A Passion for Killing (32 page)

‘Your computer would seem to disagree with you,’ İkmen said. ‘There is plenty of information you have accessed about Balchik on there. I think you have a very romantic nature, Mrs Melly.’

‘Also, the other Mrs Melly is of another opinion,’ Metin İskender said.

‘The person who stole Mrs Melly’s passport?’ the lawyer Mr Aksoy said.

İkmen smiled. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘she didn’t steal it. Mrs Melly gave it to her.’ He turned to the Englishwoman and asked, ‘It’s right you gave your British passport to Handan Ergin, isn’t it?’

‘No.’ Her face was red now. Underneath all that make-up a rash was showing through. ‘How do you . . .’

‘Mrs Ergin told us all about it,’ İkmen said. ‘How you gave her the passport. How she made herself up to look old. Interesting details. She had some time to think clearly on the plane back from Sofia.’

‘You mean she had time to make things up!’ the Englishwoman said. ‘It’s rubbish!’

‘Maybe, although why she should want to make such a story up, I cannot imagine,’ İkmen said. ‘You are both in a lot of trouble irrespective of who might have done what. Mrs Ergin says that you used her husband’s gun to kill Yaşar Uzun.’

A moment of stunned silence passed. Metin İskender leaned his chair back against the wall and swung his feet loosely beneath him.

‘Mrs Ergin says that she gave you her husband’s gun because she wanted to implicate him in a crime. As you know he stifled her, he also beat her too. She wanted to get rid of him. For your part,’ İkmen said, ‘I think that you had fallen out of love with the carpet dealer some time before. Your discovery of his separate apartment plans was just an excuse for what was done. So much of your recent existence would seem to me, Mrs Melly, an excuse. However . . .’ He leaned on the table, took a drag from his cigarette, and then blew smoke in Matilda Melly’s direction. ‘Because,’ he continued, ‘although Yaşar Uzun had bought the little house on the Bulgarian coast for you both to share, you had not intended to live in it with him. You’d found a far better young Turkish lover than Yaşar to share that house with. You had found, Mrs Melly, the love of your life.’

Matilda Melly licked her lips before saying, ‘This is what she says, is it? Handan Ergin?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you believe her?’

İkmen shrugged. ‘I know that you killed Mr Uzun, Mrs Melly, beyond that . . .’

‘I didn’t kill him! She did!’ She blurted. She then put a hand over her mouth and looked, terrified, at her lawyer. Mr Aksoy just simply shrugged. ‘No . . . Yes . . . I . . . She wanted her husband implicated in something in order to get rid of him and I looked after the baby while she did it. But I didn’t kill Yaşar! Why would I? He was an inoffensive chap deep down, he helped me get money from Peter. We shared it out sixty thousand to him, sixty thousand to me. He bought the house in which we were both going to live . . .’

‘And yet you let her kill him by your own admission, Mrs Melly.’

‘No I didn’t! She went out that night to do something – I didn’t know what! I said I’d look after the baby. She told me later about Yaşar. I was appalled.’

‘I am confused,’ Mr Aksoy said. ‘Why would Mrs Ergin kill a carpet dealer she did not know?’

Matilda Melly looked at İkmen, shrugged her shoulders helplessly, and said, ‘You think you know everything about everything. Tell him.’

‘With the reservation that I do not believe Mrs Ergin killed the carpet dealer, I think that all of this happened because, Mr Aksoy, your client fell in love with Handan Ergin.’

The lawyer looked across at Matilda Melly with an expression of utter incredulity on his face.

‘Now according to Mrs Ergin,’ İkmen said, ‘this love affair went only in one direction. You loved her, Mrs Melly, but while she was tired of her autocratic husband, she was not intending to replace him with you.’

Matilda Melly’s face became a deep blood-red.

‘She freely admits that she gave you the gun with which to kill Yaşar Uzun. She wanted to implicate her husband and get rid of him. But you shot Yaşar to get him out of the way, didn’t you? You shot him so that once Abdullah Ergin was safely in prison, you could go and live with his wife in a lovely romantic place in Bulgaria.’

‘I didn’t shoot Yaşar. Peter saw me in my bed . . .’

‘Oh, please!’ İkmen said as he shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Please! Mrs Melly, you and I both know that Mr Melly wants to change his original story in order that he may come out of this affair with something – namely you. The poor man has lost everything! Money, his carpet, and you have suddenly decided, or so it seems to me, that you are a lesbian . . .’

‘Peter saw me in my bed. He is prepared to . . .’

‘Mrs Melly, you have already admitted that you or Mrs Ergin killed Uzun,’ İkmen said. ‘Handan Ergin, like you, cannot drive. The journey from her home on Professor Kazim İsmail Gürkan Caddesi to Peri is a long one – the nosey neighbour I took you to see would have recognised her. For Mrs Ergin to go and wait for some unspecified time amongst the trees and then come back again would be ridiculous. Better that you go. You, after all, knew Mr Uzun – he did not know Mrs Ergin. He would not have stopped his car for her, not at night anyway. And yet he stopped his car for someone, who then went on to shoot him. It is my belief you had arranged to meet him on his way out of the village. You can, after all, walk to the murder site from your home. I think it quite possible that Yaşar Uzun chose to leave the Klaassens’ house when he did in order to make the rendezvous with you, Mrs Melly.’

‘Oh, and then I just shot him, cleared up and then went calmly back to my bed.’

‘Made up, as we have seen, people find it hard to recognise you,’ İkmen replied. ‘But then in Peri who is going to be about at night? You went home, got into your lonely bed and your husband knew nothing about it.’ He paused. ‘Or rather that is what Handan Ergin has told us.’

‘Mrs Ergin has told us much,’ İskender interjected.

‘Oh, and you believe her, do you? Because she’s a Turk, I suppose!’

‘Mrs Melly, Mrs Ergin has condemned herself out of her own mouth,’ İkmen said. ‘She wanted to get rid of her husband and she didn’t care that Yaşar Uzun’s death was the vehicle for that process. After going to Bulgaria she did indeed intend to meet you in London. But she was never going to stay with you, Mrs Melly.’

Matilda Melly laughed, but without much mirth. ‘No, but you are wrong, you see.
She
is in love with
me
. I . . .’

‘Mrs Melly, let me ask you something,’ İkmen said. ‘Please tell me if your relationship with Mrs Ergin was ever physical?’

Aksoy the lawyer looked shocked and even mopped his tall, outraged brow with a handkerchief. He’d heard a lot of things in his long years of practice at law, but lesbians! Turkish lesbians! His client, Mrs Melly, had said nothing to him about such ‘unnatural’ practices!

Seconds passed into minutes as Matilda Melly, her eyes now fixed stonily on İkmen’s face, said nothing. At length the policeman said, ‘As I thought. No, Mrs Melly. No, your relationship was never physical . . .’

‘She wasn’t ready, I didn’t want to . . . Our love was pure, without men, it was . . .’

‘She used you, Mrs Melly,’ İkmen said. ‘She knew you loved her. And then, although you had started to cool towards him by that time, when Yaşar Uzun bought that extra apartment in Sofia she used your hurt pride to propel you towards murder. That at least is my opinion. After you fell for her, carrying on teaching her was hard and so you left Mrs Monroe’s little school. But you continued to see Handan in secret – maybe to soothe the bruises that her husband gave her. Then he stopped her going to English classes and Mrs Ergin’s mind became enraged.’

‘I didn’t do it! Handan didn’t do it! Why . . .’

‘You just said that she did, Mrs Melly. What are you doing? You are confused, I think . . .’

‘I . . .’ Matilda Melly began to cry.

‘And what, exactly, did you mean, Mrs Melly, when you talked just now about “clearing up” after Yaşar Uzun’s death? He was shot, his car came off the road, what was there to clear?’

‘Well, nothing, it’s just a figure of speech,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do it myself and so I can only conjecture what someone might have done after the event. Clearing up is . . . well, anyone would . . . clear up . . .’

‘No,’ İkmen said, ‘not everyone. Most people would be anxious to get away from the scene of the crime, Mrs Melly. Everything in your house will be examined by our forensics experts, especially brooms and other sweeping implements. Clearing up is important to me too.’

‘I didn’t do it!’ Matilda Melly said through her tears. ‘I didn’t do it!’

‘Well, then, if you didn’t, you had better start telling me the truth now,’ İkmen said. ‘Because believe me, Mrs Melly, Mrs Ergin has told us everything on her side with only the possible exception of her shoe size. Either you or she did it! Which one of you is it to be?’

İzzet Melik returned from Hakkari later on that afternoon carrying a whole sheaf of papers and information related to the life and death of Deniz Koç. Of course until the young man’s exhumed body had been properly examined, whether or not he had actually been murdered was still not certain. But the fact that a male nurse who had been largely responsible for his care, and who had disappeared shortly after İzzet Melik had arrived, was still unaccounted for was deeply suspicious. After making sure that his aunt Esma was happy to receive him later that evening, Süleyman arranged for a young constable to take him to the domestic terminal of Atatürk Airport to collect his sergeant. Süleyman was very pleased to see him. The small sigh of satisfaction that İzzet emitted when they both entered Süleyman’s office seemed to suggest that he too was glad to be ‘home’.

‘So is there any sort of connection between this missing nurse and Cabbar Soylu?’ Süleyman said as they both sat down and immediately lit cigarettes.

‘Not beyond the fact that apparently Soylu always talked to this particular nurse whenever he and his wife visited, no,’ İzzet replied. ‘Not everyone in the east is related, you know.’

Süleyman gave him a very cynical look. ‘İzzet,’ he said, ‘you’re a man who can keep a secret, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

He half knew the tale Süleyman was about to tell him anyway, much of which had come out during the course of their odd, haunted meeting back in the Markiz patisserie. The senior man went on to tell İzzet much about Mürsel and the peeper, the unfortunate Leyla Saban and, most significantly, the role of the town of Hakkari in all of those people’s lives.

‘The Koç family, the Soylus, Leyla Saban’s mother and the man I knew as Mürsel all had one thing in common,’ he said at the end of his tale.

‘Hakkari.’

‘Exactly! And you say that the east is misrepresented, İzzet? Mürsel was by his own admission the father of Leyla Saban and possibly of Deniz Koç too! I tremble to think of what other relationships may have evolved within what is a very small group of people in the scheme of things.’

‘True.’ İzzet frowned. ‘Although, Inspector, my working out in the east would not, very easily, have delivered the peeper to us, would it? I mean that was because of what you did here in the city.’

‘Well, not just me,’ Süleyman turned away briefly. He had not gone into the finer details surrounding the eventual arrest of Mürsel and the death of Nuri Koç. ‘As I have told you, others were involved.’

‘Yes, but you were there, Inspector. I was off out east and, unless this nurse when we find him eventually proves me wrong, then I wouldn’t really have got any further along the trail than Cabbar Soylu. I certainly couldn’t have made the connection to that Mürsel man or the peeper.’

‘Maybe not.’ Süleyman shrugged. ‘But at least the peeper nightmare is over. It is Leyla Saban’s father and Emine Soylu I feel most sorry for in all of this you know. They have lost their children. And for what? For greed, in the case of poor Deniz Koç, who died because he was inconvenient to his stepfather, and in the case of Leyla Saban due to some twisted, misdirected sense of honour in the head of a father she never knew.’

‘People can be vile, Inspector.’

‘Yes. And don’t worry, I’m not going to say anything about how much worse they are out east,’ he said with a smile. ‘I understand there are some very interesting places east of Kayseri.’

‘Oh, yes,’ İzzet replied. ‘Lake Van is actually very beautiful and you know a lot of people are now going out to places like Mardin. There’s a lot to recommend these destinations.’ He paused. ‘Though not necessarily the food . . .’

‘Yes, I noticed that you have lost a few kilos,’ Süleyman said.

‘Yes . . . It was at times painful, at others just unpleasant . . .’

‘Ah, but you carried on working in spite of it!’

İzzet sighed. ‘Yes, Inspector, I did.’

‘And although we know that the person who ordered Deniz Koç’s death is himself no more, our counterparts in the east can now pursue the man who actually did the deed.’ Süleyman smiled. ‘Let us hope that I am tonight as adept at solving mysteries as you have been, İzzet.’

‘Tonight?’

‘I have to go and see an aunt of mine,’ he said, ‘about an aunt of hers. Great Aunt Gözde, she was called. Now she was a mystery in herself, let me tell you!’

‘Before I begin,’ Matilda Melly said, ‘I have to know for certain that Handan did in fact say that I killed Yaşar.’

‘She said just that, Mrs Melly,’ İkmen replied. ‘Now . . .’

‘I met Handan, as you know, at Kim Monroe’s English classes,’ Matilda Melly said. ‘We got on well. To my surprise and in spite of having a thing with Yaşar at the time, I was attracted to her. Physically. I’d never had such . . . tendencies before but . . . Well, I knew that I shouldn’t do anything about it, but seeing Handan every week was torment. So I left. Fortunately or unfortunately Kim kept me abreast of what was going on in the classes, which was how I knew about the scene Handan’s husband had made. It was then that I actively sought her out – I remembered where she lived from my days at the English classes. I felt so sorry for her! One day I waited on the corner of her street until she came out to do her shopping.’