‘If he is out . . .’
‘He could be,’ İkmen said. He put his ear close up to the door and heard the sound of some sort of cop or cowboy show shooting away on a TV set inside. ‘Someone’s in.’ He banged on the door with his fist and shouted, ‘Police! Open up!’
He hadn’t wanted to attract attention, but apparently that was what was needed, because as well as several neighbours poking their heads out of several doors, the door in front of him slowly opened too.
‘Yes? What is it? What do you want?’ The voice was old and reedy and it belonged to a tiny woman whose back was so hunched, her face looked as if it was growing out of her chest.
‘Good evening, Aunt,’ İkmen said. ‘We’ve come to see a man called Osman Yavuz.’
‘Why?’
‘Does he live here?’ İkmen asked.
The old woman looked around with tiny, hostile eyes, and seeing that many of her neighbours had now gathered outside their apartments, she said, ‘Come inside. Too many ears out here.’
As they stepped over the threshold and took off their shoes, İkmen and Ayşe were aware of the scorn with which the old woman regarded them. They also noticed that the apartment where she lived was small, dark and smelt of sour cooking oil.
‘Osman isn’t here any more,’ the old woman said as she led them through into a tiny lounge that was crammed with ancient, creaking sofas. On the sofas, cushions of all sizes and colours were piled up in chaotic pyramids. On top of some of these structures sat a range of various-coloured Persian cats. There were places for humans to sit, just not very many. The old woman walked over to the television in the corner and turned it off. ‘American rubbish!’
‘Where has Osman gone?’ Ayşe asked.
The old woman shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe back to his mother.’
‘You’re not his mother?’
She laughed. ‘Osman is eighteen!’ she said. ‘I am his grandmother.’
‘So his mother . . .’
‘His mother was the wife of my son,’ the old woman said.
‘Was?’
Her face fell into a purse-shaped collection of wrinkles. ‘My son died,’ she said. ‘Years ago. His wife went back to be with her family in Bursa. What’s all this about? Why do you want Osman?’
‘We need to talk to him about one of his friends,’ İkmen said.
‘Who? He doesn’t have any friends.’
The old woman, like the officers, remained standing. Her small eyes looked up at them, filled with suspicion.
‘We need to speak to your grandson,’ Ayşe repeated. ‘Why don’t you know where Osman has gone?’
‘He’s eighteen. He’s always coming and going. I don’t know what he does!’
‘We’ll need to have his mother’s telephone number,’ İkmen said.
‘She doesn’t have one,’ the old woman replied. ‘Have you tried his mobile?’
‘The number is out of service,’ İkmen said.
Now the old woman frowned. Suddenly she realised what had happened. ‘You have Osman’s number already?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘How . . .’
‘We’ll need his mother’s address,’ İkmen said. ‘Can you write that down for us?’
She said that she could, and shuffled off to her bedroom to get a pen and some paper. As soon as she had gone, Ayşe said, ‘What about the photographs on the phone? Do we mention them?’
‘What? To the old lady?’ İkmen shook his head. ‘Not even to the boy’s mother, if we find her.’
‘Mmm.’ Ayşe frowned.
‘The boy will have to know that we have his phone number, because we managed to trace him through it. But if he knows for sure that we’ve seen those photographs on Gözde’s phone, he might bolt.’
‘If I were him, I would,’ Ayşe said.
‘Depends what he’s done – if anything.’
Ayşe lowered her voice. ‘Sir, he has naked photographs of that girl on his phone!’
İkmen shrugged. ‘We think,’ he said. ‘She certainly sent them to him. Doesn’t mean he asked for them. Doesn’t mean he had anything to do with her death.’
The old woman shuffled back in and shoved a piece of paper into İkmen’s hand.
‘I just hope that he has maybe got a job now,’ she said wearily. ‘It does no good for men to be lying in their beds doing nothing but sending texts and dreaming. A man without work is a useless thing. What is more, a man with no work is a dangerous thing. They get up to no good . . .’
Mehmet Süleyman was not a great devotee of the internet. It had its uses, clearly, and e-mail was very convenient, but he couldn’t sit looking at it for hours on end like some people. The Make the Most of İstanbul site was, however, of interest, peripheral as it was to the suspicious fire in Beşiktaş. Jane Ford, the wife of Richard Ford, the man who had first discovered the blaze, administered the site.
Make the Most of İstanbul provided a lot of information. There were sections covering property, health, education, professional services, shopping and cultural events. There were book and music reviews, and forums for discussion of topics like the upcoming ban on smoking in enclosed spaces. When he came across this, Süleyman looked at the cigarette between his fingers and sighed. Come July, he’d have to go outside the station if he wanted to smoke. İkmen, who always had been and remained a voracious smoker, was currently living in denial about this. But he too, in the end, would have to conform.
Süleyman clicked on another category and found that Make the Most of İstanbul had a ‘contacts’ section. Part friendship site and part lonely hearts column, it was peopled by men and women nervously trying to build lives in an alien city. Like displaced people everywhere, their aim, albeit unconscious in some cases, was to cling to what they knew, thereby relegating the exotic ‘other’ in which they found themselves to the periphery, albeit a colourful one.
American male, 34, tall, athletic, Harvard grad. Alone in İstanbul. Wants to meet slim, health-conscious American female, 28–34, for fun, sightseeing and possibly romance.
American male, American female. It was so specific. No other kind of Westerner would do. Not a Frenchwoman, not a Briton, not an Australian. And it wasn’t just confined to Americans either. Almost everyone, it seemed, wanted to stay in their own ethnic or religious niche. The exceptions, more coyly worded, were no less specific, no less needy.
Professional Spanish lady (40) would like to meet distinguished Turkish gentleman for companionship. Any age group considered.
Any age group . . . He imagined her. Professional, competent, attractive, but forty and therefore willing to take whatever she could get. It was sad, but then loneliness of any sort was never pretty. He lived in a house full of people and yet he was alone. Once again he and his wife were not getting on, and as was his custom, he was beginning to spend his time elsewhere: with Çetin İkmen, at work and, just in the last month, with a certain gypsy woman in what had once been the old Jewish neighbourhood of Balat. Gonca was somewhere in her fifties. A respected artist, she was also a handsome, sexy and vibrant character who made him laugh. He knew it was wrong, but Gonca had been there for him before and she was, especially when he was unhappy, a very hard habit to break.
He came out of the contacts section and began looking at some of the articles that readers of the site had submitted. They had titles like ‘Walking in the Princes’ Islands’, ‘My First Ramazan’ and ‘Street Vendors of Old İstanbul’. He read a few excerpts. He found them informed, earnest, worthy. These were people who obviously cared about where they were and wanted to actively engage with it. That said, he also detected an air of condescension, particularly in the reader submissions. Local ‘colour’ was not always what these writers believed it to be. Some ‘İstanbul customs’ were not native to the city at all; rather they had been imported to it from Anatolia by economic migrants. What was more, much of this commentary was quite uncritical. True, to criticise the practices of a country tha
t was not your own was not easy. But even a staunch patriot like Süleyman found some of the very fulsome praise rather difficult to stomach.
He spent another half an hour flicking through various menus, and then he quit and shut down his computer. It was already midnight and he still hadn’t eaten anything. His wife, Zelfa, would have prepared something hours before. That was almost certainly in the bin by this time. He took his jacket off the back of his chair, lit up a cigarette and left his office slowly.
Chapter 6
* * *
Fire investigation was, the pathologist knew, a very exacting and specific field of study. So when he received a call from a member of the investigative team telling him that the fire at the apartment in Beşiktaş had been set deliberately, he was in no doubt that that was correct. Someone had poured petrol over Gözde Seyhan’s head as she stood in the middle of her bedroom, and then ignited her with either a match or a lighter. The theory concurred with his own opinion. The investigator also told him that from the angle at which the petrol had been poured, he was certain the girl could not have done it herself.
Because a volatile accelerant had been used, the girl hadn’t stood a chance. The flames had burned upwards, inflicting massive damage upon her head and torso, while her legs, which had attracted rather less petrol than the other parts of her body, were comparatively unscathed. The room had burned as it had because of Gözde’s abortive attempts to put herself out. Not knowing that a petrol blaze, unlike an unaccelerated fire, couldn’t be smothered, she had attempted to extinguish the flames by rolling on the floor. During the course of this action, she had brushed up against her bed, the curtains and some other fabrics that were scattered around the room. A lot of highly flammable man-made fibres were involved, and so the whole area had ignited and then burned with a ferociousness that would not have happened had Gözde just simply dropped where she stood.
Dr Arto Sarkissian looked down at the blackened remains of the girl and tried not to picture what she had been through that day. But he couldn’t. Questions like, had she screamed? Had she even had time to make any sort of sound? kept on running over and across his mind in loathsome waves. Who had done this to her? Who could do such a thing to another human being? And why? Çetin İkmen, as well as the fire investigators, was of the opinion that the girl’s death was some sort of honour killing. But the doctor had established that Gözde Seyhan was a virgin, and so why anyone would have cause, if that was indeed even a vaguely appropriate term, to kill her was a mystery. But then he knew little of honour killings, and how and why they happened. Rare, if on the increase in the city, they had until recently been recognised as being a rural or tribal phenomenon. Personally, Arto had rarely come into contact with a body strongly suspected to have died as a result of an honour killing, until now. Some people he knew muttered about a perceived rise in Islamic fundamentalism. But Arto, though a Christian himself, always refuted the notion that honour killing was a Muslim phenomenon.
‘Every society does it,’ he would say to friends who insisted upon discussing such things. ‘Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus. It’s something that’s more about the notion of honour in a community, whatever that is, than a religious construct. If a man cannot keep his women “in order”, then he loses face. It says far more to me about men than it does about religion. What ghastly control freaks we all are!’
Whatever his opinion, it wasn’t going to help Gözde Seyhan. She’d died in agony, her skin roasting, every breath she took feeding the flames that were consuming her ruined lungs.
Hamid İdiz had taught what he liked to call ‘pianoforte’ for over thirty years. His mother had been a concert pianist, and although Hamid had never attained those dizzy professional heights himself, he had always led a life ‘in music’, as he liked to put it. From his small apartment on Efe Lane in the fashionable suburb of Şişli, he operated a small but exclusive piano school, which had, he hoped, given several generations of İstanbullu children a greater appreciation of music.
Hamid Bey, as he liked to be called, was an easily recognisable local character in Şişli. Resplendent in English tweed suits, winter and summer, he also sported the kind of luxuriant moustache so beloved by his Ottoman forebears. This he waxed every day and twirled between his fingers obsessively as his often criminally untalented pupils attempted to play. But he was a good teacher and he knew it, and his students, for the most part, liked him. There was, however, another side to his character of which most of his students and all of their wealthy parents were unaware. Hamid İdiz liked to cruise. Sashaying down the middle of the main İstiklal Street in Beyoğlu, his hips swinging provocatively from side to side, he loved to attract like-minded men and take them into tight, dark alleyways. Under such circumstances full sex was rarely a possibility, but a frequently fumbled foray into mutual masturbation or oral sex gave him the high that he, and whoever he was with, needed. Sometimes he would develop a fancy for one of his young pupils, but generally, his adventures in Beyoğlu would mean that he could resist temptation. He did have ‘friends’, too – men equally as furtive and closeted as himself who would visit for a glass of wine, some classical music and the passive sex that Hamid Bey so enjoyed.
It was two hours before his first lesson of that day when a person arrived he had not expected to see. They kissed, and excited by the spontaneity of the arrival, Hamid Bey went to his bedroom, took his clothes off and exhorted his paramour to, ‘Take me!’ He closed his eyes, ready for the delicious pain mixed with pleasure that he so craved. But it never came. Instead he felt a sharp, cold pain across his throat, and as blood poured down his chest and on to his nice satin sheets, Hamid Bey choked and then died.
‘Well, Osman Yavuz would seem to be on the missing list,’ Çetin İkmen said as he replaced his telephone receiver and lit up a cigarette.
Ayşe Farsakoğlu, who was also smoking, pointed at İkmen’s cigarette and said, ‘Remember the ban comes into force in July.’
İkmen growled, ‘Don’t remind me.’
As quickly as she had brought the subject up, Ayşe changed it. ‘That was Bursa, I take it?’
‘A sergeant went to see the boy’s mother. She claims not to have seen him for six months. She thought she was at his grandmother’s in Beşiktaş.’
‘Did the sergeant believe her?’
‘He told me he saw no reason not to,’ İkmen said. ‘Apparently the mother was very forthcoming about the boy. It would seem that trouble follows him.’
‘The grandmother intimated that he was lazy.’
‘Jobless, lazy and given to random acts of petty vandalism, so his mother told the sergeant,’ İkmen said. ‘Although whether we can swallow that whole, I don’t know. Apparently the widow Yavuz has five other kids, younger than Osman, to take care of, as well as an elderly mother and father. Maybe she just wanted lazy Osman out of the way.’
‘Shift him over to her husband’s mother.’
‘Indeed.’
They both sat in silence for a moment, savouring what would soon be a luxury of the past – the ability to smoke at their desks. Neither or them welcomed the ban, although Ayşe had said that she would probably use its imposition as an excuse to try and give up. İkmen, on the other hand, had stated to everyone that he had absolutely no intention of quitting. ‘I won’t be told what to do with my own bloody body!’ he said to anyone who would listen. ‘It’s mine and I’ll do whatever I want with it!’
‘Well we know that whatever else Osman Yavuz may have done, he didn’t take Gözde Seyhan’s virginity,’ Ayşe said. İkmen had spoken to the pathologist Arto Sarkissian earlier, when this fact, as well as the grim news that the fire had been beyond doubt deliberate, had been given to him. Shortly afterwards he had officially opened a murder investigation.
‘Gözde must have had some sort of relationship with the boy,’ İkmen said. ‘People don’t send naked pictures of themselves to strangers, do they?’
Ayşe shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Gözde wa
s kept inside by her parents. On one level she lived a traditional rural life, and yet she was surrounded by city mores and values, and of course, like a lot of these women, she watched a lot of television. I think that girls like Gözde are often the victims of mixed messages, sir. Mother and father tell her she has to stay in, stay pure, not answer back. TV shows her a world of scantily clad R and B singers, material wealth she cannot even hope to aspire to and lots of attractive men. Maybe she and the boy did meet, somehow, perhaps when she was hanging out washing. Clearly they swapped phone numbers, although whether the boy requested those photographs has to be open to question. Not all of these covered country girls are as innocent in their heads as they would have their parents believe.’
İkmen, who knew his deputy to be a committed feminist, said, ‘I can’t believe you are defending the boy.’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘He may well be as guilty as hell. I mean, we all know about sexting, don’t we?’
The İstanbul police had dealt with several of these cases over the previous twelve months. Basically young, very naive girls were targeted by unscrupulous men and boys to either send them naked photographs of themselves, usually via their phones, or to ‘perform’ on short video clips for the pleasure of these males. It was a kind of blackmail. Either the girls did as they were told, or their conservative parents (and the parents of these girls were always conservative) would be told lies about them. Such lies, if the parents were so inclined, could lead to the girls being in mortal danger.
‘But I believe we need to be cautious,’ Ayşe continued. ‘This looks like an honour killing. But it might not be.’
‘We need to find Osman Yavuz,’ İkmen said. ‘We also need to find out who owns the petrol can we found at the Seyhans’ apartment.’
A Noble Killing Page 5
