A Passion for Killing (18 page)

Matilda Melly’s reaction to her husband’s confession was both muted and violent at the same time. When he told her that he had given Yaşar Uzun a deposit on the Lawrence carpet without her consent, closely followed by the amount involved, she hadn’t reacted at all. When he told her how he had raised the capital, she had choked on her tea, but she hadn’t actually said anything. It was only when Peter launched into the details about what was to happen next, specifically the likelihood of their never seeing any of the one hundred and twenty thousand pounds again, that she spoke.

‘You’ve been very stupid, haven’t you?’ she said as she shielded her eyes with her hand from the bright springtime sun that had just begun to invade the terrace at the side of their pool.

‘You think I don’t know that?’ her husband responded angrily. He was pale and, she knew, hung over from a drinking session he’d had somewhere the night before.

‘You were duped.’

‘Yes!’

‘Conned.’

‘Yes!’

‘Stitched up . . .’

‘How many ways do you want to tell me I’ve been fucked, eh, Matilda?’

She shrugged, looked briefly across and beyond the rooftop of the Rabins’ house opposite and then stared down at the knitting in her lap.

‘So, basically, we have a mortgage for the foreseeable future,’ her husband said. ‘It means that when we go back to the UK, we’ll either have to stay put in the Clarence Road house or we’ll have to settle for something elsewhere if we want to be mortgage-free.’

‘I want to live by the waterfront . . .’

‘Well, you can’t.’ He ran his fingers through his greying, sandy hair.

‘But I want to,’ she responded calmly.

‘Matilda,’ her husband said, ‘you are a fifty-two-year-old woman, not a petulant child. Just because you want something, doesn’t mean that you’ll get it. For once in your life, face reality!’

Still calm, Matilda put her knitting down on the plastic patio chair beside her and said, ‘Peter, I faced the reality of not having children many years ago. Travelling the world was a reality I quite liked living with, but not what went along with it; first your string of affairs with foreign women and then this collecting madness . . .’

‘We dealt with my affairs!’ Peter leaned in to point a long, thin finger in her face. ‘We weren’t talking about those again!’

‘And now, effectively, you throw away our future and I’m expected to deal with that too?’ She stood up and said, ‘No.’

He looked up at her, squinting as the sun behind her head and body blinded his eyes. ‘What?’

‘I’m going,’ she said calmly and then began to walk towards the patio doors and into the house.

In spite of his hangover, Peter sprang to his feet. ‘Going? What do you mean, going? Where?’

She turned to face him and for the first time in probably over twenty years he noticed that in spite of her pudginess and apparent compliance, she was really quite an attractive woman. ‘Leaving you,’ she said quietly.

He flushed hotly. ‘You can’t leave me!’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘Where will you go? Where . . .’

‘To a place by the water,’ she said.

‘But you haven’t got any money!’

‘Then I’ll have to get some, won’t I?’ she said. She walked towards the stairs that led to the upper storey of the house.

‘What are you doing?’ her almost hysterical husband said.

Matilda carried on walking. ‘I thought I might pack a bag for the moment,’ she said.

‘If you think that you’re going to find some fucking place by the water now . . .’

‘No,’ she turned. ‘I thought I might stay with a friend for a few days while I sort myself out. If anyone will have me. If not, I’ll stay in a hotel. Then I’ll go and be by the water.’

‘But why, Mat –’ He ran his fingers through his hair yet again and then began to cry. ‘I . . .’

‘You . . .’ – Her eyes blazed as she turned for the first time – ‘you thought more of that carpet than you did of me!’

And then she ran up the stairs and he heard her slam what had been her bedroom door behind her.

‘But what am I going to do now?’ Peter Melly wailed up into the vast height of his fashionable living room. ‘I’ve lost absolutely everything! What about me!’

Five minutes later, when she came down the stairs with her suitcase, she still retained her calmness. In fact, rather than just rush out of the building as he thought she might do, Matilda Melly put her bag down and then sat on one of the sofas. ‘Peter,’ she said, rather imperiously, he felt, ‘
I
have something to tell
you
.’

The noise from the ceaseless thundering traffic along Ordu Caddesi was all too apparent in the echoing bleakness of the Sofia Travel Agency. Apart from a few rather tatty posters of somewhere called ‘Sunny Beach’ – which had a definite air of menace about it – and some people, apparently rose pickers, in colourful peasant costumes, there was little beyond scary-looking men in the place.

‘Can I shut this door so that I can hear myself think?’ İkmen said as he walked towards a desk and the truly thuggish-looking individual sitting behind it.

‘It’s warm now, we need the air,’ the man, who had an almost chewably thick eastern European accent, replied.

İkmen leaned down on to the desk. Two black-clad youths with necks like bulls moved forward. Ayşe Farsakoğlu, who was standing behind İkmen, looked up at the youths and said, ‘Get back. Give the inspector some space!’

They smirked, but they backed off anyway.

‘I’ve come to talk about a man called Yaşar Uzun,’ İkmen said to the man at the desk. ‘You and he met on 3 March this year, Nikolai. Now he’s dead.’

Nikolai Stoev wrinkled his very wide forehead. ‘And you think that I . . .’

‘Shut the door for me, will you, Sergeant Farsakoğlu?’ İkmen said as he sat himself down in the rickety metal chair in front of the Bulgarian’s desk. ‘I’m not so sure that Mr Stoev will be quite so keen on fresh air now, in view of what we’re about to discuss.’

Ayşe Farsakoğlu went and did as he had asked her and then stood behind him, staring at the craggy face of Nikolai Stoev.

‘So, Nikolai,’ İkmen said, ‘how many denials will I have to endure before you admit that you knew Yaşar Uzun?’

The Bulgarian smiled, revealing as he did so several golden teeth. ‘None,’ he said. ‘I remember Yaşar Uzun, a very pleasant man, a carpet dealer. He came to me because he wanted to buy some property in Bulgaria.’

İkmen, somewhat taken aback by this, coming as it did from the usually most elusive Stoev, said, ‘And did you manage to get him to buy anything? At Sunny Beach, perhaps?’

Nikolai Stoev laughed. ‘No, he wasn’t interested in old communist resorts like Sunny Beach. For us Bulgarians sometimes that big communist-style architecture can be quite nostalgic, but not for you people.’

‘Then why do you have a picture of Sunny Beach on your wall here?’ İkmen asked.

Stoev shrugged. ‘It reminds me of home. It pleases my poor old Slavic heart.’

‘So what, if anything, did interest Yaşar Uzun?’ İkmen lit up a cigarette without offering one to his host. Like most gangsters, Nikolai Stoev could easily afford his own cigarettes. With people like him traditional Turkish manners were, İkmen had always felt, purely optional.

‘He bought a very nice house in Balchik,’ the Bulgarian replied. ‘He bought it just from a photograph I showed him on that day in this office. I am a brilliant salesman.’

İkmen, frowning, wondered why and how anyone would buy a property without ever actually seeing it. ‘What is Balchik and how much did he pay?’

‘Balchik is a very lovely Black Sea resort. It has pretty, whitewashed houses and wonderful botanical gardens.’ Nikolai Stoev turned to one of his men, said something in Bulgarian, and watched with İkmen as the man made his way to a staircase at the back of the shop. ‘He’s going to get the account book to see what Mr Uzun paid,’ he said to İkmen. ‘I think he paid in cash . . .’

‘So how did you persuade Mr Uzun to buy this Balchik place?’ İkmen asked as he offered Ayşe Farsakoğlu a cigarette and then flicked his own ash on to the floor.

‘I didn’t,’ the Bulgarian said. ‘Mr Uzun came here knowing all about Balchik. He asked for it specifically. He wanted a house near the waterfront and Queen Marie of Romania’s old palace. The Romanians ruled that part of my country for a while in the 1920s and 1930s.’

‘Do you know why he wanted this particular place?’ İkmen asked. A very short, thick-set individual gave him and Ayşe a chipped ashtray to share.

‘Balchik?’ He smiled. ‘Well, it is very romantic, Inspector İkmen! Especially for Turks. You know that Queen Marie built that palace in Balchik as a love nest for herself and her Turkish lover? She was sixty, he was twenty. The place looks like a cross between a wedding cake and Aya Sofya. Mr Uzun, I know, wanted to take a very specific lady there.’

‘Do you know who?’

Nikolai Stoev took the large ledger book from the man who had retrieved it earlier and was now holding it out to him. ‘Inspector, I am not Mr Uzun’s mother! How should I know who this woman was?’ He opened the book and then peered down at the figures written inside. ‘Ah, here. Yes. Yaşar Uzun paid forty thousand euros for a three-bedroom house in Balchik. Yes. Oh, and yes, then there was the apartment too.’

‘The apartment?’

‘Yes, in Sofia, our capital. In a nice, nice area.’ Nikolai Stoev looked up and said, ‘He bought that just from the description I gave him. An excellent customer, decisive. For two bedrooms he paid just under twenty thousand euros. It’s a lot of money.’

İkmen, who knew a little bit about property prices in İstanbul, raised an eyebrow.

‘For us,’ Stoev explained. ‘Bulgaria. We are a little, new country. We are a land of great opportunity for investors, anything is possible. But for Turks . . . It’s cheap. Mr Uzun did pay, as I thought, in cash with euros.’

They knew that Yaşar Uzun had the money from Peter Melly by this time, only half of which had entered his bank account. These really rather odd Bulgarian purchases had to make up for either withdrawals from Uzun’s own bank account or the spending of the other sixty thousand pounds which he must have converted from sterling into euros at some point. But this was the first that İkmen had heard about any ‘lady’ in the carpet dealer’s life.

‘So, Mr Uzun, now his surviving relatives own these properties outright?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he or his lady friend move in to the place in Balchik, do you know?’

Nikolai Stoev said, ‘No. The house and the apartment were his, he could do as he pleased with them.’ He smiled and leaned across the desk conspiratorially. ‘One thing I do remember was that he wanted all of the papers for the house and the apartment to be separate. He didn’t want the lady to know that he had the apartment. I think that maybe he had plans to see other “ladies” when he was in Sofia . . .’

‘Did you ever see him again?’ İkmen asked.

‘Only to give him the keys and his paperwork the following week. It was very quick and he was an excellent customer. I have friends in the legal profession back home.’

‘Most people who traffic heroin and prostitutes have some sort of connection to the judiciary,’ İkmen said with a smile.

‘Inspector!’

‘Oh, don’t worry about me, Nikolai, I’m not going to take your organisation down today.’ İkmen took his notebook out of his pocket and placed it in front of Stoev. ‘I need the addresses of the two properties you sold Uzun.’

Nikolai Stoev gave this job to one of his minions.

‘I hope he can write,’ İkmen said acidly as he watched the distinctly simian man slowly copy what was in the ledger into İkmen’s notebook.

‘He can.’ Nikolai Stoev smiled. ‘You know, Inspector, you should consider buying somewhere in Bulgaria. A lot of people are moving to my country. It’s very cheap for Turks.’

‘For some Turks,’ İkmen corrected. ‘Not me.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame.’ He leaned across his desk again and then tilted his head towards Ayşe Farsakoğlu. ‘If you had a little place, you could offer your lady policeman a little “holiday”. Just the two of you, a little career development . . .’

İkmen’s hand flew across the table and caught Stoev’s neck in a sharp-fingered grasp. ‘Don’t push it, Nikolai!’ he said as he watched the gang of shady men move in around him. ‘Remember who you are and know that it is only because it suits
me
that today is not the day when I come for you and your monkeys. It will not always be so. Tomorrow may very well be different. Now, Mr Stoev, where were you on the night of the fifth of April?’

Apart from the fact that she regularly attended the Neve şalom Synagogue, which implied at least some sort of religious faith, there was nothing that Süleyman could discover about Leyla Saban that would make her an obvious peeper victim. She wasn’t promiscuous in any way, she was certainly not a gangster, and had not, as far as he could tell, ever killed anyone. But then some of these, particularly the latter victims, were not obvious. Maybe the peeper had now really lost his mind. Maybe now anyone in the least bit ‘imperfect’ would do. It occurred to Süleyman that perhaps Leyla had just been an opportunistic victim. But if that were so, he wondered what the peeper could have been doing hanging around the Jewish Museum after it had closed.

‘Here is my Leyla,’ the old man said as he laid the heavy photograph album in Süleyman’s lap. ‘That’s her with her little brother, my son, İzak. He will be devastated . . .’

Süleyman looked down at the photograph of a teenage Leyla Saban with a boy of about seven or eight and said, ‘Mr Saban, your son . . .’

‘İzak moved to Israel last year,’ Fortune Saban said sadly. ‘I didn’t want him to go. He said he wanted to fight for Israel. I begged him to stay here and do his military service for his real country, this country.’

Maybe that was the flaw, Süleyman thought, maybe Leyla’s brother’s apparent disloyalty to the state was why she was killed.