you have Portman’s mail rerouted to the consulate-general as a matter of procedure?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, why?’
‘Never mind,’ I said, ending the call.
I pocketed the cell and climbed the front steps. The uniform opened the door for me again and I went back inside. Two envelopes lay on the tassels fringing the end of the Turkish rug that ran the length of the hallway. I bent down and picked them up, intrigued. Both were addressed to the leasing agent – which made sense. I wondered whether other letters had been delivered, but I couldn’t see any. Maybe the leasing agent had already collected them. There was nothing on the side table, and nothing in either drawer. I looked behind the vase and discovered a stack of mail. All bills. Except for one. Prickles went up my spine and played with the hair on the back of my neck.
In neat handwriting, the letter had been addressed to a ‘Sultan Mehmet II’ at 827 Tenth Avenue, West 55th Street, New York, NY 10019. Sultan Mehmet II. The name was familiar . . . Wasn’t he the guy in Burnbaum’s painting standing on a mountain of body parts?
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