A Noble Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘But I . . .’ Osman Yavuz raised his tear-stained face and looked into the hard features of his interrogator. ‘They were just people I met at the Rainbow sometimes. Anyway, I told you, I never showed any of them that picture of Gözde.’

  ‘The fact that you shared lewd pictures at all is appalling and against the law!’ İskender roared.

  ‘But I don’t know who they are!’ Osman wept. ‘We meet, we talk, I don’t know their names! Not all of them!’

  ‘Well then, we’ll have the names that you do know!’ İskender slapped a pen down on the table in front of the boy and said, ‘Get writing!’

  But when it came to it, Osman couldn’t. He couldn’t think straight, much less remember the names of people he hardly knew. They’d just been boys swapping pictures they’d taken off their dad’s phone, their elder brother’s BlackBerry. Nameless nerds, just like him. Because he couldn’t remember, and because they still did not entirely believe his story about Gözde, the police decided to detain him. Osman sat in a small, cold cell and tried not to cry when he thought about what his grandma might say.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  Ismail Yıldız paced back and forth across the small kitchen he shared with his brother Hikmet, nursing his silent mobile phone in his hands. Hikmet, who was trying to eat his breakfast in something resembling peace, said, ‘Will you sit down, İsmail? You’re making me dizzy.’

  ‘I just want him to ring,’ İsmail said. ‘Cem. He said that he had a girl lined up. Why doesn’t he just call me?’

  ‘Because he isn’t ready yet,’ Hikmet said as patiently as he could. ‘We wait for him, remember? You can’t force anything. If you do, it will look very suspicious and he will back off. Remember what Çetin Bey said.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but . . .’

  ‘I understand that you’re scared,’ Hikmet said. ‘Going under cover is always frightening, but you won’t be alone. You’ll have the whole team at your back. As soon as we’ve found out who this Cem is and what he’s doing, we can pull him, and hopefully the others he works with too.’

  İsmail sat down at the table and watched Hikmet shell and then eat a hard-boiled egg. ‘Do you really think that he works for that gangster? Tayfun Ergin?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hikmet replied. ‘Ergin has been active in this area lately. It’s possible.’

  ‘Oh.’ İsmail put a nervous hand up to his lips, his face white with tension and lack of sleep.

  Hikmet laid a hand on his brother’s wrist and said, ‘It will be all right.’

  ‘İnşallah.’

  But İsmail was not convinced. He’d asked his brother the same set of questions almost continually ever since they’d left the station the previous afternoon. It was because he was scared, because he wanted whatever was going to happen to happen quickly and be done with. But there was no hurrying something like this. A link had been made with a man who apparently arranged honour killings for money, and it was now up to this man, Cem, to take the process to the next level. What Hikmet didn’t tell his brother was what İkmen had told him, which was that he was half expecting Cem and his ‘business’ to be entirely chimerical.

  ‘This man has to know you’re a police officer,’ İkmen had confided to him. ‘It could so easily be a feint, a distraction, even a wind-up.’

  ‘My brother is known as a very religious man, Çetin Bey,’ Hikmet had countered. ‘Maybe in this fashion they seek to distance him from me?’

  İkmen had accepted that that was possible. He’d sent his officer and his officer’s brother home to do what they were doing, which was to wait.

  ‘Hikmet, if something goes wrong . . .’

  At that very moment İsmail’s mobile began to ring.

  In his panic he almost dropped it. ‘Allah!’

  With terrified eyes he looked over at his brother, who said, ‘For heaven’s sake, answer it!’

  With fingers that sweated and shook so much he could barely control them, İsmail Yıldız eventually managed to push the receive button and then said, ‘Yes?’

  There was a tense second before Hikmet saw him take a deep calming breath and then say, ‘Oh, hello, Mother, how are you?’

  Cem, whoever he was, was not going to call when İsmail or anyone else wanted him to. As Hikmet had known right from the start, this was going to be a waiting game.

  The American woman, Mrs Jane Ford, had expressed little surprise when Osman Yavuz’s name had been brought up by Mehmet Süleyman. But then the young man had told İkmen that Mrs Ford had, once upon a time, been his English teacher. Later, in his cell, he’d told İkmen that she’d been something else to him, too.

  ‘I didn’t want you to think that I was close to him,’ Jane Ford told İkmen when he and Ayşe Farsakoğlu visited her at her apartment. Her husband was at work and so she was alone, working on her Make the Most of İstanbul website, when they called.

  ‘Why not?’

  Mrs Ford looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Osman and myself . . . well, look, I had a little bit of a fling with the boy. So unserious, so much an aberration! This was before he became besotted with Gözde. I was glad when he got so stuck on her! What was I thinking! So I helped him to meet her. She was sweet and he was all sexed and romanced up!’

  According to Jane Ford, she had in effect wound the boy up sexually and then just let him go. The sexting, which had followed her desertion of him, was now a little more understandable. Nevertheless, İkmen left the Fords’ apartment in a dark and gloomy mood. Looking at his watch as he got back in his car, he said to Ayşe, ‘It’s midday. Let’s get some lunch.’

  Because this was İkmen and not someone like Inspector İskender, who really appreciated good food, they didn’t end up having their lunch at a restaurant or even at a café. He drove down to Tophane and selected a nargile salon at random. It was called the Peace Pipe. ‘You can get a sandwich here,’ he said as he looked with a cursory eye over the menu. ‘If you like that sort of thing.’

  Ayşe ordered a cheese sandwich and a coffee and agreed to join İkmen in an apple tobacco nargile. She liked water-pipe smoking but she had also agreed to join him in order to prevent him from getting a tömbeki. His smoker’s cough was quite bad enough without a massive hit of raw leaf tobacco.

  As they waited for their order to be brought to them, İkmen said, ‘Is it just my suspicious mind, or do you think it possible that Mrs Ford might be a suspect in the Gözde Seyhan case?’

  Ayşe furrowed her brow. ‘Mrs Ford? Why?’

  ‘She was in the vicinity, her own apartment, when the fire that killed Gözde began,’ he said. ‘She’d had an affair with the boy the girl was seeing, the girl the boy was besotted by.’

  ‘But she said that her fling with Osman was just that, a fling, an aberration.’

  ‘She tells us.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just a thought. I’m putting it out there because it’s in my head and because the woman lied.’

  ‘No one wants to be even remotely connected to a murder, sir,’ Ayşe said. ‘I think that self-preservation kicks in with most people. That and panic.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Ayşe’s food, the nargile and their drinks arrived and İkmen fitted his mouthpiece into the pipe and fired it up. As usual, he wasn’t eating. ‘I do wonder, though,’ he said, ‘how an older woman like Mrs Ford would take the news that a lover, albeit a discarded one, had taken up with a young and pretty girl.’

  Jane Ford was not much older than Ayşe who now looked down at her sandwich with apparent rapt attention. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m just thinking it might have injured her pride,’ İkmen said. ‘Inspector Süleyman had a look at her Make the Most of İstanbul website, you know, and found it very informative. He also told me it was rather sad, too. There are a lot of lonely foreigners in this city, and not a few of them take up with us. Apparently they find us rather alluring.’

  Ayşe smiled. Time was when she had found Mehmet Süleyman ‘rather alluring’. She still did, although these
days she had that well and truly under control.

  ‘And on the basis that not every lonely heart is single, Mrs Ford clearly found her own way around her loneliness very close to home.’

  ‘Poor Mr Ford.’

  ‘Indeed.’ İkmen cleared his throat. ‘But my point is, Ayşe, that we have to be open to possibilities here. Mrs Ford was in the Mersin Apartments when the fire began and she did have a potential motive to kill Gözde Seyhan. Discarded or not, Osman Yavuz had been her lover.’

  ‘But she helped him contact Gözde Seyhan!’

  ‘Maybe in the hope that he’d get over her, reject her, that her parents would put a stop to it? I don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘But the DNA the forensic institute discovered on the petrol can we found in the Seyhan apartment has to belong to someone.’

  ‘How do we obtain Mrs Ford’s DNA, unless . . .’

  ‘I can’t arrest her on a hunch,’ İkmen said. His face fell and he sighed. ‘But who am I kidding? I know it was the Seyhans. Saadet was so close to cracking yesterday. If only . . .’ He leaned forward and squinted at something or someone apparently behind Ayşe’s shoulder. ‘Isn’t that Cahit Seyhan?’

  She turned and looked over her shoulder. The thin, shambling figure of Cahit Seyhan had indeed entered the establishment next door to the Peace Pipe. Unnoticed, İkmen and Ayşe watched him sit down and order a pipe from a waiter at an establishment the owner of the Peace Pipe told him was called the Tulip.

  As sure as the sun rose in the east, it was certain that one day Mehmet Süleyman and İzzet Melik would come to a point where one would say an unwanted thing to the other. It had all started out with İzzet telling his superior about his most recent foray into the Tulip nargile salon.

  ‘If I can get the confidence of the punters as well as the staff, I know I can get in to look at their computers without arousing suspicion,’ he said.

  ‘And yet you will have to do it while neither Murad Emin nor Ali Reza Zafir is working,’ Süleyman replied. ‘It seems like a lot of effort for what I still believe is a non-existent case. But then if you choose to do this on your own time . . .’

  For several minutes, in spite of İzzet’s inner fury at his ideas still being dismissed in such a cursory manner, they talked of other things. Then İzzet, unable to keep quiet any longer, said, ‘So much radicalisation happens on line these days. Young boys like Murad, like Ali Reza are very vulnerable to these messages and—’

  ‘Oh, will you please stop it with these two boys! On and on!’ Süleyman said. ‘There are other suspects, you know, other people with real issues against poor old Hamid İdiz.’

  It had been at that point that İzzet had exploded. It had been at that point that he had taken that irreversible step over into his superior’s private life.

  ‘Why do you want to avoid Murad Emin?’ he cried. ‘Is it because he lives so close to where your mistress the gypsy lives?’

  They were both standing by this time, but now İzzet took a step back. Süleyman’s face was so dark with blood it was almost black. İzzet inwardly reminded himself that he was no slacker when it came to defending himself. He also decided that since there was no way back from what he had said already, he might as well continue.

  ‘Inspector, everyone knows about you and Gonca the gypsy,’ he said. ‘I know, the men in the squad room know, Inspector İkmen knows, all of Balat is abuzz with it! Miss Madrid the music teacher told me that people all over the city have heard about it!’

  Süleyman was like stone. Nothing moved except for a very slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. But his eyes burned into İzzet’s face.

  ‘I’ve told no one,’ İzzet said. ‘That I promise you. But you have to accept that people know, that there’s no point trying to pretend.’

  Still the inspector did not respond. İzzet had not expected that and now found that he didn’t know what to do next. Should he reassure Süleyman that everyone was basically on his side? Or should be really stick the knife in and tell him what Izabella Madrid had told him about how Gonca’s people were unlikely to let the situation between them develop still further?

  ‘If you really are avoiding Murad Emin in case you are seen by people the gypsy knows who may talk, then you can stop doing that,’ İzzet said. ‘There’s no point.’

  Süleyman tried to put one foot in front of the other, then gave up and resumed his seat once again. The world, or so it seemed, knew! In spite of everything he had done to keep it quiet, it was common knowledge. And because it was common knowledge, Murad Emin’s prostitute of a mother had known! Of course she had! All at once he felt humiliated and stupid and frightened. If everyone knew, what about his wife? He hadn’t been home for days; he had no idea whether she knew about Gonca or not. The fear that she did and that she would as a result take Yusuf away from him robbed him of his breath.

  ‘Inspector?’ İzzet had bent down to look carefully at his superior, who had suddenly gone from being very red in the face to very, very white.

  Süleyman knew that İzzet was concerned. For all his macho-man posturing, the sergeant was a good person who he knew respected him. It must have taken a lot of courage for him to tell his boss what he had. But Süleyman was still furious. How dare İzzet even breathe the gypsy’s name within his hearing; how dare he bring such humiliation down upon him! As soon as he could find his voice he looked at the sergeant and said, ‘Just go. Don’t argue with me. Just leave.’

  İzzet Melik left. It was the end of his shift anyway, and so, albeit with a very heavy heart, he made his way out of the station, into his car and over to Tophane and the Tulip nargile salon.

  That night, he raped her. He’d done it before, but not for many years. He’d done it just before she met her lovely soldier out in the fields, Gözde’s tender father. Then, as now, Cahit had put his hands over her mouth to stop her screaming as he forced himself into her. Saadet cried because she was both humiliated and hurt. She thought about her soldier and about her poor dead Gözde and how much the girl had looked like the man who had been her real father. The thought of him helped her to some extent to bear what Cahit was doing to her. He was a beast, he always had been! That his daughter had not been his and that neither of his sons had really taken after him was a judgement upon him. Even Lokman, for all his macho swagger, was not like him. Sometimes she could see the hatred in her son’s eyes when he looked at his father. But then Cahit deserved no less.

  She looked up into his cragged, straining face as he pushed himself into her for the last time and wished with all of her soul that he would die. As far as she knew, she was still able to bear children, and he, her pig of a husband, had deliberately forced himself upon her without using contraception. What a terrible thing it would be to become pregnant again at her age. By her hated husband, the beast, the murderer. Saadet closed her eyes, as much to blot out the word in her head as to hide Cahit’s sated face. He got off her and she heard him zip his trousers up. He’d never, even when they were young, made love to her naked. There’d never been the freedom to do that in his parents’ house, which was where they had lived when they were first married. A house always full of people and animals. Only her soldier had ever made love to her naked. They’d found a spot underneath some olive trees, where he had undressed himself and then her. He’d kissed and caressed her body for what had seemed like hours before they’d had intercourse. After that, aroused again, she’d mounted him. He’d told her how beautiful she was and she’d even hoped that he would just throw his uniform into a ditch and offer to run away with her. But he hadn’t. He’d been a very patriotic boy. But he still cried when his company moved on to the next village. She had seen him do it.

  ‘You should be honoured that I still want to relieve myself with you,’ she heard her husband say as he sat down on a chair to lace up his boots. ‘I could get that anywhere I wanted.’

  ‘Then why don’t you!’ Saadet found herself saying, more vehemently than she knew could be healthy for her. ‘You used nothing,
I could be pregnant!’

  Cahit smiled. ‘I need a son to replace the unnatural thing that Kenan became.’

  ‘We can never replace Kenan!’ Saadet began to cry, although with rather more fury than grief. ‘We can no more replace him than we can replace Gözde!’

  ‘That little slut!’ Cahit grimaced and then spat on the floor. ‘You give me a boy, woman, or I’ll kill you!’ He began to walk towards the door, which he unlocked with the key he’d had in his pocket. ‘In the meantime you can stay in here and make my baby. That will keep you in where I can know where you are!’

  With a head full of hatred and a heart full of grief, Saadet began to cry and scream as she heard Cahit lock her into that tiny, airless room once again. With every fibre of her soul she hoped that he hadn’t made her pregnant. She looked down at her belly and began to pound at it with her fists, but then as quickly as she had attacked herself she stopped. Killing whatever might be nascent within her wasn’t the answer. Getting out was what she had to do; there really was no other reasonable option. Inspector İkmen had asked her for the truth many, many times, and now at last she was ready to tell him. It would, she knew, be beyond anything he had ever heard before. The wickedness of it!

  But first she would have to get out – somehow. She got up and stood on a chair to look out of her one solitary window. At three floors up it was much too high for her to either climb out or jump. She’d have to find some other way. She thought about the only times she was ever allowed out of that room, to go to the bathroom, and about the people who supervised her. There was her husband, his sister, her nephew and her niece. There was also, occasionally, Lokman. Now if she could somehow get to speak to him alone . . .

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  The owner of the Tulip nargile salon, Mustafa Bey, had been, so İzzet learned, a taxi driver.