A Noble Killing (9 page)

A usual day for the Beşiktaş Garage mechanics involved some oil changes, tyre replacement and maybe the fitting of a new exhaust. Murder had never been on their agenda. True, men had sometimes had the odd fight that sometimes had involved knives, but when Kenan Seyhan pulled a gun out of his jacket pocket, they all instinctively took another step back.

‘Maybe it is for the best that Orhan Bey went to get the police,’ the oldest man whispered to the youngest. ‘We cannot be party to death!’

Lokman Seyhan, whose face had now turned white, looked his brother in the eyes and said, ‘So you’re going to shoot me.’

Kenan took the safety catch off and smiled. ‘It’s an act of revenge,’ he said. ‘You know all about that, don’t you, Lokman!’

Mehmet Süleyman showered and dressed and had already switched on his laptop when Gonca came into the bedroom with his tea. Once he had finished all the work associated with the homicide in Şişli the previous day, he had gone straight back to his gypsy lover for another night of extremely unbridled passion. He’d told his wife that he was staying at the home of his old friend Balthazar Cohen in nearby Fener, knowing that Balthazar would lie for him. But apparently Zelfa had not called. She was adopting an ‘I don’t care’ approach, which was a technique she had employed against her husband before. It had little effect. Only threatening his relationship with his little boy, Yusuf, could hurt Süleyman now. His marriage was over in all but name.

‘What are you looking at?’ Gonca said as she put his tea down by his elbow and glanced over his shoulder at the computer screen. ‘Is that English?’

‘It’s a website called Make the Most of İstanbul,’ he replied. ‘It’s for expatriates. Mainly for Americans, I think, but other foreigners use it too.’

‘What for?’

‘All sorts of things.’

‘Like what?’ She sat down beside him and began to suck one of his ear lobes.

‘For restaurant recommendations, real-estate advice, language classes, to make contact with people . . .’ Distracted by her now, he took his ear lobe out of her mouth and said, ‘I have to go to work.’

‘No time for . . .’

‘No time for anything except this very nice tea you have brought me, no,’ he said.

Gonca pulled a frown. ‘Pity.’

He picked up his glass of tea and smiled. He’d become a little worried about her during the course of this their latest affair. Maybe it was because she was now that much older than when he had first met her. ‘Gonca,’ he said gently, ‘I am married.’

‘I know!’ She said it bad-temperedly, pulling slightly away from him as she did so. ‘But you don’t love her!’

‘No . . .’

‘So if you don’t love her . . .’ Then suddenly she smiled. ‘Maybe your wife and I could fight!’

‘Over me? I don’t think so,’ Süleyman said sternly, then turned back to look at his screen. ‘Not seemly for a police officer to be associated with such activities.’

‘And with gypsies?’ she said.

He didn’t respond. Gonca did this sometimes, played the ‘downtrodden gypsy’ card, as he put it. As a working artist, which was her actual profession, she had all the confidence in the world. But as an ageing woman, it was slipping now.

‘I think that you just use me for sex,’ Gonca said as she got up off the bed and walked over to the window.

He did not respond. Intent upon the screen, his eyes were caught by an unusual lonely hearts advertisement:
Turkish boy, newly arrived from Anatolia. Lonely and innocent. Please would a nice girl call?

There was a box number after this short, rather pathetic (Süleyman felt) little request. Whether any ‘nice’ American or European girls had contacted this person’s box was moot. Süleyman was willing to bet hard cash that a lot of middle-aged women had. But that, maybe, had been the point. Mrs Ford, the American who ran the site, would possibly know. But then the case with which she had been associated was now solely İkmen’s. Süleyman as of the previous day, was working on the murder of Hamid İdiz.

‘You know I think that the Turks are colder these days,’ Gonca said as, still staring out of the window, she lit up a cigarette. ‘Everyone talks about religion now.’

‘Some people do.’ He closed down the Make the Most of İstanbul website and then switched off the laptop. ‘Does it bother you?’

‘I like to have my head uncovered in the street,’ she said. ‘I like to live a free life and take my pleasure where I will.’ She looked over at him and frowned. ‘I don’t want you to get cold like these men I see with their long, long beards!’

There was real fear in her eyes, and despite himself, he went over to her and took her in his arms. ‘Why would I do that?’ he said. ‘Grow a beard? Become cold?’

‘I . . .’

He kissed her. ‘Gonca,’ he said, ‘I have a religion. You say that you do not, and that is fine, for both of us. I care about you. I would never make you do anything you didn’t want to.’

He stopped short of telling her that he loved her. In truth, he didn’t know whether he did or not. What he did know was that he was aroused again, and so, to her great delight, he made love to her up against her bedroom wall, below the window.

When he’d finished, he smiled and said, ‘So who’s cold now?’

Neither of the brothers would say what the fight was about, and so none of the police officers Lokman Seyhan’s employer had called to break up the proceedings could begin to guess what the problem might be. They were all quite junior officers, and once they’d asked the men what the fight was about, they found themselves at something of a loss. One constable weighed the MKEK Yavuz 16 pistol – a standard military service weapon – in his hand, while his colleague asked Kenan Seyhan whether he had a licence for it.

Kenan shrugged his shoulders. ‘No.’

‘Then why were you carrying it? Why were you threatening your brother with it?’

The garage owner, Orhan Bey, prodded Lokman Seyhan in the chest and said, ‘You drew the knife! You’ve always been trouble! You can go!’

‘Orhan Bey, please . . .’

‘These are the facts,’ Orhan Bey said to the police officers. ‘This man,’ he pointed at Kenan Seyhan, ‘came into my garage this morning, crying. I recognised him as this man’s brother.’ He pointed to a terrified-looking Lokman Seyhan.

‘Orhan Bey!’

‘Be quiet!’ he snapped. He turned to the police officers once again. The rest of his employees watched in rapt silence. ‘I don’t know why this man was crying,’ he continued. ‘I thought that maybe there had been another death in their family. I left Lokman alone with his brother. I am a reasonable man. But then . . .’ He threw his arms dramatically in the air. ‘Chaos! They are at each other’s throats, and then my employee pulls a knife on his own brother! His
own brother
!’

The first constable looked at both of the Seyhan brothers in turn and then said, ‘Are either of you going to speak to us?’

Both men looked down at the ground, in silence.

‘You speak about another death in the family of these men,’ the second constable said to Orhan Bey. ‘What was the first death?’

The two brothers looked up, white-faced, but neither of them spoke.

‘Their sister died a few days ago, in a fire,’ Orhan Bey said. ‘The whole family had to be moved out of their apartment. You people, the police, are involved.’ He looked at the two Seyhan men with contempt. ‘It’s been reported in the newspapers that the girl was murdered.’

‘Did Osman have a computer, Mrs Yavuz?’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu asked the old woman.

‘A computer?’ She lowered herself down on to one of her heavily cushioned sofas, pushing two cats on to the floor as she did so. ‘Where would he get a computer from? Do I look as if I would have money for a computer?’

In the boy’s bedroom, İkmen and İskender were searching through his things for any clue that might connect him to possible sexting rings.

‘Do you know if he went to internet cafés?’

Mrs Yavuz shrugged. ‘How should I know? He didn’t go out much, and when he did, he didn’t tell me anything about it. What’s all this about?’

Ayşe sat down. A large black Persian cat sprang out of her way and then growled at her.

‘Reza!’ the old woman shouted at the animal. ‘Don’t growl! If you growl, I’ll have you turned into gloves!’

The cat ran off in the direction of the kitchen.

‘Mrs Yavuz,’ Ayşe said gently, ‘we have reason to believe that your grandson may have been collecting indecent images of girls on his mobile telephone. Now we’re not yet sure—’

‘Indecent images! Of girls!’ Mrs Yavuz put a hand up to her chest and said, ‘Allah! No, that can’t be right! All he ever did with that phone was send those text things!’

‘Mrs Yavuz, I know that this is difficult to understand . . .’

‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu?’ It was İkmen’s voice calling her from Osman Yavuz’s bedroom.

‘Sir?’

‘Can you come in here, please?’

Ayşe got up. The black Persian came scampering out of the kitchen and immediately took her place.

‘Indecent images?’ the old woman said. ‘What indecent images? Have you got my grandson’s phone?’

‘Excuse me,’ Ayşe said, and made her way out of the old woman’s sitting room and across the hall into what had been the boy’s bedroom. Large posters of Beşiktaş Football Club hung on the walls; underfoot were many brightly coloured T-shirts, seemingly discarded to their fate.

‘Sir?’

Inspector İskender was standing beside Inspector İkmen. As Ayşe got closer to the two men, İskender held up a picture. It was of a pretty, smiling young girl with very small, very naked breasts.

‘There were a lot of these in a box underneath Osman’s bed,’ İskender said. ‘All laser-printed.’

‘Any of Gözde Seyhan?’ Ayşe asked.

İkmen held a large cardboard box up for her to see. ‘We don’t know, he said. ‘There are hundreds of images in here. Osman Yavuz was obviously a very busy boy. We need to find where these copies might have come from.’

Although what he was reading was an account of an intense homosexual relationship, Mehmet Süleyman could identify with the sentiments expressed. Hamid İdiz’s private diary, as well as being a very well-written compendium of erotica, was also an account of a relationship between two men that was becoming a great love. There were similarities between İdiz’s feelings for his unnamed lover and the intensity that Süleyman himself felt at times with Gonca.

When Beloved takes me
, wrote İdiz,
it is the finest pleasure in the whole of creation
.

In the whole of creation . . . When Süleyman had made love to Gonca up against her bedroom wall, he’d had a terrible urge to tell her that he loved her. Was it, could it just be sex? He looked down at the diary again and read in İdiz’s careful hand,
Why then do I stray? What kind of person am I? Some boy on İstiklal Street said he’d suck me off and I let him. 20 TL
.
Cheap little slut!

Süleyman would go home to his wife. Not that he’d have anything more than harsh words with her. But he wasn’t above picking up some tourist, even a local whore. He was good-looking, it was easy. But was it right?

İzzet Melik, who was looking through some of İdiz’s papers at his desk across the office, said, ‘Hamid İdiz was apparently involved in some music festival supposed to be held at the Aya İrini in May. Says here performers are coming from Georgia and Armenia as well as from here in Turkey.’

‘If you find the names of the people who might be organising it, take a note,’ Süleyman said.

‘Sir.’

Silence descended yet again as Süleyman read:
Beloved’s family are such animals! They call what we do an abomination. But it is so beautiful!

The image of Gonca’s face at the moment of orgasm flashed through his mind. He wasn’t concentrating! His Beloved, if that was what she was, kept on distracting him. He turned away from the diary to the deceased man’s appointment book. That was very dry and very uninformative.
Friday 5th November – 1 p.m. Halide P, 2.30 p.m. Nurettin O, 4 p.m. Ali Reza Z, 6 p.m. Murad E
. Kids booked in for piano lessons, three boys and one girl.

He looked at the same date in the diary:
Friday 5th November – Beloved stayed the whole night! Could hardly bear to part with him this morning. Bathed him first. Sweet Baby! Halide P, first lesson, silly giggling fool as usual. Nurettin at 2.30 (yawn). Then two proper little tarts if they did but know it! Ali Reza might because he always has a hard-on when he’s playing, but Murad E is forever nervous. Every time I so much as pass him by, he shakes and blushes. I do it deliberately, just for the sport. What fun it would be to have a threesome with those two lovelies! Not that I ever will. Not that I ever should
.

The diary appeared to be a very comprehensive account of Hamid İdiz’s erotic experiences, including fantasies that quite clearly involved some of his students. Süleyman looked at dates in the current year and found again one entry in the appointment book and another corresponding entry in the diary.

Appointment book:
23rd February – 4 p.m. Ali Reza Z, moved from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Murad E
.

Diary:
23rd February – Can’t stop looking at Ali Reza’s bulge. Think he might have caught me at it today! But then he did smile. Murad E is really bad for me! He’s so gorgeous now I just want to rip his clothes off every time I see him! So I’ve taken to being extra stern with him. I can’t afford to have accusations, the police on my doorstep and all of that!

Süleyman wondered how old these children were and began to feel cold. He thought about his own son, who had just started taking violin lessons with a Mr Reynolds that Zelfa knew from the Irish Consulate, and visibly shuddered. İzzet Melik saw this and said, ‘Cold, sir?’

‘No, İzzet,’ he replied. ‘Not cold. We need to find out who these students of Mr İdiz’s are. We particularly need to identify two boys known as Ali Reza Z and Murad E, and we need to do it quickly.’