Ayşe began riffling though her coat pockets to try and locate her phone. ‘Sssh!’

  Nar attempted to move past Ayşe to get a look at the inner kitchen door.

  But the policewoman held her back. ‘Do you have a phone with you?’ she whispered.

  ‘A phone? Yes. Don’t you?’

  ‘I left it at home,’ Ayşe said.

  ‘Well, that was a bit—’

  ‘Just give me your phone!’ Her frustration, mainly at herself, was causing her voice to rise. She looked towards the kitchens to make sure that the gunman wasn’t coming towards them.

  Following an instinct that was more to do with wanting to protect her one-time lover from whatever danger lurked inside the hotel, Ayşe moved forward, pulling

  Nar – who had put her precious shoes down and was desperately trying to extricate her phone from the top of one of her stockings – behind her. To both sides of her were doors, possibly to store cupboards or fridges. She heard men’s voices from the kitchen.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ a young voice said.

  There was a laugh, then an older more smoke-dried voice said, ‘Bodrum for me. A boat, a bottle of rakı, maybe a girl . . .’

  ‘In your dreams,’ a third voice said.

  ‘What? The boat, the rakı or the girl?’

  ‘What do you think!’

  They all laughed. Frozen, Ayşe wondered what to do next. She could hear Nar behind her, breathing heavily. She hoped she’d found her phone. But then she heard the young man say, ‘It’s quiet outside, I’m going out for that cigarette now.’

  ‘Oh, have one in here!’ the older man said.

  ‘No,’ the young man said, ‘I can’t smoke in a kitchen, it just isn’t nice.’

  ‘OK.’

  Ayşe grabbed the handle of the door nearest to her and opened it. She pulled Nar after her. The blinding whiteness of the room was the first thing that hit her. It was some kind of fridge or freezer. Once Nar was in, Ayşe pushed the door to, but not shut. She made Nar keep it open with just one finger.

  Hiding in a fridge was certainly a novel experience but the real surprise for Ayşe and Nar came in the shape of a rather urbane-looking man who appeared to be moving blocks of cheese around.

  Chapter 10

  The boy, Alp İlhan, was clearly frightened but in spite of his fear, his love for what he did shone through.

  ‘Murder mystery events are only part of what we do,’ he told İkmen, Süleyman and the others. ‘We put on plays, our own work and others, anywhere that will take us.’

  ‘You all go to Boğaziçi University?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  İkmen looked down at his notebook. ‘And you started Bowstrings the summer before last?’

  ‘Yes. With Ceyda Ümit and Söner Erkan. It was my idea.’

  He was a pleasant enough young man but there was a streak of what might be quite ruthless ambition there too. His fictional guise as an Ottoman prince rather suited him.

  ‘I assume that, being students, you needed to raise some capital to start Bowstrings,’ İkmen said. ‘You must need to pay for costume hire, publicity, for rehearsal time for your plays. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So how did you do that?’

  He sighed. ‘I work as a tour guide in the summer,’ he said. ‘I can speak English and so I get some work through a travel agency in Sultanahmet. But that’s not much. Most of the money that Bowstrings have had so far has come from Söner’s parents. They’re rich.’

  ‘Would you say that Söner’s parents basically own Bowstrings?’ İkmen said. Alp was a good-looking boy but now that İkmen regarded him closely he could see that for all his beauty he was just a rather ordinary lower-middle-class İstanbul lad. He was the type of kid whose dad probably had a middle management job in a bank and whose mum stayed at home and wore a headscarf. Not unlike İkmen’s own children.

  Alp looked down at the floor. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And is that a happy arrangement?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Yeah. Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘They pay all our bills but . . .’ After casting a glance at their captors over one shoulder, he leaned forward in his chair and said, ‘Söner could kind of hold that over everyone’s head from time to time. Like, if we didn’t want to do what he wanted to do he could say he was going to tell his dad . . .’

  ‘Who would cut off your money?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  İkmen looked at the boy, who was obviously frightened for all sorts of reasons, and then he said, ‘Did you like Söner, Alp?’

  He had to think about it for a moment but then he said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  The black-clad ghoul with the camera on his helmet moved in closer and İkmen lost his temper. He glared into the man’s eyes and said, ‘What are you filming for? Posterity? Your own amusement?’

  The man moved in even closer and Hovsep Pars put a hand up to his chest in a vain attempt to still his wildly beating heart.

  ‘What kind of sick—’

  ‘Your job, Inspector İkmen, is to question suspects and then make a judgement,’ the leader of the masked gunmen interjected. ‘Don’t speculate about me or my team. Get it right and you’ll never hear from us again.’

  ‘Yes, but what do you want?’ Krikor Sarkissian burst out. His face was red with tension and even İkmen, across the other side of the room, could see the veins in his neck pulsating. ‘You come here—’

  ‘Shut up.’ The leader said it quietly but with an insistence that carried with it a definite layer of menace. ‘Your job is not to ask questions. Your job is to watch Inspectors İkmen and Süleyman go about their work and then help them with their judgement at the end.’ Then he turned to look at İkmen. ‘Time is ticking, Inspector. Do you have many more questions for this witness?’

  ‘A few.’ İkmen returned his gaze to Alp’s face. ‘I get the impression that your liking for Söner was not exactly wholehearted.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him, Inspector. You have to believe me.’

  Carefully sidestepping the issue, İkmen said, ‘What didn’t you like about him?’

  ‘Oh.’ Alp flung his arms in the air in a gesture of exasperation. ‘He was bossy, lazy and he was terrible with money. Always borrowing cash or Akbils or cigarettes from everyone else. Kenan, he plays the Armenian Avram Bey, he’s even paid Söner’s rent in the past.’

  ‘And yet Söner has rich parents?’

  ‘Yes, but he has – had – rich tastes too,’ Alp said. Then his features grimaced and he began to cry. Arto Sarkissian, who was sitting next to the boy, put a fatherly arm around his shoulders.

  Under cover of the sound of Alp’s crying, Süleyman whispered to İkmen, ‘There’s an old telephone over by the Christmas tree. I don’t know if it works. But if I can get close enough maybe I can find out.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  They both looked up just in time to see the leader walking towards them.

  ‘Oh, just the case . . .’

  He struck İkmen on the cheek with one hard, open hand. It hurt. ‘Discussion will come after you’ve finished all your interviews,’ the leader said quietly. ‘It’s the way Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple would have done it. And if that method was good enough for them then it is most certainly good enough for you.’

  ‘Do you remember seeing film of Beslan?’ Ceyda Ümit said to the plump, middle-aged man at her side.

  ‘Was that where Chechen terrorists took over a school somewhere in Russia?’ Burak Fisekçi asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Ceyda looked around the ballroom with wide, frightened 1920s-style eyes. There were, she counted, eight black-clad masked men silently watching their every move. ‘They were Muslim fundamentalists.’

  ‘Do you think that these people might be fundamentalists too?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But whoever they are, I wasn’t expecting them. I didn’t sign up for this, Burak Bey.’

  ‘None of us did,’ he said. And then he smiled at her. ‘If I’d known this was going to happen I would never have asked you and your friends to come and perform for us tonight, Ceyda.’

  ‘And Söner is dead. How can that be?’ she said. ‘He was supposed to be the victim in the drama, yes, but not in real life.’

  ‘Why was he the victim in your murder mystery entertainment?’ Burak Fisekçi asked.

  ‘No one told you?’

  ‘No. Once we’d set the basic plot, it was decided that it was best that only the actors, you, knew all the details, in case I inadvertently gave something away. Remember?’

  ‘Yes, sort of. I . . . I killed young Yusuf Effendi because he was blackmailing me,’ she said. ‘I’d been having an affair with Signor Garibaldi which Yusuf got to know about.’

  Burak raised a small smile. ‘How exotic.’

  ‘Well, it would have been.’ She looked around the room and then she said, ‘Alp is a long time.’ She frowned.

  ‘He’s with Dr Sarkissian and his brother and the policemen. I shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘He’s also with more of these people,’ Ceyda said. ‘Burak Bey, can you think of a reason, any reason, why this is happening to us?’

  ‘I can’t.’ He took one of her small, dry hands in one of his large, damp mitts and he smiled at her again. ‘But I’m sure it will all be all right in the end. I’m sure it will.’

  Ceyda forced herself to raise a smile. She’d known Burak Bey all her life and had always found him truthful and reliable. So his words were a comfort even though she knew that there was no way even Burak Fisekçi could predict what was going to happen.

  Bowstrings had got the gig through Ceyda Ümit.

  ‘Burak Fisekçi, my assistant, lives in the same apartment block as Ceyda Ümit’s family,’ Krikor Sarkissian told Çetin İkmen. ‘When we were first considering the idea of a murder mystery event, Burak told me that he knew a young girl who was part of a theatrical troupe. They came along to the clinic. They had some good ideas and, more crucially, they’d already performed a murder mystery event at the Four Seasons. That had been very successful. I thought it would be nice to give a group of young actors a chance – not to mention some money.’

  ‘Whose idea was it to have a murder mystery evening?’ İkmen asked. The fact that the guests had been too absorbed in the fictional mystery to notice anything that might have been going awry in real life could point to some sort of connection between the play and subsequent events. But then it might not. İkmen hadn’t noticed anything suspicious, with the exception of the strange man who had visited the concierge earlier. He wondered if that concierge was still in the hotel or had already gone home.

  ‘We had a brainstorming session,’ Krikor Sarkissian said. ‘We do that a lot when we have a problem.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Myself, Burak, our nurses, Selma Hanım, our receptionist. It was a long time ago, Çetin, eighteen months or so.’

  ‘Do you remember who came up with the idea for a murder mystery evening?’

  ‘We all did really,’ Krikor said. ‘My first thought on it was to just have a straightforward dinner somewhere with maybe some circus acts performing after the meal. We talked for hours. But because Burak knew Ceyda and her actor friends and what they did, the murder mystery evening was ultimately his idea.’

  ‘Are any of the other participants in that meeting here tonight?’

  ‘No, Selma Hanım didn’t want to come and our nursing staff has completely changed since that time.’

  ‘Did anyone take any notes during the meeting?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Burak always takes notes during meetings, that is part of his function. Although I doubt very much whether he’ll have those notes on him tonight.’

  İkmen looked at their captors. ‘I don’t suppose it will be possible to leave the hotel to search for evidence, will it?’

  No one spoke until the leader said, ‘What do you think, Çetin Bey?’

  İkmen looked him in the eyes. ‘What do I think? I don’t know. But I can say what worries me.’

  ‘And what is that?’ the leader asked.

  ‘What worries me most is if Inspector Süleyman and I successfully identify who killed Söner Erkan but you choose to disagree with us.’

  The eyes underneath the balaclava helmet crinkled a little as the leader’s brows came together. ‘But why would I do that?’

  Out of the corner of his eye, İkmen saw Süleyman move a few centimetres to his left, closer to the telephone.

  ‘Because you want to kill us,’ İkmen said.

  Now the eyes relaxed. ‘And why would I want to do that, Inspector İkmen?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ İkmen replied. ‘So far, sir, you and your colleagues represent something that is outside my experience.’ Then he looked down at his notes. ‘I’d like to see the crime scene,’ he said. ‘My first view of it was truncated by your invasion or whatever one might call it.’

  ‘If you wish to see the crime scene again,’ the leader said, ‘then that can be arranged. Mr Söner Erkan hasn’t gone anywhere.’

  It took Ersu Bey just over a minute to realise that he was not the only man in the fridge. There was an attractive woman in her thirties and a very tall and glamorous figure who had the breasts of a woman and the feet and throat of a man. A transsexual. Ersu Bey didn’t know how to feel. On one level he was repulsed while on the other he was grateful for the company of anyone in that awful, cold and confined space. However what the real woman said to him was disturbing.

  ‘It seems some people, we don’t know who, have taken over the hotel,’ she said. ‘We know they’re armed and we suspect they’ve killed but—’

  ‘Who are you?’ Ersu Bey said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The transsexual, who had one heavily lacquered fingernail keeping the door open just a crack, hissed, ‘Keep it down! They’ll hear you!’

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu put her hand in her pocket but didn’t find her police badge. She shrugged. ‘I’m a police officer,’ she whispered. ‘My name is Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu.’ Then she pointed at the transsexual. ‘She is Nar. I can’t explain exactly who she is, it would take too long. Who are you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Sssh!’ Nar hissed again. ‘Keep it down, I said!’

  ‘I am Ersu Nadir,’ he whispered. ‘I am the maître d’hôtel. Why are you and this, er, person in my refrigerator?’

  ‘Why were you locked in your own refrigerator, Ersu Bey?’ Ayşe said.

  ‘I asked—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who asked what or why!’ Ayşe was exasperated. She hadn’t expected to find herself hiding in a fridge, never mind a fridge occupied by a man she got the impression was something of a martinet. ‘At the moment one of the gunmen is outside the kitchen door having a smoke,’ she said. ‘When he comes back in and returns to the kitchen, maybe we can move out into the hotel. It depends what he and his colleagues do. Who locked you in here?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ He still didn’t know whether to believe her story about being a police officer, but if she and the transsexual were going to get him out of the fridge, did it really matter too much? Not that he really cared . . . ‘I was putting butter away and then the door closed. I didn’t see who did it. Some of our kitchen staff are not as bright as they might be. Tonight they’re mainly casuals.’

  ‘You don’t think that you were locked in deliberately?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘He’s coming back!’ Nar took her index finger out of the crack in the door and replaced it with her little finger. The corridor from the kitchen to the back door was dingy and she wanted to cut down any light coming from the fridge as much as possible. Fortunately the fridge door opened towards the inner door of the hotel, so with any luck the man would only see the light from the crack if he looked back before he went into the kitchen. None of them breathed as they heard his footsteps pass along the corridor outside.

  Chapter 11

  Arto Sarkissian hadn’t had any latex gloves on him when he came to the Pera Palas and so he asked the anonymous men if one of them might bring him some washing-up gloves from the hotel kitchens. The leader duly called someone and after about ten minutes a pair of yellow plastic gloves were delivered to room 411. Getting the gloves was one thing but using them was quite another. Compared to the thin latex gloves he generally used in his work, these were horribly unwieldy.

  Arto examined what was a very deep wound in Söner Erkan’s throat. There were other wounds to his chest but they were not, he believed, the cause of the young man’s death. Like Çetin İkmen, Arto Sarkissian believed that it was the thrust to the neck that had killed him.

  ‘Looks like a straight blade severed the carotid artery,’ he said.

  ‘Was I right? Was he still alive when it happened?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the pathologist said.

  ‘What about the other wounds?’

  ‘Window dressing.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Either the assailant wanted to mislead us with the chest wounds for some reason, or he or she attacked the corpse post mortem, maybe because they didn’t realise he was already dead.’ Arto Sarkissian looked at the masked leader and said, ‘Can we look for the murder weapon?’

  ‘Of course.’

  İkmen, Arto Sarkissian and Mehmet Süleyman began to search the room. Apparently only one pair of gloves had been found in the kitchen and so İkmen and Süleyman were reduced to wrapping handkerchiefs around their hands as they opened drawers and looked underneath the bed and in the bathroom. With luck, at some point in the future, a properly appointed police team would gain access to 411 to conduct a systematic search. But for the moment they just had to do what they could. In terms of fingerprints and/or footprints, only those of Lale Aktar were obvious. Her shoes were distinctive. Little, high-heeled Jimmy Choos which had left bloody stiletto and pointed toe marks across the bedroom floor and out into the corridor. But they found no weapon.

  Arto Sarkissian looked down at the body again. ‘I think he was lying on the bed on his back when he was stabbed,’ he said.