Copyright © 2011 Barbara Nadel
The right of Barbara Nadel to be indentified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 978 0 7553 7163 1
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.headline.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Dedication
Cast of Characters
Prelude
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
About the Author
Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time and has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel Deadly Web in 2005. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Francis Hancock series set during World War Two.
To all my wonderful female friends, to Kathy, Pat, Ruth, Jeyda, Elsie, Sarah, Jenny, Vivian, Gilda and to my agent, Juliet.
Cast of Characters
* * *
Çetin İkmen – middle-aged İstanbul police inspector
Mehmet Süleyman – İstanbul police inspector, İkmen’s protégé
Commissioner Ardıç – İkmen and Süleyman’s boss
Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu – İkmen’s deputy
Sergeant İzzet Melik – Süleyman’s deputy
Metin İskender – younger İstanbul police inspector
Dr Arto Sarkissian – police pathologist, an ethnic Armenian
Constable Hikmet Yıldız – İstanbul police constable
İsmail Yıldız – Hikmet’s brother
Hatice – police psychologist
Flower – one of Süleyman’s informants
Gonca – Süleyman’s gypsy mistress
Şukru– Gonca’s brother
Hamid İdiz – piano teacher based in fashionable Şişli district
Ali Reza Zafir– teenage pupil of Hamid İdiz
Murad Emin – teenage pupil of Hamid İdiz
Izabella Madrid – piano teacher based in Balat district
Cahit Seyhan – father of victim Gözde Seyhan
Saadet Seyhan – Cahit’s wife
Lokman Seyhan – Cahit and Saadet’s older son
Kenan Seyhan – Cahit and Saadet’s younger son, Lokman’s brother
Gözde Seyhan – Cahit and Saadet’s daughter
Feray Akol – Cahit Seyhan’s sister
Nesrin and Aykan Akol – Feray’s daughter and son
Osman Yavuz – computer geek
Richard and Jane Ford – American expats
Tayfun Ergin – gangster
Cem Koç – chancer
Rafik Bey – grocer
Mustafa Bey – nargile salon owner
Şenol – police computer expert
Prelude
* * *
His feet pounded against the dusty road surface to the jagged beat of his heart. Every so often he had to jump a brick or a pile of rubbish, skirt around a new and pristine car that at one time would have made him stop and stare.
But now, at that moment, his existence was only about survival. Physically he had to get away. That was the easy part. There was also getting away in his head, and that was quite another matter. If only she hadn’t turned to look at him! Before, when he’d rehearsed the whole thing in his mind, he’d imagined that once she had caught, she’d just fall to the floor. The pain surely would make her drop like a sack of pomegranates. Instead she’d just stood there, turned and calmly looked at him. Try as he might, in the few minutes since he’d left her, he couldn’t make that terrible glance anything other than what it had been. Hatred. He knew she had known what she had done. She must have realised that there would be repercussions! Not that her crime and its ramifications made him feel any better now. In a way, all of that was practically irrelevant.
What was relevant was that he felt very differently from the way he had thought he would feel. He’d taken a human life! He’d taken a human life and it didn’t feel good. It didn’t give him a sense of being a man, of doing what was right, of feeling really honoured or brave or anything except fear, horror and regret. Maybe later, when he wasn’t running like a frightened lamb, he might feel differently. Perhaps when he himself was safe . . . He looked up at the tall, blank apartment buildings that lined every street that he ran along and he wondered what, if anything, the unknown people in those apartments had seen. He didn’t know the area. That had been one of his advantages. It was also, now, to him, a drawback. Not knowing the area and the people meant that he didn’t know, given that someone must have seen him, how that person or anyone else in the district would react. He turned a tight corner into a wider street that looked as if it might be quite important.
It was while running down that wider, more prestigious street that he was passed by a speeding fire engine. As it whipped past his shoulder, sucking his hair in its direction as it went, he found himself screaming.
The darkness and the impenetrability of the smoke was typical of a fire that had taken hold at least twenty minutes before. The three-man team on the high-pressure hose were experienced fire officers who knew how dangerous their situation was.
The blaze had first been reported by a neighbour. A foreigner, he had been panicking when he spoke to the control room. But his shaky, weirdly accented message had been relayed to the station eventually, and the appliance and its crew had left immediately. They’d all known that getting from the fire station to the site of the blaze would take too much time. It was always the same. Unless the fire was on one of the big, broad boulevards off Taksim Square, in the very centre of the city, they had problems. İstanbul was an ancient city. It had been built for ancient forms of transport like horses, carts and sedan chairs. Tiny little streets and alleyways like this one in the district of Beşiktaş were difficult to get to, and even once the appliance had arrived, the logistics of entering some of the tortuously laid-out buildings were a nightmare.
When the officers had arrived, they had been able to see the fire easily from the street. One of the many gawping onlookers had told them that the blazing apartment belonged to a family called Seyhan. They had tw
o sons and a daughter. The young men, at least, had been seen leaving for work earlier in the day. Although the fire officers had to haul the hose up a flight of stairs to the front entrance of the apartment building, they didn’t have any further to climb. The Seyhans’ apartment was to the right of the stairs leading to the upper floors. The front door was smashed out with an axe. Once inside, had the team not already been wearing breathing apparatus, they would have begun to lose consciousness. The fire, so it seemed, had its origins in a room at the far right-hand end of the central rectangular hall. Dense black and grey smoke curled from the open doorway and across the hall ceiling like tendrils of evil chiffon. Apartment blocks like this were full of plastic foam. It stuffed the chairs and beds of the newly arrived migrants from the countryside – the typical residents of such buildings. Back in their sparse Anatolian villages, these people had rested upon horsehair cushions and mattresses covered with intricate and often very old tapestries. But they had swapped those old things for bright, shiny modern furnishings that looked clean but which, when burnt, gave off fumes that could kill a person who just breathed them in once.
Slowly and cautiously the team moved forward. The smoke in that room was now so dense that not even a scrap of light could be seen coming in from the street outside. The door frames, though thin and now scorched, looked like the edges of a black and ruined mouth. A gateway, the fire officers all knew, that could so easily lead them to their deaths. Even experienced hearts beat faster, the sound of breathing behind masks became short and ragged. Hauling the thick and heavy hose after them, they moved into position. A beat, a moment passed as they all stared into the swirling darkness before them. And then . . .
And then . . . ‘Flashover!’ Only one of them said it, his words muffled by his mask. But they all knew what it was. The smoke, finally eaten by the strengthening flames, disappeared in a terrible conflagration of red, white and gold. Everything was illuminated: chairs, cupboards, a bed; even the window, once blackened, now burned in shades of bright yellow as the soot on the pane incinerated. The team stood, as they did at moments of flashover, motionless. Temporarily pushed back by the heat as well as briefly awed by the violent actions of the fire (one never, ever became accustomed to such a thing), a half-step back was quickly followed by the activation of the hose and the beginning of the battle these men were duty-bound to win. As they moved slowly forwards, the man at the very back of the team thought he saw something move on the floor just beyond the entrance to the room. At the time, he felt sure it had to be just a low-level flame.
Chapter 1
* * *
‘That shop always used to sell beer and wine,’ Inspector Çetin İkmen said as he slouched gloomily away from the small street corner grocer’s shop. ‘What does he mean, it’s his right not to sell alcohol if he doesn’t want to? It’s his duty to sell whatever his customers want!’
İkmen’s companion, his friend and colleague Inspector Mehmet Süleyman, smiled. Although much younger than İkmen, he had served as a police officer with the older man for over twenty years and so he knew him very well. It wasn’t that İkmen had particularly wanted to have a drink. He’d gone into the shop to buy a couple of cans of Efes lager to take home with him for the evening. It was the reason why the shopkeeper hadn’t been able to let him have the beer that irked İkmen. He looked up and down the busy Ortabahçe Street and said, ‘This isn’t some back end of Beşiktaş! This is one of the main thoroughfares!’
His friend raised one of his finely curved eyebrows and said, ‘I take it we are talking about . . .’
‘People come in to the city from villages in Anatolia to find work, and I have no problem with that,’ İkmen said. ‘But the owner of that shop only took it over last month and already he’s cut out alcohol.’
‘If people are practising and sincere Muslims, they can’t drink,’ Süleyman said.
İkmen lit a cigarette and then said gloomily, ‘I thought this area was supposed to be gentrifying. I thought Beşiktaş was meant to be the next Nişantaşı. A place where the middle classes move in, designer shops and bars spring up and massive four-by-four vehicles line the streets.’
Süleyman smiled. İkmen, unlike himself, came from purely working-class stock. In that respect he’d had more in common with the shopkeeper he’d just argued with than he did with his colleague. But Çetin İkmen, unlike the shopkeeper, was not from some village in the far east, up near the border with Armenia. He was an İstanbullu born and bred, and so, although nominally a Muslim, he did not have a problem with alcohol and in fact at times enjoyed drinking it rather more than was good for him.
‘I am far from being an enemy of religion,’ İkmen continued. ‘Anyone can practise his or her religion to his or her heart’s content as far as I am concerned. Just don’t try and influence me. Let me do what secular people do, and if I end up in hell, then so be it. It’s my soul. My business.’
Ever since the Turkish Republic had been founded by Atatürk in 1923, the country had been, officially, a secular state. That hadn’t changed. What had altered was that the ruling political party since 2002, those who actually ran the state, derived originally from an organisation with Islamic roots. This, allied with increased migration from the countryside to the cities of people with a more conservative standpoint, meant that religion and its outward symbols was much more visible than it had been. Unlike Turkey in the 1950s and 60s, when Çetin İkmen had been growing up, religion was now a hot topic for discussion; and observance, in some areas, was actively approved. For a secular republican like İkmen, that was not always easy to accept. Although his wife was and always had been a woman of faith, Çetin had been raised to believe that anything not rooted in sound, preferably scientific fact was mere superstition. His colleague, Mehmet Süleyman, though in agreement with the older man in many ways, wasn’t so sure. He’d been brought up in a family once part of the pre-republican imperial Ottoman elite, and although he didn’t practise it, Islam was still an influence on his life.
‘This area is becoming popular with bankers, accountants, PR people and the like,’ Süleyman said. ‘It’s very convenient and there are some nice apartments here. But Çetin, there are still a lot of streets that look as if they’ve been dropped in whole from one of the eastern provinces. If you remember, when Nişantaşı began to gentrify, there were still some very poor areas until really quite recently.’
‘Yes, but if the professional classes are moving in, then why stop selling alcohol? Bankers and media types drink it . . .’
‘Not all of them.’ Süleyman took his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and lit up. ‘Some of the young professionals in particular are rediscovering religion now. That shopkeeper probably does come from somewhere like Trabzon or Van, but his customers may very well have been raised in very smart Bosphorus yalıs.’
İkmen raised his eyes impatiently to the sky. ‘What the . . .’
It was at this point that they heard the sound of people shouting. They all screamed out the same thing: ‘Fire!’
The two men looked first at each other and then in the direction of the sound. And although they couldn’t actually see any sign of flames or smoke in the street or on the horizon, they began to make their way towards the rising tide of panicking human voices.
‘We will,’ İkmen said as he began to break into a somewhat breathless jog, ‘continue this conversation at another time.’
The fire engine was in the middle of the road. But then because Egyptian Garden Street was so narrow anyway, there wasn’t anywhere else that it could be. Amazingly, there was a man in a sports utility vehicle behind the appliance, screaming out of the window and banging his hand down on the horn. Apparently he had to get to a meeting and nothing else in the universe mattered.
Çetin İkmen put his head and his police badge up to the car window and smiled. ‘You could back up,’ he said. ‘We can get the vehicle behind you to move.’
The man, who was very young and very red-faced, gulped, lo
oked down at the floor of his car and hunched his shoulders. This was something İkmen had seen in the narrow streets of İstanbul many times before. Big car, young, inexperienced driver, tiny alleyway. ‘Inspector!’ he called over to Süleyman, who was talking to one of the fire officers. ‘Could you back this car up for this gentleman?’
His colleague, who was also very well aware of this phenomenon, ran over with his hands outstretched for the keys to the ignition. İkmen walked to where one of the fire officers was in conversation with a man with bright ginger hair. The once dusty street was now covered in mud from the water hose, and had to be very carefully negotiated. Officers were still inside the building, where the fire, though no longer raging, had yet to be brought completely under control.
Badge in hand, İkmen introduced himself to the fire officer, who turned away from the ginger-headed man and took the policeman to one side.
‘He’s American,’ he said, as he tipped his head back towards the man he’d just been speaking to. ‘He noticed a smell of burning in the lobby. Then he saw smoke coming out underneath the front door of the apartment. It was he who called us.’
İkmen looked back at the tall, rather pallid man and said, ‘He looks shaken up.’
‘His own apartment is two storeys above the fire,’ the officer said. ‘He knows most of the people in the block, including the family on the ground floor.’
Süleyman, who was now inside the sports utility vehicle, waved an arm to indicate that the car behind should start to back up. Some builders who had been working on a nearby construction site sauntered over to the back of the crowd in front of the apartment building.
‘The family who rent the apartment are called Seyhan,’ the officer continued. ‘Must’ve been out when the fire started, as far as we can tell. I don’t think that there’s anything here for you, Inspector. Of course we won’t know for sure until the fire is out . . .’
A Noble Killing Page 1
