A Noble Killing (4 page)

It wasn’t that he hadn’t prepared. He’d practised every day, it was what he loved to do. But his fingers wouldn’t do what they usually did. Normally they caressed the keys, loved the feel of the instrument, revelled in the glorious sounds that it made. But hands that still shook, just would not stop shaking, made progress impossible.

Hamid Bey twirled one end of his moustache between his fingers and said, ‘Schubert, it would seem, is making you nervous. Why?’

He loved Schubert’s
Six moments musicaux
. It was one of the most wonderful pieces ever written for the piano and he’d been perfecting his performance of it for months. How he felt, the way his hands wouldn’t work, had nothing to do with Schubert. It had to do with the look she had given him through the orange, gold and bright red flames. Indirectly it had to do with Hamid Bey. It also had very much to do with the fact that he just couldn’t remember what he’d done with the petrol can. He’d poured the liquid over her head (she had screamed; he didn’t want to think about that) and then he’d put the can down and . . . what? Where had he left it? What had he done with it? It certainly hadn’t been with him when he left the apartment building on Egyptian Garden Street. And yet he knew he should have taken it! He knew he would get into—

‘Schubert?’ Hamid Bey reiterated. ‘After all these weeks we’ve spent together in his company, please don’t tell me that we have now all fallen out?’

Hamid Bey left his wicker peacock chair and came over to stand beside the piano. As usual, he stood too close.

‘I don’t think I feel very well, Hamid Bey,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Hamid Bey sighed. The teacher was so close, he felt his tobacco-scented breath on the back of his neck. Then Hamid bent to speak into his ear. Even closer. ‘We must put on a good show,’ he said. ‘Performers are coming from Georgia and Armenia. We must show them what we can do.’

‘Yes, Hamid Bey.’ Everything inside him cringed.

‘Yes.’ Hamid Bey remained where he was for just a moment and then he sauntered back to his peacock chair. As he sat down, he said, ‘So let’s have no more talk of illness, shall we?’ He took the baton that he always kept on the coffee table by his side and beat it against one of his fine brown brogues. ‘Attend!
Moderato
! Let us begin again!’

He put his shaking fingers back into their starting position on the piano and took a deep breath.

‘People don’t think about dental records any more these days,’ the investigator said. ‘But . . .’ He bent down towards the body and moved the charred jaws apart, ‘unless this woman was a criminal . . .’

‘You’re sure it is a woman?’ the fire chief asked. It was late. Dark outside. He’d been at the scene of the fire since mid-morning, but although he was clearly exhausted, he was still obliged to oversee the work of the investigation team.

‘Yes,’ the young man said. Then, peering down into the blackened mouth, he added, ‘I can see dental work. Fillings. She’s seen a dentist.’

‘I’ll need to ask the family where their daughter got her teeth done,’ the fire chief said.

‘Yes. And as I say, if they ask you about DNA analysis, tell them that unless their daughter blew up a car or something, no one will have that.’ He let the jaws go and sat back on his haunches. ‘Everyone watches all those CSI programmes from America now and so everyone thinks that DNA is the answer to everything. Some sort of magic process whereby we take a hair sample from a body, the police do something, there’s a lot of violence and shouting and then the name of the murderer falls out at the other end. It makes me mad.’

The fire chief, in spite of where he was and his tiredness, smiled. The forensic scientist was right: a lot of people knew a bit about complicated concepts like DNA because of television and the internet. Not many, sadly, knew enough to really understand them.

‘I’ll speak to the family,’ he reiterated.

‘Don’t tell them that we have any doubts about the fire yet,’ the young man said. ‘Just ask for the name of their dentist. We’ll contact the police.’

‘They were here earlier,’ the chief said.

‘Yes, I know.’ He turned away, back to his work once again. ‘İkmen.’

‘You know him?’

‘I know of him,’ the scientist said. ‘This may well interest him.’

‘Murder?’

The investigator shrugged. ‘Or suicide,’ he said. ‘The accelerant was poured over her head. Some of these girls either choose or are compelled to set themselves alight under certain circumstances.’

The two men looked at each other, neither really wanting to say what both knew was in their minds. Eventually it was the chief who broke the silence.

‘You think,’ he said, ‘that the police might find that this girl may have transgressed her family’s standards in some way?’

The scientist frowned. ‘Let us call it what we both think it might be, shall we, Chief?’

The fire chief took a deep breath. ‘A killing or a suicide designed to regain the honour of this family,’ he said.

‘That’s it,’ the scientist replied. ‘That’s what I would say we are probably up against. That is what I will suggest to the police that they look into.’

Çetin İkmen couldn’t sleep. Like the chief, he’d suspected right from the start that the fire on Egyptian Garden Street had been set deliberately. The forensic investigators hadn’t found any obvious electrical faults in the apartment, no signs of unattended burning cigarettes. What they had found behind the front door in the hall was an empty petrol can. Lokman Seyhan was a car mechanic. How simple could it be? Maybe the girl had been seen out by a neighbour with an unrelated man, or perhaps slightly risqué text messages had been exchanged with a boy down the street. The family got to know or were told and son Lokman was given the task of killing his own sister. Family honour was restored. Simple.

Except that İkmen knew that it wouldn’t be anything of the kind. First of all, the body had to be identified as being that of Gözde Seyhan. Once that had been established, hopefully from dental records, an investigation would have to be conducted into Gözde’s life, who could have killed her and the possible reasons why. In the meantime, the petrol can would need to be examined for forensic evidence and whatever was on Gözde’s telephone would have to be looked at very carefully. Youngsters like the (at present only officially missing) Gözde Seyhan lived their lives on and in their mobile telephones. None of İkmen’s younger children had any idea what a conventional address book, made from paper, looked like. Life was becoming ever more dominated by electronics, ever more modern and fast and incomprehensible to a man in his late fifties like Çetin İkmen.

After a while, he left Fatma snoring in their bed and went into the living room. If he wanted to, he knew that he could watch any number of channels on the TV that would entertain him with music, sport, news, drama, soft porn or even midnight cartoons. But he didn’t want any of that. He lit a cigarette and then went over to his chair by the window and sat down. Pulling one of the window blinds open, he looked out and across Sultanahmet Square to where the great soaring bulk of the Sultanahmet Mosque made the already dark horizon around it black. Some people, even some avowedly religious types like the fire chief, tended to conflate honour killings with religion. True, such outrages did tend to happen almost exclusively amongst those who followed a religion of whatever sort. The faith was often used as justification for the killing. If a girl was behaving in an ‘immoral’ way, God was often cited as being the entity who was most offended by this. But the reality was that honour killings, in İkmen’s experience, were about saving face.

Human beings were naturally curious. In cities, where lots of things happened and where opportunities existed to expand the mind and experience new ideas, this curiosity was at least catered for. But in small villages in the east, where, İkmen knew, snow could fall for three months of every year almost without let-up, minds could turn to darker pursuits. If, for example, someone saw a neighbour’s daughter talking in a slightly flirtatious way to a young man who was not a relative, a campaign of malicious gossip could begin. And if the girl’s family did not do something to curb their child, the whole group could be ostracised as people of unwholesome and weak character. Such ostracisation could take the form of simply not speaking to that family, but it could also have financial and other implications. These could include people refusing to do business with the family, not selling them goods, and the withdrawal of offers of marriage. Sometimes curbing the recalcitrant child meant just locking her away, or maybe giving her a very public beating. But sometimes harsher sanctions were required and the child would either be killed or persuaded by her relatives to kill herself. The press was littered with stories of fathers with tears in their eyes putting guns to their daughters’ heads, of boys thought too young to attract long prison sentences killing their sisters. And then there were the suicides. Pathetic little notes would often accompany those, from girls so sorry for their ‘poor’ fathers, brothers and uncles, so mortified by the ‘crimes’ that had left them with no choice but to end their own lives.

And with increasing migration from the countryside, instances of honour killings in the cities were escalating. Çetin İkmen had been unable to secure a conviction in the three suspected cases he had so far been called upon to attend. Lack of evidence and some apparently iron-clad alibis had meant that he had been unable to take those cases any further. In two of them he had known almost beyond doubt that the girls in question had been murdered in order to restore family honour. In one of those cases some satisfaction had been gained by the fact that the family involved had, shortly after their girl’s death, suffered a financial catastrophe that had all but put them out on to the streets. All three families had suffered some level of privation. But like the fire chief, who had failed to gather enough evidence against the family on Mecit Ali Street, İkmen was still irked by his lack of success. There was something else that worried him too, something that he knew he had to consider when it came to the officers working with him. There were people in every strata of society, across all professions, who approved of honour killings. Whether they came from a village background, or were advocates of ‘traditional’ values, or believed that some religious imperative existed to excuse such behaviour, they were a reality and they were, İkmen knew, present in the ranks of the police. Who approved of such killings and who did not, he didn’t know. But he was very sure that, should this case turn out to be what he thought it was, he would soon find out.

No one spoke of anything except practicalities.

‘Lokman and Kenan can sleep here,’ Feray Akol said as she rolled out two thin mattresses on the floor of a drab, almost empty room. ‘One day this will, please to God, be the room that my Aykan brings a bride home to, and then I will be able to take my rest.’

Saadet Seyhan, looking on in a vague daze, said, ‘Kenan has gone out. I don’t know when he will be back.’

‘Men do that,’ her sister-in-law said simply. ‘Tonight your boys can sleep here in my son’s room. You are family.’

It was very obvious to Saadet that Feray was irked. Her face twisted with the effort of holding in her rage. A widow of some ten years, she had come only three days before to İstanbul with her daughter Nesrin from the village where she and her brother Cahit had been born. Her son, Aykan, had been working in the city for two years before he’d managed to earn enough money to send for his mother and sister. Feray had thought that her entry into the city would be like that of a queen. All she had found in reality was a tiny apartment with an antiquated bathroom, an unidentifiable smell in the kitchen and mould in all the cupboards. And now she had to share that very little with her brother and his family. The only consolation was that at least the neighbours were respectable. In Fatih, it was only women from other parts of the city who went about with their heads uncovered. There were no bars, no shops that sold alcohol, no licensed restaurants, and women did not, as far as she could tell, leave their homes and their children to just go out whenever they pleased. In that sense, this part of İstanbul was very much like the village. It made Feray feel as secure as anyone who had just come from a village of three hundred people to a city of twelve million could feel.

Saadet and Cahit lay on the floor of the small living room. As their nephew played some endless shooting game on a console on his lap, they tried to sleep, Cahit with some success, but Saadet couldn’t. She told herself that it was because Kenan was still out and she was worried about where he was and what he was doing. But that wasn’t really the case. While Aykan shot up aliens or foreign enemies or whoever they were, Saadet buried her head in the cushion that Feray had given her and fought to hold back her tears. If Cahit heard so much as a murmur from her, he would, she knew, beat her black and blue. Eventually she went to sleep. When she woke, however, it was still dark. Aykan was nowhere to be seen and Cahit had moved from her side. In the corner of the room she heard him talking to someone she couldn’t see.

Cahit said, ‘I know what you’ve done, where you’ve been!’

It was her son Kenan’s voice that whispered an answer: ‘Don’t talk to me! Don’t talk to me about
that
!’

The elderly woman who stared at him from across the corridor looked, Mehmet Süleyman thought, Greek. Dressed in a black cardigan and skirt, her hair hidden behind a jet-coloured headscarf, she was like Zoë, the Greek nanny he’d had as a child. She’d been old back in the 1960s, when Mehmet’s mother had first engaged her to look after her two boys. Zoë, he recalled, had been a Phanar, a native İstanbul Greek. In common with the Süleyman family, she had been a relic from a long-gone past. Like the Phanar Greeks, the Ottoman Turkish Süleyman family were a diminishing breed. With no sultanate or empire to serve, as well as no money to speak of, families like the Süleymans were in an unstoppable decline. Nobody in modern Turkey cared that Mehmet’s grandfather had been a prince. His own son, Yusuf, admittedly still a small child, didn’t even know. Mehmet’s own upbringing had been very different. He had known who and what his grandfather had been almost with his first breath.