This Is a Dreadful Sentence

by Penny Freedman

  ‘What are you talking about, Mark? We don’t even know who he is.’

  ‘We do now. Caught with the gun on him. And wait till you hear who it is.’

  ‘I’m five minutes away, Mark. Keep it till I get there.’

  Entering the Incident Room was like arriving late at a party. His team sat sprawled in chairs, propped on tables, talking and laughing, the air fizzing with relief. The mugs of coffee might just as well have been flutes of champagne. A small cheer went up as he came in.

  ‘I seem to have missed all the fun,’ he said. ‘I was delayed by a phone call. I might as well tell you my news, then you can tell me yours. Laurent Amiel’s been found. Not kidnapped, just living rough in sunny Dungate.’

  Another cheer rose, more raucous this time.

  ‘OK. We’ll deal with him later. Now, tell me, Mark. You’ve picked up our man, with his gun?’

  ‘Not us, sir. Traffic.’

  ‘Traffic? But the road blocks have –‘

  ‘Not here. Near Heathrow.’

  ‘Heathrow? OK, I won’t ask any more questions. Just tell me the story, Mark. The floor’s yours.’

  Bowing to ironic applause from the team, Tyler started.

  ‘At four fifteen this morning, Traffic picked up a driver going the wrong way down the A4 near Heathrow Airport.

  He was a foreigner and seems, temporarily, to have forgotten to drive on the left.’

  He waited for the cheers and laughter to die down before continuing.

  ‘When they got him out of his car to breathalyse him, he tried to do a runner, so they took him into custody and gave his car a good going over. Among other things, they found a map of the Marlbury College campus and a Smith and Wesson 9mm semi-automatic. On his phone, they found photos of a man they recognised because his face had been all over the front pages – Valery Tarasov.’

  ‘And this man is?’

  ‘A Turk, travelling on a Russian passport. Goes by the name of Direnç Yilmaz.’

  Amid whoops and whistles from the team, Scott said, ‘Irina Boklova’s husband?’

  ‘The very same.’

  Scott could see Irina’s composed face, the contemptuous twist of her small, lipsticked mouth, and he heard her words: my husband is simply loser, actually.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘On his way here,’ Simon Kerr broke in, eager for some of the glory, unable to allow Tyler the limelight any longer. ‘We sent a squad to pick him up and bring in the car. Should be here any time now.’

  When Scott and Tyler walked into Interview Room One two hours later, they found Direnç Yilmaz flanked by two young women: a Turkish interpreter in a headscarf, who introduced herself as Leyla Mirza, and Emma Bright, the solicitor. When Scott looked at Yilmaz himself, he knew immediately where he had seen him before: outside a seminar room, squinting in through the glass door panel at the class inside, on the day when Scott too had been waiting outside – waiting to interview Valery Tarasov. How long ago was that? A week or more. This guy had been stalking Tarasov for some time then. He surveyed him. There was a passing similarity to his cousin Ekrem – not to the battered body he had seen in the library, but to the passport photo. Direnç was younger and his face showed only a hint of the heavy jowliness that would come. It was a self-indulgent face, though this morning, pale and unshaven, it looked simply weak and scared. Sad man Scott heard Irina saying.

  Having greeted the interpreter and the solicitor and introduced Tyler, Scott turned on the interview tape and addressed Yilmaz.

  ‘I see you have an interpreter, Mr Yilmaz,’ he said. ‘Do you speak any English at all?’

  Yilmaz turned to the interpreter and they exchanged a few words in Turkish before she said.

  ‘He doesn’t speak any English.’

  ‘Then we’ll proceed through you, Miss Mirza. You’ve done this before, I assume?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fine. Mr Yilmaz, you were stopped by the police this morning for a traffic offence and a gun was found in your car – a gun for which you appear to have no licence. Can you explain what it was doing there?’

  After the necessary delay, the answer came through the ventriloquism of Leyla Mirza.

  ‘I don’t know anything about a gun.’

  ‘It has your fingerprints on it.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  Tyler joined in.

  ‘When the police stopped you this morning, you tried to run away. Why did you do that if you’re an innocent man?’

  ‘I was in a hurry. I had to get to the airport for my flight back to Moscow.’

  ‘And how were you going to get to the airport without your car, Yilmaz? Run?’ Tyler laughed.

  Yilmaz muttered something to Leyla Mirza.

  ‘He has nothing to say,’ she said.

  Scott took a new tack.

  ‘What are you doing in the UK, Mr Yilmaz?’

  ‘I am a tourist.’

  ‘And you’ve been in the UK for nearly three weeks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where have you visited?’

  ‘Many places.’

  ‘Including Marlbury?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Definitely. I’ve seen you there myself, on the campus of Marlbury College. The campus you had a map of in your car.’

  ‘OK, I was there. That’s not a crime, is it?’

  It was odd to hear Leyla Mirza’s quiet tone leeching the aggression out of his answer. It made it difficult – difficult to maintain momentum, difficult to feed off the aggression.

  ‘That depends on what you were doing there,’ Scott said. ‘Why did you choose Marlbury? There are plenty more obvious tourist spots to visit.’

  ‘I have friends there.’

  ‘Friends like your ex-wife and your cousin?’ asked Tyler as a DC entered with a written message for Scott.

  ‘I’m not interested in my cousin Ekrem. I came for my wife. I wanted her back. I did her no harm. She can’t just get tired of me and throw me away. I won’t allow it. I came to take her back.’

  Again the blandness of the interpreter’s tone was disconcerting, disorienting.

  ‘So what were you going to do?’ Scott asked as he finished reading the message and folded it. ‘Take her back to Russia at gunpoint?’

  ‘No. I didn’t want to hurt her. I wanted to persuade her. I thought she would listen to me.’

  ‘But she didn’t?’

  ‘I never spoke to her. There was always Tarasov with her. As soon as I saw them I knew it was no good. I watched them always laughing and joking together in the class. I knew he was her lover.’

  ‘So you shot him?’

  Yilmaz ran his hands through his hair before he replied in a low voice. Leyla Mirza seemed to ask for confirmation before she said, calmly as ever, ‘Yes, I shot him.’

  ‘And now perhaps you’d like to tell us who put you up to it,’ Scott said.

  Leyla Mirza hesitated.

  ‘Put you up to it?’ she queried.

  ‘Persuaded him to do it,’ Tyler explained.

  ‘Or paid him,’ Scott added.

  She nodded and relayed the question.

  ‘No-one,’ came the answer. ‘I did it myself. He was my wife’s lover. I shot him. That’s all.’

  ‘According to our information,’ Scott told him, ‘he wasn’t her lover actually. If you’d spoken to her, she’d probably have told you that. Did she even know you were here, by the way? Did you just spy on her?’

  ‘She never saw me. I made sure. I didn’t want to give her the chance to shame me.’

  ‘Well, let’s leave that aside. We know you shot him. This –‘ He indicated the slip of paper he had received ‘– is a report from our ballistics expert. The bullets that killed Tarasov were fired from the gun with your fingerprints on it, found in your car.’

  He paused for Leyla Mirza to translate before adding, ‘So, you see, we don’t really need your confession. What we need is for you to tell us who paid you to do it.’<
br />
  ‘No-one paid. I have pride, I did it myself.’

  ‘Yilmaz, according to your ex-wife, you have no money, and according to you, you speak no English. Do you really expect us to believe that you were able to fly to the UK, stay for three weeks, hire a car, buy a gun and kill two people with no help from anyone else?’

  Scott saw the surprise start into Yilmaz’s face as the question was translated.

  ‘Why do you say two people?’

  ‘I assume that, eventually, you’ll admit that you killed your cousin Ekrem as well. What happened? Was he sniffing around Irina too?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with killing Ekrem. Nothing at all. I killed Tarasov. I did it alone. I have nothing more to say.’

  ‘What about the money?’ Tyler asked. ‘Tell us where the money came from for this little trip.’

  ‘I have money. You should not believe my wife. I am a business man. I have money.’

  ‘What sort of business?’

  ‘Buying and selling.’

  ‘And the name of your company, Yilmaz?’ asked Tyler, getting a pen and notebook out. ‘It’s registered in Russia, I assume? How many employees do you have? What’s your annual turnover?’

  Yilmaz’s reply to Leyla Mirza seemed longer than her translation.

  ‘It’s not like that. It’s an informal company. I work by myself.’

  ‘But you earn enough money to go flying off on a holiday in the UK? I wonder who’s looking after this business of yours while you’re away,’ Tyler commented.

  Yilmaz made no reply.

  ‘Let me suggest a situation to you.’ Scott leaned back in his chair. ‘Let me paint a picture for you.’

  Yilmaz, in his turn, slumped back in his seat.

  ‘Five years ago, you were working in a tourist resort on the Black Sea – buying and selling to the tourists. You meet a young Russian doctor who’s on holiday there and you can’t believe your luck. You persuade her to marry you, to take you back to Russia, get you Russian citizenship, support you on her earnings until you make the fortune that you’re bound to make in the brave new Russia.’

  He paused to let Leyla Mirza catch up and wondered if that was a look of reproach on her calm face. He continued, ‘But it doesn’t work out that well, does it? You find that fortunes aren’t as easy to make as all that and your wife finds that she’s made a terrible mistake. You’re a loser, you’re a drag on her. What you haven’t reckoned with is how easy divorce is for women in Russia - compared with Turkey anyway. Before you know it, she’s dumped you.’

  Again, he waited. Again the interpreter’s gaze shamed him.

  ‘Now, you’re on your own. You try hard to bully your wife into changing her mind, but it’s no good. You actually drive her out of the country. Without your Russian wife you’re an outsider, and you have no money. You try a bit of this and a bit of that and soon you’re on the wrong side of the law and you’re making enemies in the criminal world. This is when you need protection and here the friends of Mikhail Belenki come in.’

  He pronounced the name with care, distinctly, and had the satisfaction of seeing the flash of recognition that crossed Yilmaz’s face.

  ‘They offer you help. They’ll protect you – maybe even pay you – if you’ll do a little job for them. They want Ekrem Yilmaz and Valery Tarasov killed. Maybe just for revenge because they landed Belenki in prison, maybe because they know too much about Belenki’s business and can’t be trusted. Conveniently, they’re both studying in the same college in the UK, and even more conveniently for you, your ex-wife is there too.’

  Pausing once more for Yilmaz to take this in, he went on, ‘So this is the deal. They’ll book your flights, hire the car, provide the gun, give you all the money you need, and you just have to do the deed. And maybe you’ll be able to bring your wife back too. Well, that didn’t work out, but you nearly got away with the rest, didn’t you? If you’d remembered to drive on the left, you would have got clean away.’

  Yilmaz slumped forward for a moment, resting his head on his arms, then sat up to give his reply.

  ‘I didn’t kill Ekrem. I know nothing about that.’

  ‘Which means that I’m right about the rest?’

  ‘I told you I killed Tarasov. I did it alone. Your story is nonsense.’

  ‘Yilmaz,’ said Scott, ‘you’re going to be convicted of his murder and you’re going to get a long prison sentence. If you co-operate with us, we can make things easier for you. You could serve part of your sentence in Russia, for example, or in Turkey.’

  Yilmaz broke into rapid and urgent talk with Leyla Mirza and she turned and spoke not to Scott but to Emma Bright, who had been uncharacteristically silent so far.

  ‘He does not want to go back to Russia,’ she told her, ‘or to Turkey. He is afraid.’

  The solicitor looked, in turn, at Scott.

  ‘Of course he is,’ he exclaimed. ‘He’s been and screwed up and he’ll get punished by the Belenki gang, who’ll believe he’s fingered them whether he has or not. His only hope is a good long stretch in a nice, safe British jail. Perhaps we should do the deal the other way round: we’ll promise to keep him in Britain if he’ll spill the beans.’

  Emma Bright gave him a questioning look.

  ‘If you’re serious,’ she said, ‘I shall need to discuss options with my client. I’d like to request a break to talk to him.’

  ’Fine. If you wouldn’t mind staying, Miss Mirza?’

  As Scott and Tyler were leaving the room, Yilmaz spoke, looking directly at Scott, and Leyla Mirza translated.

  ‘If I killed Ekrem, why didn’t I shoot him too?’

  ‘And that,’ Scott said to Tyler when they were outside the door, ‘is a very good question indeed.’

  29

  SATURDAY: Third Person Plural

  I am woken at six by Freda’s dawn chorus, and for once I don’t mind. I’ve been sleeping only in snatches and I’m planning to be at the Social Science block on the dot of nine, when the porter comes on duty. There are, however, three hours to kill. I feed Freda and myself, then dress us both with care, aiming to be as appealing as possible to the holder of the key to the library door. After that, I have a go at the Guardian’s Saturday quiz and do the quick crossword. It is now seventhirty. I could start the cryptic crossword or the sudoku but my concentration is all to pieces, so I decide to phone David instead. With a second murder on his plate, I assume he won’t be having a leisurely Saturday morning, and I’m right.

  He answers right away and I can tell he’s stressed. I shouldn’t tease him about his press conference yesterday, but I do, which probably doesn’t improve his mood. Even so, I must say he’s pretty ungracious when I tell him about finding Laurent. I’ve done his job for him, for God’s sake, and I don’t get a word of thanks. He gets all punitive about Laurent and wants to bring him in and bang him up. I’m pretty pissed off with Laurent myself but I begin to feel quite sorry for him. Precipitately, I hint that I may be on to something else, but he’s not interested – freezes me off. Well fine. He’ll just have to come begging later, won’t he?

  At eight-thirty I’m strapping Freda into her buggy, tying Piglet to the straps and setting off through a grey drizzle. Very few people are around on this unappealing morning, but a couple of times, as I’m manoeuvring over crossings, I catch sight of a couple of youngsters in hooded anoraks behind me and I wonder if these are friends of Laurent’s and if, by any chance, I’m being followed.

  I arrive too early at Social Sciences, and Freda and I do a circuit of the building to keep warm. The tapes have been taken away from the front of the library, but a notice on the door declares it to be closed until further notice. When we get back to the foyer, though, Clive Davies is just arriving. Hallelujah! If I could have wished for anyone, it would have been Clive. I have put time and effort into my relationship with Clive over the years - not with any ulterior motive but because he’s a nice guy and he likes to talk. It’s often he who unlocks the English Languag
e building first thing, and in our morning exchanges, I have heard about his holidays, admired photos of his grandchildren and even sympathised over the state of his garden (rain, drought, slugs, greenfly, whitefly, blackfly), though my interest in and knowledge of gardening is zero. Now, just possibly, I shall get my reward.

  ‘Clive!’ I cry. ‘I’m so glad it’s you.’

  This is, sadly, the only true thing I’m going to say to him this morning. I accompany it with what I hope is a dazzling smile and it’s possible that I put my head on one side in a winsome sort of way. Yes, I’m almost sure that I do. Then I introduce Freda who, trouper that she is, gives him a wide, gummy smile that far outshines anything I can produce.

  ‘And what can I do for you, Gina?’ he asks cheerfully.

  ‘You can save my life, Clive,’ I cry, ‘but I’m afraid you’re going to tell me it’s more than your job’s worth.’

  Clive addresses Freda.

  ‘Ooh, she’s trouble, isn’t she, your Gran?’

  Freda gurgles her agreement.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is, Clive,’ I say. ‘Weeks ago I asked the library to get me a book that I need for a course I’m teaching next term. It came in, I know, because they sent me an e-mail about it, but I didn’t have time to pick it up before – all this happened.’

  I gesture vaguely towards the library door.

  ‘Now,’ I bash on, ‘I’m desperate for it. I can’t write my lectures for next term without it.’

  ‘Well that is bad news,’ he says, deadpan, and I’m not sure how I’m doing.

  ‘So I wondered,’ I say, gazing up at him from beneath my specially-mascaraed lashes and wishing I were twenty years younger, ‘if you could possibly let me into the library office for five minutes, just to pick it up. I know where it’ll be and I promise not to touch anything else. I’d be eternally grateful.’

  I pause and wait. He looks at me unsmiling. Then he says, ‘You said it was more than my job’s worth, and you’re right. If anyone found out, I’d be shot.’

  But his hand is moving towards a pair of keys hanging on the board at the back of his booth and I know I’m there.

  ‘Come on,’ he says and, amazingly, we’re walking towards the library door.