Deep Waters (19 page)

‘Oh dear,’ İkmen replied as he bent down to look into the woman’s furious face. ‘That is not good, Angeliki.’

‘None of my sons were involved in the attack on the catamite! None of them!’

‘Did I say that they were?’ İkmen said with feigned innocence. ‘I think not.’ He looked up at the constable holding the woman and asked, ‘Did anyone tell Mrs Vlora why we are here while you were in the kitchen, Bilgen?’

‘No, sir.’

He turned back to the old woman. ‘Well then, Angeliki, either you can now hear through a lot of noise and thick walls or things are truly getting worse and worse for you.’

‘Witch’s child!’ the old woman hissed at him. ‘I know why you’re persecuting us!’

‘Oh, and why is that?’

‘Because you’re lazy! Because my boys are convenient culprits for the Berisha boy’s murder! And because I told you the truth about your mother’s death which you just cannot take!’

Stung by her words, İkmen rounded fiercely upon her. ‘For your information,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘I’m just about the most diligent detective you’ll find in this city. I could have arrested your boys within twenty-four hours of Rifat’s death if I’d wanted to, if I’d been convinced of their guilt. But I’m not. I’m not convinced of their innocence either.’ He paused then, taking just a moment to light a cigarette, his eyes not leaving hers as he did so. ‘And as for my mother, so far your story is substantiated by no one.’

‘And you won’t take the word of an Albanian woman, oh no!’

‘Not if that woman is both a harbourer of criminals and a drug dealer, no. Would you?’

She shrugged. ‘If you asked the right people . . .’

‘What do you mean?’ he said, staring into her crafty yellowing eyes, searching for yet more deceit.

‘If Ahmet Bajraktar is still with the living . . .’

‘My uncle?’

‘The witch’s brother, yes. He knows, İkmen.’ A smile broke across the dryness of her lips. ‘He knows everything.’

‘What—’

‘Do you want this lot downstairs now, sir?’ Tepe asked as he, the other officers and their prisoners effectively broke the spell that had briefly existed between İkmen and Angeliki Vlora.

İkmen turned away from the old woman and looked up into his sergeant’s questioning face.

‘Yes,’ he said and then seemingly gathering both strength and resolve from his separation from the old woman, he added, ‘Yes, take them down to the cars. Don’t let them talk to each other. Oh, and you can tell forensic they’ve got the place to themselves.’

‘Right.’

As the officers and their prisoners moved out of the apartment and into the communal areas of the building, İkmen put one unsteady hand up to his head and then wiped away the small bead of sweat which, despite the current freezing conditions, had formed upon his brow.

Breakfast was not a meal that often featured in Zelfa Halman’s day. A cup of coffee and three cigarettes was the usual form. This morning, however, and in the face of what felt alarmingly like sickness, she felt that she should really try to force something down. Must be the effects of drinking that champagne the previous night, she thought. OK, she’d had only two glasses, but then she hadn’t been able to drink like she used to in the old days for many years. She hadn’t attempted five pints of Guinness followed by several large whiskies for a long time – if she had she might have felt that her hangover was justified, but it wasn’t and so it was with a bad grace that she ordered breakfast and tea in the little café opposite her office.

When it arrived, although the cheese, honey and bread looked reasonably appetising, the sight of the hard-boiled egg made her feel even worse. Cringing, she picked it up, wrapped it in a napkin and dumped it on the empty table beside her. She took a sip of her tea and then checked her watch before she attempted to deal with the food that remained on her plate. She had half an hour before her first appointment, which was enough, hopefully, to inject a little humanity back into what felt like a toxin-wracked body. Shakily she picked up her knife.

‘Hello, doctor.’

It was a young, male voice and one that, with its perfectly accented English, she recognised immediately.

‘Hello, Ali,’ she said and tried not to be shocked at the hollowness of the eyes that now regarded her with what seemed to be amusement. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came in for some tea,’ he said as, unbidden, he lowered himself into the chair opposite hers. And then as if answering some silent question he could see forming in her mind he said, ‘I do drink, you know.’

‘But no food,’ Zelfa said, cutting into her cheese without enthusiasm.

‘Maybe later.’ He smiled. ‘But not now.’ Leaning forward, he said, ‘I know you telephoned my father last night and I know what you said.’

Zelfa sighed. ‘Then you’ll know, as I do, that he is very concerned and wants the best for you.’

The boy looked across at her paltry efforts at eating with something Zelfa recognised as smugness.

‘That’s what he told
you
,’ he said as he watched her chew disgustedly on the cheese. ‘He told
me
that he’s sick of my madness and that if I don’t conform to what he wants me to be he’ll have me put away.’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it.’

‘Yes, he did! I know him!’ His eyes took on an even more intense aspect. ‘He isn’t a nice man, my father. Sometimes he hurts people. He hurt Mum with his indifference and lack of understanding. But then,’ he added sadly, ‘we all had our part to play in that drama.’

‘Ali,’ Zelfa said gently, ‘we’ve talked about your mother’s death and you know that I feel there is work to be done there. Your feelings of guilt are totally disproportionate. You were a child, what could you have done? Your mother was, as I understand it, a very unhappy woman.’

‘What do you know about it?’ he snapped. ‘I don’t want to talk about that! Death. I don’t have to go there! I want to talk about me and I want you to make certain that my father doesn’t put me in some stinking institution!’ Then looking deeply into her eyes he pleaded, ‘You won’t let him, will you, doctor? I mean, I’m not mad.’

‘I certainly couldn’t and wouldn’t hospitalise you at the present time, Ali, no,’ Zelfa responded calmly, hedging, as doctors do, her bets for the future.

Not that the boy seemed to have heard. ‘Because unlike my mother I have no intention of taking my own life. I just wish to live my life in a way that I find appropriate to the creature that I am. I am not a cheap gangster like my father, I am a gentleman. I have manners, I protect the honour of my beloved sister, I dress plainly and well.’ He looked arrogantly around the café at the other diners, contempt written all over his features.

His verbal fluency coupled with his school uniform gave Zelfa momentary pause. Perhaps that other bright boy, Mehmet Suleyman, had affected people like this when he was a schoolboy? Serious, charming, mannered – although without the obvious fevered disorder that characterised this child’s hollow eyes. Her lover, her man, soon to be her husband. She made a conscious effort not to smile at the thought before she spoke again.

‘Look, Ali,’ she said and laid her knife on her plate, ‘all your father wants you to do is to eat as normally as you can and make yourself agreeable to your peers. I know that you experience problems with sleep, but if you won’t take the tablets that I’ve given you—’

‘But I like the night, doctor!’ he cried excitedly. ‘My sister and I have always stayed up into the night, as I’ve told you before. It’s beautiful at night with her,’ he smiled, ‘and anyway it was difficult for her to go out in the day back in England.’

‘Because of your mother’s illness?’ Zelfa recalled the conversation she’d had with Ali about his much older sister when he first started coming to her.

‘Partly.’ He looked away.

‘You do know that you can’t really live in a horror story, don’t you?’ Zelfa persisted. ‘You may feel as if your life so far has been full of horror—’

‘Mum read
Dracula
when she was pregnant with my sister.’

‘Meaning?’ Zelfa frowned.

‘Oh, it was just an observation,’ he said, shrugging into what appeared to be sulky teenager mode. ‘Mum liked that stuff. So did my sister, it wasn’t just me.’

It was not, Zelfa thought, probably the best material for a suicidally depressed woman to read whether she was pregnant or not. It made her wonder what the woman had been perusing when she did finally take her own life.

‘Your mother was always depressed, wasn’t she?’ she said. ‘That’s hard for all concerned. Depressed people can have an effect on those around them, pulling them, often unwittingly, into their own dark world.’

‘You really don’t understand at all, do you?’ he said wearily.

‘No, I don’t, but if we talked more about these issues—’

‘Mum is not the reason my father wants to put me in an institution.’

‘I agree,’ Zelfa responded evenly, ‘but I do think that you have issues with your mother’s suicide which are impacting upon your current behaviour. And things are not, as yet, improving, Ali. I mean, this latest fixation about becoming institutionalised . . .’

‘But he does mean to do it to me, doctor! It isn’t a delusion! You must believe me!’

‘Whether I believe you or not is not at issue here, Ali,’ Zelfa said. ‘That you believe it is what concerns me. We need to look at why you think it is even a possibility. I believe the issue is intimately connected with unpleasant things that have gone on in the past.’

He moved his head downwards, pushing it into his thin shoulders, like a miserable little child. And although the sight of this made Zelfa want to put her arms round him to give some comfort and warmth to his starved body, she resisted this unprofessional urge. Instead, and against the better judgement of a psychiatrist with a full appointment book for that day, she said, ‘Look, Ali, you’re obviously very agitated today so why don’t you come and see me when you finish school? We can talk more comfortably in my office.’

‘But won’t my father have to pay—’

‘I’m sure your father won’t mind when he realises how important this is to you. He does, after all, want you to get well.’ Feeling a little less nauseous now than she had been when Ali arrived, Zelfa took a long drink from her tea glass.

Ali still looked uncertain.

In an attempt to break through his misery, Zelfa said, ‘Look, why don’t I just see you with no charge? Your father is paying for Thursday anyway.’

‘Are you sure, doctor?’

‘Yes.’ This was a sick boy who, if she was right, might be getting sicker; anything she could do to help him she should – even if that meant being out of pocket. And besides, the boy intrigued her, she had to admit. There was something unusual here, he interested her in the academic sense. Obviously possessed of his own version of reality involving a fear of being ‘locked away’ coupled with gothic fascination with the macabre, Ali Evren put Zelfa in mind of Edgar Allan Poe.

Smiling now, the boy rose to his feet. ‘Then I will see you later on this afternoon, doctor,’ he said, punctuating his words with a small bow.

‘OK. But promise me you’ll try to speak to at least one of your classmates.’

He responded sharply, ‘I don’t talk to base creatures, doctor.’

And then he left. Zelfa looked again at her watch before sinking back into thoughts about her lover and what it might mean to be his wife. There was, she knew, a meeting planned between the Suleyman brothers and their father, who probably already knew of his younger son’s ‘good news’ from Murad Suleyman. Where that left things with regard to Mehmet’s mother, Zelfa didn’t know. Perhaps she, like her own father, was currently living in blissful cluelessness. You must, her guilt told her firmly,
get around to telling the old man soon
 . . .

‘I don’t know that I’m entirely happy with this, you know, Çetin,’ Mehmet Suleyman said as he walked with İkmen towards the interview rooms. ‘I mean, if this man is the main focus of your investigation . . .’

‘Which is why I want Tepe to give his brothers a good grilling,’ İkmen replied with vigour. ‘And anyway, as I’ve explained, I need you.’

‘Yes.’

The two men lapsed into silence. İkmen needed the space to try to banish the unwanted demons that surrounded the subject of his mother’s death; Suleyman was grappling with what the older man had told him – that İkmen now felt that his preoccupation with his mother was beginning to distance him from what was truly important in this investigation, the death of Rifat Berisha. With little beyond paperwork at the present time to occupy his mind, Suleyman was well placed to help keep İkmen focused. If only, thought Suleyman, Tepe wouldn’t take all this personally . . .

Just before they entered Interview Room 1, İkmen’s lugubrious face broke into a smile. Holding his hand out to his colleague he said cheerfully, ‘Oh, and lest I forget, Mehmet, congratulations on your forthcoming marriage.’

‘Thank you,’ Suleyman replied, taking the outstretched hand warmly in his own. ‘I meant to tell you myself yesterday but—’

‘I was otherwise engaged,’ the older man said and pushed open the door to the interview room. ‘Cohen phoned me.’

‘Oh.’

Mehti Vlora looked even smaller than usual as he sat hunched in his chair, glaring at the guard who viewed him impassively from across the other side of the room. Several hours had passed since Mehti had been brought into the station, and knowing that his need would now be great, İkmen threw a half-full packet of cigarettes onto the table in front of him, indicating that he should help himself. With very bad grace, Mehti did so.

As the lead officer, İkmen reminded his prisoner that he was entitled to have a lawyer with him during his interview, a service that Mehti, yet again, refused. Once all the preliminary tasks regarding the exposition of rights and the setting up of tapes were over, İkmen began what appeared at first to be a somewhat laborious line of questioning.