Chapter Forty-three

I RETURNED TO my deckchair, put my shoes on and walked fast back into town. Using the map in my head, I made my way down half a dozen narrow streets, skirted the side of a plaza and, up ahead, saw heavy traffic passing down the road I was looking for.

I reached the intersection, looked in both directions to locate number 176 and realized I had been there before.

Suddenly, the world shifted on its axis.

In that one moment – that one crystalline dot of time – the balance of the hopeless investigation swung in my favour and I knew I had found the phone box I was looking for.

It was standing on the opposite side of the thoroughfare, ten yards from a BP gas station. I recognized it because it was one of the boxes which I had photographed on my first day. All around me was the sound of the traffic we had heard in the background of the Echelon recording. Number 176 was the gas station and – unlike the first time I had seen it – a man was sitting in a chair outside, ready to pump gas. It was Ahmut Pamuk and on a table in front of him were a clutch of leather- and woodworking tools he was using to repair a traditional Turkish string instrument.

Repairing an instrument today, I thought, playing one on a different occasion. A ç igirtma, for instance.

I didn’t move and, as I had done so many times before in my professional life, I excluded the confusion of the world and turned my mind inwards. I saw a woman approach: she either came on foot and walked close to the fuel pumps or arrived by car and left it on one side of the gas station – it was the only place to park in the vicinity.

She stepped up to the phone box, waited for the phone to ring and then held up her cellphone with its recorded message. There were no shops or houses nearby where somebody could have observed her – probably the reason it had been chosen – but her cellphone had been just far enough from the mouthpiece of the phone for Echelon to pick up the noise of the traffic and the faint sound of Ahmut Pamuk.

The musician would have been at his table, playing the strange wind instrument, probably writing down the notes of the folk song and preparing to send it to the archives.

I said nothing, did nothing, felt nothing. I ran it through my mind once more to ensure that my longing for information hadn’t coloured my logic. Satisfied at last, determined not to surrender to any emotion, I turned and looked at every square inch of the gas station’s office and roof. I was searching for pointers and only when I found them did I unchain my feelings and let my heart soar.

Against all the odds, working with nothing more than a couple of sounds captured by accident, I had found the phone box and – thanks to what I had just seen – I knew I had a chance of identifying the woman.