Deep Waters (17 page)

‘You thought the worst!’ she snapped.

‘Well, considering his parents were entirely ignorant of the matter . . .’

‘It was his body! He could do what—’

‘But you must agree, Miss Evren, that the apparent secrecy surrounding his donation does look suspicious – we were bound to investigate.’

Her poor twisted face now attempted a smile. ‘I know.’

İkmen felt quite sorry for her. ‘But now that you have told us the truth, that is fine,’ he said gently, ‘though I will of course have to check with the British authorities.’

‘Yes, yes. Please do,’ she said distractedly, obviously now chastising herself. ‘We obtained a visa for Rifat at the consulate and . . . I’m so very sorry that I lied to you, Inspector İkmen. I just thought that with Rifat’s death you would think all sorts of things and . . .’

‘Well, as long as that is all, miss.’ He paused briefly in order to give her some time to vouchsafe more information. But she didn’t. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to give me a statement to that effect.’

She sighed. ‘Of course.’

But then something subtly changed. Felicity Evren suddenly leaned forward and pointed to her face. ‘You know, although he helped me beyond all measure, I didn’t need Rifat, as some women might have done, to feed my ego. I mean, looking the way that I do, why would I?’

Taken aback, not quite understanding what was expected of him here, İkmen simply said, ‘No, miss.’

‘Had I wanted Rifat to love me, I would have had no difficulty in securing his affections. One doesn’t when one is beautiful, does one?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ İkmen said with great honesty. ‘But if that is your perception . . .’ He shrugged.

Felicity Evren smiled, crookedly. İkmen turned away. Was she being ironic or was she just delusional? At a loss, he returned again to the day of Rifat’s death, taking a kind of refuge there.

‘So after you had lunch with Mr Berisha . . .’

‘I went home and Rifat, to my knowledge, went to his home,’ she said.

‘And he didn’t seem either nervous or worried?’

‘No. I invited him to dinner at my home, next Friday, and then we parted company.’ She shrugged. ‘Very normal.’

‘Right, well,’ he said as he gathered various bits of evidence back into Rifat Berisha’s file, ‘we’ll need all the details about your trip to England in your statement.’

‘You want me to do that now?’

‘I’ll take you down to one of our interview rooms in a moment, yes,’ he said.

‘Very well.’

İkmen stood up. ‘Then that will clear up at least one part of our investigation, will it not?’

‘Yes.’ She rose too and smiled as he held the door open for her. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re very welcome.’

Of course her story made perfect sense, and İkmen had no doubt that the British authorities would confirm the details. But he wasn’t particularly happy about it. Rifat’s parents had had a right to know what he had done, even if Rifat himself hadn’t wanted them to. What if he had become ill upon his return to the Republic? What could poor little Engelushjia have been able to do about that? And anyway, it was an abuse of power as far as he was concerned. The rich could buy anything and everything they wanted. He knew it was how life was, but that didn’t mean that he necessarily liked it.

There were other issues here too. Like Felicity’s appearance, and her attitude to it. Also, if she had been so concerned about the matter of Rifat’s gift of a kidney to her as to lie to the police about it, what else might she or her family want to conceal about what had happened over in England?

Grunting against the steep gradient that fell away sharply behind the white BMW, Zelfa Halman pushed the car door open and eased her feet down onto the pot-holed road surface below. She turned to look at the small Fiat that had pulled up behind them.

‘Isn’t that your brother?’ she called across the car roof to Mehmet Suleyman.

‘Yes,’ he replied, smiling. Joining her in the road, he took one of her hands in his. ‘I wanted Murad to be with us when we told people. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No. Of course not.’ And then squeezing his hand encouragingly, she walked with him down to where a slightly plump man of medium height was extricating himself and a toddler from the Fiat.

‘Murad!’

The face that looked up from behind the tangle of beribboned hair on the little girl’s head was as affable as it was tired looking. Although shorter than his younger brother, Murad Suleyman would have shared Mehmet’s good looks had it not been for the weakness of his chin. It was a feature many put down to the significant amount of imperial blood that ran in his veins.

‘Hello, Brother,’ he said as he tried vainly to prevent his daughter, who was now stretching her arms out towards her uncle, from over-balancing out of his arms.

Letting go of Zelfa’s hand, Mehmet grabbed the little girl from his brother’s arms with a laugh.

‘Oh, this is a lovely welcome from a lovely girl!’ he said as the little one wound her arms round his neck, burying her face in the thick collar of his coat.

‘Well, you are Edibe’s only uncle, so what do you expect?’ Murad said and then turned his tired eyes towards Zelfa. ‘Good to see you again, doctor.’

‘Thank you.’

He smiled breifly at her before addressing his brother once again. ‘So is this just a social invitation or something more?’

‘When we get inside, I will tell you everything,’ Mehmet replied. He caught Zelfa’s eye and smiled.

‘Not anything to do with Father’s invitation then?’ Murad said.

‘No, but . . .’

The two brothers exchanged what to Zelfa looked like a strained gaze.

‘But what, Mehmet?’

‘But now is not the time to talk about that,’ the younger man said, breaking once again into a smile directed solely at Zelfa. ‘Tonight is about happy, hopeful things that lie not in the past but in the future.’

‘How very mysterious!’

Murad’s words were not, to Zelfa at least, in any way convincing. He was, she felt, not only ready for the news but judging by the champagne bottle poking out of his overcoat pocket, prepared for it too.

As they all moved forward towards the Cohens’ apartment block, Zelfa smiled at this small, and kindly, deception.

In some families it is easy to see resemblances. In others there is little or nothing to denote blood connection. The İkmen brothers, Çetin and Halil, appeared not only unrelated but like foreigners. As Halil’s housekeeper left after serving the two men with tea, Çetin İkmen, now alone with this virtual stranger, began to feel the alienation most acutely. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Halil – in fact quite the reverse was true – more that he felt awkward in his company, especially if
that
subject was to be discussed. As soon as he’d arrived at Halil’s pleasant Emirgan house, he had, erroneously he thought now, launched into the subject of their mother. That Halil had been reluctant to talk about his family in front of Mrs Kemal had been obvious from the straight-faced silence with which he had greeted Çetin’s opening remarks. Now, however, with only the silence of the night to bear witness to their conversation, the words still stuck in Çetin’s throat.

Looking across at the well-dressed man sitting back, seemingly comfortably, in his armchair, Çetin shuffled precariously on the edge of his seat and cleared his throat. He took his cigarettes and lighter out of the pocket of the coat he was still wearing and held them aloft for his brother to see. ‘May I?’

‘There’s an ashtray on the table,’ Halil answered with a shrug.

Smiling, Çetin leaned forward to offer his brother a cigarette. With a small bow of the head and the placing of one hand over his heart, Halil refused.

Çetin, a little more relaxed now he could light up, noticed for the first time that the hair around his brother’s ears and temples was quite white. It was one of those rare moments when one realises that those close to one are no longer young. Counting upwards from his own age, Çetin İkmen discovered that his brother was now fifty-seven. It was a strange, half-known shock that took a little time to recover from.

In the silence, Halil finally spoke. ‘So what is it exactly that you want to discuss about Mother’s death?’

Çetin took a deep drag on his cigarette before answering.

‘I want to know what happened that day,’ he said. ‘I want to understand.’

‘You were there—’

‘I was ten years old, Halil,’ Çetin cut in sharply.

‘Yes, and I was thirteen.’

‘You walked into that room. You stood in front of me. I saw only your back.’

Halil leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands between his knees. ‘You were my little brother, Çetin. I wanted to protect you. I knew that Mother was dead.’

‘How?’ He took a nervous drag on his cigarette and attempted to catch Halil’s eyes which seemed to be trying to avoid his own. ‘One thing I do know is that she was lying on her bed. Couldn’t she have just been asleep?’

‘Çetin, she was dead.’

‘Yes, but how—’

‘I don’t know how I knew! It all happened a very long time ago!’ He got up quickly from his chair and walked across to his brother, took a cigarette out of the packet in his hands and lit up.

‘If Mother did indeed die of a heart attack, there couldn’t have been all that much to see surely.’

Halil halted in his progress back to his seat and turned to face his brother.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember. Perhaps you should speak to Arto about the possible post-mortem condition of a cardiac patient.’

‘All I’m saying is—’

‘Çetin, I don’t know,’ and then with a long drag on his cigarette followed by a sigh he sat back down in his chair. ‘And I don’t understand why these old miseries are suddenly so important to you. Mother died when we were both children. Father had a terrible, hard life for many years after that. I thought that you and I had decided to consign all of that to the past.’

Halil’s observations were not, Çetin knew, unreasonable. Life had indeed been very difficult for the family in the wake of Ayşe İkmen’s death. Their father had had to carry on working in order to support his boys, but at a price. Keeping house, cooking and doing the laundry were not activities that two intellectual and intense boys wanted or enjoyed. They would both fall exhausted into their beds at the end of days spent cleaning, cooking, going to school and doing their homework. Late into the night, every night, their father Timür would work on his lecture notes, prepare the soup for the following morning and, in the winter months, go out into the garden to gather wood for the fire. Not once during that time did his eyes so much as touch upon another woman, even though he was still a youngish man at that time and must have been terribly lonely.

But notwithstanding all of this bitter old pain, Çetin knew that if he were ever to get the vision of Angeliki Vlora’s vindictive face out of his mind, he would have to somehow root out the truth. Besides, with his mother’s death weighing on his mind plus the connection he had with the Albanian community via Samsun, Çetin felt that he was becoming compromised with regard to the Rifat Berisha case. The sooner this question regarding Ayşe’s death could be cleared up, the better. And so he told his brother everything: about Angeliki Vlora, about
gjakmaria
, about the unfortunate involvement of their cousin. The only thing he omitted was Angeliki’s allegations about the manner of their mother’s death, reasoning that if that were correct, Halil would know about it anyway.

When he’d finished, Halil took another cigarette from his brother’s packet and leaned back thoughtfully in his chair.

‘So you see, Halil,’ Çetin said, lighting up also, ‘I do need to know. It’s affecting my work . . .’

‘Yes, well . . .’ Halil replied, ‘I do see that it is important that you know, Çetin.’

‘But?’

Halil smiled. ‘But if Arto can’t find anything in Uncle Vahan’s papers, I think you may very well be at a dead end.’

‘But Halil, you were—’

‘Yes, I was there, Çetin, and yes, I called Uncle Vahan and got you looked after by the neighbours.’ He leaned forward in his chair, his eyes intense and also a little moist. ‘But the truth is that even if you threatened me with death I could not tell you what I saw in Mother’s bedroom.’

For Çetin who, on his way over to Halil’s, had struggled with various theories regarding what if anything his brother might have been concealing from him all these years, this empty revelation came as a shock. It also, for the moment, puzzled him.

‘So now when you think about going into that room . . .’

‘I see only blackness,’ Halil replied. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? At all?’

‘Çetin, I can’t even recall what Mother looked like unless I get my photographs out!’

‘But you look so like her.’

‘Then perhaps that is why I do not linger at the mirror in the morning! Perhaps it all hurts too much!’

They lapsed into silence. Çetin tried to order his thoughts. If Halil had expunged the memory of their mother’s death from his mind, what did that signify? This was not, Çetin knew, unusual in those who had suffered severe trauma. But as time progressed such memories generally either returned or the person suffered some other problems resulting from the sublimation of the unacceptable, which usually led to that person seeking psychiatric help. As far as he knew, neither of these things had happened to Halil. So had his brother seen something so terrible in that room that what appeared to be a permanent curtain had been brought down on the sight? Could it be that he had seen their mother lying there with her throat slashed open – the gash deep and liverish like the one that had taken Rifat Berisha’s life? Could there be truth in what Angeliki Vlora had told him?

‘Halil—’

The sound of his mobile ringing interrupted him. With a brief apologetic nod at his brother, Çetin took the instrument out of his coat pocket and pressed the receive button.