Chapter Fifty-three

FORCED TO RELY on my flashlight, I returned to the desktop, finished with it and started on the drawers. They were even more barren.

On a scrap of paper – a half-completed crossword torn from a London newspaper – I found that someone had written the word ‘clownfish’ in the margin. Maybe they had been trying to work out a clue. Maybe not. It was scrawled, written quickly, and I couldn’t tell if it was Cumali’s handwriting or not, so I photographed it too.

A few minutes later, leafing through the pages of an old day-runner diary, I found a handwritten list of sea-life – all in English – which featured the same word. Again, it meant nothing to me – perhaps she had been trying to teach her son something – and I moved on.

Thanks to the power failure, I had far less hesitation in using the flashlight – everybody in Bodrum would be doing it – and I swept the room, searching the limestone walls and uneven floorboards, looking for a hidden safe. There was nothing, so I took the USB drive out of the computer – thankfully, it had finished copying the files before the power failed – went back up the stairs and made my way to the next most likely place to yield results: Cumali’s bedroom.

I was about to start on the cop’s bureau when the beam from the flashlight gave me a glimpse of a tall filing cabinet in her walk-in closet. I tried one of the drawers and – strange, I thought – found that the cabinet was locked.

I opened my wallet and took out a small set of picks and, though it had been years since I had learned the technique, the lock was so simple it took me less than a minute to throw the bolt. The first drawer was full of police case files – including several dealing with the death of Dodge – but behind them, in a gap at the back, I discovered the reason why Cumali kept it locked. She didn’t want her son getting hold of the Walther P99 pistol I found there.

There was nothing remarkable about its presence – a lot of cops kept a stand-by side arm at home – but I located the serial number etched into its barrel and entered it into my cellphone for later checking. Who could tell? Sometime, somewhere, it might have been used or registered to somebody, and that could give me a vital clue.

The next drawer was almost empty – just bills that were stamped ‘paid’ and a file containing an itemized account from the regional hospital. Although most of it was in Turkish, the names of the drugs that had been ordered were in English, and I knew from my medical training what they were used for. I looked at the first page of the file, saw the name of the patient and the date and realized that, several weeks earlier, Cumali’s son had been admitted with meningococcal meningitis.

It was an extremely dangerous infection – especially for kids – and notoriously difficult to diagnose fast enough. A lot of doctors, even those in emergency rooms, often misread it as the flu and, by the time the mistake was discovered, it was often too late. Cumali must have been fortunate enough to encounter an ER doctor who was sufficiently knowledgeable – and strong-minded enough – not to wait for the results of the pathology tests but had immediately put the boy on the massive doses of intravenous antibiotics, which had undoubtedly saved his life.

I kept going through the file, feeling good about what had happened – at last the little guy had caught a break. I got to the final page and glanced at Leyla Cumali’s signature on the bill. I was about to put the file back when I paused. Perhaps it was because I had never really looked at her name written down before, but I realized something: I didn’t know her surname at all. Not for certain.

The strict practice in Turkey was for a divorced woman to return to her pre-marriage name, but I remembered reading once that a court could grant dispensations. Say, against the odds, Cumali was her married name – it meant that there might be a clue in an earlier life, in a previous surname.

In everything I had searched I hadn’t found a birth certificate, marriage licence, passport – anything at all – to show what name she had been born with. It was possible that the documents were kept in a secure location – a safe in her office at the station house, for example – but I couldn’t be sure and worked faster, going through every drawer of the filing cabinet to see if I could find them.

The curtains behind me were closed tight and the wind was drowning out every other sound, so I had no idea that a car had come down the street and pulled into Cumali’s driveway.