Two MI5 officers stood on either side of Derdâ’s bed.
One looked up and said, “Look, the only thing we’re asking you to do is testify in court. That’s all. Nothing else. Nothing about your personal life. And we’ll do everything we can to see that you can stay in England, because, as you may or may not be aware, you’re now residing here illegally. All you have to do is tell the judge what you know.”
“But I don’t know anything,” Derdâ said.
“But you know Bezir, right?” the other officer asked. “The one who brought you here and kept you locked up in that apartment.”
“Yes …” she whispered, softly.
“Ok then, so just explain what happened to you in that house. And of course there’s your dad. We need you to talk about him.”
“But I only saw him once,” Derdâ said. Her voice was louder.
“Look Derdâ, we’re here so that we can catch all the people who have hurt you since you came to London.”
He was lying. For the past five years they’d been after everyone from the Dulluhan brothers to Gido Agha, from the Tariqat leader Hıdır Arif to Bezir’s kickboxers. And if it had been at all in their powers to do so, they would have extradited Sheik Gazi himself from one of his guest homes in Turkey and put him on trial in London. But for the time being, people at the London headquarters were preoccupied with this dramatic new trial. What could have been more dramatic than the plight of a young girl taken from her village in Turkey at the age of eleven against her will, a girl who eventually ended up living and working with a London sadist and drug addict? And her father was the man who had organized it all from the beginning.
Derdâ was now the linchpin in the Turkish underworld in London. The claim in court was that she was somehow involved with radical Islamic gangs working with London drug lords. In making this connection, they hoped to kill many birds with just one stone. All the related persons could be added to the suspect list, their bank accounts subject to inspection. At least a few would receive life sentences. To be able to pull it off, MI5 officer James Bond had to do what James Bond would never do. He had to lie to a sixteen-year-old girl. Derdâ believed everything he said.
Derdâ was sent to a private drug rehabilitation center in Brighton. At the end of week five in her treatment the MI5 came and took her back to London. The Queens Court building—known in most other countries as the Palace of Justice, for the sense of intrigue that the name evoked—was submerged in a mask of snow. Derdâ quickly learned that although the building went by a different name it still hatched the same kind of intrigues.
In an historical court room in an historical building, Derdâ appeared before the judge. She was a protected witness so Hıdıf Arif would never know who had testified against him in a court of law.
“They took my picture in a village in Turkey and they sent it to Hıdıf Arif in London. He was the one who picked the girls. And he picked me. He picked the man I had to marry, too. Rahime told me all of this, you know, that woman who jumped off Tower Bridge …”
Derdâ was happy to tell them everything she could remember. She even told them about Black T.
“I bought heroin from him. He was a member of a gang called the Fighting Wolves. They fought with rival Kurdish gangs. He worked for my father, Regaip. And the kid said he wanted to be Jamaican.”
They weren’t too concerned with the Jamaican angle. All the same, Derdâ was tireless in her account of everything she could remember. She even told them about the spittle that would fly out of Vezir’s mouth during his religious lectures on the eleventh floor of her apartment. But she didn’t mention Steven, Stanley, or Mitch. It was strange, but somehow she felt that they had played a part in saving her life. The truth was she despised Stanley, but there was no need for him to go to prison. He already led a life confined by the walls of his heroin addiction, or so she thought.
And she was right, for the next six years he lived within such walls and the harsh reality on the street. After his father died, Stanley returned to his family home—it was finally his—but soon died of a heroin overdose. The walls had come crashing down around him. As for Steven, he was buried in his chador, as specified in his will. Only Mitch managed to turn his life around. He returned to his native California where he married a man then quickly divorced him. Then he married a woman and they started shooting documentary films together. Most of them traced the plight of Muslims in the various countries where he had lived. In a speech he gave after receiving an award, Mitch said, “I’m not sure where she is right now, but I owe so much to a particular Muslim girl who was always a source of inspiration.”
Unaware of such future notoriety, Derdâ mistakenly mentioned one of Mitch’s films during her testimony, but the content was so grotesque that the judge didn’t believe her and put it all down to delusions formed during Derdâ’s days of heavy drug use. So she changed the subject. When it came to the story of the fifty-two Cambridge students, he only said, “there’s no need for this, no need.” It was almost time for lunch. Derdâ understood those types would never believe her story.
When they asked her if there was anything else she’d like to add, Derdâ asked about her dad.
“I’m afraid he’s passed away. He took his own life.”
“My mother would always say, ‘God willing they will kill that man one day.’ Now I can
