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.

It was almost dark by the time I reached it. The large wrought-iron gates blocking the road, backed by black canvas for privacy, were closed, and the lanterns on top of the stone pillars remained unlit. A police car stood almost unseen in a small grove of trees and, when I drew to a stop, an overweight cop leaned out of the window and started yelling in Turkish and waving me away.

I turned off the engine and got out of the car. He threw his door open, snarling, and I saw his hand reach for his billy club. I’m sorry to report that Turkish cops don’t have a reputation for asking twice but, fortunately, I beat him to the draw. I had my gold shield out and pointed at his face before he got within range.

He stared at it for a second, pissed off, then returned to his squad car. I heard him arguing on his radio and, when he was finally told what to do, he hoisted up his pants and took his sweet time approaching a small pedestrian gate opened by an electronic keypad. The device was set into concrete, a twelve-digit version, custom-made and impenetrable: nobody would be removing its face plate and trying to manipulate the circuitry any time soon. Two cameras mounted on the high wall – one fixed, one sweeping and motion-activated – held us in their glass eye. On the second try, the cop, consulting a scrap of paper, got the code right, the gate swung open and he stepped back. As I passed, I could smell the booze on his breath.

The gate clicked shut behind me and, alone in the gloom, I saw that an expanse of grass a hundred feet wide circled the grounds inside the wall. I guessed it was an electronic moat, monitored by cameras and probably loaded with motion detectors. No interloper, even assuming they could have scaled the wall, would have had a chance of crossing it undetected and reaching the treeline on the far side. The house had been built decades ago, back when Bodrum would have been an unknown fishing village, but even then somebody had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure their security, and I wondered why.

I followed the tree-lined drive, my shoes crunching on the gravel, heading down a tunnel of overarching boughs. It grew steadily darker and quieter and, though I couldn’t explain why, I undid my jacket and made sure I could reach the Beretta tucked into my belt at the back. It was that sort of place, that sort of night.

The drive dog-legged round a silent fountain and revealed the house. The sight did nothing to comfort me: it was huge and dark and what had seemed sinister through a telescope from far away looked in close-up as if it wanted to overpower you. Most houses built in spectacular locations, even old houses, are designed for the view, with wide windows and long runs of glass. The French House had broad eaves, an oak front door and windows recessed deep into the cut-limestone facade. It felt like it had been built for privacy – an impression given even more emphasis because all the shutters at the front were closed.

I skirted round the side of the building, avoiding the pools of dark shadow closest to the wall, and passed a helicopter landing pad and a stone-built security centre near the garages. It was empty. Leading away from it was a path, and I followed it through a high hedge and on to a terraced lawn. The view was amazing – a necklace of distant islands, the floodlit Crusader castle, the lights of Bodrum hugging the bays – but I didn’t like it. Not at all. Call me paranoid, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was somebody in the house watching me.

I turned and looked back. It was in darkness, so quiet a coma seemed to have settled over it. The shutters on the ground floor were open here, but all the rest were shut. I took my jacket off, laid it on a teak bench and walked down the sweeping lawn towards the wrought-iron gazebo. Halfway down, I heard something in the acres of silence and swung round fast to look at the house – on a third-floor terrace a shutter was swinging on its hinges. It could have been the wind, and I had no way of knowing if it had been fastened when I first looked at the house.

I reached the gazebo, took four paces to the north and climbed over the railing. This was where Dodge had been standing when he tumbled down, and I suddenly felt nauseous: the drop was so precipitous and the surging water, far below, so disorienting that I felt as if I were being pulled towards it. The ground beneath my feet was crumbling and I knew the railing behind was too far to reach. I thought I felt, or heard, something close behind me – I wasn’t sure – but there was no time to yell. I wheeled hard, launched myself at the railing and grabbed it. There was nobody there.

I caught my breath and climbed back on to solid ground. I was stone-cold sober and yet, once I was on the wrong side of the fence, I could have easily fallen. What the hell had Dodge been doing down there?

From the safety of the barrier fence, I looked at the view again. I tried to imagine what it must have been like: the air full of explosions and multicoloured rockets, the sound of music drifting across the water from party boats and dance clubs, the silver moon running ladders of light halfway to Greece. Underneath it, stumbling a little down the lawn, came a man on a four-day drug binge, maybe trying to wrench himself back to sobriety and calm the raging testosterone and whirling paranoia. But why, I asked myself again, why head for the gazebo?

My guess was that he had been looking for something, probably in the water out in the bay. The closer he got to it, the better the chance he had of seeing it. That’s why he had brought the binoculars and had either stood up on the railing or stepped over it. But what had he been looking for?

The records of his cellphone, included in the documents Detective Cumali had given to me, showed that he hadn’t received any calls for at least an hour either side of his death. The surveillance cameras also showed that, during that same period, nobody had left the guardhouse to speak to him.

Yet something or somebody had induced him to grab a pair of binoculars, leave his lovely friend tina, step out of the library, cross the formal terrace and head down the lawn to try to see something in the dark waters of the bay.

Say it was a person who – literally – had led him down the garden path to the gazebo. The most logical explanation was that they knew either how to beat the surveillance system or how to enter the estate inside the electronic moat. It had to be somebody Dodge knew or trusted, otherwise he would have raised the alarm. They could have then pushed him over the edge and left by the same route they had entered.

Almost immediately another thought followed: if it was murder, I had only seen one in recent memory anywhere near as good. That was half a world away, at the Eastside Inn. Any doubts I had about a connection between the two deaths were vanishing fast.

I turned, walked up the lawn, picked up my jacket and climbed the steps to the formal terrace. It was time to enter the dark and brooding house.