‘Was there ever any interaction between them and anyone else? Did they ever bring any friends or guests to the restaurant?’
‘No. It was always just the two of them. I don’t even remember any other diners coming up to them and saying hello in passing. That was their usual table…’ Osman pointed to the furthest-away table at the back of the restaurant, at the end of the seating arc. It confirmed Fabel’s theory about the restaurant being chosen because it offered an element of anonymity: no one would pass that table to leave or go to the washrooms. Meliha and Muller-Voigt would have had to endure only Osman’s good-natured interruptions.
‘I want you to think very hard, Osman,’ said Fabel. ‘Was there anything, anything at all, out of the ordinary that you can recall about them?’
Osman frowned as he did exactly as Fabel had asked. After a moment he said: ‘No, I’m really sorry, but there was nothing. They were just a happy couple who seemed very involved in each other. I was so upset when I heard about Herr Muller-Voigt. I really wish I could do more to help…’
‘Thank you, Osman. You have been very helpful.’ Fabel smiled; he knew the young waiter really had done his best to remember any useful detail. Fabel thanked the owner of the restaurant and he and Anna headed for the door.
‘I was surprised she didn’t come in here more often,’ Osman said as they were leaving. ‘With her living so near.’
Both Anna and Fabel froze in the doorway. They stepped back in, letting the door close behind them.
‘You know where she lives?’ asked Fabel. Something like a small electrical current tingled in the back of his neck.
‘Well… yes. I guess. Unless she was just visiting, but it looked to me like she lived there.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Anna.
‘There’s an apartment building about three blocks away. I was passing it one day — my cousin lives in the next building — and I saw Frau Yazar go in through the main door, carrying groceries.’
‘Get your jacket…’ Fabel said to Osman and held the door open.
It took no longer than fifteen minutes of talking to her neighbours to establish that Meliha Yazar lived on the third floor of the building. It was a modern apartment building only three blocks, as Osman had said, from the Ottoman Palace.
Once they had established that they had found the right place, Fabel had sent Osman back to the restaurant, the young waiter beaming at the thought that he really had contributed something worthwhile. Fabel had been able to dispel Osman’s only concern that perhaps Meliha Yazar was in trouble with the police.
‘Not at all,’ Fabel had said reassuringly. ‘We’re trying to help Frau Yazar. You have helped Frau Yazar.’
Osman had gone back to work happy.
But it soon became clear that Meliha Yazar was not Meliha Yazar.
‘You mean Frau Kebir…’ said the young mother who had answered the door of the other apartment on the third floor, clutching a toddler to her flank. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages. Maybe a month. She does go away a lot. To do with her job, probably. I think she maybe goes back to Turkey.’
‘Do you know what her job is?’ asked Anna.
‘Couldn’t really say.’
‘And there’s been no one around the apartment for a month?’
‘I didn’t say that. She’s not been there for a month, but she was having some work done on the apartment. About three weeks ago there was a team of workmen in, after she had gone. It was okay, though, because she slipped a note under my door a couple of days before, just to warn me.’
‘I see,’ said Fabel. ‘Did Frau Ya- I mean Frau Kebir… did she leave you a key, by any chance?’
‘Oh no.’ The young mother bounced the restive toddler in her arms. ‘She was very quiet. Very private.’
Fabel thanked her and the young mother went back into her flat.
‘You know something, Anna?’ said Fabel as they stood outside the door of the apartment. ‘They’re not as good as their PR makes out.’
‘Who?’
‘The Pharos Project,’ said Fabel. ‘All this time I thought they had wiped out all trace of Meliha Yazar. But it wasn’t them all along. The phoney address she gave Muller-Voigt, her fake surname — nice move, that, I have to say: keep your first name in case someone you know from your past bumps into you in public — all that was her herself. She didn’t want any trace of Meliha Yazar.’
‘Some kind of scam? Is that what you’re saying she was into?’
Fabel shook his head. ‘No. Far from it. More like an undercover investigation.’
Anna stared at the solid-looking front door for a moment. ‘Do you want me to get an emergency warrant to enter?’ asked Anna.
In answer, Fabel swung a kick at the door. It took a second kick before the wood around the lock splintered and the door yielded.
‘We have reason to believe that the occupant of this dwelling is in danger,’ he said. ‘We don’t need a warrant.’
The front door opened onto a long hall. It was bright and immaculately clean and at its far end there was a large framed poster from which a handsome middle-aged man gazed back at Fabel with piercingly light eyes. The man wore an old-fashioned suit and had his thumbs rammed into the pockets of his waistcoat. There was an incredible sense of determination in the pale eyes, one of which was slightly out of alignment because, Fabel already knew, of a First World War shrapnel wound.
‘This is her apartment, all right,’ said Fabel, nodding towards the poster.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Anna.
‘Her icon. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The father of modern Turkey. Meliha Yazar — or Kebir or whatever her real name was — was seeking a new Ataturk. An “Ataturk for the Environment”, Muller-Voigt said. Come on. Let’s check this out.’
They moved from room to room. The flat was filled with books in Turkish, German and English. Literary classics, environmental tracts, geological and ecological textbooks. Fabel walked into the bedroom. The bed was made, everything was in perfect order as it had been throughout the apartment. Absolutely perfect order.
‘She was tidy, I’ll give her that,’ said Anna somewhere behind Fabel.
‘Too tidy,’ he said, picking up the three paperbacks that sat on her bedside table. ‘They’ve been through everything. Every corner. Every nook and cranny. My bet is that they photographed everything first and then put it all back when they’d gone through it. It’s nice work, I’ll give them that.’
‘The workmen her neighbour talked about?’
Fabel did not answer; instead he sifted through the paperbacks as if he were slowly shuffling cards. An English edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. A German edition of Der Richter und sein Henker by Friederich Durrenmatt. A copy of Silent Spring by Rachael Carson, again in English. He looked through them again. There was something significant about the mix of books, but he could not think what it was. He stepped out of the bedroom, the books still in his hands. By the time they had finished, the forensics team had arrived.
‘You been handling anything else I should know about?’ asked Holger Brauner, with a nod towards the books in Fabel’s hand.
‘You won’t get anything here, Holger,’ said Fabel. ‘Have a look around. What’s wrong with this picture?’
Brauner scanned the room, then turned back to Fabel and shrugged. ‘You got me… other than it’s a hell of a tidy place.’
‘Someone’s beaten us to it,’ said Fabel. ‘Real professionals. They’ve cleaned up behind themselves.’
‘I wish they’d turn over my apartment,’ said Anna. ‘It could really do with a spring clean.’
‘But that’s not all that’s wrong with this picture. You too, Anna. Notice something odd?’
They both looked around the room again. Anna frowned for a moment, then a look of enlightenment swept across her face.
‘Same as the last Network Killer victim?’
‘Exactly,’ said Fabel. Brauner made a confused face.
‘No computer…’ said Fabel. ‘No computer, no cellphone, no chargers, no memory sticks, not even an electronic calculator.’