“I was drunk off my arse!” Janson protested, slipping into a lower-middle-class Home Counties accent. “Bloody Turks. This girl promised me a ‘private show’—for all I knew she was talking about belly dancing!”

“I’ll just bet,” the man replied with a leering smirk. “Such an innocent you are.” After several days of having to jolly along his paid-up wards, he was relishing the opportunity to stick it to a customer.

“But to leave me here! It was a packaged holiday, all right—but that wasn’t supposed to be part of the package! Strand me here like they couldn’t give a toss?”

“Happens. Happens. One of the lads goes on a binge or gets lost. You can’t expect the whole group to miss the flight home because of one person. That’s not reasonable, now, is it?”

“Sodding hell, I’ve been a complete bleedin’ idiot,” Janson said, remorse creeping into his voice. “Lettin’ the little head do the thinking, not the big one, if you see.”

“‘Who among us?’ like the Good Book says,” the man replied, his tone softening. “Now tell me the name again?”

“Cavanaugh. Richard Cavanaugh.” Lifting the name from a Holiday Express manifest had taken him a full twenty minutes at a cybercafé on Kibris Sehitleri Street.

“Right. Dicky Cavanaugh takes a dirty holiday to Turkey and learns a lesson in clean living.” Needling the hapless customer—one whose misadventures left him in no position to file a complaint—seemed to amuse him no end.

Janson glowered.

The platinum-haired man called the Izmir affiliate of Thomas Cook Travel on his Vodafone and explained the customer’s predicament, leaving out the interesting parts. He repeated the name twice. He remained on the line for ten minutes, doing progressively less talking and more listening.

He shook his head, laughing, after he hung up. “Hah! They think you’ve arrived at Stansted two hours ago, with your group.”

“Bloody hell?” Janson looked incredulous.

“Happens,” the man said philosophically, savoring his own worldliness. “Happens. The manifest says a tour group of twenty is arriving, nobody wants to redo all the paperwork, so the computer thinks all twenty’s accounted for. Couldn’t happen on commercial service, but charter airlines are a bit dodgier. Oops—don’t tell the boss I said that. ‘Cut-rate prices for a top-rate experience,’ is what we like to say. If the computer was right, you’d be larking about in your optician’s shop at Uxbridge, instead of quaking in your boots in bloody Izmir and wondering if you’re ever going to see home and hearth again.” A sidewise glance. “Any good, was she?”

“What?”

“The bird. Was she any good?”

Janson was abashed. “That’s the tragic part, see. I was too pissed to remember.”

The man gave him a quick squeeze on the shoulder. “I think I can fix things for you this time,” he said. “But mind you, we’re not in the dirty-holiday business. Keep it in your trousers, mate. Like my girl says, careful you don’t poke someone’s eye out.” He roared with laughter at his own coarse wit. “And you with a bloody spectacles shop!”