Free Black Butterfly by Mark Gatiss

lopsided washstand hung a cracked photograph of Attaturk–the face tinted with colour, slightly sinister in his severe black hat. The dying sun was slicing a dusty beam through a gap in the pale blue curtains.
    I was fully dressed and hadn’t even taken off my shoes. My mouth tasted as though something had crawled into it to die and there was a thudding pain behind my eyes. I knew the symptoms only too well. I’d been drugged!
    Damn that boy. How had he done it? Could only have been the coffee. That textbook stunt, knocking over the pot. I cursed myself. I was getting too old for this. I’d learned precious little from him, other than his name–and that he was already acquainted with mine! At least my instincts had been right in one respect. Kingdom Kum had been involved in the bizarre death of Vyvyan Hooplah. However, I certainly had no intention of being scared off by his crude threats.
    Istanbul announced itself with the achingly mournful call to prayer. I eased myself up off my bunk, scowled at the throbbing pain in my head and my sore cheek, and quickly left the train.
    Of course, Kingdom Kum was long gone.
    He could have been anywhere by now. Perhaps Istanbul was merely a staging-post for him. I could only hope that, if my contact in the city were half as good as his reputation promised, I could soon be back on Mr Kum’s trail.
    There was a reply waiting for me at the telegraph office, as I’d hoped, welcoming me to the city and giving the address of an hotel into which my contact had booked me.
    I walked down from the station, the lemon-and-honey smoke that rose above the ancient city creating a bluish miasma. I lit a cigarette and took a moment or two to gaze out over the wonderful Bosphorus, alive with shipping on a fantastic scale. Trawlers, tankers, pleasure cruisers and yachts spangled the expanse of shimmering blue, rather like a Tudor map showing the arrangement of the Armada.
    After a while, I found the hotel. It was one of those cosy places constructed in the old colonial style: a three-storey clapboard structure, painted an attractive green, the window frames outlined in white. Downstairs, all was cool and shadowy. A beaming concierge in a comical fez showed me to my room where I bathed, luxuriously, and surrendered my suit to be laundered. I put through a call to London and spent most of the afternoon shouting coded messages down the blower to Delilah. Of course, the old girl was officially retired, but she still had plenty of contacts amongst the ‘Domestics’–the Academy’s loyalstaff of functionaries. Could they find a connection between those deaths: Gobetween, Watchbell, Meddler, Hooplah–and possibly Miracle? The crackly connection kept breaking, necessitating tedious journeys to the front desk. When I was done, I stretched out to sleep on the neat bed.
     
    The night was very warm. Little blocks of charcoal burned brightly in swinging lamps outside shut-up shops, in which bejewelled scarves and mottled mirrors glinted. Here and there, a bundle of rags would suddenly stir into life and a swarthy face turn upwards, eyes glistening in the starlight. Clothes freshly laundered, I made my way up a stone stair and found myself on a raised concrete platform on which sprouted half a dozen cafés. Outside the first, a dervish was–well, whirling –for the benefit of giggling tourists, sprawled out on striped cushions. As they sucked on tall hookahs, a sickly-sweet aroma of apples and tobacco assailed me. I walked on until I came to the third café, parted a thin muslin curtain and went inside.
    Formed from the intersection of a series of low arches, the room seemed to be the remains of some exquisite aqueduct, the brickwork still solid and dry, rough edges softened by cushions and fluttering drapes. The ceiling was so low, I had to stoop as I groped my way towards a hexagonal table.
    A great rolling fug of tobacco smoke billowed overhead. The light sources were so discreet as to be almost