Authors: Terry Hayes
What I really needed was my car.
Chapter Twenty
THE FRENCH HOUSE was easy enough to find. Once you headed out of Bodrum and reached the southern
headland, you took the long road that wound up through overhanging cypress trees and drove until
you could go no further.
It was almost dark by the time I reached it. The large wrought-iron gates blocking the road, backed
by black canvas for privacy, were closed, and the lanterns on top of the stone pillars remained unlit. A police car stood almost unseen in a small grove of trees and, when I drew to a stop, an overweight
cop leaned out of the window and started yelling in Turkish and waving me away.
I turned off the engine and got out of the car. He threw his door open, snarling, and I saw his hand reach for his billy club. I’m sorry to report that Turkish cops don’t have a reputation for asking twice but, fortunately, I beat him to the draw. I had my gold shield out and pointed at his face before he got within range.
He stared at it for a second, pissed off, then returned to his squad car. I heard him arguing on his radio and, when he was finally told what to do, he hoisted up his pants and took his sweet time approaching a small pedestrian gate opened by an electronic keypad. The device was set into concrete, a twelve-digit version, custom-made and impenetrable: nobody would be removing its face
plate and trying to manipulate the circuitry any time soon. Two cameras mounted on the high wall –
one fixed, one sweeping and motion-activated – held us in their glass eye. On the second try, the cop, consulting a scrap of paper, got the code right, the gate swung open and he stepped back. As I passed, I could smell the booze on his breath.
The gate clicked shut behind me and, alone in the gloom, I saw that an expanse of grass a hundred
feet wide circled the grounds inside the wall. I guessed it was an electronic moat, monitored by cameras and probably loaded with motion detectors. No interloper, even assuming they could have scaled the wall, would have had a chance of crossing it undetected and reaching the treeline on the far side. The house had been built decades ago, back when Bodrum would have been an unknown fishing
village, but even then somebody had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure their security, and I wondered why.
I followed the tree-lined drive, my shoes crunching on the gravel, heading down a tunnel of overarching boughs. It grew steadily darker and quieter and, though I couldn’t explain why, I undid
my jacket and made sure I could reach the Beretta tucked into my belt at the back. It was that sort of place, that sort of night.
The drive dog-legged round a silent fountain and revealed the house. The sight did nothing to comfort me: it was huge and dark and what had seemed sinister through a telescope from far away looked in close-up as if it wanted to overpower you. Most houses built in spectacular locations, even old houses, are designed for the view, with wide windows and long runs of glass. The French House
had broad eaves, an oak front door and windows recessed deep into the cut-limestone facade. It felt
like it had been built for privacy – an impression given even more emphasis because all the shutters at the front were closed.
I skirted round the side of the building, avoiding the pools of dark shadow closest to the wall, and passed a helicopter landing pad and a stone-built security centre near the garages. It was empty.
Leading away from it was a path, and I followed it through a high hedge and on to a terraced lawn.
The view was amazing – a necklace of distant islands, the floodlit Crusader castle, the lights of
Bodrum hugging the bays – but I didn’t like it. Not at all. Call me paranoid, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was somebody in the house watching me.
I turned and looked back. It was in darkness, so quiet a coma seemed to have settled over it. The shutters on the ground floor were open here, but all the rest were shut. I took my jacket off, laid it on a teak bench and walked down the sweeping lawn towards the wrought-iron gazebo. Halfway down, I
heard something in the acres of silence and swung round fast to look at the house – on a third-floor terrace a shutter was swinging on its hinges. It could have been the wind, and I had no way of knowing if it had been fastened when I first looked at the house.
I reached the gazebo, took four paces to the north and climbed over the railing. This was where Dodge had been standing when he tumbled down, and I suddenly felt nauseous: the drop was so precipitous and the surging water, far below, so disorienting that I felt as if I were being pulled towards it. The ground beneath my feet was crumbling and I knew the railing behind was too far to
reach. I thought I felt, or heard, something close behind me – I wasn’t sure – but there was no time to yell. I wheeled hard, launched myself at the railing and grabbed it. There was nobody there.
I caught my breath and climbed back on to solid ground. I was stone-cold sober and yet, once I was
on the wrong side of the fence, I could have easily fallen. What the hell had Dodge been doing down
there?
From the safety of the barrier fence, I looked at the view again. I tried to imagine what it must have been like: the air full of explosions and multicoloured rockets, the sound of music drifting across the water from party boats and dance clubs, the silver moon running ladders of light halfway to Greece.
Underneath it, stumbling a little down the lawn, came a man on a four-day drug binge, maybe trying
to wrench himself back to sobriety and calm the raging testosterone and whirling paranoia. But why, I asked myself again, why head for the gazebo?
My guess was that he had been looking for something, probably in the water out in the bay. The closer he got to it, the better the chance he had of seeing it. That’s why he had brought the binoculars and had either stood up on the railing or stepped over it. But what had he been looking for?
The records of his cellphone, included in the documents Detective Cumali had given to me, showed
that he hadn’t received any calls for at least an hour either side of his death. The surveillance cameras also showed that, during that same period, nobody had left the guardhouse to speak to him.
Yet something or somebody had induced him to grab a pair of binoculars, leave his lovely friend
tina, step out of the library, cross the formal terrace and head down the lawn to try to see something in the dark waters of the bay.
Say it was a person who – literally – had led him down the garden path to the gazebo. The most logical explanation was that they knew either how to beat the surveillance system or how to enter the estate inside the electronic moat. It had to be somebody Dodge knew or trusted, otherwise he would
have raised the alarm. They could have then pushed him over the edge and left by the same route they had entered.
Almost immediately another thought followed: if it was murder, I had only seen one in recent memory anywhere near as good. That was half a world away, at the Eastside Inn. Any doubts I had about a connection between the two deaths were vanishing fast.
I turned, walked up the lawn, picked up my jacket and climbed the steps to the formal terrace. It was time to enter the dark and brooding house.
Chapter Twenty-one
I TRIED THE handles on two sets of french doors without success. The third one was unlocked, which meant that either the absent security people were very sloppy or there was somebody inside.
I took the small flashlight attached to my key ring, turned it on, stepped into the salon and closed the door. By the narrow beam of light I saw a beautiful room. Whoever decorated it had taste: Grace
would have felt right at home, I thought. Most of the furniture was English antique – restrained, elegant and fabulously expensive. The mellow parquet floors were covered in large silk rugs and the
ivory-coloured walls hung with half a dozen paintings by the biggest of the big-name Impressionists.
The thin beam of light swept past them and fell on a pair of tall doors that led into the library. In many ways it was a more beautiful room than the
salon
– it was smaller and that made the proportions better, and the rows of books gave it a warmer, more informal mood. I wasn’t surprised that Dodge
had made it his headquarters.
A deep leather armchair had a side table next to it and, though the drugs had been removed, the paraphernalia was still there: the silver foils, a glass pipe, half a dozen bottles of Evian, cigarettes and an overflowing ashtray. Through a wall of French windows the chair commanded a panoramic view
of the sea and sky – hell, if he had wanted to see the fireworks he wouldn’t have even needed to stand up. The effect in the room would have been even more remarkable thanks to two huge gilt mirrors on
either side of the fireplace directly behind the chair.
They struck me as being incongruous in a library – I knew Grace would never have approved – but
even the rich have their idiosyncrasies.
I stepped over the crime tape securing that side of the room – it didn’t matter, the Turks said the investigation was over – leaned on the back of the chair and looked out at the view. I tried to imagine what somebody could have said to him which would have made him leave the safety of his headquarters.
I reached down into my mind, holding my breath and trying to swim deeper. Once again, just like
when I had stood in the room at the Eastside Inn and realized that it was a woman who was living there, I shut everything out … The answer was close … lying just the other side of knowing … if only I could touch it … a person he knew had come through the tall doors …
I didn’t hear it, but the concealed door behind me opened. It was one of those ones you find in a lot of old libraries – decorated with the spines of books to make it blend seamlessly into the rest of the shelves. Whoever stepped through it must have been wearing rubber-soled shoes, because I didn’t hear a footfall on the silk carpet. But there is a sound clothing makes when it moves – or maybe it’s not even a sound, more like a disturbance of the air – that is almost impossible to conceal. I felt it then.
Heart leaping into my throat, I reached behind me, drew the Beretta in one fluid motion, slipped off the safety, turned fast, crouched low to reduce my size as a target, spread my feet, raised the weapon as a direct extension of my right arm and crooked my finger round the trigger – exactly as they had
taught me so many years ago when I was young and didn’t know yet what it was like to kill a man and
see the faces of his two young girls in my dreams.
A different man, a less troubled man, would have shot. Instead, I hesitated and looked down the barrel and saw a barefoot woman dressed in black – which was appropriate, given that she was newly
widowed. It was Cameron.
‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked, trying to appear calm in the gloom, but the gun had scared her and she couldn’t stop her hand from shaking.
I holstered it. ‘My name is Brodie Wilson. I’m—’
‘The FBI guy? Cumali, the Turkish cop, said they were sending someone.’
‘Yes.’
‘The FBI always walks into people’s houses unannounced?’
‘I apologize,’ I replied. ‘I was under the impression it was empty. I came to look around.’
Her hand had stopped shaking, but she was still rattled and she pulled out a cigarette. But she didn’t light it – it was one of those electronic jobs favoured by people trying to kick the habit. She let it dangle from her elegant fingers. ‘Does the FBI normally investigate accidents? Who asked you to come to Bodrum?’
‘One of your husband’s lawyers or trustees, I believe.’
‘That figures,’ she said. ‘Who was it – Fairfax, Resnick, Porter?’
It seemed from her list there were a lot of her husband’s circle who didn’t approve of a sales assistant – even if it was Prada – hitting the jackpot. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
She laughed, without any humour. ‘You wouldn’t tell me even if you did, would you?’
‘No,’ I replied.
She took a drag from the electronic cigarette. From anybody else, it would have appeared ridiculous. ‘The house looked deserted,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about the gun, but you surprised me.’
She didn’t bother answering. I got the feeling she was sizing me up. ‘How did you get on to the estate?’ I asked, trying to keep the question as casual as possible.
‘What do you mean?’ she replied.
‘I came through the front gate – there weren’t any cars parked there and the cop on duty didn’t say
anything about you being at home.’
‘Our boat is moored in the bay – that’s where I’ve been staying since the accident. One of the dinghies brought me over and I walked up the steps.’
She must have seen a shadow of doubt cross my face, because she shrugged. ‘The dinghy is in the
boathouse. The crewman is still down there – go and ask him if you want.’
‘Of course not,’ I replied. ‘It’s your house, you can do whatever you like. That was you up on the
terrace, was it?’
She hesitated. ‘I didn’t realize you were watching.’
‘I was down on the lawn – I couldn’t be sure, I thought I saw a shadow.’
‘A shutter was blowing in the wind,’ she replied.
I turned quickly – from somewhere far away, I thought I heard a door close. ‘Is there somebody else in the house?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I thought I heard …’ I listened harder, but I couldn’t catch it. Everything was silent.