Time to Die

7

Detective Sergeant Enver Demirel was not a happy man. If he had read his horoscope in the newspaper he’d found on his desk, it would have promised him a challenging twelve hours ahead and that was certainly the kind of day he was having. Challenging. Today’s challenge was not to feel too despondent. When police work went well, Enver thoroughly enjoyed his job. When he had days like today, it felt like trying to empty the sea with a bucket: utterly futile. A five-week, painstaking investigation into a prolific local burglar was now, to all intents and purposes, dead in the water. All that time, all the hopes they had raised of burglary victims who felt that for once the police were doing something more constructive than issuing them with a case number to facilitate insurance claims, wasted.

It had really irritated him because it was the kind of policing he felt they should be doing. Proper policing, not faffing around with celebrities or distractions like bloody Plebgate. Haringey, the London borough that his patch Wood Green lay in, had about a quarter of a million people living in it. It was probably the population of Iceland, thought Enver. It was certainly big enough. Last year there had been about three thousand reported burglaries. Percentage-wise it was over double the national average. The burglar they’d been after had caused misery throughout Wood Green. Many of these people would have been uninsured. There were big pockets of poverty in the borough and premiums were high. It was the kind of crime that most people worried about, that and being mugged or attacked. The kind of crime that directly affected them. It wasn’t just the nicked electrical goods or jewellery. It was the door kicked in, the smashed window, the ransacked flat, the feeling of invasion.

Phil Johnson, their target, was a prolific criminal and his arrest would have shown the local community that the police were working for them, not against them. It would have won hearts and minds. It would have been a high-profile statement that the police were doing something useful, catching criminals, not just issuing crime case numbers for insurance claim purposes. Yesterday the case against him was rock solid. But now, all this had changed. As of this morning, he had a key eyewitness who was refusing to cooperate and a suspect who’d left the country for the Caribbean, indefinitely. Despite the other evidence they still had on him, Enver knew that once the momentum was lost Johnson would slip down to a fairly low position on the ‘to do’ list when he returned. And now, courtesy of his own extended relatives, he had this new problem to deal with.

Today, in his lunch hour, he was in the back room of a mosque in Wood Green while family pressure was gently but ruthlessly applied by the imam of the mosque, his Uncle Osman. The small room with its wooden floor smelt of furniture polish overlaid with acrimony.

The conversation was taking place in heavily accented Turkish, which Enver, who was born in London, didn’t really speak too well, and English. He had to keep interrupting, to ask for clarification.

‘So, let me get this straight. He,’ Enver pointed an accusing finger at Mehmet who sat unhappily and powerlessly in his chair while these two men, the policeman and the imam, decided his future, ‘didn’t come forward on Thursday to report his child missing because he’s here, in the UK, illegally and didn’t know what to do?’ Enver’s tone of voice was incredulous. ‘It’s a missing child investigation, not visa fraud! What was he thinking?’

Osman nodded wearily. He looked hard at his nephew, Enver Demirel. He knew he was emotionally blackmailing him, but it was in a good cause. Mehmet Yilmaz was in the most terrible trouble a parent could be in and it was their duty to help. Whether or not mistakes had been made was neither here nor there. What’s done was done. He could appreciate Enver’s rage. But that would pass. Enver was a good person and Osman was sure he’d deliver. It was just that Enver was judging Mehmet using British frames of reference. If you were in trouble in Turkey, the police were not automatically your first choice for help. Family and community were. Turkey, as Turkey, had only really been around for a century or so. It was a strange mix of the new and the old. Corruption ran deep at most official levels and the police were no exception. He looked into Enver’s angry brown eyes.

It was a while since he’d seen his nephew and he was surprised and a little concerned by the weight that Enver had put on. His nephew seemed to have morphed from whippet thin to gently fat in the blink of an eye. Majid, his brother, Enver’s father, had died of a massive heart attack in his fifties and looking at the suddenly corpulent son, who had also grown a thick, drooping moustache since he’d seen him last, Osman realized he looked uncannily like Majid. He looked so like him it was disturbing. Osman was worried history would repeat itself.

The old imam spoke. ‘He was frightened and confused. He doesn’t speak much English. Hardly any in fact. He got friends in the community to speak to the supermarket management. They knew nothing. They don’t employ anyone who has the name Ayse or who matches her description. We told people in the local Turkish mosques at Friday prayers. That’s probably a good two thousand people. Would the police have that kind of coverage? Would they treat a missing illegal immigrant seriously?’ He looked gently at Enver. They both knew the answer. ‘Now we’re coming to you for help and advice. That’s all.’

Osman had also approached the local Turkish London radio station and newspapers. They had all said they’d be delighted to do everything they could to help, but the police would have to be informed. Mehmet had been adamant. No police. Approaching Enver had been Osman’s idea of a compromise.

The old imam, immaculate in an antique three-piece suit, winced gently from the pain of the arthritis in his left hand and then smiled at himself. ‘Why me?’ he had been on the point of thinking. Why did God see fit to inflict arthritis on me. Then he thought, Majid got the heart, I got arthritis. I shouldn’t complain. I mustn’t be impatient. It is not my will, Osman thought, that is important. What I will does not matter.

Enver sipped his Fanta and glared at the hunched, bearded figure of Mehmet. The Sergeant was normally a very patient man but Mehmet’s slowness in coming forward had made any investigation hugely difficult. Mehmet sat on his chair, shoulders rounded, twisting his fingers uncomfortably. He was hollow-faced, dark rings around his eyes. He hadn’t slept properly since Thursday. Life, for Mehmet, had taken on an unreal, nightmarish quality, as if he was living in some kind of cave and events were flickering away on the wall, like a terrible hallucination. It’s Monday today, Enver was thinking, and this abduction had happened on Thursday. Four days, gone. His frustration at this time lag was clearly visible on his face. Osman gently recapitulated for Enver’s benefit the problems that Mehmet faced and why he had done, or more to the point, hadn’t done, what he did.

The biggest problem was of course that he was here illegally and there was currently a crackdown on Turkish illegal workers. If Mehmet had been Kurdish, he could maybe have claimed some form of asylum, citing Turkish persecution, but coming from a country that had wanted to join the EU, and indeed had been backed in that by the British government, it was hard to see an asylum request being granted.

The next problem was one of debt. Mehmet owed a great deal of money to his family in Turkey for getting him over here. It was money that had to be repaid. It was a debt of honour as well as of hard cash. Currently half of everything he earned went straight back to Cappadocia, remitted to pay back what he owed. Mehmet paid no tax or National Insurance and both he and Mehmet’s employers were keen to keep it that way. They did not want the local Inland Revenue on their backs. Tax avoidance and the employment of illegal immigrants were very hot topics at the moment; trouble was to be avoided at all costs. Osman explained to Enver that Mehmet was working off a debt of about twenty thousand pounds for the fraudulent paperwork and the various bribes that had got him and Nur, his wife, over here. If he were deported, he could never pay it back.

And now Reyhan, his daughter, was at school and Nur pregnant again. Mehmet had been hoping — though maybe hope was the wrong word — that Ali had been kidnapped for money. In Cappadocia such things were not too unusual. If that had been the case, somehow he’d have found the cash. But as the days had gone past and no demands had come, it had become obvious to him this wasn’t so.

Enver looked again at Mehmet, at the short, stocky muscular peasant who in turn looked at the police sergeant with anguish, as if it lay within Enver’s grasp to somehow make everything OK again. It was infuriating to be made the repository of such blind, unrealistic hopes. They wanted him to launch an unofficial investigation into a child’s disappearance, somehow using as much of the Metropolitan Police’s official time and resources as possible. He made up his mind to say ‘no’. If we do this at all, he thought to himself, you can go through official channels. I’m not an unofficial cheerleader for London’s Turkish community.

If he said yes, he suspected — no, he knew, he didn’t suspect — it would be the thin end of the wedge. He could easily visualize endless petitions from London Turks. ‘Go to Enver, he’ll sort you out. He did it for Mehmet Yilmaz, he can’t refuse you.’

He cleared his throat to say, I can’t help you. It was an official-sounding noise, the prelude to a statement. He put his official face on, straightening his posture to add authority. As he did so, Mehmet produced a small, grey, woollen rabbit from his jacket pocket. Mehmet cradled it gently in his hands. He looked at it and Enver heard his breathing change to a deep, agonized rasp, as if putting as much air as possible inside his lungs would somehow compensate for the pain.

The stitching along the knitted toy’s spine had long ago come adrift and the toy rabbit had been neatly, lovingly, sewn back together with black thread. Enver could guess what it was and who it had belonged to.

‘Please,’ said Mehmet, holding out Ali’s toy rabbit like a talisman to Enver. His eyes filled with tears. It was the only English word he’d spoken so far. Maybe the only one he knew. It was enough. Enver knew then he was going to help.

Enver cursed himself mentally for a fool and took his notebook out. He knew too he was going to regret this. Well, he could always put in for a transfer to Norfolk. He’d heard it had the lowest number of immigrants in the UK. King’s Lynn, he guessed, would be Turkish free. He would be safe from his family out there. He turned to his uncle. ‘Tell him to go through the events of last Thursday.’ Mehmet started speaking; Enver started writing.