A Noble Killing (8 page)

Ayşe was about to answer until she realised that of course he had been talking to Hikmet.

‘Sister and I are just looking,’ she heard Yıldız say. So now she was his sister. That was OK. Except she knew that amongst the religious people, the word ‘sister’ did not necessarily mean that one was related. People were brothers and sisters in Islam. It was a graceful and gracious form of address and she remembered hearing it from her few visits back to her father’s old village. But it was not her.

‘So am I your sister now?’ she said to Yıldız as the two of them moved through the crowds of bearded men, covered woman and lots of children.

‘Ayşe,’ he said – she’d told him that he had to naturally call her that – ‘you cannot be my actual sister.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because some people, a few admittedly, know me round here.’

He only lived at most half a kilometre away. And busy as the market and its environs were, there was always the chance that he could bump into someone that either he or his brother knew.

They looked around some more stalls, most of them selling food or household goods, and then went to a small restaurant back on Macar Kardeşler Street, where they sat in the family room upstairs. This too made Ayşe feel like a fish out of water. Going to family rooms above restaurants, which people had been doing since time immemorial, was something she had done when she was young. She’d gone with her mother and her mother’s friends, sitting with them as they gossiped away from their husbands. Men could and would enter family rooms but only as Hikmet was doing now, with a female relative or with children. They both ordered mixed vegetables with rice and chips and some cans of Coca-Cola.

‘I haven’t eaten in one of these places in years,’ Ayşe said as she leaned across the table towards Hikmet Yıldız.

He frowned. ‘So where do you normally eat?’

‘If I eat out at all, it is in Beyoğlu,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I will stray down to Karaköy.’

These were very Westernised, very secular districts of the city, where women could and did eat on their own, if they wished. This place, with its family room, its groups of almost completely covered women and thickly bearded men, was a whole other world.

‘Did you find out anything in Beşiktaş?’ Hikmet Yıldız asked his superior. Ayşe had been to the street where Gözde Seyhan had died, before coming on to Fatih.

‘People had only just heard that the body was Gözde’s,’ she said. ‘There was a sort of subdued atmosphere. People were shocked, I think. All the talk I heard consisted of expressions of sympathy for the dead girl and her family. If Gözde was having some sort of relationship with the boy across the road, then I don’t think that was general knowledge.’

‘Beşiktaş isn’t conservative.’

‘Parts of it are,’ Ayşe said. ‘The Seyhans’ neighbours were a mixed bunch.’

‘Some foreigners.’

‘Americans.’ The Ford couple. The wife ran a website for expatriates in İstanbul.

The waiter came then, bringing them their food and drink. It was simple fare but it looked good, and again it was redolent of food that Ayşe had tasted since her very early childhood. It was as she was eating that she heard the two women behind her begin to talk.

‘My sister lives across from this family whose daughter died in a fire in Beşiktaş,’ the one directly behind her said.

‘If the girl was bad, then it was well done,’ her companion replied.

Ayşe looked over at Hikmet and put a finger up to her lips to silence him, lest he suddenly decide to talk.

‘Oh, I agree!’ the first woman said forcefully. ‘If she had shamed them, then what could they do?’

Ayşe had expected such attitudes in Fatih. What came next, however, was a surprise to her.

The first woman said, ‘My sister does say, however, that the family themselves – not the people who lived here already, but those from over in Beşiktaş who are staying with them – are not as decent as they could be.’

‘What does that mean?’ the second woman enquired. Ayşe Farsakoğlu pricked up her ears. She was quite anxious to know that too.

‘Some immoral behaviour. I can’t say,’ the first woman said.

‘No, of course not,’ her companion agreed. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’

Ayşe felt her hackles rise. When the two women had left, she said to Hikmet Yıldız, ‘Why do they do that?’

‘What?’

She leaned across the table towards him again and said, ‘Not talk about sin.’

He shrugged. Some things were obvious, or so he thought. ‘They don’t want to sully themselves,’ he said. ‘Talking about sin is bad.’

‘Doing it is worse,’ Ayşe snapped back. ‘Killing young girls for no good reason is pretty bad.’

They looked at each other and saw in each other’s eyes their differences of opinion. He could not condone honour killing but he could understand where it came from and why it happened. Her mind was totally closed. He looked away first.

Still staring at his profile, Ayşe said, ‘I wonder what kind of “immoral behaviour” the Seyhans indulge in. I’d be willing to wager it does not include the mother.’

There was blood everywhere – all over the bed, on the carpet, up the walls.

Süleyman looked down at the pale, stiff body that lay face down on the bed and said, ‘Do we have a name?’

‘Hamid İdiz,’ his sergeant, İzzet Melik, said. ‘A piano teacher.’

There had been a very shiny grand piano in the sitting room.

‘Constable downstairs has already turned one student away.’

Süleyman bent down in order to look at the face of Hamid İdiz. Beyond the ghastly shade of blue that tinged his skin, he looked as if he had been an attractive man.

‘Who found him?’

‘His first student, a girl, rang the bell several times before going to get the
kapıcı
,’ İzzet said. ‘According to her, Hamid Bey never missed a lesson and was never late. The
kapıcı
concurred with this and opened up the apartment. Hamid İdiz was diabetic, and so of course the
kapıcı
was worried that he might be in a coma.’

‘Reasonable.’ Süleyman looked around the bedroom. A gold colour scheme had been employed, now sodden with red. ‘Do we know how old Mr İdiz was?’

İzzet looked at his notebook. ‘Fifty-three, the
kapıcı
said.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

They both knew, as all Turks did, that the custodians of apartment blocks usually knew a lot of things about their tenants.

‘He said that Mr İdiz was “flamboyant”,’ İzzet said.

Süleyman picked up a magazine that lay on a chair over by the window and moved the front cover aside with the end of a ballpoint pen. ‘What wonderful euphemisms people use for the word homosexual,’ he said.

‘The apartment’s full of queer porn,’ İzzet said.

‘What fun forensics are going to have!’

‘Yes, sir.’ İzzet frowned.

‘I assume we’re waiting on the arrival of Dr Sarkissian?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘In the meantime, did the
kapıcı
see anyone arrive before the girl this morning or last night?’ Süleyman said.

İzzet shrugged. ‘Well, he did . . .’

Süleyman looked at the many bottles of cologne and aftershave on Hamid Bey’s kidney-shaped dressing table and said, ‘Well?’

‘Sir, this is quite an easy-going building,’ İzzet said. ‘You know how posh they are over here.’

Süleyman did. Aristocrats they generally were not, but Şişli people were nearly always well-to-do, and they guarded their goods and their privacy jealously.

‘People come and go without hindrance,’ İzzet continued. ‘The
kapıcı
only challenges tradesman, police, gypsies.’

‘Yes, but he usually knows who comes and goes, even if he is instructed to look the other way,’ Süleyman said.

‘Yes, well we did get to that,’ İzzet said.

‘Good.’

‘And none of Mr İdiz’s regulars came to the apartment either last night or this morning. A young man of about twenty-five came to visit someone this morning, and then there was a gypsy last night, but the
kapıcı
got rid of him. All the other visitors were women.’

‘Could have been a woman,’ Süleyman said as he put on a pair of plastic gloves and then began to look in a small bookcase that was beside the dressing table. ‘Go and get descriptions from him, İzzet. Men
and
women. Just because the man was homosexual doesn’t rule out his being killed by a woman. His sexuality may very well have been irrelevant to his death.’

İzzet Melik left to go down to see the
kapıcı
. Süleyman riffled through Mr İdiz’s many books by luminaries such as Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis and Iris Murdoch. Mr İdiz it seemed, had liked to read, if not as passionately as he liked to listen to music. His collections of CDs and sheet music were both vast. In addition, all of this material was well-thumbed, indicating that as a teacher of music he was clearly very busy.

Sergeant Melik came back into the room and said, ‘
Kapıcı
is going to make a list, with descriptions of as much as he can remember.’

‘Good.’ Süleyman scanned the room and then said, ‘Any sign of any sort of diary or appointment book? He was a private teacher; he must have had some sort of schedule.’

‘Not yet, sir, no,’ İzzet replied.

‘Well, then maybe once the doctor has arrived, we should make that our priority,’ Süleyman said. ‘If nothing else, we will have to contact his pupils to let them and their families know that Mr İdiz is no longer giving piano lessons.’

Inspector Metin İskender looked at İkmen over the top of the very thin and expensive reading glasses he had only recently started wearing. ‘My experience of the sexting phenomenon usually involves rings, as in groups of males, targeting one or more lone female,’ he said. ‘They threaten, exploit, usually blackmail and then move on.’

Metin İskender was much younger than either İkmen or Süleyman. In spite of coming from a very poor background, he had married well and risen through the ranks of the police very quickly. He was clever, arrogant and sometimes charmless, but he was totally committed to his job and he was good at it. In recent years he had been given the task of trying to combat the rising number of crimes perpetrated using mobile phone technology. This had taken him into some very outlandish corners of the human psyche.

‘A sexting operation will generally start just with one boy and one girl,’ he continued. ‘The girl will either come from a very traditional family or a semi-liberal background. She will almost never, in my experience, come from the academic elite or even from the social elite.’

‘Because parents in those groups are too liberal about sexual matters?’

‘In reality they may or may not be, as you know, Inspector,’ İskender said. ‘But the sexters dare not take that risk. Traditional girls are much easier to blackmail. So this boy will basically groom the girl by telling her that he loves her, and eventually he will ask her to send him photographs of herself. Clothed at first, but later semi- and then totally naked. He may even ask her to abuse herself on camera.’

İkmen shook his head. ‘What can you say? And these men then share the photographs amongst them?’

‘Yes. All members of the group can be involved with different girls at the same time. They can all share photographs and videos and sell them on to others outside the group too. These images can end up anywhere – even abroad.’

‘So Osman Yavuz could be one of a group?’

‘Yes,’ İskender said. ‘Do you have any idea where he might be?’

‘No. His description and photograph have been circulated. His grandmother in Beşiktaş thought he was with his mother in Bursa. But he isn’t there,’ İkmen said. ‘No one seems to know where he is, or rather no one is admitting to having that knowledge. His mobile phone is dead. He’s probably ditched that. All we really know about him is that he was lazy and isolated. His grandmother said that he had no friends, and yet if I recall correctly, he spent a lot of his time texting, which—’

‘He could have been texting the girl or other members of a sexting ring,’ İskender said. ‘You know, Inspector, from what you’ve told me, I have to admit that this Yavuz character does sound suspicious.’

‘I didn’t know how suspicious until I spoke to you,’ İkmen said.

İskender shrugged. ‘It’s about knowing what to look for. Which brings us to the inevitable question about whether or not the apartment this man shared with his grandmother has been searched.’

‘It hasn’t, no,’ İkmen said. ‘Not yet.’

‘Well then it must be,’ İskender replied. ‘And given the circumstances, maybe I should be the one to do it.’

The other mechanics had tried to break the fight up, but now that Lokman Seyhan had pulled a knife, everybody was standing well back. Only one of the men had noticed that Orhan Bey, the owner of the garage, had disappeared very soon after the fight had begun. The rest of them knew that natural justice had to be allowed to take its course, whatever the result. This was bitter brother-against-brother violence, and it seemed to them to be about something that was deeply personal to both of them.

‘You dare to show your filthy face here!’ Lokman Seyhan screamed at his brother Kenan. ‘Womb-scraping!’

‘All you know is how to kill!’ Kenan yelled through the tears that ran down his cheeks. ‘You kill everything I love!’

Lokman lunged at him with the knife, missing Kenan’s face by less than a centimetre. ‘Arse-giver!’

‘Bringing death in the name of religion! Using Islam to excuse your sadism! Blasphemer!’

‘You call
me
a blasphemer!’ Lokman laughed. ‘You son of a donkey, cock-sucking—’

‘Murderer! You are no brother of mine! Pull a knife on me? Kill me too, will you, Lokman? Who is going to be your next victim? Our mother?’

‘
Our
mother? You were born of a djinn and a whore and came out of the womb of a donkey!’ Lokman lunged again. ‘Why don’t you fight me like a man, Kenan? Why don’t you draw your knife and let’s get really busy?’