Deep Waters (16 page)

‘I do not know,’ the man replied. ‘Here, take.’

Shuffling sounds as the telephone receiver changed hands crackled in İkmen’s ear. Just before the woman spoke, the policeman lit a cigarette.

‘Flick Evren,’ the woman said breathily into the receiver. ‘Yes?’

‘Hello, Miss Evren,’ İkmen replied with what even Tepe recognised as a very good English accent. ‘My name is Inspector Çetin İkmen. I work for the İstanbul Police Department.’

‘Oh. Yes?’

‘Yes. I am telephoning, Miss Evren, about the death of a young man I believe was a good friend of yours.’

‘Oh.’ He could almost see her gaze drop sadly towards the floor – her grief encapsulated in one small paravocal expression. ‘How did you . . . ?’

‘Mr Berisha’s family are, as I hope you can appreciate, helping us with our inquiries. And because Mr Berisha’s death has been declared unlawful we are bound to interest ourselves in all his contacts.’

‘Of course.’

‘And so anything that you, as a friend, could tell us, Miss Evren, would be appreciated.’

He heard her sigh. ‘Now?’ she said. ‘I—’

‘We could make an appointment for the near future,’ İkmen said and rapidly looked at the back of his cigarette packet, which served as his diary for the day. ‘Perhaps around five o’clock?’

‘Today?’

‘Yes.’ It was always as well, İkmen thought, to be quite clear about what you wanted from those you wished to question. Such gentle bullying allowed everyone to understand the reality of their position within the process – even if words like ‘you will’ or ‘you must’ were never actually used.

‘Well,’ the woman drawled, ‘do you want me to come in?’

‘I can drive out to your home if you wish,’ İkmen said.

‘Oh, no. No, I’ll come to you,’ she said and then added through the filter of a tense little laugh, ‘I’ll get Hassan to drive me. It won’t be any trouble.’

‘Excellent. Thank you.’

‘Right.’

He gave her the address of the station plus directions up to his office. She, in her turn, stated that she was looking forward to their meeting, which struck İkmen as odd. But then with Miss Felicity Evren being so very obviously English, this was perhaps not so strange. Old Timür İkmen always used to say that the British were polite to the point of irrationality. Once again, İkmen thought grimly, his late father had probably been right. In view of recent events, however, it was perhaps unwise to be thinking about his parents. In an attempt to divert himself he looked up sharply at his junior and said, ‘Perhaps you could take Miss Berisha home now then, Orhan. No sense in her sitting downstairs indefinitely.’

‘No, sir.’ He stood up.

‘You can tell her that everything is in hand with regard to Miss Evren,’ İkmen said. ‘You don’t need to go into detail.’

He turned his attention back to the pile of papers he had been considering when Tepe first entered his office. But his mind refused to concentrate on the task in hand. His mother’s death now haunted both his days and his nights, and he had begun to think that perhaps putting off talking to his brother was more an act of cowardice on his part than genuine care for Halil. After all, if, as Arto Sarkissian seemed to think, there was nothing relevant to his mother in Vahan Sarkissian’s papers, he would have to contact Halil anyway.

With a sigh he lifted the telephone receiver and dialled his brother’s number. After what seemed like an eternity, a smooth voice answered.

‘Halil, it’s Çetin,’ İkmen said quickly, aware of the very real danger of losing his nerve at this point. ‘I need to see you.’

The reply he got was full of concern. ‘What’s wrong, brother? Is it Fatma or . . .’

‘No, Fatma and the children are fine – as is, as far as it ever could be, the money situation,’ İkmen said, effectively covering the usual reasons for calling on his brother.

‘Then . . .’

‘Look, Halil,’ İkmen said, knowing that he was being unaccountably tetchy, ‘I just need to talk to you, OK? I mean, are you busy this evening?’

‘Çetin, this is really worrying me.’

‘Yes or no, Halil!’ İkmen said, his temper flaring. ‘I can come to you or we can go out.’

‘Çetin—’

‘Halil, I need to speak to you about our mother!’ and then furious that he had disclosed the subject of his anxieties before he was ready, he added, ‘It’s a conversation we should have had forty years ago!’

‘
What?
’

Responding instantly to the panic in his brother’s voice, İkmen said, ‘Can we talk of these things or not? Can I come and see you?’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yes! Yes, I need to do this, Halil, I—’

‘All right! All right!’ In his mind’s eye İkmen could see the long, heavily ringed fingers of his brother’s hands flying into the air in agitated submission – hands, if not the gestures that they made, so like those of Ayşe İkmen. But then everybody said that the older İkmen brother had inherited his mother’s good looks while the ‘little one’ had gained much from her magical personality.

‘I will be finished with these figures at around seven,’ Halil said, ‘so if you want to come after that, I will ask Mrs Kemal to prepare dinner for two.’

‘There’s really no need,’ İkmen said as he recalled the contemptuous looks his brother’s housekeeper had given him the last time he had visited. But then what did he expect? His brother, as a successful, childless and now divorced accountant, lived, dressed and ate well. Çetin, on the other hand, as a married policeman with nine children, looked exactly like what he was – a stressed-out chain-smoker with several barely controlled stomach ulcers.

‘Well then, I will see you later,’ Halil said with a resigned sigh.

‘Thank you, Halil.’

‘It’s nothing.’

But it was, and Çetin İkmen knew that they both knew it. The one thing that the subject of Ayşe İkmen could never be was nothing. Though dead for over forty years, the witch of Üsküdar had always been the focus of passionate speculation to those interested in such dark things – and, of course, to her two sons, between whom, although they never spoke of her, İkmen often thought, she stood immovably, like one of the harsh mountains of her birthplace.

She hadn’t expected to find someone like him in a place like this. Tall, slim and quite spectacularly handsome, the man was locking the door to what she assumed must be his office. And, because he was so obviously leaving, Felicity Evren had to assume that this attractive man couldn’t possibly be the inspector she had spoken to on the telephone. He was, in all probability, a colleague whom, had she felt more confident of her Turkish, she would have asked about this İkmen fellow, simply to speak to him. But as quickly as he had appeared, so Inspector Suleyman, or so the plate on his door would have it, had gone, leaving Felicity alone with the door opposite – the one belonging, so its plate said, to Inspector Çetin İkmen.

A single tap on the glass brought a short, wiry man to the door. First, slightly bemused, his face quickly resolved into a really very pleasant smile.

‘Hello, Miss Evren,’ he said in perfect English as he extended a small hand towards her. ‘Thank you so much for coming so promptly.’

‘Anything I can do to help . . .’ She shrugged, the upward motion of her shoulders accentuating the pronounced puffiness that İkmen observed on the left-hand side of her face, and the barely concealed discolouration of the flesh.

‘Please sit down.’ İkmen pulled his hand free from her grip and motioned her towards the chair in front of his desk.

‘Thank you.’

She sat, her tiny form almost disappearing from view behind piles of paper.

‘Can I get you some tea?’

‘No. Thank you,’ she said and smiled in a manner almost as disconcerting as her shrug.

İkmen, ever the perfect host, took his cigarettes and lighter from his pocket. ‘Cigarette?’

‘No, thank you,’ she said, ‘but please, if you want to smoke then don’t let me stop you.’

He nodded by way of thanks and lit up.

‘My father smokes quite heavily,’ she said as she watched İkmen light his cigarette and then exhale with pleasure. ‘Like all of you, really.’

İkmen frowned. ‘All of you?’ he said. ‘Meaning, Miss Evren?’

Laughing, she answered, ‘Turks, Inspector. My father, like you, is Turkish.’

‘Oh. And you?’

‘Like my mother, I am English,’ she said, ‘but then that is something that I think you knew already.’

He smiled.

‘You speak the language so well, Inspector, and with such a perfect accent.’

Ever embarrassed by flattery, İkmen looked down at the desk in front of him. ‘My father taught English, French and Russian at the university. Many years ago now, however.’

‘My father lived in London all his life until now, but he doesn’t speak the language as well as you do,’ she replied.

‘Thank you.’

And then, for a moment, a silence descended upon them. Felicity Evren, feeling that she might perhaps have over-flattered this unknown man, looked away. İkmen, too, though for other reasons, sought out something upon which to pin his gaze. This, conveniently, turned out to be Rifat Berisha’s file.

‘So, Miss Evren, how long did you know Rifat Berisha?’ he asked.

‘For about eighteen months.’

‘Right.’ İkmen turned the pages of the thick file and came to the postcards and tickets from London.

‘And where did you meet Mr Berisha?’

‘I bought a very delicate cup and saucer from him,’ Felicity Evren said with a smile of remembrance. ‘He had a stall, with some other men, at the Ortaköy Sunday market.’

‘These other men,’ İkmen asked, ‘were they Albanian too?’

She shrugged. ‘I imagine so, yes. I couldn’t understand anything they said.’

‘And then?’ İkmen prompted with a forward movement of his shoulders.

‘We became friends, Inspector,’ she answered, smiling that awful crooked smile of hers. ‘He showed me so much of this city. We had a lot of fun together. I’ve only lived in İstanbul for two years, since I came here with my father and brother.’

‘So your mother . . .’

‘Is dead, Inspector.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

She just shrugged and, taking this as his cue to move on, İkmen said, ‘When did you last see Mr Berisha, Miss Evren?’

She paused to think. ‘The morning before the night of his death. We had lunch together.’

‘Where?’ İkmen put his cigarette out and then immediately lit another.

‘At the Yeşil Ev,’ she replied, naming one of the ever increasing number of Ottoman Mansion Hotels.

İkmen, frowning, observed, ‘Expensive.’

‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I’d been shopping. It was a nice way to finish my trip.’

İkmen took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘And so, Miss Evren, did Mr Berisha, at either that luncheon or before, give you any reason to think that he might be in some kind of danger?’

‘No,’ she replied without, this time, pausing to consider her answer. ‘Although he didn’t talk very much at lunch.’ She smiled. ‘I’m afraid I tended to go on a bit about my purchases. I always hogged the conversation.’

‘And yet you and he had a lot of fun.’

‘Yes, we did,’ she said with a sudden, quite aggressive sharpness. ‘Rifat liked the way I was with him. Our friendship was good!’

‘Yes,’ İkmen said in as conciliatory a way as possible. ‘Yes, there are plenty of things that men and woman can . . . do . . .’

‘We did not have . . . have sex, either,’ she added, still quite obviously fuelled by anger. ‘I loved Rifat and I will miss him bitterly, but not in . . . in that way.’

‘No.’ İkmen nodded. ‘Quite right.’

Another small silence followed, which was again eventually broken by İkmen.

‘So did you and Rifat ever go further afield, outside the city?’

‘We spent a day in Bursa together,’ she said, ‘just before the earthquake.’

‘No other trips then?’ İkmen asked as he looked down once again at the postcards and tickets in Rifat’s file, ‘You didn’t go abroad?’

‘Abroad?’ She laughed. ‘Are you serious? Rifat was Albanian, Inspector İkmen, they’re not welcome in a whole lot of places, you know – especially in Europe which is where I tend to go when I leave Turkey.’

İkmen frowned. ‘So you have no idea where he might have obtained these?’ he said as he pushed the postcards and tickets towards her.

Felicity Evren looked down at them briefly and shrugged. ‘No. I suppose I may have given him the postcards at some time but I don’t remember doing so.’

He smiled. ‘And you have no idea where else he might have got them from?’

‘No.’

İkmen took the cards and tickets back. ‘Do you know how Miss Berisha came to have your telephone number, Miss Evren?’

‘She didn’t say. It must have been amongst Rifat’s things.’

‘No, he memorised it actually,’ İkmen said blandly. ‘Engelushjia Berisha told my sergeant that her brother gave her your number when he went abroad with you last year. He didn’t know where he was going to be staying, but he wanted her to have the number just in case anything should happen to him.’

Felicity Evren turned her face away.

‘Miss Berisha also told my sergeant,’ İkmen continued, ‘that while he was abroad with you, Rifat had surgery. He gave you one of his kidneys, didn’t he, Miss Evren? Before you answer, remember that I can order you to be examined to verify this.’

‘You have no idea,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘I had kidney disease . . . It’s . . .’

‘And in return you gave Rifat a very nice car.’

She turned back to face him again, her features red with anger. ‘That was not why I gave him the car!’ Her voice trembled with emotion. ‘Rifat helped me because he loved me. I gave him the car because I am rich and I loved him. No money ever changed hands!’

‘Free donation of an organ is not illegal,’ İkmen said. ‘You must understand that when our doctor discovered that Rifat had only one kidney—’