The Istanbul Puzzle

The Porsche had pulled up by the plane. A man got out of the back, strode towards us. He was tall, dressed in a mustard coloured suit. He had that lightly tanned, angular sort of face that reminded me of pictures of celebrities trying hard to look good.

The door opened with a whoosh. Wind and the smell of jet fuel filled the cabin.

‘Good to see you, Isabel,’ boomed a voice. ‘Looks like I got here just in time.’ The man in the mustard suit sat in the seat beside her. Both of them were facing me.

‘It’s a bit tight in here,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Isabel.’ He patted her knee. Then he turned to me.

‘This is the man, eh, Isabel?’

‘Sean,’ she said. ‘Meet Peter Fitzgerald. He works in the Consulate.’ As if that explained everything. Then I remembered. This was the guy who’d told me about Alek’s death.

‘Peter, this is Sean Ryan, from the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford. He co-founded it. He’s their Director of Projects.’

Not for long, I thought, after the way this project in Istanbul had gone, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. In any case, the expression on Peter’s face was that of a wine waiter who’d just been asked for plum juice.

‘We spoke on the phone,’ he said. ‘So sorry about your colleague. What a dreadful death. It’s certainly stirred things up here.’ He put his hand out. I shook it.

‘Alek didn’t deserve that,’ I said.

Isabel was staring at me.

‘I’m sure. What a terrible nightmare,’ said Peter. ‘And what about you, how are you? I heard you had a difficult night.’

‘I’m alright,’ I said. I didn’t need his sympathy.

I heard scuffling, looked around.

Two leather bags were being loaded into the passageway between the seats and the door to the pilot’s cabin. My own small bag, with everything from my hotel room packed into it, had been waiting at the private jet terminal when we’d arrived.

I’d seen, straight away, that my stuff had been rifled through, that some items were missing, but compared to what had happened to Alek, and what could have happened to me last night I felt fortunate.

‘Tell me all about yourself,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I was a bit abrupt on the phone the other day. A lot on my plate right now.’ He tapped his nose.

Peter seemed to be fascinated by everything I had to say. It was an hour, at least, and we were many miles from Istanbul before the flow of his questions slowed. By then he knew all about my origins, my father’s Purple Star background, our life in Norfolk, and in upstate New York, where I started college after my father left the military, and all about my very English mother, my one-year research extension in London, how I met Irene, my first job, how we founded the Institute. Surprisingly, there were things he didn’t ask about though. Like what had happened to my wife. Maybe he knew the answers to those questions already.

‘Tell him about the mosaic Alek took a picture of,’ said Isabel, when Peter seemed to have finished his questioning.

I told him the little I knew. Isabel took the photo of the mosaic out of her bag and passed it to him as I was talking.

‘Very interesting,’ he said. When I finished, he looked around, as if he was afraid someone might be listening to us.

‘And you have no idea where this picture was taken?’ He waved the photo at me.

I sat back. ‘I told Isabel already, and the answer is still no. Our project is about assessing how the mosaics in Hagia Sophia have changed over the years. It was never about identifying unknown mosaics.’

‘Your colleague was working only in Hagia Sophia, correct?’ He was staring at me.

I nodded.

‘There’s a lot of interesting stuff besides mosaics in Hagia Sophia, isn’t there?’

‘Yes. It goes back a long way. The building we see there now was put up in the 530s,’ I said.

Peter’s eyebrows shot up. ‘It’s older than that, I think. Didn’t that old treasure hunter, Schneider, find out during the excavations he carried out in ’35 that the foundations were from an earlier church?’ He knew his stuff.

‘The first Christian church on the site was probably built in 351.’

Isabel looked amused.

‘Yes,’ said Peter, drily. ‘Hagia Sophia is one of the foundation churches of Christianity.’ His right hand slapped his armrest. ‘And it’s the best of them by far. Don’t some people say it’ll be returned to Christianity one day?’ He looked at me innocently.

Was he trying to trap me? I didn’t reply.

‘So you don’t go along with all this Christian revival thing, do you, Sean?’

‘No.’

‘And you don’t know anything about the stories in the Turkish papers?’

‘No.’

I felt myself getting irritated. Not only was he asking too many questions, I was also beginning to feel boxed in with his long legs blocking access to the corridor.

‘If any of those journalists poked into the dusty corners of your life, Sean, would they find anything … smelly?’

Now he was really annoying me. I shook my head, fast. ‘Not a single thing. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.’

‘Not that it would be just journalists doing the investigating,’ he said, gesturing towards Isabel and himself. His tone was haughty, detached, as if he knew things I didn’t.

He looked me in the eye and smiled. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

‘There’s going to be a lot of interest in this story over the next few days, Sean. It’ll blow over, of course, but until then every blogger in Europe will be looking for an angle on Alek’s death. I do hope you’re not hiding any nasty little secrets.’

‘How many times do I have to repeat myself?’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’ I raised my hands, held them in the air, palms forward, as if I was going to push him and his accusations away.

He rubbed at his trousers, fixed the crease.

‘I understand you’re upset, Sean, but this story has real legs. I don’t know if Isabel warned you, but all the security services, MI5, and 6, and all the rest, they do an under-every-stone trawl in cases like this. And if they do find anything funny, I must tell you, unofficially, they’re not beyond a little bit of mild torture, given what we’re up against now.’ He put his hands together, then braced them on his knees. ‘When it comes to defending our country we do get a bit of leeway these days, you know. But I’m sure you’ve nothing to hide.’

Was he joking? I’d imagined the local police in Oxford going around to the Institute, asking a few questions. Not a platoon of security service types trawling through every chapter of my life.

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’

The cabin was quiet except for the rumble of the plane’s engine.

‘So there’s nothing you want to tell us?’

‘Not a thing,’ I said, emphatically.