A Noble Killing (27 page)

‘How are you?’ he asked.

For the first time she took her eyes off her canvas and looked at him. ‘How do you think I am?’ she said. ‘Eh? How do you think?’

Şukru took in a deep breath and then looked down at the floor. In spite of the fact that he knew that what had been done had been for the good name and honour of his family, he still felt sorry for her. ‘How was he, your policeman? When you told him?’ he said.

‘Oh, overjoyed!’ she said. ‘Ecstatic! Just delighted to be told to go for no apparent reason!’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘But did I tell him that I loved him? That
that
was the reason he just had to go? Of course I didn’t!’ she said bitterly. ‘Would you have done that, Şukru? Would you have broken the heart of the person you loved?’

She was crying now. He hadn’t seen her cry since they were children.

‘No . . .’

‘Then why would I, eh? Why would I?’ she said. Finally at the end of both her strength and her patience, she stuck her needle into her canvas and leaned back against the stool behind her. ‘I wish I could just curl up and die!’

‘No you don’t.’

‘Don’t you tell me what to feel!’ she screamed. She was weeping so hard she was choking. ‘Don’t you dare do that, Şukru!’

She called him names. Vile and abusive names that would have made a lesser man than him blush. She had loved that policeman so much! The force of her hatred and her passion was enormous. But Şukru just let her scream it all out in his direction. Better that than at their father. He, old as he was, was likely to kill her for less. Only when her fury had finally burnt itself out and she was lying on her studio floor sobbing into her hair did he even attempt to go over to her.

‘Gonca . . .’ He wasn’t going to say that he was sorry, because he wasn’t. What had been done was what had to be done. He put a hand on her shoulder and felt her body flinch underneath his touch. He pulled away and then sat back on his haunches, waiting for whatever she was going through to stop. He wasn’t going to leave her like this.

After about ten minutes of almost silent crying, she raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were even more puffy now, and her face was bright, bright red. Şukru felt how badly women suffered for love, even old women like his sister. Barren and wrinkled and no longer as slim as a whip, Gonca still had such presence, such dignity and even beauty. But she mourned the leaving of her lover, because as Şukru knew only too well, she would be terrified that he had been her last. After a few moments of heavy breathing she said, ‘Go, and do not come back until I send for you.’

‘Gonca . . .’ She had never been this upset before, not even when her first husband ran away with a girl half her age.

‘Just go,’ she said quietly. ‘I will recover, Şukru, because I have to. I have children.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Just go!’ Her eyes were black with fury, the pupils glittering like tiny chips of malignant jet.

Şukru stood up, and with a shrug began to walk towards the studio door. Just before he got there, he turned and saw his sister, now sitting up on her haunches, snarling at him like an animal. ‘I keep this family, I love this family,’ she said with pure hatred in her voice. ‘But I will never forgive you or this family for doing this to me. To kill love is a sin. It is a sin against people, against nature and against God!’

Three of the DVDs had Murad Emin’s name written on them in marker pen. İzzet assumed that it was in the boy’s own handwriting.

‘I can’t find anything exactly untoward on here,’ Şenol said as he scrolled through various menus and did other seemingly arcane things. Out in the salon, Mustafa, his father and the tobacco supplier were having a very therapeutic smoke. From what İzzet could hear of their conversation, the leaf tobacco was extremely mellow and satisfying.

İzzet looked at his watch and realised that he and Şenol had been ensconced in the small back room with the computers for over an hour. Soon Mustafa Bey would be wanting to join them again for more tales of the exploits of famous Ottoman wrestlers.

‘Şenol?’

‘Yes?’

İzzet passed one of the three DVDs over to him and said, ‘Can you have a look at this?’

‘OK.’

İzzet went back to looking through the crack in the door to make sure that they were undisturbed. He heard Şenol slide the disk into the computer, and then he heard what sounded at first like Arabesk music. But the singer’s words were not in Turkish, or in fact in any other language that İzzet could speak.

‘What . . .’

‘Something in Arabic or Farsi up on the screen,’ Şenol said as he looked very intently at one of the computers. ‘Do you . . .’

‘No,’ İzzet said. ‘Italian, some French and English. You?’

‘I can only really speak German, a little English,’ Şenol said. Then there was a sound like a muffled scream, and Şenol’s eyes widened. ‘Allah!’

‘What is it?’

Reluctant though he was to leave his post and risk possible discovery, İzzet ran over to his friend and looked at the screen over his shoulder.

‘I could so easily have lived without seeing that,’ Şenol said with a distinct quaver in his voice. ‘My life would have been so much better without that image.’

İzzet could only agree. As he watched the headless body of some poor soul twitch on the ground in front of the hooded men with machetes who had just executed him, he wondered what kind of person would want to do or even see such terrible things.

Çetin İkmen looked at his own clean-shaven face in the bathroom mirror and frowned. He didn’t like his face without its moustache. Hairless it seemed to highlight what he felt was a weak chin. He put a hand up and touched the rough skin that now seemed to shout at him from his left cheek. On the few occasions when he had done this in the past, he’d never liked it. He would, he knew, be growing another moustache again as soon as the operation in Çarşamba was at an end. Like the suit that Fatma was ironing for him in the kitchen, it wasn’t right, not for him. He was mustachioed, crumpled and stained; it was who he was. He was also, now that he was alone, deeply worried about what they were about to do that evening, and not just because he had already considered all the things that could possibly go wrong.

İkmen was not, and had never been, convinced that this man Cem had anything to do with the death of Gözde Seyhan, the whole reason for his investigation into honour killing. The girl had lived a long way from Fatih, where Cem appeared to be based, and although the Seyhans had had relatives in that district at the time of Gözde’s death, they hadn’t had strong connections with the area. Cem could be involved in some way with the gangster Tayfun Ergin, who was by all accounts moving in on some businesses in Fatih. But that was in no way certain. Honour killings in the city had increased in line with the recent heavy migration from the countryside. Some people denied this, but to İkmen it was obvious. And just as people became more sophisticated when they came into contact with new and more challenging situations, so crime in the city evolved from what it had once been out in the country. For an outraged father to kill his daughter in the middle of the city was not easy. One could not count upon the silence of long-term and loyal neighbours and friends, the police were more sophisticated and more punitive over such matters, and disposing of a dead body in a built-up area was fraught with danger. To contract that murder out, even at a price poor people would struggle to pay, made sense. And yet İkmen was not convinced that Cem had killed Gözde. There was a feeling about what İsmail Yıldız had told him about this man and his operation that made İkmen think that he’d never done anything like this before. Chillingly, the possibility of several people making money out of this phenomenon was not lost upon Çetin İkmen. Where a need existed, real or perceived, so people would appear to fill that need. Sadly the need was real, and it was, apparently, increasing.

‘Murad’s probably on his way home now,’ his father said as he smiled and tried to look at the officers through half-closed eyes. ‘School, you know. He’s been to school.’

It was almost as if he was trying to remind himself where his son had been. But then by anyone’s standards, Mr Emin was way off his head on whatever he’d taken earlier that day.

‘We need to speak to Murad,’ Süleyman said sternly. He had two constables and İzzet Melik at his back, and in his pocket three appalling extremist DVDs with Murad Emin’s name on them.

‘There’s his mobile . . .’

‘We need to speak to your son in person,’ Süleyman said as he pushed past the boy’s father and entered the apartment. The sharp smell of burning cannabis resin hit his nostrils immediately, but he ignored it and motioned for the other officers to follow him in. ‘We’ll wait.’

‘Oh.’

Süleyman waved in Mr Emin’s face the warrant he had just obtained to search the premises, and then told İzzet and the constables to go and look in the boy’s room. Mr Emin, dismayed and agitated now, joined them. Süleyman himself went into the litter-strewn room that passed for the family’s living area. There he found, half clothed, Emin’s wife.

‘Oh,’ she said when she saw him, her eyes clouded by the smoke from the joint that she was holding, ‘what can I do for you? I can give you a hand job for—’

‘No thank you!’ He stomped over, took the joint out of her hand and threw it into an ashtray. He was furious. This woman, this broken, degraded, filthy addict, had made him, albeit unconsciously, look away from her son, a boy who at the very least was besotted with extremist propaganda.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure that no one was listening to him, and then he hissed, ‘Last time I was here, you said something about did my wife know. Did my wife know what, exactly? About whom?’ He put a hand up to her throat and squeezed just a little. ‘Well? What did you mean by that? Speak!’

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.