A Noble Killing Read online

  ‘No.’

  It was İkmen’s day off as well as Süleyman’s. As they did sometimes, the two men had been spending some time together – drinking tea, playing backgammon, smoking and talking. The younger man was having marital problems, a regular feature of his adult life, and so had welcomed the chance to get away from his family home in nearby Ortaköy. İkmen, of whose nine children only two remained at his home in Sultanahmet, didn’t really escape from his apartment when he wasn’t on duty, but he was nevertheless often quite glad to get away. In contrast to Süleyman, he adored his wife. Fatma İkmen was a strong, loving and very capable woman. Unlike her husband, however, she was a pious Muslim, and although Çetin was quite happy and content for her to follow her faith, he was becoming increasingly irritated by her almost daily attempts to engage his interest in Islam. Whatever the religion in question, as far as Çetin İkmen was concerned, it was of no interest or concern to him.

  ‘We’ll wait until you’ve extinguished the blaze, just in case,’ İkmen said. The car behind the sports utility vehicle was now back on the main Ortabahçe Street and Süleyman had started reversing. The young owner of the vehicle stood on the pavement looking sheepish.

  The fire officer shrugged. ‘Always happy to have police support,’ he said as he looked at the crowd in front of the apartment building, which had kept on growing. ‘You can help us push this lot back. But as for the fire . . . What can you say? This Seyhan family are apparently from the east. Could’ve built a fire to roast their meat on in the middle of the floor. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. I’ve known them set fires on floors, in bins, all over the place. They come to the city, never even seen an electric oven before . . .’

  ‘But if, as you think, the apartment was empty, that couldn’t possibly be what happened, could it?’ İkmen asked. ‘Would anyone just set a fire and then walk away?’

  ‘Some of them brought up in mud huts can and do,’ the officer said gloomily. ‘You can make a fire out of wood on a dirt floor with a hole in the ceiling. It’s how a lot of them have always lived. Doesn’t occur to them that they can’t do that here.’ He shook his head. ‘Bloody peasants!’

  A lot of Çetin İkmen also felt irritated by what to him seemed like further evidence of the baleful influence and ignorance of ‘them’. He could almost see the family in his mind. The father, flat-capped, mustachioed and unsmiling; the bowed, veiled mother, old before her time; the children, timid if female, while the boys boiled with resentment, struggling to contain their pent-up envy of everyone better off then themselves. On the other hand, the fire officer was generalising, and there was not, as yet, any evidence to indicate how the blaze might have started. Maybe a faulty electrical appliance was to blame? That, too, was not an unusual scenario, even in the best houses and apartments in İstanbul.

  İkmen was looking at Süleyman backing the SUV around the corner at the end of the street when the fire chief came out of the building and walked over to his officer. Süleyman had reversed the vehicle at speed. This had prompted some gasps of terror from the car’s owner, whose thick hair gel had actually started to melt under the onslaught of heat from his own fear and anger.

  ‘We’ve found a body,’ the policeman heard the fire chief say to the officer in a low, calm voice.

  ‘Just one?’

  ‘I think so,’ the chief replied.

  İkmen turned and held his badge up for the chief to see. ‘Need any help?’ he asked.

  For a moment the fire chief frowned, and then he said, ‘Yes. Yes, actually it might be no bad thing to have a police officer involved.’

  Like many Turkish apartment blocks built back in the 1960s, the Mersin Apartments provided a lot of space for their tenants. Apartment A, like all of the others in the building, had three good-sized bedrooms, a kitchen, a big living room and two bathrooms. Arranged around a large central hall, it had the look of a place that had once been very well cared for. Now, although only one of the rooms had actually been subjected to fire, the hall ceiling was scorched where flames had escaped through the open door. The sound of water dripping from ceilings and down walls into the many pools of liquid on the floor sounded lonely and eerie, especially in counterpoint to the gruff voices of the fire officers. And although the scene had now been declared safe from both gas and noxious fumes, there was a very unpleasant smell on the air that İkmen couldn’t place.

  ‘I believe this was a bedroom,’ the fire chief said as he led İkmen towards a doorway into a deep black hole.

  ‘If we’re waiting for forensic examiners . . .’ İkmen began.

  ‘It’s just to the left of the door. You don’t need to go in. Just look.’

  İkmen moved slightly forwards. Beyond the door was something so black, so matt in apparent texture that it gave him the feeling he was invading an utterly solid and unyielding place. He quickly pulled his head backwards. The fire chief, who was accustomed to such scenes, said, ‘I know, it’s a shock. It was a fierce blaze. When we got here, the place was full of poisonous smoke. Then we had what we call flashover. This is when the smoke and the soot ignite and there’s a brightness of flame you just wouldn’t credit unless you’d actually seen it. Afterwards we get this.’

  ‘A black room.’

  The chief unclipped a torch from his belt, switched it on and then gave it to İkmen. ‘This should help.’

  İkmen shone the beam of light through the doorway and down to his left. There were all sorts of shapes down there. Blackened lumps at eccentric angles, textures of darkness that went from the shiny to the viscous to the granular and the rough.

  ‘I know that everything will just look like charcoal,’ the fire chief said, ‘but if you look, you’ll see a row of sticks. They curve slightly.’

  At first İkmen couldn’t see anything like curved sticks. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the light from the torch contrasted against the various grades of black in the room, something that resembled what the chief had told him about came into view.

  ‘There?’ He pointed downwards.

  İkmen was a short, thin man and so it was quite easy for the burly fire chief to see over his shoulder. ‘Yes,’ the chief said, ‘that’s them. Ribcage. Underneath all the soot, the legs appear to be intact. If you get down low you can see the head. It isn’t pretty.’

  Çetin İkmen bent at the knees and leaned into the blackness. Above the ribs was something ball-like. Frowning, he said, ‘So do you think that this person set the fire?’

  ‘We won’t be able to say for sure until the scene has been investigated.’

  Moving the torch from side to side, İkmen thought that he had managed to pick out where the body’s nose had been. He stood up and handed the light back to the fire chief. ‘So the fire had well and truly taken hold when you arrived?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the fire chief replied. ‘Bedrooms, which is what this seems to be, catch quickly. Soft furnishings burn easily. Contained in this room, and to a lesser extent out here in the hall, the blaze wasn’t obvious to people passing by in the street. The American who lives upstairs reported it. Smelt smoke in the lobby outside.’

  ‘From your experience,’ İkmen said, ‘what do you think are the likely causes of the blaze?’

  The fire chief shrugged. ‘We’ll have to mount a full investigation. Faulty wiring, faulty appliances, burning cigarette. Who knows?’ He frowned.

  İkmen said, ‘You don’t list arson, and yet you were pleased to see me when I told you I was a police officer. Is there something on your mind?’

  The fire chief sighed. ‘Come on,’ he said as he took one of İkmen’s arms in his, ‘let’s go outside.’

  He led the policemen away from the other fire officers inside the building, away from the crowds at the front, to a small, shabby yard around the back. A couple of people in one of the apartments opposite were looking out of their windows to see if they could discern anything of the commotion surrounding the fire, but otherwise the two men were alone. Signifi
cantly they could not, it seemed, be overheard.

  ‘There was a fire in a block like this up on Mecit Ali Street just over a month ago,’ the fire chief said. ‘Started in a bedroom, one victim, just like this. On that occasion the victim turned out to be a girl of fifteen. Her family had only been in Beşiktaş for a year, and the story went that she was homesick for her old village just south of Van. That, it was said, was why she poured petrol over herself and took her own life. Just like this, the incident happened when the girl was on her own in the apartment, family out and about and no witnesses.’

  ‘You think that the victim here is a girl?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet. But if it is . . .’

  ‘You think suicide could be a possibility?’

  The chief sighed, took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, offered one to İkmen and then lit up. ‘You a religious man, are you, Inspector?’ he asked.

  İkmen eyed the chief very narrowly. If this was a precursor to a discussion about suicide and the possible torments of hell that some believed followed such an act, he was going to have to beat a hasty retreat. But he had to answer one way or another. ‘No,’ he said gingerly. ‘Er . . .’

  The fire chief smiled. ‘I wish in a way I could be like that too,’ he said. ‘Secular. But I do believe. Try to be a good Muslim. You know. That said, I don’t always like everyone else who calls himself a good Muslim. Can’t go along with those Afghans, the Taliban and all that.’

  ‘Well, no, that’s just good sense,’ İkmen said. ‘What killing has to do with Islam is a mystery to all good believers and secular people with understanding.’

  ‘Exactly.’ The fire chief sighed once again. What he was trying to say was obviously very difficult for him. ‘And to me, Inspector, that means that killing is not allowed,’ he said. ‘Don’t care if it’s for religious or political or tribal reasons. Even what some – generally people from the provinces – would call a killing for the sake of honour.’ He looked İkmen hard in the eyes at this point. The policeman for his part knew instantly what he was thinking and where his talk was going.

  ‘You . . .’

  ‘The death of the girl on Mecit Ali Street was declared a suicide,’ the chief said. ‘I’ve no evidence to say that that wasn’t exactly what it was. But she was a bright girl, she was doing well at school and she had a lot of friends. Why would she want to go back to some fly-blown village? Why would she kill herself rather than be clever and popular, as she was? On the day of that fire, one of my men was walking through the crowd when he heard someone say the word “slut”. What did that mean? As far as we were told, the girl didn’t have a boyfriend. That never came up. Then there was her family. Like a row of stones when I told them what had happened to her. No emotion at all.’

  ‘Shock?’

  ‘Oh, could be, could be,’ the chief said as he puffed and then puffed again on his cigarette. ‘I tried to find out why that person in the crowd would have called the girl a slut, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it. All these migrants close ranks, don’t they? But there must have been a reason. Maybe someone saw her talking to some man in the street, or . . .’ He coughed and then cleared his throat loudly. ‘Inspector, if the body in that apartment in there is a woman or a girl . . .’

  ‘What you’re talking about here, Chief, is a possible honour killing, isn’t it?’ İkmen said. He looked up into the chief’s smutted, heavily lined face and smiled. ‘Of course I will investigate if you have the slightest suspicion about this death,’ he said. ‘I will not, I promise you, just let it go.’

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  Weeping, he nevertheless arrived at where he had been told to go. A clean shower with good soap and hot water followed. Then new, clean clothes. But they weren’t his style, which irritated him. When he put them on and looked at himself in the mirror, the sight of them made him want to tear them off and rip them up. He looked at the stinking pile of fabric that was his old clothes on the floor and had to really control himself. In spite of everything, he wanted to put them on. He looked in the mirror and saw a face that was pure white with black pits where, somewhere, his eyes were sunk. He looked like that American rock star, that freak . . . Marilyn Manson.

  What was he doing looking like Marilyn Manson? He was supposed to be a good person, a moral person, not some sexual deviant! The black T-shirt didn’t help. It was tight, too, which gave his body the kind of definition he’d seen in magazines he knew he shouldn’t be looking at. Shame and anger were followed by more pity for her. She who had turned and looked at him through the flames. She whose burning eyes of hatred had shown him that she had understood what he had done and why. What she cannot have appreciated was the utter rightness and necessity of the act. Stupid girl! Stupid, stupid, wicked girl! How could she not have known? How could she not have appreciated that ramifications were inevitable? And how could he feel sorry for her, and why?

  He put his old clothes into a plastic bag, which he then placed on the floor by the door. The new outfit would just have to do. He opened the door, walked out into the street and headed for the tram stop.

  Cahit Seyhan and his wife Saadet were just as İkmen had imagined them to be. He was probably about fifty, small and thin, with short grey hair and a large grey moustache. She was maybe ten years his junior, overweight and slow and swathed in many metres of dull, patterned material. Her head, if not her face, was covered. Her abiding expression, like that of her husband, was one of bovine acceptance.

  ‘My sister and her family have just moved into a place over in Fatih,’ Cahit Seyhan said. He spoke with a rough accent, which sounded imprecise to İkmen. It made what he said sound sloppy and simple-minded. ‘We went to see them.’

  ‘Our son is to marry his cousin Nesrin,’ Saadet said.

  İkmen just about managed to stop himself from rolling his eyes. What was it about country people and aristocrats and inbreeding? Why did those two particular groups do that? Why did they persist in something that would only serve to amplify any pre-existing undesirable traits or sicknesses?

  ‘You’ve got three children, Mr Seyhan?’ the fire chief asked.

  They were all standing in the Seyhans’ living room, at the other end of the apartment from the room where the fire had begun. It was a large room, furnished sparsely. Like most Turkish living rooms, it had a sizeable carpet on the floor, although not one of any merit or value. Cheaply turned out in a factory, probably in China, it might very well have been given to the family in exchange for an original rug made by some female ancestor. Equating old with useless, they had probably swapped it for something new and bright, and as the unscrupulous carpet dealer who had almost certainly done the deal with them would have said at the time, brand new was always far superior in a modern home. Apart from that, the Seyhans owned one sofa, a television and several large, tattered cushions that lay around the edge of the carpet in lieu of chairs.

  Cahit Seyhan lit a cigarette. ‘I have two sons, Kenan and Lokman, and a daughter, Gözde.’

  ‘Where are your children at the moment?’ the fire chief continued.

  ‘Kenan works in a restaurant in Sultanahmet. My older son works with cars.’

  Things that migrants did, İkmen thought. Waiting at table, cleaning, fixing cars.

  ‘And your daughter?’ he asked.

  ‘She was here,’ Mr Seyhan said.

  İkmen looked at the fire chief, who asked, ‘What is the room at the end of the corridor, where the fire started?’

  ‘That is our daughter’s bedroom,’ Mrs Seyhan said.

  Neither of them asked where their daughter was. Neither of them showed even the slightest hint of emotion. İkmen began to feel slightly sick. Maybe, he thought, the fire chief was right. Maybe this girl, Gözde, just like the other girl he’d told him about, had been meant to die.

  ‘Mr Seyhan,’ the chief began, ‘I have to—’

  ‘Mum! Dad!’ A tall, thin man of about twenty-five burst through the door ahead of
an agitated-looking Süleyman.

  ‘This man says he is your son,’ Süleyman said to Saadet Seyhan as the man threw himself into his mother’s arms and then kissed her all over her face.

  ‘Lokman!’ she said, smiling as she did so. ‘Lokman, my son.’

  ‘Oh well, he was clearly telling the truth,’ Süleyman said. He looked over at İkmen, who raised an eyebrow and shrugged. The young man was clearly very dirty, and now that he was in the room, there was a strong smell of petrol too.

  ‘I heard the fire engine,’ Lokman Seyhan said excitedly, ‘and then one of the boys came into the garage and said that the fire was over in Egyptian Garden. I couldn’t believe it was here!’ He began to cry. ‘Where is Gözde? Where is she?’

  ‘Gözde?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘Our daughter,’ Mr Seyhan said. ‘She is seventeen years old.’

  ‘Ssh, ssh!’ Mrs Seyhan soothed her crying son. ‘It’s all right, my lion, it will be well, my soul!’

  The fire chief said, ‘I am afraid to have to inform you that we have discovered a body in your daughter’s bedroom. Now of course until tests have been completed we—’

  Saadet Seyhan’s eyes opened wide and she screamed, momentarily drowning out what the fire chief was saying.

  ‘Mum!’ Whereas before she had been comforting him, now the young man comforted his mother, hugging her, kissing her hair, cooing gently into her ears.

  The fire chief looked at the dry-eyed Seyhan patriarch and said, ‘We don’t know if the body is that of your daughter. We don’t know how or why this fire started.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, Mr Seyhan, that we will have to bring in forensic investigators,’ the fire chief said.

  ‘Is that why the police are here?’ Seyhan asked as he tipped his head towards Çetin İkmen.

  ‘No,’ the chief replied. ‘Inspectors İkmen and Süleyman were in the vicinity when the fire was discovered. At the moment they are here to assist us in keeping order. A lot of people come to look at scenes like this, for reasons best known to themselves . . .’