Deep Waters (22 page)

‘Yes, but—’

‘Well then, we have nothing to worry about, do we?’ he said with a smile. ‘The animal will wake us up and—’

‘Don’t you dare patronise me, Çetin İkmen!’ Fatma roared as she waved a cleaning cloth furiously at him.

Slamming his pide back down onto his plate, İkmen countered, ‘Don’t shout at me when I’m eating, woman!’

She was just about to shout again when what was rapidly turning into an argument was interrupted by the door buzzer.

‘And who is that at this time of night!’ Fatma said, rolling her eyes in frustration.

‘Well, how should I know?’ her husband replied. ‘Why don’t you go and find out?’

‘I will,’ she said and stomped angrily past him towards the kitchen door. ‘But not because you tell me to do so!’

When she had gone, İkmen looked down at his not even half-eaten meal and pushed his plate impatiently to one side. Rarely an enthusiastic eater, the argument had put him completely off his food now and so he did what he always did at times like these and lit up a cigarette.

A few minutes later he heard footsteps come back down the hall and inwardly braced himself for yet another round of strife. But the person who entered the kitchen was not, thankfully, Fatma.

‘Hello, Çetin,’ Arto Sarkissian said as he smiled his way into the room.

‘Arto!’

‘No, don’t get up.’ The Armenian waved his friend back down into his chair. ‘Finish your meal.’

Looking briefly at the rapidly cooling pide, İkmen scowled. ‘I have,’ he said.

‘Ah. Well, that won’t please Fatma very much.’

‘What a pity,’ İkmen replied acidly.

For a few seconds, Arto watched his friend as he smoked in what seemed to be distracted silence, then he extended his hand towards the plate and said, ‘Give it to me.’

İkmen, laughing, pushed the plate in his friend’s direction and then slouched back into his chair.

‘Just like old times,’ he said softly.

‘Yes, except that these days I shouldn’t really be eating anyone else’s food.’ Arto took a large bite of bread and egg. ‘I sometimes think that one of the reasons I’m so fat now is because I used to eat your food whenever you came to our house.’

İkmen shrugged. ‘You were always very willing.’

‘It was a mystery to my mother how you remained so skinny.’

‘Did you ever tell her the truth?’

Arto smiled. ‘No. But then sometimes people do keep things from others for very good reasons, don’t they, Çetin?’

There was a look in his friend’s eyes that made İkmen sit up straighter – it was the kind of look he knew Arto used just before he was going to tell somebody something important or unpleasant.

‘You found something amongst Uncle Vahan’s things, didn’t you?’ İkmen said, his whole body tense.

Arto took another bite of the pide and then put it down. ‘Yes.’

İkmen waited, if not patiently, until his friend had finished chewing. ‘And?’

‘The official line on your mother’s death,’ Arto said gravely, ‘was suicide. I’m very sorry, Çetin.’

‘But that’s impossible!’

Looking at the table as opposed to his friend’s outraged face did, Arto found, help his progress through this nightmare slightly. ‘I’m afraid the report is quite specific. There was even a note. Your mother cut her own throat.’

İkmen put his hands to his head and got to his feet, knocking his chair over as he did so. He began to pace distractedly across the kitchen. ‘But I was only a child, Arto! How could she do that to us?’

‘I don’t know, Çetin. Her note, apparently, stated nothing beyond her intentions, and my father’s report didn’t go into any psychological specifics, if indeed they were known at the time. Zelfa Halman might be able to come up with some theories if you ask her. In fact I tried phoning her office late this afternoon but apparently she’d gone home after her last appointment, she didn’t feel well.’

‘If this is the case,’ İkmen said, totally ignoring what his friend had just offered, ‘my brother and my father lied to me.’

‘Well . . .’

‘All that stuff Halil came out with the other day about how he couldn’t remember anything about Mother’s death, about how every time he tries, it all goes black . . .’

‘Çetin . . .’

‘They lied to me, Arto! Uncle Vahan lied to me too, and to you!’

‘I expect your father was just trying to protect you.’

‘Yes, at the time, I can see that,’ İkmen said as he put one cigarette out and lit up another. ‘But why didn’t he tell me later on? And as for Halil . . .’

‘Now, Çetin, I know that in your work you have sometimes seen what can happen when people are confronted with information or sights that they just cannot bear.’ Standing up too now, he moved over to where his friend was pacing and put a hand firmly on his shoulder. ‘They blank them out.’

‘For over forty years!’ İkmen roared.

Fearing that if he didn’t establish a firm hold upon this situation soon, Çetin would spin out into hysteria, Arto changed his tone to one of stern and brutal honesty.

‘Your brother,’ he said, ‘walked into a nightmare the day he found your mother! You know what people look like when they’ve had their throats slashed – imagine coming home and finding the person who loves you most looking like that! Imagine Fatma looking like that!’

‘Arto . . .’

‘He knew she was dead! He could see that there was nothing he could do for her and so he did the next logical thing, he made certain that you, his little brother, didn’t have to endure it too.’ Without taking his eyes off İkmen’s face, Arto bent down and picked the fallen chair up off the floor. Then he told his friend, or rather ordered him, to sit down. Strangely, for he was still very agitated, İkmen complied.

‘The fact that Halil has never spoken to you of these things before,’ Arto said as he, too, seated himself, ‘is, I believe, because he genuinely doesn’t recall them. I suspect, although I don’t know this of course, that as soon as our fathers and the police arrived and the pressure was off Halil, he wiped the image from his mind. I certainly remember being told of your mother’s death on the day that it occurred and of being fed what became the official line, that she’d had a heart attack. Neither Krikor nor I ever knew any different, until today.’

‘But Father knew.’

‘Our fathers both knew, Çetin, as did the police. But I think that once they realised that your brother had expunged what he had seen from his mind, they made a decision to change the details regarding Auntie Ayşe’s death into a far more palatable lie. We were all very young at the time.’

‘Halil will have to know now, won’t he?’

Arto sighed. ‘I think we need to take advice on that, Çetin,’ he said. ‘Psychiatric advice.’

İkmen, although somewhat calmer, frowned.

‘Halil has over forty years of denial to come to terms with,’ Arto said gravely. ‘It was in fact with him in mind, rather than you, that I called Zelfa.’

They lapsed into a silence born, on İkmen’s part at least, of exhaustion. Arto had not wanted to bring this news to his friend and, in truth, had he made the discovery when not under instruction from İkmen he might have kept it to himself. İkmen had asked him to find out whether or not his mother had been murdered and he had brought him news of something almost more difficult to bear. After all, with murder there was, even if the culprit was unknown, another person out there somewhere upon whom one could pin one’s fury, but with suicide there were just loss and confusion and, worst of all, rejection.

‘So,’ İkmen said finally in a voice that appeared to have reasserted some control over its tone, ‘can I see Uncle Vahan’s report?’

‘Of course.’ Arto reached inside his jacket pocket and retrieved a couple of yellowing sheets of paper. ‘But your mother’s note isn’t with it, Çetin. I don’t know where it might be or even if it still exists.’

Wordlessly, İkmen took the papers from Arto’s hands and spent the next few minutes reading what was written there. Once he wiped a tear from his eye with the cuff of his shirt. When he had finished, he handed the papers back to his friend.

‘Thank you, Arto,’ he said, once he felt able to speak again. ‘I appreciate your doing this for me, it can’t have been easy for you.’

‘I’m just sorry that that spiteful Albanian woman caused us both to search for what we should never, really, have known.’

‘Mmm.’ And then slowly frowning as if something even more troubling had occurred to him, İkmen said, ‘If our fathers were so keen to keep her suicide a secret from their children they must have lied to mother’s friends and family too.’

‘I should imagine so, yes,’ Arto agreed. ‘They would have to have done to ensure that we didn’t learn anything from an unguarded tongue.’

‘And yet Angeliki Vlora, who cannot surely have known about this, still maintains that my mother was murdered with a knife and that my Uncle Ahmet knows all about that.’

‘Well then, you’ll have to tell your uncle what I have told you today and ask him what he knows about it.’

İkmen leaned forward onto the table and placed his head in his hands. ‘Oh, Arto,’ he said, only now beginning to weep in earnest, ‘what am I going to say?’

By way of reply, Arto went out into the hall and retrieved Fatma who had been patiently waiting outside. As soon as she entered the kitchen, she flung her arms round her husband’s shoulders and stroked his hair until his tears began to subside.

Dr Babur Halman watched closely as his daughter joined him at the breakfast table. Still wearing her bathrobe, she sat down heavily in the chair opposite.

‘Still not feeling well?’ Babur inquired as he watched her unnaturally white face scowl at the food laid out in front of her.

‘I think it must be anxiety,’ she said, attempting with a grimace to drink the small glass of tea her father had poured for her earlier.

‘Wedding nerves,’ her father said sagely. And then he smiled. He’d been so pleased about her news when she’d told him the previous night and obviously still was now.

‘No, I think it’s about that case I told you about last night actually,’ she said. ‘I feel the patient in question might be sliding down into something – I don’t know what. Full-blown psychosis?’

‘Patients do sometimes intimate things that test our ability to protect their confidentiality – particularly your type of patient.’

‘It’s not that this person,’ she said, ‘has intimated to me that he wishes to hurt someone. It’s just that his world view is so macabre. I feel, well, almost stifled in his presence.’

Babur forked a little tomato and cheese into his mouth before asking, ‘And so?’

‘If what I’m being told is true, then it could be that my patient’s home situation is really quite unhealthy.’

‘In what way?’

‘I can’t say that I really know,’ she said. ‘The way he talks is characterised by seemingly paranoid thoughts and concealment. He’s scared, as if there’s something or someone after him. There is also, I’m sure, a sexual element although whether that is real or just adolescent fantasy I don’t know.’

‘Mmm. Freudian elements.’ Babur, who didn’t hold with psychoanalysis, smiled. ‘Perhaps your patient is playing games with you.’

‘Well, exactly!’ she replied, excited now that her father had, seemingly, arrived at the same conclusion as she had. ‘I mean, I can hardly accuse others of things if it’s all a delusion.’

‘No, but this person could be in danger.’

‘At psychological risk,’ she corrected.

Babur shrugged. ‘Same thing.’

Zelfa sighed, after which both father and daughter sat in silence for some moments. Until, that is, her fingers agitated against the tablecloth.

‘I’ve asked my patient to come back daily for the time being,’ she said. ‘But the family member who pays the bill isn’t willing to engage with the process. This person just wants their relative better, which I can appreciate, but it does mean that the door to further information about the home situation is difficult to access. There’s a sibling too, but I don’t begin to understand that. It’s as if the sibling is loved, protected but my patient is not.’

‘You could suggest a home visit,’ Babur offered. ‘You could say that since you want to see your patient so frequently, a home visit might help to relieve some of the pressure you know this can cause to someone who is unwell.’

‘Mmm.’ Zelfa smiled. ‘That’s not bad, actually.’

‘Old doctors still have their uses,’ her father replied and then leaned forward across the table towards her. ‘Only one of which is to know when my own daughter is physically ill.’

‘Eh?’

Babur spread white, unsalted butter on his bread as he spoke. ‘Well, I appreciate that you are worried and preoccupied about this patient, but I also know, and have done for some time, that you have no colour in your face and you are weary all the time.’

‘Well, the menopause—’

‘That’s your explanation for anything and everything.’

‘But—’

‘Just have a blood test, Zelfa,’ he said rather sternly. ‘The menopause, if that’s what it is, can affect your iron levels. Get something done. I don’t have to tell you what the consequences of iron deprivation can be, do I?’

Like a small child bowing under the weight of her parent’s anger, Zelfa lowered her head. ‘No.’

‘So do what far too few of us actually do in practice and go and see a doctor, doctor!’

Once she had been assured that Mehti Vlora and his brother Mehmet were absolutely, definitely residing in police cells, Samsun Bajraktar was only too willing to talk to İkmen about them.

Originally there had been five Vlora boys – Mehmet, Aryan, Mehti, Dhori and Leka who had, it was said, died of typhus when he was a child. Dhori, who it was widely believed had been murdered by Rahman Berisha, had been the baby of the family. Born when his mother was well into her forties, there had been a gap in excess of twenty years between Dhori and his eldest sibling, Mehmet. Addicted to women and drink, young Dhori had been, according to Samsun, an amiable enough lad – he rarely fought and was generally pleasant. With regard to brains, however, Dhori had not been over-endowed, that particular honour falling to Aryan who Samsun felt had always been out of place in ‘that family’.