Hotel Bosphorus by Esmahan Aykol Page B

takes place because the heart stops.” It seemed to me that he didn’t know much about this either.
    â€œHmm,” I said again. Actually, I was more interested in the state of the hair-dryer than the body. “I want to ask you something else.”
    â€œAsk away.”
    â€œAbout the hair-dryer. In hotels, hair-dryers are usually made so that they won’t work unless you keep pressing the button down, as a safety measure. Anyway, I won’t generalize, but the hair-dryers in that hotel worked on that basis. Did the murderer put the dryer into the water while pressing the button?”
    He nodded at me approvingly. “Did you check the hair-dryers at the hotel?” he asked.
    â€œI looked at the one in Petra’s room and assumed they all worked the same way.” I hadn’t only been studying the instructions and ingredients of anti-wrinkle creams while I was in Petra’s bathroom that morning.
    â€œYou’re right,” he said. “They’re the same in all the rooms, including Müller’s. You have to keep the button pressed for it to work. But the murderer didn’t use the hotel hair-dryer.”
    â€œWhat!” I exclaimed.
    â€œIt was a cheap and simple model, produced by Philips about four years ago and no longer on the market. The company made those products in Taiwan. They made millions of them and sold them all over the world… Unfortunately, the same model was on sale in Turkey and Germany. We’ve been unable to get anywhere along that trail.”
    â€œAnd that model had a very long electric cord…” I said. He looked at me so strangely, I felt obliged to explain why I had said such a thing:

    â€œAs you know, Petra was staying in a suite. In that suite, the bathroom alone was almost the size of my living room.” As I said this, Batuhan let his eyes wander round the living room as if trying to measure its size. I continued to explain my theory:
    â€œI don’t actually know where the socket was in the bathroom, but if we assume that, like most sockets, it was near the washbasin, there was quite a distance between the socket and the bath.” I was tired of repeating the word “socket”.
    I considered whether or not my words made sense, and added, “That is if the suites are all the same size.”
    â€œThey are the same size,” he said, nodding his head. “You’ve actually thought things through very well. But you’re not the only one to think of that; the murderer also thought about it because he or she brought along some extension leads. Three cables, two metres long each… Two were attached to each other, the other was unused.”
    â€œYou mean that the murderer was standing there fixing extension leads together while Müller was drinking whisky in the bath? Oh, that’s just rubbish!”
    â€œThey probably weren’t fixed together in the bathroom. It’s most likely that he or she prepared them in the living room while Müller was in the bath. We found the unused cable on the table in the living room.”
    â€œHmm,” I said. “And there weren’t any fingerprints on the cables?”
    â€œNone,” he said, with a sigh. He had clearly hoped there would be, until the results of the laboratory analysis arrived. “It’s pointless looking for fingerprints in hotel rooms so we don’t usually bother about them.
However, this time, we checked the whisky bottle, the socket and the cables. It’s as if the murderer wore gloves, which is ridiculous. The murder victim would obviously have been suspicious of someone wandering around wearing gloves. But there wasn’t a single fingerprint on the extension leads.”
    â€œMaybe the murder victim didn’t have time to get suspicious,” I said.
    â€œUnlikely. The murderer would have opened the door quietly, entered and fixed the leads together while Müller was in the bath…