‘Your talent would have shone through anyway!’

  But she didn’t respond to Krikor’s jolliness with a smile. Instead, she said, ‘I don’t think that’s really true. You know, Krikor, my father was sent to prison when I was ten and he’s still there. People like me do not get anywhere without people like Faruk and you. It just doesn’t happen. We have to claw our way out.’

  He was on the same floor as Çetin İkmen although not, thankfully, in the same room. Mehmet Süleyman looked around his elegant magnolia and grey deluxe hotel room and lit a cigarette. He opened the French windows on to his balcony and the sound of the early evening traffic swept in at him like a noisy wind. The sun was just setting over the Golden Horn and the city looked both exciting and comforting to him. He’d never lived anywhere except İstanbul and for all its massive increase in size and population, it was still essentially the same city he had been born into back in the 1960s. And the Pera Palas Hotel had been part of that. As a child, his mother had brought himself and his brother Murad to the hotel with her when she met her friends for afternoon tea. Back then it had been a neglected, slightly dusty place populated by rather odd foreign tourists and members of İstanbul’s faded Ottoman remnants – like his family. He and Murad had usually amused themselves going up and down in the antique lift. The lift attendant, an elderly man, as Mehmet recalled him, had been both very patient with them and appalled.

  Mehmet finished his cigarette out on the balcony and then went back into his room. There was a fabulous shower in the white marble bathroom and so, once he’d hung his suit up in the wardrobe, he took his clothes off and washed. The pressure of the hot water on his face and body was so much more vigorous than that of the one he had at home. His parents’ bathroom was ancient and scruffy and neither he nor they could afford to do anything about it. Quite apart from the maintenance he paid to his ex-wife for his son Yusuf, Mehmet had to run a car, pay rent to his parents and try to have some sort of life in what was becoming an expensive city. There was no money left over for bathrooms.

  He washed his hair, which he noticed by the very strong lights in the bathroom had become even more grey of late. Soon he’d have to decide whether or not he was going to dye it. But if he did that he knew that Çetin İkmen, if no one else, would laugh at him. The older man was just letting age happen to him. İkmen was really getting quite old now and Mehmet wondered, not for the first time, how much longer he could or would carry on working. It wasn’t a thought that he found pleasing in any way and so he pushed it out of his mind. He had to stay focused. The main thing about this upcoming event was to solve the ‘crime’ that the theatre company were going to stage and win the admiration of Lale Aktar. Now there, according to her publicity photographs, was a good-looking woman. And married to a man who was not only old enough to be her father, he was old enough to be Mehmet Süleyman’s father too.

  Chapter 3

  The Event

  The late shift was going to consist of a largely casual skeleton staff who would come on at 11 p.m. when the meal was over and the murder mystery show was in full swing. Then the fun would really begin. The guests didn’t have a clue what sort of spectacle they were in for. Or how much physical activity. The dinner menu included an extensive meze, lobster, lamb shank in pomegranate molasses, a range of desserts and cheeses, not to mention different wines with each course, which would mean that most of the guests wouldn’t be in any shape to run about much. But then that was all part of the fun.

  People were going to be talking about Krikor Sarkissian’s fund-raising event at the Pera Palas Hotel for ever. It was going to be one of those occasions when individuals would ask each other, ‘Where were you when you first heard the news about that nightmare that took place at the Pera Palas Hotel?’

  ‘Can I get an Efes?’

  Arto Sarkissian raised his eyes to the ceiling in despair. Warm and comfortable in the convivial surroundings of the Orient Bar, cushioned by soft, velvet-covered furniture and mingling with some of the most glamorous and interesting people in the city, he was being, to his mind, unnecessarily hassled by his oldest friend.

  ‘You want beer?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t like champagne,’ Çetin İkmen said. ‘It gives me hiccups.’

  Arto shook his head. ‘Just go up to the bar and ask for whatever you want,’ he said. ‘They have Efes Pilsen, they have everything; drinks both lavish and plebeian.’

  ‘OK.’ İkmen eased past a very influential media couple and made for the bar. As soon as he’d got his beer, Arto knew that Çetin would take it outside into the cold so that he could smoke. He was fifty-nine years old this very day and he was still behaving like some sort of intellectual working-class snob. He wouldn’t drink champagne, especially not with the glitterati, because he didn’t approve – of either the drink or those who drank it. But they were the ones, at the present time, who made the world go round and Çetin, Arto felt, really needed to get used to it. It was all about celebrity now.

  ‘Doctor?’

  He looked round and saw a very smartly dressed Mehmet Süleyman standing next to him. Champagne glass in hand, he represented the type of person the Pera Palas had been built for. In a way no less of an anachronism than Çetin İkmen, the easy grace and lack of glitz of a true Ottoman gave the Orient Bar a touch of regal class.

  Arto Sarkissian smiled. ‘Inspector.’

  ‘Is that Hovsep Pars?’ Süleyman asked, pointing to a very small man sitting alone in one of the distant corners of the bar.

  ‘Yes.’ Arto looked down.

  ‘I thought he didn’t go anywhere since . . .’

  Arto shrugged. ‘Family tragedies happen,’ he said. ‘One must carry on and live one’s life.’

  ‘Yes, but he—’

  ‘What Hovsep’s sister and her husband did was nothing to do with him,’ the doctor cut in. ‘It’s just tragic that it has taken him such a long time to come to terms with it. If indeed he has.’

  They both looked at the small, lonely man, his head down, concentratedly drinking his champagne.

  ‘He came for Krikor,’ Arto said. ‘Not as a fellow Armenian or even as a man of wealth, but because he loves my brother. Everybody does.’

  Çetin İkmen, now furnished with a glass of Efes Pilsen, caught Süleyman’s eye and nodded his head towards the back of the room as he made for the exit.

  ‘I think Çetin wants me to go outside and have a cigarette with him,’ Süleyman said to the doctor.

  ‘Are you going? I’d deem it a favour if you did. He’s so uncomfortable here.’

  Süleyman smiled. ‘What a strange world we live in, Doctor, where Turks must smoke in the cold.’

  He started to make his way out of the bar but then suddenly he stopped. In common with everyone else in the Orient Bar, Süleyman stared at the tall, elegant figure of a woman dressed in a full-length golden evening gown. Slim and beautiful, her shining blonde hair, which came down to her shoulders, was swept dramatically to one side in a Veronica Lake style, hiding her left eye almost completely. For a moment nobody spoke. Then conversation started again and the woman glided up to Krikor Sarkissian and kissed him. Süleyman walked back to Arto and said, ‘Is that Lale Aktar?’

  ‘Yes,’ Arto said. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’

  ‘Even more beautiful than in her photographs!’

  ‘And married too, Inspector,’ Arto said with a smile. ‘Faruk Aktar is a personal friend of Krikor’s.’

  The warning duly noted, Süleyman went to the back of the bar and followed İkmen out into the cold.

  She knew how to work a room.

  ‘So here he is, the person behind the murder mystery theme,’ Krikor heard Lale Aktar say to Burak Fisekçi, his assistant. She gave him her hand which Burak gallantly kissed. An ugly lump of a man, Burak seemed both flattered and appalled by her attention, probably because it made people look at him. Krikor saw his usually sallow complexion turn bright red.

  ‘Dr Sarkissian did most of the work,’ Burak said.

  ‘He doesn’t give himself enough credit,’ Krikor said to Lale. ‘If it hadn’t been for him, this evening would just have been a simple dinner party. He is my right hand.’ Krikor patted his assistant on the shoulder. Then he turned away and introduced Lale to some of his other guests. He watched her charm them all. It was as if she’d been doing this sort of thing all her life. Sometimes it was quite difficult to remember that Lale Aktar’s first book had only been published five years before.

  Written using her unmarried name of Lale Kanlı, The Çukorova Mystery had been a minor literary event. Some critics likened her work, which was exciting but conventional, to that of Agatha Christie. But then she’d met Faruk Aktar, married him, and everything had changed. Her next book, Screams in the Night, had been about a serial killer in a small Anatolian village. What so captured the public’s imagination about this book was that the killer was a woman who liked to torture her victims. Illiterate and furious, the vengeful widow Handan, the anti-heroine of Screams, had been an instant sensation. Feminist groups loved her, ministers of religion and other conservative elements saw the character as a threat, and Lale courted even more controversy when she told the press that some elements in Screams were derived directly from her own village background. She’d been raised around illiteracy, forced marriages, honour killings and dangerous folk beliefs that included the likening of strong, independent women to witches.

  By the time Screams came out, Lale was slim and polished and Faruk had made sure that every liberal media tycoon was right behind her career. Her life was charmed and she knew it. Lale – and Krikor admired her enormously for this – didn’t just give money to the charitable causes she supported, she got stuck in. As well as taking time to visit his clinic, she volunteered with a scheme that fed the homeless, visited prisons and hospitals, and continued to write ground-breaking crime novels that challenged the status quo. Occasionally Krikor found himself wondering what, if anything, she did for her family back in her village, or indeed for her father who was serving a sentence for an unspecified crime in a prison somewhere in Anatolia. Krikor never asked her about it and, as far as he knew, neither did her husband.

  ‘Krikor, where’s Arto?’

  She was back at his side with a champagne flute in her hand.

  Krikor looked around and saw his brother leaning up against the bar talking to a small man wearing a red cummerbund.

  He pointed. ‘Over there.’

  ‘Is that his friend Çetin İkmen with him?’ she asked.

  Krikor looked back just to check and then said, ‘No. I think that gentleman may be something to do with the Chief Rabbi’s office. We have several representatives from the rabbinate here tonight. I think that Inspector İkmen is probably outside smoking. Why?’

  She smiled. ‘I’ve heard Arto talk about him and I noticed from my list that he’s on my investigative team.’

  ‘Is he?’ Arto laughed. ‘Oh, what a naughty man my Burak is to put Çetin in opposition to his colleague Mehmet Süleyman.’ He looked around to try and see where Burak Fisekçi had gone, but he’d sloped off somewhere, probably in an attempt to be alone. Events like this were not easy for him.

  ‘Well, don’t change it now, Krikor,’ Lale said. ‘If I’ve got a police officer on my team then I’m not complaining.’

  ‘I want to win for my own self-esteem,’ Süleyman said.

  It was cold outside the hotel and a light mist was beginning to come up from the Golden Horn. But Süleyman and İkmen, together with other small groups of guests who were also braving the weather, had to smoke somewhere.

  Shuffling stiffly from foot to foot in an attempt to keep warm, İkmen said, ‘You sure it’s not to impress the famous novelist?’

  ‘Well, yes, that too . . .’

  ‘She is married,’ İkmen said.

  ‘I know that!’

  ‘Yes, and I know you, my dear friend,’ İkmen said. ‘Neither time nor misfortune seems to have impinged on the effect you have on women. But I don’t have to tell you how bad—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I think I know by now just how tediously disapproving you are of my private life.’ He took a drag from his cigarette and then said, ‘I’m not going to make a pass at Lale Aktar, Çetin. Apart from anything else, why on earth would someone like her even be aware of a penniless policeman like me?’

  ‘Because you are the opposing team leader.’

  He shrugged.

  İkmen raised a warning finger. ‘Competition can be very erotic,’ he said. ‘That which we are not can be highly alluring. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. Your second wife was a psychiatrist.’

  The slightly pained and also chilled look on Çetin İkmen’s face made Mehmet Süleyman smile. İkmen really didn’t want to be anywhere near this event and so he was complaining about everything and everyone. In an attempt to lighten the mood, Süleyman said, ‘What’s your room like?’

  ‘I can smoke in there,’ İkmen said gloomily.

  ‘Yes, but what’s it—’

  ‘It has a bed, a bathroom and a cupboard to hang my normal clothes up in,’ İkmen said.

  There was going to be no lightening his mood, clearly, so Süleyman stopped trying. It was at times like this that the younger man felt the difference in age between them most acutely. İkmen had always been irascible but now that trait was magnified and also he was much more vocal about what he liked and didn’t like. Formal occasions were not for him and formal occasions allied to ‘fun’ were positively poisonous.

  And, of course, it was İkmen’s birthday. Süleyman knew it, the Sarkissian brothers knew it and everyone, as usual, was tiptoeing around it, and İkmen, as if it was just another day. Mehmet Süleyman put one cigarette out, lit another and then watched what looked like a group of goths get out of a taxi and go into the hotel. They were, he imagined, the Bowstrings, the murder mystery theatre troupe.

  The Grand Pera Ballroom was set up for the banquet which would consist of five courses plus coffee and petits fours. There were a hundred guests who would be seated at round tables set with either six or eight places each. To cater for such numbers was a major, almost military operation, which fortunately boasted an ex-solider as its orchestrator. Ersu Nadir had been a professional soldier for twenty-five years before he became maître d’hôtel at the Pera Palas. Now a handsome and highly organised fifty-year-old, he inspected every place setting on every table while his waiting staff looked on, barely daring to breathe. Ersu Bey was not one to find fault where none existed but if he did find anything wrong he would not hesitate to point out the error to whoever was responsible in front of the whole banqueting team. Finally finding himself satisfied, he called housekeeping to come and brush one of the Murano chandeliers just one more time, then he went into the adjoining Aynalı room where the theatre group had just arrived. To Ersu Bey they looked like a bunch of anarchists.

  ‘Hello, I’m Alp,’ a boy who Ersu Bey thought was probably no more than twenty-five said.

  ‘Sir, I am the maître d’hôtel, Ersu Nadir.’ He bowed.

  ‘Is it OK if we use this room to get changed in and sort out our stuff?’

  ‘Of course.’

  There was one girl and a couple of slightly older women with Alp, plus four other men, and Ersu Bey did wonder whether he should ask if they’d like separate changing facilities but then he noticed that they were already getting undressed. Theatrical people did things like this. On the one hand, he approved – had not Atatürk himself declared that men and women should be equal? – but he was also very embarrassed.

  ‘So what is this, er, this performance you are giving tonight?’

  ‘We’re doing a piece I wrote myself,’ Alp said. ‘It’s based, loosely, on the novels of Agatha Christie and it’s set in the nineteen twenties. We’re all playing characters staying here at the hotel. I’m called İzzedin Effendi, I’m a former Ottoman prince, Ceyda there is my wife Nuray Hanımefendi, plus we’ve İzzedin’s younger brother, Yusuf, an Armenian called Avram Bey, a Dr Garibaldi, an Italian, the owner of the hotel, Nicos Bey, an American governess, Sarah, and the housekeeper Sofia Hanım.’

  ‘So one of these characters is killed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is your Hercule Poirot, your Miss Marple or whatever?’

  ‘Ah, it is for the guests to discover who killed whichever one of the company is ‘murdered,’ Alp said. ‘There will be clues both in our performance and scattered throughout the hotel.’

  ‘I see.’ Ersu Bey didn’t really approve. But then he was hardly on board with either the murder mystery evening or Dr Krikor Sarkissian’s drug clinic. In Ersu Bey’s opinion, drug addicts belonged not in hospital but in prison.

  ‘We’re scheduled to start our performance at ten,’ Alp said.

  ‘But you and your company will eat with the guests.’

  ‘Yes. We’ll mingle, in character, then when the meal is over, when the coffee is being served, our performance will begin in earnest.’

  Ersu Bey didn’t even pretend to understand what that meant. No performance area had been set up and so he couldn’t really picture what was going to happen. However he smiled and said, ‘Well, sir, I will be working until eleven this evening and so if I can assist you in any way at all, please don’t hesitate to ask.’

  ‘Thank you. Er, do you know where Dr Sarkissian is?’

  ‘In the Orient Bar, sir. Would you like me to get him for you?’

  ‘Well, actually it’s his assistant Burak Bey I really need to speak to,’ Alp said. ‘Mr Burak Fisekçi.’

  Ersu Bey smiled. ‘I will have him paged for you, sir.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  When Ersu Bey had gone, Alp looked at his colleagues and they all laughed.

  ‘I thought,’ one of the women said, ‘that men like him were dying out.’