Deep Waters (3 page)

With a sigh, he sat down next to his wife and took one of her hands in his. Although he could fully appreciate what she was saying, he could not, he knew, do anything real to lessen her anxiety. Moving was impractical, the older children were opposed to it anyway, and without the slightest clue as to when or even if the next big earthquake might occur, speculation was pointless. There was nothing he could even say beyond, ‘Look, Fatma, keep the hamster if it makes you happy.’ And although this did seem to cheer her, as evidenced by the thin smile that ghosted across her face, when a few silent minutes later he got up to leave for work, her eyes followed him with a troubling intensity.

It was, he thought later, as if she were trying to etch every inch of his features onto her memory.

Nobody knew how long it had been there. Haluk the taxi driver, who the others were rapidly concluding was the sort of person who liked people to think he knew everything, gave his opinion that it must have been there for some time.

‘Just the bruising will tell you that,’ he said as he pulled at the dead man’s shirt. ‘See?’

‘Put that down!’ cried Beyazıt, the now outraged bus driver. He attempted to snatch the taxi man’s hand away from the body. ‘The police might take fingerprints off that and if they find your marks—’

‘Oh, like they’re going to take prints off cloth?’ Haluk said contemptuously. ‘What kind of idiot do you take me for?’

One of the assorted Eminönü fishermen who had come over to what was now developing into quite a crowd on Reşadiye Caddesi rather volubly agreed with the bus driver. And seeing as the fisherman was considerably bigger than he was, Haluk for the moment kept his counsel.

Just ten minutes before, Haluk’s car had hit what he had thought at the time was a particularly hard bundle of rubbish. He stopped to check his taxi for damage, intending to give the pile only a cursory glance, until he saw that it had a human face.

At first Haluk had thought that perhaps he had actually killed the man himself. After all, his car had made contact with him. Indeed, with this in mind, the taxi driver’s first instinct had been to run away. But then as the knowledge began to sink in that when he had stopped, so had the bus behind him, not to mention the appearance of the bus driver and several passengers, Haluk changed his mind. After all, even if he had killed the man, he must have been lying in the gutter at the time, which was not the kind of behaviour a sane person would exhibit. And given the man’s bundled appearance, it could surely not be his fault if he had hit him.

‘Some of this blood is very dry,’ said another, smaller fisherman as he bent over and peered at the body. ‘He could’ve been here for some time. Probably got hit before the fog cleared. There was no way a man could see his path in that.’

Several people muttered in agreement. As they all knew only too well, the previous night had been filthy and impenetrable. It had been the sort of night when their ancestors would have said that witches, djinn and all sorts of other supernatural horrors walked abroad. Not that that made the death of what was, by the look of what was left of him, quite a young man any less horrific. And indeed the fact that silence reigned amongst the crowd from then until the arrival of the police suggested that this was a feeling shared by all those present.

The police, when they arrived, consisted of two young leather-clad ‘Dolphins’, motorbike-riding rapid-response officers, who immediately drew a large group of admiring young men around their bikes.

The shorter Dolphin was just removing his helmet when Haluk began.

‘This man is dead,’ he said, waving a hand in the direction of the corpse. ‘He was dead before my vehicle even touched him.’ Then looking up at the fishermen for support, he added, ‘Is that no so, brothers?’

‘Well, in truth . . .’

‘Let’s just see the body, shall we?’ the slightly taller Dolphin, a man by the name of Rauf, replied firmly. As his partner attempted to push the crowd back, he bent down and looked at a face that appeared to be emerging from both the remnants of a shirt and large swathes of either a curtain or a bedcover. Like the fisherman before him, Rauf immediately noticed that although a lot of blood did appear to be in evidence, most of it had long since dried out. The man’s face had sustained heavy bruising, but where so much blood had come from was not immediately apparent. Rauf gently moved the man’s chin up from inside his heavily stained shirt, and all became very clear. Widening his eyes just a little in response to what he saw, Rauf called his partner over to his side.

‘Look at this,’ he said as he lifted the heavy chin once again.

His partner briefly raised his eyes up to heaven before unclipping his radio from his jacket and speaking into it. He and his colleague, he said, had been called to what could be an unlawful death.

As soon as he shut his office door behind him, Inspector Mehmet Suleyman took the packet of photographs out of his pocket and opened it onto his desk. Taking the first picture out as he sat down, Suleyman smiled as he saw the wicked little face of his friend Balthazar Cohen smile back at him. Wreathed as ever in curtains of cigarette smoke, Balthazar had his arm round the shoulders of a young, somewhat taller man whom Suleyman knew to be his friend’s son, Berekiah. Home now after finishing his military service, the young man had walked unwittingly into what had been a large gathering of his family and friends. He had, Suleyman recalled, dealt with it very well. After all, it cannot have been easy, even with prior knowledge, to confront the image of your once active father as a cripple with no job.

Although his home had been untouched by the massive earthquake that struck İstanbul on 17 August 1999, Constable Cohen, as he had been then, had not been there at the time. He’d been staying with a recently divorced lady in one of the newer apartment blocks in Yeşilköy, out by the airport. When the earthquake came, the building collapsed like a set of badly stacked plates, and Balthazar Cohen had been trapped under the rubble, which was where he stayed for the next thirty-six hours – beside the body of his dead mistress. Suleyman, who had lodged with the Cohens in their crowded Karaköy apartment since his separation from his wife almost two years previously, noted with some admiration that not once had Balthazar’s wife mentioned the circumstances surrounding her husband’s present infirmities. But then perhaps Estelle Cohen believed, as some of her husband’s old colleagues did, that Balthazar was now well and truly paying for his sins.

Suleyman flicked quickly through the rest of the pictures, smiling at the occasional sight of his own camera-shy face amongst their number, before putting them back into his pocket again. Estelle, he thought as he allowed himself a moment to look out of his fog-grimed window, would like them. Berekiah particularly looked well. Perhaps the young man would, in time, come round to his father’s idea of joining the police. Suleyman hoped so, even though Cohen’s little ‘talks’ on this subject to his son did sometimes smack of vicarious living. But that was understandable. Cohen, by losing his legs, had also lost his liberty and independence and had come, over the months since the disaster, to rely more and more upon reports from the ‘outside world’ from the likes of Suleyman, Estelle and Berekiah. Suleyman knew that when he did eventually leave the Cohens’ apartment, Balthazar would take it badly. If, of course, he did leave. Moving on without the presence of the woman he now hoped would be his wife would be pretty pointless. But trying to convince Zelfa Halman that he really did love her was proving problematic. With no confidence in what he saw as her voluptuous looks and nursing numerous psychological theories regarding the sometimes impulsive behaviour of people who have lived through disasters, Zelfa was treating his proposal with some caution. If only he could convince her that nothing beyond having her in his life mattered to him. But then he observed with a visible scowl that he was, after all, dealing with a psychiatrist and everybody knew what they were like.

Now, however, he had to push such thoughts aside. He switched on his computer terminal and watched as the machine started its laborious journey towards anything relevant to him. While he was waiting, Suleyman emptied his ashtray into the bin and then lit up his first cigarette of the day. He would, he knew, smoke many more before the day was out. With his sergeant, Çöktin, off with flu, he was going to be alone in this office probably for some days to come. Given the vast heap of paperwork he knew he needed to catch up on, that was no bad thing – even if his lungs were not particularly looking forward to the experience.

His finger was poised to press the series of buttons that would give him access to his files when he heard a knock on his door.

‘Come in,’ he said, just as the short, thin individual outside the door moved inside.

‘I’ve been called to an incident in Eminönü,’ Çetin İkmen said brightly. ‘Couple of Dolphins reckon they’ve stumbled upon a gangland execution.’

Suleyman frowned. ‘Really? What makes them think that?’

‘Classic execution mode. The victim’s had his throat slit, apparently. Ear to ear.’ İkmen illustrated this by dragging one finger across his own throat. ‘Are you busy?’

‘I’ve got a lot of paperwork to catch up on.’

‘Quite free to accompany me then,’ İkmen said and unhooked his colleague’s overcoat from behind the office door.

‘I don’t think our superiors would share your disdain for the bureaucratic niceties, Çetin,’ Suleyman replied with a smile. ‘However . . .’ He started the sequence necessary to shut down the computer.

‘Good man!’ İkmen said with some passion. He handed Suleyman his coat. ‘Now that the fog has gone, it’s really not a bad day.’

‘Good.’

‘It’s been a long time since you and I attended a crime scene together,’ İkmen said.

‘Yes,’ Suleyman agreed, ‘but then I’m only coming along as your guest, aren’t I? I mean, Tepe is your sergeant now and—’

‘Oh, yes,’ İkmen said with a wave of his hand, ‘but the trouble with him is that he just isn’t you, my dear Mehmet.’

‘Oh, Çetin, now . . .’

But İkmen had gone. And after he had put his coat on, a slightly amused, if somewhat exasperated, Suleyman followed.

The late owner of the identity card that Orhan Tepe was now clutching between his latex-gloved fingers had been called Rifat Berisha. The name made Tepe frown. As far as he could tell, Berisha was not a common Turkish name, but then it didn’t have any of the usual minority hallmarks either. It was obviously neither Armenian nor Greek and it was doubtful that it was Jewish. Not that this aspect was of particular importance. More to the point was that Mr Berisha was only twenty-five years old and that he had, in all probability, been murdered. Or at least that was what many members of the crowd Tepe had so recently helped push back from the scene thought. Now lurking beyond the barriers erected around the site by his fellow officers, these onlookers had, if anything, increased in number in the half-hour since the area had been cleared. This was not something that, by the look of the thunderous expression that now hung across his features, particularly pleased Tepe’s superior, Inspector İkmen.

‘Haven’t these bastards got work to do?’ he asked a bored-looking officer to Tepe’s left.

The officer didn’t really have an answer to what was anyway a rhetorical question and he grimaced in an embarrassed fashion. This would have irritated İkmen had not the man who used to be his sergeant prior to Tepe intervened.

‘Unless this man killed himself,’ Suleyman said as he peered down at the heavily stained corpse, ‘somebody as yet unknown must have some very gory clothes to dispose of. Our friend here has been almost decapitated.’

‘The doctor will confirm that or not,’ İkmen said distractedly as he lit yet another cigarette. ‘When he gets here.’

Then with a sigh he moved towards the Bosphorus side of the site. Perhaps he was thinking that a view of the water might make him feel better about the sudden depression he was experiencing. Tepe, the ID card clutched firmly between his fingers, followed his boss to the waterside rail.

‘Sir?’

İkmen turned briefly towards his young deputy, smiled and then looked out across the water once again, towards the Asian side of the city.

‘You know, Tepe,’ he said just as the younger man was beginning to think that perhaps his boss had entered some sort of fugue state, ‘my mother used to say that it was possible to see our house in Üsküdar from here. However, try as I might, I have never been able to spot it myself. Perhaps there are just too many buildings in the way now or maybe my mother was simply telling lies.’ He turned again and once more he smiled at Tepe. ‘It would have been in character for her, you know.’

Tepe, who was aware of the stories that were told about İkmen’s late mother – her interest in witchcraft for instance – blushed slightly by way of reply. After all, it was not every day you heard a man brand his own mother a liar. Mothers were, usually, almost sacred beings to the average Turkish man. But then İkmen was about as far from average as it was possible to get.

A few seconds later, Tepe remembered what was in his hands and very obviously cleared his throat.

‘Yes?’ İkmen said, roused once again from his reverie.

‘I did find this.’ Tepe held up the stained card for İkmen’s perusal. ‘It was sticking out of the pocket of his jeans and so—’

‘You should have waited for forensic,’ İkmen said with a frown, but then as he moved closer to look at the item, he muttered, ‘Mmm.’

‘Anything interesting?’ a younger, more cultured voice asked.

Tepe, looking up into Suleyman’s gravely handsome features, said, ‘Looks like the victim’s ID card, sir.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ İkmen said as he stared at it. ‘An Albanian if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Ah.’

‘Berisha is an Albanian name,’ İkmen said. ‘One of their more recent despots was, I believe, called Berisha. It will be interesting to discover whether this man is one of his clan.’