She paused for a moment before replying, ‘You’ll find that my Aunt Jane, Jane Harrison, left me money, some years—’
‘How much?’
Matilda Melly leaned forward, a small smile now on her lips, and said, ‘What, you mean how much money . . .’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t answer, pretending to think.
He put his cigarette out before lighting another and leaning across the table at her. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘Mrs Melly, what you should know is that your husband Peter instructed his bank, HSBC, to make a record of all the serial numbers of the sterling notes that he gave to Yaşar Uzun.’
He looked at her face for any slight sign or change of colour, but none was forthcoming.
‘And so,’ he continued, ‘if a significant number of the banknotes in your suitcase correspond to the numbers recorded by HSBC, then I can reach only two conclusions. Either that Mr Uzun and yourself were lovers or partners in some way and that you shared the money that was paid for the carpet by your husband. Or that you or someone you know took the money from Uzun just before or just after his death. That person may have killed him, you . . .’
‘I want a lawyer,’ she cut in suddenly. Now her face was pale, very pale.
‘That is your right . . .’
She banged a fist down on to the table before standing up and saying, ‘Now!’
İkmen looked across at İskender and then both men watched as the Englishwoman turned her body and her face to the bare wall behind the desk.
Although fully aware of the fact that he wasn’t at police headquarters because of anything he had done wrong, Lee Roberts was made uncomfortable by the look and the smell of the place. Functional and featureless, the place reeked of sweat, stale cigarettes and a sort of sweetish odour, which he later discovered was the lemon-scented cologne that a lot of people chose to sterilise their hands with both before and after eating. However, the office that the very attractive female officer ushered him into was not nearly as smelly as the rest of the building seemed to be. Tidy and clean, it was not, the young woman told him, the office of the man he had thought he had come to see.
‘Inspector İkmen cannot come,’ she said in her slightly husky, very sexy voice. ‘Sorry. A colleague, Inspector Süleyman, will come now. He knows all things about this problems that you have. Can I get you tea?’
Lee Roberts said that would be very nice. He was both tired and dehydrated after his flight from London. Tea would perk him up. And so the female officer yelled something unintelligible out into the corridor and then they both waited in silence for this other Inspector who, Lee hoped, really did know something about his grandfather’s carpet. After all, it wasn’t that Granddad’s Lawrence of Arabia carpet was a simple matter. It was stolen, he knew, because of the drunken boasting of his own father. Lee had things to tell the Turkish police that he knew they didn’t yet know. Things that he was aware would complicate matters, probably to his detriment. He felt for the old photograph his grandfather had taken of the Kerman many years before and then looked up and smiled. In his mid-thirties, Lee Roberts was a slim, pleasant-looking man – his smile making the Turkish policewoman blush just a little. But then it was a very open, available smile which was not surprising in view of the fact that Lee was recently divorced and openly on the lookout for a new woman in his life.
‘Mr Roberts?’
He looked around for the source of the deep, male voice and found himself looking at a tall, incredibly handsome man in early middle age. The female officer who had collected him from Atatürk Airport was also looking up at the tall, handsome man with rapt attention. Lee inwardly bowed to the far superior competition and then stood up and offered the man his hand.
‘Lee Roberts.’ He then noticed that the man had his right arm in a sling. ‘Oh . . .’
‘A little accident. It is nothing,’ the man said. Then he told him his name, ‘Inspector Süleyman.’
‘Nice to meet you, Inspector.’
Süleyman moved behind his desk and sat down. ‘Please do sit down, Mr Roberts,’ he said.
Lee Roberts sat.
‘Now I apologise that Inspector İkmen cannot be here,’ Süleyman said. ‘But something very, how do you say? Something very pressing has arisen and he must go to deal with that. Scotland Yard are satisfied we understand that you are the grandson of the Private Victor Roberts who was the servant of T. E. Lawrence. You do, Mr Roberts, have the documents they told you to bring?’
‘Yes.’ He took the photograph of the carpet out of his pocket and then dug inside his hand luggage for his passport and birth certificate plus a sheaf of documents that had belonged to his late grandfather – birth certificate, military pay-books etc.
Süleyman passed a cursory eye over this paperwork before he said, ‘We will need to make photocopies and you will need to sign a document saying that we have given the carpet back to you. I will have a copy in English for you to look at.’
‘That’s very kind,’ Lee said.
‘It’s nothing.’
Lee Roberts could very easily have left it at that, taken the Kerman, gone back to Britain, and lived happily ever after. It’s what his father would have done. But Lee was more like his late grandfather than his own old man. After all, it hadn’t been Victor who had been so happy to find the Kerman in that antique shop in İstanbul all those years ago. He’d only allowed Stanley, Lee’s father, to buy the carpet on condition that they both at some point had a stab at finding its rightful owner. But after Antalya and the theft of the carpet that had been impossible. Victor, at least, had died a very sad man because of it.
‘Inspector Süleyman,’ Lee said after a pause. ‘I have something to tell you.’
‘Oh? What is that?’
‘I don’t own the Lawrence carpet,’ Lee Roberts said. ‘Victor, my grandfather, gave it away here in İstanbul, back in 1920. The person he gave it to is the only rightful owner.’
Chapter 17
İkmen looked down at his watch and then turned to Metin İskender. ‘We’d better get to the airport,’ he said. ‘Pick up this other “Matilda Melly” from the Bulgarians.’
‘What do you think they’re talking about?’ İskender replied as he tipped his head in the direction of Peter Melly in seemingly rapt conversation with his wife’s appointed lawyer.
‘I don’t know,’ İkmen said as he lit up a cigarette and then leaned against the corridor wall. ‘But I think that, in some way, Peter Melly still loves his wife.’
‘I didn’t know that he didn’t love her,’ İskender said.
‘I’m saying that he does.’ İkmen smiled. ‘Not that he is necessarily in love with her, you understand. Peter Melly has had affairs. But I think that Matilda is essential to him in that way that a lot of long-term wives are essential to their husbands. There is a comfort in the familiarity.’
İskender looked at him slightly questioningly. After all, İkmen himself had been married for a very long time. Not that he felt in even the slightest way that Fatma was just little more than a comfortable familiarity. Fatma İkmen was many things but a mere habit was not one of them.
While first İkmen and then İskender finished their cigarettes, they watched Peter Melly and the lawyer who had been allocated to his wife talk in a huddle at a corner of the corridor. The lawyer, who İkmen recognised as one of the more fluent English speakers, was considerably overweight and frequently mopped his sweating brow with a handkerchief. Far too much rich food and probably liberal amounts of alcohol too, İkmen surmised, and then, looking down at his own bony fingers, he smiled. Not that this fat, overblown lawyer would, if he were right, do Mrs Melly very much good. If he was indeed correct, then Mrs Melly was already as good as lost.
That this Englishman, Mr Roberts, now said that he didn’t own the Lawrence carpet was not what Mehmet Süleyman had been expecting. The carpet was worth a lot of money. But he was insisting it wasn’t his. He was also, to Süleyman’s slight irritation, beginning to expound what promised to be a long and possibly rambling story. Although not regretting taking Mr Roberts on on İkmen’s behalf, he nevertheless felt that the older man was more equipped to deal with the Englishman than himself.
‘When the First World War ended, this city was occupied by allied troops,’ Lee Roberts said. ‘Mainly, I have to confess, from the UK.’
Süleyman, who was now smoking a Gauloise, tipped his head to show that he had understood. The Allied occupation of İstanbul at the end of the Great War was not his favourite topic, but Roberts had said he had a story to tell and now he was telling it.
‘So Granddad came here with the army,’ the Englishman continued. ‘He told me a bit about it. It wasn’t pretty. There was hunger and despair and . . .’
‘Our people had yet to rise again as they did in the War of Independence, Mr Roberts,’ Süleyman said. ‘The Ottomans had been defeated and we do not, believe me, take defeat well.’
‘No, well . . .’ Süleyman looked as if he could have been a general or something in years gone by. It had not been often in his life that Lee Roberts had come across such a haughty bearing. He silently thanked God for the presence of the female sergeant who had got his tea and appeared to be a far easier character all round.
‘So,’ Lee Roberts said, ‘Granddad was in İstanbul with the Lawrence carpet. He really treasured it, you know. Colonel Lawrence had been good to him. Granddad did some things in this city that later he was not proud of but there were some that he was proud of. The main one being when he rescued a lady from a gang of drunken sailors.’
‘A Turkish lady?’
‘Yes. Granddad said that her face was covered by a veil. He never in all the time that he was with her saw her whole face. But she had, he said, amazing eyes.’
‘And Victor Roberts rescued her?’
‘Yes. I think, reading between the lines – Granddad was quite a prude really, always found it difficult to actually give things their proper names – that the sailors were trying to rape the woman. By a combination of shouting, threatening them with his pistol and pushing them off, Granddad managed to free the lady from them.’
‘He did a very good thing,’ Süleyman said.
‘Yes.’ Lee Roberts smiled. ‘He was a good sort, my granddad. I miss him.’ He turned his head to one side away from the handsome man and, even more importantly, the pretty female police officer. There was no need for either of them to see his tears. Victor had been dead for years, but Lee still mourned him every day. Unlike his own father, his granddad had been a decent, moral man. ‘But anyway,’ he continued, ‘by way of a sort of reward for what Granddad had done, the lady asked him to come to her home so that she could offer him a drink and some food. He tried to decline, knowing how poor the people were at that time, but she insisted and so he escorted her back to what was, he said, a considerable house.’
‘She was rich?’
‘I think she had been,’ Lee said. ‘The way Granddad told it, she still had servants who lurked around as sort of chaperones really, but very little in the way of food. But she spoke a little English and he could speak a bit of Turkish by that time and so in a weird kind of way they got on. She was a very proud lady, Victor always said, but he knew that she and her servants were starving. For several months he took them food . . .’
Süleyman looked at this pale stranger and wondered what on earth his sad story might be leading up to. Although, unlike İkmen, he hadn’t followed the whole Lawrence carpet affair through from the beginning, he was, in spite of the rambling nature of the tale, intrigued.
‘He would, he said, turn up when he could which was generally a couple of times a week. As they ate, the lady slipping food underneath her veil, they talked. He told her about his life with his wife and children in North London. She spoke little about her life apart from going over what the servants were doing. But he was all right with that, understanding that the lady was a proper and reserved sort of person.’
‘Quite so.’
Lee Roberts took in a deep breath and then said, ‘Until the day that he gave her the Lawrence carpet, that is.’
Süleyman frowned. He hoped he was not going to be treated to a tale of western depravity and salaciousness. Victor Roberts had not, he trusted, taken this poor lone Turkish woman for himself and then given her a mere carpet for her troubles? But then he remembered that Roberts had never seen the lady’s face.
‘The lady told Granddad, out of the blue, about how she had lost her fiancé in the desert of Arabia. Apparently he hadn’t even got to the, what do they call it, the theatre of war, the battle, when he died. She mourned him bitterly. The Ministry of War people here had told her that he had died on a train, one that it was said had been blown up by Colonel Lawrence. So she told my grandfather all this and when he asked her whether she knew where her fiancé had died, she said that she did. It was at Ma’an in Jordan.’ He paused as if for effect.
Not being as au fait with the whole Lawrence carpet story as İkmen had been, Süleyman just shrugged.
Lee Roberts, taking the hint, said, ‘The dynamited train at Ma’an was, so Lawrence told my grandfather, where he had obtained the Kerman carpet. The story went that he took it from a very beautiful dying Turkish officer. Then of course the fact that this young man’s blood was all over the carpet was seen as a sort of symbolic victory over him and his people. It was honourable booty, if you like. Now, knowing what we do about T. E. Lawrence, we can put a rather more homoerotic interpretation on this event. Not that my grandfather would have done so, but—’
‘Are you saying’, Süleyman asked, ‘that the blood of this lady’s fiancé is on that carpet?’
‘No,’ Lee Roberts replied, ‘I’m not. But for my grandfather it was certainly a possibility. And I think that when he heard the lady’s story he felt very sorry for her, which was why he gave her the carpet. It was, he felt, as if he were giving something of her lost love back to her. She wouldn’t take it at first, but when he insisted she, apparently, held the thing up to her veiled face, kissing the wool through the gauze around her mouth. Granddad wasn’t a soft man by any means, but he admitted that the sight of it brought him close to tears.’