‘Every society does it,’ he would say to friends who insisted upon discussing such things. ‘Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus. It’s something that’s more about the notion of honour in a community, whatever that is, than a religious construct. If a man cannot keep his women “in order”, then he loses face. It says far more to me about men than it does about religion. What ghastly control freaks we all are!’
Whatever his opinion, it wasn’t going to help Gözde Seyhan. She’d died in agony, her skin roasting, every breath she took feeding the flames that were consuming her ruined lungs.
Hamid İdiz had taught what he liked to call ‘pianoforte’ for over thirty years. His mother had been a concert pianist, and although Hamid had never attained those dizzy professional heights himself, he had always led a life ‘in music’, as he liked to put it. From his small apartment on Efe Lane in the fashionable suburb of Şişli, he operated a small but exclusive piano school, which had, he hoped, given several generations of İstanbullu children a greater appreciation of music.
Hamid Bey, as he liked to be called, was an easily recognisable local character in Şişli. Resplendent in English tweed suits, winter and summer, he also sported the kind of luxuriant moustache so beloved by his Ottoman forebears. This he waxed every day and twirled between his fingers obsessively as his often criminally untalented pupils attempted to play. But he was a good teacher and he knew it, and his students, for the most part, liked him. There was, however, another side to his character of which most of his students and all of their wealthy parents were unaware. Hamid İdiz liked to cruise. Sashaying down the middle of the main İstiklal Street in Beyoğlu, his hips swinging provocatively from side to side, he loved to attract like-minded men and take them into tight, dark alleyways. Under such circumstances full sex was rarely a possibility, but a frequently fumbled foray into mutual masturbation or oral sex gave him the high that he, and whoever he was with, needed. Sometimes he would develop a fancy for one of his young pupils, but generally, his adventures in Beyoğlu would mean that he could resist temptation. He did have ‘friends’, too – men equally as furtive and closeted as himself who would visit for a glass of wine, some classical music and the passive sex that Hamid Bey so enjoyed.
It was two hours before his first lesson of that day when a person arrived he had not expected to see. They kissed, and excited by the spontaneity of the arrival, Hamid Bey went to his bedroom, took his clothes off and exhorted his paramour to, ‘Take me!’ He closed his eyes, ready for the delicious pain mixed with pleasure that he so craved. But it never came. Instead he felt a sharp, cold pain across his throat, and as blood poured down his chest and on to his nice satin sheets, Hamid Bey choked and then died.
‘Well, Osman Yavuz would seem to be on the missing list,’ Çetin İkmen said as he replaced his telephone receiver and lit up a cigarette.
Ayşe Farsakoğlu, who was also smoking, pointed at İkmen’s cigarette and said, ‘Remember the ban comes into force in July.’
İkmen growled, ‘Don’t remind me.’
As quickly as she had brought the subject up, Ayşe changed it. ‘That was Bursa, I take it?’
‘A sergeant went to see the boy’s mother. She claims not to have seen him for six months. She thought she was at his grandmother’s in Beşiktaş.’
‘Did the sergeant believe her?’
‘He told me he saw no reason not to,’ İkmen said. ‘Apparently the mother was very forthcoming about the boy. It would seem that trouble follows him.’
‘The grandmother intimated that he was lazy.’
‘Jobless, lazy and given to random acts of petty vandalism, so his mother told the sergeant,’ İkmen said. ‘Although whether we can swallow that whole, I don’t know. Apparently the widow Yavuz has five other kids, younger than Osman, to take care of, as well as an elderly mother and father. Maybe she just wanted lazy Osman out of the way.’
‘Shift him over to her husband’s mother.’
‘Indeed.’
They both sat in silence for a moment, savouring what would soon be a luxury of the past – the ability to smoke at their desks. Neither or them welcomed the ban, although Ayşe had said that she would probably use its imposition as an excuse to try and give up. İkmen, on the other hand, had stated to everyone that he had absolutely no intention of quitting. ‘I won’t be told what to do with my own bloody body!’ he said to anyone who would listen. ‘It’s mine and I’ll do whatever I want with it!’
‘Well we know that whatever else Osman Yavuz may have done, he didn’t take Gözde Seyhan’s virginity,’ Ayşe said. İkmen had spoken to the pathologist Arto Sarkissian earlier, when this fact, as well as the grim news that the fire had been beyond doubt deliberate, had been given to him. Shortly afterwards he had officially opened a murder investigation.
‘Gözde must have had some sort of relationship with the boy,’ İkmen said. ‘People don’t send naked pictures of themselves to strangers, do they?’
Ayşe shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Gözde was kept inside by her parents. On one level she lived a traditional rural life, and yet she was surrounded by city mores and values, and of course, like a lot of these women, she watched a lot of television. I think that girls like Gözde are often the victims of mixed messages, sir. Mother and father tell her she has to stay in, stay pure, not answer back. TV shows her a world of scantily clad R and B singers, material wealth she cannot even hope to aspire to and lots of attractive men. Maybe she and the boy did meet, somehow, perhaps when she was hanging out washing. Clearly they swapped phone numbers, although whether the boy requested those photographs has to be open to question. Not all of these covered country girls are as innocent in their heads as they would have their parents believe.’
İkmen, who knew his deputy to be a committed feminist, said, ‘I can’t believe
you
are defending the boy.’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘He may well be as guilty as hell. I mean, we all know about sexting, don’t we?’
The İstanbul police had dealt with several of these cases over the previous twelve months. Basically young, very naive girls were targeted by unscrupulous men and boys to either send them naked photographs of themselves, usually via their phones, or to ‘perform’ on short video clips for the pleasure of these males. It was a kind of blackmail. Either the girls did as they were told, or their conservative parents (and the parents of these girls were always conservative) would be told lies about them. Such lies, if the parents were so inclined, could lead to the girls being in mortal danger.
‘But I believe we need to be cautious,’ Ayşe continued. ‘This looks like an honour killing. But it might not be.’
‘We need to find Osman Yavuz,’ İkmen said. ‘We also need to find out who owns the petrol can we found at the Seyhans’ apartment.’
‘It wasn’t Gözde’s brother Lokman’s?’
‘He says not, and none of his prints were on it,’ İkmen said. ‘We can’t prove that it was or wasn’t Lokman’s can. That said, he works in a garage and so he had easier access to petrol than anyone else. And it was definitely petrol that was poured over Gözde and then set alight.’ İkmen frowned. ‘Somehow we need to build a biography of this cloistered girl’s life. Let’s start by seeing if we can dig up any gossip about her. Honour killings can sometimes have their genesis in whispers heard in the bazaar, can’t they?’
‘The word of a bitter old woman or a man the girl may already have rejected can sometimes cause families to kill or maim a child just to save face.’
‘Sadly, that is very true, Ayşe,’ İkmen said. ‘I want you out in Beşiktaş and over in Fatih where the family live now. See what you can pick up.’
‘Sir.’ She rose from her seat and began to put her jacket on.
‘And take Constable Yıldız with you to Fatih,’ İkmen said. ‘He has local knowledge.’
Gonca the gypsy made a lot of noise whenever they had sex. Her many children had either left home years before or were playing out somewhere in the street, and her neighbours knew exactly what she did and made no comment or trouble for her about it. Gonca consequently gave full voice to her feelings. But then Mehmet Süleyman loved that kind of spontaneity. His wife, long ago, had been just like that. When things had been right between them.
‘Oh!’ Gonca threw herself off him and lay back on her huge bed with a smile on her face. ‘You know,’ she said huskily, ‘you have a very good penis. One of the best! I should like to keep it under my pillow and bring it out when I want an orgasm.’
‘Just my penis?’ He was smiling. Such a statement was typical of Gonca. She was, after all, not just a gypsy, but a very outré gypsy artist. And artists were supposed to be weird.
‘Why would I want anything else?’ she said as she gave him a cigarette and then lit one for herself. ‘A whole man would drive me mad. Even you. But if I could just have your penis . . .’ She winked at him, then put her hand on the object of her desire and said, ‘Imagine how much fun I could have with it!’
He laughed. ‘You are impossible,’ he said as he gently ruffled her long black hair.
Her broad brown face broke into a hundred cracks and wrinkles as she smiled. ‘I am who I am,’ she said, and then she touched the side of his face very tenderly with one thick finger. ‘Maybe I would take the whole body if it was you. Maybe.’
‘And maybe cats will land on the moon,’ he said.
Gonca slipped her legs over the side of her bed and put on her dressing gown. ‘Cats are very clever,’ she said. ‘Don’t underestimate them. I’m going to get
rakı.
Do you want some?’
It was the middle of the day, but he wasn’t at work and so why shouldn’t he indulge in a little alcohol?
‘Yes,’ he said. Gonca left the room.
He’d made a conscious decision to spend the day with Gonca after his wife had basically kicked him out of his house. He’d willingly taken his son to school and would have stayed at home to be with Zelfa. But she had told him to go. ‘When you drop Yusuf at school, just keep on going,’ she’d said. ‘Get out of my sight!’
She’d lost patience with his infidelities. Not with Gonca – Zelfa didn’t know about her – but with other women he had come into contact with. Zelfa was menopausal and had by her own admission lost interest in sex. So he’d gone elsewhere. Not that he was excusing himself; he knew that what he was doing was wrong. But that didn’t mean he was going to stop doing it.
Süleyman switched his mobile phone back on and found that he had one text message. It was from his deputy, Sergeant İzzet Melik, and it said, ‘Call me.’ İzzet very rarely contacted his superior when he wasn’t on duty, and so Süleyman did as he was asked.
‘İzzet?’
‘Sir, I’m in Şişli,’ İzzet said. ‘2B Ateş Apartments, Efe Lane. I’ve just got here, and I’m standing next to a bed with a dead naked man on it. His throat’s been cut.’
İzzet knew how much his boss thrilled to the chase. Murder and its resolution was addictive, they all knew that. Süleyman had already slipped his shirt over his shoulders and strapped his gun holster underneath his arm as he said, ‘I’ll be there.’
He put his trousers on just as she came into the room holding two tall glasses of white, cloudy
rakı
. He looked up at her and frowned. ‘Sorry.’
‘Duty calls?’ She took a long gulp from one of the glasses and then a small sip from the other.
‘An incident in Şişli,’ he said.
‘Oh, where the rich people live.’ She smiled.
‘I have to go.’ He stood up, walked over to her, took her head in his hands and kissed her hard and long on the lips. Then he left.
Chapter 7
The Akol family and their new guests the Seyhans lived in an apartment above a fabric shop on Macar Kardeşler Street. It was a rather nondescript sort of place, although the apartment did overlook, if at a distance, the magnificent Roman Aqueduct of Valens.
But Ayşe Farsakoğlu and Constable Hikmet Yıldız didn’t go to the Akol apartment. Only that morning, Çetin İkmen had told them that Gözde’s death had not been an accident. Other officers had already been in to collect the clothes the family said they had been wearing on that fateful day. News of the murder was out on radio, television and all across the internet. As İkmen had suggested, Farsakoğlu and Yıldız went into Fatih district to listen to what, if anything, people were saying about it, and about the families who lived in their midst. It was Wednesday, market day, and so most people would be out and about.
The two police officers had to do a few things to their appearances before they walked towards the seventeen streets that made up the Wednesday market. Hikmet was out of uniform, and Ayşe had covered her head with a scarf tied into a turban by a female officer back at the station who had a very religious sister. There was no way on earth that she could ever have tied it herself.
‘I look like your mother!’ she grumbled to Hikmet as she gazed with a critical eye at a pile of cherries heaped up on the back of a tattered old donkey cart. He didn’t reply. The truth was that she was indeed considerably older than he was. Not that she looked like his mother in any way. But her anger disturbed him. She was so resentful about wearing the turban. He knew she was a modern, secular woman, but he couldn’t really understand why she was
so
angry. She was, after all, only playing a part.
The stall next to the cherry cart was selling plastic bowls, brushes and mops. It stood in front of a small shop that sold Muslim religious artefacts. There were wall hangings depicting the Kaa’ba in Mecca, the most holy place in Islam, CDs and tapes of religious lectures and music by musicians such as the British convert Yusuf Islam. There were
tesbih
prayer beads in every colour imaginable, small prayer mats for travelling and transparent lockets containing drops of water from the sacred Zamzam well in Saudi Arabia. A woman in full black
chador
stood outside, looking through the window at the CDs.
‘Can I help you, brother?’ an elderly, rather querulous voice asked.