A Noble Killing (12 page)

‘Mr Emin,’ Süleyman said to the man, ‘if your son says that Hamid İdiz masturbated in front of him, then we have to believe that is what happened. Mr İdiz was a very active homosexual, and apart from that, he does allude in his writings to an unrequited fancy for your son.’

‘Oh.’

The boy looked at his father with fury on his face and said, ‘I told you! Islam proscribes such things! They are unnatural! Sinful!’

Murad Emin, unlike his thin and heavily-lined father, was a well built and attractive boy. His clothes, though not in the height of fashion, were nevertheless well looked after. His hair was attractively styled and he had a clear complexion. His parents must, Süleyman felt, have some care for him and his younger sister.

Mr Emin took Süleyman away from the tango and into his small, spare kitchen. ‘What you have to understand, Inspector,’ he said, ‘is that my son is a very gifted boy.’ He waved his thin arms around the room. ‘You can see how we live. My wife . . . she has a degree, we both do, and yet she . . .’ His eyes filled with tears.

‘Sir, I am not here to pass judgement upon what men and women have to do to survive,’ Süleyman said. It was very obvious by this time just what Mrs Emin was. ‘My aim is only to make sure that Hamid İdiz’s pupils are safe, and also, if I can, to find his killer.’

Mr Emin bit down hard on his thin lower lip. ‘Miss Madrid, Murad’s first piano teacher, spotted his talent,’ he said. ‘He still used to go to her to practise after school even when Hamid Bey had taken him on. We don’t have a piano . . .’

‘You say he used to go to Miss Madrid?’

‘Murad took a little job at a nargile salon in Tophane. Week nights The owner has a piano. He lets my son practise. It’s convenient.’

Süleyman nodded.

‘Hamid Bey was so impressed by my son that he wouldn’t take payment for his lessons,’ Mr Emin said. This reflected exactly what both Ali Reza Zafir and Izabella Madrid had told Süleyman. ‘He said that my son could go all the way. Join one of the great orchestras. Get out of this.’ He looked around the dank kitchen with sad eyes. ‘I knew what Hamid Bey was, what he would sometimes do. My son told me. But he never touched Murad, never hurt him. I would never have tolerated that. Maybe I was wrong in what I did tolerate.’

‘Your son, though unhurt, is not happy, Mr Emin,’ Süleyman said. ‘But no crime has been committed and so my work here is done, with the exception of the fact that at some point I will have to interview your son formally about Hamid Bey. I will have to interview all of his pupils.’

‘Of course.’ And then suddenly his face brightened. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘do you happen to know whether the Turco–Caucasian Music Festival is still going ahead? Murad is so silent these days, there’s no point asking him, and his poor mother was so looking forward to it.’

Süleyman said he had some information. Then they had returned to where the tango was happening, and together with İzzet Melik he had looked on politely and in silence. It was only just before they were about to leave that the thing that now haunted him happened. Mr Emin’s wife, the prostitute, showed them out. As Süleyman passed, she smiled and whispered, ‘Your wife know, does she?’

He felt his face drain. He wanted to ask her ‘About what?’ but İzzet was with him and he wasn’t sure that his deputy had actually heard what the woman had said. Did the Emin woman know about Gonca? Was that what she meant, or was he just seeing connections where none existed? In the lukewarm light of early morning, he really didn’t know.

Çetin İkmen didn’t have to go far to find his dead body. Propped up on a bench in the corner of the Kaktus Bar on Imam Adnan Lane, it was only a five-minute walk from the Rainbow Internet Café. What was more, the identity of the corpse was far from being a mystery to him.

‘He’s called Kenan Seyhan,’ İkmen told the two constables who had been called in by the owners of the Kaktus when the body was discovered. The customers, a random selection of media types and those of a generally left-wing nature, stood outside in small shocked groups. They had imagined that the man sitting quietly in a corner was just having a little sleep.

İkmen picked up the tall, empty glass from the table in front of Kenan Seyhan and sniffed it.
Rakı
. ‘So he’d been drinking,’ he said. ‘I wonder what else.’

One of the constables said, ‘The doctor’s on his way.’

İkmen leaned in as close as he could to the body without actually touching it. Kenan Seyhan had not been dead for long. He was still slightly warm and his face had not yet dropped from what looked like an expression of fear into the slack death mask with which İkmen was all too familiar. Even in death, Kenan Seyhan looked haunted. İkmen called through to Ayşe Farsakoğlu and told her to assemble a squad of uniforms to go and pick up Kenan’s parents and his brother. At least one of them would have to formally identify the body. At the same time, Lokman Seyhan in particular would need to be questioned about his recent movements. If indeed he was still in town. He and Kenan had had some very serious ‘issues’, as the Americans put it. Had he somehow killed his brother in this funky lefty bar and then just run away?

It was while İkmen was looking closely at the corpse that he noticed that Kenan Seyhan had a piece of paper sticking out of the top pocket of his shirt. He picked a clean napkin up from one of the nearby tables and wrapped it around his fingers so he could draw the paper out without touching it. Opening it up, he found four statements written on it in childlike block capitals. They made his hair stand on end.

Even if they didn’t know his name, all the men in the coffee house knew what Hikmet Yıldız did for a living. No one really liked the fact that he was a policeman, although the oleaginous owner always insisted he accept free tea. It was too much bother to argue.

Hikmet sat down at an empty table over by the door. Like every other coffee house in the country, this one was sparsely furnished with plain wooden tables and chairs, swathed in cigarette smoke and full of dour men. Away from their wives, they all did as they pleased. Some played backgammon, some watched the endless football matches that always seemed to be on the television over by the samovar in the corner. Others talked in low voices, nodding their flat-capped heads in agreement with each other from time to time. They all smoked, with the exception of the small group of ultra-religious Muslims who sat at a table right at the back of the coffee house, drinking tea, telling their prayer beads and debating. Everybody in Fatih was observant, but these men and boys were different; they looked at Hikmet with active hostility. Clearly, he reasoned, they felt he was an enemy, an agent of a secular state of which they did not approve. They wanted, so he imagined, Sharia as opposed to secular law, just like his brother.

He’d only been sitting down for a minute when the oleaginous owner bustled over and put a glass of tea down in front of him. ‘Ah, Constable,’ he said, over-enthusiastically, ‘what a glorious morning Allah has seen fit to give us, eh? Warm, but not too hot.’

‘Yes.’

‘A fine day for quiet contemplation in one’s favourite coffee house.’ He smiled. ‘I assume, Constable, that you are free from your very important duty today?’

‘Yes.’ The creepy man had noticed that he was out of uniform. Although quite what he was going to do with his day off, Hikmet didn’t know. Being at home with his unemployed brother was depressing. That was one of the reasons he generally started his days in the coffee house – even old men mutely playing backgammon and the mutterings of religious fanatics was better than that. He was wondering whether he might just head on up to Beyoğlu and spend the day in a bar when a group of smart men wearing sunglasses and some very chunky jewellery swept in and sat down at a table in the middle of the coffee house. All the men were young and unknown to him, with the exception of the slightly older character at the centre of everyone’s attention. Hikmet instinctively turned his head away so the man in question couldn’t see his face. Not that Tayfun ‘The Smoker’ Ergin would necessarily have recognised one of the many insignificant police constables who had come to arrest him the previous August. He had, after all, been entirely exonerated by the wife he’d almost beaten to death. When it came to the crunch, she just hadn’t been able to follow through and put him away. Now, apparently, the couple were divorced.

‘Coffee!’ Ergin barked at the oleaginous owner. For someone known by the name ‘The Smoker’, he had a very light, unscarred voice. But then Tayfun Ergin didn’t smoke. He was known as The Smoker because he had started his life of crime collecting protection money from nargile salons for an old gangster called ‘Lame’ Rafik. When the old man died, Tayfun and his gang of thugs took over, and he had been bleeding nargile salons as well as bars across the city for the past ten years. Quite what he was doing in Fatih, where nargile salons were few and poor and bars unheard of, Hikmet couldn’t imagine. But it soon became clear that not everyone wanted the gangster in their midst.

Just after the owner had served Ergin and his men, one of the religious types got up and walked over to his table. Prayer beads still in hand, he said, ‘Mr Ergin, your interest is noted, but your interference is unwanted. You should go.’

Ergin, who in spite of everything was a good-looking man, flashed the religious one a dazzling smile. ‘Sir, I am both a businessman who enables and a true believer. I seek only to help.’

The owner, now white-faced with apparent terror, attempted to pull the religious man away. ‘Brother . . .’

‘No! No!’ the man with the beads cried. ‘He must know we do not—’

‘Ssh! Ssh!’ The owner, thinking that Hikmet couldn’t see him, nodded his head in the policeman’s direction, warning of his presence. But Hikmet could see out of the corner of his eye what was happening. He also saw Ergin and his boys smirking as the religious man sat down amid his own agitated fellows. What had the gangster done to upset
them
? What was he doing in Fatih anyway? And what on earth was all that about ‘interference’ and ‘interest’? Was Ergin moving into Fatih? Why?

The religious types left first, followed a few minutes later by an obviously amused Ergin and his entourage. Although Hikmet doubted very much whether the coffee house owner would tell him anything of any use, he did ask him, ‘What was all that about?’ just before he left.

‘Oh, I don’t have the slightest idea, Constable,’ the creepy one said with a smile. ‘I just don’t want any trouble in my place.’

Which was true, but there was more to it than that, and both the coffee shop owner and Hikmet knew it. As he left the building, Hikmet Yıldız decided to bring Tayfun Ergin to Çetin İkmen’s attention again. The inspector had been after him for years, and if Ergin was up to something new, he would certainly want to know about it.

‘The toxicology and the DNA will take time,’ Dr Arto Sarkissian said to İkmen. ‘But taking into account the box we found in Mr Seyhan’s pocket together with the alcohol he drank, I would say that he died from an overdose of diazepam mixed with
rakı
.’

The doctor had just managed to catch İkmen before he began his interview with Kenan Seyhan’s parents and his brother Lokman. Cahit, the father, had already identified his son’s body. Now they all had to deal with what Kenan had written in that suicide note.

‘I still think it’s very odd to commit suicide in a bar,’ İkmen said as he drew level with the door to the interview room.

The doctor shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The Kaktus isn’t the sort of place where people stare or pry into what you’re doing. He could down his pills without attracting attention. Also, the kind of middle-class liberal types who frequent places like that are unlikely to rob you. And he wanted that note found.’

‘True.’

‘He was lucky he wasn’t sick,’ Arto said as he made his way past the policeman and down the corridor, ‘but then I don’t think he’d eaten for quite some time.’

İkmen pushed the door of the interview room open and sat down at the table in the middle of the room beside his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu. On the other side were the three white faces of Cahit, Saadet and Lokman Seyhan. İkmen expressed sympathy for their loss before he came to the note.

‘There are four statements,’ he said. ‘As far as we can tell from your son’s other personal effects, the handwriting is his own.’

‘What does it say?’ Cahit asked. He looked tense as well as upset and the skin around his eyes was red. ‘Tell us.’

İkmen looked down at the photocopy of Kenan Seyhan’s suicide note and said, ‘The first statement reads:
My lover Hamid İdiz is dead and so I no longer wish to live
.’

No one moved or spoke. Ayşe Farsakoğlu wondered whether the fact that Kenan Seyhan had been homosexual was the reason why those women she’d heard talking in Fatih had alluded to ‘immoral behaviour’ in the family.

Lokman Seyhan spoke first. ‘My brother was queer.’

‘Which would now put into context some of those things you said when you fought him,’ İkmen said. ‘Hamid İdiz had just been found murdered—’

‘I was glad of that!’ Cahit Seyhan cried. ‘I was glad!’

‘You knew . . .’

‘That pervert seduced my son!’

‘They were lovers,’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu countered. Inspector Süleyman, whose case Hamid İdiz was, had been made aware of Kenan Seyhan’s death and the events surrounding it. It was his opinion that Seyhan was most probably İdiz’s unnamed secret lover.

Cahit Seyhan looked at Ayşe with fury in his eyes while his wife, now unable to hold on to her composure any longer, broke down and cried.

‘The nature of your son’s death as well as the contents of his note leave very little doubt that he took his own life,’ İkmen continued.

Saadet murmured, ‘Allah!’

‘So why are we here,’ Lokman said, ‘if he killed himself? We’ve identified his body. Why . . .’

‘
I fear my father killed Hamid
,’ İkmen said as he continued reading from the photocopy. He followed on with the last two sentences Kenan Seyhan had written: ‘
My family killed my sister Gözde
,’ he said, ‘
Everyone I care about is dead
.’