‘We need to know whether you’ve seen Murad Emin,’ Süleyman said, getting straight to the point. He saw the boy look at İzzet Melik. ‘We know that you work together at the Tulip,’ he said. ‘We know that you know each other better than you would have had us believe.’
Dr Zafir brought his son over to his mother and sat the boy between them. His face expressed concern and he said, ‘What are you implying, Inspector?’
‘I’m implying nothing,’ Süleyman said. ‘I’m saying as a statement of fact that your son and the Emin boy sought for reasons best known to themselves to conceal the extent of their friendship from us. I don’t know why. The fact is that we need to speak to Murad Emin urgently, and so if your son knows where he is . . .’
‘Why do you want to speak to Murad?’ the boy asked. ‘What has he done?’
‘Why do you think he’s done anything?’ Süleyman countered.
Ali Reza looked up at his parents and then down at the floor.
‘Well?’
Dr Zafir looked at Süleyman with daggers in his eyes. How dare this mere public servant speak to his son like that!
The boy looked up and sighed. ‘Inspector, I haven’t seen Murad since last night, at the Tulip.’
‘You were working together.’
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t seen him today? This evening?’
‘No.’
‘My son has been here with us since four,’ his father said. ‘He finished school at three and then came straight home on the bus.’
‘I wasn’t feeling too good,’ Ali Reza said.
‘Why was that?’
‘Oh, Inspector, the boy—’
‘It’s all right, Dad,’ Ali Reza said with a smile. He turned to Süleyman. ‘Actually, I have been meaning to say something before, but . . .’ He lowered his eyes. ‘Working with Murad has become a bit of a trial lately.’
Dr and Mrs Zafir both frowned.
‘In what way?’ Süleyman asked.
‘He makes me nervous,’ the boy said. ‘With his opinions about people and . . . He doesn’t like unbelievers.’
‘People who are not Muslims?’
‘Yes.’ He looked up with strained, bloodshot eyes.
‘Well, Ali Reza,’ Süleyman said, ‘we did gather that for ourselves when we interviewed Murad.’ He looked at İzzet Melik, who nodded his agreement. ‘We got the impression that this was nothing new.’
‘It isn’t,’ Ali Reza said. ‘It’s always been annoying and upsetting. I thought that we were friends.’ He looked genuinely hurt. ‘I tolerated it for a while because he was my friend, but then it went further.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He started getting into all the jihadi stuff,’ Ali Reza said. ‘DVDs. He got them from those bearded crazy men you see on the street over where he lives. Then photographs and websites he was told to go on and . . . I think he may even want to join the Taliban or something.’
His mother put a hand up to her chest and murmured, ‘Allah!’
Süleyman leaned forward in his seat and looked the boy hard in the eyes. ‘Now tell me the truth, Ali Reza,’ he said. Do you think that Murad could possibly have had something to do with Hamid İdiz’s death? You have nothing to fear; just tell me the truth.’
‘I don’t know,’ the boy said, a little sulkily, Süleyman thought. ‘Why should I? Murad is no friend of mine, not any more.’
İkmen had his mobile phone on vibrate, but he still took it out of his pocket to look at it. He didn’t trust technology and was anxious to be right there when İsmail Yıldız called. Now that the fire officers were inside the apartment, the whole street, including a strangely subdued kapıcı, were out and about and seeing what they could see. Usually the most vocal of people, whipping up people’s emotions and spreading gossip whenever anything happened in the buildings they cared for, this kapıcı, on this occasion, was virtually silent.
Now divested of her dowdy clothes and horrible headscarf, Ayşe Farsakoğlu was in charge of the scene, while Çetin İkmen, still in his uncomfortably smart suit, stood behind the crowd and out of sight. İsmail Yıldız had headed home as soon as his job was done, and was now awaiting instructions from Cem. None of İkmen’s officers had reported seeing anyone answering Cem’s description in or around the scene. Yet he would have to somehow verify what had happened, which could mean that he would either come by himself in the near future or maybe send someone else to check it out.
As the body bag containing what İkmen knew was in fact the live body of the girl Sabiha was carried out of the building and into the street, and Ayşe yelled at her officers to keep the weeping locals at bay, one such weeping local raised his mobile phone in the air and took a picture. Some people, it appeared, were rather less distrusting of electronics than İkmen.
Chapter 27
* * *
You couldn’t trust Gonca the gypsy’s kids.
‘Oi, you!’ one of them called out to Izabella as she walked past the Church of St Mary of the Mongols. ‘In them derelict houses. There’s that boy you teach the piano, the one whose mum sells her snatch!’
Izabella Madrid wasn’t shocked. ‘Sells her snatch, does she?’ she said very calmly. ‘Is that the same as trading your arse? Better? Worse?’
For a moment the child, a boy, looked confused, and then he said, ‘My mum’s an artist and she makes more money then you! Her boyfriend’s got a gun!’
‘Yes, he’s a policeman,’ Izabella said.
‘My mum can have anyone she likes!’
He ran away laughing. Izabella resisted the urge to shout out something really obscene about his mother and just smiled to herself instead. Then she looked at the derelict houses. They’d been in that state for years. Kids had always played in them, although not generally serious sorts like Murad Emin. She hoped he hadn’t been chased into the old buildings by the gypsies’ kids or other ‘rough’ types.
Izabella went into the first house, which was really just two walls and half a ceiling, and called out the boy’s name. There was no reply. The sky was darkening and the place was taking on a distinctly spooky character. Not that Izabella was easily frightened. She was, she always told anyone who asked her, about threats both physical and supernatural, far too old and too ugly to be really afraid of anything. But that wasn’t altogether quite true, and when she went into the next house, which had the benefit of a back wall, she did feel just a little shudder pass through her body.
‘Murad!’
Her voice echoed around what had once possibly been the home of a man of substance and his family; a merchant, a jeweller or a pharmacist. It was very strange that Murad should be in such a place, if indeed he was. The boy worked most evenings at the Tulip nargile salon.
‘Murad, it’s Miss Madrid,’ she said. ‘Gonca the gypsy’s children have gone now; you can come out.’
Gonca’s tribe were not generally vicious or bullying, but they were completely wild and totally without religious direction. A pious boy like Murad would be a prime target for such carefree rolling stones, particularly in view of the fact that he had a mother they could all make fun of. Poor Mrs Emin. A junkie like her husband, although rather more degraded inasmuch as she was the one who sold herself for their heroin. With what she earned, the Emins could probably have afforded to pay for Murad to have piano lessons with Hamid İdiz, but their ‘gear’ had, as always, come way before their children. Murad had in recent times become a rather more haughty and challenging boy than he had been, and Izabella found the Islamicisation of almost his every utterance wearing and incomprehensible. But she was sure that given time and increased wisdom he would come to a rather more balanced and peaceable interpretation of his religion. He was, after all, a clever boy.
She knew that she wasn’t alone when something moved towards the back of the building and a rat ran out and across the front of her shoes.
‘Murad?’
She had begun to walk over towards the place from which the r
at had come when suddenly the boy stood up and ran towards her.
‘Oh, Miss Madrid!’ Murad Emin said as he raced into her somewhat startled embrace. ‘You’ve got to help me!’
She said that she would, of course she did; he was crying by this time. But his race into her infidel embrace gave her pause deep down inside. The Murad she knew just didn’t do things like that, not any more.
It was gone eight o’clock when Saadet heard Cahit and her nephew Aykan leave the apartment. Cahit wanted to show him, so he said, a new coffee house. But he didn’t take Lokman, and Saadet knew why. She knew the signs. He was going to a brothel and he was taking that great fat lump of a nephew with him, because where else would Aykan get sex?
Cahit had been a hypocrite almost from the start. The first time she’d seen him coming out of the brothel back in the village, he’d told her he’d only done what he’d done for her sake. A decent woman like her wouldn’t want to have to pander to his baser urges, would she? He wouldn’t expect it of her. He was doing it for her! But then, for a time, he’d been at the brothel more than he’d been at home. Saadet had spoken nervously to his mother, who had beaten her for telling on her husband but had put a stop to it. As a punishment, Cahit had made Saadet do what the whores had done. Then they’d moved to the city and he’d started going to brothels again.
She heard the door shut behind them and settled in to listening to the television from the next room. Nesrin and the hated Feray were in there, rotting their brains with soap operas and American sitcoms they couldn’t possibly appreciate. Saadet thought about Gözde and how much she had loved the American series Friends. She’d wanted so much, she’d told Saadet one day, a nice apartment with friends just like Rachel. At the time, Saadet had smacked her for her ‘looseness’. Now the thought of it made her want to cry with shame. Whatever that girl had done had been nothing compared to what had been done to her, what Saadet had allowed to be done to her! But she did not allow herself the luxury of tears. She was a terrible, terrible woman who deserved absolutely no compassion, not even from herself.
She heard Nesrin laugh her silly high-pitched laugh and wondered how, if at all, she could persuade Lokman to defy his father and not marry her. Nesrin wasn’t a bad girl – she wasn’t like her mother – but Saadet knew that her son could do so much better. The boy would be bored with her after just days, and then they would both be unhappy. She thought about her soldier and about how some of the sexual things she had hated to do with Cahit she had loved with him. As she closed her eyes she could see herself, young and naked, her body straining towards his under the full sun of a summer morning. She was aware of the fact that the front door of the apartment had opened and closed once again, but she thought that it was probably because Lokman had now gone out too.
So she was very surprised when less than a minute later Lokman opened the door of her prison and looked down at her. She could only hope that he wasn’t going to hit her.
He whispered, ‘Auntie Feray has just gone out. Nesrin is dozing. If you want to go, now has to be the time.’
‘But Lokman . . .’
‘Sssh!’ He put a hand over her mouth and then raised her up from the floor so he could speak to her. ‘I don’t know what the truth is,’ he said softly. ‘But if there is a chance that Father killed Gözde, then that cannot stand.’
She looked into his eyes as he took his hand away from her mouth. ‘Lokman . . .’
‘I’m doing this for Gözde,’ he said. Then he added almost grudgingly, ‘And because Father shouldn’t rape you, it’s wrong.’
‘Send it to him,’ İkmen said to the terrified boy who had just taken a very bad, very shaky photograph of the body bag being loaded into an ambulance. He’d tried to get the fire appliance into the shot as well but had only managed to photograph one rather anonymous open door.
The boy sent the photograph to the man, apparently called Al, who had given him twenty lire to take it for him.
‘Where and when did you meet this man?’ İkmen asked. There was a tall, broad constable at his side now, who the boy looked at with fear.
‘I don’t know. Maybe twenty minutes ago?’ the kid said. He was no more than fifteen, spotty and geeky. He’d no doubt spend his twenty lire on computer games. ‘He said there was a fire.’
‘Which he wanted photographs of?’
‘He wanted photos if they brought a dead body out,’ the boy said.
‘Did he say why?’
‘No.’
İkmen didn’t ask the boy why he had agreed to perform such a gruesome task for someone he didn’t know. The kid was dressed shabbily; it was obvious. He asked him where he’d met the man, and the boy pointed to a small alleyway on the left that passed beside a grocer’s shop.
‘What did he look like?’ İkmen asked as he looked down at the boy’s phone to see whether ‘Al’ responded to what had been sent to him.
‘Oh, he was old,’ the boy said.
‘And by old you mean . . .’
‘Thirty-five,’ the boy said, ‘maybe even forty.’
Even the constable, who was no more than twenty-five himself, smiled.
‘I see,’ İkmen said. ‘Ancient. And was he short? Tall? Fat or thin? Dark or fair?’
The boy looked up into the sky, as if that might suddenly and magically improve his memory, then he said, ‘Well . . .’
İkmen’s phone began to ring, and he put it to his ear immediately.
‘It’s me,’ İsmail Yıldız said.
‘Yes? And?’
‘Cem has just called,’ he said. ‘He wants to meet me at the nargile salon at the Royal Tombs on the corner of Divan Yolu and Babıali Street.’
‘When?’
‘As soon as I can get there,’ İsmail said. ‘I’m leaving home now. I’ll take a taxi.’
İkmen reckoned it would take İsmail about ten minutes to get from his home in Fatih to the Royal Tombs in Sultanahmet. It would take İkmen about the same amount of time to jump in his car and go over there.
‘I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘But if you get there before me, keep Cem with you for as long as you can.’
‘Yes, Çetin Bey.’ İsmail cut the connection.
İkmen told the boy to give his details to the constable at his side, then he went over to Hikmet Yıldız and told him to follow him to his car. Hikmet was in plain clothes, but İkmen chose two uniformed officers to accompany him as well. Arresting this Cem, an unknown quantity, could be quite straightforward or it could be problematic. He had no idea.
Just before they headed off towards Sultanahmet, Ayşe Farsakoğlu came over to the car and said to İkmen, ‘Sabiha’s family are apparently returning to the apartment.’
‘Well I’m off, hopefully to meet Cem,’ he said. ‘Play along with them until I’ve secured him.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He drove off in the direction of the Royal Tombs in Sultanahmet.
Ali Reza Zafir had no idea about where Murad Emin liked to go when he wasn’t either at his piano lessons or at work. İzzet Melik had been obliged to tell the owner of the Tulip nargile salon who and what he really was when he and his colleague had found those extremist DVDs. Now, with Süleyman, he returned to the salon, but the boy wasn’t there and no one had any sort of idea where he might be.
As they left the Tulip, İzzet said, ‘I think he’s probably still in Balat.’
He hadn’t gone back to his parents’ apartment. A constable had been left there with Mr and Mrs Emin, and he said that Murad had most definitely not been seen.
Süleyman was still not happy about going back to Balat yet again, but he said, ‘You may be right. We should check it out.’
‘With junkies for parents, the kid can’t have that much money, even though he does work,’ İzzet said. ‘And Balat is a very good place to hide out. Lots of nooks, crannies and ruins.’
They got into Süleyman’s car and headed for the Atatürk Bridge. As Süleyman pulled out into the horn-hooting traffic, he said, �
�You know, İzzet, I’m not sure that I understand the relationship between Ali Reza and Murad Emin.’
‘Relationship?’
‘I don’t mean that they’re lovers or anything like that,’ Süleyman said. ‘I think they are or were friends, very good friends. But there’s something else too. A feeling of . . . indebtedness?’
İzzet frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not really certain,’ Süleyman said. ‘Maybe it has something to do with their piano-playing. When we first met Ali Reza he said he wanted to be a concert pianist. But from what I can gather, it is Murad who has the musical genius.’
‘You think Ali Reza might be jealous?’
‘It has to be possible,’ Süleyman replied. ‘And yet surely if he was that jealous, he would have informed on Murad’s interest in terrorism when he first found out about it. Clearly he didn’t do that, even though he claims that it bothered him. The boys have to be rivals in this upcoming Turco–Caucasian music festival. Why not get Murad out of the way?’
‘He’ll be out of the way now,’ İzzet replied.
‘Yes, but why not off him sooner?’ Süleyman asked. ‘It’s not like Ali Reza is some sort of street kid who will attract reprisals. He could have got rid of Murad at any time. Why didn’t he?’
Chapter 28
* * *
Cem was the invisible man. As the boy back in Çarşamba had told him, İkmen saw that he was indeed about thirty-five, medium height, medium build, not particularly dark and not particularly fair either. He wore dull, rather rumpled clothing, typical of a manual labourer from the country. He had a small, nascent moustache and a flat cap that sat as if dropped directly down from heaven on the top of his head. İsmail Yıldız, in his loose cream shirt and baggy şalvar trousers, looked positively exotic in comparison.
While İkmen and Hikmet Yıldız watched, the two men greeted each other and İsmail ordered tea. Neither man smoked or did much beyond say a very few words to each other until their drinks had arrived. İkmen put his radio to his ear in order to hear their conversation. İsmail Yıldız had worn a wire to record his every encounter since he’d left the girl Sabiha’s apartment. The two men chatted about this and that, the weather and the pollution in the city, until İkmen heard İsmail say, ‘So, brother, you have called me here to talk about the job and also, I hope, to pay me. The job was satisfactory?’
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