Arabesk (7 page)

He'd been ushered into 'the presence' by a woman who announced herself as Tansu's sister. Although possessed of the same platinum-blonde hair and a fairly extensively renovated face, the similarities between the two stopped there. While Latife went off to make tea with her very own hands, her sister wept copiously for her 'beloved’ Erol Urfa and for the tragedy that had so recently overwhelmed him. It had of course been Tansu who had, via a few well-chosen words about her lover's supposed 'indisposition', sent the press corps screaming up' to the apartment on Ìstiklal Caddesi. In a civilised block like the Ìzzet Apartments, Suleyman had been able to keep the crime scene unusually discreet; since so few people actually knew that Erol had aflat there, it was really quite easy. Until, that is, Tansu's performance at the officers' club. That alone made him dislike her and as he'd struggled to get any sort of sense from her thickly rouged mouth, his feelings had become more and more hostile.

All she could talk of was Erol Urfa. Although she did from time to time, briefly, express her sorrow at his wife's death and the disappearance of his daughter, most of her words alluded to how she was feeling. But then some of these older women who had younger lovers were both obsessed and desperate to retain their affections. But Suleyman quickly turned his mind away from that particular subject and thought about what he had actually learned from the conversation with Tansu.

Erol had not been with her on the night of the murder. According to Çöktin, Urfa had been with some old friend of his from back east. No name had, as yet, been forthcoming but Suleyman had already determined to question Urfa himself at the earliest possible opportunity. Çöktin had spoken to the star in his own language, exhibiting an implicit solidarity that may or may not have been helpful with regard to the extraction of information. Tansu had been at home all that evening, mainly sitting out on her veranda which had become, or so she said, so pleasant since she'd had a nearby wasps' nest destroyed. Her sister said that she had been with her on the veranda too, for all that was worth. Of the woman's two brothers, the eldest, Galip, had been at the Inonu Stadium watching the football match live while apparently the younger one, Yilmaz, had watched the match on television. Both men had been co-operative in a bemused sort of way until, that is, their sister, finally catching on that she could be a suspect in this affair, became quite hysterical during the middle part of the interview. Leaping like a cat, all claws bared, from her sickbed, she had paced the room spitting verbal bile at quite imaginary accusers for some time. Suleyman had been horribly embarrassed at the time. It had been ' difficult, after that, to have any sympathy for a woman who was, though ageing, still a spoilt, vicious child at heart Suleyman knew he would have to take care not to condemn her out of hand. She, if anyone, had good reason to want Ruya Urfa dead but there was nothing, as yet, to connect either her or her relatives directly to the scene.

But time would tell. Forensic had lifted several sets of fingerprints from the apartment, as well as some faint footprints. Soon the process of identifying to whom these belonged would begin, as would the interrogation of Cengiz Temiz who had been discovered finally on a Tiinel train. According to Çöktin he would say absolutely nothing beyond denying that he had killed Ruya Urfa. Now down in the cells for the night, he would have, ample time, if he were capable of such thoughts, to reconsider his words. His parents had, apparently, already engaged one of the city's top defence lawyers.

The mobile telephone that was sitting on the seat beside him buzzed into life. Suleyman picked it up and put it to his ear.

'Suleyman.'

'Hello, it's Sarkissian. Just thought I'd let you know that the cyanide that killed Mrs Urfa was administered in a sweet.'

'Oh?'

'Yes, almond halva to be precise. Clever, eh?'

An almond sweet to cover the smell of the bitter poison? Yes, it was, and if Çöktin was right about Cengiz Temiz, it was far too clever for him.

'Thank you’ Doctor,' Suleyman said at last. 'Will I see you in the morning?'

'You will. Your office. At what time?'

'About nine.'

The doctor laughed. 'You rise too early for me. Make it ten and I'll be there.'

'I look forward to it' Suleyman smiled as he switched the phone off again.

So Mrs Urfa was seduced to her death by sweet things, was she? No remnants of the sweet had been found outside of Ruya Urfa's body, which suggested that whoever had given her the halva had taken the residue away with them. After, that is, he or she had watched the victim fight for breath and then die. Cyanide, which is a very quick-acting agent, robs the bloodstream of oxygen thereby effectively asphyxiating the victim.

Perhaps it was these grim thoughts that made Suleyman, unconsciously, pull off the long shore road and head for a small wooden house that nestled discreetly behind a row of trendy art shops. But perhaps not The pretty Bosphorus village of Ortakoy where, hopefully, he could spend a little time before returning to Cohen's unruly apartment had become quite familiar to him in recent months. That he had fetched up here so unconsciously was, however, a worry. If he was driving to Ortakoy without thinking then what else was he letting slip about his visits to the village?

After he had parked his car, he walked up to the salt-stained front door and knocked For quite some time he heard nothing from inside. The lights were on but even so no one was in, or maybe the old man was at home alone. Suleyman put his hands into the pockets of his jacket and watched as the earth beneath his feet juddered just very slightly. 'Only a tremor,' he muttered softly to himself, his usual mantra to chase away the demons of the earth. And, indeed, the tremor did subside almost as soon as it had begun even if his heart persisted in racing. One never knew when the demons beneath the city might get tired of such paltry spells.

The woman who eventually opened the salt-stained door was short and blonde. The thick black cigarette sticking out from between her fingers made her, together with her long, sleepy eyes, look rather like a plump Lauren Bacall.

'Hello, Inspector,' she said in that strange, foreign way of hers. 'This is a nice surprise.'

'Hello, Dr Halman,' he said. 'I was just passing and. . .'

She smiled broadly at a neighbour who was walking by and then said to Suleyman, 'Father is out with some old university friends but if you don't mind having your drink prepared by me . . .'

'That would be very nice.'

He walked into the house. She closed the door behind him. He walked straight up the stairs and into her bedroom. Zelfa Halman, following, discarded her skirt at the doorway.

Chapter 4

Mina rose quickly from her bed and stepped lightly across to the window. As she did so she looked back, briefly, to make sure that Mickey was still sleeping. She could just see his open mouth breathing heavily through the thick mat of his long grey hair. She opened the curtains, revealing the quiet early morning street beyond. She let her eyes rove searchingly across the shuttered old building opposite.

Mina herself couldn't remember when the old Ìskender Hamam, the public baths, had been open for business. For all of her life the owner, Madame Kleopatra, had been dying up in that top bedroom where Mina's mother had attended to her needs for the last fifteen years. It was said that Madame Kleopatra had once been part of that odd and rare phenomenon, a Graeco-Turkish marriage. But no one could remember her Turkish husband these days and the old Greek herself, now finally drifting senselessly along on the cloud of morphine her doctor gave her every evening, barely knew her own name. Not that Madame Kleopatra or even Mina's mother, Semra, were the objects of Mina's thoughts at that moment. It was the child that had her thoughts now, that little life that Semra guarded just as surely as she had once cared for Mina herself.

Though not ideal, this arrangement was better than if she had the child with her. Semra only had to attend to her barely conscious charge a couple of times a day, times during which she could take the child along too if the little one were restless or wakeful. Mina's work was of quite a different order. The last thing the usually European men whom Mickey pimped to her bed wanted was a child around while they exacted release from her body. Mickey didn't know about the child but then nor did anyone else in Mina's immediate vicinity, apart from her mother and, of course, poor old 'Fat Boy'.

Mina moved her gaze down the face of the building and into the street. A short, skinny figure caught her eye as she scanned for signs of early morning life. It was a policeman, a local, that Jewish cop who had sometimes visited her when she was younger. Though physically unpleasant he was not, she recalled, a bad man. Cohen, that was his name. He had quite amused her by translating dirty Turkish words into his native tongue, Ladino, the language of the Jews. That facility, plus his very obvious distrust of Mickey, had made her like him. She turned back from the window and looked again at the wasted form of the man in her bed. Mickey had first come to Turkey in the year of her birth, 1970, an English.boy on the hippy trail to India who had found Istanbul's drug scene to his liking and decided to stay. She didn't know exactly how old he had been then but she imagined it was around twenty. In the years that followed, Mickey had done lots of different things to enable him to pay for his drug habit; pimping for Mina was just the latest of these. The child would not fall in with Mickey's plans, except perhaps as something that could be sold in order to obtain drugs. He would hate it, were he to discover its existence.

But then Mickey knew nothing of what occurred in the Ìskender Hamam anyway. Though resident in Turkey for nearly thirty years, he still couldn't speak the language and therefore knew nothing about Semra or Madame Kleopatra or, more importantly, Madame Kleopatra's regular doses of morphine. So the child was safe, for now. In the future, however, things would have to alter. The child had changed everything now; for the better, to Mina's mind, although not yet as totally as she would have wanted. In order to be with the child she would, somehow, have to get rid of Mickey. How she might do this she didn't know. But an idea came to her later when she finally managed to slip out to see Semra and the child. Through a crack in Madame Kleopatra's door, Mina saw the smart Phanariote doctor use his big syringe to plunge the dying Madame Kleopatra into yet deeper painless euphoria. Mickey, too, when he was particularly bad, let others, as he put it, 'medicine' him. Sometimes he even let Mina do it.

The child pawed gently at Mina's small, empty breasts while the prostitute cooed lovingly, smiling into the little one's eyes.

Various fingerprints and some faint footprints had been found in Ruya and Erol Urfa's apartment. Some fingerprints no doubt belonged to one or other of the couple. Forensic were not yet able to say to whom each example belonged but they did know that there were four distinct types of print, only one of which represented that of a small child. Cengiz Temiz was, so far, the only person who had been obliged to supply prints for matching - with the exception, of course, of Erol Urfa. Suleyman was, as he told Dr Arto Sarkissian when he met him in his office at ten o'clock that morning, still keeping an open mind on the seemingly innocent Arabesk star.

'But if Urfa did kill his wife that doesn't answer the question about the whereabouts of his child,' Sarkissian pointed out.

Suleyman, whose face, the doctor observed, was rather more tired and drawn than was usual even for him, lit a cigarette before answering. 'He could have taken her to some friends, some of his own sort from the east. Everybody in the country was watching the football that night so nobody would have noticed.'

'But he's a nice-looking boy and although his poor wife was quite a plain little thing, well. . .' He paused in order to rub a hand roughly across his sweating forehead. To kill her in order to be able to marry that Tansu creature is—'

'Mad, or the act of a man who is unbelievably ambitious.'

Sarkissian smiled. 'Now if we were talking about his manager I would say that either or both of those things could apply. But Urfa himself ?' He shrugged. 'I don't know. He doesn't strike me as either even if there is, oh, I don't know, something about him I cannot quite place.' . 'Something not quite right?' 'Yes.'

- 'I have the same feeling myself.' Suleyman flicked the end of his cigarette into what Aito Sarkissian instantly recognised as one of Çetin Ìkmen's ashtrays. 'But then there's an awful lot not right with Cengiz Temiz too.' The Down's. Suleyman nodded.

Through the frosted glass in the door of Suleyman's office they both observed the vague smudges that were a senior officer of both their acquaintance and an unknown woman offering her body and her jewellery to him. Suleyman and Sarkissian did what they knew Çetin Ìkmen would not have done, and ignored it

'Has he spoken yet or is it still just rote denial?'

'As soon as I walked into the room he flung himself under the table,' Suleyman replied. 'I don't think I've ever seen a person in such a state of terror.

He drools, he gibbers, he stutters that he didn't Mil anyone ... But how he could possibly know that Ruya Urfa was dead before Erol had even arrived at the apartments is a mystery. His parents and one of the other neighbours maintain he was well away from the apartment when they heard Erol scream. The door to the apartment was shut, according to Urfa, and so it wasn't as if Cengiz could have spotted the body from the hall.'

'He usually went out through the fire escape anyway according to his parents,' the doctor pointed out.

'Yes.' Suleyman sat down behind his now rather messy desk and ran his fingers through his hair. 'He denies what he should not know, his parents were absent at the time of the murder and he's terrified beyond belief. Whether he did it or not, I've no idea. But I'm certain he has some knowledge of the events surrounding the death. It's just getting at what they might be. And until forensic come across with something I am temporarily at a loss.' Glancing briefly at his one dust-grimed window he said, 'I just hope that when they do call, it's to my mobile. The switchboard's been jammed since dawn with press calls, Erol's more demented fans and various unhappy individuals who claim to have the child. The latter, of course, require action by uniform and I must get out of here myself in the near future - if I can get around the TRT pack who appear to be constructing gecekondu accommodation in the car park.'