Deadly Web (6 page)

‘Not obviously so,’ Çöktin said. ‘They didn’t live close to each other. Gülay Arat was still at high school – a different one to the place Cem had attended – he was a student at İstanbul University. But there is a possibility they may have had contact via the Internet, which is why I’m looking at their computers.’

‘At games?’

Çöktin looked up at İkmen’s wry face and smiled. ‘I’ve only just started. I’m just seeing what they’ve got on their machines.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Both of the youngsters spent a lot of time on their computers. If they shared anything, it was an interest in the dark, supernatural side of life. The girl, Gülay, used to be one of those Goth kids.’

‘And their families?’ İkmen put his cigarette out in one of Çöktin’s ashtrays and then immediately lit another. ‘What did they have to add?’

Çöktin shrugged. ‘Not much. The boy’s parents are both careerists, advertising sales. Gülay Arat’s father owns a couple of those loud nightclubs out in Ortaköy – I think her mother’s a drunk. None of them seems to have much of an idea about what their children did or were interested in. We only found out about Gülay’s computer habit from her young brother.’

İkmen shook his head slowly and sadly. ‘So many of these poor kids now, offspring of the nouveaux riches – they have everything except their parents’ attention. It’s why they dress in black, talk about vampires and exist only in their computers.’

‘Yes, although quite a few working-class youngsters spend a lot of time on line too, you know.’

‘By on line, I suppose you mean on the Internet,’ İkmen said gloomily. ‘Yes, I know. My youngest son keeps on pestering me about getting a computer so he can go on line. He says it will help him with his homework. He’s only at middle school.’

‘A lot of primary school kids have them these days, sir.’

İkmen shook his head again and stood up. ‘From what I can gather there’s more rubbish and stupid chat on that Internet than anything else. It’s like mobile phones. You know, my son Bülent spends a ridiculous amount of money and time calling and texting his friends. Even at work, because of this text messaging, he and his friends communicate all day long about nothing.’

Çöktin smiled. Like a lot of the older officers in the department, İkmen was a technophobe. Although he was now more accustomed to his mobile phone than he had been, İkmen still couldn’t use the text function. The department had issued him with a computer some time ago, which he did use on occasion, although it was well known that his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, was the real user of the equipment.

‘But I must go now,’ İkmen said as he walked towards the office door, ‘leave you in peace with your virtual cars or whatever that is on the screen.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He left and Çöktin returned to what he’d been doing before, which was, in fact, driving a Humvee at speed through the streets of Los Angeles.

Nur Süleyman looked across the table at her son and frowned. Ever since that foreign bitch had taken his son, her grandson, away, Mehmet’s weight had dropped. He was always tired now too. Today, when she hadn’t been able to rouse him until eight thirty, was a case in point. He had been due at work at nine and, although she didn’t like his being a common policeman any more now than she had done when he’d started, she recognised that he needed to earn money. Unlike her husband who, she knew, was planning to spend the day as he always did – doing nothing.

‘Mehmet, I think you should see Dr Birand,’ she began.

‘I’ve told you, I am seeing a doctor, Mother,’ Mehmet said without looking up from his tea glass.

‘I don’t mean some police—’

‘I’ve been to see a very good doctor, thank you, Mother,’ he cut in, ‘and I am fine.’

‘No you’re not!’

He looked up, angry now. ‘I am. Under the circumstances, I’m really holding up very well.’

‘Under the circumstances!’ Nur flung her arms in the air and shook her head. ‘Such circumstances! Our Yusuf gone with that baggage you would insist upon marrying! How that woman could leave you, I don’t know! At her age, she should have been kissing your feet in gratitude!’

‘Mother, you don’t understand! There were faults on both sides. It wasn’t just Zelfa.’

‘Of course you will be able to marry again,’ his mother continued as she poured out more tea for herself and her son. ‘Women will be falling over themselves—’

‘I’m still married at the moment.’

‘Yes, but not for long,’ Nur said with conviction. ‘Get a divorce as soon as you can, Mehmet. I’ll speak to Mr Bayar for you today.’

‘When I need a lawyer I’ll speak to one of my own choosing myself!’ Mehmet, incensed, rose to his feet. ‘I may be living at home for the time being, Mother, but I’m not a child! I’m nearly forty!’

‘I still do everything for your father,’ Nur responded nastily. ‘What makes you think you’re not like him?’

‘Nothing, Mother.’ Mehmet picked his cigarettes and lighter up off the table and put them into his jacket pocket. ‘We’re both useless!’

He then walked quickly out of the dining room before he said something even more inflammatory. Living back with his brother, Murad, and even his father, wasn’t really that bad, but his mother was and always had been intolerable. He’d only been separated from his wife for a matter of days before he returned to his parents’ house. But Nur had been on to him immediately: suggesting the names of women he might like to take out on a date, prattling on about how some people these days found their partners on the Internet. As if she knew anything about it!

How could he, in his position, even think about dating? He couldn’t even think about sex at the moment. Not that he had been thinking about sex. Ever since the possibility of his being HIV-positive had become apparent to him, sex had been relegated to the status of things other people did. Sex was something that he came across sometimes during the course of an investigation.

Gülay Arat, so Dr Sarkissian had told him last night, had had sex prior to her death. Or rather, she’d had something, maybe not a penis, he thought, inside her vagina. Something large. What kind of brutal and sterile act was that? Where was the pleasure in using an inanimate thing on a woman? Sex, surely, was about two people connecting, flesh to flesh, achieving pleasure together. He loved the feeling of his skin melting into the skin of a woman. But then not everyone got their kicks in the same way. Perhaps whoever had put something inside Gülay got off on fucking women with dildos or whatever. Playing with sex ‘toys’ wasn’t, after all, that unusual. What was more worrying was just when this person had done this. Naked on a steep hillside, Gülay Arat had either plunged a knife into her own chest or been killed by someone as yet unknown. Had that been before or after the person who’d been moving the thing inside her had achieved orgasm? Or had that happened at the moment of her death?

‘I’m here for another two weeks and so I may as well help you get things moving.’

Hulya looked up at her husband and shrugged.

‘If you’re sure, Uncle Jak,’ Berekiah said. ‘You don’t come home often. You must have better things to do.’

‘You mean like listening to your father’s list of complaints?’ Jak sighed. ‘Something we can all do without. True, I’ve got a bit of business here, but I’d like to help you kids get started.’

‘It’s very good of you, Mr Cohen.’

‘Jak, please,’ he said as he smiled broadly at Hulya, ‘we’re family.’ Then, taking his mobile phone out of his pocket, he continued, ‘Right, so I think if we get some people in to clear the garden first, that’ll give the builders more space to put things when they come to do the structural stuff. Let me just go outside and see if I can roughly estimate the square meterage of the plot.’

He bounded out through the hole that was the kitchen door and disappeared into the bramble-and-bindweed-choked garden. Hulya and Berekiah looked at each other and then at the total chaos around them. As if defeated by the sheer scale of the problem that was his and Hulya’s house, Berekiah sat down on the rickety floorboards and put his head in his hands.

‘It was very nice of your uncle to give us this house,’ Hulya said – the tone of her voice seeming to intimate that she was trying to convince herself of that fact.

‘Yes,’ Berekiah answered through his fingers.

‘It will be perfect for a family.’

Berekiah raised his head from his hands and looked around again. ‘For a family the size of yours, yes,’ he said, ‘but for us? I’ll be an old man by the time we’ll have finished paying for all the work this place needs. And, anyway, I thought we were only going to have two children.’

‘Maybe.’ She walked around, idly touching old, dust-covered pieces of furniture as she went. ‘Your uncle seems very keen to help us.’

‘Yes, but we can’t let Uncle Jak pay for much more. It isn’t right to take advantage and, anyway, Dad would go mad if he knew.’

‘Your dad was quite keen for Jak to pay for our wedding.’

‘Only because it was his only way of saving face,’ Berekiah said. ‘Çetin Bey was going to do everything. Dad would have been totally dishonoured. Not only is his son marrying a Muslim whether he likes it or not but he’s too poor to pay for the bridegroom’s suit! How would that have looked? He had to call Jak.’

Hulya bent down to look into a low cupboard. ‘And now Uncle Jak has bought us a house . . .’

‘He’s bought us what is left of a house, yes,’ Berekiah said as he rose quickly to his feet. ‘I know you love the eccentricity of the place, Hulya, but it has been empty for years. Some really big, and expensive pieces of work will have to be done before we can move in.’

‘I know.’ She shut the cupboard door and then walked over to what had once been the kitchen fireplace.

‘We may have to live with Mum and Dad for some time.’ He followed her and placed his hands on her waist. ‘Which means that we’ll have to take every opportunity to be away from them that we can,’ one of his hands moved up to her breasts, ‘like coming up here, at night . . .’

‘Berekiah!’

His other hand slid inside her skirt. ‘I just keep on and on thinking about it, Hulya!’ he whispered. ‘How beautiful it was! If only Jak . . .’

After one quick look over her shoulder, Hulya took Berekiah by the arm and led him into what looked like an old larder or storeroom. ‘Come on!’

He didn’t protest then or when, a few moments later, she pulled him towards her.

‘Oh, Hulya!’

She took his tongue in her mouth. Her hands began to move down his chest.

‘Hulya dear, could you get a glass of— Oh . . .’

The two young people looked back into the room where Jak was standing together with a heavily bearded monk.

‘Ah.’ Berekiah whipped his hands away from his wife as if scalded.

‘Brother, er, Constantine here has had a rather nasty shock,’ Jak said.

‘Desecration!’ the monk said in a trembling voice. ‘At the church!’

Hulya went to him and placed her hands on his shoulders. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said.

‘It’s evil!’ the monk whispered harshly. ‘Godless!’

Jak, Berekiah and Hulya all looked at each other as the monk descended into tears.

It was the shock more than anything else that caused Sırma Karaca to burst into tears. She hadn’t been close to Gülay Arat for some while. In fact the last time they had spoken properly, which was a good six months before, the two girls had fallen out. In retrospect, like a lot of things, their disagreement looked stupid to Sırma now.

‘She said that she couldn’t possibly go around with me any more because of my clothes,’ she said as she rested her head against her mother’s shoulder. ‘She said she found them childish and embarrassing.’

Her mother reached across the coffee table to get her daughter a tissue.

‘But she used to wear this stuff too,’ Sırma said, holding up metres of thin black dress for her mother to see. ‘She used to come with us to Atlas Pasaj. It was Gülay who first went there.’

‘Yes, but Gülay . . . moved on . . .’

‘You mean “grew up”!’ Sırma turned her black, smudged eyes furiously on to her mother’s face. ‘Why don’t you say it, Mum? It’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Sırma!’

‘The way you worry about me is stupid!’ Sırma said petulantly. ‘I like going to Atlas Pasaj. My life would be nothing without the friends I’ve got there. And I like how I dress too.’

‘Yes, darling, but in this heat . . .’

‘You’d like me to wear pretty, summery dresses?’ Sırma pulled away from her mother and scowled. ‘I don’t do that.’

Her mother smiled sadly. ‘Oh, but Sırma, black is so depressing.’

Sırma wiped the tears away from her eyes with one of her long, cobweb-style cuffs and stood up. ‘Right, and you’re so worried about my depression, aren’t you? But the way I am hasn’t got anything to do with that. I like how I am, I’m happy like this! And anyway, I’m taking Prozac so I’m not going to kill myself, am I?’

‘No . . .’

‘No, it’s Gülay who’s dead, isn’t it? Gülay, who left the scene for a much more grown-up life and pretty dresses.’

‘Sırma, I know you’re upset about Gülay.’

The girl suddenly lost all of her fight and began to cry once again. Her mother stood up and hugged her.

‘I really used to like Gülay a lot you know, Mum,’ the girl said miserably. ‘Tanzer, Defne, Hüseyin and me – we’ve never been the same since Gülay went away.’

‘I know.’

But then as quickly as her misery had started, so it finished, giving way to the flashing anger she had exhibited before.

‘If anyone’s to blame for Gülay’s death it’s her parents!’ she snapped.

‘Sırma!’

The girl pushed her mother away with a theatrical shrug and then threw herself back down on to the plush sofa she had been reclining upon when her mother came to tell her about her friend’s death. As the thin black material settled about her, Sırma said, ‘She had to get away from them. That’s why she was here so often. They never had time for her.’