Free Death by Design by Barbara Nadel

stop. Three men, all big and leather-jacketed and blond, pushed the pair roughly into their truck and then took off at high speed. Who knew what kind of work those men had lined up for them? İkmen guessed the man would do something either dangerous or illegal or both, and the girl? She had been a pretty little thing and the men in the van had leered at her. Once her baby was delivered, he didn’t like to think too hard about what might happen to her. The man driving beside him, Wolfgang’s son as he inwardly thought of him, didn’t show a flicker of emotion, much less concern. But Wolfgang himself, İkmen felt, did really believe that he was doing some good by this. He had in the past helped people to escape from East Germany to the West. He had also intimated that he had assisted some in their flight from Hitler’s concentration camps. His view of refugees and their need to move on at any cost very obviously coloured his view. Whether or not he knew about the crime and prostitution rings that his son delivered these people to, İkmen didn’t know. Whether Wolfgang really did work in some instances for the German police he didn’t know either. Whatever the truth of the matter, he was now in the United Kingdom and as soon as he was alone, there was a phone call he had to make.
    He settled back into his seat and watched the other cars, vans and lorries on the motorway. Unlike in Turkey, where most motorists sounded their horns most of the time, here the vehicles were relatively quiet. But as he watched the traffic he noted that it was no less aggressive for all that. The British drove quietly but with a very evident and smouldering passion to be superior, fastest and best. It was then that he began to actively recall his previous visit to the UK back in the 1970s. How polite and kind he had thought the British to be at first. But then he’d gone to a few pubs and seen another side to that quiet character he did not find so impressive. The cars they drove now were much sleeker and shinier than the old Morris Minors and Ford Anglias they had driven back in the seventies; they were quite clearly much richer now than they had been then. But as the truck was passed by a madly speeding Subaru complete with passengers making rude hand gestures out of the windows, he could see that money had probably not improved them.

Chapter 8
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    ‘I don’t want nothing what makes me look common, you get me?’ the young girl said from inside the folds of the scarf that enfolded her head and the lower part of her face. ‘Them little diamonds are well nasty.’
    The woman decorating the girl’s nails, the so-called ‘nail technician’, sighed. Why did so many of the London Turkish girls sound like Jamaicans? They didn’t really sound like that at all. In fact as soon as either their parents or other older extended family members came on the scene they reverted either to Turkish or very well-spoken English. Of course they did! Those parents had worked very hard to send these girls to schools where they were taught to speak like the late Princess Diana. Her own parents, two hundred and fifty miles to the north in Manchester, had been just the same. ‘You speak like that nice Gail from off Coronation Street ,’ her mother had told her. ‘She’s northern but she speaks really nice.’
    ‘I quite like them little butterflies there,’ the girl said and pointed to a small plastic tray full of tiny, nail-sized metal butterflies. ‘They’re nice I think, ain’t it.’
    ‘Yes.’ She smiled. She didn’t like this job. It was rather too girly. It was at this moment that her very girly pink mobile phone began to ring. Luckily most people had more than one mobile these days and so she knew that none of her colleagues, other nail technicians, would think anything of her taking a previously unseen phone out of her bag. She excused herself to her client and answered it.
    ‘Hello, Ayşe here.’
    ‘Hello, Ayşe, it’s Çetin Ertegrul