A Noble Killing

Copyright © 2011 Barbara Nadel

The right of Barbara Nadel to be indentified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 0 7553 7163 1

HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time and has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel
Deadly Web
in 2005. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Francis Hancock series set during World War Two.

To all my wonderful female friends, to Kathy, Pat, Ruth, Jeyda, Elsie, Sarah, Jenny, Vivian, Gilda and to my agent, Juliet.

Cast of Characters

Çetin İkmen
– middle-aged İstanbul police inspector

Mehmet Süleyman
– İstanbul police inspector, İkmen’s protégé

Commissioner Ardıç
– İkmen and Süleyman’s boss

Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu
– İkmen’s deputy

Sergeant İzzet Melik
– Süleyman’s deputy

Metin İskender
– younger İstanbul police inspector

Dr Arto Sarkissian
– police pathologist, an ethnic Armenian

Constable Hikmet Yıldız
– İstanbul police constable

İsmail Yıldız
– Hikmet’s brother

Hatice
– police psychologist

Flower
– one of Süleyman’s informants

Gonca
– Süleyman’s gypsy mistress

Şukru
– Gonca’s brother

Hamid İdiz
– piano teacher based in fashionable Şişli district

Ali Reza Zafir
– teenage pupil of Hamid İdiz

Murad Emin
– teenage pupil of Hamid İdiz

Izabella Madrid
– piano teacher based in Balat district

Cahit Seyhan
– father of victim Gözde Seyhan

Saadet Seyhan
– Cahit’s wife

Lokman Seyhan
– Cahit and Saadet’s older son

Kenan Seyhan
– Cahit and Saadet’s younger son, Lokman’s brother

Gözde Seyhan
– Cahit and Saadet’s daughter

Feray Akol
– Cahit Seyhan’s sister

Nesrin and Aykan Akol
– Feray’s daughter and son

Osman Yavuz
– computer geek

Richard and Jane Ford
– American expats

Tayfun Ergin
– gangster

Cem Koç
– chancer

Rafik Bey
– grocer

Mustafa Bey
– nargile salon owner

Şenol
– police computer expert

His feet pounded against the dusty road surface to the jagged beat of his heart. Every so often he had to jump a brick or a pile of rubbish, skirt around a new and pristine car that at one time would have made him stop and stare.

But now, at that moment, his existence was only about survival. Physically he had to get away. That was the easy part. There was also getting away in his head, and that was quite another matter. If only she hadn’t turned to look at him! Before, when he’d rehearsed the whole thing in his mind, he’d imagined that once she had caught, she’d just fall to the floor. The pain surely would make her drop like a sack of pomegranates. Instead she’d just stood there, turned and calmly looked at him. Try as he might, in the few minutes since he’d left her, he couldn’t make that terrible glance anything other than what it had been. Hatred. He knew she had known what she had done. She must have realised that there would be repercussions! Not that her crime and its ramifications made him feel any better now. In a way, all of that was practically irrelevant.

What was relevant was that he felt very differently from the way he had thought he would feel. He’d taken a human life! He’d taken a human life and it didn’t feel good. It didn’t give him a sense of being a man, of doing what was right, of feeling really honoured or brave or anything except fear, horror and regret. Maybe later, when he wasn’t running like a frightened lamb, he might feel differently. Perhaps when he himself was safe . . . He looked up at the tall, blank apartment buildings that lined every street that he ran along and he wondered what, if anything, the unknown people in those apartments had seen. He didn’t know the area. That had been one of his advantages. It was also, now, to him, a drawback. Not knowing the area and the people meant that he didn’t know, given that someone must have seen him, how that person or anyone else in the district would react. He turned a tight corner into a wider street that looked as if it might be quite important.

It was while running down that wider, more prestigious street that he was passed by a speeding fire engine. As it whipped past his shoulder, sucking his hair in its direction as it went, he found himself screaming.

The darkness and the impenetrability of the smoke was typical of a fire that had taken hold at least twenty minutes before. The three-man team on the high-pressure hose were experienced fire officers who knew how dangerous their situation was.

The blaze had first been reported by a neighbour. A foreigner, he had been panicking when he spoke to the control room. But his shaky, weirdly accented message had been relayed to the station eventually, and the appliance and its crew had left immediately. They’d all known that getting from the fire station to the site of the blaze would take too much time. It was always the same. Unless the fire was on one of the big, broad boulevards off Taksim Square, in the very centre of the city, they had problems. İstanbul was an ancient city. It had been built for ancient forms of transport like horses, carts and sedan chairs. Tiny little streets and alleyways like this one in the district of Beşiktaş were difficult to get to, and even once the appliance had arrived, the logistics of entering some of the tortuously laid-out buildings were a nightmare.

When the officers had arrived, they had been able to see the fire easily from the street. One of the many gawping onlookers had told them that the blazing apartment belonged to a family called Seyhan. They had two sons and a daughter. The young men, at least, had been seen leaving for work earlier in the day. Although the fire officers had to haul the hose up a flight of stairs to the front entrance of the apartment building, they didn’t have any further to climb. The Seyhans’ apartment was to the right of the stairs leading to the upper floors. The front door was smashed out with an axe. Once inside, had the team not already been wearing breathing apparatus, they would have begun to lose consciousness. The fire, so it seemed, had its origins in a room at the far right-hand end of the central rectangular hall. Dense black and grey smoke curled from the open doorway and across the hall ceiling like tendrils of evil chiffon. Apartment blocks like this were full of plastic foam. It stuffed the chairs and beds of the newly arrived migrants from the countryside – the typical residents of such buildings. Back in their sparse Anatolian villages, these people had rested upon horsehair cushions and mattresses covered with intricate and often very old tapestries. But they had swapped those old things for bright, shiny modern furnishings that looked clean but which, when burnt, gave off fumes that could kill a person who just breathed them in once.

Slowly and cautiously the team moved forward. The smoke in that room was now so dense that not even a scrap of light could be seen coming in from the street outside. The door frames, though thin and now scorched, looked like the edges of a black and ruined mouth. A gateway, the fire officers all knew, that could so easily lead them to their deaths. Even experienced hearts beat faster, the sound of breathing behind masks became short and ragged. Hauling the thick and heavy hose after them, they moved into position. A beat, a moment passed as they all stared into the swirling darkness before them. And then . . .

And then . . . ‘Flashover!’ Only one of them said it, his words muffled by his mask. But they all knew what it was. The smoke, finally eaten by the strengthening flames, disappeared in a terrible conflagration of red, white and gold. Everything was illuminated: chairs, cupboards, a bed; even the window, once blackened, now burned in shades of bright yellow as the soot on the pane incinerated. The team stood, as they did at moments of flashover, motionless. Temporarily pushed back by the heat as well as briefly awed by the violent actions of the fire (one never, ever became accustomed to such a thing), a half-step back was quickly followed by the activation of the hose and the beginning of the battle these men were duty-bound to win. As they moved slowly forwards, the man at the very back of the team thought he saw something move on the floor just beyond the entrance to the room. At the time, he felt sure it had to be just a low-level flame.

‘That shop always used to sell beer and wine,’ Inspector Çetin İkmen said as he slouched gloomily away from the small street corner grocer’s shop. ‘What does he mean, it’s his right not to sell alcohol if he doesn’t want to? It’s his duty to sell whatever his customers want!’

İkmen’s companion, his friend and colleague Inspector Mehmet Süleyman, smiled. Although much younger than İkmen, he had served as a police officer with the older man for over twenty years and so he knew him very well. It wasn’t that İkmen had particularly wanted to have a drink. He’d gone into the shop to buy a couple of cans of Efes lager to take home with him for the evening. It was the reason why the shopkeeper hadn’t been able to let him have the beer that irked İkmen. He looked up and down the busy Ortabahçe Street and said, ‘This isn’t some back end of Beşiktaş! This is one of the main thoroughfares!’

His friend raised one of his finely curved eyebrows and said, ‘I take it we are talking about . . .’

‘People come in to the city from villages in Anatolia to find work, and I have no problem with that,’ İkmen said. ‘But the owner of that shop only took it over last month and already he’s cut out alcohol.’