Hard Rain

Six

Masters flashed her badge at the two uniformed officers armed with weathered, early-model MP5 sub-machine guns who were holding the fort. The men discussed our arrival between them before unlocking the door. Masters stomped past them. I showed my shield and followed her in, one of the uniforms in tow behind me.

It was dark inside. A wide stairway with ornate carved banisters climbed upwards. A radio was playing somewhere. I did a circuit of the ground floor, which was empty, and arrived back at the stairway. From information I’d already seen, I knew this to be a three-storey house that was three centuries old, arranged around a central courtyard. The house was cool and still and smelt of various chemical solvents doing battle with aromas that most people fortunately never have to experience. I followed those smells up the stairs to the top floor. They grew stronger with each step, along with the radio’s volume.

I heard laughter and voices. A woman was singing along tunelessly to a radio, or maybe it was the tune that was tuneless. I came down a wide hallway, walking on a dark red Turkish runner that turned my footsteps into whispers. The rug was laid over ancient black floorboards, the walls a light green colour and hung with paintings — old paintings of sea battles and landscapes and portraits of mostly Asiatic faces with wide, high cheekbones.

As I moved through the house, the aromas that smelt industrial were getting the upper hand. I turned a corner and saw a set of double doors that had been thrown open. Masters came around another corner and arrived on the other side of the room. Behind me, I sensed the uniform from the front door. Yellow crime-scene tape, which had, until recently, sealed the double doors shut, was rolled into an untidy ball and left on the rug. The radio, the singing, the voices and the smells were all coming from inside this room.

Masters didn’t acknowledge my presence, still annoyed at me for calling her Dick Wad a fuckwit. She kept walking, into the scene of the crime. I completed the pincer move. Our arrival stopped the singing and the talking. The uniform accompanying us said something in Turkish and I picked out the word ‘Amerikali’ a couple of times. The cleaners gawked at us like we were from another world, which, I guess, we were.

The cleaning detail was a three-man team, two of whom were women. They all stood and continued staring at us. Both women were middle-aged and about as shapely as a couple of concrete mixers. Both wore black headscarves. The guy was older and bigger, with a broad face and a thick salt-and-pepper moustache twirled at either end like an old-fashioned villain’s. We needed an ice-breaker. I went up to one of the women and presented her with the ketchup stain on my T-shirt. I gave her a shrug that said, ‘What do I do here?’

‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, and said something that made everyone laugh.

The uniform surprised me by speaking English. ‘Ha, ha… she says Istanbul has already left its mark on you. She doesn’t want to take it off.’

Nevertheless, the woman walked to a bucket, took out a bottle and squirted a clear liquid over the stain, which made it instantly disappear.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ I said.

She smiled — they all smiled — and went back to what they were doing, including the singing. I should join the UN.

I took a circuit around the room. It was a mess. I recalled to mind Captain Cain’s happy snaps. The chair the Attaché had been sitting in just prior to his murder had been removed. The square of pale green carpet over the floor safe was also gone and its door open. I squatted beside the safe for a closer look. The door, lock mechanism and internal walls were still covered in fingerprint dust and prints were clearly visible. The safe was empty.

The rest of the carpet had been ripped up in one corner and rolled back almost to the centre of the room, where the safe was set into the floor, revealing the old floorboards beneath. I could see that attempts had been made to get the Attaché’s blood out of the carpet pile, but these had obviously failed and there were several large black stains spread into wide circles by the cleaners’ labours — which, I assumed, marked out the area where the victim had been dismembered. There was the smell of decay in the air, as if an animal had recently died within a nearby wall cavity. The women were scrubbing at blood spatter on the upper walls with bristle brushes on the ends of poles. Their efforts were simply moving it around, like on the carpet. The guy with the mo was mixing paint in a two-and-a-half-gallon drum. The stains they couldn’t remove were going to be painted over.

‘The wall safe is this way.’ Masters nodded back behind her, the way she’d come in, and moved off, leading the way to an adjoining room. It was some kind of sitting room with more old paintings of people long dead and gone — longer gone than the Attaché perhaps, but by no means more dead.

Crime-scene tape stretched across the painting of an elephant being attacked by a party wielding spears. The beast was on its knees, a bloody rent in its gut. Something that looked like a large sausage hung from the gash. Guys wearing turbans appeared to be cheering from atop another elephant nearby. The uniform cop interrupted my viewing pleasure, peeling the tape away from the painting.

‘Behind here,’ he said. He pulled one side of the painting away from the wall and it swung open, revealing a small safe recessed into the masonry. The door, which was steel an inch-and-a-half thick, hung from a single hinge and curled back on itself like a potato crisp. Some seriously powerful explosive had done that. The door was powdered in the fine, light grey fingerprint dust, as were the safe’s inside walls, ceiling and floor. No prints had been revealed.

‘Whatever did that to the wall safe was probably military,’ I observed.

Masters nodded.

‘C’mon, let’s go play in the sewer.’ I wanted the snooping around over and done with before Istanbul’s Starsky and Hutch turned up at the agreed time.

According to the briefing notes supplied to us back in DC, local crime-scene investigators believed that activity by the killer had been limited to just these two rooms on the second floor. Nevertheless, all the doors and doorframes throughout the place had been dusted for prints. Good and thorough.

We made our way down the stairs to the ground floor and the door to the courtyard. I unlocked it, opened it wide and examined the frame — no jimmy marks in the woodwork, though a pane of glass had been punched out of a window beside the door. The killer must have found the door locked. Smashing the pane, reaching in and unlocking it was a simple matter. Forensics had gone crazy in the general area around the broken window, and the framework was wearing more powder than a Colombian drug lord’s nostrils.

Outside, winter sunshine washed over half the courtyard while the other half remained in shadow. Ancient tiles paved the ground and lime-green moss filled the spaces between most of them. There was sea-salt and mildew and cat’s urine in the air. A birdbath sat in one sunny corner, a couple of pigeons copulating in it. Our arrival startled them and they flew off. I felt momentarily guilty, but then I thought, what the hell… I wasn’t getting any so why should they?

The manhole cover mentioned in the case notes was easy to find, on account of the fact that a couple of pieces of outdoor furniture had been dragged over it and lassoed together with yellow crime-scene tape. I shifted one of the chairs to get at the cover.

‘How’re we going to get that opened?’ Masters asked.

‘Room service,’ I suggested.

‘What?’

Just as I said this — and as I expected — the uniform accompanying us stepped up with the appropriate tool and began putting it to use.

‘See?’ I said.

I wasn’t sure whether to thank the guy or give him a tip. I also wondered whether being so helpful to us wouldn’t get him into trouble with Karli and Iyaz. I was more familiar with police cooperation delivered with a snarl than a smile, but I wasn’t complaining. Maybe the watchword on this case really was ‘co-operation’. Or maybe these uniform guys just hadn’t yet learned to be assholes. Whatever the reason, our number-one helper spat on his hands, rubbed them together and then, with a grunt, hoisted the metal plate out of its seat.

Masters and I peered down into the hole, getting the angle of the sun just right so that we could see the bottom. There was a vertical shaft of maybe a couple of feet opening out into a pipe that was around a yard and a half in diameter — wide enough to crawl through at a crouch. I could see some sort of trickling fluid. I doubted it was Perrier.

‘Well,’ I said to Masters, indicating the way down with a gentlemanly sweep of my hand, ‘zeal before flair.’

‘Thanks, Cooper. I didn’t expect you to throw your coat on the ground, but I thought as the senior investigator you’d —’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Let my subordinates prove themselves? Thrust them forward into the light? Revel as they snatch the initiative?’

‘I was going to say, “lead by example”.’ Masters stood to one side to give me room.

This was one I wasn’t going to win. With a hand on either side of the hole, I lowered my body down into the drain and dropped the last couple of feet. I spread my feet so as not to land in whatever was making its way to the sea, but my boots slipped against the walls, and I went down on both my good hand and the fibreglass cast, my face inches from the stinking, running flow. ‘Shit,’ I said, pushing myself up and getting back on my feet, my right hand and the cast greasy with pipe slime. I crouched and backed away from the overhead hole to give Masters room. A ladder came down the shaft, followed by Masters’ Nikes.

‘Where did that come from?’ I asked up, annoyed.

‘The ladder? Found it propped against a wall. I figured people had been going in and out of this pipe for days.’

Grinding my teeth, I turned around carefully and followed the pipe, using a small LED on my key ring to light the way. The air in the pipe smelt like you’d expect the breath of a 2000-year-old city to smell, and one that wasn’t in the habit of cleaning its teeth.

Wide cracks fractured the pipe in numerous places as we worked our way along, and the occasional tree root hung down into the cold, moist air. There were other manhole covers overhead indicated by keyholes of white light — openings to more courtyards and gardens.

Soon enough, the downward angle of the pipe increased and came to a junction with a bunch of other pipes. We climbed down into it and found a tangle of crime-scene tape marking the spot where forensics had made their discovery of the murder weapons. I decided I’d be surprised if tests on the recovered articles revealed anything of interest about the person who’d left them behind. The murder seemed to have been too cold-blooded, and too meticulously planned and executed for anyone to have made any obviously dumb mistakes. So why leave anything behind at all, I wondered — especially the murder weapons — when it would have been just as simple to disappear without a trace?

Other than the tape, there was nothing to see in the junction box. We continued for another thirty feet or so, working our way towards the light at the end of the tunnel. As we came around a kink, we surprised half-a-dozen black rats having a meeting. One of them (maybe it was the union boss) was the size of a rabbit. It shrieked aggressively and sat up on its hind legs and sniffed the air, its grimy pink snout twitching and quivering at us, brown teeth gnawing at our scent. The other rats took its lead and joined in. I heard Masters gasp. She went to grab my arm and slipped. If we’d had a kitchen chair handy, she’d have jumped up on it.

‘Christ!’ she said as she slipped, stepping into the rivulet of effluent. Her turn to go for a paddle.

The rats stood their ground.

‘I hate those fucking things,’ Masters whispered hoarsely, steadying herself.

A couple of the animals scampered forward a few feet towards us and squeaked. Masters flinched. ‘You just hurt their feelings,’ I told her.

With a final chorus of rat noises, the rodents retreated, disappearing into a crack.

‘Ugh… disgusting,’ said Masters with loathing.

‘I thought they were kinda cute.’

She shivered. ‘Can we get out of here?’

So Masters didn’t like rats. I was learning so much about her on this case. ‘In a minute.’

‘You doing this to be a jerk?’ she asked, exasperated.

‘Moi? Actually, I want to see where this comes out — see where the killers came in.’

Another thirty feet of bouncing along on our haunches brought us out into the cool bright sun and a vast expanse of water: the Bosphorus. The far shore was momentarily obscured by an orange-painted container ship sliding past, the low throb of its huge engines pulsing up through the pipe and into the soles of my feet. A small, rusty oiler chugged in the opposite direction, heading north. The pipe exited a yard or so above the waters of the Bosphorus slapping at the concrete wall. I grabbed hold of one of the remaining corroded iron rods that had once secured the end of the pipe. The concrete holding it in had been freshly broken. The rod came away from the crumbling masonry, slipped from my grasp and fell into the water with a low splash.

By the time we made it back to the ladder, my quads were burning from crawling along inside the pipe. Masters went up first, not happy to be left down here alone with King Rat and his subjects a moment longer than necessary.

Shadows had claimed more of the courtyard. The uniform was standing in the remaining island of sunshine, smoking, enjoying a three-way discussion with Detective Sergeants Karli and Iyaz — if being chewed out was his idea of enjoyment. From the hangdog body language, I didn’t think it was. He threw his cigarette on the ground.

Iyaz saw us. He nudged Karli. They left the uniform mid-sentence and walked over to us. Karli hitched up his pants higher than usual as he led the pair towards the manhole. Maybe he was worried that Iyaz was going to pull them down.

‘Hey, guys, great to see you,’ I said. ‘What’s been happening?’

‘We said we would meet at 11:30,’ Karli replied.

It was just after midday. I shrugged. ‘Then you’re late.’

‘We wait out the front for you,’ said Iyaz.

‘If you’d asked your people at the door, they’d have told you we’d come inside,’ Masters said.

Karli and Iyaz glanced at each other and frowned harder.

‘Okay, so we’ve had a look around. We agree the killers came and went through the pipe. That means most likely there’d have been a boat somewhere out in that strait. It would have been three or four hundred yards out beyond the wall. Far enough away so as not to attract attention, but not far enough out to get mowed down by a supertanker.

‘That’s too far to swim with the gear they were carrying. Scuba gear would have been used. The water’s close to freezing, which means they’d have used full drysuits. Along with keeping them warm on the swim, the suits would also have guaranteed the killers left nothing — not even hairs — at the crime scene for forensics to find. So, it might be an idea to get some divers out in the channel there to see if you can’t find anything useful they might have left behind.’

‘Drysuits, swimmers, killers… they?’ Masters asked. ‘Plural?’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the other point I was going to make. We’re looking for two killers. Whoever did it couldn’t have been working alone.’