A Dead Man in Istanbul

by Michael Pearce

  ‘He doesn’t seem to think much of Cunningham.’

  ‘Mutual, old boy. Cunningham didn’t think much of him. Reckoned he was a complete blockhead.’

  ‘So he might have thought it necessary to supplement his efforts?’

  ‘Spying, you mean? Well, he might. We used to suggest that sometimes just to get up Chalmers’ nose. But I would have thought that was about as likely as bird-watching. You’ve got to understand that there’s a bit of a code about that in the Diplomatic. It’s the sort of thing you don’t do. Except if you’re a military attaché. Now, I’ll admit that Cunningham was the kind of man who would do plenty of things that ordinary diplomats don’t do, but . . . spying? A bit infra dig, old man, especially for someone like Cunningham.

  ‘And there’s another thing: you don’t spy on your own, you do it for somebody. There’s always someone you’re passing the information to. But – apart from the fact that Cunningham found it difficult to work for anyone – who could that have been in Cunningham’s case? Not the F.O., old boy, it doesn’t go in for that sort of thing. And if it did in Istanbul, the Old Man would have to know about it. Strictly hierarchical, we are.

  ‘The army? They’re the ones who normally do intelligence work. But I’ve told you what Cunningham thought of Chalmers, and he thought much the same about the army. Who else, then? A private mission for the Prime Minister? I don’t think so.

  ‘No, I’d forget about spying. The only spying Cunningham would be likely to have done would have been to work out beforehand how he was going to climb up into some woman’s bedroom.’

  But not, surely, on the Gelibolu side of the Straits, where, from what they all said, the ground was barren, the peninsula depopulated, and likely women even fewer than the fortifications. On the other side, then, to which Leander had swum and where Cunningham had temporarily marooned Felicity? But that, too, seemed unlikely. From what Seymour had seen, the land was as barren and as empty as it was on the Gelibolu side. To emulate Leander, Cunningham had had to actually put a woman there: Felicity.

  But – hold on a minute – Felicity had been there only for the rehearsal. Had there been some other woman there for the real thing?

  Seymour needed to question Mohammed again. On the whole he would have preferred to have done it, despite the language difficulty, without the help of the Chief Dragoman. But there was a protocol in this, he had learned, and Seymour had gone native sufficiently as not to wish to break it. Reluctantly he went in search of the Dragoman.

  ‘Sure!’ said the Dragoman happily. ‘We question Mohammed. What you want to know?’

  ‘Was there a woman on the other side when they set out?’

  ‘A woman! Oh, ho!’ said the Chief Dragoman, rubbing his hands lubriciously.

  ‘Mohammed, what you up to? You and Cunningham Effendi? Some nice juicy lady, yes? I surprise.’

  ‘Me?’ said Mohammed, amazed.

  ‘You visit some lady’s house, yes? Before you go in boat? Mohammed, I impressed. First, the lady, then the rowing. You strong man, Mohammed. No wonder you eight children.’

  Mohammed opened his mouth, then closed it.

  ‘And with Cunningham Effendi, too! How you do it, Mohammed? Together?’

  Mohammed looked at the Chief Dragoman, then at Seymour, and moved away worried.

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute! said Seymour. ‘Listen, Mohammed: no juicy lady. Right?’

  ‘No juicy lady?’ said the Dragoman, disappointed.

  ‘No. All I want to know, Mohammed, is: was there a woman with Cunningham when you went to the other side of the Straits to start?’

  Mohammed’s look of alarm returned.

  ‘Woman?’ he unmistakably said. And Seymour reckoned he could understand the next bit too: ‘Are you crazy, or something?’

  ‘No woman,’ said the Chief Dragoman sadly.

  But, then, thought Seymour, if for some reason Cunningham was doing it all in reverse, wouldn’t the woman, after all, have been on the Gelibolu side? Ought he not to ask Mohammed about that?

  Just at the moment, though, he felt he wouldn’t.

  The Chief Dragoman was deep in thought.

  ‘Effendi,’ he said, after a moment, ‘what’s the problem? You want woman? I fix.’

  That evening Seymour went to the theatre to see Lalagé. Not for the reason the Chief Dragoman had supposed nor Lalagé suggested but strictly on business. Nor did he go in the Embassy landau. It wasn’t just that sitting up there with the driver and a gilt-edged cavass beside him he felt rather foolish. It was more that he was increasingly beginning to feel cut off. The Embassy trappings had closed round him like a screen, shielding him, no doubt, from unwanted intimacies but also separating him from, well, life. He had some sympathy with Cunningham wanting to go down into the city after a rarefied Embassy dinner on the heights.

  And which was it that had occasioned Cunningham’s death? Life on the heights or life down below? Some complex diplomatic reason or even doubtfully diplomatic reason, spying, for example? Anyway something to do with international politics? Or something more personal, a woman, perhaps, anyway something to do with ordinary life?

  If it was the latter, he doubted whether he would find out much from the Embassy staff. Not even from the drivers and porters and cavasses who usually knew so much. He had a feeling that Cunningham would simply have left them behind, as he and Rice-Cholmondely had done, and plunged off into the streets alone.

  No, he would have to talk to someone in the streets and the person who inevitably came to mind was Lalagé. She seemed to have been on intimate terms with Cunningham and might know about that side of him. And not only that. There was obviously some intelligence-gathering relationship between the Embassy and some at least of the theatre players, and she might be able to enlighten him about that, too.

  So he set off on foot. Down the hill, past the cemetery with the turbaned pillars, into the narrow crowded streets with their exotic smells and noises.

  Almost at once he learned why the diplomats normally made use of the carriage. It was swelteringly hot and by the time he reached the Galata Bridge his shirt was drenched with sweat. He paused for a moment by the bridge, looking down into the water and at the array of ships, and gathering his breath.

  Seymour liked docks. He had spent all his life within a mile of the London docks. Even when he had been posted to the Special Branch he had continued to work in that area, where his skill at languages helped him with the immigrants who abounded there. He came from an immigrant family himself, back a little way. His grandfather had come from Poland, his mother from Hungary. They had landed in the docks and then, like so many other immigrant families, had stayed.

  Seymour had grown up there among the many languages of the East End and had very early developed an ear for them. So good an ear, in fact, that the police interpreter had noticed it and began to take him round with him. This in turn had led to the police noticing him and eventually to his joining the police. He had become known as ‘the languages man’ and so when the Foreign Office had asked for someone with knowledge of foreign languages his name had been the one that was put forward.

  But it wasn’t just the languages. His upbringing had given him a sense of the people and lives behind the languages. That sense was missing here; but now, as he went about on foot, hearing the talk and seeing the people, he began to capture it a little. The Arabic and Turkish he could not understand, although he was beginning to grasp them a little. But there were other languages in the streets, too, Italian and German and French, and these he had no difficulty with. For all the differences, this part of Istanbul was not actually that different from the East End.

  He found his way through to the theatre, stopping in the park to listen to the music, turning aside for a leisurely cup of coffee in one of the candlelit coffee houses. Although it was dark now, the evening was pleasantly warm. The people were relaxed. He began to feel comfortable and at home.

  He didn’t want to arrive too early a
t the theatre. He had arranged to meet Lalagé after the performance. He would take her out for a meal in one of the restaurants nearby.

  There seemed to be quite a crowd in the street outside the theatre. There were people in uniforms. There seemed to have been an accident of some sort.

  A carriage was standing by the side door. It was different from the other carriages he had seen, more box-like and without seats. Some men were opening the back of the carriage. It fell down into a flap. The men reached inside and pulled out a stretcher.

  A senior-looking man in a fez came out of the theatre and stood for a moment talking to the stretcher-bearers. Then he stood aside to let them go in. His eye, just at that moment, caught Seymour’s.

  ‘Why, Mr Seymour!’ he said. ‘What brings you here?’

  It was Mukhtar, the terjiman from Gelibolu.

  Seymour pushed his way through towards him.

  ‘I was meeting someone,’ he said. ‘One of the actresses.’

  The terjiman’s eyebrows went up.

  ‘Actresses?’ he said.

  ‘Players,’ amended Seymour. He didn’t want to get the theatre into trouble.

  ‘Really?’ said Mukhtar. He beckoned Seymour towards him and they went in. He led Seymour along a corridor and up some stairs.

  They went into a room. A woman was lying on a bed, her head turned away.

  ‘Not this one?’ said the terjiman.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Yes,’ said Seymour.

  The terjiman nodded.

  ‘I shall ask you some questions, please,’ he said. ‘One moment!’

  The stretcher-bearers came in. They looked at the terjiman enquiringly. He made a gesture of assent and they lifted the body on to the stretcher. As they were going out, they nearly collided with a tall, thin man in a dark suit and fez who came bustling in through the door. He bent over the stretcher.

  ‘Do you want me to go with it?’ he asked Mukhtar.

  ‘Please, Mr Demeyrel. It’s best if you get on with it as quickly as you can. The heat,’ he explained to Seymour.

  The three men left together.

  Seymour looked round the room. It was small and dark and dirty and there were various bits of clothing scattered around. A dressing room, Seymour supposed.

  ‘It is not nice here,’ said Mukhtar, wrinkling his nose. ‘Let us go somewhere else.’

  As they were leaving the theatre, a small, harassed-looking man interrupted them.

  ‘Can I use it?’ he asked. ‘The room, I mean?’

  The terjiman nodded.

  ‘I’ve finished here for the time being,’ he said.

  ‘This is terrible!’ said the little man.

  Mukhtar didn’t say anything.

  The little man seemed compelled to offer an explanation for wanting to use the room.

  ‘It’s the performance this evening. I mean, we’ve got to go on. And there are points when we need all the changing rooms.’

  ‘If you’re going on the way you have done,’ said Mukhtar sternly, ‘you’re asking for trouble!’

  The little man, who seemed to be the theatre manager, hung his head.

  ‘There are only two of them,’ he said. ‘Now that Lalagé’s gone.’

  ‘Yes, well, they may not be so keen to continue now that they’ve seen what happened to Miss Kassim. However, that’s not my business. I’m only interested in Miss Kassim.’

  ‘I don’t want you to think,’ said the little manager, with sudden dignity, ‘that I’m not.’

  He stepped aside and they went on out. The crowd was still gathered at the foot of the steps.

  ‘They’re back,’ Seymour heard someone say. ‘The Fleshmakers.’

  ‘They’ve never really gone,’ someone else said.

  The terjiman led Seymour down one of the dark alleyways. To his surprise they came out on the Galata Bridge. He hadn’t realized it was so close. They went down some steps off to one side. Below the bridge was a large floating quay covered with stalls and booths. Some of the stalls, selling materials of various kinds, had spread their wares over the space between the shops. They seemed to cover every inch of the quay. From somewhere further along came the smell of frying fish.

  Mukhtar stepped over the cloth and led him through a space between two of the stalls, so narrow that if you hadn’t known it was there you would have missed it. At the end there was an area fenced off by four-feet high walls of carpet. Inside, there were low tables and at one end there were braziers on which a turbaned man was making coffee. They went to a table at the side. There were no chairs; they sat on the floor, and when Seymour did, he was conscious of the floor moving. The man at the end served them coffee in tiny cups, pouring from a tall copper pot with a long spout.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Seymour,’ said Mukhtar, ‘that you should, so soon after coming here, see the bad side of Istanbul.’

  He spoke English well, although slightly over-correctly.

  ‘It is what brought me here,’ said Seymour.

  Mukhtar nodded.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And you will understand that it is not all like this.’

  He sipped his coffee.

  ‘And now to Miss Kassim. You were coming to see her, you said?’

  ‘Yes. We had met yesterday evening. At the theatre. She came to our box at a point when she was not onstage.’

  ‘And you arranged to meet her this evening?’

  ‘After the performance, yes.’

  ‘May I ask why? We are colleagues, Mr Seymour, and you can be frank.’

  Seymour smiled.

  ‘I was just hoping to talk to her,’ he said. ‘And I was not expecting, if that is what you are thinking, that it would lead to other things.’

  ‘Forgive me. It was a possibility. May I ask what you were going to talk to her about?’

  ‘Cunningham.’

  ‘Ah, Cunningham.’

  ‘She knew Cunningham, it appears.’

  ‘Yes.’ It did not seem to come as a surprise to him. ‘And what, exactly, were you hoping that Miss Kassim could tell you about Cunningham?’

  ‘I was hoping,’ Seymour said, ‘that she could give me a more rounded picture of him. All I have got so far is the Embassy side.’

  The terjiman smiled.

  ‘And she would, you hoped, be able to enlighten you about the other sides?’

  ‘So I hoped.’

  ‘They were, of course, lovers,’ said Mukhtar.

  ‘Were they?’

  ‘There were others. She was one among many.’ Was there a note of disapproval in his voice? ‘But their relationship seems to have been particularly intense.’

  ‘I did not know. For certain,’ he added, not wishing to give too great an impression of ignorance. ‘It was one of the things I wanted to find out.’

  The terjiman nodded.

  ‘And that was all?’

  ‘All?’

  ‘You did not wish to find out, for instance, how other sides of Miss Kassim’s activities had been progressing?’

  ‘Other sides?’

  Mukhtar did not expand.

  ‘No? Good. You were just, as you say, gathering information about Mr Cunningham’s personal life. Well, if I can help, I would be glad to. We are, after all, colleagues, are we not?’

  ‘We are, and I am most grateful to you for your offer of help. Please let me make it clear that I have no wish at all to intrude on your investigation. Nor to duplicate it. I am sure it will be conducted perfectly satisfactorily. It is just that, since Mr Cunningham was a British citizen, and, indeed, an official of His Majesty’s service, certain enquiries have to be made.’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘There are, too,’ Seymour felt he could add, ‘certain pressures at home in this case.’

  Mukhtar smiled broadly.

  ‘That, too, I can understand. And, as you can imagine, there are also pressures here.’

  They both laughed. There was a kind of professional solidarity developing between them.


  The terjiman glanced at his watch.

  ‘I am afraid I must return to the theatre. There are other questions to be asked.’

  ‘Of course!’

  They went back along the tight little street, full now of the smells of people cooking their evening meal. From the smell it appeared that onions were going to figure largely.

  ‘It is a pity,’ said Mukhtar, ‘about Miss Kassim. I was going to the theatre anyway today to see. There were some questions I wanted to put to her. Like yours,’ he said, smiling, ‘they were about Mr Cunningham. But now I shall not be able to put them.’

  ‘Sadly, no.’ Seymour thought for a moment. ‘May I ask – does the fact that you were here to ask her some questions about him imply that you see a possible connection between the cases?’

  ‘Possible? Well, possible, yes. But I have no firm view yet. The questions about Cunningham Effendi are one thing, and Miss Kassim’s death, another. At the moment. All we know so far is that Miss Kassim is dead, apparently murdered.’

  ‘May I ask how she was killed?’

  ‘She was strangled. Probably, my colleague, Mr Demeyrel, suggests, with the string of a bow.’

  ‘Bowstring?’ said Seymour, startled, and with the words of the landau driver still fresh in his mind.

  ‘Yes. Confirmation will have to wait until he performs his autopsy, because the string is so deeply embedded in the flesh that it is hard to tell with the naked eye. But, clearly, it is a very thin, hair-like cord of some kind, so thin that it is barely visible. Indeed, I myself did not see it until Mr Demeyrel pointed it out to me. He thought it might give an immediate lead to my enquiries.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Seymour, ‘it would.’

  ‘That is why I have to go back to the theatre. The band should be there now.’

  ‘Band?’

  ‘There will be string players among them.’

  ‘Oh! That kind of bowstring!’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Mukhtar puzzled. ‘What kind did you think?’

  That bloody landau driver, thought Seymour! With his bowstrings and Fleshmakers!