‘But why would Cabbar do that?’ Emine Soylu said. ‘Why?’
‘Mrs Soylu,’ Süleyman said gently, ‘your husband, I am told, wanted to move to Western Europe, set up business there in some capacity.’
‘He talked of it, yes.’
‘And what was your opinion about that, Mrs Soylu?’
She shrugged. ‘I was, well . . . I like Paris very much, you know, Inspector. Rome is a little, well,’ she forced a laugh, ‘Italian for my taste, but . . . Cabbar was very keen. I . . . What can I say . . .’
‘You said you wouldn’t go, didn’t you, Mrs Soylu?’
She just looked at him through her big, wide eyes, which had only now just started to get wet from her tears.
‘You couldn’t be that far away from Deniz, could you? Here in İstanbul was OK because at least you were in the same country but in France or Italy or, worse still, in Britain or Ireland . . .’
‘I only saw him twice a year as it was,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t, I wouldn’t desert him! It was wrong! I told Cabbar, I . . .’
The realisation crashed across her face like a wave. She threw herself down on to the seat beside her and cried. ‘I killed him!’ she screamed. ‘My poor son, I killed you! Allah! Allah!’
It was to Süleyman a very primitive display of grief as one might indeed see around grave sites in the east. Even her voice had coarsened. Would she soon, he wondered, start tearing at her face as the working classes were wont to do even in the city? Selfishly he hoped not. He always found that so hard to stomach. He looked around that over-stuffed room for something other than the screaming woman upon which to focus. There were hideous lamps, hideous family photographs treated to look like bad oil paintings, ghastly rugs, unpleasant coffee tables . . . Everywhere he looked there was evidence of gangster ‘taste’ in full and lurid flight. And then suddenly there, too, was Cabbar’s son, Rahmi Soylu, his young face a mixture of irritation, ‘manliness’ and a little bit of concern.
‘What’s going on?’ he said as he approached the settee upon which his stepmother was slumped. ‘What have you said to her?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve had to give your mother some bad news,’ Süleyman replied. And then looking down at Emine Soylu he said, ‘Mrs Soylu, do you want me to tell Rahmi? Do you . . .’
But she just wept – screamed and wept. Rahmi Soylu looked down at her with ill-disguised contempt and said, ‘Someone tell me what this is about.’
Süleyman took a deep breath. ‘We have discovered that your stepmother’s son Deniz was murdered.’
The young man shrugged and said, ‘But he killed himself, didn’t he? He was mad.’
‘Mr Soylu, I am afraid our suspicions have been roused to the degree that we are now seeking to exhume the body of Mr Koç . . .’
The crying stopped abruptly and immediately. Both men turned to look at a wild and livid Emine Soylu. ‘Exhumed? Dug up?’
‘Yes, Mrs Soylu, I’m afraid that if we want to try and confirm what has been alleged . . .’
‘Dug from the ground!’ She sat or rather reared up on the settee.
‘Mrs Soylu . . .’
‘But his soul will be in torment! You!’ She pointed one long, red-tipped finger at Rahmi. ‘This evil, this outrage, is because of your father!’
‘My father?’ His face contorted with sudden and frightening rage. Süleyman made ready to put himself between them. ‘What’s my father got to do with your dead lunatic? Look at yourself, you could only carry weak, deformed things – you could never carry a child of my father’s. Don’t blame my father for . . .’
‘Your father killed my son!’ Emine Koç screamed into his face. ‘He had him murdered!’ And then in spite of all of Süleyman’s good intentions she launched herself at Rahmi, kicking, screaming and clawing with all of her strength. It took considerable force from a weakened Süleyman as well as from the young victim himself to pull her off. When eventually a very shaken Rahmi Soylu was freed, the policeman bundled him out of the room with a promise to tell him the full story on his own after he had finished speaking to his stepmother.
When he went back into the sitting room, he saw Emine Soylu wiping her bloodied nails calmly on a tissue.
‘Mrs Soylu . . .’
‘Would you think me evil if I told you that part of me actually enjoyed giving that young man a beating?’ she said a little breathlessly. ‘He’s grown so arrogant in recent years! I told Cabbar. “You give your son too much!” I said. But he wouldn’t listen. He spoiled him. I did too.’ She looked down at the floor. ‘But it was Deniz I always wanted. He was my own flesh and blood.’
Süleyman sat down again. ‘I am so sorry to have to bring you such bad news, Mrs Soylu,’ he said. ‘I cannot imagine what you must be feeling.’
‘With not even a husband or another, real child to comfort me,’ she said. But then she looked up and suddenly smiled. ‘I’ve been here before. I know how old I look in spite of all my operations. Horror does that to you. I know that Cabbar’s friends always thought that I was older than him. But I am younger – a lot younger. Inspector, do you know how old I was when my Deniz was born?’
‘No.’ A horrible cold feeling stretched across his back as he remembered what Mürsel had said about Nuri Koç’s sister, Emine. She had, he’d told Süleyman, been ‘accommodating’.
‘I was twelve years old,’ Emine Soylu said simply. ‘Raped by boys old enough to go and do their military service. That’s horror.’
Raped. Just a child. Raped, left not by one man but by a group. What she had been doing out, alone, with boys in a conservative town like Hakkari, Süleyman couldn’t imagine. But she told him and then he knew.
‘I was with my older brother Nuri at the time,’ she said. ‘The boys were his friends. There were four. He was going into the service with them. He knew what they’d done. He called me a whore at the time. Bastard! Men are like that where we come from. They take women by force and then they brand them sluts! Later on I let my brother believe that I had forgiven him. A while ago my brother Nuri was reported as a missing person. I was glad. I hope he’s dead. I never have and never will forgive him.’
Kim Monroe and Matilda Melly had, apparently, argued that morning and the Englishwoman had since taken herself off to somewhere in the city prior to her flight back to the UK.
‘Matilda was pissed that I told you I thought she might be having affairs,’ Kim said as she followed İkmen into the Mellys’ large, white sitting room.
‘Start in the kitchen,’ İkmen said to the two young constables who had accompanied himself, Ayşe Farsakoğlu and Kim Monroe into the property. He then turned to the Canadian and said, ‘Thank you for agreeing to witness our search, Mrs Monroe. I feel a lot more comfortable about being in the home of a diplomat now. Did you explain to Mrs Melly that you were only telling me what you believed to be the truth?’
‘I tried,’ Kim Monroe replied. ‘But she wasn’t listening by then.’
‘Did she say what she might do when she gets home to England?’
‘She said people who really love her are there. Her mom and dad, I guess. Inspector, shouldn’t Matilda be around to follow up on her stolen passport situation?’
İkmen, who was now looking over at Ayşe Farsakoğlu as she looked through various carpet-stuffed cupboards, said, ‘The British have issued her with a temporary replacement and she has given them a satisfactory statement. They are working with the Bulgarians and our own immigration people. As long as she provides a genuine address in England she can do as she pleases. She’s done nothing wrong.’
‘No.’
‘Now,’ he said, ‘you, Mrs Monroe, have a house identical to this one, do you not?’
‘Ours is a little bigger, I think,’ Kim said, ‘but, yeah, the layout is the same.’
‘So tell me,’ İkmen said, ‘which of the four bedrooms upstairs is the main bedroom?’
‘The one at the front, over the street door,’ she said.
‘I will begin there,’ İkmen said. And then he turned to Ayşe. ‘I’m going up . . .’
‘To the Mellys’ bedroom, yes, sir,’ Ayşe said. ‘I know my English isn’t perfect, but I do understand . . .’
‘I apologise.’ He began to climb the stairs that were in the corner of the great white sitting room.
‘Oh, Inspector,’ Kim Monroe said just before he breathlessly reached the top stair.
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t forget that Matilda’s room is at the back overlooking the garden.’
There was a pause before İkmen said, ‘What?’
‘Matilda’s bedroom,’ the Canadian said, ‘it’s at the back opposite Peter’s room. Just so you can know which is where and what . . .’
‘Mrs Monroe,’ İkmen butted in forcefully, ‘am I right in deducing from this that Mr and Mrs Melly didn’t actually sleep together?’
‘No, they haven’t done for years, Matilda told me. She’s got her own computer system and all her stuff in the back room,’ Kim said and then, noticing for the first time that Ayşe Farsakoğlu and İkmen were looking at her in a strange way, she shook her head. ‘What? What have I said?’
‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu,’ İkmen said gravely, ‘will you supervise my search of Mrs Melly’s room please? If her computer is still here, I’m going to switch it on.’ He then turned to Kim Monroe and said, ‘I had been led to believe that the Mellys still slept together. Both their alibis for the night of Yaşar Uzun’s death rest, in part, upon that notion.’
Kim Monroe bit her lips tensely.
Chapter 15
Hotels and pansiyons in Turkey are obliged by law to take passport details from foreign nationals who wish to stay at their premises. In some establishments, but not all, this is computerised. Where it was not, rather laborious records were kept on paper. Fond of computers, though he claimed not to be, Çetin İkmen was, now that he had checked the guest lists of most of the hotels and pansiyons which were computerised, flinching at the thought of his officers having to wade through the mountains of handwritten papers that were still normal in many places. In such establishments time, and sometimes, the entire concept of haste had long been forgotten.
‘Mr Melly,’ he said as he leaned across his desk towards the white-faced Englishman in front of him, ‘are you sure you have no idea where your wife might be staying?’
‘I’ve told you no,’ Peter Melly said as he contemplated an office far smaller and shabbier than his own. ‘And anyway, İkmen, I don’t really see why you are so insistent upon finding Matilda.’
‘As I told you, Mr Melly, it is because she lied,’ İkmen said. ‘When I interviewed her, Mrs Melly told me that “we” – I quote – “sleep at the front of the house”. We. You and her.’
‘Well, I didn’t exactly . . .’
‘You both provided alibis for each other,’ İkmen said. ‘And yet you have separate rooms!’
‘Well, maybe that night we decided to . . .’
‘Oh, come, come, Mr Melly,’ İkmen said, ‘do not insult my intelligence! You and your wife either sleep together or you do not! You told me that you saw your wife on the night that Mr Uzun died and yet if you do not sleep together there is no way that could have happened. So what is it to be? Did you or did you not sleep with your wife on the night that Yaşar Uzun died?’
Between his favourite bar, the Balık Pazar for a little shopping and, bafflingly, the UFO Museum on Büyükparmakkapı Sokak, Mr Peter Melly had been a difficult man to find outside the strictures of the British Consulate. On top of that, pinning him down about the state of his obviously deceased marriage was still not proving easy. But İkmen had had the bit between his teeth for hours now, ever since that casual remark that Kim Monroe had made about the Mellys’ bedrooms.
‘Well, Mr Melly?’
The Englishman sighed and then said, ‘Well, no, I didn’t. Things haven’t been right since that posting to Paris five years ago. There was a Frenchwoman, as there tends to be . . .’
‘So you did not see your wife until the following morning?’ İkmen said.
‘Well, I may have done, but . . .’
‘So it is possible that she could have been out when you arrived home from Mr and Mrs Klaassen’s carpet party?’
‘Well . . . Yes, I suppose that physically . . .’ He looked up. ‘But why would my wife want to kill Yaşar Uzun?’ he said. ‘She hardly knew him.’
İkmen looked across at Ayşe Farsakoğlu and said, ‘Sergeant, can you please organise for some officers to get into the back streets of Sultanahmet. Check the records of every little hippy hostel you can find. Almost all paper in those places, I’m afraid.’
‘Sir, Mrs Melly is fifty-two.’
‘Ayşe, those places don’t discriminate. Anybody’s money is good enough for them.’
‘Sir.’ With a sigh she left the room.
İkmen turned back to Peter Melly and said, ‘But are you sure your wife didn’t know Yaşar Uzun?’
‘Yes! Why would she? Matilda has no interest in carpets!’
‘Maybe not, but what about carpet dealers?’ İkmen said.
The Englishman’s face darkened. ‘If you’re suggesting . . .’
‘I am not suggesting anything,’ İkmen replied. ‘Others have suggested to me that perhaps your own infidelity might have been repaid by your wife.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous! Matilda would never have cuckolded me!’ He crossed his arms awkwardly across his chest and then said, ‘If that’s that bloody Kim Monroe . . .’
‘Not only Mrs Monroe, Mr Melly,’ İkmen said. ‘Your wife has been seen with other men. Whether any wrongdoing took place I do not know. But Yaşar Uzun was a ladies’ man and some of his ladies were foreigners. In addition, we know that Mrs Melly did have a certain interest in common with Mr Uzun outside the carpet business. Maybe your wife and Mr Uzun had a, what do you call it, a lovers’ tiff out on the Peri road.’
‘What “interest”? What do you mean?’
‘You don’t believe your wife capable of an affair? Anyone is capable of an affair,’ İkmen said, knowing down to the bottom of his soul that he was probably the one exception to this rule. ‘But then maybe she killed Yaşar Uzun because she was so angry about the Kerman. Perhaps she was trying to get some of your money back, some of her future.’