A Noble Killing (21 page)

‘Why should I believe you? Eh? Why?’

‘Because I’m telling you the truth!’ she said as she tried to protect her face from his belt and his fists. Once she’d left the police station, she’d made sure that she’d done some shopping in order to lend credence to her story. Had anyone seen her get into that car? No one she knew had been on the street when she went down to the baker’s. But maybe someone had been watching her from across the road, from up in an apartment, from almost anywhere.

‘Slut!’ Cahit pulled his fist back and smashed it into her mouth. She heard the crack before she felt any pain. She put two fingers into her mouth and pulled out a broken, bloodied tooth. The sight of it, the blood, the tooth or both, made her want to scream. It had a different effect upon her husband. He was panting with the effort of it all, and looked satisfied, as if the blooding of his wife had sated his rage, if only temporarily.

‘Slut,’ he reiterated. Now no longer hysterical, he added in a calm voice, ‘You will never leave this apartment again. Understand?’

Oh, she understood all right! He was locking her away, just as he had tried to lock Gözde away, just as his own mother had been incarcerated back in the village. She had been a legend. People had said of her that she was so good, she never so much as saw the light of day. Poor woman. As Saadet watched her husband nurse the fist he had broken her tooth with, she had an overwhelming urge to tell him about her daughter. She hadn’t thought about that, hadn’t allowed herself to remember it, for years. But now that İkmen had reminded her, she suddenly could not get Gözde’s real father’s face out of her mind. A soldier from İstanbul, just passing through the village, a conscript at least five years her junior. But he’d been so polite, so kind, helping her to carry water from the well. He’d been good-looking, too. He, the man whose name she hadn’t even known, had passed on those fine features to her pretty daughter. Her pretty dead daughter, born of the gentle lovemaking Saadet had experienced only once with her soldier. Oh, she wanted to tell Cahit so much! She wanted to hurt him so badly! But all she actually said as she bowed her head in his direction was ‘Yes, Cahit.’

He left the room without further comment, locking the door behind him just to make his point. So now she was confined. Locked in an airless apartment with a husband, a sister-in-law and a nephew she hated and who hated her. Her niece she didn’t hate; she was just fat and lazy and useless. Only Lokman, her one remaining son, had a place in her heart. But would he help her? Would he let her out in defiance of his own father? It was unlikely and utterly unthinkable should she decide to tell him the truth about his sister’s real father. Her son could, she knew, even kill her. But then if she did get out of the Akols’ apartment, she didn’t have anywhere to go.

Saadet sat down on the floor, took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and held it up to her mouth. A front tooth! Her bully of a husband had knocked out a front tooth! But then who but she would ever see it? No one. She wasn’t going out again; it didn’t matter. Locked away, she would cook and clean and do what her sister-in-law told her. Cahit would beat her, and occasionally he would force himself on her. Saadet, overwhelmed, began to cry. She couldn’t live like that, she just couldn’t, not after Gözde, not after Kenan.

Only that policeman, only İkmen, could help her now. But she’d passed up the chance he’d given her only hours before to tell him everything and make a new life for herself. She’d not been ready, she’d been too afraid. And now that time had passed and Cahit had made her his prisoner. The only way she could make things right was to somehow leave the apartment. But how she was going to do that, Saadet just didn’t know.

He slipped into the Rainbow Internet Café almost without her noticing. The skinny loner boy the police had been so interested in. He sat down at a computer beside a bunch of trannies, who were so caught up in giggling at something on their machine, they didn’t even see him. But the woman with the blood-red nails and the flamboyant dress sense did. She took out the card one of the inspectors had given her and went into the alleyway behind the café to make the call. Fifteen minutes later, Osman Yavuz was being led away into a police car amid the screams and squeaks of the gang of transsexuals.

‘I didn’t kill Gözde!’ the boy said as İkmen and İskender looked at him across the table with still, fathomless eyes. Osman was and always had been completely unnerved by policemen. ‘I loved her!’

‘Then why did you cut and run when you found out she was dead?’ İkmen asked.

‘Because I knew you’d think it was me!’ Osman Yavuz was not a very impressive boy. Skinny and spotty, he was also pale and very, very nervous. And he smelt bad, giving the distinct impression that he hadn’t washed for some time.

‘Why would we think it was you?’ İskender asked. ‘What makes you imagine that we’d think you were so important?’

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.

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.