Deep Waters (20 page)

‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me about this feud you have with the Berishas.’

‘I thought I was brought here because of the attack on the catamite,’ Mehti replied.

İkmen smiled. ‘We’ll get to that in due course. For the moment, Mehti, why don’t you give me a history lesson? I mean, I presume this feud started back in Ghegeria.’

‘Yeah.’

Suleyman, who had no idea where or what Ghegeria might be, kept his face impassive, his eyes fixed upon their prisoner.

‘Go on,’ İkmen prompted.

Mehti Vlora shrugged. ‘So they hate us and we hate them. What’s to tell?’

‘What has happened with regard to this feud since you’ve been in this country would be a good start,’ İkmen replied.

‘Why are you asking me this!’ Suddenly animated, Mehti jumped up from his chair only to be instantly pushed back down into it by the guard.

İkmen leaned across the table towards him. ‘Because it seems to me,’ he said, ‘that ever since Rifat Berisha’s death all I’ve heard about are feuds between Albanians! Samsun Bajraktar is an Albanian—’

‘Yes, and you are of his
fis
!’

‘Let’s leave me out of this, shall we?’ İkmen growled through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve had quite enough of hearing about my own supposed involvement in this melodrama! I want to know how this feud has progressed since you came to Turkey.’

‘Then you’d better ask Rahman Berisha, hadn’t you?’

‘Why?’

‘Because he killed our little brother Dhori, that’s why!’ Mehti said and pounded his fist on the table in what looked like triumph.

Suleyman, who up until this point hadn’t felt equipped to add anything to the proceedings, cleared his throat. ‘And so this “murder”, Mr Vlora, when did it happen?’

Seemingly exhausted by his recent outburst, Mehti muttered, ‘I don’t know. Before the beginning of last year . . . In the summer . . .’

‘Nineteen ninety-nine?’

‘I guess.’

İkmen looked questioningly at Suleyman, who just shrugged.

‘I don’t think that either my colleague or I remember the case,’ İkmen said.

Mehti looked İkmen straight in the eyes as he replied, ‘Well, that’s because Rahman hid the body.’

Suleyman, feeling yet again that this was getting beyond him, nevertheless asked, ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know! Ask Berisha! We’ve searched and searched for Dhori ever since that time, but . . .’ He hung his head again in an attempt to hide eyes which were now filling with tears. ‘But we never find him.’

İkmen, knowing that asking why the Vloras didn’t contact the police when their brother first vanished was a useless question, instead turned his attention to possible alternative explanations for Dhori Vlora’s disappearance.

‘But couldn’t Dhori have just gone away to another city?’ he asked. ‘Or couldn’t someone else have killed him?’

‘Dhori had no enemies beyond the Berishas!’ Mehti replied hotly. ‘He was a good boy. Everyone liked him. He even had an old woman who wanted to spend money on him!’

‘A European?’ İkmen inquired tartly, recalling Mehti’s English girl.

‘Why?’

‘Because you, at least, seem to possess a fascination for such women,’ İkmen replied, and then recalled Rifat Berisha’s friendship with Felicity Evren. ‘Like so many of your men,’ he added.

Mehti didn’t react to this. All he said was, ‘I don’t know who she was, I never met the woman. Dhori kept a lot to himself, you know.’

İkmen leaned back in his chair and looked fixedly at the wall in front of him, leaving it to Suleyman to ask what had to be the logical next question.

‘Assuming that Rahman Berisha did kill your brother,’ he said, ‘there must have been a reason why he did it.’

Mehti Vlora lowered his gaze to the floor. ‘
Gjakmaria
, the blood . . .’

‘Which, according to your custom,’ Suleyman continued, ‘means that your family must have spilt Berisha blood prior to your brother’s death.’

Mehti didn’t answer.

‘That is something else we might ask the Berishas about, don’t you think, Inspector?’ İkmen, now roused from his reverie, asked his colleague.

‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ Suleyman said with a smile.

‘Rifat Berisha only got what was coming to him.’

Both İkmen and Suleyman looked at their prisoner.

‘Oh, did he?’

‘And did you give him what was coming to him, Mehti? Was that the reason why you tried to silence Samsun Bajraktar? In case he told me too much about your history with the Berishas – like why Rahman may have killed your brother?’

For a moment it seemed as if Mehti Vlora had decided to ignore these questions. His mind appeared to be elsewhere. When he did finally speak, his words were mumbled.

‘I want to do a deal,’ he said.

İkmen leaned forward, frowning.

‘Would you care to repeat that please, Mr Vlora?’ he said. ‘Just so that we can understand it on the tape.’

‘I want to do a deal with you,’ Mehti said, his voice clearer. ‘I’ll give you Rifat’s murderer if you let my family go.’

İkmen first looked across at Suleyman and then sighed deeply.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s have the details and then I’ll see what, if anything, I can do.’

Mehti Vlora’s statement was taken in the form of a dictated script because his writing skills were poor. As a gesture, rather than as part of the deal, Aryan Vlora and the two younger women were released from the cells just before Mehti began his story. Unlike Angeliki and Mehmet Vlora, neither Aryan nor the women had had any drugs on them when they were arrested, so, in any event, İkmen only released those he possessed the power to release anyway.

According to his statement, Mehti Vlora had been watching Rifat Berisha for some months before he finally killed him. He knew that he’d left the city for some considerable time at one point and that he routinely saw a foreign woman with a ‘twisted face’ in smart and expensive parts of town. On the night of Rifat’s death, Mehti followed him to this woman’s house and then waited for him, hiding himself in the back of Rifat’s car. When Rifat came out, Mehti allowed him to drive for a few kilometres before he revealed himself and ordered his victim to pull over to the side of the road. Then he killed him with one deep slash of his knife. He drove the car containing the now dead Rifat Berisha back to Eminönü where, under cover of the fog, he dumped the body near to where it was found by the ferry piers. Thus far, if one discounted the bravado in the phrase ‘one deep slash’, it was all very believable given the history between these two families, although İkmen would have found Mehmet Vlora a more convincing killer – Mehti, it had to be admitted, possessed a certain lassitude of spirit which made him an odd murderer.

Where Mehti’s story faced problems was in the details surrounding what happened after he had dumped Rifat’s body. To drive back towards Felicity Evren’s house in Bebek and then dump the vehicle in Ortaköy seemed pointless. Leaving the blood-soaked car outside the Evrens’ house, thereby involving them with the police right from the start would, surely, have made much more sense. Although Felicity and her family would not have been implicated directly, the police would, at least temporarily, have concentrated their efforts away from Eminönü and the Vloras. When asked why he had performed this seemingly illogical move, Mehti simply replied that he had been scared and hadn’t really known what he was doing at the time, which was indeed possible. However, the fact that he knew where the car had been dumped was significant – or at least it would have been had İkmen not known how quickly such information could have been spread from the Berisha family to the rest of the Albanian community.

Other points of interest involved the old Fiat Mehti claimed he had stolen in order to follow Rifat that night. He had, he said, left it opposite the Evrens’ house when he jemmied his way into the back of his victim’s Mercedes. Bebek, İkmen knew, was the sort of district where people reported dumped cars, particularly if they were old and scruffy-looking, and so asking the Traffic Division for some information on that was high on his agenda. He was also a little disappointed that Mehti had not yet made any mention of either the shards of coloured glass in the victim’s face or of the curtains in which the killer had wrapped Rifat’s body. These could be just oversights, or they might signal that he had chosen to fabricate his story, perhaps to please his punitive and aggrieved relatives. If so, the price of life imprisonment he would soon be obliged to pay was very high. There was still, as yet, no forensic evidence to confirm Mehti’s story. Various items had been removed from the Vlora place but the apartment had yielded only old bloodstains. These would still need to be processed but they were unlikely to have come from Rifat Berisha. Whether Mehti’s fingerprints or any of his blood or other detritus was amongst the evidence gleaned from Rifat’s car also remained to be seen.

With so much hinging upon past events alleged to have taken place between the Vloras and the Berishas, İkmen took the decision to go with Tepe back to the Berishas’ Kutucular Caddesi apartment. There, hopefully, a conversation with Rahman Berisha might prove instructive. Suleyman, for his part, set off to follow Mehti Vlora’s directions to the Evrens’ Bebek residence. It was, he and İkmen had agreed, important to ascertain whether or not the Evrens’ had seen anything untoward outside their house that night. Felicity particularly needed further work. The last she’d seen of Rifat, so she’d told İkmen, was at lunch on that final day. But if Mehti Vlora was telling the truth, that had to be wrong. According to Mehti, Rifat had gone to the Evren house that night. If he hadn’t gone to see his girlfriend, what was he doing there?

‘He came here to see me,’ İlhan Evren said impassively.

‘Why did he do that, sir?’ Suleyman asked.

Evren, who was an obese man, shifted uncomfortably in his seat before replying, ‘He wanted money.’

It wasn’t easy trying to hold a conversation with a man who so pointedly did not offer one a seat. But Suleyman comforted himself with the thought that he had the advantage in terms of position; awkward though it might be to stand all through this conversation, it was Evren who had to look up at him in order to communicate.

‘And did you give him money?’

‘Well, of course not!’ Evren retorted angrily. ‘He’d already had a car courtesy of my daughter! He was getting nothing more from me! Nothing!’

‘Nothing more from you, sir?’ Suleyman asked, emphasising the second word.

Evren took a fat cigar out of the top pocket of his jacket before replying.

‘I paid for that boy to come to London with us; bought his flights, new clothes, everything.’

Recalling what İkmen had told him about Felicity Evren and her seeming reluctance to discuss that trip, it struck Suleyman as surprising her father was being so forthright about it.

‘Why did you take Rifat to London, Mr Evren?’ he asked as he watched the man’s thick lips attach themselves to the end of his cigar.

Evren puffed to get his smoke going, then briefly inspected the lit end of the cigar before continuing.

‘Mr Berisha kindly donated one of his kidneys to my daughter. She’s already given a statement about it to another of your lot.’

Despite Felicity’s statement to İkmen, after so much talk back at the station regarding the possible trade in human organs, such a bald statement from Evren came as a shock to Suleyman. Not, of course, that Evren had said that he had actually paid for the kidney.

Out of patience with Evren’s boorish manners, Suleyman sat down unbidden in one of the chairs opposite his host.

‘So your daughter—’

‘My daughter has multiple health problems,’ Evren said impatiently. ‘I was happy for her to receive dialysis here but I wanted her to have her surgery in London. I wanted her to have the best. I know Mr Collins, I’ve done work for him in the past. I trust him.’

‘Mr Collins?’

‘The consultant who removed Mr Berisha’s kidney and put it into my daughter’s body. It’s perfectly legal for a person to willingly donate one of their organs. No actual money ever changed hands.’

‘Except for Rifat’s expenses and that Mercedes your daughter—’

‘Felicity did that of her own volition!’ Evren roared. ‘Nothing to do with me! I warned her against it. I said it would set a bad precedent, and it did!’

Suleyman frowned. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that the car gave him ideas.’

‘What sort of ideas?’

‘Well, that he’d been paid for his fucking kidney, of course!’ Evren shouted. ‘That sort of thing is illegal in Britain, which is exactly what Rifat Berisha said to me when he came here that night to try and extort money from me!’

One of the doors that led out of what Suleyman felt was a spectacularly ugly room opened, revealing the man he had passed in the hall when Evren had reluctantly shown him into his house.

Catching sight of this figure, Evren suddenly smiled. ‘I won’t be much longer, Alexei,’ he said. ‘Get yourself a drink, have caviar, enjoy.’

The man laughed briefly before departing. It was a thick and yet at the same time brittle noise which, Suleyman thought, was almost as alarming as the excessive width of his shoulders.

He turned back to Evren. ‘Go on, sir. Were you surprised, shocked, by Berisha’s behaviour?’

‘Not really. He told me originally that he was willing to give Felicity one of his kidneys because he was in love with her. Now, I’m not a fool and I knew that could not be true.’

‘Why not?’

‘He was Albanian,’ Evren barked. ‘They have this clan thing. They indulge in blood feuds. Carry all sorts of hardware to protect themselves. They only marry their own and anyway, have you seen my daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’ll know that she isn’t the type of woman a man could love!’

‘I—’

‘Felicity is a nightmare!’ With much determination, if some difficulty, Evren leaned forward towards Suleyman, his face red with fury. ‘She always has been! Born like a freak! If Mary, my wife, hadn’t produced my son, well . . . Not that he’s much use any more . . .’ He looked down and away, towards the legs of Suleyman’s chair. ‘Of course I’ve never told Felicity that, I’ve always tried to boost her confidence, especially since her mother’s death, which she took badly. I’ve given her everything, even entertained useless, blackmailing young men in my home.’ He flicked his gaze up to Suleyman once again. ‘Oh, Berisha wasn’t the first, no. As soon as we arrived in this city the bastards started coming! Neighbours to dinner, sniffing out our money. But he was the only one who ever got really in here, ever paid, albeit in cheap flesh, for all the largesse I have allowed my daughter to squander over the years.’