Death by Design by Barbara Nadel Page B

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