Death by Design

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘You want me to get a job in one of those factories.’

  ‘Get to know Süleyman Elgiz. He, too, is originally from İstanbul. Ask him about work. Also,’ Ayşe continued, ‘there is someone else in the Rize we need you to get to know.’

  She took a small photograph out of her handbag and gave it to İkmen. It showed a thin, dark man probably in his late twenties. His long, pointed chin was covered with a sparse, wispy beard.

  ‘This man is Ali Reza Hajizadeh,’ she said. ‘He is a British national, the son of Iranian refugees who came to this county in the nineteen eighties. He was introduced to radical Islamic thought while a student at Birmingham University. One of his peers at Birmingham blew himself up while making a homemade bomb in his room. The people he mixed with there were serious. He rejected his parents and devoted his life to the pursuit of radicalising other young Muslims. He, too, lives in the Rize Guest House. Officially he is in receipt of sickness benefit from the state. Unofficially and interestingly, he also works for Ülker. When not attending various Shi’a mosques across the city, he drives Ülker’s wife Maxine around. Hajizadeh has been seen in the company of known jihadists, he contributes to radical newsletters and websites. He hates the west and all its works with a passion but he also,’ she smiled, ‘it is said, sleeps with Maxine Ülker from time to time.’

  ‘Very pious,’ İkmen said gloomily.

  Ayşe smiled. ‘Cultivate Hajizadeh. He speaks Turkish. Part of his mission is to radicalise the Turks of Stoke Newington,’ she said. ‘You’re bitter about how your life has turned out so far. Maybe a renewed interest in religion might help.’

  ‘Maybe.’ İkmen put his cigarette out on the ground beside him and then lit up another.

  ‘Yigit, the landlord of the Rize, is also important,’ Ayşe continued. ‘He knows Ahmet Ülker and it was through him that Süleyman Elgiz got his job at Hackney Wick. Yigit is sly and acquisitive and it is well known that he charges new immigrants for “introductions” to prospective employers.’

  ‘Charming.’ İkmen sighed. ‘But then these poor people get exploited by everyone, don’t they?’

  ‘They shouldn’t come,’ Ayşe said, İkmen felt somewhat harshly. ‘By the way, how was your journey?’

  İkmen breathed in deeply. ‘Frightening, arduous. I came in with two Africans. A man and a pregnant girl. Some very heavy-looking men picked them up just outside Canterbury. To be honest, I feared for them.’

  Ayşe neither responded nor commented. ‘You must be tired,’ she said.

  Still frowning, he said, ‘You have no idea.’ He had been convinced he would die in that tiny compartment in the German truck. Dead, with only unintelligible Africans and thousands of bratwurst sausages for company!

  She stood up. ‘Keep your mobile phone with you at all times,’ she said. ‘In the next twenty-four hours your handler will call you.’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘No, I’m not your handler,’ Ayşe said. ‘I’m like you. I’ve been embedded here for nearly six months.’

  Six months! İkmen got wearily to his feet. How long did the Metropolitan Police want him to spend on this job?

  ‘I’ve a handler of my own,’ Ayşe said. ‘Now come on, let’s get you to the Rize. Oh, you’ll need this.’ She shuffled around in her handbag for a moment and then took out what looked like a blue credit card. ‘It’s called an Oyster card. It’s a pre-pay travel card like Akbil in İstanbul. We’ve put one hundred pounds on it for you. Use it on tubes, buses, the Docklands Light Railway.’

  İkmen took the card from her and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Does the rule about not smoking indoors apply to guest houses?’ İkmen asked as they crunched down the leafy pathway through the gravestones back towards Church Street.

  Ayşe, in spite of herself, smiled. ‘It’s a cheap Turkish pansiyon, uncle,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

  The room the landlord Abdullah Yigit gave to İkmen was a little bit better than the one he’d had in Berlin – at least it didn’t smell. But the bedclothes were grey, the cupboards dusty and broken and the small sink was rough to the touch and heavily stained. But there was a small television, tuned to MTV. İkmen immediately changed channel to the main state broadcaster, BBC1. This he remembered from his first visit back in the 1970s. And although the presentation of the evening news programme he was watching now was much slicker than it had been back then, BBC1 news still possessed a certain gravitas that he liked.

  İkmen sat down on his bed, took an ashtray from the bedside cabinet and smoked as he watched TV. He kept the volume down not because he was worried about disturbing others (the kid in the room next door had been listening to full blast rap music when he’d first arrived – no one cared) but because he didn’t want anyone to know that he spoke any English. Any hope of success as a potential spy inside Ülker’s organisation depended upon that.

  Initially the news broadcast focused on the various conflicts in the Middle East as well as some rather gloomy economic forecasts for the coming six months. Then there was a feature on the new mayor of London, Haluk Üner. He was at a rubbish dump in a borough of east London called Barking and the mayor, together with a lot of rough-looking men in high-visibility jackets, was igniting an industrial incinerator.

  ‘I want the gangs who produce this counterfeit trash and use the money they make from it to kill others to know that their time in London is coming to an end,’ the mayor said as he flicked a switch to light the vast machine. He smiled at the men around him. ‘Half a million pounds worth of fakes up in smoke!’

  The men around him cheered. The piece then cut to Üner being interviewed outside the incinerator by a serious young female reporter.

  ‘So, Mr Üner,’ she said as she held the microphone up to his mouth, ‘are you happy with what’s happened here today?’

  ‘The destruction of an estimated half a million pounds’ worth of fake clothes, bags, watches and electrical goods?’ He smiled. ‘I’m delighted, Kirsty. And this is just the start! Londoners are hitting back. Through the good offices of the Metropolitan Police and through the “Condemn a Counterfeit” scheme I initiated myself whereby people can anonymously call my office and tell us about shops and businesses selling or making this rubbish, Londoners are fighting this menace.’

  ‘Mr Üner,’ the reporter continued, ‘what do you say to people who see this war you’re waging against the counterfeiters and their alleged terrorist masters as just window-dressing. I mean, it is well-known that you are Muslim and—’

  ‘Yes, I am a Muslim and proud of it,’ Haluk Üner said. ‘My parents came here from Turkey back in the nineteen fifties. I am both British and Turkish and I am proud to call myself a Londoner too. But Kirsty, when you talk about Islam you have to understand that Islam as a religion has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.’

  ‘Yes, but the terror organisation that has most threatened London in recent years is a radical Islamic one. These counterfeiters are, it is thought, bankrolling organisations like al Qaeda.’

  ‘And other terrorist groups too. Some Islamic, some not.’ He smiled again. ‘It is my mission to protect all Londoners from terror threats wherever they come from. If we can cut off just one source of income that emanates from this country then we are winning. My message is simple: fakes hurt people, money from them translates into bombs and guns. Those who make the fakes are little more than slaves. This has to stop and I am going to make sure that it does.’

  İkmen hadn’t known that the new mayor of London had a Turkish background. He came across as very gutsy and seemed very young to be holding such a high office. He was also very handsome and reminded İkmen of Mehmet Süleyman when he was younger. But Üner seemed to have much more energy than Süleyman had ever had. And unlike his İstanbul colleague, who was lugubrious by nature and disillusioned by life, the mayor was a man with a mission. Like an American-style superhero he was going to ‘clean up’ his city and make it safe for old people, women and childr
en, and he was going to do so with his Islamic credentials out for all the world to see. İkmen admired him even if he couldn’t help feeling that the mayor was being really very naïve. The fakers and their terrorist backers, if such parties really did exist, wouldn’t put up with Üner having their shops raided, breaking into their factories, destroying their goods and seizing their money. He had declared war on them on TV and probably via all sorts of other media too. İkmen could not help but feel a little fearful for Mr Haluk Üner.

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  ‘Mr Riley sends his best,’ the man, whose name was Terry, said to İkmen. Terry was about his own age, a coppers’ copper who smoked, swore and wore clothes that looked sorely in need of a good dry-clean. He was a type that was familiar to İkmen from his first visit to the UK in the seventies. The only other member of the British police he had met so far had been Ayşe and she was very unfamiliar indeed. Terry was İkmen’s handler while he was undercover.

  ‘My regards to him also,’ İkmen replied with a smile.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Terry had told İkmen to meet him at a place that had turned out to be a very long way away from Stoke Newington and its environs. Brixton was the last and most southerly stop on the Victoria underground line, with a large Afro-Caribbean population. Back in the seventies Brixton had had a reputation, İkmen recalled, as a place where cannabis was easy to get, where parties were known to last for days and where some of the black men grew long and intricate hair locks.

  ‘Called dreadlocks,’ Terry explained when İkmen told him what he remembered about Brixton from his first visit. ‘Worn by the Rastafarians.’ Then seeing the puzzled look on İkmen’s face he said, ‘It’s a Jamaican religion. The hair’s all part of it.’

  When he’d arrived at Brixton tube station, İkmen had followed the instructions Terry had given him to Brockwell Park. This had been a considerable walk for İkmen who generally tried to avoid any sort of exercise. He had turned up out of breath, which had evinced a smile from Terry who had been sitting on a bench smoking when the Turk arrived. What had also made Terry smile was the automatic way in which the gasping İkmen had lit up himself. In Terry’s opinion, fags were rapidly giving way to intense jogging and occasional cocaine use amongst the young. He didn’t approve.

  ‘Now then, Çetin,’ he said, ‘I know Ayşe has told you what you have to do and, in your guise as her uncle, you can pass on information to her at any time. She’ll help and advise you as much as she can. But I’m here to watch your back and to make sure that you stay focused and also as safe as you can under the circumstances. I can have you out of your role within minutes, believe me. The people who come to get you won’t probably know who you are or what you’re doing but they will get you out. Understand?’

  ‘Yes.’ They were speaking in English. That was one reason why they were so far away from Ahmet Ülker’s patch.

  ‘As you know, it’s vital that no one finds out you can speak English,’ Terry said. ‘We want the people around Ülker to talk freely in front of you.’

  ‘Terry, you don’t speak Turkish . . .’

  ‘No, I don’t. So if you find yourself in a situation where you need to speak to me urgently but you’re around people who mustn’t know that you speak English, call Ayşe,’ Terry said. ‘Tell her you’ve a message for Uncle Ali, she’ll understand.’

  ‘For Uncle Ali.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Terry put his number into İkmen’s phone and also provided him with a street map of the city. Then there was a talk about what Terry felt İkmen needed to know about the Met in the twenty-first century. It was by no means comprehensive, but it did give İkmen some sort of idea about who he was now working for. As they talked, joggers and dog-walkers passed them by without apparently taking any particular notice. Later, they parted. İkmen now knew both of the officers he would be dealing with. The rest was up to him.

  He decided not to go back to the Rize until the early evening. There had been a lot of activity in the pansiyon between six and seven o’clock that morning and İkmen suspected that most of the other men had gone out then. And so armed with his A to Z he decided to spend the day visiting some of the places he had seen in the 1970s. This could not of course include Scotland Yard, but he could go and see what they called the West End, where the theatres were. In addition, going in and out of stations, shops and cafés would give him the practice he needed in pretending to be a monoglot. As well as having a very good English teacher when he was at high school, İkmen’s late father Timür had been a linguist. Timür could speak German, French and Russian as well as English, but the latter had been his favourite language. His sons Çetin and Halil had been exposed to English from birth. In fact it had been Çetin’s almost native ability in the English language that had kick-started his rise through the ranks of the İstanbul police force. Back in the late sixties when he had first joined up he had been one of the very few officers who was fluent in English. Back then, due to the many, many Turks who went to Germany to work, most people could ‘do’ German; the old aristocracy still ‘did’ French. But English had not been so widely spoken. Back then only people who called themselves ‘travellers’ ventured from Western Europe into Turkey. Now millions regularly descended upon resorts like Bodrum, Kuşadası and Marmaris where even the most lowly waiter could get by in English. Pretending not to know a word was going to be difficult.

  Using his A to Z and his Oyster card, İkmen managed to get from Brixton, via the Victoria and Piccadilly lines, to Piccadilly Circus. Back in the seventies Piccadilly Circus had been the scene of considerable drug activity. Together with the two other Turkish colleagues with whom he had travelled to the UK, he had watched the British police raid the men’s public toilets at the tube station. He remembered the terrible smell of the place, the shouting and screaming as the police banged on cubicle doors and, in some cases, broke them down with their truncheons. Then there had been the addicts themselves, pale and thin, blood sometimes running down their arms or thighs or both, the used syringes the police found all over the floor, down the toilets, sticking out of people’s bodies. It had been a shock back then. Of course there were addicts in İstanbul too but not nearly so many and very few youngsters. But now when İkmen rode the escalator up from the platform and into Piccadilly Circus station, he could either not remember where the toilets were or they had gone. The place was still tatty and a little dirty, but it was no longer swathed in cigarette smoke and the people, his fellow travellers, were in general smarter than they had been.

  Walking up the stairs and out into the street, he was hit by a wall of familiar sound. Traffic just got worse and worse wherever one was in the world. But he was happy to see that the statue of Eros was no longer in the middle of the Circus but had been incorporated into the pavement to the south and so was now much easier for visitors to access. Just like all the other foreigners, he walked over to the statue and had a look at it. Some very excited Japanese teenagers were taking seemingly endless photographs of each other standing underneath the winged figure. Eros, the life force, the source of the erotic . . . Had it been some sort of joke on the part of the city’s 1970s rent boys when they had set up what the Met had told him they called the ‘Meat Rack’ around the statue all those years ago? In the daytime, Eros had been a tourist attraction just as it was in the twenty-first century but at night it had turned into something a lot more seedy. He remembered going out on patrol one night and seeing the young boys lounging around the statue, looking up and pouting at every man that passed. There had, as he recalled, been a telephone box nearby too. He’d seen a couple – a girl and a boy – kissing inside it. That had seemed so daring to him at the time! What the British had called then ‘permissive’. How innocent it had been in reality. He couldn’t see the box now. It had gone, victim of the all-conquering mobile phone.

  With £100 on his Oyster card, İkmen was free to roam. He did after all have to familiarise himself with London. He was interested,
it wasn’t difficult. What was hard, however, was pretending not to speak the language. At midday he was hungry and so finding himself up by Leicester Square station he walked into a little café, what in İstanbul would have been called a büfe, and sat down. The waitress, a young blonde girl who spoke English with a heavy eastern European accent, came over and said, ‘Yes please, sir, would you like to order?’

  İkmen had seen a rather inviting looking dish of spaghetti and meatballs in the café’s window. He wanted to ask for just that. But he couldn’t.

  ‘Er . . .’

  He looked foreign. She said, ‘Can you not speak English?’

  Again he wanted to say, ‘Yes, of course I can and a lot better than you!’ But he made himself sit, look blank and then after a couple of seconds he shrugged.

  The waitress said something to him in a language he felt was probably Polish. He shrugged again. Then she said, ‘Coffee? Tea? You want—’

  ‘Coffee!’ He smiled.

  She wrote it down on the little order pad she had in her hand. ‘And to eat?’ She made a motion with her hand towards her mouth and then made chewing noises.

  İkmen got up from his seat and beckoned for the girl to follow him. He went outside the café and pointed to the meatballs and spaghetti through the window.

  ‘Ah.’ The girl smiled. ‘You’d like meatballs.’

  ‘Evet,’ he said – Turkish for yes. She didn’t have a clue what it meant but she did now know that he wanted meatballs which, when they finally arrived, he ate with relish. When he had finished, the girl took his plate away, talking all the while to another waitress, apparently an English girl.

  ‘I don’t have any idea where he comes from,’ the Polish girl said to her companion. ‘Maybe he is something like Iranian or something? He said a word that was very strange.’