Chapter Thirty-three

BRADLEY WAS TIMING it too, but he was using a watch so his count was different – and more accurate than mine. He figured forty-six seconds.

The obese nanny was drenched in sweat and her legs looked as if they were going to buckle at any moment. Worse still, she was standing in a pool of urine – she had peed herself the moment she realized what Bradley had in mind. At gunpoint, working to my instructions, he had ordered her and the little guy into the centre of the room, directly under the sturdy roof beam. Now, seven minutes later, the woman continued to whimper and beg for help in Turkish and, though the boy had overcome his first fit of fear and yelling, he was still crying and asking for his mother.

The whole event was tearing Bradley’s nerves to shreds and, when he wasn’t checking his watch, he stared at the floor looking as if he was going to vomit. Despite her distress, the nanny noticed it and couldn’t work it out: maybe he wasn’t such a bad man after all. It encouraged her again to muster her limited English and implore him to release them.

‘Quiet! ’ Bradley yelled, repeating it even louder and raising the gun at her when she still wouldn’t stop.

She shook again with tears, the little guy’s sobs grew more pitiful, and all Bradley wanted to do was to get it over with. It was ahead of time, but he took the nanny’s phone off the charger and – despite my insistence that he had to stick absolutely to the schedule – he rationalized it by telling himself it would take time to dial Cumali’s cellphone and there would be a delay while she answered.

It rang four times – come on, come on!

It answered – thank God, he thought – and he heard a woman’s voice speaking in Turkish. He only caught a few words before he talked loudly over her, asking if it was Leyla Cumali and telling her to listen carefully …

The woman kept speaking, her tone unaffected. It was if she was a … Bradley realized – it was an automated voice.

The nanny – tottering on her feet, all three hundred pounds of her bearing down on her weak knees, saw through her tears that something was badly wrong: Bradley was close to panic. He was breathing hard, not saying a word – the voice was speaking in a language he didn’t understand, he had no way of deciphering it and he didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t in the manual – where the hell was the Turkish cop?!

He looked at his watch – thirty-two seconds until the four minutes was up. He was about to hang up and try again when the voice, out of courtesy to the phone company’s customers, repeated the message in English: ‘The subscriber you are calling is either out of cellular range or has their mobile phone switched off. ’

Bradley lowered the phone and stared into space. Oh, Jesus.