A Noble Killing (3 page)

‘There was a fire in a block like this up on Mecit Ali Street just over a month ago,’ the fire chief said. ‘Started in a bedroom, one victim, just like this. On that occasion the victim turned out to be a girl of fifteen. Her family had only been in Beşiktaş for a year, and the story went that she was homesick for her old village just south of Van. That, it was said, was why she poured petrol over herself and took her own life. Just like this, the incident happened when the girl was on her own in the apartment, family out and about and no witnesses.’

‘You think that the victim here is a girl?’ İkmen asked.

‘I don’t know yet. But if it is . . .’

‘You think suicide could be a possibility?’

The chief sighed, took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, offered one to İkmen and then lit up. ‘You a religious man, are you, Inspector?’ he asked.

İkmen eyed the chief very narrowly. If this was a precursor to a discussion about suicide and the possible torments of hell that some believed followed such an act, he was going to have to beat a hasty retreat. But he had to answer one way or another. ‘No,’ he said gingerly. ‘Er . . .’

The fire chief smiled. ‘I wish in a way I could be like that too,’ he said. ‘Secular. But I do believe. Try to be a good Muslim. You know. That said, I don’t always like everyone else who calls himself a good Muslim. Can’t go along with those Afghans, the Taliban and all that.’

‘Well, no, that’s just good sense,’ İkmen said. ‘What killing has to do with Islam is a mystery to all good believers and secular people with understanding.’

‘Exactly.’ The fire chief sighed once again. What he was trying to say was obviously very difficult for him. ‘And to me, Inspector, that means that killing is not allowed,’ he said. ‘Don’t care if it’s for religious or political or tribal reasons. Even what some – generally people from the provinces – would call a killing for the sake of honour.’ He looked İkmen hard in the eyes at this point. The policeman for his part knew instantly what he was thinking and where his talk was going.

‘You . . .’

‘The death of the girl on Mecit Ali Street was declared a suicide,’ the chief said. ‘I’ve no evidence to say that that wasn’t exactly what it was. But she was a bright girl, she was doing well at school and she had a lot of friends. Why would she want to go back to some fly-blown village? Why would she kill herself rather than be clever and popular, as she was? On the day of that fire, one of my men was walking through the crowd when he heard someone say the word “slut”. What did that mean? As far as we were told, the girl didn’t have a boyfriend. That never came up. Then there was her family. Like a row of stones when I told them what had happened to her. No emotion at all.’

‘Shock?’

‘Oh, could be, could be,’ the chief said as he puffed and then puffed again on his cigarette. ‘I tried to find out why that person in the crowd would have called the girl a slut, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it. All these migrants close ranks, don’t they? But there must have been a reason. Maybe someone saw her talking to some man in the street, or . . .’ He coughed and then cleared his throat loudly. ‘Inspector, if the body in that apartment in there is a woman or a girl . . .’

‘What you’re talking about here, Chief, is a possible honour killing, isn’t it?’ İkmen said. He looked up into the chief’s smutted, heavily lined face and smiled. ‘Of course I will investigate if you have the slightest suspicion about this death,’ he said. ‘I will not, I promise you, just let it go.’

Weeping, he nevertheless arrived at where he had been told to go. A clean shower with good soap and hot water followed. Then new, clean clothes. But they weren’t his style, which irritated him. When he put them on and looked at himself in the mirror, the sight of them made him want to tear them off and rip them up. He looked at the stinking pile of fabric that was his old clothes on the floor and had to really control himself. In spite of everything, he wanted to put them on. He looked in the mirror and saw a face that was pure white with black pits where, somewhere, his eyes were sunk. He looked like that American rock star, that freak . . . Marilyn Manson.

What was he doing looking like Marilyn Manson? He was supposed to be a good person, a moral person, not some sexual deviant! The black T-shirt didn’t help. It was tight, too, which gave his body the kind of definition he’d seen in magazines he knew he shouldn’t be looking at. Shame and anger were followed by more pity for
her
. She who had turned and looked at him through the flames. She whose burning eyes of hatred had shown him that she had understood what he had done and why. What she cannot have appreciated was the utter rightness and necessity of the act. Stupid girl! Stupid, stupid, wicked girl! How could she not have known? How could she not have appreciated that ramifications were inevitable? And how could he feel sorry for her, and why?

He put his old clothes into a plastic bag, which he then placed on the floor by the door. The new outfit would just have to do. He opened the door, walked out into the street and headed for the tram stop.

Cahit Seyhan and his wife Saadet were just as İkmen had imagined them to be. He was probably about fifty, small and thin, with short grey hair and a large grey moustache. She was maybe ten years his junior, overweight and slow and swathed in many metres of dull, patterned material. Her head, if not her face, was covered. Her abiding expression, like that of her husband, was one of bovine acceptance.

‘My sister and her family have just moved into a place over in Fatih,’ Cahit Seyhan said. He spoke with a rough accent, which sounded imprecise to İkmen. It made what he said sound sloppy and simple-minded. ‘We went to see them.’

‘Our son is to marry his cousin Nesrin,’ Saadet said.

İkmen just about managed to stop himself from rolling his eyes. What was it about country people and aristocrats and inbreeding? Why did those two particular groups do that? Why did they
persist
in something that would only serve to amplify any pre-existing undesirable traits or sicknesses?

‘You’ve got three children, Mr Seyhan?’ the fire chief asked.

They were all standing in the Seyhans’ living room, at the other end of the apartment from the room where the fire had begun. It was a large room, furnished sparsely. Like most Turkish living rooms, it had a sizeable carpet on the floor, although not one of any merit or value. Cheaply turned out in a factory, probably in China, it might very well have been given to the family in exchange for an original rug made by some female ancestor. Equating old with useless, they had probably swapped it for something new and bright, and as the unscrupulous carpet dealer who had almost certainly done the deal with them would have said at the time, brand new was always far superior in a modern home. Apart from that, the Seyhans owned one sofa, a television and several large, tattered cushions that lay around the edge of the carpet in lieu of chairs.

Cahit Seyhan lit a cigarette. ‘I have two sons, Kenan and Lokman, and a daughter, Gözde.’

‘Where are your children at the moment?’ the fire chief continued.

‘Kenan works in a restaurant in Sultanahmet. My older son works with cars.’

Things that migrants did, İkmen thought. Waiting at table, cleaning, fixing cars.

‘And your daughter?’ he asked.

‘She was here,’ Mr Seyhan said.

İkmen looked at the fire chief, who asked, ‘What is the room at the end of the corridor, where the fire started?’

‘That is our daughter’s bedroom,’ Mrs Seyhan said.

Neither of them asked where their daughter was. Neither of them showed even the slightest hint of emotion. İkmen began to feel slightly sick. Maybe, he thought, the fire chief was right. Maybe this girl, Gözde, just like the other girl he’d told him about, had been meant to die.

‘Mr Seyhan,’ the chief began, ‘I have to—’

‘Mum! Dad!’ A tall, thin man of about twenty-five burst through the door ahead of an agitated-looking Süleyman.

‘This man says he is your son,’ Süleyman said to Saadet Seyhan as the man threw himself into his mother’s arms and then kissed her all over her face.

‘Lokman!’ she said, smiling as she did so. ‘Lokman, my son.’

‘Oh well, he was clearly telling the truth,’ Süleyman said. He looked over at İkmen, who raised an eyebrow and shrugged. The young man was clearly very dirty, and now that he was in the room, there was a strong smell of petrol too.

‘I heard the fire engine,’ Lokman Seyhan said excitedly, ‘and then one of the boys came into the garage and said that the fire was over in Egyptian Garden. I couldn’t believe it was here!’ He began to cry. ‘Where is Gözde? Where is she?’

‘Gözde?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Our daughter,’ Mr Seyhan said. ‘She is seventeen years old.’

‘Ssh, ssh!’ Mrs Seyhan soothed her crying son. ‘It’s all right, my lion, it will be well, my soul!’

The fire chief said, ‘I am afraid to have to inform you that we have discovered a body in your daughter’s bedroom. Now of course until tests have been completed we—’

Saadet Seyhan’s eyes opened wide and she screamed, momentarily drowning out what the fire chief was saying.

‘Mum!’ Whereas before she had been comforting him, now the young man comforted his mother, hugging her, kissing her hair, cooing gently into her ears.

The fire chief looked at the dry-eyed Seyhan patriarch and said, ‘We don’t know if the body is that of your daughter. We don’t know how or why this fire started.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means, Mr Seyhan, that we will have to bring in forensic investigators,’ the fire chief said.

‘Is that why the police are here?’ Seyhan asked as he tipped his head towards Çetin İkmen.

‘No,’ the chief replied. ‘Inspectors İkmen and Süleyman were in the vicinity when the fire was discovered. At the moment they are here to assist us in keeping order. A lot of people come to look at scenes like this, for reasons best known to themselves . . .’

In the short silence that followed, Lokman Seyhan looked at İkmen through narrowed eyes. ‘I’ve heard your name,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you been on television? Don’t you deal with murders?’

İkmen had been on television in the past five years rather more than he would have liked. He didn’t enjoy televised press conferences and he had always hated making statements to the media. But, fortunately or unfortunately for him, he had spent much of his career solving or attempting to solve often very bizarre and disturbing homicides. It was an area of criminal investigation that had always fascinated him and which had for the past fifteen years constituted the major part of his work. Sadly, of late, he was suddenly becoming recognisable.

‘The police are here to keep order,’ the fire chief reiterated. ‘We don’t know how the fire was caused or why, and murder doesn’t even come into it yet. But you are all going to have to leave this apartment while the investigation is carried out.’

‘Leave the apartment?’

‘Maybe go to stay with the sister that you mentioned, Mr Seyhan.’

‘Or call your landlord,’ the fire chief said. ‘He should be able to find you somewhere temporary.’

The Seyhans made two calls from Cahit’s mobile phone, one to his sister Feray in Fatih district and the other to his son Kenan in Sultanahmet. The latter said that he was coming home as soon as he could, while the former offered the family accommodation for as long as they wanted. Saadet began to open the one cupboard in the living room and had started to remove some items when the fire chief stopped her.

‘Mrs Seyhan, this whole apartment is going to have to be examined by the forensic investigators. I can’t let you take anything out of here until they have finished,’ he said.

‘Nothing? Not even tablecloths?’

Not one of them had asked about the missing Gözde since that first time. Now dry-eyed again, the family seemed to have regained their composure, if not their curiosity about the whereabouts of their daughter. İkmen thought about that previous case that the fire chief had told him about and he wondered. Was no one looking for Gözde because everyone knew exactly where she was and what had happened to her?

‘What about my medicine?’ Lokman Seyhan asked.

‘What medicine?’

‘Tablets,’ he said. ‘In the kitchen.’

‘What do you take tablets for?’ İkmen asked him.

‘Diabetes,’ he said. ‘The doctor gives them to me.’

‘Well, obviously prescribed medication will have to be taken,’ İkmen replied.

Süleyman took Lokman Seyhan to the kitchen and watched as he opened a cupboard over the sink and took out a packet of tablets. As Lokman turned, however, something on the worktop beside the fridge caught his eye. Fortunately Süleyman saw it at almost the same moment. It was a very small and very pretty mobile phone, and as Lokman Seyhan left the kitchen, he attempted to pick it up and put it in his pocket without the policeman seeing. A very firm hand caught hold of his wrist before he could do so.

‘You’re not allowed to take anything from the apartment except your medicine, Mr Seyhan,’ Süleyman said.

‘But it’s my phone . . .’

Süleyman took it out of Lokman Seyhan’s clawed fingers and peered at its tiny face and minute keyboard. He was, he had to admit, starting to find seeing very small things close up a bit of a problem.

‘It’s got all my numbers on it.’

‘It’s pink.’ It was. It also, as Süleyman saw when he turned it over, had a little label on the back with the name ‘Gözde’.

Süleyman and Lokman Seyhan saw this label at exactly the same moment. The younger man reddened. ‘It looked like my phone. Sorry,’ he said.

‘It is obviously your sister’s phone,’ Süleyman replied. ‘I wonder why she doesn’t have it with her.’

‘I don’t know.’

Lokman Seyhan walked out of the kitchen and back towards the living room. Mehmet Süleyman looked down at the little pink phone and wondered why Gözde’s brother hadn’t thought that perhaps it might be a good idea to draw such an anomaly to the attention of either the fire officers or the police – given the situation. But he hadn’t. What he had done was try to palm his sister’s phone without being detected, and once caught, he had clearly lied about why. No Turkish man, much less a man from the back of beyond, would have a phone that looked like a glorified powder compact. And pink? Pink!