‘It wasn’t Gözde’s brother Lokman’s?’
‘He says not, and none of his prints were on it,’ İkmen said. ‘We can’t prove that it was or wasn’t Lokman’s can. That said, he works in a garage and so he had easier access to petrol than anyone else. And it was definitely petrol that was poured over Gözde and then set alight.’ İkmen frowned. ‘Somehow we need to build a biography of this cloistered girl’s life. Let’s start by seeing if we can dig up any gossip about her. Honour killings can sometimes have their genesis in whispers heard in the bazaar, can’t they?’
‘The word of a bitter old woman or a man the girl may already have rejected can sometimes cause families to kill or maim a child just to save face.’
‘Sadly, that is very true, Ayşe,’ İkmen said. ‘I want you out in Beşiktaş and over in Fatih where the family live now. See what you can pick up.’
‘Sir.’ She rose from her seat and began to put her jacket on.
‘And take Constable Yıldız with you to Fatih,’ İkmen said. ‘He has local knowledge.’
Gonca the gypsy made a lot of noise whenever they had sex. Her many children had either left home years before or were playing out somewhere in the street, and her neighbours knew exactly what she did and made no comment or trouble for her about it. Gonca consequently gave full voice to her feelings. But then Mehmet Süleyman loved that kind of spontaneity. His wife, long ago, had been just like that. When things had been right between them.
‘Oh!’ Gonca threw herself off him and lay back on her huge bed with a smile on her face. ‘You know,’ she said huskily, ‘you have a very good penis. One of the best! I should like to keep it under my pillow and bring it out when I want an orgasm.’
‘Just my penis?’ He was smiling. Such a statement was typical of Gonca. She was, after all, not just a gypsy, but a very outré gypsy artist. And artists were supposed to be weird.
‘Why would I want anything else?’ she said as she gave him a cigarette and then lit one for herself. ‘A whole man would drive me mad. Even you. But if I could just have your penis . . .’ She winked at him, then put her hand on the object of her desire and said, ‘Imagine how much fun I could have with it!’
He laughed. ‘You are impossible,’ he said as he gently ruffled her long black hair.
Her broad brown face broke into a hundred cracks and wrinkles as she smiled. ‘I am who I am,’ she said, and then she touched the side of his face very tenderly with one thick finger. ‘Maybe I would take the whole body if it was you. Maybe.’
‘And maybe cats will land on the moon,’ he said.
Gonca slipped her legs over the side of her bed and put on her dressing gown. ‘Cats are very clever,’ she said. ‘Don’t underestimate them. I’m going to get rakı. Do you want some?’
It was the middle of the day, but he wasn’t at work and so why shouldn’t he indulge in a little alcohol?
‘Yes,’ he said. Gonca left the room.
He’d made a conscious decision to spend the day with Gonca after his wife had basically kicked him out of his house. He’d willingly taken his son to school and would have stayed at home to be with Zelfa. But she had told him to go. ‘When you drop Yusuf at school, just keep on going,’ she’d said. ‘Get out of my sight!’
She’d lost patience with his infidelities. Not with Gonca – Zelfa didn’t know about her – but with other women he had come into contact with. Zelfa was menopausal and had by her own admission lost interest in sex. So he’d gone elsewhere. Not that he was excusing himself; he knew that what he was doing was wrong. But that didn’t mean he was going to stop doing it.
Süleyman switched his mobile phone back on and found that he had one text message. It was from his deputy, Sergeant İzzet Melik, and it said, ‘Call me.’ İzzet very rarely contacted his superior when he wasn’t on duty, and so Süleyman did as he was asked.
‘İzzet?’
‘Sir, I’m in Şişli,’ İzzet said. ‘2B Ateş Apartments, Efe Lane. I’ve just got here, and I’m standing next to a bed with a dead naked man on it. His throat’s been cut.’
İzzet knew how much his boss thrilled to the chase. Murder and its resolution was addictive, they all knew that. Süleyman had already slipped his shirt over his shoulders and strapped his gun holster underneath his arm as he said, ‘I’ll be there.’
He put his trousers on just as she came into the room holding two tall glasses of white, cloudy rakı. He looked up at her and frowned. ‘Sorry.’
‘Duty calls?’ She took a long gulp from one of the glasses and then a small sip from the other.
‘An incident in Şişli,’ he said.
‘Oh, where the rich people live.’ She smiled.
‘I have to go.’ He stood up, walked over to her, took her head in his hands and kissed her hard and long on the lips. Then he left.
Chapter 7
* * *
The Akol family and their new guests the Seyhans lived in an apartment above a fabric shop on Macar Kardeşler Street. It was a rather nondescript sort of place, although the apartment did overlook, if at a distance, the magnificent Roman Aqueduct of Valens.
But Ayşe Farsakoğlu and Constable Hikmet Yıldız didn’t go to the Akol apartment. Only that morning, Çetin İkmen had told them that Gözde’s death had not been an accident. Other officers had already been in to collect the clothes the family said they had been wearing on that fateful day. News of the murder was out on radio, television and all across the internet. As İkmen had suggested, Farsakoğlu and Yıldız went into Fatih district to listen to what, if anything, people were saying about it, and about the families who lived in their midst. It was Wednesday, market day, and so most people would be out and about.
The two police officers had to do a few things to their appearances before they walked towards the seventeen streets that made up the Wednesday market. Hikmet was out of uniform, and Ayşe had covered her head with a scarf tied into a turban by a female officer back at the station who had a very religious sister. There was no way on earth that she could ever have tied it herself.
‘I look like your mother!’ she grumbled to Hikmet as she gazed with a critical eye at a pile of cherries heaped up on the back of a tattered old donkey cart. He didn’t reply. The truth was that she was indeed considerably older than he was. Not that she looked like his mother in any way. But her anger disturbed him. She was so resentful about wearing the turban. He knew she was a modern, secular woman, but he couldn’t really understand why she was so angry. She was, after all, only playing a part.
The stall next to the cherry cart was selling plastic bowls, brushes and mops. It stood in front of a small shop that sold Muslim religious artefacts. There were wall hangings depicting the Kaa’ba in Mecca, the most holy place in Islam, CDs and tapes of religious lectures and music by musicians such as the British convert Yusuf Islam. There were tesbih prayer beads in every colour imaginable, small prayer mats for travelling and transparent lockets containing drops of water from the sacred Zamzam well in Saudi Arabia. A woman in full black chador stood outside, looking through the window at the CDs.
‘Can I help you, brother?’ an elderly, rather querulous voice asked.
Ayşe was about to answer until she realised that of course he had been talking to Hikmet.
‘Sister and I are just looking,’ she heard Yıldız say. So now she was his sister. That was OK. Except she knew that amongst the religious people, the word ‘sister’ did not necessarily mean that one was related. People were brothers and sisters in Islam. It was a graceful and gracious form of address and she remembered hearing it from her few visits back to her father’s old village. But it was not her.
‘So am I your sister now?’ she said to Yıldız as the two of them moved through the crowds of bearded men, covered woman and lots of children.
‘Ayşe,’ he said – she’d told him that he had to naturally call her that – ‘you cannot be my actual sister.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because some peo
ple, a few admittedly, know me round here.’
He only lived at most half a kilometre away. And busy as the market and its environs were, there was always the chance that he could bump into someone that either he or his brother knew.
They looked around some more stalls, most of them selling food or household goods, and then went to a small restaurant back on Macar Kardeşler Street, where they sat in the family room upstairs. This too made Ayşe feel like a fish out of water. Going to family rooms above restaurants, which people had been doing since time immemorial, was something she had done when she was young. She’d gone with her mother and her mother’s friends, sitting with them as they gossiped away from their husbands. Men could and would enter family rooms but only as Hikmet was doing now, with a female relative or with children. They both ordered mixed vegetables with rice and chips and some cans of Coca-Cola.
‘I haven’t eaten in one of these places in years,’ Ayşe said as she leaned across the table towards Hikmet Yıldız.
He frowned. ‘So where do you normally eat?’
‘If I eat out at all, it is in Beyoğlu,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I will stray down to Karaköy.’
These were very Westernised, very secular districts of the city, where women could and did eat on their own, if they wished. This place, with its family room, its groups of almost completely covered women and thickly bearded men, was a whole other world.
‘Did you find out anything in Beşiktaş?’ Hikmet Yıldız asked his superior. Ayşe had been to the street where Gözde Seyhan had died, before coming on to Fatih.
‘People had only just heard that the body was Gözde’s,’ she said. ‘There was a sort of subdued atmosphere. People were shocked, I think. All the talk I heard consisted of expressions of sympathy for the dead girl and her family. If Gözde was having some sort of relationship with the boy across the road, then I don’t think that was general knowledge.’
‘Beşiktaş isn’t conservative.’
‘Parts of it are,’ Ayşe said. ‘The Seyhans’ neighbours were a mixed bunch.’
‘Some foreigners.’
‘Americans.’ The Ford couple. The wife ran a website for expatriates in İstanbul.
The waiter came then, bringing them their food and drink. It was simple fare but it looked good, and again it was redolent of food that Ayşe had tasted since her very early childhood. It was as she was eating that she heard the two women behind her begin to talk.
‘My sister lives across from this family whose daughter died in a fire in Beşiktaş,’ the one directly behind her said.
‘If the girl was bad, then it was well done,’ her companion replied.
Ayşe looked over at Hikmet and put a finger up to her lips to silence him, lest he suddenly decide to talk.
‘Oh, I agree!’ the first woman said forcefully. ‘If she had shamed them, then what could they do?’
Ayşe had expected such attitudes in Fatih. What came next, however, was a surprise to her.
The first woman said, ‘My sister does say, however, that the family themselves – not the people who lived here already, but those from over in Beşiktaş who are staying with them – are not as decent as they could be.’
‘What does that mean?’ the second woman enquired. Ayşe Farsakoğlu pricked up her ears. She was quite anxious to know that too.
‘Some immoral behaviour. I can’t say,’ the first woman said.
‘No, of course not,’ her companion agreed. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’
Ayşe felt her hackles rise. When the two women had left, she said to Hikmet Yıldız, ‘Why do they do that?’
‘What?’
She leaned across the table towards him again and said, ‘Not talk about sin.’
He shrugged. Some things were obvious, or so he thought. ‘They don’t want to sully themselves,’ he said. ‘Talking about sin is bad.’
‘Doing it is worse,’ Ayşe snapped back. ‘Killing young girls for no good reason is pretty bad.’
They looked at each other and saw in each other’s eyes their differences of opinion. He could not condone honour killing but he could understand where it came from and why it happened. Her mind was totally closed. He looked away first.
Still staring at his profile, Ayşe said, ‘I wonder what kind of “immoral behaviour” the Seyhans indulge in. I’d be willing to wager it does not include the mother.’
There was blood everywhere – all over the bed, on the carpet, up the walls.
Süleyman looked down at the pale, stiff body that lay face down on the bed and said, ‘Do we have a name?’
‘Hamid İdiz,’ his sergeant, İzzet Melik, said. ‘A piano teacher.’
There had been a very shiny grand piano in the sitting room.
‘Constable downstairs has already turned one student away.’
Süleyman bent down in order to look at the face of Hamid İdiz. Beyond the ghastly shade of blue that tinged his skin, he looked as if he had been an attractive man.
‘Who found him?’
‘His first student, a girl, rang the bell several times before going to get the kapıcı,’ İzzet said. ‘According to her, Hamid Bey never missed a lesson and was never late. The kapıcı concurred with this and opened up the apartment. Hamid İdiz was diabetic, and so of course the kapıcı was worried that he might be in a coma.’
‘Reasonable.’ Süleyman looked around the bedroom. A gold colour scheme had been employed, now sodden with red. ‘Do we know how old Mr İdiz was?’
İzzet looked at his notebook. ‘Fifty-three, the kapıcı said.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
They both knew, as all Turks did, that the custodians of apartment blocks usually knew a lot of things about their tenants.
‘He said that Mr İdiz was “flamboyant”,’ İzzet said.
Süleyman picked up a magazine that lay on a chair over by the window and moved the front cover aside with the end of a ballpoint pen. ‘What wonderful euphemisms people use for the word homosexual,’ he said.
‘The apartment’s full of queer porn,’ İzzet said.
‘What fun forensics are going to have!’
‘Yes, sir.’ İzzet frowned.
‘I assume we’re waiting on the arrival of Dr Sarkissian?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘In the meantime, did the kapıcı see anyone arrive before the girl this morning or last night?’ Süleyman said.
İzzet shrugged. ‘Well, he did . . .’
Süleyman looked at the many bottles of cologne and aftershave on Hamid Bey’s kidney-shaped dressing table and said, ‘Well?’
‘Sir, this is quite an easy-going building,’ İzzet said. ‘You know how posh they are over here.’
Süleyman did. Aristocrats they generally were not, but Şişli people were nearly always well-to-do, and they guarded their goods and their privacy jealously.
‘People come and go without hindrance,’ İzzet continued. ‘The kapıcı only challenges tradesman, police, gypsies.’
‘Yes, but he usually knows who comes and goes, even if he is instructed to look the other way,’ Süleyman said.
‘Yes, well we did get to that,’ İzzet said.
‘Good.’
‘And none of Mr İdiz’s regulars came to the apartment either last night or this morning. A young man of about twenty-five came to visit someone this morning, and then there was a gypsy last night, but the kapıcı got rid of him. All the other visitors were women.’
‘Could have been a woman,’ Süleyman said as he put on a pair of plastic gloves and then began to look in a small bookcase that was beside the dressing table. ‘Go and get descriptions from him, İzzet. Men and women. Just because the man was homosexual doesn’t rule out his being killed by a woman. His sexuality may very well have been irrelevant to his death.’
İzzet Melik left to go down to see the kapıcı. Süleyman riffled through Mr İdiz’s many books by luminaries such as Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis and Iris Murdoch. Mr İdiz it seeme
d, had liked to read, if not as passionately as he liked to listen to music. His collections of CDs and sheet music were both vast. In addition, all of this material was well-thumbed, indicating that as a teacher of music he was clearly very busy.
Sergeant Melik came back into the room and said, ‘Kapıcı is going to make a list, with descriptions of as much as he can remember.’
‘Good.’ Süleyman scanned the room and then said, ‘Any sign of any sort of diary or appointment book? He was a private teacher; he must have had some sort of schedule.’
‘Not yet, sir, no,’ İzzet replied.
‘Well, then maybe once the doctor has arrived, we should make that our priority,’ Süleyman said. ‘If nothing else, we will have to contact his pupils to let them and their families know that Mr İdiz is no longer giving piano lessons.’
Inspector Metin İskender looked at İkmen over the top of the very thin and expensive reading glasses he had only recently started wearing. ‘My experience of the sexting phenomenon usually involves rings, as in groups of males, targeting one or more lone female,’ he said. ‘They threaten, exploit, usually blackmail and then move on.’
Metin İskender was much younger than either İkmen or Süleyman. In spite of coming from a very poor background, he had married well and risen through the ranks of the police very quickly. He was clever, arrogant and sometimes charmless, but he was totally committed to his job and he was good at it. In recent years he had been given the task of trying to combat the rising number of crimes perpetrated using mobile phone technology. This had taken him into some very outlandish corners of the human psyche.
‘A sexting operation will generally start just with one boy and one girl,’ he continued. ‘The girl will either come from a very traditional family or a semi-liberal background. She will almost never, in my experience, come from the academic elite or even from the social elite.’
‘Because parents in those groups are too liberal about sexual matters?’
‘In reality they may or may not be, as you know, Inspector,’ İskender said. ‘But the sexters dare not take that risk. Traditional girls are much easier to blackmail. So this boy will basically groom the girl by telling her that he loves her, and eventually he will ask her to send him photographs of herself. Clothed at first, but later semi- and then totally naked. He may even ask her to abuse herself on camera.’
A Noble Killing Page 6
