It was of brown glass with a glass stopper, and an ancient label on which was written some medical code. Even as he did so, the lucid part of his brain told him to go quietly — co-operate, tell everything, then endure the bureaucratic ritual of Istanbul police enquiries, with the sad hope that HM’s Consulate would somehow intervene.
What he did instead was not just an act of panic, but of mild madness — the act of a rational man whose qualities of reasoning and self-control had totally jammed, as though seized by a cerebral cramp.
He drew the glass stopper and hurled the bottle at the first policeman. Instantly the shop was filled with the burning smell of ammonia aromatica. It hit the man just below the throat and crashed heavily on to the floor. The man stumbled back, choking, spluttering. At the same time Hawn saw the second man move. He moved fast, like a dancer. Hawn retreated a step back down the passage, grabbed blindly at another bottle. He was vaguely aware that Anna was shouting at him, but his mind was so closed that he could not understand a word she said.
The bottle hit the second man on the shoulder, and the next moment his thin face was splashed with dark indigo. Most of his overcoat, his trousers and shoes, had also turned a deep purplish blue. He hit Hawn somewhere on the neck, with a dull jarring pain that seemed to paralyse his whole body. Then the first man moved in, solid, square, his fists like big hairy hams. But they did not immediately knock him unconscious.
In an act of pitiful loyalty, Anna kicked one of the men and hit the other with her satchel-like handbag, several times, like a petulant child. They pushed her up against the counter and struck her twice, low down in the belly, and even in the darkened room Hawn saw her face go paper-white, as she crumpled on to her knees and began to vomit.
Hawn did not remember leaving the shop, or getting into the car outside. His first clear realization was driving down an open dual carriageway, very fast, under strips of floodlighting that flared into the car every few seconds. The thin man was driving — still stained an ineradicable blue — while Hawn and Anna sat squeezed up against the big policeman who, despite the fact that all the windows had been opened, gave off the pungent fumes of ammonia.
Hawn experienced a dangerous moment on the edge of hysteria. He wondered how their colleagues would receive them both — one dyed blue as if with woad, the other exuding his poisonous stench. Then he was aware that Anna was talking to him: ‘Where are they taking us?’
‘To jail. Or Police Headquarters.’ He spoke as though it was of no real importance. He had seen a film once — about a young American who’d been picked up at Istanbul Airport carrying drugs. He had been driven to the main prison, which Hawn seemed to remember was somewhere outside the city.
With the return of full consciousness came a cold aching hangover — all aggression and self-confidence dissipated, leaving him dull, utterly apathetic. He noticed the girl from the shop sitting in the front passenger seat, and wondered what sort of witness she would make. And would they believe her — always supposing that they wanted to believe her? Salak had friends in the police, and they would want the case solved quickly. The girl alone could establish that Salak was dead when Hawn and Anna arrived.
And what had happened to their driver from the hotel? Would he come forward and corroborate the exact time that he had dropped his passengers at the chemist’s? Hawn doubted it. He didn’t suppose that the Turkish Police Force was the kind of outfit which invited the ready co-operation of the public.
He wondered, too, why Salak had been wearing no shoes. But he didn’t suppose it was a detail which would worry anyone very much.
They were passing the airport now; Hawn stared out at the dark runways, at the swivelling light on the control tower, and felt a weary despair. The idea of escape had not seriously occurred to him. They’d shoot them both down like dogs, and that would be the end of it. No awkward, unanswered questions, no rigged evidence at the trial. Perhaps that was the way they intended it, anyway.
Anna was quietly crying beside him. He experienced a moment of warped irritation that gave way almost at once to impotent rage. He yelled at the big plain-clothes man: ‘Where are you taking us, you bastard?’
The man stared at him in the dark and said nothing.
‘Bastard!’ Hawn yelled again, but there was still not a flicker of reaction.
They had been driving for nearly forty minutes now, and were well outside the city: the floodlighting finished, but the road was still broad and fast, almost empty.
Hawn tried again to remember that film about the luckless young American who had been driven straight to jail. He was sure the jail was nearer the city, not further away. And yet the further they drove, the more he felt the tiny flutter of hope. The car at least offered them a transitory hiatus between certainties — between the dangling corpse of Salak, and the clanging door of a stinking Turkish prison cell.
Now they were slowing down. The driver dipped the car’s headlights; it was very dark. They pulled on to the soft verge and stopped; then the driver turned to the Turkish girl beside him and muttered something, at the same time leaning across her and opening the door on her side.
