I Am Pilgrim(137)

Every time I saw a phone box I photographed it, confident that the software in the phone was downloading it on to the map and recording its exact position. Somewhere along the line I grabbed a kebab wrapped in pitta and sat on a bench under a jacaranda tree to eat it. Only after a few minutes did I look in the window of the shop beside me. On display was an outstanding collection of saxophones and classic electric guitars. I stepped to the door and looked into the dark cavern beyond.

It was one of those places – my sort of places – that you hardly see any more. One side of the cave was occupied by piles of sheet music, racks of vinyl records, bins of CDs, and if somebody had told me there were boxes of eight-track cartridges out back I would have believed them. The other side was given over to instruments – enough Gibsons and Fender Stratocasters to make any rock ’n’ roll tragic smile – and a host of Turkish folk instruments I couldn’t put a name to, let alone a sound.

The guy smoking behind the counter – in his forties, a musician by the look of his weathered jeans and dreamy eyes – motioned me to step inside. At another time, in another life, I would have spent hours inside, but I spread my hands in mute apology and got on with the task at hand.

In the hours that followed I took enough photos of phone boxes outside tourist shops and corner markets to last a lifetime, waited an age to cross a main thoroughfare to shoot one ten yards from a BP gas station and found at least six that looked as if they had been brought in from another country and illegally connected to the overhead lines. No wonder Turkish Telecom had no record of them.

By late afternoon, footsore and thirsty, I found myself in a small public square. I sat down at an open-air café and my first thought was to order an Efes beer but, thankfully, I have some degree of self-awareness and I knew that in a mood of anger and despair I might not have stopped at one. I ordered a coffee instead and began the task I had been avoiding all day: I opened the backpack, took out the files concerning Dodge’s death and began to examine the disaster into which Whisperer and I had stumbled.

Twenty minutes later I was certain something was badly wrong with the police investigation. The key wasn’t in the interviews, the forensic examination or the analysis of the security footage. It was in the toxicology report.

Along with a lot of the other files it had been translated for Cameron’s benefit, and Detective Cumali was right, it showed there were drugs in his body, but I doubt if she had any way of judging what those levels really meant. Indeed, the final page of the medical examiner’s report merely stated they were sufficient to have significantly impaired the victim’s judgement and balance.

‘“Significantly impaired”?’ Holy crap, the young billionaire had gone nuclear. From my medical training and own dark experience I knew he couldn’t have introduced that level of drugs into his bloodstream in a matter of hours – not without overdosing. Dodge had been on an epic binge: three or four days, by my reckoning.

Unlike Cumali – or any of her forensic team – my chequered past also gave me an expert insight into the actual effects those drugs would have had on him. There was tina, of course – there was always tina these days – its faithful little sidekick GHB, or EasyLay, to cut the mood swings and a good lacing of Ecstasy to soothe the soul. Sleep was always the enemy of somebody on a binge, and that’s why there were the heavy traces of coke: to keep him awake. I was certain that nobody on a four-day drug blitz, using a cocktail of those substances, would have had any interest in fireworks. That was Sunday school compared to the light show going on in his own head and genitals.

Then I remembered the alarm that went off over the binoculars. I realized what my problem was: who would take binoculars to look at fireworks exploding almost overhead? Not unless you wanted to blind yourself. And why go to the very end of the property and stand on a cliff edge – wouldn’t the lawn or terraces have offered just as good a view? Even the most chronic drug users have some instinct for self-preservation. No, something else had induced him, in that state of heavy drug intoxication, to grab the binoculars and head down to the cliff face.

I didn’t know what it was – I didn’t know the answer to a lot of things – but I did know that the situation wasn’t as bleak as it had appeared in Detective Cumali’s office, as I drowned in her disdain and the smell of frangipani.

I thought again of that bottle of Efes. Better not, I decided: hope was even more dangerous than despair.

What I really needed was my car.





Chapter Twenty


THE FRENCH HOUSE was easy enough to find. Once you headed out of Bodrum and reached the southern headland, you took the long road that wound up through overhanging cypress trees and drove until you could go no further.