‘Be quiet!’ she hissed.
The men who had just come back in were looking around – for pigs presumably. It wouldn’t take long before they realised that İkmen was missing. İkmen was out now and Ayşe put a leg through to follow.
‘I don’t see any pigs here,’ Mustafa said ill-temperedly. Then just briefly he seemed to look into the pool of shadow that surrounded Ayşe. But as quickly as he had looked at her, he looked away. Seeing and yet not seeing as people sometimes do. With a surge of adrenaline Ayşe pushed herself through, once again scraping her head on the corrugated iron. Outside, she found Roman with İkmen slung unceremoniously across his shoulder. ‘Come on!’ he said, grabbing Ayşe’s hand. ‘Let’s get out of here!’
Ahmet Ülker looked at his watch and wondered whether he ought to make a trip to Waitrose on Ballards Lane. It was only lunchtime, nothing was due to happen for hours, and he needed more cleaning materials. He’d killed Maxine cleanly enough but all that post-mortem stuff had happened after a while. Dribble, urine and faeces. He’d got rid of most of it. What remained he’d tossed into the pool with her body. Now the ‘pool man’ had taken her away, but the kitchen still had that miasma of body fluids about it which he didn’t like. That said, he would have to be careful not to scrub away too much. Harrison and, more crucially, Hajizadeh had taken coffee in the kitchen in the early hours of the morning and he wanted to be sure that traces of those two still remained. Such details could be crucial if things went wrong. They could take the blame for Maxine.
When he had brought Derek Harrison and Ali Reza Hajizadeh back with him in his Mitsubishi Warrior, he’d driven straight into the integral garage. No one had followed him, as far as he could tell, but his organisation had been watched by the police some months back, Ahmet knew that. Not that anyone, police or otherwise, appeared to have followed them. Ahmet had taken precautions and still the men hadn’t got out of his car until the garage doors had closed, just in case. They’d then had coffee in the kitchen – keeping their voices low in order not to ‘wake’ Maxine upstairs – and Ahmet had given them the workmen’s overalls he had got for them, and told them to put them on. He’d then disabled his alarm to allow the two men to get out of his back garden and into the lane behind the property. This eventually came out three houses along at the junction with Canons Close. There the two of them continued on foot, two workmen going about their business in the early hours of the morning.
They had apparently successfully entered their target, so all was well on that front. Now for him it was just a waiting game. And so why not do some cleaning? Waitrose also did a very nice line in cupcakes, Ahmet recalled. He could wipe some of the residual stains off the floor, make himself a nice cup of coffee and have a lovely lemon or maybe pecan cupcake with it. Mmm.
‘Where is he?’ Mustafa screamed at Fasika the Ethiopian. ‘The white Turkish man, where did he go?’
Fasika, his mouth already bloodied from one blow Mustafa had landed on him, uttered not a word. Behind him, some of the other foremen were opening the factory door to go out and search.
Cengiz was sweating. ‘He doesn’t speak English!’ he said to Mustafa.
‘Well, what does he—’
‘I don’t fucking know!’ Cengiz yelled at him. ‘Are you sure you turned the key in the padlock when you chained him up?’
‘Yes!’ And then something occurred to Mustafa. ‘Allah, the man from the farm! The pig farm man!’
The pig farm man?’ Cengiz looked at Mustafa blankly.
‘The man from the pig farm who came here to tell us about the escaped—’
One of the men who had been searching outside came back in again. ‘I guess the pigs must have run off because—’
‘Shut up about the fucking pigs!’ Mustafa screamed. ‘Don’t you see, you stupid fools, all that was just to distract us! How many pigs do you see around here, eh? None! Because there never were any pigs. That man turned up to give Çetin Ertegrul or whoever he really is time to escape! Although how he got the padlock off after the beating I gave him, I don’t know.’ He drew his arm back and hit Fasika hard across the mouth yet again. ‘Mr Ülker is going to break my balls for this!’
‘They’re going to bomb a tube station,’ İkmen said as he slumped into the back of the unmarked car Roman’s men kept up at Hackney Sports Centre. ‘I have no idea which one. Ali Reza Hajizadeh is going to blow himself up.’
DI Frank Roman and Ayşe got into the car with him. Ayşe draped a blanket across İkmen’s lap.
‘The only station that anyone mentioned was Moorgate,’ İkmen continued. ‘Harrison—’
‘Derek Harrison was injured in the Moorgate tube disaster of nineteen seventy-five,’ Roman said. And then he added for İkmen’s information, ‘It was an accident. No one knows what really happened to this day. A tube train just ploughed into a wall at Moorgate station. A lot of people were killed and injured.’
‘Harrison said he was taking revenge for Moorgate,’ İkmen said. ‘Not that Moorgate was the target.’
Roman opened his mobile to call this information in to Superintendent Williams at Fenchurch Street.
‘What on earth did they do to you?’ Ayşe asked İkmen, looking at his weeping wounds.
‘A simple razor blade was all they used after they’d kicked me around the floor a few times,’ İkmen said. ‘Their version of the famous death of a thousand cuts.’
‘We’ll get you to a hospital.’
İkmen shook his head. ‘No. Just get me some clothes. If we can go back to the Rize . . .’
‘You need to go to hospital’
‘Ayşe, you too are bleeding. Your head . . .’
‘That’s nothing,’ Ayşe said as she very briefly put a hand up to the cuts in her forehead. ‘You were tortured . . .’
‘Yes, sir,’ they heard Roman say. ‘I think the most likely candidate, given what we already know, is Tower Hill. But the acting commissioner . . .’
‘There’s no way we can safely go back to the Rize now,’ Ayşe said. ‘DI Roman’s men reported to him just before we reached the car. Mustafa and some of the other men at the factory went out and began scouring the area for you about a minute after we got away. They know you’ve gone and they will be telling everyone to look out for you. I’m assuming they don’t know that you’re job?’
‘Job?’ It wasn’t often that İkmen didn’t understand an English expression, but this was one of them.
‘A police officer,’ Ayşe said. ‘You didn’t—’
‘I did not talk,’ İkmen said. ‘No. They spoke about the possibility of my being a police officer, but they didn’t know for sure. That was one of the reasons I was allowed to live. Because they didn’t know what I was they didn’t know whether or not I might be valuable to them.’
‘But we must get you to a hospital.’
‘No.’ İkmen shook his head. ‘No, Ayşe, please just get me some clothes! I want to know, I need to find out what is happening now. I can’t—’
‘The super’s diverting some bodies to Tower Hill underground station,’ Roman said as he clicked his mobile shut and turned to face Ayşe and İkmen in the back of the car. ‘There isn’t a tube station on Mark Lane, the nearest one is Tower Hill, so we have to assume that’s the most likely target.’
‘Harrison and Hajizadeh got into Ülker’s car and then lay down on the floor,’ İkmen said. ‘Then the ayatollah left wearing my clothes this morning. I don’t know where he went.’
‘Ülker drove back to East Finchley in the early hours of the morning,’ Roman said. ‘He’s still there but apparently alone. Either Harrison and Hajizadeh are still with him or they slipped away at some point. According to the super, Ülker hasn’t moved, his flat in Dalston is empty and some dodgy ex-getaway driver who sometimes works for him hasn’t left his place either. But we have to assume that it’s going to go off sometime today.’ He looked at Ayşe. ‘The super wants both of us over to Fenchurch Street now. The obbo will carry on with Carter in charge.’
‘And me?’ İkmen asked.
‘You, Inspector, need a hospital,’ Roman said.
‘No.’
‘Sir, if you don’t mind my saying so, you look like a fucking Dragon fruit. Lesions all over. Christ, you could have any sort of infection!’
‘Inspector Roman, I have come so far with this now I really want to finish it.’
‘Superintendent Williams will be horrified if he sees you like this! If I let you—’
‘If any of your superiors become agitated with you on my account then just tell them that I refused to go to hospital, which I do,’ İkmen said. ‘If you and Sergeant Kudu are going to Fenchurch Street then that is where I want to go too.’
Roman shrugged and turned to the front to start the car. Then he turned back again. ‘Inspector İkmen,’ he said, ‘you’re stark naked.’
‘Yes, I know, I—’
‘There’s a Matalan at Dalston,’ Ayşe said impatiently. ‘We can stop off and get him something there. We need to get moving. The super is expecting us.’
Chapter 23
‘Mustafa,’ Ahmet Ülker said as calmly as he could, ‘if the pig farmer says that his pigs got out and that he sent a man over to tell you about it, then that is what happened.’
‘But Ertegrul escaped while the pig man was talking to us!’ Mustafa screamed hysterically down the phone. ‘It has to have been a plot! The same man wasn’t there when I went to speak to the farmer. He said he’d gone home.’
‘Then maybe he had,’ Ülker said. What Mustafa was saying was worrying but there could be other reasons why Ertegrul got away when he did. ‘You padlocked that man to the bench, Mustafa. Maybe you failed to do so properly.’
‘No, I swear, Mr Ülker—’
‘Mustafa, everything proceeds as planned,’ Ülker said. ‘Do you see policemen at the factory door?’ There was a silence. ‘No. Everything is arranged and we have one chance and one chance only at this. It is a shame that the Ertegrul man got away but soon no one, including the police, will have any time to deal with some foreigner who has been beaten up in some factory somewhere. The man came into this country via a known trafficker. He speaks no English!’
‘He was naked!’
‘Then he is probably hiding in a bush somewhere, covering his shame with an old Coke can! Mustafa, forget Ertegrul and the pig man and get on with running my business for me.’ Ahmet Ülker ended the call by snapping his mobile phone shut. He didn’t need Mustafa losing his nerve now! He was having enough trouble holding on to himself to bother about the grunts down at his factories. As for the pig man, the chances of his being a friend of Ertegrul or his niece, given his profession, had to be slight. He didn’t need this. Neither did his partners. Ülker held his nerve and went to Waitrose.
It was one thirty by the time DI Roman got İkmen and Ayşe to the office that Superintendent Wyre Williams was using as his base at Fenchurch Street station.
‘A detailed capital-wide investigation of every single tube station is just not possible,’ he said as Roman and his colleagues walked through the door. ‘Gold Commander has allocated manpower resources to Tower Hill and is keeping those officers on the ground here where they are for the time being. If we knew which line was at risk, we could close it. But closing the whole system . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Not possible.’ And then he looked at the small, dark man wearing a very baggy and cheap-looking suit standing next to Roman and he said with a smile, ‘Inspector İkmen?’
İkmen nodded. ‘Sir.’
Then Williams frowned. ‘Your face . . .’
‘Our friends had a little fun with me,’ İkmen said.
‘Our “friends” need taking down ASAP,’ the superintendent replied. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes.’
Superintendent Williams, who had an accent İkmen recognised as being from Wales, was a man of about his own age. Slim and tall, he wore his Metropolitan Police uniform well although his face was heavily lined and careworn.
Williams sighed. ‘Well, at least we now know that it’s a tube station these people plan to hit,’ Williams said. ‘Thanks to you.’
‘What is the situation at Tower Hill?’ İkmen asked.
‘We’ve officers in the booking hall and down on the platforms,’ Williams said. ‘So far no one resembling either Harrison or Hajizadeh has been seen. Officers back at the Yard are reviewing CCTV footage from this morning in case they arrived earlier and are hiding just behind the entrances to the tunnels. We are starting, as discreetly as we can, to look at where the platforms end and the tunnels begin.’
‘Can you not just close Tower Hill?’
‘The acting commissioner, Gold Commander, is against it,’ Williams said. ‘Whether he will be of the same opinion when we get to the evening rush hour, I don’t know. What we need to do is find Harrison and Hajizadeh.’
‘And Ayatollah Nourazar,’ İkmen said.
‘Not that he really is a man of God,’ Williams said. ‘More radicaliser for hire.’ He looked at İkmen and frowned. ‘Nourazar peddles his own violent version of your religion for money, Inspector İkmen. Sniffs out the vulnerable and then unleashes them for the highest bidder. We don’t know why Ahmet Ülker is buying his services. Ülker blowing up a tube station doesn’t make sense.’
‘And yet he is clearly involved,’ İkmen said. ‘I heard him with the ayatollah and Hajizadeh. He definitely wants this done.’
The room went quiet for a moment as everyone in it looked down into the station below.
‘Is Ahmet Ülker still in his house on Bishops Avenue?’ Ayşe asked.
‘Yes,’ Williams said gloomily. ‘Apparently just before you arrived here, Sergeant Kudu, Ahmet Ülker took a jog around the tennis court at the back of his house. The minutiae of that man’s life continues to deaden and frustrate my day.’
Someone, no one yet knew who, had opened fire on a jeep carrying Turkish army officers. The incident had happened in the south-east of Turkey, just outside the city of Hakkâri. All the officers, plus one civilian, had been killed. At Police Headquarters in İstanbul no one who had any knowledge of where Çetin İkmen might be spoke of it. According to Commissioner Ardıç, the names of the dead would be released as soon as the authorities down in Hakkâri could do so. But there was an air of gloom about, particularly in Süleyman’s office. At lunchtime he went out into Sultanahmet Square to buy cigarettes and possibly clear his head with some air and sunshine. But he found as he walked that he was still knotted up inside, still distracted. In fact, so preoccupied was he that he bumped into a small, plump, headscarfed lady just in front of the cigarette kiosk.