Deadline

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Mystery; International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

A murder game becomes deadly reality... Barbara Nadel invites readers to a seemingly innocent murder mystery evening in her fifteenth novel in the Inspector Ikmen series. Deadline is the perfect read for fans of Anne Zouroudi and Elly Griffiths. 'Ikmen is always good company, and Barbara Nadel's writing, as usual captures the other-worldy though sometimes seedy atmosphere of Istanbul' - Daily Telegraph When Inspector Cetin Ikmen is invited to a murder mystery evening at Istanbul's famous Pera Palas Hotel he finds himself embroiled in a deadly game of life imitating art. Halfway through the evening, one of the actors is found actually dead in the room where Agatha Christie used to stay when she was in Istanbul. Walking in the steps of the great, Ikmen experiences fear and hatred which have echoes deep in his own and his country's past. What readers are saying about Deadline : 'The plot is ingenious and involves a mystery within a mystery ' 'An intriguing read with lots of twists and turns right up to the end' 'A true must read for fans of crime fiction'

Release date: January 3, 2013

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 373

Sample

Thirteen Days Before

‘You know I can’t stomach that sort of thing, why do you insist on putting me through it?’ Çetin İkmen asked his friend Arto Sarkissian.

The light was fading quickly over the Bosphorus and the two men were the last customers remaining outside on the İstanbul Modern Café terrace. But then İkmen, at least, nearly always took his food and drink al fresco these days. Since 2009 it had been illegal to smoke in enclosed public spaces anywhere in Turkey. It was a law that, even as a serving police inspector, he hated.

His friend, a small, round Armenian, like İkmen of a ‘certain age’, smiled. ‘It’s all for charity,’ he said. ‘Think of it as a duty, if that helps.’

‘Yes, but it’s “fun” too, isn’t it?’ İkmen growled. He put his cigarette out in the ashtray in front of him and lit up another.

‘You make it sound like abdominal surgery,’ Arto said. ‘Fun is supposed to be a good thing.’

‘Huh!’

One of the waiters appeared and automatically gave Arto the bill for their coffee and glasses of wine. İkmen wasn’t surprised that he didn’t so much as give him a second look. His suit was crumpled and he reeked of tobacco. He was an old-fashioned Turk, an anachronism amid a race of people who were rapidly, at least in İstanbul, becoming very glossy. Even Arto, his oldest and dearest friend, had a sort of groomed patina. But then he was a doctor, albeit a pathologist, and so maybe he was taking something to make himself look that way. Some wonder drug.

‘I don’t like organised fun,’ İkmen continued. ‘It makes me anxious.’

‘It’s supposed to relax you,’ Arto said. Then looking at him narrowly, he said, ‘Would it help if I said it would be good if we had a representative from the police department at the event?’

‘Mehmet Süleyman’s going, he can do that.’

Arto looked at the bill and then placed a 50 Turkish lire note down on the table to cover it. The waiter, who had been hovering, whipped it away immediately.

‘I know for a fact that Fatma is going to stay with her aunt in Bursa that week,’ the Armenian said. ‘She goes away that week every year.’

‘For which I am always grateful. My wife is a very understanding woman.’

‘You’ll be alone, you can’t cook . . .’

‘I’ll be alone as I always am!’ İkmen said. ‘I like it like that, you—’

‘You invite Krikor and myself to some dreary bar in Sultanahmet – if you remember,’ Arto interjected. ‘If it crosses your mind to invite your own brother it’s a miracle and I’m not sure that any of your more recent friends even know when your birthday is. As far as they’re concerned you age in one long, unregarded and continuous stream of time.’

‘Which is how I like it.’

‘It isn’t normal.’

‘Whoever said that normal equals good?’

‘You should at least allow your children to celebrate your birthday,’ Arto said. ‘They’re your children! They love you. I’m sure they’d like to, at the very least, take you out for a meal.’ Then he looked at the skinny, smoking figure across the table from him and added, ‘Not that eating is really what you do.’

İkmen smiled. They’d spent a happy day together until the subject of Arto’s brother Krikor’s latest fundraising event had arisen. Ambling around the İstanbul Modern gallery had been exhilarating for İkmen. Not that he understood what all the pictures, photographs and installations were really about. But in a country that in recent years had been ruled by a government with Islamic roots, an avowed secularist like İkmen felt cheered by the sight of artworks depicting things like sex, sexuality and dissent.

‘If Krikor’s project is to provide facilities to immigrant as well as Turkish addicts then it needs more money,’ Arto said.

‘Five thousand Turkish lire each, at least,’ İkmen said. ‘That’s what this “fun” of yours will cost.’ Then he shook his head.

Arto leaned across the table. Out on the Bosphorus the sound of a single ferry foghorn signalled that the night was destined to be one of dampness, mist and coughs. ‘I said I’d pay for you and I will!’ Arto snapped. ‘It is my birthday and Christmas present to you!’

‘But Arto, I’m not a Christian, I don’t—’

‘Oh, yes, and I’m in church all the time myself!’ Arto leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Christians give presents to each other and to non-Christian friends because it is one of our traditions,’ he said. ‘As well you know.’

‘Yes, well . . .’

‘Çetin, it will be amazing,’ Arto said. ‘Krikor and his staff have engaged a professional acting troupe. Lale Aktar will be there. Lale Aktar!’

‘So if Lale Aktar is there, I won’t need to be,’ İkmen said. ‘Let the great novelist do her stuff.’

‘Oh, Çetin, don’t be childish!’

‘Arto, why would I want to go to some play about murder? On my birthday? I deal with the real thing.’

Arto Sarkissian looked across at the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, now just very gently softened by sea mist. Both he and Çetin had been born over there, a long time ago. He turned back to his friend and said, ‘It’s for all the people who walk around this city with untreated sores from infected needles. For the kids from Romanian orphanages who sniff glue, for the girls who sell themselves for the price of a fix. Krikor never turns anyone away from his clinic. All they have to do is want to get clean. Money isn’t an issue.’

‘Except that it is.’

‘If he’s to carry on helping people with their addictions, yes, it is for Krikor,’ Arto said. ‘He doesn’t have any more capital.’ His brother, an addiction specialist, had already ploughed most of his own considerable fortune into his substance abuse clinic in the İstanbul district of Beyazıt. ‘This city’s population grows every day and so, unfortunately, do the number of addicts on the streets. Çetin?’

İkmen looked up and breathed in the dank, moisture-soaked air deeply. He believed in everything that Krikor Sarkissian was doing. Of course he did! He just didn’t want to go to his extravagant fund-raising event. As well as being really not at all his kind of thing, the last time he had attended one of Krikor’s fund-raisers it had led him, albeit coincidentally, into the life of a murderer whose crimes still, sometimes, haunted his sleep. But that had been nothing at all to do with Krikor Sarkissian or his very worthy project.

İkmen pulled a grumpy face (mainly because he knew that Arto would expect it of him) and said, ‘OK, I’ll come.’

Arto Sarkissian smiled as the evening call to prayer wound itself around them from every part of the city.

Inspector Mehmet Süleyman looked through the open door into Çetin İkmen’s office and stared at the elegant woman looking intently at her computer screen. She appeared completely calm, absorbed and at peace with herself.

It stunned him. How could she be like that? In just over three weeks’ time she, Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu, was going to marry a man who looked like a 1970s Arabesk crooner – all moustache, jutting stomach and machismo. Why?

‘Er, Sergeant Farsakoğlu . . .’

She turned round and smiled. ‘Sir?’

Why he’d spoken at all, Süleyman didn’t know. Maybe it was just to see her face. But that was ridiculous. He’d got over his brief affair with Ayşe Farsakoğlu years ago. But now he’d caught her attention, he had to find something to say.

‘Where is Inspector İkmen?’ he asked. He could just as easily have called or emailed and he knew she knew that.

‘It’s the first of December, sir,’ she replied.

‘Ah.’ He felt stupid. If he could, Çetin İkmen always took 1 December as leave. Everyone knew that. It was World Aids Day and he liked to spend time with one of his cousins who had apparently lost someone or other to the disease. Nobody, including İkmen, ever really spoke about it.

‘Can I help you with anything, Mehmet Bey?’ Ayşe asked.

For a moment he’d almost forgotten she was there. Slightly flustered, he said, ‘Er, no. No thank you.’

She turned her beautiful face back to her computer screen and resumed whatever it was she had been doing.

The reason behind his agitation over her fiancé was, Süleyman acknowledged, a source of shame. Since the collapse of his second marriage, Süleyman himself had been single and he had harboured some idle fantasies that Ayşe Farsakoğlu might throw herself at him again as she had years before. Not that he actually wanted a relationship with her. But she hadn’t come anywhere near him. She’d gone to his sergeant, İzzet Melik, who was ugly and poor – and kind. Much as he tried to convince himself otherwise, Mehmet Süleyman knew that İzzet, in spite of his unappealing outward appearance, was also educated and had a deep appreciation of culture, especially Italian culture. Originally from the coastal city of İzmir, İzzet had been tutored in all things Latin by an elderly Italian Jew.

When they’d had their brief relationship, over a decade ago, Ayşe had been the one who had mourned its demise, not him. But now Süleyman wondered. He wondered what life would have been like had he stayed with Ayşe instead of marrying the volatile half-Irish psychiatrist, Zelfa Halman. But if he’d done that, his son, Yusuf, would never have been born and there was no way he would wish that boy away. He, if nothing else, was the light of his existence.

But his pride was still bruised. If Ayşe Farsakoğlu had wanted a man, why had she not come to him? He was good-looking, successful and he came from a well-connected if admittedly impoverished Ottoman family. But then he remembered how his Ottoman roots had frightened Ayşe all those years ago. Whether she had felt unworthy of him or just alarmed by his noble pedigree, he could no longer recall. But he’d been with his first wife back then, his cousin, Zuleika, who very shortly afterwards had divorced him. At the time there had also been an awful case involving a man who had been to his school. A lot had been going on. His recollections of that time were hazy. None of that, however, shed any light on why Ayşe was choosing to marry a man who looked like a particularly unkempt rural taxi driver. Could it possibly be that, even after all these years, it was to spite him?

There was a march down İstiklal Street and then a rally in Taksim Square, but Samsun Bajraktar didn’t want to go.

‘Why should I share my grief with a load of young people and politicos?’ she said bitterly as she sat down on her tattered leather sofa and lit a cigarette. ‘Anyway, I can’t walk any sort of distance in my new boots.’

‘World Aids Day is a time you should get out there, Samsun,’ İkmen said.

‘And get beaten up by the police?’ she sneered.

İkmen drew hard on his cigarette and smiled. ‘You think I’d let that happen?’

‘It happens all the time to people like me! Even now! Even in lovely, fluffy democratising Turkey!’ She threw him a look that could probably have severely wounded a lesser man. ‘If we’re lucky we just get laughed at!’

A long time ago, pre some very expensive Italian surgery, Samsun had been a man called Mustafa. The son of Çetin İkmen’s maternal uncle Ahmet, like the rest of that family she was originally Albanian. Now in her early sixties and living just opposite the Grand Bazaar in a small, lately rather down-at-heel flat, Samsun existed as a lone transsexual without her deceased lover, the leather merchant, Abdurrahman. He had died of an Aids-related illness five years before. Every 1 December, World Aids Day, Çetin İkmen spent time with Samsun, drinking, smoking and remembering her one true love, who had ultimately betrayed her.

‘I’d walk with you,’ İkmen said.

Samsun ignored him. The first of December was difficult because of what Abdurrahman had brought into their lives. The Aids virus had been hard for her. That she had not contracted it from him had seemed like a miracle for a long time – until she had read more about the disease and come to realise just how difficult it could be to catch. How Abdurrahman had caught it and from whom was still a mystery and that was a big part of Samsun’s problem.

‘How could he have done that to me, Çetin?’ she said as she raised a large glass of brandy to her lips and then drank.

İkmen, who heard the same thing from Samsun every December, shook his head. He didn’t know any more than she did. But Abdurrahman had been a big, good-looking and well-off man – many years Samsun’s junior – and so temptation would have been put in his way. A popular leather merchant and former grease wrestler, he had never been shy about either his bisexuality or his legendary prowess in bed. But he’d made a commitment to Samsun, which he had broken even if he had left her all his worldly goods, which included this small flat. But then she, and only she, had nursed him through his final illness. İkmen hardly dared to imagine what she had seen and experienced. It was part of the reason why he always made time to see her on this day. He admired her courage and he loved her.

As usual, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ And as usual she didn’t listen.

‘We were in love! Why did he need anyone else? I didn’t.’

There was no answer. Samsun began to ramble on about how she had tried to stop Abdurrahman straying with spells and charms. Like İkmen’s late mother, she practised witchcraft even though, a lot of the time and especially with Abdurrahman, it had appeared to be useless. Now, at least in her own mind, she was old and past her best and faced a future of unwanted singledom, alone in her little flat opposite the Grand Bazaar.

İkmen, as he always did, attempted to nod his head and shake it in all the right places. She was set to get roaring drunk and go on for hours and he’d support her through that. But İkmen actually had other things on his mind. This coming birthday took him up to fifty-nine. Just one year before sixty when, according to his brother Halıl, he would no longer be able to claim to be middle-aged any more. He’d be old. He’d qualified for his pension years before but had chosen to carry on working. How would his employment play out when he was sixty? He didn’t know and so he thought about other things. Then his actual birthday and what it was going to consist of this year crashed back into his consciousness again and he felt himself begin to get angry.

In the normal course of events he would have spent his birthday alone, or with friends, getting quietly drunk while Fatma and their youngest child, Kemal, visited Fatma’s ancient aunt in Bursa. Revelling in lonely misery was something that İkmen actively looked forward to. But not this year. This year his best friend had paid for him to have a treat. A gourmet meal and a night in one of İstanbul’s most prestigious hotels. Oh, and something called a ‘murder mystery’ was going to happen too – all under the gaze of Turkey’s youngest and most sensational crime writer, Lale Aktar. He’d seen her on TV a few times and she came across quite well, if rather flirtatiously. All he could hope for was that the great and the good who went to the event gave generously to Krikor Sarkissian’s free drug and alcohol clinic in nearby Beyazıt. That, after all, was the point of the whole sorry affair.

He looked up at Samsun who was still drinking, smoking and going on about Abdurrahman. The last time Krikor had organised a fund-raising event of this magnitude, Samsun had only just met her now dead beau. Then the event had been held in a palace on the Bosphorus. This time another type of palace was involved.

Eleven Hours Before

Getting out of the taxi, she tried to look cool – as if she had been going to such places all her life – and she achieved her aim. But try as she might, when she looked up at the historic and magnificent façade, she knew that this hotel was just about as far as anyone could get from her old village back home in Anatolia. This was the Pera Palas, where people arriving in İstanbul via the Orient Express would stay back in the first half of the twentieth century. It was the hotel where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Republic, liked to stay, where King Edward VIII of England had slept, as well as Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway, Mata Hari and Jackie Onassis. But most importantly for crime novelist Lale Aktar, the great English crime fiction writer, Agatha Christie had stayed here too. And she, Lale Aktar, a woman from the back end of nowhere, was going to spend a night in what had been her room.

As Lale walked underneath the brightly lit canopy towards the gleaming, art nouveau entrance, the door into the hotel quietly and seemingly automatically opened in front of her. A young man, wearing the smart grey Pera Palas uniform, said, ‘Good morning, madam. Welcome to the Pera Palas. May I take your bag?’

Lale gave her small, lightweight suitcase to him without a word. She looked at her surroundings – exquisite marble flooring, doors and fittings of highly polished oak and mahogany, even a brightly decorated Christmas tree – and she thought, I’ve arrived. Even though she was Turkey’s bestselling crime author and she was married to one of the country’s most wealthy men, only now, here, did she feel she had actually arrived. It was just a pity her stay at the hotel was going to be so short.

A woman called Canan from the hotel’s publicity department was waiting for her in the lobby and, together with the young porter, they all got into the creaking wood and wrought-iron lift. An original artefact from way before the recent hotel refit, it dated back to 1895 and had been used by everyone who had ever stayed here. Canan urged Lale to sit on the velvet seat at the back of the lift and then the porter closed the wrought-iron gates and they began to ascend.

After a moment, unable to contain her excitement any longer, Lale said, ‘I never thought I’d stay in the Pera Palas. Not me.’

Canan smiled. Was it an indulgent smile? Lale couldn’t tell. All she knew was that for a girl from her village to be able to read, much less write a book, was totally miraculous. But then if she hadn’t run away from that hot, baked nowhere to İstanbul, would she have even thought about writing a book? Probably not.

The lift passed beyond the first floor and made its way towards the second. What she could see of the hotel was big, opulent and bright. Two years ago, Faruk, her husband, had taken her to Paris for a weekend. The Pera Palas reminded her of that city.

The lift stopped at the fourth floor. The porter opened the doors for her and Lale stepped out on to a sweeping oval concourse lined with guest rooms and decorated with furniture and artefacts from the hotel’s illustrious past. In the middle, a great open space was cordoned off by an ornate, metal scrollwork banister. Lale looked up and saw that the roof of the hotel was made of glass. The sun was shining and it lit up everything it touched. They walked along the right-hand side of the gallery until the porter stopped in front of room 411. As he opened it with a key card, Canan turned to Lale and said, ‘I hope you find the room inspiring, Mrs Aktar.’

‘I’m sure I will.’

As the porter pushed the door open to reveal the antique furniture and modern fittings inside, Lale began to shake. Only very vaguely did she later recall Canan saying, ‘Dr Sarkissian sends his greetings and says that he will meet you for tea in the Kubbeli Saloon at three o’clock, provided that is convenient.’

‘It is.’

Lale moved into the room and came to a halt in front of a large, backlit photograph of a rather motherly looking woman in late middle age. Canan, smiling, said, ‘I will leave you alone now, Mrs Aktar. Enjoy the room and if you need anything, please do not hesitate to call.’

‘Thank you.’

The porter left, followed by Canan who, just before she closed the door behind her, said, ‘You know, Mrs Aktar, Agatha Christie’s room is supposed to be haunted. I hope you’re not afraid of ghosts.’

Lale looked away from Agatha Christie’s portrait for a moment and said, ‘No. Ghosts don’t bother me at all.’

‘Happy birthday, Dad!’

Ever since he’d gone to live and work in England, Çetin İkmen’s eldest son, Sınan, had always celebrated his father’s birthday by phoning up and joyfully shouting his good wishes at him. It was touching, if annoying, especially if it happened when he was in his office.

‘Yes, thank you, Sınan,’ he said. ‘It’s very good of you to remember.’

Ayşe Farsakoğlu, who was fully aware that it was İkmen’s birthday but knew better than to allude to it, looked up at her superior’s disgruntled face and suppressed a smile. As far back as she could remember he had been a lugubrious man. Devoted to his wife Fatma and their children, a loyal and generous friend, he was nevertheless not one for outward displays of joy or big celebrations. Ayşe smiled in his direction.

İkmen ended his call from his son and looked at her. ‘Yes?’ he inquired.

‘Oh, I was just feeling jealous about your stay at the Pera Palas,’ she said.

‘Were you?’ İkmen sniffed disconsolately. ‘If it’s any help, if I could give my ticket to you, I would. I fail to see what all the fuss is about. My daughter Hulya got married at the Pera Palas.’

‘But, sir, it’s had a total refit since then,’ Ayşe said. ‘It’s really fabulous now.’

‘You’ve been there?’

‘With Sergeant Melik,’ she said. ‘We looked at the ballroom as a venue for our wedding but . . . But it was too expensive.’

‘Huh!’ İkmen grunted. ‘These sorts of places are al. . .