Dance with Death (22 page)

‘But Kemalettin Senar has had tests?’ Erten, less concerned with İstanbul than İkmen was, asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Which proved positive for this Huntington’s disease?’

‘That I cannot tell you,’ Dr Ali responded.

‘I understand.’

İkmen, who had been listening in spite of the television set, once again turned his eyes away from the horrors of İstanbul and said, ‘OK, Doctor, let’s look at it another way, then, shall we? If you tested Nalan Senar to see whether or not she was a carrier of Huntington’s and you discovered that she was, would you be surprised? Or rather, would you be surprised if she wasn’t?’

‘I’d be very surprised if she wasn’t,’ Dr Ali said as he ground his cigarette out in his ashtray and then leaned back into his chair. ‘Nalan’s husband and his family were always very normal. When something like a murder happens, outsiders can view villages like Muratpaşa as hotbeds of aberration. But most people are normal here, really. The Senars, as they were, were very nice people. Tatar Senar married Nalan because she was beautiful and, more importantly, blond. Shallow, I know, but men will be men as we know . . . The Senars were always more prosperous and therefore more educated than Yurt’s family. Nalan was lucky that she managed to excite Tatar’s lust to the extent that she did. Mind you, once they were married he lost interest in her and the children very quickly. Even when he was dying he was still harsh with poor Turgut, impatient with Kemalettin.’

‘I see.’

‘Poor Kemalettin. But then the village, in general, is very accepting of his peccadilloes,’ the doctor continued. ‘None of us enjoys seeing a grown man abusing himself in the street but as you have probably observed yourself, Inspector, we generally let it go without comment. There is not, after all, any point in telling the poor man not to do it. I know that some try, but his mother and his brother barely notice any more.’

Unless, İkmen thought, one is a certain American tourist that Turgut Senar seems to be taking a great interest in. He’d been furious when Kemalettin had manipulated himself in front of Dolores Lavell. And yet the American, as a previous visitor to the area, had witnessed this ‘phenomenon’ before. Turgut Senar also had seen the American probably many times in the past. This begged a question about why he was so enamoured with her now and not before? He was married, with a child, and so he had a lot to lose. Had the Lavell woman perhaps bought herself a face-lift since her last visit? He knew rich Americans did such things. But then maybe there was another reason for Dolores’ popularity with Turgut, which had nothing to do with her looks. But İkmen couldn’t think round that problem for the time being, and so after a few more seconds’ thought he said, ‘People in this village seem to be obsessed with blood, inheritance and what have you.’

The doctor frowned. ‘Yes. There was considerable inbreeding in the past. Not now. It’s caused trouble over the years.’

İkmen tore his eyes away from the television again, suddenly galvanised. ‘Did you know that Aysu Alkaya was pregnant before her disappearance, Dr Ali?’

‘No.’ He looked down at his desk. ‘I was as surprised, probably more so than many others, when I learned of it.’

‘Why is that?’ İkmen asked.

Dr Ali sighed and then looked up. ‘Because of the deformity to her feet,’ he said. ‘I was convinced that Ziya Kahraman would reject her. I actually advised her not to marry him. Ziya was very anxious to produce an “untainted” son. I thought that once he saw her feet he would assume that they were the result of inbreeding and throw her out.’

‘But that didn’t happen.’

‘No.’

‘Doctor, is the phenomenon of extra digits always connected to in-breeding?’ İkmen asked.

‘Not always. But in a primitive place such as Muratpaşa was back in the nineteen eighties, that, as well as attributions of evil and ownership by Şeytan, were usually the assumptions that attend these cases.’

‘I see.’ İkmen turned his gaze back fully to the television once again. Someone was being brought out of the Cohens’ apartment building on a stretcher. He or she wasn’t moving.

Mehmet Süleyman had wanted to stay with his friend, but at the same time he fully understood why that just wasn’t possible. He’d seen some terrible things – many of them worse than this – in the course of his career as a police officer, but he’d never felt so affected before; he’d never known a person’s screams so tear his heart in all of his life. Even out in the street where he now sat with Berekiah Cohen’s traumatised parents he could still hear the young man’s screams of pain as the doctor and nurse attending him attempted to free his shoulder from the enormous shard of glass that held him impaled to the wall behind what was left of his bed.

‘I don’t understand why he’s in so much pain!’ Balthazar said as he wept into the folds of the blanket a nurse had draped in his lap to cover the stumps of his legs. ‘Don’t these people have morphine or something?’

‘Morphine can only do so much,’ his wife said as she held on limply to Mehmet Süleyman’s hand, her eyes glassed over with shock. ‘Berekiah is fixed to the wall. There is blood just . . . it’s everywhere, it’s down the walls, it’s . . .’

And then she screamed. Mehmet Süleyman threw his arms round her and held on so tightly his hands went first white and then blue. ‘They’re doing everything they can for him, Estelle. He’s young and strong . . .’

‘I knew that no good would come of it,’ Balthazar said as he shook his head violently from side to side. ‘I told Çetin Bey.’

A man with a thick moustache and impenetrable, hooded eyes staggered across the piles of rubble in the street towards the ambulance beside which the Cohens and Süleyman were crouching.

‘I told the woman, too,’ Balthazar continued as he completely failed to register the face or form of the newcomer in their midst. ‘A Jew and a Muslim cannot be together, it’s like a dog and a cat . . .’

‘This, this . . . whatever this is has nothing to do with Hulya and Berekiah,’ Süleyman said. ‘Nothing!’

‘They’ve bombed our synagogue, Mehmet!’ the crippled man yelled. ‘And the Beth Israel over in Şişli!’

‘I . . .’

‘Inspector Süleyman . . .’

In response to this entirely different voice, Süleyman raised his head from Estelle Cohen’s shoulder and looked up. ‘Melik?’

‘I’ve been trying to call your mobile phone,’ İzzet Melik replied gruffly.

‘Yes, I . . .’ He’d been aware it had gone off once. But he hadn’t been able to answer it. He’d been lost in the dizzying swirls of blood behind Berekiah Cohen’s screaming face.

‘Then I heard about all this and I came up,’ Melik continued. ‘It’s terrible.’

Another scream from inside the apartment building caused Estelle Cohen to grasp on to Mehmet Süleyman still tighter. ‘My poor child! My soul!’

‘Sssh! Sssh!’ Süleyman soothed. ‘He’s going to be all right, Estelle. He’s young and he’s fit. He has a wife and a son . . .’

Melik, who didn’t know the Cohens or understand Süleyman’s relationship to them, cleared his throat. So harsh was the sound that it caused Süleyman to look up at him again. ‘What?’

‘Traffic officer on his way home found a body round the side of the Saray Hamam two hours ago. Little homo with his throat slit. I was just wondering what we know about this peeper when the Neve Şalom went up.’ Just very slightly he smiled. ‘What a day, eh?’

The news that her father’s young wife had been pregnant when she died hadn’t come as a shock to Nazlı Kahraman, though she’d had to feign surprise for the benefit of that policeman from İstanbul. To not do so would have looked bad. Had he discovered that she had known that Aysu Alkaya hadn’t had a period for at least two months prior to her death he might have come to a very damning conclusion. But then in the accepted sense, officially, for want of a better word, Nazlı hadn’t known about Aysu’s condition any more than her late father. Aysu hadn’t told her husband, that man so desperate for a son, that man who would have treated his wife so much more kindly had he known. Ziya’s daughter had failed to inform her father, too . . .

Nazlı Kahraman looked out of her kitchen window and into the courtyard where her young husband was chopping logs for the stove. He had his shirt off and his well-sculpted chest gleamed with sweat. But the sight of him didn’t arouse any sort of interest or desire within her. That sort of thing was disgusting and besides, she was worried. Now that it was halfway through the afternoon she was very tired and hungry too. For all her protestations to her slack ‘Greek’ husband, she wasn’t finding Ramazan any easier as the years progressed. Nazlı walked out of her kitchen and, ducking her head under the rough tufa doorway into the hall, she grabbed the telephone from off the wall and dialled a number. While she waited for someone to answer she chewed her bottom lip with the top plate of her false teeth.

When a man’s voice eventually came on the line she said, ‘Baha, it’s Nazlı Hanım; we need to talk.’

Baha Ermis took a sharp intake of breath. ‘What for, Hanım?’

‘That policeman from İstanbul, he knows what I have always known about my “stepmother” and her delicate condition.’

‘Haldun Alkaya has told everyone.’

‘The İstanbul policeman İkmen wants me to have this DNA test at some point.’

‘So?’ Baha Ermis coughed suddenly and then, just as rapidly, he stopped. ‘You have nothing to hide, Nazlı Hanım.’

‘No, but maybe my father did.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ermis said. ‘Ziya Bey didn’t kill Aysu Alkaya. That madman Kemalettin did it. He got to her, got her pregnant . . .’

‘Baha, I need to trust you with this . . .’

‘Hanım?’

She knew that she could trust him. Baha Ermis, like his father before him, was devoted to the Kahramans. It was indeed one of the reasons why Nazlı could never quite believe Baha’s story about how he’d seen Kemalettin Senar with Aysu Alkaya outside the Kahraman house on the night that the girl disappeared. Of course it was, had to be possible. But Baha was and always had been obsequious to her as well as being, in general, a gossip and a liar.

Nazlı Kahraman took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t see my father go to bed the night Aysu disappeared,’ she said. ‘And in the morning he looked dishevelled. He had not changed his clothes.’

‘Ziya Bey was old, Hanım. Maybe he couldn’t sleep. Sometimes he would sit up at night going over the accounts, you remember?’ He didn’t add that Ziya Kahraman frequently did this in order to find areas in which he might make still more savings.

‘Only in his office,’ Nazlı replied. ‘And he wasn’t in his office. He was . . . elsewhere. Baha, did you really see Kemalettin Senar and Aysu outside our house that night?’

‘Well, yes, I . . .’

‘The police, you know, can use this DNA to tell who killed her. There can be no mistake. They will be taking my sample to look at both me and my father. Look, Baha, I know you have always been loyal and faithful to this family and I am very grateful, but . . .’ She swallowed hard. ‘Baha, on the life of your mother you must tell me the truth. Was Kemalettin Senar really outside the house with Aysu that night? Was it him or was it my father? I have to . . .’

‘I don’t know who it was, Hanım!’ the voice on the other end cried. ‘It was a figure, slim and a little hunched. It could have been Kemalettin, most likely it was him! With respect to Ziya Bey, Hanım, it must have been Senar who made Aysu with child. Ziya Bey was old . . .’

‘He took her the night of their marriage. There was blood on the wedding sheet, I saw it. But, well, if the child was Kemalettin’s then the police will be able to see that too with this DNA,’ she sighed. ‘What if my father knew he had been dishonoured, Baha? He would never have tolerated such a thing!’

‘Ziya Bey was an honourable man. The girl was a whore, what choice did he have?’

‘But we don’t know that he killed her. We must never speak of it! Not to anyone!’

‘No!’

‘And yet . . .’ She leaned heavily against the wall as if deflated. ‘If the child was Kemalettin Senar’s, why would he, even a madman like him, kill both it and Aysu? I can see how he could run off with the girl, but . . .’

‘Kemalettin Senar is, as you have said, a madman. Who knows what he might do, Hanım?’ And then through gritted teeth he continued, ‘It was a bad day when the policeman from İstanbul came to this village. With his tests and DNA. Just because he is the cousin of Menşure Hanım, he thinks he can interfere . . .’

‘He is an agent of the law,’ Nazlı breathed fatalistically. ‘What can we do?’

‘There must be something,’ Baha Ermis replied. ‘Let me think about it.’

Suddenly angered by his arrogant and obsequious posturing, Nazlı Hanım said, ‘Oh, for the love of Allah, you can do nothing! Stop fooling yourself, Baha! You are nothing! I’ll give you nothing! Why make yourself so small and humble for no reason? A closed mouth is all that I want from you!’

And then she put the telephone back on the wall and closed her eyes. There was of course another dark and, Nazlı hoped, secret reason why her father could have killed Aysu Alkaya too. Those feet. Even if she had been pregnant with his child, her father could never have tolerated those ghastly deformities. As soon as he’d seen them, as soon as Aysu had tearfully allowed him to see them the morning after their wedding, Ziya Kahraman, so he had said, had decided that the girl was to be little more than his servant. Nazlı had been so pleased – then.

The policeman from İstanbul was going to blow the village apart with his strange and frightening medical tests and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it now.

‘But of course Ziya Bey was the father of this child you say my Aysu was having!’ Haldun Alkaya cried as tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. ‘She was a good girl, untouched when she married! There was blood on her marriage sheet . . .’

‘Haldun Bey, I do not mean to cause offence,’ İkmen said. ‘But I must explore every possibility, it is my job.’