Chapter Sixty-five

I CAUGHT MY first glimpse of her after forty minutes. It was just a few words in a record of an interview, but it was enough.

Cumali and her team had asked Dodge and Cameron’s friends to recount how they knew the wealthy couple and to list the times they had spent together in Bodrum. It was standard stuff, the cops trying to build a picture of their lives, and, thankfully, most of the transcripts were in English.

Among them was one with a young guy called Nathanial Clunies-Ross, the scion of a hugely wealthy British banking dynasty who had known Dodge for years.

He and his girlfriend had come down from St Tropez to spend a week with Dodge and his new wife. There was nothing remarkable in that – apart from him being twenty-six and having a hundred-million-dollar boat to cruise around on – and I ploughed through half a dozen pages as he catalogued the bankrupt lives of some seriously wealthy people.

On the last page he gave a brief account of a vodka-fuelled night at a popular dance club called Club Zulu just along the coast. He said that six of them had flown in by chopper and, near the end of the evening, Cameron had run into a young woman called Ingrid – part of a larger party – who was a casual acquaintance.

The two groups had ended up sitting together, and the most interesting thing, according to Clunies-Ross, was that one of the guys in Ingrid’s party – he couldn’t recall his name, but he was pretty sure he was Italian and probably her boyfriend – had described his adventures with middle-aged vacationers. ‘He ran a massage service on the beach, ’ Clunies-Ross had explained.

I started reading fast, the fatigue vanishing and my concentration roaring back. I sped through the rest of his interview but could find no further mention of Gianfranco or, more importantly, of the woman called Ingrid.

I turned to the back of the file and found the documents supporting the interview, including screen-grabs from CCTV cameras at Club Zulu – grainy and distorted. The last of them showed a group of people, obviously pretty loaded, leaving the club. I saw Cameron and Dodge, a guy I figured was Clunies-Ross with his girlfriend – all cleavage and legs – and right at the back, almost obscured, Gianfranco.

He had his arm around an arresting woman – short-cropped hair, an even shorter skirt, tanned and lithe, one of those young women who seem totally at ease in their own skin. By a quirk of circumstance, she was staring at the camera – she had large eyes, set a little deeper than you might have expected, and it gave the impression that she was looking straight through you. All my intuition, distilled and sharpened through countless hard missions and a thousand sleepless nights, told me it was Ingrid.

I turned and rummaged through the other files: somewhere, there was a master list, an index of all the names that had arisen during the investigation. There were scores of them, but there was only one Ingrid.

Ingrid Kohl.

The index linked to the information the cops had assembled about her. I turned to Volume B, page 46, and saw that it was almost non-existent – she was such a no-account acquaintance, her interaction with Cameron and Dodge so minor, that the cops hadn’t even bothered talking to her. They did, however, take a copy of her passport.

I looked at the photo in the book. It was the woman with the short-cropped hair at Club Zulu – Ingrid Kohl.

There was no interview, but some things were certain: she knew Cameron, she was a friend or something more intimate of Gianfranco’s and she was American. The passport said she came from Chicago, the heart of the Midwest.