A Noble Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  Finally, terror at what he might do to her broke through the drugs and she said, ‘About us!’

  ‘Us?’ He had expected her to say something about ‘the gypsy’, but instead she was talking about ‘us’. ‘What do you mean? I don’t know you! You are nothing to me! What?’

  The woman took a breath, pushing his now slightly slackening hand away from her throat. ‘It was about six months ago,’ she said. ‘In a bar, down İstiklal Street.’

  ‘What? What was in a bar, where . . .’

  ‘You were alone,’ she said. ‘We went out the back. You gave me ten lire.’

  He didn’t remember her or the occasion, of course he didn’t, but he knew of other instances like it.

  ‘I remembered you because you were much better-looking than my usual punters,’ she said. ‘Class.’ Then she added crudely, ‘Nice clean cock.’

  ‘You were . . .’ He took his hand away from her and sat down in the chair opposite. In a room at the front of the apartment he could hear his officers taking things apart. He’d paid her for some kind of sexual favour – he dared not ask – but he didn’t recall her at all. He didn’t recall any of the women that he just paid and took when he felt the need from time to time. So like the dead man, Hamid İdiz! Addicted to sexual thrills even when he was involved with women that he cared for or even loved! What was wrong with him? He put his head in his hands, then heard her say, ‘I won’t tell anyone. About us.’

  He looked up into her watery, bloodshot eyes and said, ‘There is no us. I do not recall you, madam. Not one little bit.’

  He had no doubt inside that she was telling the truth, but he could not admit it. To continue to deny her story was the only way forward, even though he knew that she wasn’t lying. Heavy footsteps coming down the hallway alerted him to the presence of others, and he moved as far away from the woman as he could get.

  It was İzzet Melik. ‘Inspector,’ he said gravely, ‘I think you ought to come and see what we’ve found.’

  Süleyman stood up and left the room. Both he and İzzet Melik were standing in the hallway when the boy, Murad Emin, appeared in the open front doorway. As soon as he saw them his face whitened, and dropping his heavy school bag on the floor in front of him, he turned and began to run.

  ‘Get after him!’ Süleyman yelled at the constable who, in response to the commotion, was looking out from the boy’s bedroom door.

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu put a hand underneath her scarf and scratched her head. She wasn’t used to wearing anything on her head, and so having some hot flap of cotton tied up underneath her chin was irritating. But to take the headscraft off was not an option, even though she was indoors. The kapıcı’s wife was a very traditional woman who had all but covered her face when Çetin İkmen had joined them in the small caretaker’s apartment. Ayşe looked over at her boss, who appeared so strange in his smart ironed suit and shaven face. Not only did he look very different, he looked extremely uncomfortable too.

  ‘That family are good people,’ the kapıcı said as he eyed the two officers with suspicion. ‘They come from Diyarbakir. I come from Diyarbakir.’

  No one had told the kapıcı or his wife why the police were so interested in Sabiha’s family. They knew only that they were under surveillance, and that once the inspector and his sergeant were in the apartment, they would be left with a constable who would make sure that they didn’t say anything to anyone that they shouldn’t. The only fact they possessed was the one that pertained to the fire department. At some point a fire crew would arrive at the apartment building and go into the ‘good’ family’s place. There would be a lot of noise and a lot of confusion. But they were not, under any circumstances, to take what they would see at face value. Nothing was going to be as it might seem.

  Ayşe looked at her watch and then said to İkmen, ‘It’s seven, sir.’

  ‘OK.’ He got up, walked over to the kapıcı’s door and put his eye up to the spy-hole. The kapıcı’s apartment had not been chosen as a base only because of what its tenant did and who he was; it was also strategic. The front door was directly opposite the front door of the girl’s apartment. İkmen looked at the dingy green door opposite, poised for any sign of movement.

  ‘Would you like some more tea?’ the kapıcı’s wife asked Ayşe Farsakoğlu for probably the fifteenth time since she had arrived.

  ‘Oh, er, yes,’ Ayşe said. ‘That would be very nice.’

  The woman was unhappy enough at having her domestic routine interrupted, at having a strange, unrelated male in the place. Better to let her do what she probably did each and every day, which was to boil up the samovar and serve tea, in a seemingly unending stream.

  ‘Would your, er, would, er, he . . .’ The woman tipped her head towards Çetin İkmen.

  ‘Oh, no. Thank you,’ Ayşe said. ‘He, er, he’s busy.’

  ‘Right.’ She went into the kitchen and Ayşe heard the sound of tea glasses clinking in the sink.

  The kapıcı looked at İkmen with a mixture of distaste and understanding. The inspector had his head pressed against the spy-hole, but still he was able to smoke a cigarette. That was impressive. What wasn’t so good was that he clearly had some sort of issue with the family of the kapıcı’s old friend from back in Diyarbakir. A good man with a good wife and good children. Why the police should be so interested in such people, he couldn’t imagine. He was sure – in fact he had actually told the inspector – that it had to be some sort of mistake. Not that the policeman had done anything more than smile rather oddly at that.

  The kapıcı’s wife came back into the living room and handed Ayşe a tiny tea glass on a gold-rimmed saucer. It was probably her best, most fancy set, reserved only for guests. It reminded Ayşe of her own parents, who had also, long ago, come to the city from the countryside. Keeping up appearances had been important to them too. She looked over at İkmen just in time to see one of his shoulders convulse.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘They’re leaving,’ she heard him say.

  Ayşe took a sip from her glass and then put it down on the small table beside her. Çetin İkmen watched with one curious eye as a middle-aged man and woman, both thin, both covered in heavy, drab clothing, closed their apartment door behind them, looked at each other for a moment and then left.

  She looked down into the small bowl her son had put in front of her and observed the tiny portion of food in it with great distaste. If Cahit did indeed want her to get pregnant again, he was not doing his bit in terms of her welfare. Three slices of aubergine, some mashed tomatoes and one slice of bread was hardly what Saadet would have called a meal. But she didn’t say anything to Lokman; she still didn’t have any way of knowing what might or might not be on his mind. She had opened her heart to him; now it was up to Lokman how he responded.

  ‘Eat,’ he told her as he stood in the doorway. Outside in the hall, beyond her makeshift prison, life continued, with television noise, people’s voices, the clank of food pots against the top of the cooker. ‘If you don’t eat, you won’t have any energy.’

  Lokman left, closing and locking the door behind him. Energy? For what? All she did was sit and contemplate her supposed ‘crime’, and the ways she might be punished for it, such as another assault by Cahit. Saadet felt her body go cold. She hadn’t loved him for so long, she could no longer recall when or even if she had ever loved him. There must have been a time, possibly when her poor dead Kenan was born. That had been a nice time, when she had been young, the village had been comfortable and familiar, and they had had everything any of them could want. By the time Lokman arrived two years later, things had changed. Cahit found work in the fields hard to come by, they were poor and often hungry, and for several years she couldn’t conceive. Only when the soldiers arrived and one beautiful one gave her a chocolate bar and her Gözde, did another little life light up her own. For a while.

  Saadet began to eat, to the sound of laughter from her hated sister-in-law’s living room.

  Mur
ad Emin had run down the stairs outside his family’s apartment, into the street and off towards the Golden Horn. One of the constables had warned the boy and then raised his pistol as if to shoot him, but Süleyman had pushed the weapon down and said, ‘He’s a child!’

  The other constable, now in hot pursuit, nevertheless found it hard to gain on the boy. Süleyman and İzzet Melik followed on in the former’s car, while back at the apartment, the boy’s parents stood at their front door looking shell-shocked and confused.

  Murad Emin ran very quickly but without any fully formed plan about where he might go or what he might do. That the police had finally come was enough to keep his feet hammering against the pavement, pushing him ever further away from the young but clearly less fit constable behind him. If the officer knew the area, he was sunk, but if he didn’t, Murad could, he knew, confuse him very easily by darting back into the tiny streets of Balat, which in this part of the district were on a hill. He’d known when he’d seen the big, ugly cop at the Tulip that he was in trouble. He should have listened to his own heart then and just left. He glanced at the Golden Horn once before he turned off on to an uneven little track beside a coppersmith’s workshop. Still with the sound of the constable’s laboured breathing behind him, he turned first right, then left, then left again, which brought him to a tiny alleyway between two very large and dilapidated houses. Miss Madrid always said that these houses had once belonged to prominent Jews, although Murad wasn’t at all sure about that. According to Miss Madrid, everything that was good and beautiful and clever had been made by or thought up by Jews. He could still hear those heavily shod feet somewhere behind him, and so he powered up the steep track between the houses as fast as he could. If he could get to the top of the hill, he could hide out in the derelict houses up by the church of St Mary of the Mongols and then take some time to think about what he might do next. The return of the police had come quickly and had taken him by surprise. Now he was going to have to do what he should have done before, which was to find someone who wasn’t Ali Reza Zafir to take care of him while he decided what to do next. He had hoped one day to contact al-Qaeda or the Taliban and go off maybe to Afghanistan to fight. But he didn’t know how to do that, and now he was alone and penniless and wanted by the police. Murad grunted with pain as he pushed himself up to the top of the hill and then looked around for the familiar entrance to the little group of derelict houses.

  Chapter 26

  * * *

  ‘My parents would never do such a thing! You’re lying!’ the girl said as she pushed away from Ayşe Farsakoğlu and pulled her headscarf tightly across her face.

  ‘Sabiha,’ Ayşe said as she squatted down beside the girl, a man is coming here to kill you. He’s doing it at the request of another man, who has been paid by your parents to murder you. I know it’s a lot—’

  ‘My parents would never do that, they love me!’

  Ayşe put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, which she shrugged off immediately. ‘I know that it is truly awful to think about one’s parents in this—’

  ‘They have no need to kill me!’ Sabiha cried. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong!’ But she turned her face away as she made this denial, and Çetin İkmen saw her.

  ‘Sabiha!’ Ayşe pleaded. ‘Please listen!’

  ‘I haven’t been with boys or . . .’

  İkmen looked down at his watch. Seeing that İsmail Yıldız would very soon be with them, he sat on the other side of the girl and said, ‘Now listen, I don’t know what, if anything, you may have done with a boy or boys. What I do know is that your parents have been told, apparently by your brother, that you have been having some sort of relationship with a man.’

  Sabiha was a pretty, narrow little thing. She creased her pale brow and said, ‘My brother? Emir?’

  ‘If that is your brother’s name, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘The man who has been enlisted to kill you, a man who very fortunately came to us and now works for us, told me just that.’

  ‘Yes, but Emir . . .’ Her eyes began to fill with tears. ‘Emir said that he liked Sami, that—’

  ‘Sami is the boy you have been seeing?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘He’s a neighbour, he . . .’ She looked up into İkmen’s eyes with a pleading expression on her face. ‘Emir? You are sure it was Emir?’

  ‘Unless you have another brother . . .’

  ‘No.’ She began to cry. Ayşe put a hand on her shoulder, which this time she did not resist. Suddenly she burst out, ‘But I trusted him! How could he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ayşe said, biting her tongue in order to stop herself from talking about men and how treacherous they were. Such blatantly feminist rhetoric would not play well with a headscarved girl from the countryside, however ‘bad’ she may have been.

  ‘Sabiha,’ İkmen said, ‘we have to catch this man who made the arrangement with your parents to have you killed. In order to do this, we have to make it look as if you have indeed died. But be assured that we will protect you at all times—’

  ‘But my mother and father,’ she cut in, her face now red with crying and anxiety. ‘What will happen to them?’

  İkmen looked across at Ayşe, who just shrugged. He knew he couldn’t and wouldn’t lie to the girl. ‘They will be arrested,’ he said.

  ‘Arrested!’

  ‘Sabiha, they are trying to have you killed,’ Ayşe said.

  ‘Yes, but arrested! My mother and my father . . .’ She took her mobile phone out of her pocket and began to dial a number. İkmen grabbed it and pressed the cancel button.

  ‘I can’t let you warn them, Sabiha,’ he said as he put the phone into his own jacket pocket. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Crying still, the girl said, ‘But what will happen to me? If I’ve no mother or father? If I’ve no brother to care for me? What?’

  Neither Ayşe nor İkmen had answers for her. She would be taken temporarily to a safe house for her own protection, but then . . . ‘Very soon the man who was employed to kill you will arrive,’ İkmen said. ‘Sabiha, my dear, we must get ready. We may have only one chance to find and capture the evil person who is behind this wicked trade. We need you to help us.’

  The Emins didn’t have a clue about where their son might have gone.

  ‘He goes to school, he works at some nargile place,’ his father said. ‘There’s Hamid Bey . . .’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh yes, right. There’s Miss Madrid . . .’

  ‘These are all people and places we know about!’ Süleyman said impatiently. If Murad Emin had any sense, he wouldn’t be hiding out with any of them. ‘Don’t you know who your son’s friends are, Mr Emin?’

  Mr Emin looked over at his wife, who shrugged and carried on smoking her joint.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Murad’s a close sort of a boy.’

  ‘A close sort of a boy who looks at violent jihadi DVDs at work and has pictures of the dead bodies of infidels underneath his bed!’ Süleyman roared. ‘Mr Emin, I am coming around to the opinion that your son could very well have been involved in the death of his homosexual piano teacher, Hamid İdiz.’

  ‘Oh, no, he always liked—’

  ‘We’ve always made sure that Murad met all sorts of people from all over the world,’ the boy’s mother said. ‘This is a house of liberal values, some would say immoral—’

  ‘Your son clearly moves to a different rhythm from your own,’ Süleyman cut in sharply. He looked around the dirty, neglected apartment and then went over to the boy’s school bag and opened it. ‘Maybe the answer lies in here,’ he said.

  As he bent down to pick the bag up, İzzet Melik whispered in his ear, ‘What about Ali Reza Zafir, sir? They knew each other from İdiz’s lessons and they both work at the Tulip.’

  Süleyman looked into the bag, at tattered exercise books, a sweat-stained gym shirt and a load of leaking pens, and then nodded at his sergeant. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

  They’d lost Murad Emin in the rat
-trap streets of Balat; they had no choice but to follow all and any leads that they did have.

  İsmail Yıldız did not look like a killer. He was a shabby, sheepish-looking man who held the petrol can he had brought with him limply in his left hand. He passed it without comment over to İkmen, who poured the liquid on top of the great bundle of rags he had constructed in the aluminium dustbin the kapıcı had brought in from the back yard. İkmen told İsmail to open one of the front windows ever so slightly so that passers-by might see and smell the smoke. Then he threw a match into the dustbin and told İsmail to run.

  ‘What happens now?’ Sabiha asked as she watched the flames from the dustbin shoot up and almost touch the living room ceiling.

  İkmen watched for a few seconds, until the smoke reached the window and began to make its way outside. Then he took his mobile phone out of his pocket and pressed a key to bring up a pre-programmed number. In less than five seconds, someone answered.

  ‘We’re “go” here,’ he said into the instrument, then he looked at the two women in front of him and smiled. ‘Not long now,’ he said.

  Ayşe looked at the girl Sabiha as she shivered and went white in the light of the ever-rising flames. The two women moved out of the room and into the hall.

  Dr Zafir was in a jocular mood. ‘Oh, you’re in luck, Inspector,’ he said to Süleyman as he let him and İzzet Melik into his very smart apartment. ‘Ali Reza is with us this evening. Often he works at his little job in the nargile salon, but not tonight.’ He called the boy. ‘Ali Reza!’

  A small blonde woman sat on one of the large sofas in the lounge: Zafir’s engineer wife. She greeted the officers warmly and then offered them tea, which they accepted. She called for the maid to make the drinks while she smiled very prettily and they all waited for the boy.

  ‘Dad?’ The boy, standing at the bottom of the apartment’s grand staircase, looked at the police officers and then at his father with concern on his face.

  Dr Zafir went over to his son, put his arm around his shoulder and brought him into the room. ‘The officers want to ask you something, Ali Reza,’ he said. ‘No need for alarm.’