Deep Waters (15 page)

And so an hour passed amid tea and tears. Rahman, Aliya and Mimoza smoked incessantly while Felicity told them how kind and special Rifat had been to her. Although she did not exactly say that she had loved him, it was possible to infer this from her words, if little else. Where and when she had met Rifat and what, if anything, her family had made of him were not topics that the Berishas were enlightened about. Indeed, at the end of Felicity’s visit they found that they didn’t even know where she lived or what kind of ‘foreigner’ she was. She just came, paid her respects and then with a hug only for Engelushjia she left. She didn’t know that the young Albanian girl knew things about her that made her feel distinctly uneasy – things she didn’t feel she could tell her parents.

‘I really think that we should let Sergeant Tepe know that she’s been here,’ Engelushjia said as she started to clear the tea glasses and ashtrays away.

‘I don’t,’ her father answered. ‘Why do they need to know about your brother’s conquests?’

‘They need to know everything about Rifat if they’re going to catch his killer,’ Engelushjia answered.

‘Yes, but we know who killed your brother,’ Aliya started. ‘It—’

‘No, we don’t!’ her daughter insisted. ‘Not for certain.’

‘Oh, so you went over to see the Vloras just for a little talk, did you?’ Rahman sneered. ‘With a knife in your pocket.’

‘I always carry a knife, as well you know!’ Engelushjia retorted. ‘In case people threaten me.’

‘Which they did.’

‘Yes! But I went there just to talk. To try and sort this stupid mess out.’ Then looking at the expressions of disbelief all around her, Engelushjia tossed her head and said, ‘Well, don’t believe me, I don’t care. But what I say is true whether you like it or not.’

Mimoza, laughing now, said, ‘You don’t have to cover up your lust for the Turkish policeman to us, girl! You should set your sights on a Turk, they have money and they’ve always liked our women.’

‘Sergeant Tepe is married actually,’ Engelushjia said and looked down her nose at the vaguely dissolute face of her mother’s cousin. ‘And even if he were not, I would have more respect for both him and myself than to just offer my body to him. I want to be with a man that I love and who loves me.’

‘Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought you were,’ Aliya Berisha said as she moved slowly towards the kitchen. Then, stopping and turning to face her daughter, she said, ‘You want to look like me at thirty-nine years old?’

Silently, Engelushjia lowered her eyes.

‘I thought not,’ her mother said bitterly and left the room.

‘Never mind,’ Mimoza laughed. ‘When your father’s avenged Rifat, I’ll persuade Dilek to make a party.’

‘What, a death party?’

‘No!’ Mimoza laughed even harder. ‘I’ll think of something, some excuse. I’ll get Dilek to bring his friends. They’re all Turks. You’re bound to find someone you want amongst them.’

‘Right,’ said Engelushjia heavily. Just the thought of Dilek’s largely drunken friends was enough to make any rational girl opt for celibacy. But the irony in her tone was lost upon Mimoza, who now followed Rahman and Aliya into the kitchen.

Alone now, Engelushjia Berisha thought again about how much she wanted all this morbid trouble to be over. She wanted Rifat to be at rest in his grave, she wanted her father to stop planning the murder she knew was coming, and she did indeed want to see Sergeant Tepe once again. It wasn’t every day that a man treated her like a human being, much less a lady – even when she had bitten his partner.

Engelushjia laughed gently and then went out into the hall to retrieve her shoes.

‘I’m going out for a while,’ she said as she threw a cardigan on over her dress and opened the front door to the apartment.

But none of those in the kitchen heard her either call or leave. They were too busy with their own plans and the demands of blood.

It was hard to decide whether she wasn’t fully attending to the boy because of the inanity and sheer self-indulgence of his condition or because her mind was already fixed upon the task she had set herself when the appointment was over. By rights she should have been concerned. After all, it wasn’t as if he was improving. The mannered morbidity he had been exhibiting for the last three months was in fact deepening.

Peering from inside his many sweaters, the boy, his kohl-rimmed eyes haunted and black, cleared his throat. ‘Doctor?’

Ashamed to have been caught out in a moment of reverie by one who shared her native language, Zelfa Halman shifted herself up a little straighter in her chair and smiled.

‘So fear of becoming obese is not what motivates you,’ she said, referring hastily to some notes she had written several minutes before.

‘I would hate to be fat,’ he replied, his pinched face forming a scowl, ‘but no. It’s more philosophical than that, it’s—’

‘You do know that the end of this process results in loss of muscle tone, teeth and hair, followed by excruciating pain.’

‘As the body in an attempt to live digests its own organs,’ he said brightly. ‘Yes. My father told me about it. But I do eat, I assure you. I’ve eaten since I last saw you two days ago – several times actually. Honestly, my father does panic . . .’

‘He cares about you, Ali. He wants you to be well.’

The boy smiled in a way she found totally confusing. ‘Yes.’

After a short pause she continued, ‘You tell me you like old horror films and books – Dracula and Frankenstein, that sort of stuff.’

‘Yes, but if you’re going to say that my appearance is due to my interest in the supernatural—’

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Because I know that I’m only a teenager and that we are prone to obsessions of this type, but it’s really rather more complicated than that, doctor. As I’ve said, it’s philosophical . . .’ He turned away, smiling into a corner of the room. Intent, no doubt, Zelfa thought, as many of his kind could be, upon romantic notions about things of a dark nature. It was something she found very European, but then the boy had lived in England, which was apparently his mother’s country. ‘Gothic’ kids were common there. The British, just like the Irish, could afford such frippery.

‘You know that the vampire’s inability to see himself in a mirror encapsulates our fear of becoming inhuman and the loss of identity a transformation to a more powerful primitive state may bring,’ he said in what over the few months she had been seeing him Zelfa had come to recognise as his precocious intellectual mode.

‘Which book did you read that in, Ali?’ she inquired.

‘My sister read it actually,’ he replied. ‘Yesterday.’ And then he said more to himself than to Zelfa, ‘Some sort of alternative explanation, I suppose.’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t pertain in any way to your own situation, does it? You, like me, are real and so you, like me, can see yourself in a mirror.’

He sighed a trifle sadly before replying, ‘Well, yes, we are currently boringly mortal, you and I.’

‘A condition we cannot change,’ Zelfa said with a smile. ‘However, if you don’t eat properly or talk to people outside your family you may eventually think that you’re something you’re not.’

‘Oh, I don’t believe that’s likely to happen, do you?’ he said, his face now comically aghast. But there was bitterness behind it too.

‘Well, I’ve known odder things happen,’ Zelfa replied firmly, ‘so don’t push it. Your mind is a delicate organ that is highly susceptible to outside influences. So, before you see me again, try at least to engage in some sort of conversation at school and eat one more item per day. Will you try that?’

‘I’ll give it a go,’ he said, looking down sulkily at the floor. And then with his head still bent he rose to his feet. ‘So will it be Thursday then?’

‘We do need, I feel,’ she said, looking up at him, ‘to explore some more of the issues that may lie behind your unhappiness.’

‘I’m not unhappy.’

‘Your father feels—’

‘My father wants to put me in an institution.’

Zelfa only just managed to stop herself from smiling at what was, she knew, a case of teenage over-exaggeration. Although a little rough around the edges, the boy’s father had seemed, in the short time she had been with him, to be a most concerned individual.

‘Ali, your father only wants you to get well.’

‘Oh, well, you’ll see,’ he said with a dismissive shrug.

Zelfa changed the subject. ‘Perhaps next time we can be really brave and return to the subject of your mother.’

He took his jacket off the back of his chair and put it on.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I mean if you would find it of interest.’

‘My needs are not really relevant here, Ali. Although if you would like me to have such an interest . . .’

‘Yes.’ He smiled, revealing a set of white, even teeth. ‘Yes, as an exercise in the exploration of annihilation, I think you might benefit from it, doctor.’

‘Then I will see you on Thursday, Ali,’ she said and rose to escort him out of her office.

‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he said, still smiling as he left.

When he had gone, Zelfa Halman sat back down heavily behind her desk. So often with anorexics, even of an indulgent borderline variety like Ali, it was a game. But this notion he had that he was somehow doing her a favour was a new one. Convoluted and really quite intellectual for one so young, she thought. Interesting. But not so interesting as to blind her to the fact that she would quite like to speak to the boy’s obese father soon. For all his posturing, it was, she felt, important that Ali learn from the horse’s mouth, as it were, that his one surviving parent was on his side.

In the meantime, and before her nerve deserted her, she had to make another phone call, the one she had been wanting to make all day. The one to Mehmet Suleyman. Her face reddened as she dialled his mobile number. ‘Bloody menopause!’ she muttered.

When, several seconds later, he answered, she did not for once refer to either her condition or say something deliberately cynical. But as she spoke to him she knew that it was far too late to go back on what she was doing. As they said back home, she would just have to ‘spit it out and be damned’.

‘Where are you, Mehmet?’ she asked after he had thanked her profusely for calling and therefore brightening up his day.

‘I’m just getting into the car,’ he said. ‘Going over to the Forensic Institute.’

‘So you’re not driving yet? And you’re not with anyone else?’

‘No. Why?’

She smiled. Here it came and he, apparently, didn’t have a clue. ‘You’re sitting down now, in the car?’

‘Yes. Zelfa—’

‘Mehmet,’ she said, and slowly savoured what was now the moment of affectionate torture she had always envisaged, ‘dear Mehmet, I have decided, after much consideration, to accept your offer and become your wife.’

The strange strangled noise that came from the other end of the line made it quite apparent that he had heard her, but she did say his name a couple of times anyway, until he answered.

‘You do know,’ he said when he had recovered his voice, ‘that you have just made me immeasurably happy, Zelfa.’

‘Yes, foolish boy,’ she said as she quickly wiped gathering tears from her eyes, ‘although in comparison to my own joy, well . . .’

‘Look, why don’t you come over tonight so that we can tell people?’

‘What, to Cohen’s?’

‘Yes,’ he laughed. ‘They will be so happy for us! Almost as happy as I am, my darling.’

She smiled. Sometimes, despite the fact that he was on the edge of middle age, Mehmet still behaved like an excited schoolboy. It was one of the many things that she loved about him.

‘OK,’ she said, quickly glancing at the diary that lay open on her desk. ‘I’ll be finished here at about six.’

‘I’ll come and pick you up!’

‘You—’

‘I don’t want my beautiful wife to walk the streets in the cold, dirty fog!’

Resisting the temptation to say something about how it had been good enough for her when she was his mistress, Zelfa just smiled and then assented to his request.

It was only when she finally put the phone down and asked for Mr Turkeş to be shown into the surgery that she thought properly about what she’d just done. ‘Oh, shit!’ she giggled as her patient walked uneasily through the door.

İkmen looked first at the small piece of paper in his hands and then shifted his gaze to Tepe’s face.

‘So you don’t think that Miss Berisha is playing games with us then, Orhan?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ Tepe replied.

‘Despite the fact that when she went to the Vloras’ apartment armed to kill she then joined forces with her enemy to lie to us about that.’

‘She says she went over there to try and talk to Mehmet. She only took the knife, she says, because she apparently takes it everywhere.’

‘She says,’ İkmen muttered, echoing what he considered to be the most important element of his colleague’s speech. Then suddenly smiling broadly he said, ‘So is Miss Berisha still with us or has she run off back to her parents’ place?’

‘She’s still here, sir,’ Tepe said. ‘In fact, I’d go so far as to say she’s quite reluctant to leave.’

‘How very odd.’

‘Perhaps she’s keen to find out whether you will telephone Felicity Evren and, if you do, what the outcome of that might be.’

İkmen raised the telephone receiver and dialled. ‘Let us not disappoint her,’ he said and then waited for someone to answer.

After several seconds the monotonous sound of an unattended phone was broken by a male voice.

‘I would like to speak to Miss Evren, please,’ İkmen said.

‘Very well,’ replied the male, who sounded quite young. Then he called out to someone in what İkmen immediately recognised as heavily accented English.

‘Miss Flick!’ he shouted. ‘Miss Flick, some man on telephone!’

‘What does he want?’ an extremely English female voice replied.