‘You live very close to the job.’ Professor Kazim İsmail Gürkan Caddesi is an extension of Yerebatan Caddesi where the Tourism police station is situated.
‘Yes, Allah has been kind to us,’ Abdullah Ergin replied. ‘Handan goes shopping in Tahtakale most days for meat and vegetables and rice. Sometimes while she’s down there she’ll go into the Mısır Çarşı just to look at all the expensive sweets and spices.’
İkmen nodded. His wife Fatma, like a lot of women in and around the Sultanahmet area, did much the same. Although Fatma usually went with her daughter Hulya and grandson Timür and was in no way shy about buying sweets if not spices and herbs from the Mısır Çarşı.
‘On Wednesdays she’ll usually go over to the Akbıyık Caddesi market. Her parents live over there in Cankurtaran and so she goes to see them at the same time. Handan is a housewife.’
‘She does nothing else?’ Ergin was a humble, poorly paid Tourism policeman, what else would his wife do? But İkmen had to ask. His question bore fruit. Abdullah Ergin’s face darkened.
‘Sergeant Ergin?’
The sergeant breathed in deeply, then out in a long, slow stream. ‘Some time ago she said that she wanted to learn to speak English,’ he said. ‘She said that maybe if she can do that she can get a job in one of the tourist shops or restaurants. I don’t know about that, but I offered to teach her a little, you know how it is.’
İkmen imagined that he probably did. He’d seen it many times before. Men teaching their wives the odd word or phrase when they felt like it. He wasn’t impressed, although he tried hard not to show it.
‘But then she found there is a class for English,’ Ergin continued. ‘It’s free, it’s just for women, and children can go along too. Every Tuesday morning at an office above a pide salonu on İncili Çavuş Sokak.’ In Sultanahmet, just around the corner from İkmen’s apartment. ‘So I took her,’ Ergin said. ‘There were about six women there, just like Handan, and it was run by three western ladies, one I know was Canadian.’
Ergin looked down at the floor with furious eyes.
‘Did Handan enjoy her classes?’ İkmen asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ he looked up. ‘She did well. Started talking about getting a job. These women were encouraging her to do that. But I said no, maybe later, maybe when our family is complete. It was then she told me she didn’t want any more children. She talked about fulfilling herself.’
‘What did you do?’ İkmen asked.
Ergin looked down at his son with sad eyes. ‘I forbade her to go back.’
‘And what did she do?’
‘She disobeyed her husband.’
‘You know this for a fact?’
‘Yes.’
İkmen sighed. He’d been up nearly all night looking, fruitlessly, for the Lawrence Kerman and now here he was talking to a man whose wife had left him because he didn’t want her to learn English. Uncharitably, İkmen imagined him beating her. So many men still felt it was their right.
‘How do you know that she disobeyed you, Sergeant Ergin? Did she go back to her class?’
‘The Canadian woman, Mrs Monroe, she told me she hadn’t seen Handan for months. Everyone at that class said the same thing. But I don’t believe them. I think that she carried on going to classes, that they put ideas in her head, and that now she’s gone off to “fulfil” herself!’
İkmen thought about lighting up a cigarette but then, remembering that there was a baby in the room, he decided against it. Even his own daughter could be funny about smoking around children now. When his lot were babies everyone had smoked and nobody had ever said anything.
‘This Canadian woman,’ İkmen said, ‘is she a teacher or . . .’
‘Her husband works for the Canadian Consulate,’ Ergin said.
‘I see.’
İkmen glanced down at the list of diplomatic officials he was shortly about to interview and quickly spotted the name ‘Mark Monroe – Canada’.
‘Would you like me to speak to these ladies?’ İkmen asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Very well. Now is there anything else you can think of that may give a clue as to where your wife might be?’
He shrugged. ‘No, I . . . Listen, Çetin Bey, you know how it is to be a hard-working man. Handan, well, Handan and I, we don’t talk, you know. I come home from work, I eat, maybe watch a little television, and then I go to bed. Life is hard.’
‘Mmm.’ İkmen knew what he was talking about. He’d been working hard, and harder, for twice as many years as this man. The difference being that he and his wife did, in spite of everything, still talk. They often rowed, but not talking with Fatma had never been an option. But then Fatma had never been afraid of her husband. She’d never had any cause to be. Handan Ergin was not so fortunate, İkmen felt.
‘We are actively looking for your wife now and I will arrange to speak to the ladies at her class, sergeant,’ İkmen said. ‘I am working on another case at the moment, but I will do whatever I can for you and I will delegate what I cannot to my inferiors.’
Abdullah Ergin nodded his approval and then gently kissed his gurgling baby on the head.
After gaining the reluctant approval of his boss, Commissioner Ardıç, to allow İzzet Melik to travel to Hakkari, Mehmet Süleyman set off in the direction of the district of Sirkeci. This is a largely commercial area of the old city down by the waterfront, dominated by Sirkeci Railway Station, which was once the terminus for the Orient Express. Süleyman, who needed to visit an apartment above a car showroom on Muradiye Caddesi, bade farewell to his sergeant at this point and then watched for a moment as İzzet Melik drove off in the direction of the Golden Horn. He lived in Zeyrek with, Süleyman had recently discovered, his younger brother who was also divorced. On the surface, a bluff and at times misogynistic individual, İzzet was nevertheless a diligent officer and had proved himself a person his superior could trust. Süleyman hoped he would be all right out in the dry-baked wilds of Hakkari. The spy, Mürsel, had considered the entire enterprise utterly without merit. But Süleyman wasn’t so sure. However, as soon as İzzet had gone, he turned to the job in hand which involved re-interviewing a boy called Esad Benmayor.
Esad, who was the youngest child of a middle-class secular Jewish family, had been one of the peeper’s earliest victims. Like a lot of those early victims Esad was young and attractive and had woken in the middle of the night to see the masked man masturbating at the end of his bed. Esad, who was not a timid boy by any means, had screamed long and loud and the peeper had responded by escaping through the same window by which he had entered. Like the majority of old city flats, the Benmayors’ place looked out over and was overlooked by countless higgledy-piggledy rooftops of all different vintages. İstanbul has always been a city of rooftops. But as pressure mounted, particularly upon hotels and pansiyons, to obtain even the merest glimpse of one of the city’s three great waterways, building upwards had been on the increase. The peeper, above all, was known to use this labyrinthine rooftop world both as a way into and way out from the majority of his victims.
The boy, whom Süleyman had telephoned in advance of his visit, was alone when he arrived.
‘Dad works in the Audi dealership downstairs,’ he said as he ushered Süleyman towards a large pale settee in the middle of what was a considerably large living room.
‘Yes, I remember,’ Süleyman replied as he sat down. ‘And your mother and sister work at Sirkeci Station, don’t they?’
Esad smiled. ‘You remembered.’
It had been six months since Süleyman had interviewed Esad after his night-time encounter with the peeper. He had been one of the few boys the policeman was pretty sure was not homosexual. Indeed, apart from the fact that he was ‘pretty’, Esad, like Cabbar Soylu, was an unusual peeper victim. An enthusiastic runner, he neither smoked nor drank and was a grade ‘A’ student on the language course he was taking at university.
‘Yes,’ Süleyman responded. ‘I’m sorry that I have to bother you with this peeper thing again, Esad . . .’
‘One boy died, didn’t he?’ Esad’s face darkened. ‘And another one was almost killed?’
‘Yes.’ The male prostitute, Nizan Tapan, had been killed the previous October, just after Abdullah Aydın had been stabbed and only just survived. Because he alone had seen the peeper’s face, Aydın, who also claimed not to be homosexual, was currently under guard by Mürsel’s people and therefore unavailable to Süleyman.
‘That’s dreadful.’ Esad sat down opposite Süleyman. ‘But İnşallah, this peeper will be caught soon.’
‘İnşallah.’
‘And I am happy to help, Inspector, if I can.’
Süleyman sighed. ‘Esad, I know I have asked you before, but circumstances mean that I must ask you again. Are you homosexual? As before, no repercussions will follow from this, I will not tell your parents and—’
‘Inspector, I am not homosexual!’ Esad shrugged and held his hands helplessly at his sides. ‘I have a girlfriend. I have the same girlfriend I had when the peeper did what he did in my room. I’m really very ordinary in every way.’
And yet there had to be something about him that had attracted the peeper’s attention! ‘Esad,’ Süleyman continued, ‘please don’t be offended, but I have to ask, do you ever do anything that may be construed as, er, as immoral . . .’
‘You mean like sleeping with my girlfriend or beating my mother and sister or something?’ He tipped his head backwards to signal his denial. ‘No. Don’t misunderstand me, Inspector, I am not perfect, no man can be, but I do try to be as moral as I can.’
The sound of the Benmayors’ doorbell brought their conversation to a temporary close.
‘That’s probably Gelin, my girlfriend,’ the young man said as he sprang lightly from his seat. ‘She’ll tell you about me, I’m sure.’
While he was out of the room Süleyman looked around at the very ordinary flat with its clean, if slightly worn, furniture and its liberal scattering of family photographs. So far, unless he was hiding some awful crime somewhere in his short-lived background, Esad Benmayor was indeed a very ordinary boy. But then when his girlfriend Gelin entered the room everything changed.
‘We sometimes try to get together for namaz – performed in separate rooms, of course – when I’m not at college,’ Esad said as he ushered the little turbaned girl into his living room. ‘Gelin, this is Inspector Süleyman from the police, about that horrible business I had last year.’
‘Oh, yes, that was horrible.’ She sat down without offering her hand to Süleyman in greeting. ‘We mustn’t miss namaz, Esad.’
‘No, of course not. Inspector Süleyman will be gone by midday, won’t you, Inspector?’
‘Well, er . . .’ He thought Esad Benmayor was a secular Jew. Had he possibly become confused in Süleyman’s mind with someone else? ‘Esad,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that you were a religious person . . .’
‘Oh, yes,’ the boy replied. ‘Islam is everything to me.’
‘Er, since . . .’
‘Inspector, I was never a practising Jew,’ Esad said with a smile. ‘But I converted to Islam last September, a year almost to the day after I met Gelin.’
Last September. Just a month before Esad’s bedroom was invaded by the peeper. ‘Oh. Good.’
The girl still neither looked up nor smiled.
‘Your parents gave a big party for me, didn’t they, Gelin?’
Süleyman imagined that the Benmayor family were probably less than enthusiastic. And as for the peeper? Well, Esad was indeed a very good boy in the accepted sense of the word. But for someone like the peeper, if Mürsel was right about the offender, Esad would be abhorrent. To willingly move from rational secularism to something the peeper would no doubt consider to be the depths of superstition would in all probability make him very angry. It might even make him want to kill.
‘Esad,’ Süleyman said, ‘can you remember who came to the party Gelin’s parents put on for you?’
‘A lot of clerics,’ Esad said with a smile. ‘A
lot
of clerics.’
İkmen’s knowledge of the life and career of Yaşar Uzun was not unduly increased by his contact with the various diplomatic types who had attended Yaşar’s final carpet show in Peri. He still had no news about the Lawrence carpet for the Englishman, and Peter Melly had been extremely agitated during the entire course of the interview. One of the Americans, a woman who had been angling to leave as soon as she arrived, had irritated İkmen intensely, but he had got on well with the Canadian, Mark Monroe. Easygoing and polite, Mr Monroe was quite happy to talk some more to the Turkish detective once all the other foreigners had left. İkmen asked him straight out whether his wife did any English teaching in the old city.
‘On İncili Çavuş Sokak, yes,’ Mark Monroe said with a smile. ‘Kim and some other diplomatic wives teach English to a group of local women.’
‘Do you know who the other ladies are?’ İkmen asked.
‘Yes, there’s another Canadian wife, Dawn Shaw, and Peter Melly’s wife Matilda from the UK Consulate. They’re the main ones. Why?’
Before he could answer Monroe’s question, İkmen’s mobile began to ring. He apologised and turned aside to take the call. When he had finished he said, ‘I am required to be at the Forensic Institute now so I am afraid that I must leave you, Mr Monroe.’ He picked up his car keys from his desk. ‘But in answer to your question, one of the students of the English class your wife works at has recently gone missing. The lady’s husband claims to have spoken to your wife on the subject.’
‘Kim didn’t mention it to me.’
‘Your wife told the husband that his wife had left the class some time before. Mr Monroe, would it be possible for your wife to contact me herself? I think I need to clarify this situation with her.’
Monroe shrugged. ‘Sure.’
‘Thank you.’
İkmen led Mark Monroe out of the building and then drove himself over to the Forensic Institute. Yaşar Uzun’s personal effects were now ready for İkmen to collect on behalf of the dead man’s family. They were also going to let him have a look at what had been salvaged from the carpet dealer’s Jeep.