A Noble Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  İskender had a way with a put-down that İkmen found both impressive and unnecessarily cruel. This boy, whatever he may or may not have done, was clearly a nothing in the great city of İstanbul; he hardly needed reminding of that.

  Osman Yavuz just hung his head, so İkmen took a different tack. ‘Osman,’ he said, ‘why did you think we’d even know of your existence? Your relationship with Gözde was a secret, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So how would we know about you, then? How would that work?’

  The boy looked up. ‘Because of her phone,’ he said. ‘I watch CSI, I know what forensics can do with phones even if they’re really badly damaged.’

  ‘Just the phone?’

  ‘Well, there was, er . . . there was the American lady who lived in Gözde’s building,’ Osman said. ‘She, er, well she sort of . . .’

  ‘She knew about you and Gözde, yes, we know,’ İkmen said.

  ‘She gave Gözde my phone number and she gave me hers,’ he said. ‘I used to go for English lessons to Mrs Ford, a long time ago. She doesn’t do that any more. Gözde called me first. It had to be that way, because if I called her, her dad or one of her brothers might pick up and then she’d be in trouble.’

  ‘What about the photograph?’ İskender asked. ‘Tell us about that.’

  ‘The photograph?’ He knew exactly what the younger, arrogant policeman was talking about, but he needed to buy some time in order to marshal his thoughts. The photographs, all of them, had been madness!

  ‘The photograph of the woman you say you loved, naked, sent to your phone,’ İskender said harshly. ‘Tell us.’

  Osman took a few moments to breathe and then he said, ‘It was Gözde’s idea . . .’

  ‘Oh, it’s always the girl’s idea, of course!’ İskender, overly familiar with far too many sexters, their habits and excuses, was immediately losing his patience.

  İkmen put a calming hand on his arm. ‘Go on, Osman.’

  Though shaken, the boy did manage to regain his composure and continued, ‘Of course I loved that she did that. But she wasn’t a bad girl and I didn’t suggest it to her! We never did anything wrong. I only met her three times, and only around the back of her building where the washing hangs. Her parents and her brothers were out and Mrs Ford called me over because she said that Gözde was alone. We kissed once. Once!’

  ‘How did you meet or notice Gözde?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘I saw her in the street many times.’

  ‘Did she know that you were watching her?’

  ‘No, but later on, when we began to talk and text, she said that she’d noticed me too.’ He leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. ‘We were in love.’ İkmen at least saw that the boy’s eyes were full of tears. ‘You know that her family killed her, don’t you? Because of me.’

  He began to sob. Ever since he’d learned of Gözde’s death, he had, so he said, been living rough in the great Karaca Ahmet Cemetery in Üsküdar. Living on food and alms begged from visitors, he’d mourned for his lost love every day.

  ‘Why do you think Gözde’s family killed her?’ İkmen asked. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Because of us,’ Osman said. ‘Because they must have found out about us! Gözde was happy. I spoke to her on the day she died and she was happy because I had told her that somehow I was going to get her out of there and take her away.’

  ‘You didn’t think of asking her father for her?’ İskender put in slightly sarcastically.

  Osman Yavuz laughed, but without any mirth. ‘Me? Even getting over the fact that I have no job, Cahit Seyhan would never have considered me. They come from a village where all the families marry each other all the time,’ he said. ‘Her brother was to marry his cousin and Gözde was supposed to marry some old man her father had picked out for her. I didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘So you had planned to run away together?’

  ‘Yes. If we could. We had no choice.’

  İskender, frowning, said, ‘But to go back to that photograph . . . Did you share it with anyone, Osman? There were a great many printed photographs of other women in all sorts of states of undress in your bedroom at your grandmother’s flat.’

  İkmen had almost forgotten about those. Osman Yavuz’s face went very white and then he put his head down in his hands.

  ‘The truth, Osman, if you please,’ İskender said with what İkmen felt was an unnecessarily smug expression on his face.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  In the past, the only people who admitted to crimes they had not committed were, in general, mentally ill. Confused and frightened, they frequently responded to routine inquiries by the police by owning up to things they had not done. But the late 1990s and now the twenty-first century had seen the rise in certain quarters of the fundamentalist or glory-seeking admitter. Together with his boss Mehmet Süleyman, İzzet Melik had spent most of the previous afternoon questioning a known queer-basher and recent religious fundamentalist they had picked up in the district of Sütlüce.

  Oh yes, but of course he’d killed Hamid İdiz! The man was a queer and this ‘soldier of faith’ had done the whole world a favour by cutting his throat like the pig he had been. They all knew he hadn’t done it. His wife, an enormous woman who clearly loved her husband but was also exasperated by him, tried to remind him that they had been at her mother’s house in the city of Edirne when Hamid İdiz had been killed, but to no avail. And so, because the man was adamant, they’d had to take him in and question him. What a waste of time!

  Now it was late, and as İzzet locked his car and began to walk towards the bright lights of the Tophane nargile joints, he hoped that Murad Emin and Ali Reza Zafir had finished their shifts and gone. He was in luck. The Tulip was full of locals and this time some tourists, but the piano was silent, and only the man he knew as the proprietor and a few middle-aged men were now serving. İzzet ordered his usual, an apple tobacco pipe and a medium-sweet coffee, and began to think about what he might do next.

  If Murad Emin, at least, was being radicalised, then how was that happening? His home was out of the question, as were his music lessons. School was a possibility, but Süleyman had already contacted them and their opinion of the boy was very high. He was an excellent student without, they felt, any overt religious feelings or opinions. But what the boy was expressing had to come from somewhere, and so far İzzet could think of few places where this could happen. When Murad was not at school or at his music lessons, he was at the Tulip. Although the nargile salon didn’t seem like the sort of place where those of a radical nature would meet, he knew that appearances could be deceptive. He also knew that on some level, the gangster Tayfun Ergin had an interest in the place, and as Inspector İkmen had only just found out that very day, Ergin was possibly part of a new business that was being set up in Fatih. This ‘company’, so İkmen had discovered, made its money by providing people willing to kill to families who wished to dispose of an inconvenient daughter or wife. Honour killings to order. Just the thought of it made İzzet wrinkle up his brow in disgust. What kind of creatures would do such a thing?

  His coffee and nargile arrived. How to proceed to find out more about the Tulip, its staff and customers was what exercised İzzet now. Puffing on his pipe, he dismissed the idea of revealing his profession to the owner. There were apparently computers on the site somewhere, although as the proprietor had told him, they were no longer held for the benefit of customers. Staff used them, which could mean that Murad and Ali Reza and maybe other kids too were being radicalised on line. There were jihadi and other radical sites all over the internet. Like the mobile telephone, the internet could be a fantastic thing, but it could also be an instrument of such darkness too! Words like ‘sexting’ and ‘grooming’ in the context of preparing a young person for sexual assault were terms that hadn’t existed until the twenty-first century. But to just ask to use the Tulip’s computers out of the blue was not a good idea. To İzzet
himself it sounded suspicious, and if other Tulip staff members were either radicalising or being radicalised it would set off all sorts of mental alarm bells. For the time being he would just have to continue to observe, to get to know a few people and gain their confidence.

  Later, two middle-aged men came and sat across the table from İzzet and began talking about football. They both supported the local team, Beşiktaş while İzzet was vociferous in his support for his beloved İzmir team, Altay SK. But it was a good-natured exchange, and what was more important, it brought in other customers and members of staff. The owner, İzzet discovered, was called Mustafa Bey. He supported Galatasaray and he also thought that women shouldn’t go to football matches. Women, he said, shouldn’t really leave the house.

  ‘Get out!’ she hissed. It was dark and her lover was deeply asleep, but Gonca could see that someone else was in her bedroom too. Someone familiar and yet unwanted, leaning over her bed. She got up as quietly as she could, pushing the weighty bulk of the unwanted man before her. As she closed the bedroom door behind her, Mehmet Süleyman murmured just the once and then apparently descended into a deep slumber once again.

  The kitchen was about as far away from her bedroom as she could get, and so Gonca took the intruder through several bedrooms filled with sleeping children and confronted him there.

  ‘What do you want, Şukru?’ she said to the middle-aged man who stood in front of her. ‘What do you mean by breaking into my house? My bedroom?’

  Şukru spread his arms wide and said, ‘May a brother not see his sister once in a while? However eccentric she may be?’

  Şukru was a few years older than Gonca. A large, dark father of eight who in his youth had been both a wrestler and a trainer of dancing bears. Now he made his living as so many gypsies did since the break-up of their largest community, in Sulukule, by moving from one unsatisfying casual job to another. The gypsies in İstanbul were not what they had been. State legislation to first stop their women dancing in makeshift bars up by the city walls, then to take away the bears and finally to dismantle Sulukule had rendered many of the men jobless and bitter. Şukru was lucky that he had a famous artist for a sister who was also very generous, and he knew it. But he was also a man who possessed traditional gypsy values. In addition, he had come on this occasion as an emissary from their father.

  ‘People are saying that you love that policeman,’ he said as he tipped his head in the direction of Gonca’s bedroom. ‘Is it true?’

  She sat down at the kitchen table and lit a long black cigarette. ‘Yes.’ She said it simply and quickly, because the truth needed no embellishment.

  ‘Ah.’ Her brother sat down opposite and took a cigarette for himself. ‘You know that he is married, that he is—’

  ‘I know he is married, I know he is not one of my kind, I know that he is a policeman and so an enemy of my people,’ Gonca said. ‘You can tell our father that I know all that.’

  Şukru would never have come of his own volition. Their father, who claimed that he was over a hundred years old and had fathered over a hundred children, had sent him. He was very prominent and powerful within the gypsy community, and this visit was all about him.

  ‘Gonca, you can take lovers,’ Şukru said as he lit his cigarette and began to puff. ‘We have always known that is what you do, but—’

  ‘I married men from our community twice,’ Gonca said. ‘Twice, Şukru! Two useless lumps of flesh who neither worked nor looked after the children they sired! Now I am beyond all that; I want something for myself!’

  ‘But if you love this man, then—’

  ‘Then that is my business!’ she said.

  ‘Gonca, he’s a married man!’

  Contrary to what most non-gypsies believed, the people of Sulukule as well as in other settled gypsy communities were very morally proper. Gonca, with her wildly eccentric and very collectable collages, with her legions of lovers and her clear delight in the sexual act, was an exception. Everyone, including her father, knew it.

  ‘It has been said that you intend to marry this man,’ Şukru said with obvious concern in his voice. ‘Is that true?’

  She shrugged. ‘If I want to marry him, then I will,’ she said. ‘If not, then . . .’

  She shrugged again, trying to seem casual about it, even though that was very far from the truth. She was besotted by the policeman; she would have stuck her head in a fire if he had asked. If he suddenly said that he didn’t want to see her again, she’d kill his wife first, then him, then herself. She had it all planned. Never had she felt anything like this in her life. She was going to cling on to it with every gram of strength that she possessed.

  ‘But you can’t marry him,’ Şukru said. ‘He is a policeman. They will never allow it, not to one of us!’

  She looked at her brother, who she could see was the image of herself, and then she looked down at the table. What the police authorities would make of Mehmet Süleyman marrying her had not occurred to her. Now at Şukru’s prompting she did think about it. It was not a comfortable notion.

  ‘And that he is married is not right!’ Şukru said. ‘Need I go on, Gonca? Need I even get to the part about how different you are from him?’

  She put her head down still further and then shook it, making her floor-length hair shudder and sway towards her brother as she did so.

  ‘You know what can happen if you marry out, don’t you?’ he said.

  She knew, but she didn’t make any sort of movement to indicate that she did. The punishment for marrying out was well known and did not need to be reiterated.

  ‘Father is not happy, but he is content for you to take lovers like this, as you know,’ Şukru said. ‘But love? Even when children cannot result from such a union, it’s still not right, Gonca. We cannot have that man in our family. You cannot take him away from his people.’

  She looked up at him with disgust. They were all quite happy for her to have a policeman as a lover while she could potentially find out information from him, while they could whisper in her ear periodically, as they did, that she should think about blackmailing him. ‘So I can fuck his brains out, but I cannot love him?’

  ‘Sister, you—’

  ‘What?’ He was halfway across the table now with his fingers at her throat. ‘Don’t want to think about your sister with a cock inside her? Oh, you are a hypocrite, Şukru,’ she said. ‘You who take so readily the money that the world outside the gypsy city gives me!’

  He loosened his grip on her neck and stood up. ‘I come as a messenger from the family,’ he said. ‘I come for all of us.’

  ‘To come into my bedroom and frighten me half to death!’

  ‘No,’ he said as he once again leaned down on to the table and took her by the throat. ‘No. To tell you, Gonca, that if you do not give this man up and stop this stupid pining for something you cannot have, you will be killed. You and your policeman both. That way, if in no other, his family and ours may regain some honour, some dignity and some self-respect.’

  He left then. Gonca, no longer angry or confident or defiant, sat at the kitchen table shaking and drinking rakı on her own until dawn broke. Only then did she return to her bedroom and look down at the sleeping body of Mehmet Süleyman. Then, and quite at odds with her usual way of expressing herself, Gonca very quietly cried.

  They’d asked him why he’d gone back to the Rainbow Internet Café and were amazed at the mundanity of his answer.

  ‘I had to pick up my e-mail,’ Osman Yavuz had told İkmen and İskender towards the end of his interview. ‘It had been ages. I was worried.’

  ‘About what?’ İkmen had asked him. ‘What on earth could be that important that it caused you to risk your liberty?’

  ‘I needed to know if I had any messages,’ he’d said. ‘If you’re not on line, then you just don’t exist, you know?’ It had sounded so limp, so bloody stupid. Which it was.

  What had also been stupid was the sexting. He’d never got Gözde involved in tha
t; he’d never shown her picture to anyone. But the fact that he had shared pictures of other girls in the past with friends and acquaintances meant that the police didn’t believe him. They wanted to know who else he’d shown Gözde’s picture to, and he just couldn’t tell them, because it had never happened.

  ‘You have not convinced me, at least,’ Inspector İskender had said, ‘that you did not abuse that girl’s trust, that you did not in fact kill her when she threatened to tell her parents that you forced her into providing that photograph.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her, I loved her!’

  ‘Then why did you make her send a naked photograph of herself to you?’ İskender said. ‘What were you going to do with it if you didn’t share it with your friends? Use it to masturbate?’

  ‘No!’ Osman felt his face flush at the word, and yet he had used pictures to gain relief, just like all the other nerds he knew around and about İstanbul. He’d even, to his shame, used that picture that Gözde had sent him. But why not? In spite of what the American woman had told him, in spite of what he had told his love, he was never going to actually be with Gözde. They were never really going to run away together and live happily every after. That never happened in real life. Something, usually parents, always got in the way. ‘When my grandma told me that the Mersin Apartments were on fire, I knew,’ he said.

  ‘Knew?’

  ‘That it was Gözde,’ he said. ‘That they had killed her. I ran into the street and I saw that it was the ground floor that was alight and I knew!’ He put his head down and sobbed.

  İskender looked at İkmen, who appeared to be genuinely sorry for the boy.

  ‘Osman,’ the older man said gently, ‘we will have to know the names of the people you shared photographs with.’

  The boy continued to weep.

  ‘Osman . . .’

  ‘Osman Yavuz,’ Inspector İskender said tartly, ‘we need to know who the other men you exchanged photographs with were, and we need to know that now!’