Divorce Turkish Style (12 page)

“No thanks, Muslum. Say hello to your dad,” I said.

I started a game of patience on the computer but, not having the patience to play it, I soon stopped. At one point, Dursun, one of my most valued customers, popped in. Dursun used to sell pirate DVDs from a tiny shop in Galip Dede Street, but he was hounded by the police and set himself up in the basement of the chandelier shop opposite the synagogue. After his goods were confiscated there, he started selling DVDs from the doorway
of an apartment building in Çeşmeli Passage. He copied all his films on to disk, so I just had to email him if I wanted anything and it was delivered to me the next day.

“Things aren't going well, Miss Kati. The police never leave me alone. Bastards! They just won't give me a break,” said Dursun, adding that the previous week they'd seized over two hundred films and taken him into custody for a night.

“I need large orders if I'm to keep up a home delivery service,” he continued. “It's no good having the odd DVD order here and there. If things don't get any better, I'm thinking of going into fruit juices.”

Dursun went on to explain at length how sales of fruit juice had shot through the roof during the previous autumn and winter. I must say that I was particularly partial to pomegranate juice, and also a mixture of orange and grapefruit juice.

“My uncle's selling slices of coconut and pineapple from his handcart in Galip Dede. He says that business is booming,” said Dursun. “I've found a little shop and, providing I can sort everything out, I'm going into the tropical juice business. I'll be expecting you, miss.”

After he left, I went to the toilet, making sure the shop door was locked so that no one would enter in my absence. By the time I came out, Batuhan was waiting outside.

“Another minute or so and I'd have left,” I said.

“We've been very busy. Two of my staff left early for a birthday party, so I had to do their work. Life would be much easier if we could take you on as an adviser,” said Batuhan with a laugh.

“Oh yes! You know how much I like the Turkish police.”

“The Turkish police like you too. But I sense a certain chill in the air,” he said, laughing again.

“There haven't been any murders in Istanbul for a while. What can I do? That's not my fault.”

“No murders? There's actually been an increase in the number of murders, but nothing seems to have aroused your interest. Still, I suppose you stick to incidents in and around Beyoğlu.”

“Well, this time it's Paşabahçe. I guess I'm prepared to go as far as the Black Sea.”

“You're expanding.” More laughter.

“Have you come here to criticize me, Batuhan?” I said, deciding that his mockery was becoming irritating.

“Is that how it seems from where you're sitting? In that case, let's swap seats,” said Batuhan. More laughter, but this time I joined in.

“Very witty!” I remarked sardonically.

We both fell silent, me in my rocking chair and he in the armchair opposite.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked.

“No thanks, I've had too much today.”

“Something else?”

“No thanks. So tell me, is business good at the moment?”

“Is that what you concluded when I offered you tea?”

“Come on, you have two people working here now. That girl, and the guy I saw the other day. What's his name?”

“Fofo,” I said.

“What kind of name is that? Sounds like the name of a poodle to me,” laughed Batuhan.

What a boorish man he was, I thought.

“It's a Spanish name,” I said, ignoring the mocking tone in his voice. “Business isn't too bad. We get by.”

“Readers of crime fiction are obviously on the increase. Actually, I'm thinking of writing my memoirs when I retire. The title will be
Thirty Years in the Homicide Squad
. What do you think?”

“Too long.”

“Maybe
Thirty Years of Homicide
, then.”

“Yes, that might do. Would you include the Sani Ankaralıgil case in it?”

“No, but I'm thinking of including you in it. I was thinking of a chapter called ‘German sleuth hunts for clues in the streets of Beyoğlu'.”

“It sounds a bit heavy-going to me,” I said, thinking that such originality was a bit too much for a policeman. “I'm making green tea for myself. If you want one, say so.”

“How can you drink that acidic stuff?”

“It might be acidic, but it's good for you. Do you want some?”

“Okay, I'll have one too.”

While we were in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil, I heard the shop door open. It had to be a customer. What timing! You wait in an empty shop for hours on end, and then…

It turned out to be an Australian couple who wanted to tell me all about their adventures during their trip to Cappadocia, where they'd collected enough material to keep them talking until morning. I practically elbowed them out of the shop and locked the door. I know it wasn't right to turn away customers, but I really didn't want to try Batuhan's patience further.

I reheated the water and brought in the tea.

“Where were we?” he asked.

“We were talking about the book you're going to write when you retire. Is Sani going to be in the book?”

Batuhan rested his chin on his hand and stared hard at me. “That chapter could be called ‘A Suspicious Death'.”

“Not murder?”

“Are you trying to put words into my mouth?” he said, rolling his eyes.

“What makes you say that?” I asked, noting that Batuhan's powers of intuition had increased noticeably in the years since we last met.

“You go first,” he said.

“I know nothing,” I said. “I have my suspicions about some factory owners in Thrace who are trying to avoid being penalized.”

“A criminal gang, huh?”

“Well, if they can organize the purchase of a Mercedes for the local governor, then hiring a killer—”

“Are you saying they could have had Sani murdered?” interrupted Batuhan.

“I only said it because you asked. We can just sit here making fun of each other if you prefer.”

“The woman wasn't killed, she died,” he said, more seriously now, though his face still showed traces of his previous idiotic expression.

“What do you mean by that? She died as the result of a fall, didn't she?” I asked.

“Exactly. What are you trying to say?”

“If she fell because someone pushed her, then she was murdered. If she slipped and fell, then she died. Do you know how she fell?” I said, and sipped my tea.

Green tea is so good for you. Its antioxidants definitely help the brain to work, even if they do nothing to improve the skin.

“Was there perhaps a closed-circuit camera in the house?” I asked.

“You're confusing me,” said Batuhan, leaning back and crossing his legs. “You should be the one writing the book. You'd write great crime fiction with your overactive imagination. Did someone push the person who slipped and fell, or did they merely slip and fall? How can anyone know?”

I was mulling over what I'd learned from crime fiction writers about murders solved using advanced technology on samples taken from under fingernails, a strand of hair found clasped in a hand, DNA tests, a drop of blood, dog hairs and so on. Anything
like that would be useful for proving that someone had killed Sani. Yet Batuhan was saying that the woman had simply died. How could he know without seeing CCTV footage that proved Sani was home alone at the time of her death?

Batuhan looked at me as if he'd got the better of me. If Fofo had been there, he'd have said, “Revenge is a dish best served cold”, though his translation into Turkish would have sounded something like “revenge, like gazpacho, should never be eaten hot”.

Batuhan suddenly rose to his feet.

“I was going to order you a kebab,” I said.

“Another time. I have to get back to the station and do some more work. I'm up to my eyeballs.”

“As you wish.”

“I'll just give you one more thing to work on as part of your intellectual gymnastics: we know that Sani wasn't murdered, but there was someone else in her apartment.”

“Now you tell me! Go on then, enlighten me!” I cried.

This time, Batuhan laughed as he used to in the old days. Was he beginning to soften a bit, perhaps?

“I really have to go, otherwise I'd have stayed for a kebab,” he said.

“But if someone had been with her, surely they'd have saved her, wouldn't they?”

“Exactly! She could have been saved. Or at the very least that person could have called an ambulance. But they didn't.”

“But it's not murder, you say?”

“It's not murder, but we have to find out who was with her in the house and why they didn't try to help her.”

“Why are you so sure that someone else was in Sani's house?” I asked, immediately remembering her missing laptop. “Was her computer stolen from there? Is that it?”

“We Turkish police have our own methods,” he said calmly, his face absolutely deadpan.

“And there I was thinking that torture was a thing of the past,” I remarked, immediately regretting my words. It was a bad joke.

“Excuse me. I must be going,” he said.

“So what are your methods?” I asked, wondering if my joke had made him uneasy.

“Ha ha! I've said too much already,” he laughed.

I let it go, because I had no intention of upsetting Batuhan in the middle of a murder investigation. We left the shop together.

Pelin was sitting in front of the TV.

“I cooked some pilaf, because there was nothing else,” she called out as I entered the sitting room.

“I'm not eating,” I said, for once not feeling hungry. “What time are you going out?”

“If you have something to do, just say so and I'll leave straight away,” said Pelin, sitting bolt upright.

“I only asked,” I said, wondering why people had to be so touchy.

“We're meeting at eleven.”

Oh great! She could have travelled to and from her place a dozen times before eleven o'clock. But I said nothing. Anyway, there hadn't been a squeak out of Naz. I wondered if she'd genuinely intended to come to see me the moment she got the report. After all, young people could be very unreliable.

If the mountain doesn't come to you, then you must go to the mountain, as they say. I decided to call Naz, but found the screen on my mobile was blank. The battery was empty and the wretched thing had shut down. Still, at least it was better than Naz being unreliable.

I started to search the apartment for the charger. Sharing anything with Fofo was always a terrible idea, because he'd leave my things in such obscure places that I could never find them. I checked the plugs, desk and under the bed in his room first, then the plugs in the sitting room, my bedroom, study and the guest room, which was empty apart from a bed, the plug above the fridge (I'd previously found it there on more than one occasion), and the plug for the hairdryer in the bathroom. Whenever I had to find something urgently, I wished that everything had a sound mechanism which responded instantly when its number was called, like a mobile phone.

For instance, if I'd mislaid a book and was tearing my hair out wondering how it ended, I'd simply say its name: “
Selige Witwen
by Ingrid Noll”. No response? Then I'd repeat it louder! And, as if by magic, I'd find it under the bedside table, where it had been all the time.

Or, say I'd been hunting for the terracotta (red was definitely out) lipstick I also used on my cheeks and was running late for a date, I'd just call out, “Lippy, lippy!” No, actually; I'd have to be a bit more specific or every lipstick in the apartment would start replying and I wouldn't be able to hear a thing. But if I shouted, “
Chanel Sorcier
!” – hey presto – it would respond from a handbag I hadn't used since the previous winter.

Take Fatma. She only came one day a week, but she spent at least eight hours in the apartment, which she believed gave her more rights than the people actually living there. She craved a system that would give her total control, especially in the kitchen. Fatma could get very agitated if she thought even a bottle opener was in the wrong place. I couldn't understand why anyone would want to move something so trivial, but it was of the utmost importance to her. Thus, if I decided to have a soda while watching a film on TV, I'd find the soda, but it would be
another thirty minutes before I could get back to the film because I couldn't find the opener. I'd look in all the drawers, on the floor, under the sink, behind the rubbish bin, inside the food cupboards, but to no avail.

In the old days, when we went camping, there were always a few guys in the group who could open a beer bottle by chipping away at it with a cigarette lighter. But I lived with Fofo now, so no one in my apartment had such skills. Finding the bottle opener was the only option. Eventually, I'd spot it, and guess where it would be? In a glass tumbler on the shelf. What on earth was my lovely little bottle opener doing there? If my signal system were invented, all I'd need to do was say “Opener, opener” and it would respond to me from inside the tumbler on the shelf, without me getting so worked up or missing crucial scenes in my film.