Deep Waters (27 page)

Zelfa wondered what her beloved ‘heathen’ Mehmet had been doing at the Evren house. As far as she was aware, he was not currently engaged in anything apart from assisting İkmen in some homicidal Albanian feud. They didn’t talk about their respective professions very much. For both of them there were far too many rules around security and confidentiality to allow any real freedom of speech. Still she wondered why he had been there and which member of the household he had gone to see. After all, the presence of the police could mean criminal activity, which in turn could point towards a far more earthly reason behind Ali’s fears than the ghost of his dead mother or his invisible sister.

It was too bad she couldn’t simply ask Mehmet. Maybe if she approached the subject obliquely or posed hypothetical questions . . . But then perhaps not. Zelfa sank still deeper into her bed. She didn’t feel like talking, not even to Mehmet, not even about Ali Evren. Old priests and her own vestigial religious indoctrination were at work inside her mind tonight. As well as feeling unwell she was bothered, she had to admit, by a trace of guilt. It seemed that the word ‘heathen’ had struck home on some sort of level. Born of a heathen and now marrying one too? Why had she not detected the vicious prejudice underneath Uncle Frank’s usually kind words before? After all, tonight had obviously demonstrated what he really thought. Stupid that she’d never considered that before. And hadn’t her own mother left her heathen father in order to go off and screw around with all those lovely Catholic boys? More pertinently, hadn’t her grandmother approved? Yes, by her silence she had. But perhaps there had been more to it than that. Right now Zelfa didn’t feel up to exploring this particular line of thought. Medieval superstition! She leaned across the bed to switch off her reading light and then lay awake in the darkness, wishing that her lover was there to help her fight the gargoyles that kept on entering her mind.

Sınan İkmen had long since returned to his home in Fener when his father Çetin finally entered the Sultan Ahmet apartment. Charged with the task of bringing his father’s uncle back from the Cerrahpaşa Hospital, Sınan had done so and more besides – after all, he could hardly refuse his mother’s offer of a meal, could he?

By the time Çetin İkmen got home, Fatma and the children were in bed. Only Uncle Ahmet, who was apparently engrossed in a music programme on the television, was still conscious. And so, after bringing them both bottles of Efes from the kitchen and asking after the rapidly improving health of his cousin, İkmen sat down beside his uncle and wondered how he might broach the subject of his mother’s death. After all, if Uncle Ahmet had indeed known the truth for all these many years, İkmen felt he was due an explanation, if for no other reason than to finally dispel Angeliki Vlora’s stories of bloody Albanian murder.

When he eventually felt that he’d drunk enough of his beer to both warm his body and give him courage, İkmen turned to the old man and said, ‘You do know that I know Mother didn’t die of a heart attack, don’t you, Uncle?’

Ahmet placed his now empty beer bottle on the table and sighed. ‘Mustafa told me that you had been asking questions.’

‘Oh, so Samsun knew.’

‘No! No of course not. Mustafa, poor creature, knew only that he should always tell me if either you or your brother asked. He didn’t know why – he never asked why. I suppose it is possible that his kind, maybe above all others, know the true value of not asking that which should not be asked.’

Now that the music programme was over, a quizshow of what İkmen felt was quite staggering banality came on. And as he half listened to the questions the ultra-smooth host posed to the nervous contestants, he wondered why he wasn’t on the TV winning a couple of months’ salary in what for him would have been a very short space of time.

But he wasn’t on the TV, he was in his apartment with his uncle, a man who had kept his secrets for long enough.

‘So how did you find out the truth about Ayşe’s death?’ the old man asked.

‘A woman called Angeliki Vlora t—’

‘That daughter of Shaitan!’ Ahmet cried malevolently and spat on the floor. ‘She told you?’

‘Yes.’

The old man’s head sank down onto his chest.

‘Uncle Ahmet . . .’

‘Of course I am aware that Emina Ndrek still moves amongst the living.’

İkmen recalled that Angeliki had mentioned the name Ndrek in connection with his mother’s death, but her name on Ahmet’s lips still came as a shock. His uncle seemed to be assuming that Angeliki Vlora had told him the truth. But Angeliki had said his mother was murdered, which meant that what Arto Sarkissian had discovered was incorrect. İkmen suddenly felt very, very sick.

‘Uncle, Emina Ndrek—’

‘With the death of your mother, all debts were paid,’ Ahmet said. ‘When I was told what had been done, I went to see Emina’s father, he called me, and between us we came to a solution. May my fathers forgive me, but I didn’t even try to follow Salih back to Albania, though it made my eyes weep.’

İkmen could only mumble, ‘But uncle, the suicide . . .’

Finally hearing as well as seeing the lack of understanding on his nephew’s face, Ahmet Bajraktar shook his head wearily and took one of İkmen’s hands in his.

‘Oh, but you don’t know, do you, Çetin?’ he said softly.

‘Know?’

‘You’ve heard only what you imagined was a rumour from Angeliki, plus the supposed truth your father and his Armenian thought they had discovered.’

His heart beating very quickly now, his lips dry as leaves, İkmen could only whisper, ‘So?’

The old man took a deep breath before replying. ‘Just over a month after I killed Işmail Ndrek, his younger brother Salih murdered your mother.’ With a. small crooked smile upon his face, he looked at İkmen and said, ‘So perhaps you should arrest me now, officer? Eh?’

İkmen only stared in horrified silence, wrapt by the vision of a face he thought he had known.

‘Oh, it was
gjakmaria
,’ the old man continued, now seemingly at ease with the subject matter. ‘But with the death of your mother all that stopped. It had to. Even Emina was shocked at what was done.’

İkmen snatched up the TV remote control and turned the hideous sniggering quiz show host to blackness. ‘I don’t understand. She was a woman . . . I mean, how . . .’

Uncle Ahmet squeezed his nephew’s hand between his bony fingers. ‘You and I need to speak to Emina Ndrek. Only between us can we give you the explanation you probably deserve now, Çetin.’ He sighed. ‘I will fix it.’

‘You . . .’

‘I’ll take you to see Emina. She still lives in Üsküdar – with her son and her memories and with a distant view of the back of your old house, where my sister lay down willingly on her bed and had her throat cut.’

As İkmen, in an effort to distract himself from this horror, tried to focus his thoughts upon any aspect he could still remember of his old wooden home, his uncle curled into his chair and wept. It was, the policeman thought later, almost as if Ahmet had never cried until this moment. It was desperately sad, or at least it would have been if İkmen had been able to feel anything other than fury. He’d had enough of these people – the Berishas, the Vloras, his own family. For the first time in his life he wanted to be someone else doing something else. He didn’t care what, as long as it took him away from all Albanians.

Slowly he rose from his seat and made his way towards the door.

‘Turn the light off when you’ve finished,’ he said coldly.

‘Çetin . . .’

But he didn’t stay to hear whatever else his uncle might have to say. As quietly as he could, he crept towards the comfort of his bed and the Turkish woman who waited there for him.

Aryan Vlora had never imagined that once he had given his statement to the police, İkmen would let him go. After all, by being present during the last moment of Egrem Berisha’s life and not reporting it, he was an accessory to murder. But then İkmen was of Albanian stock himself, so there was probably some level of understanding there. And anyway, if he had reported Egrem’s murder at the time, he would now almost certainly be dead – and İkmen knew it.

Not that freedom was going to do him very much good for very long. As soon as that idiot Mehti decided to come to his senses with regard to his ridiculous confession, it wouldn’t take him long to contact the relatives back in Kukes and arrange for his brother to disappear. Neither Mehti nor the other relatives would take kindly to Aryan appearing in court to give evidence against Mehmet. But he was still glad that he’d done it. A drugs charge would only hold Mehmet for a while but a murder conviction would put him away for good, and that, after all, was where he needed to be.

Engelushjia Berisha had waited patiently for hours in the police station while Aryan gave his statement. When he eventually emerged, she looked up at him and smiled. They left the station together. Dressed only in her thin mud-stained skirt and multiple unravelling jumpers, her poor little face looked blue in the misty light from the streetlamps beside the Yeni Valide Cami. Aryan wanted to wrap his arms round her so that she might share some of his body heat. But he knew he couldn’t do that. After all, even though he was now patently her hero, he was still a Vlora and a man old enough to be her father.

‘I’d better go on alone from here,’ she said as she looked into the dense maze of streets that made up the Eminönü bazaar quarter.

‘Of course,’ he answered with a smile and then, taking her small hand in his, he shook it gently. ‘But thank you, Engelushjia, for staying with me.’

‘We have to finish this stupid thing, Aryan,’ she replied firmly and then darted forward quickly to lightly brush his cheeks with her lips. ‘Thank you.’

And then she was gone. What she would say about the events of that day to her father, Rahman, Aryan couldn’t imagine. He just hoped that Berisha didn’t conform to the usual behaviour exhibited by
fis
in blood when their children are found associating. He could do nothing about that, of course. Men had certain rights over their daughters and that was unchangeable. Aryan just hoped that Rahman didn’t put Engelushjia in hospital.

‘You can’t arrest someone for buying curtains,’ Suleyman said as he eased himself down onto the edge of İkmen’s desk.

‘I know that!’ İkmen snapped. It wasn’t the first time he’d been short with his colleague that morning. Suleyman was making efforts not to react. İkmen looked and sounded dreadful, and silently Suleyman wondered what might have happened in İkmen’s private life to cause such a reaction.

‘And anyway,’ Suleyman continued, ‘the Evrens’ chauffeur didn’t actually know what Felicity had bought. It was only when Roditi suggested curtains—’

‘Roditi shouldn’t have suggested curtains then, should he?’ İkmen growled. ‘If only people would just use what little intelligence they have.’

‘Oh, come on, Çetin!’ Suleyman said, finally out of patience with İkmen’s bad humour. ‘Roditi was just making suggestions in the face of what he perceived to be sullenness.’

‘He should not have led that man!’ İkmen lit yet another cigarette. ‘It makes my return to the house all the more difficult.’

‘But you said you wanted to search—’

‘I do, but some degree of certainty around allegations received would help!’

‘Less than a minute ago you were going to arrest the woman!’

Quite how İkmen and Suleyman had come to be eyeball to eyeball like this was no longer entirely clear. To Suleyman it seemed that the route had been one of irrational leaps of faulty logic from an especially agitated İkmen. Uncharacteristically excited by the idea of Felicity Evren having bought the curtains she would later wrap Rifat’s body in on the day of his death, İkmen did not seem to have thought about how innocuous the simple act of buying curtains was. In itself it proved nothing, especially in light of the fact that Hassan the chauffeur didn’t have a clue about where ‘Miss Flick’ had purchased the material. And since he had obviously been led by Roditi, Hassan didn’t really know that what she had bought were curtains anyway. None of this made a great deal of difference to İkmen in this mood.

Having smoked furiously for several silent seconds, İkmen finally took his cigarette out of his mouth before saying, if a little more calmly, ‘Well, whatever, but that family is hiding something, I’m certain of it. And after what I’ve experienced recently I should know what a devious family looks like, shouldn’t I?’

‘If you are measuring the Evrens against the Vloras—’

‘Ah, but I’m not,’ İkmen replied as he stared intently into Suleyman’s face. ‘I don’t need to stray that far from home in order to find such behaviour.’

Suleyman sighed. ‘Çetin,’ he said, ‘if we are, as I think we are, talking here about the issue surrounding your mother—’

‘Her family,
my
family,’ İkmen said, vehemently jabbing his chest, ‘together with some other hellish Albanian clan, killed my mother. There!’ He hurled himself backwards into his chair. ‘There’s a family secret for you, forty years old.’

‘Çetin, are you certain?’

‘No!’ With a gesture of hopelessness, İkmen spread his hands in the air and then let them drop limply into his lap again. ‘And that is the agony of it, if the truth be told. There have been so many lies, who knows or even cares about the truth? But then that is not unlike this case, wouldn’t you say? One person confessing to a crime, another unbidden providing evidence that runs counter to it, strange transactions involving supposed love and still pulsing body parts . . .’ He brought his head down briefly to meet his hands. What was left of his cigarette fell to the floor.

Knowing that any allusion to İkmen’s state of mind would be neither appreciated nor helpful, Suleyman opted to do what he did best and took a dignified, practical stance. Bending down to pick up the still smouldering cigarette, he said, ‘Well, at least we now know that the blood in that car was definitely Rifat’s. And although forensic have not yet completed the tests on the traces of blood found in the Vloras’ apartment, they have established what group it is and it is not Rifat’s. So we know that he died in or near the car, which we know from both Mehti and the Evrens themselves was at the Evren house on the night of his death.’