Baksheesh (30 page)

Maybe he would.

But what difference would that make?

Would it diminish the righteous pride I felt?

Should it?

No!

I was the one who had solved this murder case!

“Osman,” said Batuhan, stuffing the slice of bread into his mouth.

Yes, back to Osman. Apparently, Temel Ekşi was claiming that he got into a fight with Osman and, when things turned nasty, shot at him in self-defence, wounding him in the leg. After that, Temel had left. He learnt of Osman's death from the newspapers.

“You mean,” I said, “that he's going to be charged with killing the old woman and causing grievous bodily harm to Osman?”

“Most probably, because of the pernicious circumstances leading to the cause of death,” said Batuhan.

“Hmm,” I said, not quite understanding his last sentence. “But Osman was still killed by a bullet from that man's gun.”

“No, you don't understand,” said Batuhan, putting his head between his hands. His mouth was moving as he chewed some bread. I watched a lump of it go down his throat.

“What don't I understand?” I said.

Clearly he was disturbed by what he was about to say.

“Osman wouldn't have died if he'd been able to summon help. He would have survived with proper medical treatment.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Fine, but he didn't. Maybe he didn't know the number to call an ambulance. Or he fell down, bumped his head and fainted. Who knows? Maybe he couldn't get to the phone.”

I fell silent.

“There was no phone in the room.”

I took a sip of white wine. White wine may not be the most appropriate drink to have at a kebab house, but I'm a German. Nobody can expect me to conform to Turkish patterns of behaviour. Not when it doesn't suit me, anyway.

“You mean there was no landline?”

To be honest, I hadn't paid much attention to this detail before.

“Does Temel say that Osman could have opened the window and called out?”

“Temel? Why would Temel say that?” said Batuhan, with an expression that suggested he found my question strange.

“To save himself,” I said.

“Forget about Temel,” he said, as if he thought I was enjoying thinking about Temel.

“Fine, but he is the murderer, isn't he?”

Batuhan took a large gulp of rakı.

“Look. Temel and Osman had a fight… But something happened before that, which I need to explain,” he said, as if to himself. “Osman's mobile rings. It's obviously Ä°nci. Ä°nci says she called him at that time, and Temel says Osman had a short conversation with someone. Then there's a knock at the door. Ä°nci, who is on the telephone, verifies this.”

This much I knew.

“And?” I said.

“Osman hangs up and goes to the door. Temel hears him talking to a woman, or rather hears them shouting at each other.”

“And?” I say again, suddenly sitting bolt upright. “Does the woman see Temel? If so, why hasn't she been to the police yet?”

“No, the woman doesn't see Temel. But that's not the point. Just let me speak, please. If you stop interrupting for a moment, I'll explain.”

I made a sign with my hand telling him to get to the point.

“OK, get on with it,” I said.

Osman doesn't ask the woman inside. He talks to her at the front door and sends her away. However, from the shouting, Temel realizes the woman is angry about something. She insults Osman, he shouts at her and then she goes away.”

I swear I still hadn't got it.

“Did the fight between Osman and Temel start after that?” I asked very calmly.

He nodded. “You know the rest. They fight, Temel fires the gun and leaves. When he leaves, Osman's mobile is on the desk.”

“Wasn't there a landline at the office?” I asked again.

“There was an unused telephone which had been cut off for some time because the bill hadn't been paid. Osman did all his business on the mobile.”

“So someone took his mobile?”

Batuhan nodded.

“Someone who wanted to prevent Osman calling for help. Someone who guessed that if Osman didn't get help, he might not pull through. Someone intelligent enough to work that out.”

He said this as though he was paying me a compliment.

He was staring at me leeringly.

Almost flirtatiously.

I still didn't understand.

Then finally, I understood. I clapped my hand to my chest as though taking my last breath and gasped, “Me? You mean me?” Did Batuhan really think I'd taken Osman's phone and prevented him from calling for help?

Batuhan didn't appear to be at all amused. He looked even more serious than the day my statement was taken.

“The woman who knocked on the door when Temel was at the office,” he said, nodding at me.

“Wait,” I said. My brain was beginning to work.

“Couldn't Temel have taken the mobile with him when he left the office?”

“He could have done. Of course he could.”

“Couldn't this story about a woman coming to the door be fabricated?”

“It could be.”

“In which case?”

“Temel thinks he killed Osman anyway. He says, ‘I didn't shoot to kill, but my hand slipped.' Temel wasn't the one who drew my attention to the matter of the telephone.”

“Even better. If he'd taken the telephone, he'd hardly draw your attention to the fact, would he?”

“Temel admits he shot Osman. We're not yet certain about the time, but let's say it's seven-thirty. It's not yet dark when he leaves. Somebody calls out to him in the street – the old woman. She opens the window and invites Temel in for a meal. Temel
is forced to exchange a few words with her, but he refuses the invitation and walks down to Karaköy.”

“The gun?” I said.

“What about the gun?”

“Does he throw the gun into the sea at Karaköy?”

“No. The gun he shot Osman with is something special. A Magnum. He wouldn't throw that away! He changes the barrel and has the serial number erased. We found the gun at his house. If we hadn't had any other evidence apart from the gun, say if his fingerprints hadn't been found in Osman's office, it would have been difficult to prove he was the killer. However, he admitted the crime without much effort on our part.”

“Is it normal practice to change the barrel?”

“That's what people do if an expensive gun like that gets soiled and the owner can't bear to throw it away.”

“Gets soiled?”

“A gun used for a murder is said to be ‘soiled',” Batuhan said, with a laugh that revealed his gleaming white teeth. “See what you learn from me?”

“Oh yes. Really useful things. But why did he kill the old woman? Did he say?”

“It was as you suggested right from the start,” he said, looking at me admiringly. “He was afraid that we'd go to the old woman once the investigation got under way.”

“A groundless fear,” I remarked. “You didn't have time to interrogate the neighbours, except for an eccentric bookshop proprietor.”

He scratched the back of his head and then stretched his neck from side to side, making a clicking sound.

“There's another thing, of course,” he said, pausing for a moment and studying my face.

“What's that?” I asked.

“The apartment that Osman used as an office was about to be put up for sale. That's the place you want to buy, isn't it?”

“So what?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

“I told you in my statement that I wanted to buy that apartment, which was the reason I wanted to see inside and why I argued with Osman.”

He nodded.

 

I had to admit that things didn't appear to be going very well for me. I could see the case against me:

One day before the murder, I'd argued with Osman at the door of his office and had a scuffle with him. On the day of the murder, he'd come to my shop and had an ashtray hurled at his head. Then, unable to contain myself, I'd gone back to his office that evening for another argument. I'd refused to leave when the door was shut in my face, but waited outside on the stairs, during which time I heard the sound of gunshot. Then, after Temel left, I went inside to prevent Osman from calling for help.

It was all plausible. There was even a motive. I wanted to buy the apartment, didn't I? Would I have been able to buy it if Osman was still alive? Actually, I still didn't know if it was going to be possible. Would the brothers let me?

“Did Temel leave the office door open?” I asked.

“He doesn't remember. He may have done.”

“The next morning… Who found the body? I know it was one of the brothers, but I forget his name.”

“Musa.”

“Yes, Musa. When Musa arrived, was the door shut?”

“Yes, it was.”

“So, you think that between the times that Temel left the office and Musa arrived, a woman came and took the mobile from the desk, and that this woman was Osman's real murderer.”

“That's what I think.”

“Osman could have opened the window and called out,” I said. I'd said this before but hadn't received a satisfactory reply.

Batuhan took a deep breath and exhaled loudly.

“If he'd opened the window and called out, who would he call out to? You could shout your head off all night across the Bosphorus, not a single fisherman would come from Karaköy to help you. And there was no one else in the building.”

“So, Osman's office wasn't on the side overlooking the street,” I said.

Batuhan narrowed his eyes and looked at me carefully.

“What are you trying to say? That you never saw the apartment?”

“I don't need to prove that. I didn't see the apartment. I'd only seen the workshop on the floor below where I sat in a room overlooking the street,” I said.

Batuhan leant back in his chair.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What did you just say?”

“I don't know, what did I say?”

“You said there was no one in the building. What about the building workers upstairs?”

“The illegal workers?” he said. What difference did it make if they were working illegally?

“Didn't they hear anything?”

“It so happens that on that very day, the council sealed up the penthouse apartment, because they didn't have a building permit. That block has been declared a historic building, so the slightest modification requires a permit and they hadn't obtained one. If we could prove that Temel Ekşi had had the building work stopped in order to ensure the building was empty, then we could claim that he intended to kill Osman. However, I doubt if that's the case.”

“Would you be able to prove that? Did Temel say anything about having the work stopped?”

“It looks as though Temel had nothing to do with the fact that the work was stopped. The council was merely responding to a complaint by one of the neighbours. One of the nutty intellectuals living in Kuledibi had made a complaint about the building work.”

“Who was that?”

“Someone who's obsessed with Kuledibi. An amateur architect,” chuckled Batuhan. “We have so many nutcases in this country.”

“Have you spoken to this man?”

“Of course. He really did hand in a petition to the council and refused to leave the building. Anyone who tried to talk him round just got handed one of his petitions. It's not the first time it's happened.”

“I think he's right,” I said.

Please don't think I approve of informers. But not all informers are the same. People trying to protect their district and city from villains are hardly the same as those who informed on Jewish families hiding in basements during the period of German fascism, are they?

Anyone who has been to Kuledibi will understand why I chose the word “villains”. In the 1970s and 1980s, extra floors were added to the wonderful buildings surrounding Kuledibi Square, with the result that the load-bearing walls of many of the buildings collapsed to the ground, as though cocking a snook at centuries of Istanbul earthquakes. But since so much had been paid out in bribes for these hideous, illegal rooftop extensions, nothing could be done about them.

“So you're saying the workers weren't in the building at the time of the murder?”

“When the penthouse was sealed up, they took their belongings and left.”

“What belongings?”

“Migrant workers like that live in the apartments they're working on so that they don't have to pay for accommodation.”

“Have you found these workers?”

“Do you have any idea how many illegal workers there are in this country?”

“No, I don't,” I said.

“We think there are over a million. Turkey has over a million illegal workers with no place to live and no identity papers – most of them in Istanbul.”

That sort of thing didn't bother me at all, to be honest. I've worked pretty hard in my time for people's right to freedom of movement.

“So you haven't been able to find them.”

“I haven't found them, nor have I looked for them. When we searched the scene on the morning after the murder, the seal on the door of the penthouse was intact and we have no reason to suspect that any of them got in that night.”

I wrinkled my nose at what he said.

“Nor do you have a good reason to suspect that a woman took his mobile,” I said.