Death by Design (31 page)

‘Sınan?’

At first he thought he had to be dreaming. But then he remembered, of course his son worked in England now.

‘Dad.’ He leaned down, put his arms round his father’s neck and kissed his cheeks. ‘Dad, the police came and got me. You’re something of a hero. What have you been doing?’

It took İkmen a few moments to really come into full consciousness, but when he did he told his son that he had been working with the Metropolitan Police.

‘I don’t know how much I can tell you,’ he said as he took a glass of water gratefully from his son’s hands.

‘Mum, everyone in fact, thought that you were out east,’ Sınan said.

‘Does your mother know I’m here?’

‘Once you were safe, the Met called Commissioner Ardıç who went personally to the apartment and told Mum,’ Sınan said. ‘We’re all really proud, you know, Dad. Even Mum.’

Sınan no longer lived in İstanbul but he was well aware of the tension that had scarred his parents’ marriage in the wake of his brother Bekir’s death.

‘You know you can call home now,’ Sınan said.

İkmen shook his head. ‘Later. As long as they know.’

‘They do.’ And then Sınan watched as his father’s eyes closed. ‘I’ll leave you to rest for a while, Dad.’

But İkmen didn’t hear him and as Sınan left he began snoring heavily once again.

In spite of the very serious charges being made against him, Ahmet Ülker looked really quite relaxed.

‘Hadi Nourazar approached me,’ he told Superintendent Williams. ‘It was his idea to kill the mayor. I knew nothing about that. I was paying him to frighten Mr Üner.’

‘Mr Ülker, you were instrumental in recruiting men to blow up a disused tube station,’ Williams responded. ‘Thirty-four people have died so far.’

One of those was Derek Harrison. It appeared, the police told him, that Derek had been stabbed.

‘Superintendent, Ali Reza Hajizadeh was a fanatic,’ Ülker said. ‘Even Nourazar, a fanatic himself, was wary of him. He wanted to die. What can I say? He was to create a diversion by blowing himself up on Mark Lane station. He was there to create a noise! An old railwayman that Derek knew gave us the code. Do you think that such a person would have given us the code if he had known that people were going to be killed?’

‘Give me his name and I’ll ask him,’ Williams said.

‘He’s called John Richards and he lives in Barking,’ Ülker replied. ‘I think you’ll find he is a member of the British National Party. Not someone who would help jihadis. He didn’t know that Hajizadeh was going to climb down onto the rail track. None of us did!’

‘But by your own admission you knew that Hajizadeh was a fanatic,’ Williams said. ‘You must have realised there was a possibility he would blow up a train.’

Ülker looked at his lawyer and sighed. ‘I meant no harm.’

‘You meant no harm?’ Williams laughed. ‘Mr Ülker, we put a police officer inside your organisation. The illegal workers we knew about anyway but from him we got your dodgy arthritis drug scam as well as much about your plans for Mark Lane and our mayor, Mr Üner. That officer—’

‘He is a Turk.’

‘Yes, he’s a Turk,’ Williams said.

‘You cannot trust the Turkish police.’

‘No?’ Williams laughed again. ‘Ülker, this officer and his colleagues were on the team who closed you down in İstanbul. Inspector Çetin İkmen has yet to be fully debriefed, but when he is, we’ll get even more on you. Not to mention poor old Wesley Simpson.’

Ülker looked up and frowned.

‘Beyond a bit of dodgy goods moving, Wes had retired,’ Williams said. ‘He is not best pleased about what Nourazar and you put him through.’

‘The man is a thief,’ Ülker said.

‘Oh, so I can’t take İkmen’s word for anything because he’s a Turkish policeman and I shouldn’t be listening to Wesley because he’s a thief?’

Ahmet Ülker didn’t answer.

‘And then of course there is the issue of your wife, Mr Ülker,’ Williams said. ‘Her family haven’t heard from her. They’re worried.’

‘I don’t know where she is,’ Ülker said. ‘She left me, Mr Williams. How should I know where she is if she doesn’t tell me?’

‘Maybe the search we’re going to make of all your properties as well as those registered to Yacoubian Industries will help to solve the mystery,’ Williams replied.

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Then you’re obviously not worried about what we might find,’ Williams said. ‘So maybe you didn’t kill her.’

Again, Ülker didn’t answer.

‘But then again, it’s not just Maxine we’re looking for, is it?’ He smiled. ‘A lot of money won’t look good for you. Neither will a stack of blank British passports.’

Ülker frowned. ‘Passports?’

‘Like the ones our Turkish colleagues found at your factory in İstanbul,’ Williams said.

Ülker, grave, did not answer.

‘Something else we’d like to know, Mr Ülker. Movie Star Pools turned up at your place yesterday, I imagine to clean your pool. Trouble is, there’s no such company and so I was wondering who Movie Star Pools might really be. Think you can help me with that, do you?’

Ülker turned to his lawyer and, for a moment, the two of them whispered between themselves. When they had finished, the lawyer said, ‘Superintendent, may I please have a word with my client in private?’

The Iranian official sat down beside the acting commissioner and said, ‘That’s him.’

They were observing an interview between a still visibly scarred Patrick Riley and Hadi Nourazar. The ayatollah had refused any legal representation and was currently saying nothing.

‘Hadi, when we found you,’ Riley said, ‘you were aiming a gun at the mayor of London, having just shot an entirely innocent woman.’

Nourazar looked up at the ceiling and then down again at his hands.

‘You were instrumental in the torture of a man you knew as Çetin Ertegrul, actually an undercover police officer,’ Riley continued. ‘Together with others who were encouraged by you to end their own lives, you kidnapped Mr Haluk Ülker and held him against his will.’

The Iranian official asked, ‘The men who committed suicide, how do you know that Nourazar encouraged that?’

‘The driver of the car, a civilian, hired simply to drive hard and fast, told us,’ Dee replied.

‘Can you trust him?’

‘In this instance I think we can,’ Dee said. ‘And besides, Hüseyin, why else would those men do such a thing? Two of them had families, they were all decent blokes. Nourazar got his hooks into them . . .’

‘That is his skill,’ Hüseyin the Iranian official said. ‘People follow him. Even we were taken in.’

‘When he returned to his religion?’

‘He was a model.’ Hüseyin smiled. ‘A SAVAK agent, burdened with remorse, finding solace in speaking against other royalists and, of course, in the mercy of Islam. Only later did we realise that his conception of Islam was not in accord with our own.’

‘That must have been worrying for you,’ Dee said.

Hüseyin didn’t reply.

In the interview room, Riley spoke again.

‘Mr Nourazar—’

‘Ayatollah,’ Nourazar interrupted.

Riley smiled. ‘You can drop the holy man routine with me,’ he said. ‘We know all of this jihadi thing is only for money.’

Nourazar turned away.

‘Mr Ülker has already told us that he was going to give you money. Although he says that he only wanted the mayor “frightened”. He says that killing the mayor was your idea.’

There was no response at all.

‘You want to know what I think happened?’ Riley asked. ‘I think that at the beginning you were so afraid of the Islamic Revolution you shopped all your old mates in SAVAK in order to save your own skin.’

This time, at the word SAVAK, Nourazar did respond. His face went white and he emitted a tiny gasp.

‘Oh, we know all about SAVAK and your role in it,’ Riley said. ‘We know about how you took to Islam and then how it just wasn’t really for you.’

Nourazar looked at Riley with disgust.

‘If only he would talk!’ Dee said to his Iranian guest.

‘He won’t do that,’ Hüseyin responded calmly. ‘Silence is all that remains to him. If you would give him to us, David . . .’

‘Hüseyin, if I could give him to you, I would,’ Dee said. ‘I know he’s caused trouble in Iran, but here he’s committed crimes that include incitement to murder. Between ourselves and the Turks . . .’

‘I understand,’ Hüseyin smiled. ‘You have lost people. That is hard to forgive.’

Dee leaned back in his seat. ‘He’s not done much for Anglo-Iranian relations,’ he said. ‘We have to try and control that.’

Hüseyin lowered his head a little.

‘Know what I think?’ Riley said to Nourazar as he leaned over the table towards him. ‘I think that what you really are just couldn’t help breaking through. You were a bully and a torturer with SAVAK and so you naturally gravitated towards the most extreme examples of religion. The Taliban are Sunni, right?’

Nourazar neither moved nor spoke.

‘You’re Shi’a, but you liked their style. You wanted some of that. What you also wanted was some money too, wasn’t it, Hadi? Because money was what you’d had before, wasn’t it? From the state, from people you’d tortured, from their families, willing to pay anything to get them out of your clutches.’

‘You have no idea what you are talking about,’ Nourazar responded quietly.

‘Oh, don’t I?’ Riley said. And then suddenly his face clouded. ‘When your mate Hajizadeh exploded himself at Mark Lane, a young policewoman got killed. She was a Muslim, Hadi. She was a good copper, a nice woman and she was a Muslim. And you know what?’

David Dee saw something familiar and ugly in Riley’s eyes. He looked at his Iranian guest and said, ‘I think that maybe I should stop this interview now.’

Hüseyin nodded his assent. Dee left the room. Not that Hüseyin cared about Nourazar at all. But he knew how things worked in the UK, he knew how the guilty could sometimes get free by claiming they had been led or brutalised by the police. Sometimes, of course, it was true.

‘There were Muslims on that train!’ Riley shouted. ‘Mr Üner is a Muslim! The men you told to kill themselves, they were Muslim! What are you trying to do, you stupid old bastard? Kill all your own people?’

The door of the interview room opened. ‘Inspector Riley,’ Dee said. ‘Could I have a word?’

Back in the observation room, Hüseyin the Iranian watched as Riley left with Dee and Hadi Nourazar began to smile.

‘I wanted to frighten Mr Üner,’ Ahmet Ülker said. ‘My wife’s company produces counterfeit goods. I knew that, I admit. I wanted to protect her.’

‘Oh, come on, Ahmet!’ Williams said impatiently. ‘You run those factories!’

‘My wife runs and owns Yacoubian Industries,’ Ülker corrected. ‘I may have given her the money to start the business and given her my support. But it is Maxine’s name and not my own that is on every piece of documentation that is concerned with the company.’

Williams, aware that he wasn’t going to get anywhere if he kept on denying that what Ülker said was true, even if it wasn’t, kept quiet.

‘Everything I did, including assaulting the officer you had working undercover, was because I wanted to protect my wife. I needed to frighten the mayor so he would leave us alone. Think what you like of my wife’s business, but people like fake goods. There is a market. Üner was threatening to put Maxine out of business.’

‘So you engaged the services of the Brothers of the Light,’ Williams said.

‘I met Hadi Nourazar in İstanbul,’ Ülker said. ‘As I told you, he approached me. The people he recruited were fanatics. He already had some disciples in London. But Nourazar himself is a man of money. He convinced me that he and his people could frighten Mr Üner. I would not have to dirty my hands. He began to prepare a boy who was working in my wife’s factory in İstanbul.’ He smiled. ‘Of course my wife can only have a business in Turkey in my name, but it was hers, you understand. This boy was a fanatic, he wanted to come to England to see his brother. The idea, Mr Williams, was to have the boy set an explosion on the old station. To bring the tube to a halt, you understand.’

‘Why?’

‘Firstly an explosion would cause chaos and fear and would, we knew, bring Mr Üner out of his safe office and into the open to smoke a cigarette. He does that when he’s nervous or something bad occurs.’

Unfortunately Haluk Üner’s habits were too well-known.

‘There, Nourazar and his men could find and take the mayor with little risk to themselves,’ Ülker said. ‘Secondly, I wanted to create fear – in Mr Üner and in the people of London. Mr Üner had to know that we were serious, that he had to stop his campaign against business people like my wife.’

‘You didn’t mean to kill him?’

‘Not at all! Superintendent, Nourazar was to deliver Mr Üner to me and I was going to do a deal with that man, believe me.’

‘You were going to pay Nourazar?’

‘Yes. Then he and his men would go. That was the deal.’

There was a pause.

‘My client knows nothing about passports of any type,’ Ülker’s lawyer interjected.

‘I see.’ Williams put his head down in a posture that seemed to suggest that he was thinking. ‘And what about your right-hand man, Harrison, and Ali Reza, your one-time driver. Tell me about them.’

Ahmet Ülker took a deep breath. ‘Well, as you know, the young boy we were going to bring from İstanbul died,’ he said. ‘Blew himself up.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Then my driver put himself forward. Derek Harrison had always been involved. As I imagine you know, his experiences in the Moorgate disaster during his youth had made Derek very strange. He loved and he hated the tube. He had this friend who still worked for the organisation, who knew the security code into Mark Lane station. This man—’

‘John Richards of Barking,’ Williams repeated the name that Ülker had given to him earlier.