Authors: Terry Hayes
‘You’re not disappointing me,’ I lied. ‘I’m just trying to get to the truth. Yes, the guards may be clean – unless the tapes or disks were doctored.’ I was grabbing at anything I could lay a hand to, but I tried to carry it off with a certain panache.
‘They’re disks,’ said Cumali, not buying the panache or much of anything else. ‘They’ve been checked. All of them have embedded code, which means, if you edit them, it shows up immediately.
I’m told it’s the same system used at the White House.’
She was right about that, and the beauty of the security precautions at the French House was that the wealthy people in residence had total freedom. They weren’t under constant surveillance – which probably meant a great deal to rich dilettantes using drugs – but nobody could enter the grounds without being observed and challenged. The occupants were probably as safe as they would be anywhere in the world.
‘What about motive?’ I said, trying not to show it was just another flip of the card, another roll of the dice.
‘The wife, of course. The dead man had no siblings, his parents were dead and she was the only heir. Her name is Cameron.’ She slid a photo across the desk.
Cameron – photographed in long shot and looking at the camera – had it all going on. She was in
her mid-twenties – tall and elegant, a cool haughtiness that you usually only find in models and those who are truly beautiful. According to the State Department report, she had been working as a
‘personal shopper ’ at the Prada store on Fifth Avenue when she met him. It figured – how else was a chick from nowhere going to meet a young billionaire? At the laundromat?
‘How long had they been married?’ I asked, still looking at Cameron’s face. She was that kind of
woman.
‘Eight months.’
I stared at Cumali for a beat. ‘Eight months and a billion-dollar payout – that sounds like quite a motive to me.’
The cop shook her head. Why wasn’t I surprised? ‘From 8 p.m. she was in her husband’s helicopter
with four other partygoers – visiting a series of clubs along the coast. We’ve seen the CCTV footage from all of them – every minute was accounted for.’
I could imagine it – other revellers arriving at dance clubs in Porsches, BMWs and perhaps a few
Ferraris. Then she turns up with her posse in a Bell JetRanger. It’s hard to beat a billion dollars.
‘Okay – say she’s clear,’ I theorized. ‘She got someone to do it for her.’
‘Who? They knew a few people – other rich couples who’d sailed down from Monaco and St Tropez – and they met some foreigners here. Acquaintances, really. We interviewed them all, but there wasn’t anybody you could remotely think was acting on her behalf.’
‘A hired hand,’ I threw back. ‘A paid killer.’
She laughed – but not because she found it funny. ‘How do you find someone like that?’ she demanded. ‘Not a bungling lowlife but some top-class assassin? Somebody who won’t take the
deposit and just walk away? Anyway, you’ve still got the problem that he was alone on the estate.’
‘A billion dollars, though,’ I said, more to myself than her, ‘that’s a helluva lot of money.’
‘What is it with Americans?’ she asked with contempt. ‘Why do you automatically think of killing?
If she wanted money – a few million would be enough – why wouldn’t she just divorce him?’
I was tired, I was frustrated, I was desperately worried about trying to pump air into an investigation that kept deflating. But mostly I was sick of the woman and her attitude to me and my country. I wanted to round on her, I wanted to pay out on her own failings, I wanted to ask about the drug trade and the new Silk Road and genocide against the Kurds and anything else I could lay a hand to, but I reined it in – I had to, for the greater good, and all that.
‘Was there a pre-nup?’ I asked wearily.
But she wasn’t interested. ‘I didn’t inquire,’ she said. ‘What was the point? As I’ve said, there was nobody else on the estate, the only person with any motive was twenty miles away, Mr Dodge’s actions were clear and unambiguous, the forensic evidence is irrefutable. It was an accident.’
She started to gather up the photos and reports, ready to be put back in the filing cabinet. ‘That’s the review for you, Mr Wilson. I think even the FBI would agree that the Turkish police have done a thorough and professional job.’
‘I’ll need those files, the raw data and everything else, Detective,’ I said, indicating her stack of material. I expected an explosion, and I wasn’t disappointed.
‘
What?
’ she replied.
I caught sight of Hayrunnisa watching our faces, loving it.
‘I told you, I need to conduct my own review,’ I said evenly.
‘No,’ Cumali replied. She repeated it in Turkish for added confirmation.
‘I’ve come a long way, Detective Cumali. My visit has been organized at the highest levels of government. Do you want me to call and say I’m not getting the cooperation I need?’
She didn’t move. Nor did the secretary – she had probably never heard her boss threatened with a
bazooka before. I put my hand out for the files, but Cumali shook her head.
‘They’re the originals. Anyway, they’re mostly in Turkish,’ she said.
‘I’m sure a lot of them were translated for the widow,’ I countered, but she made no move to give
them to me. ‘Please, Detective – don’t let’s do this,’ I said.
She didn’t take her eyes off me – and then appeared to give in. ‘How long do you need them for?’
she asked.
‘Three days, maybe four,’ I said. It wasn’t much, but I figured it was the best I could do.
She looked at the secretary, still deeply angry – and that should have warned me that she had a plan.
She spoke harshly in Turkish, but there was one word I understood because it was so close to the English: fotokopi.
‘Thank you,’ I said politely.
‘There’s nothing here for you in Bodrum, Agent Wilson,’ she said after a moment. ‘Nothing at all.’
With that she turned her back and started to examine her schedule and mail. She didn’t look up when Hayrunnisa returned with the photocopied files. Not even when I put them in my backpack and
walked out of her office.
Chapter Nineteen
OF ALL THE deaths of all the people in all the world – we had to choose Dodge’s. What had seemed like a piece of good fortune had turned out to be a terrible mistake.
With his death so clearly an accident, there was nothing to investigate and, with nothing to investigate, Brodie Wilson might as well have got on a plane and gone home. Detective Leyla Cumali
had called that one right.
I had bought myself a few days, but that was nowhere near enough. As I left the stationhouse I thought yet again how it was the assumptions, the unquestioned assumptions, that get you every time.
Whisperer and I should have drilled deeper and asked ourselves exactly what I was going to investigate. In fairness, we were tired and desperate when we made the decision and, in most circumstances, the death of a twenty-eight-year-old man on sea-swept rocks would have presented
something
worth investigating. But excuses were no good, we had nailed our flag to the mast and –
like any number of pirates – we paid the price when the ship went down.
The question was: what was I going to do about it? The short answer was: I had no idea. I have a
way of dealing with stress, though – I either walk or I work. Bodrum offered the opportunity to do
both and I reminded myself that the major mission – or at least a first step on it – was identifying the phone boxes in the Old Town.
So I pulled the cellphone with its specially modified camera out of my backpack, reinserted the battery and, at the end of the street, I turned right. I was working to the inner map I had in my head and, after five minutes’ fast walking, at last feeling the anxiety subside to a manageable level, I reached the edge of the search area.
I had divided it mentally into sectors and I wound back to a much slower pace, determined not to
allow any potential target to escape my notice or the camera. It wasn’t easy. For most of the year Bodrum is a sleepy town, home to about fifty thousand people, but in summer the number swells to
half a million and, even though it was the tag end of the season, the streets were crowded with vacationers, scenesters and the vast universe of people who prey on them.
I passed countless shops selling Turkish leather sandals and rare Persian carpets, nearly all of which had come overland from some factory in China. Every hundred yards there were aromatic bars
specializing in what, in Spain, would be called tapas but that far east was known as meze, and no matter what time of the day or night they were always full.
Every time I saw a phone box I photographed it, confident that the software in the phone was downloading it on to the map and recording its exact position. Somewhere along the line I grabbed a
kebab wrapped in pitta and sat on a bench under a jacaranda tree to eat it. Only after a few minutes did I look in the window of the shop beside me. On display was an outstanding collection of saxophones
and classic electric guitars. I stepped to the door and looked into the dark cavern beyond.
It was one of those places – my sort of places – that you hardly see any more. One side of the cave
was occupied by piles of sheet music, racks of vinyl records, bins of CDs, and if somebody had told
me there were boxes of eight-track cartridges out back I would have believed them. The other side was given over to instruments – enough Gibsons and Fender Stratocasters to make any rock ’n’ roll
tragic smile – and a host of Turkish folk instruments I couldn’t put a name to, let alone a sound.
The guy smoking behind the counter – in his forties, a musician by the look of his weathered jeans
and dreamy eyes – motioned me to step inside. At another time, in another life, I would have spent
hours inside, but I spread my hands in mute apology and got on with the task at hand.
In the hours that followed I took enough photos of phone boxes outside tourist shops and corner
markets to last a lifetime, waited an age to cross a main thoroughfare to shoot one ten yards from a BP gas station and found at least six that looked as if they had been brought in from another country and illegally connected to the overhead lines. No wonder Turkish Telecom had no record of them.
By late afternoon, footsore and thirsty, I found myself in a small public square. I sat down at an open-air café and my first thought was to order an Efes beer but, thankfully, I have some degree of
self-awareness and I knew that in a mood of anger and despair I might not have stopped at one. I ordered a coffee instead and began the task I had been avoiding all day: I opened the backpack, took out the files concerning Dodge’s death and began to examine the disaster into which Whisperer and I
had stumbled.
Twenty minutes later I was certain something was badly wrong with the police investigation. The
key wasn’t in the interviews, the forensic examination or the analysis of the security footage. It was in the toxicology report.
Along with a lot of the other files it had been translated for Cameron’s benefit, and Detective Cumali was right, it showed there were drugs in his body, but I doubt if she had any way of judging
what those levels really meant. Indeed, the final page of the medical examiner ’s report merely stated they were sufficient to have significantly impaired the victim’s judgement and balance.
‘“Significantly impaired”?’ Holy crap, the young billionaire had gone nuclear. From my medical
training and own dark experience I knew he couldn’t have introduced that level of drugs into his bloodstream in a matter of hours – not without overdosing. Dodge had been on an epic binge: three
or four days, by my reckoning.
Unlike Cumali – or any of her forensic team – my chequered past also gave me an expert insight
into the actual effects those drugs would have had on him. There was tina, of course – there was always tina these days – its faithful little sidekick GHB, or EasyLay, to cut the mood swings and a good lacing of Ecstasy to soothe the soul. Sleep was always the enemy of somebody on a binge, and
that’s why there were the heavy traces of coke: to keep him awake. I was certain that nobody on a four-day drug blitz, using a cocktail of those substances, would have had any interest in fireworks.
That was Sunday school compared to the light show going on in his own head and genitals.
Then I remembered the alarm that went off over the binoculars. I realized what my problem was:
who would take binoculars to look at fireworks exploding almost overhead? Not unless you wanted
to blind yourself. And why go to the very end of the property and stand on a cliff edge – wouldn’t the lawn or terraces have offered just as good a view? Even the most chronic drug users have
some
instinct for self-preservation. No, something else had induced him, in that state of heavy drug intoxication, to grab the binoculars and head down to the cliff face.
I didn’t know what it was – I didn’t know the answer to a lot of things – but I did know that the situation wasn’t as bleak as it had appeared in Detective Cumali’s office, as I drowned in her disdain and the smell of frangipani.
I thought again of that bottle of Efes. Better not, I decided: hope was even more dangerous than despair.