Deep Waters (40 page)

‘Time to go now, boys,’ he said as Mehti’s tears began to flow.

The armed men moved into the cell and ushered the manacled Albanians towards the door.

Angeliki, crying herself now but in a wild, furious way, shouted, ‘You treat my boys right, do you hear me! If you hurt them I’ll kill every one of you with my own hands! Sons of donkeys!’

But no one, not even her own sons, responded to her words and when the cell had been cleared, Tepe shut the door and locked it without comment.

Alone now, Angeliki sank down to the floor, which she beat violently with her fists. By some sort of magic, probably instigated by that son of the Bajraktar witch, Ayşe, her Aryan had turned against the
fis
and was going to make sure that her Mehmet never walked in freedom again. Silently she cursed both the policeman and his
fis
– something she had never done before for fear that the arcane and powerful Bajraktar would come and pull both her life and her soul down into hell. But that didn’t matter now. Angeliki knew that although she could send word via friends that Aryan should be dealt with in the traditional manner, she could not help her own situation. She had spoken the truth about Ayşe Bajraktar and now that woman’s son was going to make her pay with her liberty.

Her actual offence, possession of cocaine, didn’t even enter Angeliki’s mind. As far as she was concerned, İkmen was incarcerating her as part of a personal statement of hatred. She cursed both him and his children at the very top of her voice.

They met, as arranged, in Zelfa’s office, ostensibly because this was where she kept her records, though it was also accessible to everyone concerned, including policemen who were ‘on leave’.

‘Ali Evren was what we back home would call a goth, a morbid kid who finds death glamorous, or at least that was what I thought he was,’ Zelfa said as she looked down at the pages of notes she had written about him. ‘I was actually treating him for anorexia, which was not yet very serious, but it all revolved around issues he had with his mother’s death and with mortality in general. Quite common in the bereaved. But,’ she looked up at İkmen, ‘in light of what you’ve just told me, obviously I didn’t have the full picture, did I?’

‘No, but then if he didn’t want to tell you, how could you?’ İkmen replied. ‘According to his sister, Ali turned to the idea of being a vampire as a way of sidestepping, if you like, his own mortality. Felicity encouraged him – it was a way of taking the sting out of his mother’s death. Apparently he was panting with anxiety about being around religious artefacts when he was in the museum, but I don’t remember that myself.’

Zelfa shrugged. ‘He must have been completely in the grip of the fantasy in order to do what he did.’

‘Quite how the whole sex thing began or why Felicity persisted with this mirror business is less clear to me.’

‘I’ll come to that in a moment,’ Zelfa said. ‘So Ali Evren killed your Albanian.’

‘According to Felicity, when she smashed the present Rifat had given her into his face, the sight of the blood excited her brother – or at least he said that it had after the event. Of course it was principally about sexual jealousy.’

‘Exactly,’ Suleyman put in as he offered Zelfa a cigarette which, strangely, she refused. ‘I mean, Ali seems to have been quite selective about which parts of the vampire story he adhered to. As I understand it, vampires drink blood, cringe from religious symbols, avoid daylight, can’t cross water or see themselves in mirrors. Ali did only some of these things.’

‘Living out fantasies based on old legends or myths is obviously going to have its limitations,’ Zelfa said. ‘I mean people are not going to crumble to dust when they see a crucifix however much they may want that to happen. Somewhere along the line that person’s concept of the fantasy must shift to accommodate reality. Fantasies have to be elastic to withstand everyday life. Ali Evren had to go out in the daytime, he had to go to school. He rationalised this by claiming that his transformation into a vampire wasn’t yet complete. And anyway, if you read contemporary fiction on the subject you will see that a lot of the old notions about vampires have changed. We now have good vampires, child vampires, vampires who can hold on to crucifixes and laugh, and so on.’

‘So Ali just took what he wanted from the available literature,’ said Suleyman.

‘Yes, and from the “evidence” provided by his sister. It may be that she even fed him a lot of pseudo-mythical stuff about the efficacy of sleeping with a vampire in order to get him to screw her. At any rate, when her vampiric status was called into question the night the Albanian died, his world was rocked. If she wasn’t a vampire, where did that leave him? He needed proof, and unfortunately I had told him how to get it.’

‘And yet,’ İkmen said, ‘at the end he was still convinced that he, if not his sister, would cheat death.’

‘Yes and no.’ She smiled. ‘A psychiatrist’s classic answer. I know. I feel he must have known the fantasy couldn’t continue in its present form, and so the only way out of it was to throw himself from the museum and then either live as a fully formed vampire or face the hated spectre of death as a kind of punishment for not achieving his goal. I think he finally realised that whichever route he took was going to lead to hell.’

‘So he was doomed,’ Suleyman said.

‘Yes. A familiar place for him,’ she said as her fingers worked towards and then retreated from her cigarette packet. ‘Your mother is a depressive and commits suicide, your father is mostly absent and thinks you’re mad anyway, and your beloved ugly sister fucks you. You’re hardly going to be comfortable in the world of nice people and positivism. With work, of course, he could have been.’ She shrugged. ‘But, true to his nature, he concealed too much from me, and his father just wanted him well, whatever that may mean.’

‘His father wanted him in an institution,’ İkmen said, ‘after Rifat’s murder.’

‘Mmm.’

Both men knew Zelfa was still troubled by what she saw as her failure with Ali Evren. But neither of them alluded to this.

İkmen continued, ‘Felicity argued with her father about this on the night of his death. She knew exactly why Ali had killed Rifat and the reasons for his drinking the Albanian’s blood. She told her father this. She also told him that she didn’t want Ali hospitalised. But İlhan Evren wasn’t having it. We’d been to see him, he was already scared. He was also disgusted by the notion of his children having sex – unsurprisingly. And so to try, I presume, to bring his daughter back to reality and make her confront what she and her brother had done, he made her look at her face in a mirror. And she saw it, maybe as she says for the first time in years – I don’t doubt that people can avoid their own image if they want to but whether she was actually invisible to herself is another matter.’

‘And so she killed her father in a fit of rage, did she?’ asked Suleyman.

‘I’ve arrested her for his murder, yes,’ İkmen replied. ‘Felicity Evren does not seem to be as criminally adept as her late father was. İlhan could have screamed and shouted at us about Albanian blood feuds and with Mehti in custody we would probably have believed him. But he was too cautious for that. He knew that unless he had actually seen something like the green Fiat with his own eyes, he shouldn’t allude to it. He had too much past to make mistakes. And so he let us draw our own conclusions, which we did for a while.’

‘But İlhan did dispose of the body?’

İkmen lit a cigarette. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he did, together with Felicity. And very professionally too. A pity for her that she didn’t take quite so much care over the killing of her father. But then she isn’t a gangster. She’s just a deluded girl who had sex with her brother. It’s hard to imagine what her state of mind must have been to enable her to kill her father like that. The rage she must have felt . . .’

‘Her brother was more important,’ Suleyman said.

‘Yes. Ali gave her the sex she craved. And as I think I’ve said to you before, Mehmet, sex, envy and fear are the only three motives for murder. But then again, there was certainly a degree of cold calculation in her actions. She said she loved Rifat and yet she disposed of his body without a thought and then turned on the tears for his family. But she’s not all that tough. We had to call the doctor down just before I left her. She sort of collapsed, though not physically. Became almost catatonic. Maybe she was thinking about what lies ahead for her. I don’t know how long she’ll get . . .’ For just a moment İkmen slumped. His face, devoid of animation, was, Suleyman thought, really starting to look old.

İkmen sat up straighter. ‘Still, that is for a judge to decide and not us,’ he said. ‘She’s really rather a pathetic figure whose brother . . .’

‘I shot, yes,’ Suleyman finished for him.

Zelfa reached out and took one of his hands in hers.

‘Everybody’s account of your actions includes the observation that you had no choice,’ İkmen said. ‘Only Yıldız doesn’t proffer an opinion and that’s because he wasn’t there and couldn’t see. You will probably have to prostrate yourself, metaphorically, before Ardiç with regard to your initial lack of procedure, but I don’t think it’ll go beyond that.’

‘Ardiç is not happy about my involvement either,’ Zelfa said. ‘I underestimated the seriousness of Ali’s mental state. I miscalculated badly.’

‘Please don’t say that in a public place, Zelfa,’ İkmen said. But nobody laughed.

Suleyman, agitated now, got up and moved across to the window. The reflection of the thin winter light from the snowy street below made him blink.

‘Anyway, when this is all over I’m going to stop working for anybody apart from myself,’ Zelfa said as she watched her fiancé watch the street scene outside.

‘Just private practice?’ İkmen asked.

‘Why should I put myself through the misery of admitting the wildly psychotic to medieval institutions or visiting wolf-men in prison when I can talk to bored housewives and under-achieving middle-aged men. Neuroses!’ she cried, unconvincingly. ‘That is the way forward.’

‘But won’t you get frustrated?’ Suleyman asked as he turned back to the room and away from his own morbid thoughts. ‘I don’t want you to be bored just because our paths crossed over Ali Evren.’

‘Oh, I was thinking I might take this step anyway,’ she said as she, very consciously, placed one hand across her belly. ‘If we’re to be married, it’s going to be awkward.’

Suleyman sighed. ‘Yes.’

And then silence descended upon the group once again. İkmen knew that he was going to have to find an opportunity to ask Zelfa’s advice about what he should do about Halil. But whatever his intentions had been earlier in the day, now did not seem to be the right time. Perhaps he would phone her later when she got home. Right now they were all preoccupied with the bizarre set of circumstances that had led to three people losing their lives in acts of what seemed to İkmen to be mad pointlessness. That the professional cloud that currently hung over poor Suleyman.

But there was still one thing he wanted Zelfa to explain to him, if she could.

‘Zelfa,’ he said, ‘you mentioned earlier that you would return to the subject of this mirror business . . .’

‘Ah yes,’ she said. But although she was listening to İkmen she was looking at her lover as he leaned against the windowsill, staring up at nothing on the ceiling. He looked so tired and strained. All the more reason to get what she knew she had to tell him over with as soon as possible.

She rose from her seat and placed Ali Evren’s file back in her cabinet. ‘Yes,’ she repeated, ‘but I think I’ll do that on the way home, if you don’t mind, Çetin.’

‘Oh, yes, er . . .’

‘We’ll take Çetin back first, Mehmet,’ she said as she retrieved her coat from the back of her chair.

‘Yes,’ he said absently. ‘Of course.’

None of them spoke until they reached Suleyman’s car. Dusk and the still thickening snow had thrown a cloak of silence across the great city of Constantine and, until they got inside the car and Suleyman put the heater on, the three of them were struck dumb by its icy spell.

‘Of course, theoretically, Ali Evren could have killed his father,’ İkmen said from the back seat of the car. ‘His prints are going to be all over that office. Adnan Öz will, I know, exploit that. But I suppose we’ll just have to wait, as ever, for forensic.’

‘Yes.’ Zelfa turned round in her seat to look at him. ‘But then why did he seem so shocked when his sister told him of his father’s death?’

‘Because he didn’t do it,’ İkmen replied, ‘but Felicity Evren hasn’t confessed to the murder of her father, nor do I believe she will. I know because of what she told us that I have a case but I would like some forensic evidence too.’

Suleyman switched on the front and rear windscreen wipers. The sound of mechanically moving snow swished dully.

‘So where does all of this leave us with regard to Rifat Berisha then, Çetin?’ he asked as he, to his fiancée’s secret chagrin, lit up a cigarette. ‘I know we all heard the boy admit to it and there is also the sister’s testimony, but is that enough?’

‘We have to check prints and samples against those taken from the Evren family. When it’s done we’ll know for sure. Or not.’ He sighed. ‘Useless Mehti Vlora! If only he’d stayed after he saw Rifat enter the Evren house. But he was too scared even to do that.’

‘Well, I for one do think that Ali was telling us the truth,’ Zelfa began.

‘Oh yes,’ İkmen nodded, ‘I agree. But it’s so much easier if you’ve got some concrete evidence too. But tell me something about Felicity and her mirrors, Zelfa.’

‘Shall I take you straight home, Çetin?’ Suleyman interjected as he slowly pulled out into the slush-filled road.

‘Yes, that’d be good,’ İkmen replied and then, turned back to Zelfa, idly noting that, unusually for her, she wasn’t smoking. ‘So, this theory, Zelfa.’

‘The condition, or rather theoretical condition, is called negative autoscopy,’ she began, and as the car travelled through the snow-bound city, İkmen was treated to an explanation that, even by his standards, was unusual. But he found that it made sense to him. Not seeing what one didn’t want to see was understandable. In effect it was the reverse of what, some would say, happened during his encounters with his mother. He wanted to hear from her and so he did, at least that was what someone like Zelfa would say. Uncle Ahmet, like his other Albanian relatives, would describe this phenomenon as a ghost – which in a sense it was, whether one believed in the spirit or not. Something of a person remained – an intelligent energy of sorts. Felicity Evren, in contrast, had closed her mind to her own image and made herself a sort of blank slate on which she could impose whatever she wanted. And it occurred to İkmen that in some ways this was not so different from what Halil had done with what he had seen the day their mother had died. The mind did what it had to do to make life bearable.