Dead of Night Read online

  DEAD OF NIGHT

  Barbara Nadel

  Copyright © 2012 Barbara Nadel

  The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7167 9

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Map of Downtown Detroit

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Detroit

  The Melungeons

  Acknowledgements

  To the great city and great people of Detroit. Also for

  Jim Reeve and his big, beautiful view of the Shard of Glass

  Cast of Characters

  Çetin İkmen – middle-aged İstanbul police inspector

  Mehmet Süleyman – İstanbul police inspector, İkmen’s protégé

  Commissioner Ardıç – İkmen and Süleyman’s boss

  Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu – İkmen’s deputy

  Sergeant İzzet Melik – Süleyman’s deputy

  Dr Arto Sarkissian – İstanbul police pathologist

  Tayyar Bekdil – Süleyman’s cousin, a journalist in Detroit

  Lieutenant Gerald Diaz – of Detroit Police Department (DPD)

  Lieutenant John Shalhoub – of DPD

  Lieutenant Ed Devine – of DPD

  Sergeant Donna Ferrari – of DPD

  Detective Lionel Katz – of DPD

  Officer Rita Addison – of DPD

  Officer Mark Zevets – of DPD

  Dr Rob Weiss – ballistics expert

  Rosa Guzman – forensic investigator

  Ezekiel (Zeke) Goins – elderly Melungeon

  Samuel Goins – Zeke’s brother, a Detroit city councillor

  Martha Bell – urban regenerator, Zeke’s landlady

  Keisha Bell – Martha’s daughter

  Grant T. Miller – man Zeke Goins suspects killed his son, Elvis

  Marta Sosobowski – widow of deceased Detroit cop, John Sosobowski

  Stefan and Richard Voss – undertakers

  Kyle Redmond – an auto wrecker

  1 December 1978 – Detroit, Michigan

  His breath came in short, spiky gasps as his face was pushed hard into the unyielding brickwork in front of him. There was a gun jammed against the side of his head. It was wielded by the same unknown person who had twisted his arm up his back so that his hand nearly touched his head. He was afraid, but also angry. In spite of not being able to breathe properly, he yelled, ‘You fucking Purple motherfucker!’

  But there was no reply, none of the usual murmurs of approval from the other gang members that generally accompanied hits of this kind. Was there anyone else with whoever had grabbed him? He began to feel the blood drain from his face as he considered the possibility that his assailant was alone. Apart from the shame he felt at being somehow disabled by possibly just one person, he also knew what this could mean on another level. Every so often kids like him just got taken. Generally it was by some sort of wacko freak who wanted to have sex with them – or with their body after they were dead. He’d seen that movie The Hills Have Eyes; he knew what went on.

  ‘Listen, man, I ain’t gonna let you have my butt!’ he said, and then instantly regretted it. His ma always said his mouth was way too big for his head. The pressure on his arm and then from the gun against his temple increased. Either he’d hit on the truth, or he’d just enraged his attacker still further. After all, if he wasn’t homosexual, he had just insulted him. Then it got worse. ‘But if you gonna rob me, then that’s cool,’ he blurted. ‘Or . . . no, it ain’t cool, but . . .’

  But he didn’t want to be robbed either! Again, he panicked.

  ‘Not that I’m sayin’ you’re a faggot or nothing, man,’ he said. ‘Maybe you just want my stuff. I dunno!’ Then his voice rose in terror and he yelled, ‘Just tell me what you do want, you crazy freak!’

  There was snow on the ground underneath his feet. He looked down at it, knowing with a certainty that made his head dizzy that his blood and brains were going to colour its city greyness red. He began to shiver. The gunman, his weapon pointed at his head, pulled the muzzle back just ever so slightly. ‘Why are you going to kill me, man?’ the boy cried plaintively. ‘I ain’t nothing special. What I ever do to you?’

  But he never got an answer to that or any other question. His assailant pulled the trigger at just short of point-blank range, and as the boy himself had imagined in the last moments of his life, his blood and brains turned the Detroit winter snow red.

  Chapter 1

  27 November 2009 – İstanbul, Turkey

  Inspector Çetin İkmen’s office was cold. The police station heating system had developed a fault, and so everyone was having to make do with tiny, weak electric heaters. Also İkmen was not actually in his office, which always made it, so his sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu believed, even more dreary and cheerless.

  She leaned towards the tiny one-bar heater and thought about how badly her week without her boss was starting. So far, since İkmen and another inspector, Mehmet Süleyman, had left to go to a policing conference abroad, first the computer system had thrown a tantrum, and then the heating had broken down. It was almost as if the fabric of the building was protesting at their absence. Ayşe herself always felt lost without İkmen, and whenever Süleyman was out of town, she worried. Some years before, she’d had a brief affair with the handsome, urbane Mehmet. She still, in spite of his so far two marriages as well as numerous affairs and liaisons, had feelings for him. Where the two officers had gone, representing the entire Turkish police force, was a very long way away, to a place apparently even colder than İstanbul. As she leaned still further in towards the fire, Ayşe found such an idea almost beyond belief. Then a knock at the door made her look up. ‘Come in.’

  The door opened to reveal a slightly overweight dark man in his late forties.

  ‘Sergeant Melik.’

  İzzet Meli
k was Mehmet Süleyman’s sergeant, and like Ayşe Farsakoğlu, he was not finding the absence of his boss or the bitterly cold November wind easy to deal with. He was also, Ayşe noticed, carrying a paper bag that appeared to be steaming. He held it up so that she could see it. ‘Börek,’ he said, announcing the presence of hot, savoury Turkish pastries. ‘If the heating’s going to be down for a while, we need to eat properly and keep warm.’

  Ayşe smiled. İzzet, in spite of his tough, macho-man exterior, was a kind and rather cultured soul who had held a romantic torch for her, in silence, for years.

  ‘That’s a very nice thought,’ she said.

  He took a tissue out of his pocket and then picked a triangular pastry out of the bag and wrapped it up for her. ‘Mind if I join you, Sergeant Farsakoğlu?’

  He was always so careful to be proper and respectful with her. As she looked at him, in spite of his heaviness and lack of physical grace, Ayşe felt herself warm to him. Like her boss, Çetin İkmen, İzzet Melik was a ‘good’ man. What you saw was, generally, what you got. No subterfuge, no hidden agendas, none of the fascinating mercurial scariness that could surface in Mehmet Süleyman from time to time. She pointed to the battered chair behind İkmen’s desk and said, ‘Bring that over.’

  He smiled. For a while they both sat in companionable silence, eating their börek, İzzet pulling his coat in tight around his shoulders. Then Ayşe said, ‘So this conference our bosses have gone to . . .’

  ‘Policing in Changing Urban Environments,’ İzzet said, quoting the conference title verbatim.

  ‘What’s it . . .’

  ‘About?’ He shrugged. ‘I think it’s about gangs and drugs and migration and how those things, and other factors, affect life in a modern city.’

  Ayşe bit into a particularly cheesy bit of her börek and was amazed at just how much better it made her feel.

  ‘Officers are going from all over the world,’ İzzet continued. ‘But then changing urban environments affect us all. You know this city. İstanbul, had only two million inhabitants back in 1978? We’re now twelve million, at least.’

  ‘More people, more problems,’ Ayşe said.

  ‘Yes. And a lot of those problems are global now too,’ he said. ‘Kids from New York to Bangkok sniff gas, shove cocaine up their noses and make up rap tunes about inner-city alienation. The internet allows terrorist groups to reach out to men and women on the streets of cities everywhere. Everything’s expanding, complicating, getting faster.’ He frowned. ‘If we don’t either take control of it, try to understand it or both, we could find ourselves in the middle of an urban nightmare, a real futuristic dystopia.’

  İzzet was way cleverer than he looked. Sometimes he was too clever. Ayşe knew what a dystopia was, but she never would have used the word herself. She finished her börek and then wiped her fingers on the tissue. ‘Well, whatever comes out of it,’ she said, ‘Inspector İkmen and Inspector Süleyman are getting to go to America. Çetin Bey was a little nervous, you know. Such a long flight!’

  ‘They’re changing planes at Frankfurt,’ İzzet said. Then he frowned again. ‘One thing I can’t understand is why this conference is being held in a city that is actually shrinking.’

  ‘Shrinking?’

  ‘Since the US motor industry started to go into decline at the end of the 1950s, Detroit, where the conference is taking place, has been contracting,’ he said. ‘As I understand it, anyone with any money left years ago. Those that remain are largely poor and unemployed. Detroit has one of the highest murder rates in America.’

  Ayşe, suddenly cold again, shuddered. ‘Inşallah the inspectors will be safe in such a place!’ she said.

  ‘With hundreds of officers from all over the world around them, not to mention the Detroit Police Department?’ İzzet smiled. ‘It’ll be OK.’

  Ayşe looked unsure. ‘With one of the highest murder rates in America?’ she said. ‘One has to ask what the police there are actually doing.’

  İzzet looked away from her and into the depths of the electric heater and said, ‘Maybe Detroit is what cities become when they get beyond the mega-city stage. Maybe eventually everyone will just leave.’

  ‘İstanbul?’

  He shrugged again. ‘We’re still growing. But it has to stop sometime. When no one can stand it any more, when the infrastructure breaks down, when there aren’t enough jobs for everyone.’ He looked across at her. ‘That was what happened in Detroit. Maybe it’s what will happen here too.’

  Air travel wasn’t Çetin İkmen’s favourite form of locomotion. Not that he’d done a lot of it. Until this trip, the furthest he had flown had been to London, which had taken all of three and a half hours. Now he was on what he considered to be an eight-hour marathon from Frankfurt to Detroit, and less than sixty minutes into the flight, he was already uncomfortable and bored.

  Mehmet Süleyman, his one-time protégé and now colleague, had managed somehow, already, to drop off to sleep. Quite how he had achieved that, İkmen didn’t know. Maybe it was some sort of defence mechanism against the craving he knew the younger man would be experiencing for a cigarette. There had been no time to find somewhere to smoke when they’d changed planes at Frankfurt airport. No one let anyone smoke in peace any more! Even his own office had been out of bounds for smoking since the previous July. It made İkmen miserable. Now that the weather was cold, trudging out to the back of the station was a chore. It was, he felt, ridiculous too. Almost everyone he knew was outside more often than they were in! Except, of course, his sergeant. Ayşe Farsakoğlu had given up when the ban on smoking in enclosed spaces had first been imposed. He was proud of her for that, even if he had no intention of following her example. He thought about his destination, about how rabid, or seemingly so, Americans were against smoking, and it almost made him wish that the plane would crash. At least death would end his nicotine cravings, as well as his fear of being a long way away from the ground in a sealed metal tube.

  He took one of the boiled sweets his daughter Çiçek had given him out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Recently married to a Turkish Airlines pilot, Çiçek had been a flight attendant for twelve years, and so she knew a thing or two about air travel and its risks and problems. She’d met her father at the airport armed with a bag of boiled sweets, a neck pillow, some sort of headache-preventing thing consisting of a strip of cold gel one placed on one’s forehead, and a pair of long, tight compression socks.

  ‘The flight socks will stop you getting deep-vein thrombosis,’ she’d said when she’d made him sit down and put them on in Departures. ‘Long flights increase everyone’s risk. And someone who smokes as much as you do is a prime candidate.’

  Mehmet Süleyman, who didn’t get a pair of flight socks, had smirked. Now, watching him asleep and apparently motionless, İkmen wondered whether it would be the younger man, and not he, who would get deep-vein thrombosis. Çiçek had said that as well as wearing flight socks, it was also a good idea to move around, or at least keep your feet moving. İkmen idly rotated an ankle, and then reached forward for the Lufthansa flight magazine in the pouch in front of his seat. As he did so, Mehmet Süleyman first frowned, then shuffled uncomfortably in his sleep. Economy seats were problematic for tall people like him. But then the İstanbul Police Department could hardly be expected to pay for their officers to travel in business class, especially at a time when the entire world seemed to be falling into recession.

  For İkmen, space was not too much of an issue. Short and thin, he had no problem with his leg room, or even with the fact that the person in front of him had now tilted his own seat backwards. İkmen flicked through the magazine, which fortunately for him was in English as well as German. English and French plus some German was what he spoke. Süleyman spoke English too, but was far more fluent in French, which reflected his decidedly privileged and Ottoman background. The old royalists had all spoken French, which they considered very cultured. Süleyman’s father, the son of a prince, albeit a deposed
one, had been no exception.

  The articles in the magazine ranged from cookery to the architectural delights of the German capital, Berlin. But the beautiful photographs of cafés and cathedrals made İkmen frown. Where they were headed wasn’t going to be anything like that. His youngest son, Kemal, who was turning out to be quite a computer geek, had shown him some websites about the city he was going to visit. Detroit, it seemed, was characterised by urban decay. Once the ‘Motor City’, an industrial giant, geared up to providing sustenance to the US’s endless love affair with the automobile, it was now apparently in decline. As far as İkmen could tell, it was full of poor, unemployed people living lives blighted by gang warfare and drugs in houses and apartments that were on the verge of collapse. An urban nightmare with a history of civil unrest and a reputation for being almost impossible to police, Detroit provided a vision of a post-industrial future that could spread across the western world – and that included the Turkish Republic. İkmen baulked at this at the same time as he accepted that it was a possibility. Even cheap Turkish goods couldn’t compete with cheaper Indian, Chinese or Korean imports. New players were emerging on the world stage, players whose efficiency and expertise could leave the more traditional industrial nations high and dry. But then if Detroit had been chosen as the best place to host a conference about policing changing urban environments, there had to be more to it than just pointing out the city’s failings.

  ‘It seems Detroit is coming back to life,’ his boss, Commissioner Ardıç, had told him when they had first discussed the conference back in June. ‘Don’t know how. You have to find that out. Policing remains a challenge. There have been numerous corruption scandals in the past. But the Detroit Police Department have already gone where some of us have yet to imagine. They’re finding solutions, it seems; the people of the city as well as the police.’

  Ardıç wanted İkmen and Süleyman to find out how the Americans were dealing with their gangs, with the drug culture that seemed to go with that phenomenon, and with the reality of mass unemployment and the resultant poverty. Officers were coming from all over the world to observe, ask questions, listen and learn, and also to share their experiences with each other. It would, İkmen felt, be a full and interesting week, if not a particularly pretty one.