Dead of Night

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals; Private Investigators

Synopsis

Inner city murder crosses two continents.

Inspectors Cetin Ikmen and Mehmet Suleyman from Istanbul are sent to a policing conference in Detroit, but little can prepare them for the corruption that lies at its heart. When Ezekial Goins, an elderly man of Turkish descent approaches them to crack the long-unsolved murder of his son, a quiet trip takes a far more sinister turn. As they delve deeper into the case, the pair find themselves immersed in a terrifying world of inter-gang drug war and racial prejudice that puts them in mortal danger, and forces Ikmen to confront some demons of his own...

Release date: January 5, 2012

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 320

Sample

1 December 1978 – Detroit, Michigan

His breath came in short, spiky gasps as his face was pushed hard into the unyielding brickwork in front of him. There was
a gun jammed against the side of his head. It was wielded by the same unknown person who had twisted his arm up his back so
that his hand nearly touched his head. He was afraid, but also angry. In spite of not being able to breathe properly, he yelled,
‘You fucking Purple motherfucker!’


But there was no reply, none of the usual murmurs of approval from the other gang members that generally accompanied hits
of this kind. Was there anyone else with whoever had grabbed him? He began to feel the blood drain from his face as he considered
the possibility that his assailant was alone. Apart from the shame he felt at being somehow disabled by possibly just one
person, he also knew what this could mean on another level. Every so often kids like him just got taken. Generally it was
by some sort of wacko freak who wanted to have sex with them – or with their body after they were dead. He’d seen that movie
The Hills Have Eyes; he knew what went on.


‘Listen, man, I ain’t gonna let you have my butt!’ he said, and then instantly regretted it. His ma always said his mouth
was way too big for his head. The pressure on his arm and then from the gun against his temple increased. Either he’d hit
on the truth, or he’d just enraged his attacker still further. After all, if he wasn’t homosexual, he had just insulted him. Then it got worse. ‘But if you gonna rob me, then that’s cool,’ he blurted. ‘Or . . . no, it ain’t cool,
but . . .’


But he didn’t want to be robbed either! Again, he panicked.

‘Not that I’m sayin’ you’re a faggot or nothing, man,’ he said. ‘Maybe you just want my stuff. I dunno!’ Then his voice rose
in terror and he yelled, ‘Just tell me what you do want, you crazy freak!’


There was snow on the ground underneath his feet. He looked down at it, knowing with a certainty that made his head dizzy
that his blood and brains were going to colour its city greyness red. He began to shiver. The gunman, his weapon pointed at
his head, pulled the muzzle back just ever so slightly. ‘Why are you going to kill me, man?’ the boy cried plaintively. ‘I
ain’t nothing special. What I ever do to you?’


But he never got an answer to that or any other question. His assailant pulled the trigger at just short of point-blank range,
and as the boy himself had imagined in the last moments of his life, his blood and brains turned the Detroit winter snow red.


27 November 2009 – İstanbul, Turkey


Inspector Çetin İkmen’s office was cold. The police station heating system had developed a fault, and so everyone was having
to make do with tiny, weak electric heaters. Also İkmen was not actually in his office, which always made it, so his sergeant
Ayşe Farsakoğlu believed, even more dreary and cheerless.


She leaned towards the tiny one-bar heater and thought about how badly her week without her boss was starting. So far, since
İkmen and another inspector, Mehmet Süleyman, had left to go to a policing conference abroad, first the computer system had
thrown a tantrum, and then the heating had broken down. It was almost as if the fabric of the building was protesting at their
absence. Ayşe herself always felt lost without İkmen, and whenever Süleyman was out of town, she worried. Some years before,
she’d had a brief affair with the handsome, urbane Mehmet. She still, in spite of his so far two marriages as well as numerous
affairs and liaisons, had feelings for him. Where the two officers had gone, representing the entire Turkish police force,
was a very long way away, to a place apparently even colder than İstanbul. As she leaned still further in towards the fire,
Ayşe found such an idea almost beyond belief. Then a knock at the door made her look up. ‘Come in.’


The door opened to reveal a slightly overweight dark man in his late forties.

‘Sergeant Melik.’

İzzet Melik was Mehmet Süleyman’s sergeant, and like Ayşe Farsakoğlu, he was not finding the absence of his boss or the bitterly
cold November wind easy to deal with. He was also, Ayşe noticed, carrying a paper bag that appeared to be steaming. He held
it up so that she could see it. ‘Börek,’ he said, announcing the presence of hot, savoury Turkish pastries. ‘If the heating’s
going to be down for a while, we need to eat properly and keep warm.’


Ayşe smiled. İzzet, in spite of his tough, macho-man exterior, was a kind and rather cultured soul who had held a romantic
torch for her, in silence, for years.


‘That’s a very nice thought,’ she said.

He took a tissue out of his pocket and then picked a triangular pastry out of the bag and wrapped it up for her. ‘Mind if
I join you, Sergeant Farsakoğlu?’


He was always so careful to be proper and respectful with her. As she looked at him, in spite of his heaviness and lack of
physical grace, Ayşe felt herself warm to him. Like her boss, Çetin İkmen, İzzet Melik was a ‘good’ man. What you saw was,
generally, what you got. No subterfuge, no hidden agendas, none of the fascinating mercurial scariness that could surface
in Mehmet Süleyman from time to time. She pointed to the battered chair behind İkmen’s desk and said, ‘Bring that over.’


He smiled. For a while they both sat in companionable silence, eating their börek, İzzet pulling his coat in tight around
his shoulders. Then Ayşe said, ‘So this conference our bosses have gone to . . .’


‘Policing in Changing Urban Environments,’ İzzet said, quoting the conference title verbatim.


‘What’s it . . .’

‘About?’ He shrugged. ‘I think it’s about gangs and drugs and migration and how those things, and other factors, affect life
in a modern city.’


Ayşe bit into a particularly cheesy bit of her börek and was amazed at just how much better it made her feel.

‘Officers are going from all over the world,’ İzzet continued. ‘But then changing urban environments affect us all. You know
this city. İstanbul, had only two million inhabitants back in 1978? We’re now twelve million, at least.’


‘More people, more problems,’ Ayşe said.

‘Yes. And a lot of those problems are global now too,’ he said. ‘Kids from New York to Bangkok sniff gas, shove cocaine up
their noses and make up rap tunes about inner-city alienation. The internet allows terrorist groups to reach out to men and
women on the streets of cities everywhere. Everything’s expanding, complicating, getting faster.’ He frowned. ‘If we don’t
either take control of it, try to understand it or both, we could find ourselves in the middle of an urban nightmare, a real
futuristic dystopia.’


İzzet was way cleverer than he looked. Sometimes he was too clever. Ayşe knew what a dystopia was, but she never would have
used the word herself. She finished her börek and then wiped her fingers on the tissue. ‘Well, whatever comes out of it,’
she said, ‘Inspector İkmen and Inspector Süleyman are getting to go to America. Çetin Bey was a little nervous, you know.
Such a long flight!’


‘They’re changing planes at Frankfurt,’ İzzet said. Then he frowned again. ‘One thing I can’t understand is why this conference
is being held in a city that is actually shrinking.’


‘Shrinking?’

‘Since the US motor industry started to go into decline at the end of the 1950s, Detroit, where the conference is taking place,
has been contracting,’ he said. ‘As I understand it, anyone with any money left years ago. Those that remain are largely poor
and unemployed. Detroit has one of the highest murder rates in America.’


Ayşe, suddenly cold again, shuddered. ‘Inşallah the inspectors will be safe in such a place!’ she said.

‘With hundreds of officers from all over the world around them, not to mention the Detroit Police Department?’ İzzet smiled.
‘It’ll be OK.’


Ayşe looked unsure. ‘With one of the highest murder rates in America?’ she said. ‘One has to ask what the police there are
actually doing.’


İzzet looked away from her and into the depths of the electric heater and said, ‘Maybe Detroit is what cities become when
they get beyond the mega-city stage. Maybe eventually everyone will just leave.’


‘İstanbul?’

He shrugged again. ‘We’re still growing. But it has to stop sometime. When no one can stand it any more, when the infrastructure
breaks down, when there aren’t enough jobs for everyone.’ He looked across at her. ‘That was what happened in Detroit. Maybe
it’s what will happen here too.’


Air travel wasn’t Çetin İkmen’s favourite form of locomotion. Not that he’d done a lot of it. Until this trip, the furthest
he had flown had been to London, which had taken all of three and a half hours. Now he was on what he considered to be an
eight-hour marathon from Frankfurt to Detroit, and less than sixty minutes into the flight, he was already uncomfortable and
bored.


Mehmet Süleyman, his one-time protégé and now colleague, had managed somehow, already, to drop off to sleep. Quite how he
had achieved that, İkmen didn’t know. Maybe it was some sort of defence mechanism against the craving he knew the younger
man would be experiencing for a cigarette. There had been no time to find somewhere to smoke when they’d changed planes at
Frankfurt airport. No one let anyone smoke in peace any more! Even his own office had been out of bounds for smoking since
the previous July. It made İkmen miserable. Now that the weather was cold, trudging out to the back of the station was a chore.
It was, he felt, ridiculous too. Almost everyone he knew was outside more often than they were in! Except, of course, his
sergeant. Ayşe Farsakoğlu had given up when the ban on smoking in enclosed spaces had first been imposed. He was proud of her for that, even if he had no intention of following her example. He thought about his destination, about how rabid,
or seemingly so, Americans were against smoking, and it almost made him wish that the plane would crash. At least death would
end his nicotine cravings, as well as his fear of being a long way away from the ground in a sealed metal tube.


He took one of the boiled sweets his daughter Çiçek had given him out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Recently married
to a Turkish Airlines pilot, Çiçek had been a flight attendant for twelve years, and so she knew a thing or two about air
travel and its risks and problems. She’d met her father at the airport armed with a bag of boiled sweets, a neck pillow, some
sort of headache-preventing thing consisting of a strip of cold gel one placed on one’s forehead, and a pair of long, tight
compression socks.


‘The flight socks will stop you getting deep-vein thrombosis,’ she’d said when she’d made him sit down and put them on in
Departures. ‘Long flights increase everyone’s risk. And someone who smokes as much as you do is a prime candidate.’


Mehmet Süleyman, who didn’t get a pair of flight socks, had smirked. Now, watching him asleep and apparently motionless, İkmen
wondered whether it would be the younger man, and not he, who would get deep-vein thrombosis. Çiçek had said that as well
as wearing flight socks, it was also a good idea to move around, or at least keep your feet moving. İkmen idly rotated an
ankle, and then reached forward for the Lufthansa flight magazine in the pouch in front of his seat. As he did so, Mehmet
Süleyman first frowned, then shuffled uncomfortably in his sleep. Economy seats were problematic for tall people like him.
But then the İstanbul Police Department could hardly be expected to pay for their officers to travel in business class, especially
at a time when the entire world seemed to be falling into recession.


For İkmen, space was not too much of an issue. Short and thin, he had no problem with his leg room, or even with the fact
that the person in front of him had now tilted his own seat backwards. İkmen flicked through the magazine, which fortunately for him
was in English as well as German. English and French plus some German was what he spoke. Süleyman spoke English too, but was
far more fluent in French, which reflected his decidedly privileged and Ottoman background. The old royalists had all spoken
French, which they considered very cultured. Süleyman’s father, the son of a prince, albeit a deposed one, had been no exception.


The articles in the magazine ranged from cookery to the architectural delights of the German capital, Berlin. But the beautiful
photographs of cafés and cathedrals made İkmen frown. Where they were headed wasn’t going to be anything like that. His youngest
son, Kemal, who was turning out to be quite a computer geek, had shown him some websites about the city he was going to visit.
Detroit, it seemed, was characterised by urban decay. Once the ‘Motor City’, an industrial giant, geared up to providing sustenance
to the US’s endless love affair with the automobile, it was now apparently in decline. As far as İkmen could tell, it was
full of poor, unemployed people living lives blighted by gang warfare and drugs in houses and apartments that were on the
verge of collapse. An urban nightmare with a history of civil unrest and a reputation for being almost impossible to police,
Detroit provided a vision of a post-industrial future that could spread across the western world – and that included the Turkish
Republic. İkmen baulked at this at the same time as he accepted that it was a possibility. Even cheap Turkish goods couldn’t
compete with cheaper Indian, Chinese or Korean imports. New players were emerging on the world stage, players whose efficiency
and expertise could leave the more traditional industrial nations high and dry. But then if Detroit had been chosen as the
best place to host a conference about policing changing urban environments, there had to be more to it than just pointing
out the city’s failings.


‘It seems Detroit is coming back to life,’ his boss, Commissioner Ardıç, had told him when they had first discussed the conference
back in June. ‘Don’t know how. You have to find that out. Policing remains a challenge. There have been numerous corruption
scandals in the past. But the Detroit Police Department have already gone where some of us have yet to imagine. They’re finding
solutions, it seems; the people of the city as well as the police.’


Ardıç wanted İkmen and Süleyman to find out how the Americans were dealing with their gangs, with the drug culture that seemed
to go with that phenomenon, and with the reality of mass unemployment and the resultant poverty. Officers were coming from
all over the world to observe, ask questions, listen and learn, and also to share their experiences with each other. It would,
İkmen felt, be a full and interesting week, if not a particularly pretty one.


The old man sat so still in that battered garden chair of his that for a moment, the girl thought he might be dead. It was
snowing, and she was cold and didn’t really want to be outside at all. But her mother had told her to.


‘Go out and get Mr Goins inside,’ she had said when she’d seen the old man sitting motionless in amongst where they grew the
vegetables. ‘He’s too old to be sat out in the snow like that.’


The girl, Keisha, had put her coat and snow boots on and run out of her apartment and down the stairs to the gardens outside.
From her kitchen window, three floors up, her mother watched in case anyone approached her daughter. Antoine Cadillac Project
had been turned into a place of peace, of self-sufficiency and urban beauty, but that didn’t mean that the boys with knives,
the gun-toting drug-dealers and muggers didn’t pay them a visit once in a while. Kids were particularly vulnerable, and Martha,
Keisha’s mother, had already lost one child, with a second almost gone to crack cocaine, in spite of her best efforts to steer
her children away from drugs and gangs.


Keisha nudged the old man with one gloved hand. ‘Mr Goins!’ she said, her breath turning to ice as she spoke. ‘Ma says you
gotta come in now!’


His eyes closed, he didn’t move. Only the very faintest of mists coming from his mouth gave Keisha any indication that he
was even alive. His face was a very weird colour – blue. She shook him again. ‘Mr Goins!’


This time he grunted, sniffed and then opened his eyes. Like Keisha’s, the old man’s eyes were as black as crude oil. He looked
around him without seeing the girl, and then said in that southern accent, just like Keisha’s grandpa Wally had had, ‘Where
in the name of the Lord is that boy? Where he about?’


Keisha knew some of what this meant.

‘Mr Goins,’ Keisha said, ‘your boy ain’t here! You gotta come inside now. It’s snowing.’

He turned and looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time, and said, ‘What you doin’ here, child?’

Keisha sighed. Mr Goins forgot things. Sometimes it was where he was, sometimes it was who people were, sometimes it was his
own name. There was only one thing that he never seemed to forget, but Keisha, young as she was, knew that she should never,
ever start that subject up with him. Most times he raised it himself, as he had just done when she woke him.


‘Ma’s made some hamburger. Come inside,’ Keisha said as she put one of her small hands underneath his arm and began to pull
him up on to his feet.


From her kitchen window three floors up, Martha Bell wondered yet again how and why she’d come to take some mad old white-looking
man into her home. But then she knew the answer to that question just as surely as everyone else on Antoine Cadillac did.
Somebody’d had to.


‘It started coming down about five hours ago and it hasn’t stopped since,’ the hotel receptionist said with a smile. ‘But
that’s winter for you.’


İkmen looked at Süleyman, whose face was, if anything, whiter than the snow they had just come in out of. It had only taken
seconds for the two officers to get out of the taxi, pay and enter the hotel, but it was enough to freeze them both almost
solid. On top of the almost empty streets, the ghosts of buildings hinting at urban desolation, the shock of the frigid temperatures
was intense.


‘Yes.’ İkmen attempted to smile.

The Lakeland Plaza was an old hotel in the grand tradition of early-twentieth-century Detroit buildings. It was huge, almost
Soviet in its four-square functional facade, while inside it was not unlike some of the grander nineteenth-century İstanbul
palaces. High ceilings, vast gilt mirrors and heavy, dusty chandeliers projected a feeling of venerable, if faded, worth.
İkmen rather liked what he had seen so far, although Süleyman, chilled to the marrow and beyond, just wanted to have a wash
and get some sleep before the conference began in a little under three hours’ time.


‘You’re in Suite Twelve, sir,’ the receptionist said as she handed a swipe-card key across to İkmen.

‘Thank you.’ Suite Twelve sounded very grand indeed, and İkmen, glazed and dazed after the flight, began to feel slightly
dizzy. In the last twenty-four hours he had not only entered a new continent; he had also, after nearly fifty-eight years on the earth, taken possession of the key to his first hotel suite.


The receptionist pointed to a couple of doors way, way across the vast wastes of marble flooring and said, ‘Elevators over
there, gentlemen. Floor fourteen. Have a nice day.’


Süleyman, at least, had expected some sort of help with their luggage, but no bellhop or porter materialised. The two men
picked up their suitcases and walked towards the lifts through a crowd of people who all sounded American. Although grand,
there was a slight dustiness about the reception area that İkmen, at least, had not expected. The United States, he had always
believed, was a country that had the highest standards of hygiene in the world. They got into a lift that had a few bits of
litter in one corner, and İkmen pressed the button marked 14. The lift, however, had a mind and will of its own.


First stop was floor three, which, though dimly lit, was heavily carpeted and had an ornate, rococo feel. Floor seven was
rather plainer and brighter, and a couple of besuited men stood and stared at the Turks for a few moments before the lifts
doors closed again.


‘Obviously going down,’ İkmen observed. Süleyman, tired beyond patience, didn’t answer. The lift started again; this time
it stopped at floor eleven. This was somewhat different from the floors the men had seen before. When the doors opened, they
found that they could barely make out anything much through the gloom. If the doors hadn’t got stuck as they attempted to
close again, they would have seen nothing. As it was, the temporary malfunction in the lift allowed them not only to smell
an odour that was a mixture of cigarette smoke, cooking meat and urine, but also to see that the floors were uncarpeted, and
that just across from the lifts, against one stained, gloomy wall, was an old, abandoned fridge.


As the doors closed, this time successfully, Süleyman, who had been silent up to that point, said, ‘May Allah protect us.’

İkmen smiled. Undecided himself when it came to divine entities, he said, ‘Well, at least that wasn’t our floor.’

Süleyman, a thunderous look on his pale face, retreated back into silence.


When the lift did finally reach a juddering halt at floor fourteen, the Lakeland Plaza had clearly regained its mojo. The
floors were carpeted, the walls clean and the only smell was that of air-freshener mixed with the very faintest tinge of tobacco.
The latter, in a world that was becoming increasingly hostile to cigarettes, made İkmen smile. America’s fearsome reputation
as an enemy of smoking had made him wonder how he would cope, and even whether he would be arrested for smoking at some point
during this trip. But then maybe Detroit was an exception to this rule.


İkmen and Süleyman got out of the lift and looked for a door marked Suite Twelve. It took them several minutes to find it,
mainly because the numbers on the doors were so small. All the while they looked, Süleyman groaned with weariness. İkmen ignored
him. As soon as they’d landed and the younger man had seen the snow, he’d descended into exhaustion and despair. He had not,
apparently, brought very thick clothes with him. He had not, as İkmen – or rather his wife Fatma – had done, packed thermal
underwear. But then the twice-divorced Süleyman no longer had a loving woman to do that or anything else for him.


İkmen opened the door to Suite Twelve and walked inside. It was a plain, again vaguely tobacco-scented suite of rooms that
looked clean and adequate. After all, if the İstanbul Police Department was paying for a hotel suite, it would not be elaborate,
at least not for the likes for İkmen and Süleyman. İkmen walked into the smaller of the two bedrooms and put his case on the
bed. The slightly dusty window at the end of the bed allowed him to see a range of skyscrapers capped with snow and in some
cases decorated with long, witch’s-finger-shaped icicles. Buoyed up by the prospect of new and possibly exciting sights and
experiences, he had just started to smile again when he heard Süleyman, from the next room, mutter, ‘I can’t believe it! What
is this?’


İkmen, his face unsmiling now, went to see what the problem was. He found his friend and colleague in their shared bathroom,
pointing at something above the bath.


‘Fingermarks!’ he said furiously. ‘Red fingermarks!’

‘You mean blood?’

‘Who knows? Maybe it’s just hair colouring!’ Süleyman shrugged. ‘Fridges in the corridors, blood, maybe, on the walls, dust!
What kind of place is this?’


‘It’s Detroit.’

‘Yes, I know . . .’

‘A city with problems,’ İkmen said. ‘That’s why we’re here. No point in talking about urban issues in a city where everything
is perfect. We’ve come to talk about gangs and drugs and drive-by shootings and—’


‘Talk, yes, experience, no,’ Süleyman said as he angrily put a cigarette into his mouth and lit up. ‘I knew I should have
taken Tayyar up on his offer! I knew it!’


Süleyman’s cousin Tayyar, a journalist, had worked in Detroit for two years and had a very nice house in the smart Grosse
Pointe district. When Süleyman had told him that he was due to come to the city for a conference, Tayyar had offered both
him and İkmen rooms in his house. But as İkmen had pointed out, it was a long way from there to the conference centre downtown
where they were obliged to go every day for nearly a week. Now, however, although quite happy with the hotel himself, İkmen
did rather regret having said no to Tayyar’s offer. Süleyman was furious, and was already on the highest of very high Ottoman
horses. İkmen watched as, in an attempt to rail about the state of the suite to reception, his colleague wrestled with his
bedside phone, which did not, it seemed, work.


The bullet had gone clean through one ear and clean out the other. It was probably just a fluke, but Gerald was nevertheless
impressed. If he carried on being impressed by the details, then maybe he’d forget how young the kid was – and how dead.


Brush Park district looked even more spooky than it normally did in the snow. Jagged ghosts of houses pushed up through the
whiteness, their glassless windows like gouged-out eyes surrounded by the tatters of once-luxuriant ivy. Gerald knew it as
a place where rich motor executives and industrialists had once lived. Now, although bits of it were being restored, for the
most part Brush Park, at least in its northern quarter, was a place of spectres, of grand, dying buildings, of coteries of
crackheads in what were once someone’s servants’ quarters, and, just occasionally, of the odd weird kid exploring. Had the
fifteen year old Gerald now knew had been called Aaron Spencer been one of them? He’d had his school bag with him, pens and
books flung out everywhere as he fell, now stained with snow and with Aaron Spencer’s blood.


One of the youngsters in uniform came over, looked down at the kid and said, ‘Drive-by.’

‘Maybe.’ Gerald shrugged. He was much taller than the young officer, much darker too.

‘You know it, Lieutenant,’ the officer said as he slouched away, going back no doubt, Gerald guessed, to the warmth of one
of the squad cars. But then who could blame him? It was fucking freezing, and besides, it wasn’t as if anyone could do anything
for Aaron Spencer now. They probably wouldn’t even find who had killed him, or be able to tell the kid’s parents why thei. . .