Deep Waters Read online

  About the Author

  Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel is now a public relations officer for the National Schizophrenia Fellowship’s Good Companions Service. Her previous job was a mental health advocate in a psychiatric hospital. She has also worked with sexually abused teenagers and taught psychology in both schools and colleges. Born in the East End of London, she has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years.

  Copyright © 2002 Barbara Nadel

  The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 8645 1

  Headline Publishing Group

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my beloved father. His untimely death in August 2001 robbed the world of a generous, funny and magical soul. No words I can write will ever do him real justice.

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  The woman’s hooded eyes widened in alarm.

  ‘You’re not going out, are you?’ she said to the young man’s back as he squinted to see himself in the mirror fragment over the sink.

  ‘We need money,’ he replied simply.

  The woman, who was only fourteen years older than her son, moved her bulk between man and mirror and faced him foursquare, her hands on her hips.

  ‘If you’re stealing cars—’

  ‘No, I’m not stealing cars, Mother,’ he said, his voice beginning to exhibit irritation.

  ‘When you tried to take wallets from people’s pockets you got caught.’

  ‘But I got away, didn’t I?’ He looked up into his mother’s prematurely aged face. ‘And anyway, this isn’t about that, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  For a few seconds, silence replaced words as the young man and his mother looked intensely into each other’s eyes. On the floor various old baby toys plus several packets of disposable nappies moved gently in the draught that rocked the door of the family’s washroom.

  ‘If they see you they’ll try to kill you. They must.’ Her words were starkly factual, only the familiar ear could have detected the fierce emotion that lay behind them.

  Her son sighed. ‘What, Mehti? It’s only Mehti, Mother. I see him every day! He’s an idiot, he’s retarded . . .’

  The woman, her eyes now downcast, bit thoughtfully on her bottom lip. ‘If we need money then I will get it,’ she said. ‘I can beg and I can steal . . . It’s dark now, evil.’

  ‘This is business, Mother.’ He rubbed way too much cheap aftershave lotion into his chin and then wiped the residue off his hands onto his jeans. ‘Big money.’

  ‘But what—’

  ‘Don’t ask! Don’t make me lie to my own blood!’

  ‘Rifat—’

  ‘No!’

  Turning away from his mother, Rifat took a thin belt down from one of the hooks on the wall and threaded it round the waistband of his jeans. Though well-proportioned, he was a short man, beginning to exhibit signs of impending obesity. But still he was, so his mother thought now, a very handsome man, not unlike his father, or rather the man his father had once been.

  Just the thought of it made her next words shake with emotion. ‘If they kill you then the blood will never stop running. You know that, don’t you, Rifat?’

  Rifat opened the door to a quick and wicked wind from the central Asian steppes. As his hair moved slightly in the draught, he smoothed it down with one hand and with the other picked up a small, brightly wrapped parcel. Then, smiling, he said, ‘If they kill me, I would expect the blood never to end. Not for a man like me.’

  And then he was gone. As he pulled the door shut behind him, a small wisp of the dense night-time fog puffed muscularly into the room before expiring down on the floor.

  When she was certain that he could no longer hear her, his mother muttered, ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid boy!’

  Only the walls were in a position to respond; the rest of her family were either asleep or dead.

  There had been a time, Dr Zelfa Halman recalled, when to put a call through from İstanbul to anywhere outside Turkey had necessitated lengthy planning and patience. And although she was an educated woman who knew that progress was inevitable, she still never ceased to marvel at just how quickly she could now connect with her maternal family in the Irish Republic. Quickly, that is, provided one allowed for the slow progress of one Father Francis Collins from his favourite chair to the old dial telephone that always had and always would live in the hall. Uncle Frank, as he was to Zelfa, was nearly eighty years old now; just three years senior to her mother, had she lived.

  A deep cough preceded Father Collins’ recitation of his telephone number.

  It made Zelfa smile. ‘Still smoking then, Uncle?’ she said, the lilt of her Irish voice increasing with each English word spoken.

  ‘Now then, Bridget, is that any way to speak to a man of God?’

  She laughed both at the irony in his tone and at the use of her Irish name. After twelve years in Turkey, ‘Bridget’ was somebody she could only sometimes, and selectively, relate to.

  ‘So to what do I owe the pleasure of your call?’ the old priest inquired. ‘Are you coming home for a bit or what?’

  ‘Well, I do hope to come home soon, yes, but . . .’ she paused briefly to light a cigarette. ‘What I actually wanted to do was ask for your advice.’

  ‘I thought you lot had that sort of thing sewn up pretty much,’ he replied, the irony still there in his voice.

  ‘Even psychiatrists need help sometimes, Uncle Frank.’

  ‘True. But since you and God parted company when you were about eighteen, I can’t see what I can offer you in the way of advice that you won’t find risible. Fags and booze aside, my own views about morality are informed by Our Lord as opposed to your man Freud.’

  ‘Uncle Frank, a Turk has asked me to marry him.’ There now, it was out. Briefly she looked into the mirror across the hall, seeing herself as a small, grey blob. Purposefully she addressed herself to the telephone again. ‘Uncle Frank?’

  ‘Er . . .’ The old man cleared his throat of what sounded like several pounds of phlegm. ‘Oh, well, that’s, um . . . Your father must be pleased . . .’

  ‘Dad doesn’t know yet.’ r />
  ‘Well, shouldn’t you be—’

  ‘Uncle Frank, I’m forty-seven years old, for God’s sake! I can tell whoever I like in whatever order I choose!’

  A brief moment of silence ensued, a moment during which the priest, at least, drew breath.

  ‘Seeing as your father’s a Turk,’ he said, ‘and you now live there yourself, I can’t see what your problem might be, Bridget. I mean, were you even slightly interested in your faith—’

  ‘This man, Mehmet he’s called, is twelve years younger than I am, Uncle Frank.’

  A sharp intake of breath on the part of the priest caused Zelfa to scale even higher reaches of verbal desperation.

  ‘I look so old compared to him! He’s about as fit as a man can be, Uncle Frank, and I just look like a fat, grey troll at his side! And I’m too old to have his children! I mean, what the hell can he see in me? I mean—’

  ‘Well, if we discount the good living you people tend to make, which I am sure this man gives not a hoot for,’ Father Frank said, ‘then we’re left only with your wit, intelligence, beauty and charm. And given that these qualities are all that you have, then I suppose this lad must be quite mad to want to marry you.’

  In spite of herself, Zelfa smiled. OK, the old man was biased but she knew that when it came to the matter of her attractiveness, she was her own worst enemy and her hardest critic. Very deep down indeed, she knew that the truth lay somewhere between what her uncle had said about her and her own perception of herself. However . . .

  ‘But when I’m sixty he’ll only be forty-eight!’

  ‘And when you’re a hundred he’ll be eighty-eight and you’ll both look like shite! But if he still loves you and you still love him then what of it?’ Although the old man was over two thousand miles away from her, Zelfa distinctly heard him take a cigarette out of his packet, stick it in his mouth and light up. ‘What I’m saying, Bridget, I suppose, is that if he loves you, nothing much else matters. Does he love you?’

  ‘He says he does, although I can’t think why.’

  Frank Collins sighed. So like her mother in so many ways – except the most important one. Bridget, although twice as clever and considerably prettier than her mother, had never matched Bernadette Halman’s supreme self-confidence. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Bernadette had pursued and won so many lovers in her short life – several while she was still living with Bridget’s father. Maybe that knowledge had undermined Bridget’s confidence in the concept of marriage. Or maybe it was as she said, that this man was too young to be able to give her any sense of security. Only Bridget and this Mehmet character could know. But then his niece was asking for his advice and, for good or ill, he had to give it to her. After all, if a priest couldn’t give advice (and do a little bit around saying Mass too!) then what could he do?

  ‘Well, you either trust his word or you don’t, Bridget,’ he said at length, ‘and only you can make that decision. Do you love him?’

  ‘I’d happily die for him, Uncle Frank.’ Such passionate words made her seem much younger than she was – they sounded almost like the protestations of a teenager. But then as the Irish branch, at least, of Bridget’s family had always been sadly aware, there had never been even the slightest whiff of marriage in her life before. She was really quite green when it came to affairs of the heart.

  ‘So if you love him,’ the priest began, ‘and he—’

  ‘How can he love me? I keep thinking he must be some kind of deviant or gold digger!’ she cried mournfully, now very close to tears.

  ‘Is he poor?’

  ‘No. His family reckon they’re impoverished but that’s only in comparison to the shitloads of money they once had. They’re aristocrats.’

  ‘Are they so?’

  ‘But he, Mehmet, he’s just a policeman. They earn sweet F.A. here.’ She put her cigarette out in the ashtray and then immediately lit another. ‘Not, of course, that he’s ever asked me for money. He’s spent a lot of money on me, taken me out and . . .’

  ‘Made you very happy, by the sound of it,’ the priest added tartly.

  Zelfa, now a little more subdued, especially in light of what her uncle had just said, bowed her blonde head. ‘Yes. Yes, he has.’

  ‘Well, that’s something to cling on to and to use as a starting point for your thoughts on this too, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’ Perhaps it was because it was so late and she was tired, but Zelfa could not, for the moment, quite catch her uncle’s drift.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that maybe you shouldn’t look at the money or the age difference or any of that just now. Maybe you should just concentrate on the love.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘No, Bridget, no “buts”.’

  She could see him, in her mind, his right index finger raised, as she so clearly remembered it, to silence dissenters in her long ago Holy Communion classes. Zelfa, in spite of her current mood of confusion, smiled.

  ‘If you love him and he loves you then that is, if my understanding of such things is correct, enough,’ said Frank Collins with some vigour. ‘And anyway,’ he added, with a large helping of that rare cynicism Zelfa knew and loved him for, ‘your father’s property must be worth bugger all since that earthquake and so I wouldn’t worry about gold digging.’

  ‘If we have another one like that I’ll be lucky to have a head to worry with,’ she said with the type of graveyard humour those who have experienced great trauma frequently indulge in.

  ‘Yes, a man can quickly meet with his maker.’

  ‘I know. Mehmet’s sister-in-law died and his best friend had to have his legs amputated during . . .’ Suddenly she could not bring herself to use the word ‘earthquake’ for fear of losing control of her emotions. Everyone had lost someone during that cataclysmic event. Everyone. ‘During the events of last year. He’s still, at times, very sad.’

  ‘Oh, well then,’ the priest said briskly, ‘you’d better go about cheering him up one way or the other. I’m not saying I wouldn’t rather you marry a Padraig or a Declan, but . . .’

  ‘But what if he’s just marrying me in order to provide some measure of security in his world? I mean, there are problems with his mother and I have thought that perhaps I could be some sort of substitute figure.’

  ‘Or you could just be analysing the ins and outs of a duck’s arse,’ the old man said with a smile in his voice. ‘You people do tend to do that. But at the end of the day, Bridget, it’s all down to strength of feeling and risk. If you love him then you’ll take a risk with him and if you do not, you won’t.’

  Dr Zelfa Halman frowned. What her uncle had said was undoubtedly true and that she did love Mehmet Suleyman was undeniable. But whether she could ignore her professional training and just sink into this desire was another matter.

  He knew that really he shouldn’t be here. Even though martial law was now a thing of the past, any passing cop could, if the mood took him, question him, move him on or just generally give him a hard time. But only, Enver thought with a smile, if they could see him through the thick fog. And given that he wasn’t moving, coupled with the fact that they, the police, didn’t seem to be about at the present time, that eventuality appeared to be unlikely. More relaxed now that he’d explored the probability of police appearance in detail, Enver leaned on the rail and sighed. Usually at this time of the morning – it was now 4 a.m. – one could see the lights coming on over in Karaköy as people there either rose to go to work or, in some cases, expelled paying guests from their beds. But not this morning. This morning the close bulk of the Galata Bridge disappeared completely in the middle of the Golden Horn, obscured by both the darkness and the lung-wrenching fog. Not that the lack of Karaköy made Enver stop looking towards it. It was the only place he had ever been happy.

  Both the Refah Party and the unruly earth itself could do what they liked, but certain parts of Karaköy would always cater to those twin obsessions of men: drink and sex. And in his young
er days, Enver had known all about both. In fact, his now deceased wife had been helping her mother to run a certain ‘establishment’ when Enver first met her. His children, although to this day they still didn’t know it, had frequently visited their grandmother at her brothel when they were small. But now that his eldest son, with whom Enver had lived for several years, ran a very respectable coffee shop just five minutes from where he was standing, there could be no allusion to anything even slightly ‘unseemly’. Eminönü was, although so often thronged with tourists, the ‘Old City’, quite opposed to the louche ‘European-ness’ of naughty Karaköy. But Enver’s heart was full of nostalgia. And it was this, combined with an increasing insomnia problem, that so often, like now, found him out of his bed either looking across at or going to Karaköy. Not that the latter option was very realistic at the present time. As well as concealing him, Enver knew that the fog could also conceal other more malignant individuals who might wish, for the price of a few cigarettes, to do him harm. There had always been an element like this, the truly desperate, in the old days, usually poor migrants from the country. Now, however, what with all the Russians, Albanians and other, Allah alone knew who, folk entering the city, it was rather more problematic working out just who had stolen your watch, your wallet or whatever.

  So, on balance, best stay put. With Reşadiye Caddesi just behind him, Enver was within striking distance, even with his elderly gait, of Hasırcılar Caddesi and home. And if something were to go wrong between here and there, well, that was the will of Allah and therefore unavoidable. When a car pulled up somewhere behind Enver, just beyond the Eminönü tram stop, the old man did nevertheless briefly hold his breath. Who, apart from the police or the military, might be stopping beside an impenetrably foggy waterway at this time in the morning, he couldn’t imagine. Indeed, the thought that it must be a police car was so hard to shift that he sought confirmation by peering in the direction of the sound of the vehicle’s powerful engine. But whatever type of vehicle it was remained shrouded from him by the combined forces of the fog and his own failing eyesight.