Death by Design

by Barbara Nadel

  İkmen was fascinated by the tableau before him and intrigued as to how these apparently pious men were going to relieve themselves in front of a group of infidel policeman, but his attention was fixed on Nourazar and the mayor. The latter was breathing hard and his face was white as if he’d just powdered it in order to take part in a Japanese Noh play. When Mr Üner had decided to take on the counterfeit gangs, he had never, İkmen felt, envisaged this. The mayor had security but not of a very obvious type, and what there was had obviously let him down. How Nourazar and his men had got to Üner, İkmen didn’t know exactly but he was pretty certain Üner had been grabbed when he’d left City Hall to have a smoke. Everyone knew that he did that. He certainly wouldn’t be doing it again. If the mayor survived, no one would ever be allowed to get close to him again. Nourazar, İkmen saw, was smiling. He was wearing İkmen’s clothes and the sight was freakish. İkmen knew that even if he got them back he would never be able to wear them after that. Now that he really looked at Nourazar, İkmen could see that his eyes were a very pale and arresting shade of blue. He’d never noticed that before.

  The ayatollah cleared his throat and immediately all hell broke loose.

  At first Superintendent Williams thought that the men were firing at them. Instinctively he ducked down low to the ground as the officers around him shouldered their weapons and shouted. The terrible sounds of fired weapons and screams, the smell of cordite and blood and just the sheer hideous, ugly mess of it all . . .

  No one saw the three men actually move their weapons and take aim. But suddenly they were all dead on the ground with parts of their skulls blown out, their faces distorted by the actions of bullets on brains, their features knocked into expressions of shock and fear. Wesley Simpson, who had thought his last moment had come, was also on the ground. Unhurt, he was lying in a puddle of his own piss, mouthing something over and over to himself. But Çetin İkmen didn’t see any of this. All he saw was Nourazar running, dragging his hostage after him, heading across the park and towards the main road, Tooley Street. If he got there, armed as he was, what would he do? Would he get hold of another car somehow? Would he maybe start shooting indiscriminately to induce fear and thereby clear the path ahead? İkmen didn’t even think about it. His lungs were shot anyway, what more harm was a little bit of exercise going to do? As the officers around him began to realise what was happening, İkmen threw himself across the grass and towards Nourazar and the mayor at full pelt.

  ‘Get after them but keep your distance!’ Williams shouted to the men who now ran off in pursuit after İkmen, Nourazar and the mayor. ‘God knows what Nourazar might do!’

  The superintendent also ran. It was not that much easier for him than it had been for İkmen. He was impressed by how quick off the blocks the Turk had been. Çetin İkmen was apparently a heavy smoker who also liked a drink. He was very far from being any sort of athlete. But he was tearing towards Tooley Street and gaining on the mayor and his captor.

  About halfway across the grass, Williams looked back towards the two police cars and the Subaru. Three CO19 officers had taken charge of the scene, its dead bodies and its weapons. God, to just kill themselves like that! Not that he had actually seen the moment of death himself; like his officers, like everyone involved, he suspected, he had been unable to believe and therefore process what he had seen. The moment was a thin wash of colours punctuated by one simultaneous lethal roaring sound. He couldn’t imagine what it had been like to have been in the middle of all that but Wesley Simpson would know. Wesley Simpson, who had for some reason just been left to tell the tale. But then Nourazar’s men had died for their cause, which had probably been more important to them than the death of some getaway driver. If Nourazar had indeed taken the mayor at Ülker’s behest with the intention of killing him for money, where and when would he do it?

  Williams ran behind his men all the way up to Tooley Street. When he got there he saw İkmen getting into a black cab and heading east. Nourazar must have somehow got hold of a car, which the Turk was now following.

  Chapter 29

  * * *

  Ahmet Ülker’s mobile phone had ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ as its ringtone. It was irritating but not nearly as annoying as the rap tune that DI Hogarth’s young daughter used on her phone. Ülker ignored it. Acting Commissioner Dee, still in the observation room and just done with a call from Superintendent Williams, had other ideas.

  ‘Get him to answer that phone!’ he shouted into Hogarth’s earpiece. ‘Nourazar has gone on the run with Mr Üner. That could be him.’

  Hogarth looked at Ülker and smiled. ‘Why don’t you answer your phone?’ he said. ‘Your wife is missing. It could be her.’

  Ahmet Ülker just sat. His solicitor, a thin man in his fifties, frowned. ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ continued. Ülker had either switched his voicemail facility off or he did not have one.

  DI Hogarth rose from his seat and began to walk round to Ülker’s side of the table. ‘If that is your wife then we need to talk to her,’ he said. ‘Answer your phone, Mr Ülker.’

  ‘It’s not her.’ Ahmet Ülker put his head down and continued to ignore the phone.

  ‘Oh, is it the wrong ringtone?’ Hogarth asked. My kids have personalised ringtones for all their mates. Who’s “The Flight of the Bumblebee” for, Mr Ülker? Is it one of your dodgy suppliers? Is it maybe some pole dancer who is younger and prettier than your missus?’ The ‘Flight’ went on relentlessly in the background. ‘Answer it,’ Hogarth said.

  Ahmet Ülker didn’t speak or move.

  ‘If you don’t answer it, then I’ll have to take it off you,’ Hogarth continued.

  Ahmet Ülker looked over at his solicitor who just shrugged. Slowly he put his hand into his jacket pocket.

  ‘And don’t think about switching it off,’ Hogarth said. ‘I, for one, am just too fascinated about who might want to speak to you so urgently.’

  Ahmet Ülker took the phone out of his pocket and then clicked the answer button. He held it very tightly to his ear.

  ‘I’ve never done this before, you know,’ the man driving the cab said to İkmen. ‘I’ve had “follow that cab” before. That was some sort of prank on this girl’s birthday. She worked in some broking office in the city. But then you know what them lot up there were like back in the day.’ He smiled. ‘Then again, I suppose you don’t, do you?’

  ‘What?’

  At first it had been a bit of a problem for İkmen getting this man to ‘follow that Ford Escort’. He’d told him he was a police officer, but of course he had no badge to prove this. He’d then probably made matters worse for a bit by telling him he was a Turkish policeman. His bloodstained, scruffy appearance hadn’t helped either. But the way the Ford Escort in question had pulled out into the traffic with the apparent hijacker waving a pistol around had eventually persuaded the cabbie to help. Once on the road, İkmen had explained that the hijacker of the Escort was holding the mayor of London hostage. If he hadn’t seen that gun the driver, Sidney, would have thought that maybe İkmen was mad. It would not have been the first time he’d had a nutter in his cab. But that gun, plus the sight of the Escort’s real owner screaming in fear by the side of the road, had shaken Sid, that and all the chaos around and about Tower Hill. People were saying that al Qaeda had bombed London again and so if the bloke who’d kidnapped the mayor was one of them then Sidney was only too pleased to go after him.

  ‘You being foreign, you wouldn’t know about all the nonsense in the City with the bankers and their big bonuses and before them the yuppies and all their rubbish.’ Then suddenly changing the subject he said, ‘You got a gun, have you?’

  ‘No,’ İkmen said. ‘I am a Turk, Mr . . .’

  ‘Sidney,’ Sidney said. ‘Just call me Sid.’

  ‘Sid, I have been working with your police. I am not one of them.’ He looked behind to see if he could spot any police pursuit vehicles. He couldn’t, but he could hear them. Three cars in front of the cab,
the blue Ford Escort tore down Jamaica Road, Nourazar or someone almost permanently on the horn.

  ‘You got any idea where this character might be taking the mayor?’ Sidney asked as he negotiated his way around the side of a large delivery lorry.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ İkmen said. ‘I think he just wants to get away.’

  ‘Looks like a bit of a snarl-up up ahead,’ the driver said.

  ‘Snarl-up?’

  ‘Traffic jam, an obstruction. Just beyond the roundabout.’ He pointed ahead and then said, ‘What’s he doing now?’

  İkmen, rattling about in the back without a seat belt, strained to see what was coming up in front. He was exhausted, running only on adrenaline and, if he were honest, quite frightened. Without a mobile phone or any other way of contacting the police he felt exposed and vulnerable. He was in a foreign city, he’d been battered and cut with a razor blade, and he no longer had Ayşe to guide him. He wondered about her. What had happened after she had been taken to the hospital? He hoped she was going to be all right.

  ‘Oh, turning right on to James’s Road, are you?’ Sidney said, pulling his cab round to the right. ‘You sure you ain’t got a clue where this bloke’s going, mate?’

  ‘No.’ Then suddenly a voice from nowhere crackled out of something at the front of the cab and İkmen said, ‘Is that a radio?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can you tell your office where we are and what we are doing and tell them to call Scotland Yard.’

  ‘I can but—’

  ‘Sid, you must ask your people to call Superintendent Williams,’ İkmen said. Then he looked at the road behind and added, ‘He can’t be far.’

  ‘Oh, turning into Clements Road. Where the fuck is he going?’ Sidney said.

  ‘Sidney!’

  ‘All right, all right, I’ll call me controller,’ Sidney said.

  ‘You must,’ İkmen replied. ‘I cannot take on a man with a gun alone and neither can you.’

  Hadi Nourazar switched off the phone that nestled between his legs and smiled. As far as he knew he’d left the police behind at City Hall. That Turk had attempted to follow, but the last he’d seen of him was some mad flapping dance he’d done in the middle of Tooley Street to try and flag down a cab. He couldn’t be sure but he felt fairly confident he had lost him. That said, he was he knew far from at the end of this adventure. The original plan had been to take the mayor out into the countryside and kill him in a wood in Kent somewhere; one of the boys, Rashid, had known where. Now Rashid was dead and, besides, everything had changed when the police turned up at City Hall. That was not meant to have happened. How it had done so, he couldn’t imagine. And yet there had been that man with the police at City Hall, that Turk he’d taken his clothes from, the one who was following . . .

  ‘What happens now?’ asked the mayor who was still bleeding heavily beside him. When Nourazar had hit him he had also knocked out his top front teeth.

  Nourazar waved his gun at him. ‘Why are you still bleeding like that? What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I bleed heavily,’ Haluk Üner said. ‘I always have. Why? Do you think I have AIDS?’

  ‘Do you?’ He looked over his shoulder and saw that the car directly behind was a red Chevrolet.

  ‘Do you?’ the mayor countered.

  Hadi Nourazar gave him a disgusted look. ‘Hamdi had an apartment in this area,’ he said, naming another of his dead acolytes. ‘You heard Mr Ülker, he will meet us there.’

  Haluk Üner had indeed heard the voice of Ahmet Ülker when Nourazar put his phone on speaker. Ülker had taken an age to answer and Nourazar had got quite rattled before he answered. Apparently Ülker had been in his jacuzzi. They had arranged to meet at Hamdi’s flat in Rotherhithe Street. It was a first-floor council flat.

  Ülker had told Nourazar to head for the Rotherhithe tunnel and, from there, Rotherhithe station. Rotherhithe Street from then on was easy. But now they were on Lower Road, a one-way street, going south, absolutely not where Nourazar needed to be heading. There was a lot of traffic, people wanting to get out of a city they saw as a terrorist target yet again. Nourazar pushed the gun with the side of the mayor’s head and told him to turn off left down a road called Chilton Grove. Nourazar could control that. What he couldn’t control was Ahmet Ülker. The Turk had promised Nourazar a million dollars for Haluk Üner and all the chaos the Iranian had created around the mayor’s abduction. He had, after all, supplied all the weapons needed, all the explosive required for Harrison and Hajizadeh to blow up the station. A million dollars for jihad – or not. The million dollars would in fact be spent on comforts for himself and his family. If the Iranians wouldn’t let him live in his own country, what else was he supposed to do? And yet Ülker had been strange on the phone. He had sounded reticent and nervous and Nourazar was worried. What if the police had somehow worked it all out? What if that little Turk whose clothes he had taken had been able to speak some English? On top of that there was the driver of the Subaru. But he knew nothing.

  Remembering those who had died made Nourazar frown. Had Rashid, Hamdi and Omar known what they were really involved with, they would never have sacrificed themselves as they had. But then that was why this operation had been so perfect, because he inspired that sort of dedication. He was a holy man, a warrior for Islam. People followed him without question. People believed they would end up in Paradise if they did as he asked. Hadi Nourazar wondered where exactly Rashid, Hamdi and Omar were at this moment. He doubted very much that they would be receiving their reward in Paradise. Personally he didn’t believe in any of that stuff. His god was what it had always been – power.

  Now that he had contact with İkmen, Superintendent Williams felt relieved. The cab the Turk was travelling in still had sight of the blue Ford Escort Nourazar had taken, though the route he was following was somewhat eccentric. It was clear that Nourazar didn’t know his way to Rotherhithe Street. Williams and three CO19 officers were due to rendezvous with DI Hogarth and his team, who were bringing Ahmet Ülker, at a two-bedroomed flat on Rotherhithe Street. They would get to the home of the late Mr Hamdi Khan before the others and would therefore have to conceal themselves in the garages underneath Trinity Wharf opposite until Hogarth arrived with Ülker. Thank God the man had finally crumbled under questioning. There was not going to be any way they could warn Khan’s wife, should she be at home, which was going to be terrible for her. Williams had no doubt that the first thing Nourazar would do when he saw her was tell her about her husband’s glorious death. The Khans had only been married for a year. Williams did not think that Mrs Khan would approve, however pious she might be.

  They pulled on to Rotherhithe Street just after the YMCA on Salter Road and headed for Trinity Wharf. The caretaker of the building had been told to open up the garages for the police and when they arrived the gates were wide open. As the police car swept down the ramp and into the bowels of the building, one resident, a middle-aged bespectacled man in a suit, gaped at them. ‘Fucking hell!’ he said. But apart from that, no one seemed to notice or care about their sudden appearance. An eerie silence settled across Rotherhithe Street.

  Chapter 30

  * * *

  The cab pulled up just before the low block of flats that Nourazar had taken his hostage into. İkmen got out and said to the driver, ‘Wait here. Call Superintendent Williams. Don’t get out.’

  ‘You haven’t paid me yet, I’m not going anywhere,’ Sidney said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  But İkmen wasn’t listening. He was looking up at a block of old council flats where long, concrete balconies provided access to apartments characterised by scuffed and time-worn doors. He could see Nourazar and the mayor standing in front of the one at the far end of the balcony, nearest the stairs. Via the cabbie, İkmen had learned that Williams and a CO19 unit were on their way, as well as DI Hogarth from Scotland Yard with Ahmet Ülker. A phone call from Nourazar to Ülker at Scotland Yard had apparently put the factory owner into a
position where he had no choice but to cooperate with the police. But İkmen knew that Nourazar would not necessarily wait until Ülker arrived before he killed Mr Üner. All he was interested in was the money and all Ülker wanted as far as Nourazar was concerned was the mayor of London’s death. İkmen wasn’t sure what he could do about this on his own and unarmed, but he felt he had to be where Nourazar and the mayor were.

  Up on the balcony, the door to the apartment the Iranian and his hostage stood outside opened and İkmen caught a glimpse of a young headscarfed woman. He jogged wearily over to the concrete stairwell and began to make his way up. The walls, covered in graffiti tags, were grimy and splashed with what smelt like rancid cheese, underneath which was the unmistakable smell of piss. İkmen kicked a pizza box out of his way and reached the first floor. He listened to Nourazar and the woman talk.

  ‘It will only be for a few moments, Fatima,’ he heard Nourazar say. ‘Nothing bad will happen, I promise.’

  ‘Yes, but Ayatollah Hadi,’ a distinctly Cockney voice replied, ‘I can’t have any trouble, not in my condition. Where’s Hamdi?’

  ‘If you let us inside, I’ll tell you,’ Nourazar said.

  There was a pause and then the woman said, ‘Ayatollah Hadi, that man is the mayor of London, what—’

  There was a metallic click, which sounded like the safety catch being taken off a pistol. The woman gasped audibly.

  ‘Fatima, go inside and let’s talk,’ Nourazar said. ‘You will not be hurt, I promise.’

  İkmen heard them go inside and after several seconds he moved out of the stairwell and on to the balcony. The door to the apartment had been left ajar, possibly for Ahmet Ülker. Inside he heard, at first, the sound of a television. This was switched off and replaced by the low rumble of Nourazar’s voice. Out in the street, a large silver BMW car pulled up in front of the block. At the same time the door to the underground garages of the executive apartments opposite began to move upwards.