A Noble Killing (6 page)

‘I will.’

The connection cut and İkmen put his phone down and looked over at his sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu. She was bent over a cardboard file, frowning.

‘Ayşe,’ he said, ‘we will need to find out exactly who that petrol can we found at the fire in Beşiktaş belongs to.’

She looked up. ‘Was it arson?’ she asked.

‘That I don’t yet know for certain,’ İkmen replied. ‘But the body is definitely that of Gözde Seyhan. Any progress on the contents of her mobile phone?’

‘No, sir,’ Ayşe said as she lifted her office telephone receiver and began to dial, ‘but I’ll chase it up right away. If this is an honour killing, then we must make an example of the perpetrators.’

She looked both angry and determined. İkmen had wanted to say that she should not allow herself to get too carried away until they actually knew how the fire had been caused. But so many alarm bells were going off in his head that to say so much as a word would, he felt, be extremely hypocritical. And so he let her make her call and kept his counsel.

‘The body the firemen found was that of your sister.’

Kenan Seyhan listened to his father’s voice on the end of the telephone line, then he nodded. ‘I see.’

‘Now the police tell me that they must keep her body for some tests,’ Cahit Seyhan said. ‘They need to discover how she died.’

‘Yes, they do,’ his son replied.

‘Everything rests in the hands of Allah.’

Kenan Seyhan didn’t answer. He had been sitting outside the restaurant where he worked, having a cigarette, when his father had called. Only very reluctantly had he picked up.

‘I won’t be home tonight,’ he told his father. ‘Auntie Feray and Mother needn’t cook for me.’

‘You’re going—’

‘You know where I’m going!’ Kenan said hotly. ‘So don’t say anything. I’m away from you! Doing what you want!’

‘You’re not—’

‘I’m away from you, aren’t I?’ Kenan snapped. ‘As we agreed!’

His father put the phone down on him and Kenan sighed. As he looked into the distance, he saw the lights that hung between the minarets of the Sultanahmet Mosque blaze into life. They made him, momentarily, frown.

It was nearly ten p.m. by the time İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu arrived at number 14, Star Apartments, Egyptian Garden Street, Beşiktaş. The block was on the opposite side of the road from the Mersin Apartments where the Seyhan family lived. Number 14 was high up on the fourth floor. In addition, this building was less well cared for. There was a lot of litter in the stairwell, and as they had entered, the officers had been observed by a large number of quite dirty-looking children. Standing in front of a blank, scarred front door, waiting for the occupants to open up, İkmen had to keep on pressing the timed light switch on the wall in order not to be plunged into darkness.

They had come, late as it was, to see someone called Osman Yavuz. A mobile telephone number registered to him had been the last one that Gözde Seyhan had called before her death. In fact, assuming that the girl had died between seven and seven forty-five in the morning, the call, which had been recorded as having taken place at 6.51, had occurred only just prior to her demise. İkmen, who had already rung the doorbell once, rang it again. Ayşe Farsakoğlu looked over at her boss nervously.

‘If he is out . . .’

‘He could be,’ İkmen said. He put his ear close up to the door and heard the sound of some sort of cop or cowboy show shooting away on a TV set inside. ‘Someone’s in.’ He banged on the door with his fist and shouted, ‘Police! Open up!’

He hadn’t wanted to attract attention, but apparently that was what was needed, because as well as several neighbours poking their heads out of several doors, the door in front of him slowly opened too.

‘Yes? What is it? What do you want?’ The voice was old and reedy and it belonged to a tiny woman whose back was so hunched, her face looked as if it was growing out of her chest.

‘Good evening, Aunt,’ İkmen said. ‘We’ve come to see a man called Osman Yavuz.’

‘Why?’

‘Does he live here?’ İkmen asked.

The old woman looked around with tiny, hostile eyes, and seeing that many of her neighbours had now gathered outside their apartments, she said, ‘Come inside. Too many ears out here.’

As they stepped over the threshold and took off their shoes, İkmen and Ayşe were aware of the scorn with which the old woman regarded them. They also noticed that the apartment where she lived was small, dark and smelt of sour cooking oil.

‘Osman isn’t here any more,’ the old woman said as she led them through into a tiny lounge that was crammed with ancient, creaking sofas. On the sofas, cushions of all sizes and colours were piled up in chaotic pyramids. On top of some of these structures sat a range of various-coloured Persian cats. There were places for humans to sit, just not very many. The old woman walked over to the television in the corner and turned it off. ‘American rubbish!’

‘Where has Osman gone?’ Ayşe asked.

The old woman shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe back to his mother.’

‘You’re not his mother?’

She laughed. ‘Osman is eighteen!’ she said. ‘I am his grandmother.’

‘So his mother . . .’

‘His mother was the wife of my son,’ the old woman said.

‘Was?’

Her face fell into a purse-shaped collection of wrinkles. ‘My son died,’ she said. ‘Years ago. His wife went back to be with her family in Bursa. What’s all this about? Why do you want Osman?’

‘We need to talk to him about one of his friends,’ İkmen said.

‘Who? He doesn’t have any friends.’

The old woman, like the officers, remained standing. Her small eyes looked up at them, filled with suspicion.

‘We need to speak to your grandson,’ Ayşe repeated. ‘Why don’t you know where Osman has gone?’

‘He’s eighteen. He’s always coming and going. I don’t know what he does!’

‘We’ll need to have his mother’s telephone number,’ İkmen said.

‘She doesn’t have one,’ the old woman replied. ‘Have you tried his mobile?’

‘The number is out of service,’ İkmen said.

Now the old woman frowned. Suddenly she realised what had happened. ‘You have Osman’s number already?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘How . . .’

‘We’ll need his mother’s address,’ İkmen said. ‘Can you write that down for us?’

She said that she could, and shuffled off to her bedroom to get a pen and some paper. As soon as she had gone, Ayşe said, ‘What about the photographs on the phone? Do we mention them?’

‘What? To the old lady?’ İkmen shook his head. ‘Not even to the boy’s mother, if we find her.’

‘Mmm.’ Ayşe frowned.

‘The boy will have to know that we have his phone number, because we managed to trace him through it. But if he knows for sure that we’ve seen those photographs on Gözde’s phone, he might bolt.’

‘If I were him, I would,’ Ayşe said.

‘Depends what he’s done – if anything.’

Ayşe lowered her voice. ‘Sir, he has naked photographs of that girl on his phone!’

İkmen shrugged. ‘We think,’ he said. ‘She certainly sent them to him. Doesn’t mean he asked for them. Doesn’t mean he had anything to do with her death.’

The old woman shuffled back in and shoved a piece of paper into İkmen’s hand.

‘I just hope that he has maybe got a job now,’ she said wearily. ‘It does no good for men to be lying in their beds doing nothing but sending texts and dreaming. A man without work is a useless thing. What is more, a man with no work is a dangerous thing. They get up to no good . . .’

Mehmet Süleyman was not a great devotee of the internet. It had its uses, clearly, and e-mail was very convenient, but he couldn’t sit looking at it for hours on end like some people. The Make the Most of İstanbul site was, however, of interest, peripheral as it was to the suspicious fire in Beşiktaş. Jane Ford, the wife of Richard Ford, the man who had first discovered the blaze, administered the site.

Make the Most of İstanbul provided a lot of information. There were sections covering property, health, education, professional services, shopping and cultural events. There were book and music reviews, and forums for discussion of topics like the upcoming ban on smoking in enclosed spaces. When he came across this, Süleyman looked at the cigarette between his fingers and sighed. Come July, he’d have to go outside the station if he wanted to smoke. İkmen, who always had been and remained a voracious smoker, was currently living in denial about this. But he too, in the end, would have to conform.

Süleyman clicked on another category and found that Make the Most of İstanbul had a ‘contacts’ section. Part friendship site and part lonely hearts column, it was peopled by men and women nervously trying to build lives in an alien city. Like displaced people everywhere, their aim, albeit unconscious in some cases, was to cling to what they knew, thereby relegating the exotic ‘other’ in which they found themselves to the periphery, albeit a colourful one.

American
male,
American
female. It was so specific. No other kind of Westerner would do. Not a Frenchwoman, not a Briton, not an Australian. And it wasn’t just confined to Americans either. Almost everyone, it seemed, wanted to stay in their own ethnic or religious niche. The exceptions, more coyly worded, were no less specific, no less needy.

Any age group . . . He imagined her. Professional, competent, attractive, but forty and therefore willing to take whatever she could get. It was sad, but then loneliness of any sort was never pretty. He lived in a house full of people and yet he was alone. Once again he and his wife were not getting on, and as was his custom, he was beginning to spend his time elsewhere: with Çetin İkmen, at work and, just in the last month, with a certain gypsy woman in what had once been the old Jewish neighbourhood of Balat. Gonca was somewhere in her fifties. A respected artist, she was also a handsome, sexy and vibrant character who made him laugh. He knew it was wrong, but Gonca had been there for him before and she was, especially when he was unhappy, a very hard habit to break.

He came out of the contacts section and began looking at some of the articles that readers of the site had submitted. They had titles like ‘Walking in the Princes’ Islands’, ‘My First Ramazan’ and ‘Street Vendors of Old İstanbul’. He read a few excerpts. He found them informed, earnest, worthy. These were people who obviously cared about where they were and wanted to actively engage with it. That said, he also detected an air of condescension, particularly in the reader submissions. Local ‘colour’ was not always what these writers believed it to be. Some ‘İstanbul customs’ were not native to the city at all; rather they had been imported to it from Anatolia by economic migrants. What was more, much of this commentary was quite uncritical. True, to criticise the practices of a country that was not your own was not easy. But even a staunch patriot like Süleyman found some of the very fulsome praise rather difficult to stomach.

He spent another half an hour flicking through various menus, and then he quit and shut down his computer. It was already midnight and he still hadn’t eaten anything. His wife, Zelfa, would have prepared something hours before. That was almost certainly in the bin by this time. He took his jacket off the back of his chair, lit up a cigarette and left his office slowly.

Fire investigation was, the pathologist knew, a very exacting and specific field of study. So when he received a call from a member of the investigative team telling him that the fire at the apartment in Beşiktaş had been set deliberately, he was in no doubt that that was correct. Someone had poured petrol over Gözde Seyhan’s head as she stood in the middle of her bedroom, and then ignited her with either a match or a lighter. The theory concurred with his own opinion. The investigator also told him that from the angle at which the petrol had been poured, he was certain the girl could not have done it herself.

Because a volatile accelerant had been used, the girl hadn’t stood a chance. The flames had burned upwards, inflicting massive damage upon her head and torso, while her legs, which had attracted rather less petrol than the other parts of her body, were comparatively unscathed. The room had burned as it had because of Gözde’s abortive attempts to put herself out. Not knowing that a petrol blaze, unlike an unaccelerated fire, couldn’t be smothered, she had attempted to extinguish the flames by rolling on the floor. During the course of this action, she had brushed up against her bed, the curtains and some other fabrics that were scattered around the room. A lot of highly flammable man-made fibres were involved, and so the whole area had ignited and then burned with a ferociousness that would not have happened had Gözde just simply dropped where she stood.

Dr Arto Sarkissian looked down at the blackened remains of the girl and tried not to picture what she had been through that day. But he couldn’t. Questions like, had she screamed? Had she even had time to make any sort of sound? kept on running over and across his mind in loathsome waves. Who had done this to her? Who
could
do such a thing to another human being? And why? Çetin İkmen, as well as the fire investigators, was of the opinion that the girl’s death was some sort of honour killing. But the doctor had established that Gözde Seyhan was a virgin, and so why anyone would have cause, if that was indeed even a vaguely appropriate term, to kill her was a mystery. But then he knew little of honour killings, and how and why they happened. Rare, if on the increase in the city, they had until recently been recognised as being a rural or tribal phenomenon. Personally, Arto had rarely come into contact with a body strongly suspected to have died as a result of an honour killing, until now. Some people he knew muttered about a perceived rise in Islamic fundamentalism. But Arto, though a Christian himself, always refuted the notion that honour killing was a Muslim phenomenon.