A Noble Killing (2 page)

‘If people are practising and sincere Muslims, they can’t drink,’ Süleyman said.

İkmen lit a cigarette and then said gloomily, ‘I thought this area was supposed to be gentrifying. I thought Beşiktaş was meant to be the next Nişantaşı. A place where the middle classes move in, designer shops and bars spring up and massive four-by-four vehicles line the streets.’

Süleyman smiled. İkmen, unlike himself, came from purely working-class stock. In that respect he’d had more in common with the shopkeeper he’d just argued with than he did with his colleague. But Çetin İkmen, unlike the shopkeeper, was not from some village in the far east, up near the border with Armenia. He was an İstanbullu born and bred, and so, although nominally a Muslim, he did not have a problem with alcohol and in fact at times enjoyed drinking it rather more than was good for him.

‘I am far from being an enemy of religion,’ İkmen continued. ‘Anyone can practise his or her religion to his or her heart’s content as far as I am concerned. Just don’t try and influence me. Let me do what secular people do, and if I end up in hell, then so be it. It’s my soul. My business.’

Ever since the Turkish Republic had been founded by Atatürk in 1923, the country had been, officially, a secular state. That hadn’t changed. What had altered was that the ruling political party since 2002, those who actually ran the state, derived originally from an organisation with Islamic roots. This, allied with increased migration from the countryside to the cities of people with a more conservative standpoint, meant that religion and its outward symbols was much more visible than it had been. Unlike Turkey in the 1950s and 60s, when Çetin İkmen had been growing up, religion was now a hot topic for discussion; and observance, in some areas, was actively approved. For a secular republican like İkmen, that was not always easy to accept. Although his wife was and always had been a woman of faith, Çetin had been raised to believe that anything not rooted in sound, preferably scientific fact was mere superstition. His colleague, Mehmet Süleyman, though in agreement with the older man in many ways, wasn’t so sure. He’d been brought up in a family once part of the pre-republican imperial Ottoman elite, and although he didn’t practise it, Islam was still an influence on his life.

‘This area is becoming popular with bankers, accountants, PR people and the like,’ Süleyman said. ‘It’s very convenient and there are some nice apartments here. But Çetin, there are still a lot of streets that look as if they’ve been dropped in whole from one of the eastern provinces. If you remember, when Nişantaşı began to gentrify, there were still some very poor areas until really quite recently.’

‘Yes, but if the professional classes are moving in, then why stop selling alcohol? Bankers and media types drink it . . .’

‘Not all of them.’ Süleyman took his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and lit up. ‘Some of the young professionals in particular are rediscovering religion now. That shopkeeper probably does come from somewhere like Trabzon or Van, but his customers may very well have been raised in very smart Bosphorus
yalıs
.’

İkmen raised his eyes impatiently to the sky. ‘What the . . .’

It was at this point that they heard the sound of people shouting. They all screamed out the same thing: ‘Fire!’

The two men looked first at each other and then in the direction of the sound. And although they couldn’t actually see any sign of flames or smoke in the street or on the horizon, they began to make their way towards the rising tide of panicking human voices.

‘We will,’ İkmen said as he began to break into a somewhat breathless jog, ‘continue this conversation at another time.’

The fire engine was in the middle of the road. But then because Egyptian Garden Street was so narrow anyway, there wasn’t anywhere else that it could be. Amazingly, there was a man in a sports utility vehicle behind the appliance, screaming out of the window and banging his hand down on the horn. Apparently he had to get to a meeting and nothing else in the universe mattered.

Çetin İkmen put his head and his police badge up to the car window and smiled. ‘You could back up,’ he said. ‘We can get the vehicle behind you to move.’

The man, who was very young and very red-faced, gulped, looked down at the floor of his car and hunched his shoulders. This was something İkmen had seen in the narrow streets of İstanbul many times before. Big car, young, inexperienced driver, tiny alleyway. ‘Inspector!’ he called over to Süleyman, who was talking to one of the fire officers. ‘Could you back this car up for this gentleman?’

His colleague, who was also very well aware of this phenomenon, ran over with his hands outstretched for the keys to the ignition. İkmen walked to where one of the fire officers was in conversation with a man with bright ginger hair. The once dusty street was now covered in mud from the water hose, and had to be very carefully negotiated. Officers were still inside the building, where the fire, though no longer raging, had yet to be brought completely under control.

Badge in hand, İkmen introduced himself to the fire officer, who turned away from the ginger-headed man and took the policeman to one side.

‘He’s American,’ he said, as he tipped his head back towards the man he’d just been speaking to. ‘He noticed a smell of burning in the lobby. Then he saw smoke coming out underneath the front door of the apartment. It was he who called us.’

İkmen looked back at the tall, rather pallid man and said, ‘He looks shaken up.’

‘His own apartment is two storeys above the fire,’ the officer said. ‘He knows most of the people in the block, including the family on the ground floor.’

Süleyman, who was now inside the sports utility vehicle, waved an arm to indicate that the car behind should start to back up. Some builders who had been working on a nearby construction site sauntered over to the back of the crowd in front of the apartment building.

‘The family who rent the apartment are called Seyhan,’ the officer continued. ‘Must’ve been out when the fire started, as far as we can tell. I don’t think that there’s anything here for you, Inspector. Of course we won’t know for sure until the fire is out . . .’

‘No.’

It was İkmen’s day off as well as Süleyman’s. As they did sometimes, the two men had been spending some time together – drinking tea, playing backgammon, smoking and talking. The younger man was having marital problems, a regular feature of his adult life, and so had welcomed the chance to get away from his family home in nearby Ortaköy. İkmen, of whose nine children only two remained at his home in Sultanahmet, didn’t really escape from his apartment when he wasn’t on duty, but he was nevertheless often quite glad to get away. In contrast to Süleyman, he adored his wife. Fatma İkmen was a strong, loving and very capable woman. Unlike her husband, however, she was a pious Muslim, and although Çetin was quite happy and content for her to follow her faith, he was becoming increasingly irritated by her almost daily attempts to engage his interest in Islam. Whatever the religion in question, as far as Çetin İkmen was concerned, it was of no interest or concern to him.

‘We’ll wait until you’ve extinguished the blaze, just in case,’ İkmen said. The car behind the sports utility vehicle was now back on the main Ortabahçe Street and Süleyman had started reversing. The young owner of the vehicle stood on the pavement looking sheepish.

The fire officer shrugged. ‘Always happy to have police support,’ he said as he looked at the crowd in front of the apartment building, which had kept on growing. ‘You can help us push this lot back. But as for the fire . . . What can you say? This Seyhan family are apparently from the east. Could’ve built a fire to roast their meat on in the middle of the floor. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. I’ve known them set fires on floors, in bins, all over the place. They come to the city, never even seen an electric oven before . . .’

‘But if, as you think, the apartment was empty, that couldn’t possibly be what happened, could it?’ İkmen asked. ‘Would anyone just set a fire and then walk away?’

‘Some of them brought up in mud huts can and do,’ the officer said gloomily. ‘You can make a fire out of wood on a dirt floor with a hole in the ceiling. It’s how a lot of them have always lived. Doesn’t occur to them that they can’t do that here.’ He shook his head. ‘Bloody peasants!’

A lot of Çetin İkmen also felt irritated by what to him seemed like further evidence of the baleful influence and ignorance of ‘them’. He could almost see the family in his mind. The father, flat-capped, mustachioed and unsmiling; the bowed, veiled mother, old before her time; the children, timid if female, while the boys boiled with resentment, struggling to contain their pent-up envy of everyone better off then themselves. On the other hand, the fire officer was generalising, and there was not, as yet, any evidence to indicate how the blaze might have started. Maybe a faulty electrical appliance was to blame? That, too, was not an unusual scenario, even in the best houses and apartments in İstanbul.

İkmen was looking at Süleyman backing the SUV around the corner at the end of the street when the fire chief came out of the building and walked over to his officer. Süleyman had reversed the vehicle at speed. This had prompted some gasps of terror from the car’s owner, whose thick hair gel had actually started to melt under the onslaught of heat from his own fear and anger.

‘We’ve found a body,’ the policeman heard the fire chief say to the officer in a low, calm voice.

‘Just one?’

‘I think so,’ the chief replied.

İkmen turned and held his badge up for the chief to see. ‘Need any help?’ he asked.

For a moment the fire chief frowned, and then he said, ‘Yes. Yes, actually it might be no bad thing to have a police officer involved.’

Like many Turkish apartment blocks built back in the 1960s, the Mersin Apartments provided a lot of space for their tenants. Apartment A, like all of the others in the building, had three good-sized bedrooms, a kitchen, a big living room and two bathrooms. Arranged around a large central hall, it had the look of a place that had once been very well cared for. Now, although only one of the rooms had actually been subjected to fire, the hall ceiling was scorched where flames had escaped through the open door. The sound of water dripping from ceilings and down walls into the many pools of liquid on the floor sounded lonely and eerie, especially in counterpoint to the gruff voices of the fire officers. And although the scene had now been declared safe from both gas and noxious fumes, there was a very unpleasant smell on the air that İkmen couldn’t place.

‘I believe this was a bedroom,’ the fire chief said as he led İkmen towards a doorway into a deep black hole.

‘If we’re waiting for forensic examiners . . .’ İkmen began.

‘It’s just to the left of the door. You don’t need to go in. Just look.’

İkmen moved slightly forwards. Beyond the door was something so black, so matt in apparent texture that it gave him the feeling he was invading an utterly solid and unyielding place. He quickly pulled his head backwards. The fire chief, who was accustomed to such scenes, said, ‘I know, it’s a shock. It was a fierce blaze. When we got here, the place was full of poisonous smoke. Then we had what we call flashover. This is when the smoke and the soot ignite and there’s a brightness of flame you just wouldn’t credit unless you’d actually seen it. Afterwards we get this.’

‘A black room.’

The chief unclipped a torch from his belt, switched it on and then gave it to İkmen. ‘This should help.’

İkmen shone the beam of light through the doorway and down to his left. There were all sorts of shapes down there. Blackened lumps at eccentric angles, textures of darkness that went from the shiny to the viscous to the granular and the rough.

‘I know that everything will just look like charcoal,’ the fire chief said, ‘but if you look, you’ll see a row of sticks. They curve slightly.’

At first İkmen couldn’t see anything like curved sticks. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the light from the torch contrasted against the various grades of black in the room, something that resembled what the chief had told him about came into view.

‘There?’ He pointed downwards.

İkmen was a short, thin man and so it was quite easy for the burly fire chief to see over his shoulder. ‘Yes,’ the chief said, ‘that’s them. Ribcage. Underneath all the soot, the legs appear to be intact. If you get down low you can see the head. It isn’t pretty.’

Çetin İkmen bent at the knees and leaned into the blackness. Above the ribs was something ball-like. Frowning, he said, ‘So do you think that this person set the fire?’

‘We won’t be able to say for sure until the scene has been investigated.’

Moving the torch from side to side, İkmen thought that he had managed to pick out where the body’s nose had been. He stood up and handed the light back to the fire chief. ‘So the fire had well and truly taken hold when you arrived?’

‘Oh, yes,’ the fire chief replied. ‘Bedrooms, which is what this seems to be, catch quickly. Soft furnishings burn easily. Contained in this room, and to a lesser extent out here in the hall, the blaze wasn’t obvious to people passing by in the street. The American who lives upstairs reported it. Smelt smoke in the lobby outside.’

‘From your experience,’ İkmen said, ‘what do you think are the likely causes of the blaze?’

The fire chief shrugged. ‘We’ll have to mount a full investigation. Faulty wiring, faulty appliances, burning cigarette. Who knows?’ He frowned.

İkmen said, ‘You don’t list arson, and yet you were pleased to see me when I told you I was a police officer. Is there something on your mind?’

The fire chief sighed. ‘Come on,’ he said as he took one of İkmen’s arms in his, ‘let’s go outside.’

He led the policemen away from the other fire officers inside the building, away from the crowds at the front, to a small, shabby yard around the back. A couple of people in one of the apartments opposite were looking out of their windows to see if they could discern anything of the commotion surrounding the fire, but otherwise the two men were alone. Significantly they could not, it seemed, be overheard.