Deep Waters (4 page)

‘Could that have a bearing on his death?’ Suleyman inquired.

‘Oh, it could,’ the older man said thoughtfully, ‘it could. But whatever the reason for this man’s death, his clan will get themselves involved, of that you can be sure.’

Tepe, who had up until that point been listening in silence, asked ‘So, do you know a lot about Albanians then, sir?’

Both İkmen and Suleyman smiled. ‘No more than what my Albanian mother told me,’ İkmen replied, ‘which was not a great deal.’

‘Oh.’

‘But then is it not in the nature of witches, djinn and other creatures of the night to be just a little vague?’ said the plump, bespectacled man who had suddenly appeared at İkmen’s side.

‘Oh, yes, doctor,’ İkmen replied with a smile, ‘absolutely.’

‘Good morning, Dr Sarkissian,’ Suleyman said as he watched İkmen and his old friend embrace warmly. ‘Have you seen the body yet?’

‘Briefly,’ the Armenian replied and silently shook hands with Sergeant Tepe.

‘And?’

‘And I think that whoever killed him was pretty serious about it.’

İkmen leaned against the waterside rail and pulled his thin raincoat hard round his small frame. The cold seemed to be eating into his bones. ‘Why is that, Arto?’

‘Because even after a cursory glance I can see that whoever did this almost took the poor fellow’s head off.’

‘Just as you thought, Inspector,’ İkmen said, nodding in Suleyman’s direction. ‘Vicious.’

‘I’ll be able to tell you exactly how it was done when I’ve had a proper look,’ the pathologist said brightly. ‘Do we have a name for this unfortunate?’

‘It’s Rifat Berisha, sir,’ Tepe offered. ‘Or at least—’

‘Oh, yes, that really is very Albanian, isn’t it?’ the doctor said. ‘Do we know whether Mr Berisha is a Kosovan refugee or a more long-term resident?’

‘His ID would seem to suggest the latter,’ İkmen replied. ‘Although being Albanian there is always, of course, the possibility that his papers and even his name are counterfeit.’

‘That’s a harsh judgement,’ Suleyman observed with a frown.

İkmen smiled wryly. ‘Albania is a harsh place,’ he said, and began to walk back towards the crime scene. ‘It engenders witches and demons, dictators, gangsters and liars.’

And then, briefly, he laughed.

Since coming to İstanbul nine years before, Aliya Berisha had three times put a man’s bloodstained shirt in the window of wherever the family were living. The first time, when the shirt had been her father-in-law’s, they had been staying in Balat, in a house belonging to an elderly Jew. And although it was said that the Jew had expressed ‘opinions’ on both the death of Aliya’s father-in-law and the shirt, nothing had ever been mentioned to either her or the rest of the family. Besides, shortly afterwards, when her cousin Mimoza married the Turk, Dilek Özer, they all decamped to his apartments on Kutucular Caddesi, not five minutes away from where the İstanbul police were currently opening up a murder investigation.

The two further bloodied shirts that Aliya had displayed since moving into Mr Özer’s extensive property had belonged to her husband’s only brother, Muhammed, and the youngest of her sons, the then fifteen-year-old Egrem. Dilek Özer, who neither spoke nor understood the Albanian language, readily believed his wife’s explanation for these strange exhibits of the dead. ‘We expose their shirts to honour them,’ Mimoza had said when she first caught sight of her husband looking doubtfully at the gruesome artefact. ‘It is a signal to other Albanians that our men died bravely.’

And having absolutely no knowledge of his wife’s culture, how could Dilek Özer with his hundred per cent İstanbuli heritage argue?

Had he ever pushed Mimoza on this point or indeed bothered to seek out literature on the matter, Dilek Özer’s attitude to this ‘custom’, or rather to what followed on from it, might have been radically different. He might well have thrown the entire Berisha clan out onto the street, including Mimoza.

On this particular morning, however, there were no shirts at the windows of the Berishas’ apartment, only the white face of Aliya’s daughter, Engelushjia, her eyes nervously scanning the features of the people in the street below. Behind her, within the darkness of their spare living room, Aliya sat motionless save for the brief movement of her fingers as she puffed on a cigarette. Her other hand lay protectively across what had only in the last few days become an obvious pregnancy. And although the thick bouts of coughing that burst periodically from some unseen part of the property made the women stir from time to time, not even that seemed able to rouse them completely from their frozen poses.

Beyond speech, neither woman gave voice to what they were thinking. Engelushjia was seeking good news amongst the many faces of those in the street below; Aliya, more pragmatic than her daughter, simply kept track of the time. As it stretched still further into the blackness that encapsulated the future, the spirit that allows people to hope was slowly dying inside Aliya’s mind. Were midday to come and go with nothing, then she would know. Even a man with hot, youthful appetites would be finished with a woman by then. And if trouble had come which involved the police, Aliya would surely know about that by then too. Not that she believed either of these scenarios was likely. Neither Rifat nor the police would come. Soon, she knew, she would have to send Engelushjia across to Tahtakale Caddesi in order to retrieve her brother’s body. Unlike with Egrem, Aliya was not in a condition to do it herself. Just the thought of her own inadequacy made Aliya choke on what was a flood of rising tears.

‘I do appreciate your coming with me, you know,’ İkmen said as he slipped neatly into step beside his much taller colleague.

‘I don’t suppose Tepe feels quite so joyful about it,’ Suleyman replied.

İkmen shrugged. ‘Somebody needs to remain in charge of the scene until the body has been moved. And I don’t see the virtue in not informing these Berisha people as soon as possible. If we can get a positive ID on that body today perhaps we can start to ask questions which might tell us what young Rifat was involved in.’

‘Your use of the word “we” does not, I hope, pertain to myself,’ Suleyman said as he first lit up a cigarette and then pointedly ignored the man who had appeared at his elbow, pressing him to buy a battered packet of condoms.

İkmen gave no sign that he had heard Suleyman’s comment. Closing his mind to what he did not want to address or felt incapable of dealing with was a well-practised trait of his. ‘Don’t your brother’s in-laws have premises in the Mısır Çarşısı?’ he asked as they skirted round the right-hand side of the ornate entrance to what was also known as the Spice Bazaar.

‘Yes,’ a tight-lipped Suleyman replied. ‘A caviar specialist. My mother calls it a grocer’s shop. Very lively. Very Greek.’

‘So does your brother see much of them? I mean . . .’ İkmen, aware that the death of Suleyman’s sister-in-law was still a very raw and delicate issue, uncharacteristically stumbled over his words. ‘I mean, er, since Elena . . .’

‘Murad’s in-laws have been very supportive. Mrs Papas looks after my niece every day, now that Murad works in Beşiktaş.’ Then under his breath he added, ‘Which is more than Edibe’s Turkish family do.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘The little one spends quite a bit of time over at the Cohens’ place with you.’

‘When I talk of Edibe’s Turkish family what I mean is my parents, actually, Çetin,’ Suleyman said with some passion.

‘Oh.’

Knowing from experience that further discussion of Suleyman’s family, now that his archaic Ottoman parents had been mentioned, was impossible, İkmen lapsed into silence. Not for the first time, he felt pleased that he was just a peasant – if from, on one side, rather dubious Albanian stock. Ayşe İkmen, that crafty weaver of unintelligible Albanian spells, may have been dead for over forty years now, but on days like this she lived very strongly in the head of at least one of her sons.

Negotiating the narrow, packed thoroughfare that was Hasırcılar Caddesi, İkmen wondered how much, if any, Turkish language skills the Berisha family would have. He hoped they were at least reasonably fluent. Between the twin facts of his mother’s early death and his father’s disdain for a language he said sounded like a madman’s ravings, Çetin İkmen knew very little Albanian. And, apart from a few commonly held beliefs about the superstitious nature of Albanians, the only thing that he really grasped about them was their enthusiastic pursuit of what they called
gjakmaria
– the blood feud. Not that these thoughts occupied his mind for very long. Weaving through throngs of heavily muffled shoppers and avoiding handcarts stacked with coats, socks, vine tomatoes and anything else imaginable did tend to fully occupy one’s senses. That and trying to keep up with the rapid progress of Suleyman was not easy for one as unfit as İkmen. Only when Hasırcılar Caddesi had eventually resolved into Kutucular Caddesi, the home of the Berisha family, did the younger man start to slow his steps somewhat.

Hemmed in by tiny shops selling electrical goods, cigarette lighters, buttons and underwear, the two men peered intently at the occasional doorways between the businesses in order to find what they were looking for. Such doorways, they knew, led up to both storehouses and apartments that occupied the crumbling seventeenth-century shells into which the shops had been inserted many years before. İkmen, at least, knew that a clean and bright electrical shop could very well exist underneath a damp hovel of almost indescribable sordidness.

It was Suleyman who first spotted the faded number lurking above the darkened entranceway. ‘This is number thirty-two,’ he said. He turned his nose up at the small gang of local toughs who stared hungrily at his elegant Italian suit and briskly made his way up the stairs.

Before İkmen followed, he happened to look up at the windows of the upper apartment. At one of them was a young, very white female face. When she saw him, the girl put her hand to her mouth before she disappeared into the depths of the building.

While Mehmet Suleyman was entering the Berishas’ apartment, the man some people ruefully called ‘Prince’ Muhammed waited for the doctor to call him into her office. Tall and, like his son, gravely attractive, Muhammed Suleyman tried hard to concentrate on his copy of
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
without success. Not that this failure was, under the circumstances, surprising. There was a very strange man sitting opposite who, for some reason, kept on repeating the word ‘two’ over and over to a veiled woman, who Muhammed supposed was the man’s mother. A thin young boy with ravenous eyes and a frightful toothless hag made up the rest of the waiting group. All, apart from Muhammed himself, perfectly mad of course. Had his elder son Murad not given his father to believe that young Mehmet might be serious about this female psychiatrist, he would never have come through the door.

But then sane people didn’t often come to visit psychiatrists, did they? Not that this doctor, pleasingly blonde from what he’d seen of her so far, would appreciate his lack of bizarre symptoms. In fact she would probably be furious when she discovered the real reason for his visit. Sizing up those one’s children intended to marry, the traditional function of the
görücü
, or marriage broker, was not something Muhammed would expect a foreigner to understand. This doctor would probably consider such a thing a waste of time and everyone knew that western foreigners in particular hated wasting time.

For quite different reasons, Muhammed’s wife, Nur, would also be furious if she knew what her husband was doing now. For not only was the role of the
görücü
always held by a woman, Nur was in addition particularly at odds with the younger of her two sons at the moment. In fact, ever since Mehmet had left his wife, one of Nur’s more forceful nieces, two years previously, he and his mother had barely spoken. Autocratic and unforgiving, Nur Suleyman’s pursuit of what she felt her aristocratic sons should want had over the years poisoned her relations with both of them. Strange, really, considering that it was her husband who had the aristocratic background. Nur herself was actually from a rather ambitious peasant family. Muhammed smiled to himself. Of course he should have been firmer with her years ago but . . .

Dr Halman smiled as she ushered the toothless hag into her office. She did briefly glance towards Muhammed as she moved back into her room but not, he thought, with any sense of recognition. It wasn’t a bad face. And although she was obviously middle-aged, Muhammed could see that Zelfa Halman was still an attractive prospect. Whether or not she was worthy of his son, though, he would not be able to deduce until he spoke to her. Although, of course, worthy or not, if Mehmet loved her then that would be that. His lovely little boy had, Muhammed mused rather sadly, grown into early middle age almost without his noticing. He was still handsome, but Mehmet’s eyes had, on the few occasions Muhammed had seen them lately, shown signs of having looked upon more than was good for them. Working with death for all these years cannot have helped, and then when the earthquake came, well . . . Muhammed, like so many other inhabitants of the north-western corner of the country, turned away from what was an almost unbearable memory. But when the small blonde woman came out of her office again, this time to usher the strange man and his mother into her room, Muhammed considered that perhaps such a soft and curvy little thing was just what his son needed to keep the spiky ghosts of the past at bay. And when Dr Halman smiled at him, Muhammed found himself smiling back with some enthusiasm.

Just after the smile, though, he left. One always thinks that courage should be natural to princes. But in this case it was not so.

‘Do you have any ideas about who might have wanted to harm your son, Mrs Berisha?’ İkmen asked when the ticking of the old clock in the corner of that darkened room threatened to damage his sanity.