drink to, lyrics made for bellowing. When his son Orhan had told him that he wanted to transfer to the Ankara State Conservatory to study it, therefore, he’d thought – or perhaps more accurately hoped – it was a joke.
But such were the perils of falling in love with an artistic woman.
On the concert platform, his son packed his oboe away into its case, took a zurna from his music-bag instead. He’d been granted the rare honour of choosing a piece to perform, to showcase his own talent. But what it was, Baştürk didn’t know. He frowned inquisitively at his wife Sophia; she gave him in return only an enigmatic smile. The lights dimmed a little. The players took up their instruments. His son put the zurna’s reed to his lips, readied his fingers for the first note. Baştürk found himself tensing, hope fighting fear. If this was what his son wanted, it was what he wanted too. But he’d learned the hard way, these past six months, that aspiration wasn’t the same thing as ability.
The first notes, so soft he could barely hear them. Baştürk made sure to keep his hands and expression relaxed, but his feet were clenched like fists beneath his seat until with a shock he not only recognized the piece but then quickly realized that Orhan had mastered it completely, that he was good; and now the other instruments joined in and the music began to soar raucously and joyously and he knew it was going to be okay, his son would have the life he coveted, and he sagged a little with the relief of it, and he took and squeezed his wife’s hand, and he felt quite ridiculously proud.
Now that he could relax, the music went to work on him. It was a personal favourite of his, conjuring childhood memories of his own father, of being carried on his shoulders at protest marches, of watching him holding union crowds enthralled with his fierce rhetoric. Then the music hit its first melancholic passage, and it took him with it. For it had been a mixed blessing to have such a man for a father, dooming him to a life of falling short. And he had fallen short, he knew. He’d let his father down. He’d let his wife and son down. He’d let his country down. He felt, again, the almost crippling sense of inadequacy that had blighted him so often since he’d started his new job.
A door banged behind him. He looked irritably around at this disruption of his son’s performance. Shadows conferred in those urgent low voices that were somehow doubly intrusive for being hushed. On stage, the players hesitated, uncertain whether to treat this as a rehearsal or a full performance, before staggering to an ugly, ragged stop. Baştürk slapped his knee in anger then got to his feet. ‘I thought I said no interruptions.’
‘Forgive me, Prime Minister,’ said Gonka, his senior aide, hurrying down the aisle to him. ‘But there’s been an incident. A bomb.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Not another.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ she nodded. ‘In Daphne. And I wouldn’t have disturbed you even so, but the press have found out you’re here. And they’re already gathering outside.’
I
There was nothing more Iain could do for Mustafa, and others might need his help. He made his way down the slope to the cars that had rolled to its foot. The first two were empty, but a middle-aged woman was strapped unconscious behind the wheel of the third, a green Peugeot settled on its roof. He couldn’t see any flames but its interior was clouding with smoke. The doors were all jammed shut, but its passenger-side window had partially buckled so he smashed it with a stone until it caved. He took a deep breath then wriggled inside. He released her seatbelt, took her under her arms, hauled her out and laid her on her back. Her pulse was weak but she was alive and breathing unaided.
He clambered back up the hillside. It was steep enough to make his calves and hams ache. Shrieks of pain and wails of grief greeted him. The smoke had cleared to reveal the blast’s full devastation. A great bite had been taken out of the road in front of the Daphne International Hotel and its black-glass frontage had shattered and fallen away, exposing a honeycomb interior of ruined rooms, of broken baths and toilets dangling grotesquely from twisted pipes. The scale of damage, and the lack of any residual smell of cheap explosive, suggested to him military-grade ordnance. And not some stray shell from the Syrian war: it would take a large missile or a truckload of Semtex to wreak this much—
A cracking, splintering noise ripped the air, sending the fire-crews and search-and-rescue teams scurrying for safety. Then, a second or two later, the hotel’s left-hand wall simply sheared away and toppled forwards into the general rubble, bringing the rear wall down too, throwing up more clouds of noxious dust and reducing still further any hope of finding survivors.
Ambulances were now arriving in large numbers. He led a pair of paramedics down the hill. While one of them treated the Peugeot driver, he and the other strapped Mustafa onto a stretcher and carried him back up to the top, loaded him onto an ambulance. He asked to go along with him, but the paramedic gave an expressive little shrug. It wasn’t an ambulance right now, but a body-cart; and they needed all of it. ‘Did he live around here?’ the man asked.
‘Istanbul,’ answered Iain. He nodded at the wrecked hotel. ‘He was staying there.’
‘Wife? Family?’
‘I’ll call them myself,’ said Iain.
‘We still need to know who they are.’
He summoned up Layla’s number on his smartphone, wrote it along with Mustafa’s name on the back of one of his own business cards, then added the name of his Antioch hotel should they need to contact him. The paramedic thanked him and moved off in search of further grim duties. Remarkably, it was only now that he remembered what he and Mustafa had been here to do. Or, more precisely, remembered the footage that would have been streaming into his laptop right up to the moment of detonation. If his hard-drive had somehow survived, and the footage could be recovered, it could prove vital to the investigation. On the other hand, if the police discovered it for themselves it would be a nightmare to explain away.
He went back down the slope to where he’d found Mustafa then searched in an ever-widening spiral until he spotted an edge of the toughened black casing protruding from loose earth. He pulled it free. Its screen was shattered, its hinges broken and its casing pocked by shrapnel, but it could have been far worse. He carried it obliquely back up the slope to his hire-car, locked it away in his boot. His next job promised to be harder. He took out his phone again. No signal. The masts had to be overwhelmed. He walked away in search of coverage. Still nothing. A wicked little voice whispered that the paramedics or the hospital would take care of it for him, maybe even handle it better than he could. They’d be calm, clinical, practised.
In Istanbul, last year, Layla had cooked a feast in his honour, to thank him for bringing good employment to her husband. Their two daughters had sat either side of him upon their divan while he’d read them stories from the lusciously illustrated copy of the Thousand and One Nights he’d brought as a gift.
A signal at last. Tenuous but undeniable. He felt light-headed as he dialled Mustafa’s home number, like the first hint of flu. The phone had barely rung before Layla snatched it up. She began talking Turkish so fast that it was a struggle for Iain to follow. He tried to slow her. When she recognized his voice, she burst into sobs of relief. ‘You’re safe,’ she said, switching to English. ‘Thank God you’re safe. I’ve been watching on the news. I’ve been so worried. Where’s Mustafa? Is he with you? I’ve been trying his phone.’
‘Layla,’ said Iain.
There was silence. It stretched painful as the rack. ‘He’s hurt,’ she said. ‘He’s hurt badly, isn’t he?’
‘Layla,’ he said again.
She began to wail. It was a desperate, inhuman sound, like an animal being tortured. He didn’t know what she needed from him, whether to respect her grief with silence or to tell her what he knew. He decided to talk. It would be easy enough for her to shut him up if she wanted.