I Am Pilgrim(136)

‘Was there a pre-nup?’ I asked wearily.

But she wasn’t interested. ‘I didn’t inquire,’ she said. ‘What was the point? As I’ve said, there was nobody else on the estate, the only person with any motive was twenty miles away, Mr Dodge’s actions were clear and unambiguous, the forensic evidence is irrefutable. It was an accident.’

She started to gather up the photos and reports, ready to be put back in the filing cabinet. ‘That’s the review for you, Mr Wilson. I think even the FBI would agree that the Turkish police have done a thorough and professional job.’

‘I’ll need those files, the raw data and everything else, Detective,’ I said, indicating her stack of material. I expected an explosion, and I wasn’t disappointed.

‘What?’ she replied.

I caught sight of Hayrunnisa watching our faces, loving it.

‘I told you, I need to conduct my own review,’ I said evenly.

‘No,’ Cumali replied. She repeated it in Turkish for added confirmation.

‘I’ve come a long way, Detective Cumali. My visit has been organized at the highest levels of government. Do you want me to call and say I’m not getting the cooperation I need?’

She didn’t move. Nor did the secretary – she had probably never heard her boss threatened with a bazooka before. I put my hand out for the files, but Cumali shook her head.

‘They’re the originals. Anyway, they’re mostly in Turkish,’ she said.

‘I’m sure a lot of them were translated for the widow,’ I countered, but she made no move to give them to me. ‘Please, Detective – don’t let’s do this,’ I said.

She didn’t take her eyes off me – and then appeared to give in. ‘How long do you need them for?’ she asked.

‘Three days, maybe four,’ I said. It wasn’t much, but I figured it was the best I could do.

She looked at the secretary, still deeply angry – and that should have warned me that she had a plan. She spoke harshly in Turkish, but there was one word I understood because it was so close to the English: fotokopi.

‘Thank you,’ I said politely.

‘There’s nothing here for you in Bodrum, Agent Wilson,’ she said after a moment. ‘Nothing at all.’

With that she turned her back and started to examine her schedule and mail. She didn’t look up when Hayrunnisa returned with the photocopied files. Not even when I put them in my backpack and walked out of her office.





Chapter Nineteen


OF ALL THE deaths of all the people in all the world – we had to choose Dodge’s. What had seemed like a piece of good fortune had turned out to be a terrible mistake.

With his death so clearly an accident, there was nothing to investigate and, with nothing to investigate, Brodie Wilson might as well have got on a plane and gone home. Detective Leyla Cumali had called that one right.

I had bought myself a few days, but that was nowhere near enough. As I left the stationhouse I thought yet again how it was the assumptions, the unquestioned assumptions, that get you every time. Whisperer and I should have drilled deeper and asked ourselves exactly what I was going to investigate. In fairness, we were tired and desperate when we made the decision and, in most circumstances, the death of a twenty-eight-year-old man on sea-swept rocks would have presented something worth investigating. But excuses were no good, we had nailed our flag to the mast and – like any number of pirates – we paid the price when the ship went down.

The question was: what was I going to do about it? The short answer was: I had no idea. I have a way of dealing with stress, though – I either walk or I work. Bodrum offered the opportunity to do both and I reminded myself that the major mission – or at least a first step on it – was identifying the phone boxes in the Old Town.

So I pulled the cellphone with its specially modified camera out of my backpack, reinserted the battery and, at the end of the street, I turned right. I was working to the inner map I had in my head and, after five minutes’ fast walking, at last feeling the anxiety subside to a manageable level, I reached the edge of the search area.

I had divided it mentally into sectors and I wound back to a much slower pace, determined not to allow any potential target to escape my notice or the camera. It wasn’t easy. For most of the year Bodrum is a sleepy town, home to about fifty thousand people, but in summer the number swells to half a million and, even though it was the tag end of the season, the streets were crowded with vacationers, scenesters and the vast universe of people who prey on them.

I passed countless shops selling Turkish leather sandals and rare Persian carpets, nearly all of which had come overland from some factory in China. Every hundred yards there were aromatic bars specializing in what, in Spain, would be called tapas but that far east was known as meze, and no matter what time of the day or night they were always full.