A Passion for Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Mr Roberts?’

  He looked around for the source of the deep, male voice and found himself looking at a tall, incredibly handsome man in early middle age. The female officer who had collected him from Atatürk Airport was also looking up at the tall, handsome man with rapt attention. Lee inwardly bowed to the far superior competition and then stood up and offered the man his hand.

  ‘Lee Roberts.’ He then noticed that the man had his right arm in a sling. ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘A little accident. It is nothing,’ the man said. Then he told him his name, ‘Inspector Süleyman.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Inspector.’

  Süleyman moved behind his desk and sat down. ‘Please do sit down, Mr Roberts,’ he said.

  Lee Roberts sat.

  ‘Now I apologise that Inspector İkmen cannot be here,’ Süleyman said. ‘But something very, how do you say? Something very pressing has arisen and he must go to deal with that. Scotland Yard are satisfied we understand that you are the grandson of the Private Victor Roberts who was the servant of T. E. Lawrence. You do, Mr Roberts, have the documents they told you to bring?’

  ‘Yes.’ He took the photograph of the carpet out of his pocket and then dug inside his hand luggage for his passport and birth certificate plus a sheaf of documents that had belonged to his late grandfather – birth certificate, military pay-books etc.

  Süleyman passed a cursory eye over this paperwork before he said, ‘We will need to make photocopies and you will need to sign a document saying that we have given the carpet back to you. I will have a copy in English for you to look at.’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ Lee said.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  Lee Roberts could very easily have left it at that, taken the Kerman, gone back to Britain, and lived happily ever after. It’s what his father would have done. But Lee was more like his late grandfather than his own old man. After all, it hadn’t been Victor who had been so happy to find the Kerman in that antique shop in İstanbul all those years ago. He’d only allowed Stanley, Lee’s father, to buy the carpet on condition that they both at some point had a stab at finding its rightful owner. But after Antalya and the theft of the carpet that had been impossible. Victor, at least, had died a very sad man because of it.

  ‘Inspector Süleyman,’ Lee said after a pause. ‘I have something to tell you.’

  ‘Oh? What is that?’

  ‘I don’t own the Lawrence carpet,’ Lee Roberts said. ‘Victor, my grandfather, gave it away here in İstanbul, back in 1920. The person he gave it to is the only rightful owner.’

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  İkmen looked down at his watch and then turned to Metin İskender. ‘We’d better get to the airport,’ he said. ‘Pick up this other “Matilda Melly” from the Bulgarians.’

  ‘What do you think they’re talking about?’ İskender replied as he tipped his head in the direction of Peter Melly in seemingly rapt conversation with his wife’s appointed lawyer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ İkmen said as he lit up a cigarette and then leaned against the corridor wall. ‘But I think that, in some way, Peter Melly still loves his wife.’

  ‘I didn’t know that he didn’t love her,’ İskender said.

  ‘I’m saying that he does.’ İkmen smiled. ‘Not that he is necessarily in love with her, you understand. Peter Melly has had affairs. But I think that Matilda is essential to him in that way that a lot of long-term wives are essential to their husbands. There is a comfort in the familiarity.’

  İskender looked at him slightly questioningly. After all, İkmen himself had been married for a very long time. Not that he felt in even the slightest way that Fatma was just little more than a comfortable familiarity. Fatma İkmen was many things but a mere habit was not one of them.

  While first İkmen and then İskender finished their cigarettes, they watched Peter Melly and the lawyer who had been allocated to his wife talk in a huddle at a corner of the corridor. The lawyer, who İkmen recognised as one of the more fluent English speakers, was considerably overweight and frequently mopped his sweating brow with a handkerchief. Far too much rich food and probably liberal amounts of alcohol too, İkmen surmised, and then, looking down at his own bony fingers, he smiled. Not that this fat, overblown lawyer would, if he were right, do Mrs Melly very much good. If he was indeed correct, then Mrs Melly was already as good as lost.

  That this Englishman, Mr Roberts, now said that he didn’t own the Lawrence carpet was not what Mehmet Süleyman had been expecting. The carpet was worth a lot of money. But he was insisting it wasn’t his. He was also, to Süleyman’s slight irritation, beginning to expound what promised to be a long and possibly rambling story. Although not regretting taking Mr Roberts on on İkmen’s behalf, he nevertheless felt that the older man was more equipped to deal with the Englishman than himself.

  ‘When the First World War ended, this city was occupied by allied troops,’ Lee Roberts said. ‘Mainly, I have to confess, from the UK.’

  Süleyman, who was now smoking a Gauloise, tipped his head to show that he had understood. The Allied occupation of İstanbul at the end of the Great War was not his favourite topic, but Roberts had said he had a story to tell and now he was telling it.

  ‘So Granddad came here with the army,’ the Englishman continued. ‘He told me a bit about it. It wasn’t pretty. There was hunger and despair and . . .’

  ‘Our people had yet to rise again as they did in the War of Independence, Mr Roberts,’ Süleyman said. ‘The Ottomans had been defeated and we do not, believe me, take defeat well.’

  ‘No, well . . .’ Süleyman looked as if he could have been a general or something in years gone by. It had not been often in his life that Lee Roberts had come across such a haughty bearing. He silently thanked God for the presence of the female sergeant who had got his tea and appeared to be a far easier character all round.

  ‘So,’ Lee Roberts said, ‘Granddad was in İstanbul with the Lawrence carpet. He really treasured it, you know. Colonel Lawrence had been good to him. Granddad did some things in this city that later he was not proud of but there were some that he was proud of. The main one being when he rescued a lady from a gang of drunken sailors.’

  ‘A Turkish lady?’

  ‘Yes. Granddad said that her face was covered by a veil. He never in all the time that he was with her saw her whole face. But she had, he said, amazing eyes.’

  ‘And Victor Roberts rescued her?’

  ‘Yes. I think, reading between the lines – Granddad was quite a prude really, always found it difficult to actually give things their proper names – that the sailors were trying to rape the woman. By a combination of shouting, threatening them with his pistol and pushing them off, Granddad managed to free the lady from them.’

  ‘He did a very good thing,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Yes.’ Lee Roberts smiled. ‘He was a good sort, my granddad. I miss him.’ He turned his head to one side away from the handsome man and, even more importantly, the pretty female police officer. There was no need for either of them to see his tears. Victor had been dead for years, but Lee still mourned him every day. Unlike his own father, his granddad had been a decent, moral man. ‘But anyway,’ he continued, ‘by way of a sort of reward for what Granddad had done, the lady asked him to come to her home so that she could offer him a drink and some food. He tried to decline, knowing how poor the people were at that time, but she insisted and so he escorted her back to what was, he said, a considerable house.’

  ‘She was rich?’

  ‘I think she had been,’ Lee said. ‘The way Granddad told it, she still had servants who lurked around as sort of chaperones really, but very little in the way of food. But she spoke a little English and he could speak a bit of Turkish by that time and so in a weird kind of way they got on. She was a very proud lady, Victor always said, but he knew that she and her servants were starving. For several months he took them food . . .’

  Süleyman
looked at this pale stranger and wondered what on earth his sad story might be leading up to. Although, unlike İkmen, he hadn’t followed the whole Lawrence carpet affair through from the beginning, he was, in spite of the rambling nature of the tale, intrigued.

  ‘He would, he said, turn up when he could which was generally a couple of times a week. As they ate, the lady slipping food underneath her veil, they talked. He told her about his life with his wife and children in North London. She spoke little about her life apart from going over what the servants were doing. But he was all right with that, understanding that the lady was a proper and reserved sort of person.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  Lee Roberts took in a deep breath and then said, ‘Until the day that he gave her the Lawrence carpet, that is.’

  Süleyman frowned. He hoped he was not going to be treated to a tale of western depravity and salaciousness. Victor Roberts had not, he trusted, taken this poor lone Turkish woman for himself and then given her a mere carpet for her troubles? But then he remembered that Roberts had never seen the lady’s face.

  ‘The lady told Granddad, out of the blue, about how she had lost her fiancé in the desert of Arabia. Apparently he hadn’t even got to the, what do they call it, the theatre of war, the battle, when he died. She mourned him bitterly. The Ministry of War people here had told her that he had died on a train, one that it was said had been blown up by Colonel Lawrence. So she told my grandfather all this and when he asked her whether she knew where her fiancé had died, she said that she did. It was at Ma’an in Jordan.’ He paused as if for effect.

  Not being as au fait with the whole Lawrence carpet story as İkmen had been, Süleyman just shrugged.

  Lee Roberts, taking the hint, said, ‘The dynamited train at Ma’an was, so Lawrence told my grandfather, where he had obtained the Kerman carpet. The story went that he took it from a very beautiful dying Turkish officer. Then of course the fact that this young man’s blood was all over the carpet was seen as a sort of symbolic victory over him and his people. It was honourable booty, if you like. Now, knowing what we do about T. E. Lawrence, we can put a rather more homoerotic interpretation on this event. Not that my grandfather would have done so, but—’

  ‘Are you saying’, Süleyman asked, ‘that the blood of this lady’s fiancé is on that carpet?’

  ‘No,’ Lee Roberts replied, ‘I’m not. But for my grandfather it was certainly a possibility. And I think that when he heard the lady’s story he felt very sorry for her, which was why he gave her the carpet. It was, he felt, as if he were giving something of her lost love back to her. She wouldn’t take it at first, but when he insisted she, apparently, held the thing up to her veiled face, kissing the wool through the gauze around her mouth. Granddad wasn’t a soft man by any means, but he admitted that the sight of it brought him close to tears.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘She put the carpet in a wooden box to preserve it from harm, which is how Granddad knew what it was when he saw it in the shop in İstanbul back in the eighties. He was shocked to see it. He had, you see, entertained some hope of trying to revisit the lady when he got to İstanbul with my dad. But he knew that if the carpet was for sale, she was in all probability dead. She would never have parted with it willingly, it meant too much to her. And when the man who sold it to him told him that the previous owner of the piece, who was indeed a lady, had died leaving no descendants, Granddad knew he really had to buy it. To him it was the only way to stop it falling into the hands of those who wouldn’t appreciate its meaning.’ He sighed. ‘And then my stupid father went and told the world and his wife about Granddad’s famous carpet . . .’

  ‘When it was stolen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ Süleyman nodded his head while looking at the pale man in front of him. ‘Mr Roberts, forgive me, but if this lady had no descendants . . . I mean, where did she come from in the city? Do you know?’

  ‘A place I understand has completely changed character,’ Lee Roberts replied. ‘Nişantaşı . . .’

  ‘Ah!’ Süleyman smiled. ‘Yes, there were many old mansions of the rich and aristocratic in that area.’ He didn’t add that several of them had been owned by his family. ‘But they burned or fell down a long time ago. Now it is a very smart shopping area.’

  ‘Yes, Granddad told me that when he did go there after he’d bought the carpet he didn’t recognise anything. It made him feel very sad. The carpet dealer told him that the lady, a princess, she was, had died back in the fifties. Poor Granddad, he’d left his return journey far too long. I think that in his own way he mourned the Princess Gözde for the rest of his life. I think he may have been a little in love with her.’

  For a moment, a now frowning Süleyman didn’t say a word. When he did, however, Lee Roberts noticed that the policeman’s face had become very pale.

  ‘The Princess Gözde, you say?’ Süleyman said with a slight tremble in his voice. ‘Are you sure about that name, Mr Roberts?’

  When İkmen and İskender eventually joined Matilda Melly and her lawyer, Mr Aksoy, in Interview Room 2 they noticed that the Englishwoman was looking far more relaxed than she had before. The last sighting they’d had of her had been of a very distressed and agitated woman. The woman had obviously spoken to her lawyer, whom the two policemen had seen talking to her husband, but what had been said they didn’t know.

  ‘So, Mrs Melly, where were we?’ İkmen said as he sat down, looking as he did so at a piece of paper in his hands.

  It wasn’t Matilda Melly who answered, but her lawyer. ‘Çetin Bey,’ he said in English with a smile, ‘the husband of Mrs Melly would like to put right a wrong that he has done to his wife.’

  İkmen looked up from the paper sharply. ‘Oh?’

  Shrugging his thick, meaty shoulders Aksoy said, ‘When Mr Peter Melly said that he did not see his wife on the night that the carpet dealer died, he was wrong.’

  Raising a very sceptical eyebrow at Metin İskender, İkmen said, ‘Oh? And how was he “wrong”?’

  ‘It was, as you say . . .’ He looked towards his client for assistance.

  ‘It was spite, Inspector,’ Matilda Melly said. ‘I will be completely open with you and admit that Yaşar Uzun and myself were lovers. Peter knew . . .’

  ‘So both you and your husband lied to us.’

  ‘Yes, we did. But then what would you do?’ she said. ‘Yaşar was dead, murdered. Peter and I, as lover and lover’s husband, were bound to have been in the frame. We didn’t want that! But then when I left, well, Peter became spiteful. He said that he hadn’t seen me at home on the night that Yaşar died.’

  ‘You sleep apart from your husband, Mrs Melly. Under the circumstances it is not strange that he should not see you when he came home from the carpet show.’

  ‘Yes, but I always sleep with the bedroom door open. He saw me as he walked past my room. Ask him yourself.’

  ‘I will,’ İkmen said and then with a smile he went back to looking down at the piece of paper in his hands.

  Seconds, then a minute, passed during which İkmen continued to look down at the paper and İskender just sat back in his chair with a neutral and calm expression on his face. At length Mr Aksoy leaned across the table towards İkmen and was about to speak when Metin İskender said, ‘Mrs Melly, the paper Inspector İkmen is holding has on it a list of numbers. They are the numbers of the banknotes that were supplied by the HSBC to your husband to give to Yaşar Uzun. The notes found in your suitcase correspond to them. Fifty-seven thousand pounds is the total. Nothing to do with any savings at all.’

  İkmen, watching Matilda Melly over the top of his list, noticed that her expression didn’t change. ‘Mrs Melly,’ he said, ‘did you know that your husband was giving Yaşar Uzun one hundred and twenty thousand pounds for the Kerman carpet?’

  ‘Not at the time, no,’ she said. ‘I was furious when Yaşar told me. I think he thought I’d be pleased, knowing what I felt or rather didn’t feel about Peter.�
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  ‘And yet you pretended to your husband that you didn’t know of such a deal, did you not, Mrs Melly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why was that, please?’

  She looked at Aksoy before replying. ‘Because his playing fast and loose with our money was going to give me the excuse I needed to leave’, she said and then added, ‘with, as you know, almost half of the money that Peter had given Yaşar. All without having to go to court.’

  ‘Did Mr Uzun give you the money or did you take it from his dead body?’

  A look of utter outrage settled on her face. ‘I didn’t kill Yaşar!’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t say that you did,’ İkmen replied. ‘I said only that you might have taken the money from his dead body.’

  ‘But I didn’t! Yaşar gave me that money. I intended to leave Peter anyway . . .’

  ‘For Mr Uzun?’

  ‘God no! Not my type at all!’ she laughed. Then she leaned forwards across the table. ‘Yaşar gave me half the money to shut me up,’ she said. ‘He didn’t want me protesting and spoiling his little deal with Peter and he’d still get a hundred and eighty thousand pounds at the end of it all which is no small amount. I was still unsure as to when was going to be the best time to leave Peter when, as you know, Yaşar suddenly died.’