Chapter Fifty-eight

HE WAS NEITHER, although by the sound of his cough and the lighter firing up a constant stream of cigarettes, the dead part might have been closer than he wished.

I had woken before dawn, dragged my injured leg to the laptop, put the USB travel drive into a slot and started to work through Cumali’s files. It would have been slow and grinding work, except that most of it was in Turkish and I had no choice but to discount the vast majority of them. Even so, you get a sense of things, and I couldn’t claim that among the letters and work files I found anything that raised my suspicions: the mistake that most people make when they want to stop someone from seeing material is to encrypt it, which means that a person like me knows exactly where to look.

As I had suspected when I was in her living room, nothing was coded and, if she had been smart enough to hide any incriminating files in plain sight, I was damned if I could identify them. Nor was there anything in Arabic, even though we had good reason to suspect she knew the language.

Having drawn a blank with the files, I turned to her emails. Thankfully, many of them were in English, and I saw that she had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, many of them other mothers with Down’s syndrome children. Among the hundreds of messages I found only two that made me stop – they were both from a Palestinian charity associated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a group that frequently organized suicide bombings against Israelis. The emails acknowledged donations to an orphanage in the Gaza Strip, and my first reaction was to ask why – if Cumali really wanted to help kids – she didn’t give to Unicef. On the other hand, charity was one of the Five Pillars of Islam and, if it was a crime to donate money to organizations associated with radical groups, we would end up indicting half the Muslim world. More, probably.

I marked the two emails with a red flag then put the USB drive into an envelope and addressed it to Bradley in New York. As soon as FedEx opened I would courier it to him to be on-passed to Whisperer for further analysis. I looked at the clock – it was 7 a. m. and, though it was early, I wanted to find out whether the photographer was dead or alive.

I called the number, waited for what seemed minutes, and was about to give up and try later when I heard an irritable voice give a greeting in Turkish. I apologized for speaking English, talking slowly in the hope that he could follow me.

‘Can you speak a bit faster? I’m falling back asleep here, ’ he said, in an accent that indicated he had watched a few too many Westerns.

Pleased that we could at least communicate, I asked him if he was a photographer and when he confirmed it I said that I was planning a special gift for the wedding anniversary of two friends. I wanted to put together a photo collage of their big day and needed to buy a number of reprints.

‘Have you got the code number? ’ he asked, more polite now that there was money to be made.

‘Sure, ’ I replied, and read off the number on the back of the stolen glossy.

He asked me to wait while he checked his files and, a minute or two later, he returned and told me there was no difficulty, he had the file in front of him.

‘Just to make sure there’s no confusion, ’ I said, ‘can you confirm the names of the bride and groom? ’

‘No problemo, pardner. The groom is Ali-Reza Cumali—’ He went on to give an address, but I wasn’t interested: the moment I heard it I knew for sure that the cop hadn’t reverted to her previous surname.

‘And the bride? ’ I asked, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. ‘Have you got a name for her? ’

‘Sure, ’ he replied. ‘Leyla al-Nassouri. Is that the couple? ’

‘Yeah, that’s them, Sheriff. ’ He laughed.

‘I’ve never been quite sure how to spell her unmarried name, ’ I continued. ‘Can you give it to me? ’

He did, I thanked him for his help, told him that I would be in touch as soon as I had a full list of the photos I needed and hung up. The name al-Nassouri wasn’t Turkish – it was straight out of Yemen or Saudi or the Gulf States. Wherever it was, it was Arabic. And so was the man in the Hindu Kush.

I grabbed my passport, headed out the door and almost ran to the elevator.