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.

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.