‘But on one level Ali loves Tayfun . . .’
‘Yes, I know, but the amount of money that could ruin someone like Burhan Öz or Cahit Seyhan is just about what Tayfun spends on bottled water,’ İkmen said. ‘No, I think that if what we are looking at is a business, then it is small scale. It’s fan-boys, baby gangsters . . .’
‘Religious nutcases? I don’t mean people in al-Qaeda. I mean those on single-handed disorganised missions to rid the streets of sin.’
‘But they wouldn’t take money,’ İkmen said. ‘It would destroy their credibility. If indeed anyone is taking money. Oh, of course talking to Ali did also give me a chance to check out Constable Yıldız’s assertion that Tayfun might be moving into Fatih.’
Ayşe lit a cigarette and sat down. ‘And is he?’
‘It seems he is putting out feelers,’ İkmen said. ‘He’s finding out who controls what and what that business might be worth.’
‘I wonder why he’s bothering with a district that seems to have so little to offer someone like him.’
İkmen sighed. ‘There is money in religion: artefacts, and shops that sell them. There are many coffee houses in Fatih, too. But yes, it is quite limited when you think of what Tayfun does elsewhere. Any news about Burhan Öz?’
‘Kars say that if he is the same Burhan Öz, born 1954, from the village of Gazimurat, then he hasn’t been seen out there for years and neither have his family.’
‘So we will need to access his bank account records,’ İkmen said wearily. ‘He would have got almost nothing for that old car of his, so I imagine that it was the family’s savings that went. The son couldn’t carry on at university and the rent was only partially covered by Burhan’s wages, hence the move. Two thousand lire is all that stands between most middle-class people and complete ruin, and I don’t suppose the Öz family are any different. Do you know if the Seyhans came from the same village?’
‘No, they didn’t,’ Ayşe said. ‘Twenty kilometres away. Out east it might just as well be twenty thousand.’
Chapter 17
* * *
Mehmet Süleyman had only been mildly interested in what İzzet Melik had told him about the boys Murad Emin and Ali Reza Zafir. It was unexpected that Ali Reza also worked at the Tulip Nargile Salon and that the two boys seemed to know each other rather better than either of them had let on to the police. But the inspector, so he said, didn’t feel that it actually meant anything.
‘Maybe they didn’t own up to their friendship because it is or was rather more than that,’ he said with a slight twinkle in his eye. İzzet mused upon the fact that everything Süleyman seemed to say had some kind of sexual connotation. That gypsy was ruining him!
‘If you think that the boys need watching, then I have no objection to that,’ he continued. ‘But I don’t want you approaching them. There’s nothing to connect either of them to İdiz’s death and I don’t want their parents getting the idea that we’re harassing their children.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Personally, I still think that there is virtue in trying to pursue Mr İdiz’s admittedly many lovers,’ he said. ‘Although how that might be achieved, I don’t know. With so many men in this city unforthcoming about their sexual preferences, it will be difficult. I’m wondering if we need to put someone on the streets, undercover . . .’
İzzet knew that such an operation would most certainly not involve him, for which he was very grateful. There were, he felt, some virtues in being overweight and ugly. Maybe Süleyman himself would have to do it if no one else would volunteer. In spite of his age, he was pretty enough to be queer.
‘There’s something else too,’ Süleyman said, cutting across İzzet’s thoughts.
‘Sir?’
‘My informant was of the opinion that attacks by religious zealots on the gay community are increasing. Now I don’t know if the figures we have bear this out . . .’
‘Queers don’t always report it when they get beaten up,’ İzzet said.
‘No, they don’t. But some do, and so I’d like to look at those offences and maybe pull in those who have a history of this sort of crime.’
‘You think that a religious type could have killed İdiz?’
‘It’s possible,’ Süleyman said. ‘I mean, I know that Cahit, the father of Hamid Bey’s lover Kenan Seyhan, couldn’t have killed him, in spite of what his son believed, because we now know he was working at the time of İdiz’s death. But that type of religious person is a possibility.’
‘What type, exactly, do you mean?’
‘The type that could well murder a daughter for the sake of honour.’
‘Inspector İkmen still thinks that the Seyhans killed their girl?’
‘Yes, he does,’ Süleyman said. ‘There is a type of person, whatever their religion may be, who takes its tenets to the ultimate extent. Ignorant, without ambition but often secretly envious of others who are successful in the world, they use religion as a reason for their existence and a prop for their own sense of self-importance.’
‘You’re talking about Anatolian villagers,’ İzzet said. Originally from İzmir, Turkey’s third largest city, İzzet gave the lie to his macho-man image by being very much a son of that traditionally cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. Village or small-town Anatolia was not for him.
‘Some of these people would have a rural background,’ yes,’ Süleyman said. ‘But not all. I am not talking about hard-line religio-political fanatics. Not jihadis, not al-Qaeda. They’re far too clever to bother with a couple of men kissing behind an antique shop. They play the numbers game and anything less than mass slaughter will not do. I think we are, or may well be, looking for a nasty, hate-filled loner. Could be a neighbour, a local shopkeeper, anyone who has been offended by Hamid İdiz’s presence. He may not ever have even spoken to the man.’
The two of them spent the morning looking at the faces and records of men in two discrete categories: those accused of ‘lewd’ acts and those responsible for attacks on men engaged in such practices. Some they knew and some they did not. At one thirty, Süleyman went out to a prearranged lunch appointment with some officers from the Iraqi police force who were visiting İstanbul, and urged İzzet to stop for a while and eat before he looked at any more records. İzzet did stop, but he didn’t go out to eat. He got in his car and drove over to Tophane and the Tulip Nargile Salon.
He knew that neither Murad Emin nor Ali Reza Zafir would be working, because it was a weekday and the boys were both at school. But then that was the point. He wanted to find out what he might pick up about them in their absence. As he sat down on one of the Tulip’s purple velvet sofas, he looked around at the handful of smokers. A couple of young business types in suits smoked very fragrant pipes, probably rose or strawberry tobacco; there was also one middle-aged woman and a young boy in what looked like a butcher’s apron. As soon as İzzet sat down, an elderly but fit-looking man came over to him and asked him what he wanted. He ordered a pipe with apple tobacco and a glass of tea.
When the man came back, he inserted a plastic mouthpiece into the top of the pipe in order to get it going. He then handed İzzet his own, new mouthpiece and was about to leave him to it when İzzet said, ‘I heard a boy play that piano here last night. It was excellent. Do you know anything about him?’
‘Oh, that’s Murad,’ the man said with a smile. ‘Yes, we are very proud of him. You know he’s entering an international music competition soon.’
‘Really? It’s very unusual to have music in a nargile salon. I’ve never come across it before.’
For a second the elderly man’s face clouded, and then he said, ‘You know sir, I do not presume to guess what your opinion is about the smoking ban the government are putting in place in July, but it is worrying for businesses like mine.’
‘You own this place?’
‘It is my honour.’ He smiled. ‘Young Murad came to us through another boy we employ here as a waiter at night,’ he said. ‘They both take pian
o lessons, but Murad, well, he is special, as I know you have appreciated. This old piano was in one of the storerooms out the back for years, but when the other boy said that Murad had nowhere to practise, I let him use it. Out the back at first. But then, when I discovered how good he was . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Sometimes one has brainwaves. If in the future I can only allow my customers to smoke nargile outside my salon, then I must offer something inside that is more appealing than just tea, coffee, sherbet and börek. At first I thought that might be computers but my customers did not seem nearly as interested in them as my staff.’ He laughed. ‘But the piano . . .’
‘And so the boy plays.’
‘Exactly!’ he said. ‘The boy plays beautifully and my customers absolutely love him.’
With a small bow, he left İzzet to his pipe and went to the back of the salon to tend the samovar. Although the owner hadn’t mentioned Ali Reza Zafir by name, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to assume that it was he who had introduced Murad to the Tulip. The boy’s employment constituted what İzzet felt was a rather creative way of dealing with a situation that could spell the end of nargile salons like the Tulip. The complete ban on smoking in enclosed spaces could kill the trade stone dead, and so, he imagined, a lot of nargile salon owners were having to think hard about what they might need to do next.
Relishing the experience of smoking indoors while he could, İzzet didn’t rush his pipe. Süleyman, entertaining the Iraqis alongside their boss, Commissioner Ardıç wouldn’t be back for hours. The closet queers and the queer-bashers on the computer system could wait a little longer. But after a good half an hour’s almost constant sucking on the pipe, he was satisfied. After paying his bill, he rose to leave.
He was turning to retrieve his jacket from the back of the sofa when he casually glanced over towards the back of the salon. The owner, who appeared to be looking down into his open till, was not alone. As well as two leather-clad heavies that İzzet didn’t know, there, large as life, was the well-known gangster and extortionist Tayfun Ergin.
There had been no large withdrawals from Burhan Öz’s bank account at the time of his daughter’s death, or at any other time come to that. There had not been anything much to withdraw from. The Öz family savings, such as they were, amounted to just short of thirty lire.
‘And yet,’ İkmen said to Ayşe Farsakoğlu as they made their way along the corridor towards the pathologist Arto Sarkissian’s office, ‘his outgoings have not increased either. In fact his rent, since he moved from Nişantaşı, has gone down. He doesn’t have a car any more and his son is no longer at university. He should be rolling in money.’
Ayşe Farsakoğlu, who had also been privy to İkmen’s conversation with Öz’s bank manager, said, ‘But sir, he is drawing a lot of cash.’
‘Exactly!’ İkmen said. ‘More than he ever has before. It’s going somewhere, isn’t it? Unless they’re all eating out every night . . .’
It was frustrating that they hadn’t found a massive withdrawal from Burhan Öz’s bank account. It would have given them some leverage to reopen the other two suspected honour killing cases. But then what had İkmen expected? If these families were indeed paying an individual or a gang to kill their disobedient girls, they were going to be very careful about both how the job was done and how payment was made.
İkmen and Ayşe turned a corner and found the Armenian doctor waiting for them at his office door. As usual, İkmen and Arto embraced and then all three of them went inside and the doctor closed the door. As the two police officers sat down, he said, ‘I’ve had a whole sheaf of DNA results through from the Forensic Institute. There’s one in particular, from the Seyhan fire, that we should discuss.’
‘Oh?’
‘Mmm.’ The doctor put his spectacles on and then looked down at a rather untidy heap of papers on his desk.
‘DNA material was removed from the corpse, later identified as Gözde Seyhan, on the day of her death,’ the doctor said. ‘As you know, this is quite routine where any doubt about the identity of a corpse exists. We always look at dental records, and this time, of course, they did confirm what we suspected quite independently from the DNA. However, what the forensic team also did once Miss Seyhan’s parents were at the crime scene was take swabs from both Cahit and Saadet Seyhan for comparison.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, the results show that although Saadet is most certainly Gözde’s mother, there is no way that Cahit Seyhan can be her father.’
For a few moments İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu sat in stunned silence. They had both met Saadet Seyhan, who to all intents and purposes was a very pious, rather nervous middle-aged woman. But her youngest child was not her husband’s and so she had to have been involved with another man in the past. This raised questions about whether Cahit had known and, further, whether Gözde’s paternity and not her telephone relationship with Osman Yavuz had been the reason behind her murder.
‘Arto,’ İkmen began, ‘do we have any forensic evidence that could connect the Seyhans to Gözde’s murder?’
The Armenian shrugged. ‘Their DNA is all over the apartment, because they lived there,’ he said.
‘The petrol can?’
Arto looked down at his paperwork again. ‘DNA was retrieved from two strands of hair. It is human but it does not match that of Mr or Mrs Seyhan or either of their sons. As you have probably deduced, it doesn’t match any of the DNA records we have on file either.’
‘So our potential killer is a person with a clean record,’ İkmen said. ‘Great.’ He lit a cigarette and then put his head down and looked at the floor.
‘Sorry.’
‘But sir,’ Ayşe said, ‘we’ve been exploring for some time the possibility that the Seyhans may have employed a third party to kill Gözde. All this means is that rather than suspecting that they didn’t do it themselves, now we know that.’
‘I know.’ İkmen forced a small, wan smile. ‘But I hoped that somehow they might be directly implicated. I hoped for a miracle, I know. Now we have to look for an unknown murderer who is not on our DNA database and who we may never find.’
‘We have Burhan Öz and those other two families whose finances we need to check out. We’re not done,’ Ayşe said. İkmen was, she could tell, descending albeit temporarily into gloom. ‘We’ll get them. We have to.’
‘And the fact that Cahit Seyhan was not Gözde’s father may give you a way in that did not exist before,’ Arto Sarkissian said.
‘We can’t tell him!’ İkmen said. ‘We don’t know whether he knows. If he doesn’t . . .’
‘You speak to her, on her own,’ the Armenian said. ‘Who knows, if her husband or her son did order Gözde’s murder, perhaps the fact that you know about her infidelity may make her break down. Don’t forget, Çetin, Kenan Seyhan told you in his suicide note that his family killed his sister. Unlike the statement he wrote about his lover Hamid İdiz, he did not merely “fear” that his father had killed his sister; he clearly wrote that his family had murdered her.’
‘That’s not enough to prosecute . . .’
‘I know, you need more,’ the doctor said. ‘But you’ve now got something in addition to whatever you had when you woke up this morning. It’s a possible motive.’
‘Yes, but why now? Why kill Gözde now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Arto said. ‘Maybe Cahit only found out just recently.’
‘And why not kill his wife as well?’
Again the Armenian shrugged. ‘Who knows? But this could be significant. Even the unknown DNA on the petrol can could be significant. Just because we don’t have a match now doesn’t mean that one will not appear at some time in the future. Crimes from thirty, forty years back are now being solved because of this technology.’
İkmen looked up and frowned. ‘I don’t want Gözde Seyhan to wait thirty years for justice. That girl’s awful death demands a solution! She deserves that much and we owe her it!’
When Süleyman returned to the station
, he and İzzet worked on a list of men they wanted to talk to with regard to Hamid İdiz’s death. The following morning they would assemble a squad of officers and make a start on finding the most furtive gay and bisexual men of İstanbul, as well as those who sought to hurt them.
İzzet had not told Süleyman about his visit to the Tulip Nargile Salon, and so the superior officer did not know about the sudden appearance of Tayfun Ergin. Although he suspected that Ergin might well be providing ‘protection’ for the salon, İzzet did not know that for certain. What, if anything, Ergin might have to do with Murad Emin, Ali Reza Zafir or the death of Hamid İdiz was also very much open to question. Ayşe Farsakoğlu had told him that there was some evidence that Ergin might be moving his organisation into Fatih, but that was hardly germane to what İzzet and Süleyman were doing.
On his way back to his small flat in Zeyrek, İzzet found himself stopping off in Balat, opposite the Ahrida Synagogue. After a few moments’ contemplation of the high wall that separated İstanbul’s oldest synagogue from the street, he walked across the road and up the steps to the flat belonging to the piano teacher Miss Izabella Madrid. He reasoned that Murad Emin had by this time probably gone to work at the Tulip as opposed to having a lesson with the old woman. He was right.
‘I’ve just made myself some latkes,’ Izabella Madrid said as she led him into her living room. ‘Do you want some? Do you know what they are?’
İzzet sat down in one of her overstuffed armchairs and, ignoring her apparent rudeness in a way he hadn’t done before, said, ‘Potato cakes. And yes, that would be nice.’
‘Great big lump like you needs to keep your strength up,’ she said as she went back into her kitchen.
A Noble Killing Page 14
