A Noble Killing (24 page)

İzzet admitted that his ‘lads’ most certainly did not know who Alico, once the Sultan’s champion, or any of the other wrestlers from the late Ottoman period were.

‘All they do, the young people, is talk on their mobile phones and sit in front of the computer all day long,’ Mustafa said gloomily. ‘If they would get a book out and look these things up, then they might actually learn something.’

İzzet had a sudden flash of inspiration. ‘But Mustafa Bey,’ he said, ‘you and I both know they won’t do that.’

‘More’s the pity!’

Assuming the identity of a grumpy middle-aged man with little time for youth was not difficult for İzzet Melik. His own teenage children were hundreds of miles away with his ex-wife in İzmir. Whenever he saw them they treated him like a rather inconvenient stranger and were indeed much more interested in talking to their friends on their mobile phones or on social networking sites. ‘Unless information is on a computer screen, they just won’t pay attention,’ he said.

‘Oh, I know!’ Mustafa agreed. ‘These boys who work here, whenever they’re not serving, they’re out the back on those computers! On the net! My customers are adults, they can’t be bothered by such things. But the boys . . .’ He threw his arms up in despair. ‘I only keep the wretched machines because I don’t think the boys would come to work if I didn’t have them. They must be “on line” all the time. Tell me, İzzet Bey, are you a slave to these machines?’

İzzet said that he wasn’t. In fact he went further and said that although he knew how to use a computer, he didn’t actually possess one of his own.

‘Probably very wise,’ Mustafa said gloomily. ‘If you had one, your lads would be forever on that instead of practising their holds.’

‘I agree,’ İzzet said. ‘Although with regard to what we were talking about before, it would be nice if the boys could look up information on famous athletes like Alico.’

‘That’s true.’

‘I mean, if it were on a screen, they would look at it, wouldn’t they? Assuming of course that such information is on the net . . .’

‘Oh, it’s all there,’ Mustafa said. ‘Everything’s on the net. A lot of it is rubbish and some of it is incorrect, and of course it’s all very basic. But you can go and look up Alico, Mehmet of Kurtdere or anyone you like on my machine if you want to.’

‘What . . .’ İzzet’s natural instinct had been to say
What, now? Thank you very much
. But he restrained himself. To seem too eager, especially when Murad Emin was around, might be seen as suspicious. He did not, after all, want to inadvertently jog the boy’s memory of him. Looking at the computers and hopefully seeing some evidence of who might have been viewing what was for another day, when Murad was not working. ‘That’s very kind of you, Mustafa Bey,’ he said. ‘I may well take you up on that kind offer at some point.’

Mustafa shrugged. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘The things are on all the time; just go in and look up whatever you want. All the kids do it. Why not you?’

‘Why not indeed.’

As İzzet left the Tulip later on that night, he saw the light from the two computer screens seeping through the curtains at the back of the salon. He also heard the muffled sounds of young male voices coming from the same direction. He would, he decided, come back again at lunchtime the following day, when Murad Emin would be at school, and take Mustafa Bey up on his offer of some time on the internet.

Mehmet Süleyman had telephoned his wife in a fog-like daze. He’d been so convinced that she would know about Gonca that he could feel his ears actually cringing away from the telephone as he spoke to her. But his wife, though cold, had clearly not heard anything about the gypsy. She was a woman with a famously hot temper who would, he knew, have been completely incapable of keeping such a scandalous example of his infidelity to herself. She’d just asked him where he was staying and he had told her that he was going to be lodging with a friend for the time being. She did not ask him what gender said friend might be. But then she was, or professed to be, totally uninterested in her husband as a person.

He went over to Gonca’s house. As soon as she saw him park his car outside, the gypsy hustled her children out of the house and into the yard and the street. Some of them viewed him with resentment as they passed, but that was nothing new. He was a man their mother was fucking who was not their father – and he was a policeman into the bargain. They met in the kitchen, where they kissed, and then she took him by the hand and pulled him into her bedroom. He had planned to at least broach the subject of everyone apparently knowing about their affair, but Gonca had other plans. She undressed him slowly, licking his face, his chest, his balls before pushing him down on to her bed and climbing on top of him. That first, desperate coupling was followed by many others as she gave and received pleasure as greedily as she had done the very first time they had met. He loved it. Even though it made him feel guilty for the conversation he knew he was going to have to have with her about their relationship, he couldn’t stop himself being aroused and then satisfied by her. Watching her come to orgasm as he held her down on the bed and made love to her, he wanted so much to tell her that he was in fact
in love
with her. But he didn’t. And when they’d finished that time, she did not attempt to arouse him again but instead turned to him with a serious expression on her face and said, ‘My darling, we must talk about something. It’s something very bad.’

The dead of night in their little quarter of Fatih was indeed as dark and as quiet as the grave. Those of a religious nature, Hikmet Yıldız was discovering, were very predictable and conservative in their personal habits. Unless it was Ramazan, everyone went inside early and closed their doors behind them. Summer was a little more liberal, with groups of sleepless young children playing in their yards or in the street, their veiled mothers watching them intently from dark doorways. But even then the noise was not great, not like the constant rows and screams and blaring music they had endured back in the days when the Yıldız family had lived in their rackety old apartment block. Hikmet rather missed it now that his nights were punctuated by a stillness that he personally found a little spooky. The faithful were sleeping the sleep of the just and would only be disturbed in order to attend to their devotions.

Hikmet lit a cigarette and thought about his brother sleeping, or trying to sleep, with his mobile phone on his pillow. Ismail wasn’t dealing with his new-found ‘job’ at all well. He’d got himself into this situation with the mysterious Cem all on his own. Now Hikmet, for reasons that were not just about his brother and his security, was helping him to extricate himself from it, and hopefully assisting in the solution of a terrible crime as well. To honour kill for money was a notion almost beyond belief. But on a purely practical level it made a lot of sense. To use a service whereby a complete stranger committed a murder for you was, he felt, simple genius. None of Gözde Seyhan’s family had been anywhere in the vicinity of the family’s apartment when the girl burnt to death, yet someone had killed her, and the most likely candidate for that was some sort of proxy. The girl had been seeing a boy; she had apparently, poor kid, been very happy.

Hikmet had only seen Cahit Seyhan, Gözde’s father, once. A thin, dried-out, ratty man who looked as if a strong gust of wind would knock him over. He had what Hikmet considered to be the close-together eyes and spiteful expression of a bully. The type that would use cultural norms and religion as excuses to victimise and harass others. After all, it wasn’t as if Hikmet didn’t have respect for religion; he did. His parents were very religious, kind and peace-loving people who would rather die themselves than take a life, whatever the reason. Unfortunately the world was not always like his parents.

Hikmet started to drift off to sleep at about two o’clock. Less than half an hour later, the sound of his brother’s ringtone, a weird cheep-cheeping bird-like sound, woke him, and within seconds İsmail was in his bedroom, his phone pressed to his ear.

‘It’s him,’ he said, his eyes shining with terror through the darkness as he held a hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Cem!’

‘He
will
kill you,’ Gonca said. ‘Şukru never makes idle threats.’

‘Then I will have him arrested,’ Süleyman said. ‘People who kill police officers go to prison for life.’

‘No, no, you don’t understand!’ she said. She’d been struggling to make him understand for some hours and he still didn’t seem to get it. ‘It isn’t just my brother. It isn’t even
all
my seven brothers. It’s my whole family. You are not one of us, you can never be one of us. You have to go.’

They were still in her bedroom, still in her bed, but neither of them was naked any longer. She had started it, covering herself up when she had first spoken to him after their hours of lovemaking. Now he was covered also. It seemed more appropriate.

‘Gonca, you and I have been seeing each other on and off for years,’ he said. ‘Your children know, they can’t avoid knowing, and so I assumed that your extended family had to be aware of my existence too.’

‘They were, they are,’ she said, her eyes cast down now. ‘Yes.’

‘So what has changed?’ he asked. He was truly baffled, and quite rightly so.

Gonca said nothing. How could she tell him that she loved him? That was not and could never be realistic. Besides, she didn’t know what his response would be. Would he be horrified that a mere mistress had fallen for him? Would it make him angry, or even worse, would it hurt him that her love for him had ruined what they had?

He put a hand on her arm and said, ‘Gonca, I don’t want to lose you. We have . . . we have some good, er, times together, you and I.’

She knew that he had difficulty articulating just what their relationship was, but she was aware of the fact that he most certainly did not consider her just a cheap lay. They were far too close for that. But she chose to misinterpret what he said, hoping it would silence his puzzled questions.

‘We have good sex,’ she said.

‘I like to think that we don’t
just
have sex.’

‘But what else is there?’ She glanced up into his eyes, which now looked even more confused than they had done before. ‘We don’t talk, do we?’

‘Yes we do!’ He sat up and pulled her chin around so that she faced him full on. ‘You know we do! And even if we didn’t, what business, suddenly, is this of your family?’

‘They don’t like it. If it carries on, my brother will kill you.’

‘Yes, but I don’t—’

‘Don’t try to understand, just go!’ she said. She was very close to tears, which she did not want him to see.

Mehmet Süleyman played around with the idea of telling her how he felt, but then rejected it. He knew how she was when she was adamant; he also knew that threats made by members of İstanbul’s gypsy community were not to be taken lightly. He’d worked on a few cases in the past that had involved gypsies, and he had come to regard them as people of utter conviction. If Gonca’s family wanted him dead, then he would die, life sentence or no life sentence. A life would be sacrificed to prison in order to safeguard the family’s honour. Another form of honour killing. As he looked into Gonca’s dampening eyes, he wondered how, when and where they might try to do it. After gazing at her for a long time, he said, ‘I’ll go then.’

She shook free of his hand and turned away. ‘Good.’

He wanted to carry on and tell her that he didn’t want to go, but he didn’t do that. Instead he asked if he might have a shower, a request that Gonca acceded to. And so he washed and then, after getting his things together, he left. It was five o’clock in the morning when he got into his car and began to drive off to who knew where. Now that his marriage was basically at an end, he had nowhere to go and no one to talk to about what had just happened. Once again he was rootless, and once again he faced the prospect of returning to his parents’ home in Arnavautköy with his tail between his legs. The lack of knowledge about what had just happened hit him again, and he began to feel tears of fury rising up behind his eyes. He had been dismissed, frightened off and chased away, and he didn’t like it.

The girl was called Sabiha; she was sixteen and she was going to be alone in her parents’ apartment in the Çarşamba district of Fatih that evening after seven.

‘The family want it to look like suicide,’ İsmail Yıldız told his brother Hikmet, Çetin İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu. ‘That is what Cem told me.’

They had all met up at the small restaurant underneath İkmen’s apartment. Meeting at the station might have alerted the mysterious Cem to the fact that İsmail Yıldız was not quite who he appeared to be.

‘What did you tell him?’ İkmen asked.

‘I told him I’d do it,’ İsmail replied. It was a warm morning, but he was trembling and blue with cold. Rarely, if ever, had İkmen seen someone so scared. ‘The family will leave a key underneath the doormat outside the front door.’

‘How will you do it?’

‘I said I’d burn her.’ He winced as he said the words. ‘Like you told me, Çetin Bey.’

‘He was happy with that?’

‘He said the family did not expect to live in their apartment again. They didn’t care what happened to it. Cem said I’d get two thousand lire.’

‘I wonder what his cut is?’ Ayşe said bitterly.

‘Considerably more, I imagine,’ İkmen said.

‘What are we going to do?’ İsmail said. ‘What—’

‘Well you, İsmail, are going to go to a garage and purchase some petrol,’ İkmen said. ‘Can’t have a fire without accelerant.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘What are the arrangements for after the murder?’ İkmen asked. ‘What are you supposed to do then?’

‘I wait for Cem to call me,’ İsmail said. ‘Once he knows that the girl is dead, that the fire is set and I’m away, he’ll call me. Then I will arrange with him to collect the money.’