If I had been the officer on that case I would have arrested him too, on day one, and I would have been right to.
He was on bail for five months.
He was suspended from the hospital on the twentieth of January and dismissed in the April.
And the estate was frozen, because you cannot distribute an estate while a beneficiary is under investigation in connection with the death.
Which means that the money I gave that young man to save his sister’s life made it impossible for him to save his sister’s life for eight months.
Elif Aksoy was fourteen and deteriorating, and her operation did not happen in the February as it could have. It happened in the September.
I did that. Not Bettina. Me, with a pen, on the eighth of January, trying to be clever.
What cleared him.
The video.
Meriel Dane asked me eleven questions on that recording and four of them were about him.
Who suggested this? — I did.
Whose idea was the solicitor? — Mine. He said he would ring, and he did, and he left the room.
How long have you known Mr Aksoy? — Nine days.
And then: What would you say to somebody who said he had influenced you?
And I said: “I’d say they should talk to him for ten minutes and then tell me how they think he managed it.”
And that is the sentence that, in the June, five months later, ended it.
Not on its own. There was phone data and rota records and a nurse called Ida Bramwell who had been in the corridor. But that is the one everybody quotes, including the officer who told him.
A sixty-one-year-old solicitor asked a question on a Thursday morning that nobody in that room thought was necessary, and it took a man off bail five months later.
She has told me — and I mean she has told my file, because I was dead by then — that she asks it every single time and that she has asked it since 1994 and that it has never once mattered before.
The money.
