The Mephisto Threat. E.V. Seymour

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      ‘You don’t think he was followed?’

      ‘And the hit team tipped off?’

      Ertas smiled. ‘You use dramatic language.’

      ‘Killers, then.’ Tallis briefly returned the smile. ‘If he was, I know nothing about it. He certainly didn’t suggest to me that he was being followed.’ Garry probably wouldn’t have known. He had been too preoccupied, Tallis remembered.

      ‘And how did he seem?’

      Restless. ‘Hot.’

      ‘Troubled?’

      ‘By the heat, yes.’ He was playing hardball with the guy. He knew it. Ertas knew it. But, then, Ertas knew a lot more than he was letting on, Tallis sensed. We’re both playing masters in the art of deception.

      ‘We have witnesses who appear to think that you were the intended victim.’

      ‘Bullshit.’

      Ertas smiled again. ‘You are very direct, Mr Miller.’

      ‘My apologies.’

      ‘Not at all. I like a man who is straight with me.’

      Ditto, Tallis thought, meeting Ertas’s smile with one of his own.

      ‘So you really think the other witnesses were mistaken?’ Ertas pressed.

      ‘Others?’ He’d thought only the café owner had expressed a view. Careful, he reminded himself, you’re not supposed to understand the language.

      ‘Does it make a difference how many?’

      ‘Not particularly. Like I said, they’re wrong. In the heat of the moment, it’s quite easy to draw flawed conclusions.’ Tallis could have given Ertas a lecture on perceptual distortion, the firearms officer’s nightmare. What the brain couldn’t process, it made up. Wasn’t lying, simply the mind’s natural inclination to join the dots and fill in the blanks. It often explained discrepancies in witness accounts.

      ‘I’d like you to run through everything that happened,’ Ertas stated, ‘from the time you were seated in the café to the final tragic event.’

      Tallis did. Ertas listened. He interrupted only once. ‘You say the gun was a Walther. How do you know?’

      Damn, Tallis thought. No way could he bluff this one. Only way to go: tell Ertas the truth. ‘It has a very distinctive finger-extension on the bottom of the magazine, giving a better grip for the hand.’

      ‘I didn’t know IT consultants were so well versed in firearms.’ Ertas’s dark eyes lasered into Tallis’s.

      ‘I served in the British army as a youngster.’ It wasn’t a very compelling explanation. The most he’d learned in the army about weapons had been directly connected to theatres of war—SA80s, 30 mm Rarden cannon and 7.62 mm Hughes chain guns—but Ertas gave the impression of accepting his account.

      ‘And the motorcyclists—did you see their faces?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Think they were men?’

      Tallis hesitated. The individual riding the bike had certainly seemed too big and broad to be a woman, but judging by half the female population of the United Kingdom you simply never knew. The pillion passenger had been much smaller and could have been of either sex. He told Ertas this. Then something else flashed through his brain. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe he imagined it. Surely not, he thought.

      ‘And which way did they go?’ Ertas said, breaking into Tallis’s thoughts.

      ‘Heading for the bridge.’

      Ertas asked Tallis to repeat the conversation he’d shared with Morello. Tallis gave an edited account. He wasn’t going to mention Kevin Napier or the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. As far as Ertas was concerned, he and Morello had been two Brits who’d happened to run into each other, chums passing the time of day. Happened all the time.

      ‘Did Mr Morello have any enemies?’

      ‘I wouldn’t know but, I guess, in his line of work you can’t rule anything out.’ Tallis remembered the mezeeating Russians. Garry had written a book. Had he pissed someone off? He floated the idea. Ertas seemed to file the information away. Again, Tallis had the sensation that Ertas knew something he didn’t.

      ‘Whose idea was it to meet at the Byzantine?’

      ‘Mr Morello’s.’

      ‘Did you know it’s a hangout for the criminal fraternity?’

      ‘I didn’t, no.’ So that was it, Tallis thought. Made perfect sense. The cops had already got a line going there. Probably explained why Ertas was so suspicious of him and how the police had got there so quickly. ‘Perhaps there lies your answer.’

      Ertas gave him a slow-eyed response. ‘A line of enquiry to follow, certainly. I noticed from your passport that you have spent almost three weeks here.’

      ‘That’s correct.’

      ‘In Istanbul?’

      ‘No.’ Tallis told Ertas about his sailing trip on the gulet and then his week of resort-hopping via taxi to Marmaris and Bodrum and finally the coach ride to Ephesus, one of the greatest ruined cities in the Western world. Images of colonnaded marble streets, intense heat and dust, the threefloored library with its secret passage to the brothel, and the Gate of Hercules, which formed the entrance to Curetes Street, flashed through Tallis’s mind. Everywhere there’d been reminders of Ephesus’s past. It was reputed that if the city’s torches were not lit, Ephesus was in peril.

      ‘And when are you planning to return?’

      When I’ve got what I came for, Tallis thought. ‘Not made my mind up yet.’

      There was a knock at the door.

      ‘Bir saniye lutfen.’ Just a moment, please, Ertas said, getting up. ‘So you say you’ve been in the city here for the past week?’

      He was really labouring the time factor, Tallis thought. He guessed Ertas appreciated accuracy so he gave it to him.

      ‘Five days.’

      ‘Five days,’ Ertas repeated. ‘Where are you staying?’ Ertas asked, opening the door.

      ‘The Celal Sultan Hotel.’

      The skinny police officer with the sallow, sweating features was standing on the threshold. He handed Ertas a note. Ertas took it, thanked the man, closed the door and, thoughtfulness in his expression, sat back down. ‘We will not be releasing the details of this afternoon’s incident,’ he told Tallis. What he meant, Tallis thought, was that they would not be releasing the identity of the victim. If it was suspected that Garry had been the wrong target, the police didn’t want the killers coming back for a second crack at it. Probably a sensible precaution, or…

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