Chapter 13
‘Kim, I am begging you,’ the Englishman said through a welter of stale alcohol fumes. ‘Don’t take her, let me. It could be my last chance to talk to her, for God’s sake!’
Kim Monroe was used to her friend and neighbour Peter Melly getting drunk on occasion, but this first thing in the morning phenomenon was a new one on her. Of course it had only come into being since all the Lawrence carpet business Matilda had told her about, not to mention the latter’s desertion.
‘Peter,’ Kim said as she bodily blocked his way into her house, ‘Matilda is going back to Britain tomorrow morning and I have agreed to take her to the airport.’
‘I don’t understand why she’s going home!’ Melly said as he ran his fingers through his mop of untidy, greying hair. ‘I told her it was all right. If she stayed, we could work things out!’
‘She doesn’t think so.’
‘And besides, the police here, they might still want to ask her questions . . .’
‘But they’ve interviewed her already, Peter,’ Kim replied. In spite of knowing that Peter Melly was an irresponsible shit, she was sorry for him at that moment. ‘They’ve done.’
‘Yes, but there’s still the issue of her passport!’
‘Which, if you’d been in to work, you’d know is resolved,’ Kim said. ‘Your immigration guys are working with the Bulgarians to track it down. Matilda’s got a temporary.’
‘Well, why didn’t I . . .’
‘Know? Because you’ve been drunk for days, Peter,’ Kim said. ‘You know, if I were you I’d get sobered up and off to work. You’re having a rough time, but you don’t want to lose your job too, do you?’
He turned away into the Monroes’ lush front garden and made his way back towards the clean and quiet road beyond. Kim shut the door and then went back into her kitchen where Matilda Melly was waiting for her with a cup of black coffee in her hands. As Kim entered she handed it over and said, ‘What did he say?’
‘He wants to drive you to the airport tomorrow.’ Kim took a big swig from the cup and then sighed. ‘For what it’s worth, I think he really knows he’s screwed up. I think he’s genuinely sorry and he is lost without you.’
‘Yes, but does he love me? Really love me?’ Matilda replied. And then she answered her own question with, ‘No.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I just know,’ the Englishwoman said with a smile.
‘How?’ Kim was, she knew, intrigued. If Matilda ‘knew’ that Peter didn’t love her, how had she come to that conclusion and what, if anything, was she measuring his lack of love against? Sure, he had in the past been inattentive and unfaithful. But now, he seemed to be desperate to keep his wife. A case of not knowing what one had until that thing was under threat . . .
Matilda Melly smiled. ‘Because real love isn’t selfish. Real love takes risks that are about the couple as opposed to the individual. Real love fills your soul.’
‘And so is that how you once felt about Peter?’ Kim asked.
But the Englishwoman just shrugged.
‘Was there someone else at some time? Is there . . .’
‘No.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Why?’
Kim sighed. She had been meaning to tell her, but Matilda had got back so late from the police station the previous evening that she had not had a chance. ‘Matilda, I saw you once, in Bebek, in a restaurant with a young man. Doris saw you once in Teşvikiye . . .’
‘I wasn’t with anyone in Teşvikiye!’ the Englishwoman said. ‘Did you tell the police I was in Teşvikiye?’
‘Yes, I had to. Inspector İkmen asked me outright. It was the time you were supposed to be helping with the consulate kids’ party. I couldn’t lie!’
‘Oh, couldn’t you?’ Matilda Melly suddenly snapped. ‘Oh, so that’s why İkmen kept on to me about Teşvikiye and Nişantaşı and what I was and was not doing there! God! I was shopping, Kim. You’ve all got kids, you don’t know what it’s like to be like me! Suddenly I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t be with other people’s kids, and so I went up to Nişantaşı for some retail therapy to make myself feel better.’
‘But you didn’t tell anyone!’
‘No, because it was my business,’ she said. ‘Just like the boy in Bebek is my business.’
‘Was he, the young man . . .’
‘The young man in Bebek was an afternoon of really good sex,’ Matilda said. ‘Peter thinks I’m just some sort of sexless knitting machine, but I have needs. If you say anything to Peter, by the way, I will deny it! If you say anything to anyone, I will deny it!’
‘Matilda . . .’
‘If my husband still has any money to give, I’ll want my share,’ she said. ‘Twenty-five years of loveless . . .’
‘Peter does love you, in his way, and anyway, what will you do? You can’t take afternoons with boys . . .’
‘I’m going home,’ Matilda said. ‘I won’t be having afternoons with Turkish boys back there. I won’t need to. People love me at home.’ She looked very sad.
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘I’d better go and make a start with my packing,’ she said. And then as she began to make her way out of the kitchen, she added, ‘Oh, and you don’t have to take me to the airport tomorrow, Kim. I’ll just pack my things now and then take a taxi to a hotel in town. I’ll spend my last night in İstanbul on my own. It’ll be better that way.’
‘Matilda . . .’
‘That way I’ll know that no one will be judging me.’
Kim Monroe watched her leave with a mixture of relief and sadness. Matilda Melly was, and probably always had been, a very lonely and unhappy woman. The last thing she had ever needed was to be married to a man who was so obviously a dickhead.
‘On the day that Handan Ergin went missing, exactly half the money she and her husband had saved in their account disappeared.’
‘And Sergeant Ergin didn’t notice that until today?’ İkmen said as he looked across at Metin İskender with an expression of incredulity on his face.
‘Odd as it sounds, amongst people of their type, the woman was apparently in charge of the finances. He’s been too busy looking for her to be bothered about money.’
Inwardly İkmen smiled. When Metin İskender spoke about ‘people of their type’ he meant working-class folk rather like, if not as poor as, his own parents. Until he made a conscious and very brave decision not to indulge in crime or drugs or any of the other ills that afflicted his home district of Ümraniye and to get himself out, he was at a far lower social level than the Ergins.
‘We actually found this out ourselves,’ Metin continued. ‘The Ergins are with the Garanti Bank and I made a routine request for information. That was what I found.’
‘So maybe Mrs Ergin, far from having gone missing, is actually out in the big wide world somewhere on her own, out of choice?’ İkmen said.
‘Maybe. Not that this changes anything with regard to her husband’s involvement in Yaşar Uzun’s death,’ Metin İskender said. ‘One’s own brother, as I think you will agree, Çetin, is far from a suitable alibi.’
‘Indeed, although we must still establish motive.’
‘Which is why every officer in this city should be looking for Mrs Handan Ergin. Find the wife and, I believe, we may well have found the motive. After all, if Handan was having an affair with the carpet dealer and she knew that her husband, a police officer, had killed him, she could be a very frightened woman. I for one can see only too well why she might have run.’
‘If you put it like that, I must concur,’ İkmen said.
İskender leaned forward frowning. ‘Although I sense you still have doubts?’
‘Oh, I always have doubts about everything, Metin,’ İkmen said with a smile. ‘It is my blessing and my curse. You know that Uzun deposited sixty thousand pounds from Peter Melly into his account last October? Ayşe discovered from his bank that he took it all out in bits and pieces over the following four months.’
‘So?’
‘So did he pay for his Bulgarian property with that money, converted into euros? And if he did, where is the sixty thousand sterling from Melly that is still missing?’
Metin İskender shrugged.
İkmen looked up at the ceiling and said, ‘Allah!’ And because he didn’t effectively have any answers he then changed the subject. ‘Did you hear that Mehmet Süleyman finally got the peeper?’ he said.
‘Shot him, yes. Rather a shame, that,’ the younger man replied. ‘Although from the little the commissioner told me, it would seem that this person was the most archetypal friendless loner I, at least, had been expecting. I mean, who in his right mind breaks into people’s bedrooms and performs acts of masturbation? Whether they murder or not, that type is always basically the same.’
İkmen, who knew more about it than he wished to expound upon to his colleague, and who also didn’t share İskender’s rigid view of personality, kept his counsel. However, before either of the men could speak further, Ayşe Farsakoğlu entered her superior’s office bearing glasses of tea for both İkmen and İskender.
‘Thank you for that, Ayşe,’ İkmen said as she placed the tea down in front of him.
‘It’s nothing.’
Ignoring her completely, İskender stirred a cube of sugar into his tea and then said, ‘So it was Stoev who reckoned that Uzun had a lover . . . But do we have any other evidence for this contention?’
‘We may do,’ İkmen said as he turned to his sergeant with a smile. ‘How did you get on with the kapıcı of Mr Uzun’s building last night, Ayşe?’
She made a point of looking into the beautifully arrogant face of Metin İskender. She didn’t like him. ‘Mr Osman, the kapıcı, was most elusive on the subject, sir,’ she said.
‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ İkmen said.
‘However, when I realised that it was the fact that I was female that was holding Mr Osman back – his embarrassment you understand – I asked to speak to his wife,’ Ayşe said.
İkmen smiled again, with obvious pride. His protégée had a very resourceful head on her attractive shoulders.
‘Belkis Hanım, Mrs Osman, was very illuminating,’ Ayşe continued, still looking at Inspector İskender. ‘She told me that many women came and went from Mr Uzun’s apartment. Some were, he told her, clients, a few others apparently, his sisters. Now knowing as we do that Mr Uzun only had brothers . . .’
‘So some of these women were Turkish and some were foreigners?’ İkmen asked.
‘The clients tended to be foreign, yes, sir,’ Ayşe said. ‘When I asked Belkis Hanım whether or not she might be able to identify any of them, she said that it would be difficult. Apparently amid such thronging hordes picking one from the other would be well nigh impossible.’
‘Yaşar Uzun was a busy man.’
‘Odd, don’t you think, that his employer was apparently ignorant of his philandering?’ İskender said as he looked with just slightly more regard at the face of Ayşe Farsakoğlu.
İkmen shrugged. ‘Raşit Bey is old, I don’t think that he’s always actually in his shop these days.’
‘There’s his grandson and the assistant.’
‘Well, we could go back and talk to them again,’ İkmen said. ‘But I don’t know how much good it would do. I mean, Metin, you must have seen a few carpet men at work over the years? There’s so much flirting that goes on with the female customers, how can anyone know what is real and what isn’t? The boys may well have thought he was just messing around. After all, in the absence of Raşit Bey, Yaşar was in charge, and the lads were unlikely to question him. And besides, some of these women he took back to his apartment may well have met elsewhere.’
‘But some of them were Turkish,’ İskender said, ‘so one of them could have been Handan Ergin.’
‘Maybe.’ And then turning to Ayşe, İkmen said, ‘Good work, sergeant.’
‘Oh, there’s more,’ Ayşe said.
‘More? How very wonderful, sergeant,’ İkmen said with one eye on the perpetually unimpressed İskender.
‘Something that Mr Osman was happy to talk to me about was a visit he had from a man called Mr Kordovi,’ Ayşe said. ‘He came early yesterday afternoon asking to see Mr Uzun. Mr Kordovi, Mr Osman told me, works for a car showroom up in Şişli and had come to collect the three unpaid instalments on the carpet dealer’s Jeep. Mr Kordovi was understandably upset to hear of Mr Uzun’s death but, according to Mr Osman, he was incandescent with fury about his ruined vehicle.’
‘Oh, dear.’ İkmen leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. ‘So this means – what?’
‘It means, sir,’ Ayşe said, ‘that Mr Uzun spent sixty thousand euros on property in Bulgaria, and he must have paid some sort of deposit on his apartment and on the car. But I can’t see that, given current exchange rates, he can have spent much more than sixty thousand pounds sterling.’
‘Which, given what we know about his bank account, leaves another sixty thousand . . .’
‘Numbered notes,’ Ayşe put in.
İkmen smiled. ‘Numbered notes still unaccounted for.’
Metin İskender, who had been listening to what passed between his colleagues with interest, said, ‘Mr Melly definitely gave Yaşar Uzun one hundred and twenty thousand pounds?’
‘He says he did,’ İkmen replied. ‘He certainly took that amount, raised on his property in the UK, out of his account. He has a receipt signed by Uzun for it. But half of it is missing . . .’
‘You don’t think that Melly still has it do you?’ İskender asked.
‘I can’t think why he would,’ İkmen replied.
‘Some sort of scam or . . .’
‘I don’t think so,’ İkmen said. ‘He really wants that carpet. I believe he did pay for it.’
‘But then who has the rest of the money? A load of sterling cash floating around . . .’
‘Mr Uzun had no investments,’ Ayşe said. ‘And his family don’t seem to have come into money or assets.’
İkmen shook his head. ‘Well, I suppose as a matter of course, we will have to search Mr Melly’s property. But I will be very surprised if the cash is there. What we need to do, I think, is try to identify some of the women Uzun went with. One or more of them, maybe this special woman Nikolai Stoev talked about, could have come into some nice wads of sterling. Not that that would necessarily bring us any closer to Uzun’s killer.’