The Istanbul Puzzle by Laurence O’Bryan Read Free Book Online Page A

lucky we’d both been to be doing so well so soon after graduating.
    And then she’d volunteered to go to Afghanistan with the Territorial Army. They needed doctors. Three of them had volunteered from her hospital. That had been reassuring. I’d imagined stupidly, so stupidly, that that meant there would be safety in numbers. That the odds were against all three of them being killed. Their tour started two years and three months ago.
    And she was the one who didn’t make it back. A roadside bomb, an IED – an Improvised Explosive Device – killed her two weeks into the mission.
    And for a long time I felt powerless and angry, all at the same time. Irene had been about all that was good about England. All she’d ever wanted to do was help people. It wasn’t right that she’d died. Not for one second.
    For months after it happened I fantasised about her walking through our front door. And I used to hope, despite everything logical, that I’d wake up one day to find her beside me again.
    Tragedy warps everything.
    I was slipping away, on the edge of consciousness, back in London, walking towards Buckingham Palace. A man in a long white shirt carrying a pitcher of water was coming towards me. I turned my head. Somebody was behind me, way in the distance. I knew who it was. But she was so far away. I turned, ran, stumbled.
    I woke up, sickly unease rising through me. The floor-to-ceiling curtains were shadows in the darknes. I could make out the vague outlines of the gilt-edged prints of Ottoman Istanbul that hung in a row on the wall, like Janissaries, the Sultan’s guards, standing to attention.
    Then I felt something move. There was something in the bed with me.
    Bloody hell! I swung my fist, slammed it into the mattress, bounced up out of the bed, scrambled for the light switch by the bathroom door.
    The room flooded with jaundiced light.
    There was nothing. Nothing in the bed. Nothing under it. Was I going mad?
    Relief soaked through me. Had it been an animal, a spider, something like that? My skin crawled. I should never have left the window open.
    The phone rang.
    ‘Mr Ryan?’ A woman’s voice, anxious. It was the receptionist who’d given me that envelope. I sat on the bed, cradling the telephone against my bare shoulder. The gossamer breeze from the window felt like water running over my skin.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Two men are on the way up to see you, Mr Ryan.’
    ‘What?’
    The line went dead. I could hear a truck grinding its gears outside.
    For a second I didn’t understand why she’d called. Then it came to me. She was warning me.
    A sharp knock – rat tat tat – sounded from the door. The do-not-disturb sign hanging on the doorknob vibrated.
    That was quick. Then the knock came again. It was even more insistent this time.
    I walked over to the door, put my eye to the viewer. Nothing. Just blackness. Was it broken?
    ‘Come on, Mr Ryan,’ an officious female voice called out. Someone English.
    ‘Hold on,’ I replied. I grabbed a fresh T-shirt from my bag and pulled it over my head. An even sharper knock sounded.
    Rat-tat-tat-tat.
    ‘Coming.’ What the hell was the hurry? I pulled on my chinos, pushed my feet into suede moccasins.
    Another knock.
    RAT TAT-TAT TAT-TAT.
    ‘Come on!’ She sounded petulant, as if she hadn’t heard my replies, or had heard, but didn’t think I was moving fast enough.
    I jerked the door open but held my foot against it, just in case I needed to close it in a hurry.
    An attractive-looking woman was standing outside. She was in her late twenties, I guessed, and was wearing a tight high-necked black T-shirt. Her face was symmetrical, her eyes dark green, serious, her black hair pulled back tight. She had a thin gold chain around her neck. Despite her slim frame, she was clearly someone who could look after herself.
    And she was holding an identity card in my face. I saw a severe-looking face and an official stamp, a triangle with a crown and the letters EIIR above it,