beat her own father!’
The way her eyes crinkled when she laughed reminded him so vividly of her mother that his heart ached almost as though it had just happened. With the pain came the usual premonition: that something calamitous would overtake her too, that he’d be equally powerless to stop it. He reached up and hugged her and pulled her down onto the grass beside him. ‘What is it, Father?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. His anxiety wouldn’t go away, however. If anything, it grew worse. They’d barely left the park before his mobile rang. He checked the number, was relieved to see that it was only Martino. ‘Hey, my friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re cancelling tonight?’
‘Aren’t you watching?’ asked Martino.
His heart stopped. ‘Watching what?’
‘The bomb. In Daphne.’
Taner turned his back on Katerina so that she couldn’t see his face. ‘How bad?’ he asked.
‘Bad. Really bad.’ He paused a moment, then added what Taner had most feared. ‘And they’re saying that a warning was called in. They’re saying it was us.’
III
The police had already started taking statements from possible eye-witnesses. Iain gave his name, details and a bowdlerized version of his day to a slab-faced officer with an implausible belly. A few paces away, the woman he’d earlier joked about with Mustafa was struggling to make herself understood by an officer with limited English. When he was finished, therefore, he went across and offered to translate. Her name was Karin Visser. She was twenty-seven years old. She was Dutch but had been studying and working in America for the past four years, which explained both her accent and her impeccable English. She’d been travelling around Turkey with her boss Nathan Coates, a retired oil executive, and his head of security Rick Leland. The two of them had been in Nathan’s room all morning, in some kind of meeting. No, she didn’t know who with. No, they hadn’t been in Daphne long. They’d only arrived from Ephesus late the night before, had been due to fly on to Cyprus the day after tomorrow, then back to the States at the end of the week. No, she hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. She’d gone for a long walk that morning, had returned to the hotel thinking the meeting would have finished. But it had still been going on. She opened up her day-pack to show the manila package inside, and explained how her boss had given it to her to have couriered, insisting that she see to it herself rather than merely trusting it to reception. She’d been on her way when she’d heard the blast and run back. That was when … She waved an expressive hand to indicate the destruction. The policeman thanked her wearily and asked her to let him or his colleagues know before she left the area, then went off to conduct his next interview.
‘Are you okay?’ Iain asked her.
‘I’m fine,’ said Karin. But her hand was trembling slightly and her eyes glittered. ‘It’s just, they were my friends, you know. And I’ve never been through anything like this before.’ She shook her head. ‘I feel so useless. I feel like there are things I should be doing.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. To do with Nathan and Rick, I guess. I mean did you see the hotel? Nathan’s room was right above that crater. I mean right above it.’ Her tears finally started flowing. She brushed them away with the heel of her left hand. ‘They have to be buried under God only knows how much rubble. There’s no way can they still be alive. So what do I do? Do I call their families? Or do I wait until it’s confirmed? And is it up to me to arrange for them to be …’ She closed her eyes, unable to complete the thought. ‘And then there’s stupid stuff. I left my passport in my room safe, for example. My cards, my driver’s licence, nearly all my cash. I assumed they’d be okay there.’
‘Someone from your consulate will be here soon,’ Iain assured her. ‘By tomorrow at the latest. They’ll deal with the police and the authorities for you. They’ll arrange to have your boss and your colleague flown back home. They’ll issue you with a new passport. They’ll make sure you have money and a flight.’
‘But what about until then? God, I know this is trivial, but where do I go? What do I eat? Where do I sleep? How do I get around? I don’t know a soul in this place and I don’t speak a word of the language and my friends are dead and I don’t have anywhere to stay or enough money to pay for a room and I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you a room at my hotel.’
‘I told you. I don’t have any money.’
He touched her arm gently. ‘I’ll put you on my tab,’ he said. ‘You can pay me back when you sort things out.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
She wiped her eyes. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘It’s fine.’
There was nothing more to keep them here, so he led her to his car. It was barely five miles to Antioch, but the roads were so chaotic that it took them an hour. He parked up the cobbled street from his hotel, led her inside. The receptionist stared at them in astonishment. ‘You were there?’ she asked.
Iain touched Karin on the elbow. ‘My friend here was staying at the Daphne International. She needs a room. Oh, and she’s lost her passport and her cards, so can you please put her on my account for the moment.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said the receptionist, ‘but we don’t have any rooms left. The phone’s been going crazy. Journalists and TV people and police. Everyone’s on their way. And the other hotels are the same. We’ve all been referring inquiries to each other. I honestly don’t know of any rooms left in the city.’
Iain glanced at Karin. Sharing a room with a stranger breached all kinds of company protocols, but she was visibly at the end of her tether. ‘We can go hunting, if you like,’ he said. ‘Or there’s a spare bed in my room.’
She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Just for tonight. We’ll sort something better out tomorrow.’ The receptionist smiled at this happy solution, tapped Karin’s details into her terminal, gave her a spare card-key. They took the lift up. He fixed them a drink each, spilled a pack of chocolate-covered nuts into a saucer. Karin sat heavily on a bed and checked her mobile, but the masts were evidently overwhelmed here too. He nodded at the bedside phone. ‘Use that,’ he said.
‘It’s to Holland. To let my parents know I’m safe. Then to America.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘Owe me.’ He half held up his hand to apologize for his irritability, but Karin didn’t even seem to notice. He went into the bathroom, put his hands upon the sink, rested weight upon them. It was a risk of being single too long that you lost your soft edges. He checked himself in the mirror: a mess of sweat and dust and blood. He fetched clean clothes from his wardrobe, stripped and took a shower, vigorously soaping off the dirt and blood and sweat, watching the grey-brown mess of it circle the plug and then vanish. He dialled the heat up as high as he could take it then turned his face to the spray almost as if to purge himself of something, or perhaps in penance for the fact that, yet once more in his life, an operation he was running had turned so utterly to shit.
