Deep Waters (34 page)

‘I suspect the same as you.’

‘The Evren children.’

‘Yes, Çöktin called me. I brought this lot,’ he said, gesturing at the officers. ‘In case young Ali should decide to run. I was at the Evren house actually.’

Zelfa recalled the somewhat cryptic conversation she’d had with Tepe earlier. ‘Yes. What were you doing there?’

‘Attending a crime scene.’ Seeing that she was now struggling to stand up, he offered her his hand. ‘The family chauffeur found the body of İlhan Evren this morning.’

Zelfa’s eyes widened.

‘He had a pair of scissors sticking out of his back.’ İkmen took Zelfa’s arm and gently moved her back towards the museum. ‘I have some ideas about who might have committed the crime but no hard evidence,’ he said. ‘Right now what we need to consider is whether to tell that pair in the gallery.’

Zelfa looked up at the great soaring dome dwarfing the entrance they were now passing through.

‘I think,’ she said gravely, ‘that will depend upon what is happening up there.’

Nobody actually now knows which side of the Gates of Heaven and Hell relate to which aspect of the afterlife. But considering the fact that the portal had almost certainly been named by a man, Mehmet Suleyman reasoned that the heaven side probably related to the Gynekoion – the women’s gallery. This meant that they were now pursuing Ali Evren into the southern gallery and Hell. So it was with some satisfaction that Suleyman spotted Yıldız in the northern gallery just before he passed through the portal with Çöktin and Güney. If Ali Evren did lose it completely, there was always Yıldız.

‘I think that maybe we should talk, Ali.’

‘But you want me to let go of my sister first, right?’ Ali Evren smiled – a genuine smile, in no way ironic. Totally at odds with his words. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘If you let your sister go,’ Çöktin said slowly, ‘Inspector Suleyman will talk and nobody will be hurt.’

‘How much money will my father have to give you to just forget all of this? Eh? Anyway,’ he said, his face flushing as he became more agitated, ‘you can’t kill me and so why should I worry? One way or another, my sister and I are leaving this place today, you know. She may very well leave here dead . . .’ he paused briefly to gasp for air, ‘. . . but that is something she should have thought about a long time ago.’

‘David, I—’

‘When you look in a mirror, Felicity, tell me what you see!’

‘I—’

‘Tell him, Felicity.’ Zelfa Halman was standing next to Mehmet Suleyman, her shaking hand resisting the temptation to touch him.

‘Tell your brother, Felicity,’ she said calmly. ‘It’s all over now.’

‘But I can’t!’ Her voice was horse and, Zelfa noticed, she had blood dripping down the side of her neck.

‘Felicity . . .’

‘I can’t see my own reflection! I have no idea how to describe myself!’

‘Would you like to tell me what this is about?’ Suleyman asked Zelfa quietly, his eyes never leaving Ali.

‘It was just a game to humour you!’ Felicity cried until her brother’s hand tightened round her throat.

‘You’re trying to be a vampire, aren’t you, Ali?’ Zelfa said with what Suleyman felt was remarkable sang-froid. ‘Felicity told you she can’t see her own reflection in mirrors and you wanted to be like her, didn’t you?’

‘It’s all about beating death, doctor,’ the boy replied. ‘The only way.’

‘Yes, but it’s just a game, as we just heard, Ali. Felicity is not a vampire.’

‘She told me she was!’ He looked fiercely down at the top of his sister’s head. ‘She said she could no longer see herself – ages ago! Then Mother died . . . Flick still couldn’t see . . . I said that perhaps she and I were vampires and she said yes and I said that that was such a good way to beat death! Because,’ he fixed his eyes hard upon Zelfa now, ‘death isn’t very nice, doctor! I’ve seen it and I want none of it!’

‘For yourself, yes,’ İkmen said, moving uneasily from foot to foot behind his colleagues. ‘But as a vampire you have to take the lives of others, do you not?’

The boy opened his mouth to speak but was preempted by his sister.

‘No, he hasn’t, he doesn’t, he—’

‘Rifat’s death had nothing to do with that!’ Ali shouted, disgust at such ignorance evident in his voice. ‘He said horrible things to Flick, he tried to take what was mine. He deserved to die! I only drank his blood because it was there, it was a natural thing for me to do, because of what I am – I didn’t plan to do it!’

Felicity was crying now. Her brother, clutched her still more tightly to his chest and took three steps back.

‘Where are you going?’ Zelfa asked him.

‘I told you, I’m leaving.’

Suleyman glanced quickly across the nave to the northern gallery, his eye catching something moving very quickly over there.

İkmen cleared his throat. ‘Ali,’ he said, ‘I apologise for being slow but vampires, as I understand it, must drink blood, they cannot exist in the light and—’

‘My transformation is not yet complete.’

‘But if Felicity isn’t, as I assume you now know, really a vampire then why should you believe a metamorphosis is happening within you?’

‘I just told you, I drank Rifat’s blood! And I’ve drunk hers,’ he said as he swung his sister out in front of him, turning now so that his back was towards the outer wall of the church. He was moving away from the vast drop to the floor of the nave, which could mean Suleyman thought, that he had seen Yıldız on the gallery opposite. Either way, his new position made it impossible for the young officer to get a clear shot at the boy.

‘My father has wanted to put me in a madhouse for a long time,’ he said over the top of his sister’s muffled crying. ‘But he’s as guilty as I am and—’

‘Oh, David, don’t!’

‘Shut up!’ He transferred the knife from his right hand to his left and looked down the length of the gallery towards the dead end. As in the northern gallery, there was a door, as Ali Evren knew. Old, and blackened with age, it was secured with a padlock. The boy pointed first at İkmen and then at the door.

‘Open it,’ he said, ‘right now.’

In the few brief seconds during which Ali Evren looked across at İkmen’s struggles with the padlock, Zelfa whispered to Suleyman, ‘We can’t let him just go through that door! The men outside will kill him!’

‘You know some of these doors don’t actually lead anywhere, don’t you, Ali?’ İkmen said as he made very convincing play of trying to undo an already broken padlock. ‘I don’t know why that is,’ İkmen continued when the boy didn’t reply. ‘Perhaps it was some sort of Byzantine joke.’

‘That it leads out is enough,’ the boy replied.

‘Yes, but if there’s a big drop . . .’

‘Well, I won’t die!’

Now beyond thought, Felicity Evren stared ahead of her with hopeless intensity.

‘Ali, it doesn’t have to be like this,’ Zelfa began. ‘If you will just come with me now—’

‘Your lover will beat me up,’ he said, looking at Suleyman, ‘and then you will put me in the loony bin!’ He laughed. ‘I do know that is what will happen, doctor! My father told me as much last night. He said he wasn’t prepared to cover up for me any more. He said he was going to call you. He said that the fact that he helped me would never come out because I am mad and so who would believe me?’

‘What do you mean he helped you?’

‘Father’s dead, David.’

It was said so calmly and with such certainty that for a moment İkmen’s hands stopped working at the broken padlock.

Ali twisted his sister round in his grasp and looked into her face. ‘Dead?’

İkmen glanced across at Suleyman who slipped one of his hands inside his jacket. Yıldız was completely unsighted now and they both knew it.

‘I finally told him about my part in . . . in how you are, David,’ Felicity said, her chin cringing away from the knife at her throat. ‘And he didn’t like it.’

‘Did you drink his blood?’

‘No!’

His eyes blazing, the boy snapped his gaze away from his sister’s face and across to İkmen. ‘Get that padlock off now or I’ll slash her throat!’

İkmen pulled the rusted lump of metal out of its hasp and threw it to the floor.

‘Now move away from it!’

‘Ali—’

‘Do it!’

İkmen moved over to the other side of the door.

Ali swung his sister round again to face the officers and the doctor whom he now fixed with a fierce gaze.

‘You know that it’s your fault we’re here, don’t you, doctor?’ he said. ‘You suggested this test for my sister and she failed.’

‘Ali, I know that in your reality vampires exist, but—’

‘Oh, I am going to cheat death,’ he said. He moved over to the door and pushed the handle down. ‘I don’t want to die and so I won’t. I’ll do anything to avoid that.’

As the door swung outwards, a gasp of freezing, snow-bearing air billowed into the building. From where Zelfa was standing, only a swathe of seal-grey sky, was visible.

‘This is no way out,’ İkmen said as he looked down at the huge drop beneath the now gently swinging door. ‘You’ll kill yourself.’

‘No I won’t.’ Ali stepped forward into the frame of the door. ‘I’ll only kill the false vampire, the love cheat, the woman who can die.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Felicity murmured. ‘Oh, Jesus, God . . .’

‘And all the time I thought you were a daughter of Satan!’ The boy tightened his grip on her throat, cutting off her air supply.

And then Ali looked behind him at the whitening drop below.

Suleyman drew his gun as İkmen reached across to grab hold of Felicity Evren’s wrist.

Çöktin threw himself at İkmen’s legs. Not that the dead boy still had a hold on his sister’s throat, but the momentum of the bullet plus the weight of both Ali and Felicity had been enough to pull İkmen right to the very edge of the sheer drop. Quite how he had kept hold of Felicity’s wrist he had no idea.

Amid a strange, frenetic silence, Çöktin and his fellow officers pulled and heaved both İkmen and Felicity Evren back from the door and dragged them, gasping for air, to the safety of the gallery floor. And then still in silence they watched them as they attempted to regain control of their bodies. Felicity, her head and shoulders smothered with her brother’s blood, stared vacantly at the mosaic representing the Byzantine Empress Irene, a woman of remarkable, blonde beauty. The contrast between the luminous glory of the artwork and the misshapen woman covered with gore was not lost upon those in the gallery who could still think straight.

‘Christ!’ Zelfa murmured as she walked shakily over to the doorway. Looking down, she let her eyes follow the long streak of scarlet that cut its way through the snow, staining various small projections on the outside of the building. A crowd of people had already gathered below. And although she knew that Ali Evren was down there somewhere too, the fact that she couldn’t see his body – yet – was disturbing.

‘You’d better get outside, doctor,’ she heard İkmen’s surprisingly steady voice say.

Zelfa turned. Çöktin and Güney, who had now been joined by Yıldız, were escorting Felicity Evren’s weeping figure towards a step where she could sit more comfortably. This was just opposite the Deesis mosaic, a representation of John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary interceding on mankind’s behalf on Judgement Day. The Catholic part of Zelfa’s mind smiled at this irony before her Turkish eyes looked up at the figure of Mehmet Suleyman who had his back to her, talking on his mobile telephone. The pistol he had fired at Ali Evren’s head was still in his right hand.

A touch of fingers against her shoulder alerted her to İkmen’s presence.

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Somebody needs to declare that boy’s life extinct,’ İkmen said as he gently moved her away from the gaping nothingness beyond the door.

Zelfa’s eyes were filling with tears. ‘But I’m not a pathologist.’

‘But you are a doctor, so you’re more qualified to do this than I am.’

‘Yes . . .’

‘Listen,’ he said as he took her hand in his, ‘the only way around something like this is to keep working. I know, believe me.’ And then, amazingly given the situation, he gently laughed. ‘Listen to me, giving advice to the psychiatrist!’

Suleyman had finished his call and was putting his telephone back into his pocket when they drew level with him.

‘İskender is on his way,’ he said to İkmen, referring to a senior officer who would no doubt be given the job of investigating the circumstances surrounding today’s ‘incident’.

İkmen looked down at the gun in his colleague’s hand and noted that the safety catch was back on again.

‘You’ll have to surrender your weapon,’ he said, aware that Suleyman would know this but saying it anyway, just for something to say – for something to put off the moment when Zelfa spoke to her fiancé. Not that he succeeded.

‘You killed him,’ Zelfa said as she looked up into the cold, tense eyes of her lover.

‘Yes.’

‘I needed more time to talk to him . . .’

‘Ali Evren forced the pace of events.’

‘Which you failed to control!’

Suleyman’s response was immediate and his tone and demeanour demonstrated why his ancestors had been men of power.

‘No, I failed to understand, doctor!’ he said icily. ‘I walked into a hostage situation involving a madman, somebody you knew was insane even before Rifat Berisha was murdered!’

‘No! No, he was referred . . .’

But Suleyman was walking rapidly away from them now, back towards his small team of officers and a much quieter Felicity Evren.

İkmen squeezed Zelfa’s arm. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ he said as he guided her past the men and the blood-soaked woman. ‘It’s shock. We must all settle now and think rationally about what has just occurred.’

‘But Mehmet killed that boy, he—’

‘Inspector Suleyman had no choice,’ İkmen responded sternly. ‘Ali Evren was going to launch himself into space and take his sister with him. We were going to have two very public deaths on our hands.’