Free Death by Design by Barbara Nadel Page A

here,’ the smoke-dried voice on the other end replied.
    ‘Oh, Uncle Çetin!’ she said excitedly in Turkish. ‘How lovely to hear from you! Where are you at the moment?’
    The client shuffled through the boxes of nail adornments once again and sniffed slightly impatiently.
    ‘I’m outside a place called the Toulouse Patisserie. Very nice cakes, by the look of them. Anyway, it’s off Soho Square. I haven’t been to London for thirty years, I don’t recognise that much.’
    Ayşe laughed. ‘Oh, poor uncle! Listen, do you have any money?’
    ‘Yes. I took some sterling out at an ATM across the road.’
    ‘Then put yourself in a black cab and ask the driver to take you to the Marmaris Nail Bar on Stoke Newington Church Street,’ she said. ‘It’ll probably cost you about twenty pounds.’
    ‘Twenty pounds!’
    ‘Uncle, you’re in the UK now, everything costs!’ Ayşe said. ‘Just get here and then we’ll sort things out.’ She finished the call and looked at her client. ‘Sorry about that, my uncle . . .’
    ‘From Turkey?’
    ‘Yes.’
    The girl sniffed again and then said, ‘I think now I’ll go for butterflies on the fingers and then one of them Chanel logos on each of the thumbs. That is cool.’
    Ayşe smiled as she assembled her materials. Well, at least her colleague from İstanbul had finally made it. Soon, with luck, her ‘Uncle’ Çetin would become integrated into the community and maybe get a really dodgy job. Then, hopefully, she could ship out of this hellish ‘beauty’ parlour and get back to doing what she did best. Ayşe Kudu was one of Greater Manchester police force’s few female officers trained to carry and use firearms. Fiddling about with tinfoil butterflies was most definitely not what she was accustomed to.
    ‘So why did we come here?’ İkmen asked as he sat himself down on the cold wooden bench beside her. While the light still held, his ‘niece’ had taken him to a place called Abney Park, which was actually a graveyard. They each had a small doner kebab. Quite what it was with these people in Europe and meetings in graveyards, İkmen didn’t know. But the kebab was nice.
    Ayşe said, ‘Because on a weekday no one else comes here. There’s the odd drunk and the occasional jogger but the illegals are generally too superstitious to hang out in a foreign graveyard and there’s no need for any of those who exploit them to come here. You and I can talk.’
    ‘And so you are . . .’
    ‘I am a nail technician. I’m thirty-three, I’m single and I come originally from Manchester where my parents run a kebab shop. My name is Ayşe Ertegrul and you are my uncle, my dad’s brother from İstanbul. You’ve come in illegally to find work because you’ve got money problems back home.’
    ‘My son-in-law cannot work and my daughter Çiçek is pregnant,’ İkmen said. ‘I’ll take anything I can get.’ Now that he’d finished his kebab he lit a cigarette. Ayşe pulled a face.
    ‘You know that smoking has been banned in all enclosed spaces over here, don’t you?’ she said.
    İkmen nodded. ‘And yet you see many people smoking on the street, outside offices and pubs,’ he said. ‘Everyone smoked when I came here in the nineteen seventies. Many people still seem to do so.’
    ‘It’ll take years yet to get rid of the habit completely,’ Ayşe said with rather more glee than İkmen liked. ‘But anyway, look, I’ve managed to get you a room in a place called the Rize Guest House which is basically a big house on Leswin Road. My own bedsit is on the same street and so I’ll be near at hand if you need me. The Rize is owned and run by a man called Abdullah Yigit. He’s not too bothered about who takes rooms in his place, which is why I’ve put you in there. Also we know that at least two of the men currently living in the Rize are working for Ahmet Ülker. Both illegals. One is called Reşat Doğan and the other Süleyman Elgiz. Doğan works at what