He was just about to go over and remonstrate with the man when he remembered Commissioner Ardiç‘s words about only intervening with the foreigners if they caused trouble. The man who had shouted at him was, he now saw, smiling.

  ‘Hello,’ he called back in English. ‘Enjoy your time in Istanbul.’

  ‘Thanks, pal,’ the man replied. ‘I think this is a right nice town, this.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ his wobbling and rather red-faced friend agreed, ‘top place, this.’

  And then they both weaved unsteadily, if with very good humour, down the road. People, Süleyman thought, for the umpteenth time in his life, were so very rarely what they seemed.

  For a moment, İkmen watched as the old man, the district’s linen seller, placed a pile of tea towels in a basket which the headscarved woman living opposite had lowered down to him from her third-floor apartment. If the transaction ran true to form the woman would now inspect the goods, take what she wanted, and then send the rest, plus the required money, back down to the seller in the basket. Not so many years ago, such transactions had been common in İkmen’s own neighbourhood of Sultanahmet. In fact, together with the cries of the old yoghurt and water vendors, it was one of the aspects of the district that the European hippies had found so charming. But ever since the area had been extensively ‘improved’ in the 1990s, such old-world features had been few and far between. Back to himself again now, İkmen gently dipped a finger into the small pot of white powder Ayşe Farsakoğlu had placed in his hand and then put the finger into his mouth.

  ‘Cocaine,’ he said to a drawn-looking Ahmet Aksu.

  Ayşe, whose find the narcotic had been, nodded in satisfied agreement with her boss.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ Ahmet Aksu said. ‘Your inferior,’ he looked across arrogantly at Ayşe, ‘found it amongst Emine’s belongings.’

  ‘He says his wife, and she alone, is the user, sir,’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu put in.

  ‘That may well be the case,’ İkmen said. ‘Were you aware of your wife’s habit, Mr Aksu?’

  Ahmet Aksu lowered his head. ‘Inspector İkmen,’ he said, ‘may I talk to you alone, please?’

  İkmen turned to Ayşe Farsakoğlu and said, ‘Sergeant, would you please go outside and take Constable Yildiz with you? See what the other men are doing.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ It wasn’t the first time a suspect had asked to speak to İkmen alone. It also wasn’t the first time that İkmen had acceded to such a request.

  Ahmet Aksu motioned İkmen over on to one of the great low cushions in his living room and the two of them sat down. İkmen it a cigarette and said, ‘Well?’

  The lifestyle magazine publisher also lit a cigarette and, as he exhaled, said, ‘Inspector, you must, I am sure, know that when a person reaches a certain age, energy levels can drop quite dramatically.’

  ‘I know that only too well, Mr Aksu,’ İkmen said. ‘You, your wife and myself are of an age. I do not, however, take cocaine in order to artificially enhance my energy.’

  ‘No, well… er… Look, as I said before, Inspector, I don’t take it.’ He leaned forward across his super-cool Buddhist-influenced coffee table and said, ‘It is Emine, she—’

  ‘You knew that your wife was taking cocaine.’ It was said as a statement of fact because both of the men in the room, their profiles outlined against the waters of the distant Golden Horn, knew the answer to that question.

  ‘Yes. I did. But she did it’, Aksu said, ‘in order to continue to have the sexual pleasure she had always had in the past.’ He leaned in even closer across the table. ‘Women of her age, with the menopause, well, they don’t get as much out of sex as they did.’

  İkmen began to think about his own wife, a contemporary of Emine Aksu, but then he turned his mind away from Tier and back to business. ‘So your wife took cocaine in order to have a better sex life with you?’

  ‘Well, not just with me …’

  ‘With you at all?’ İkmen asked. ‘You sleep in separate rooms, Mr Aksu.’

  ‘Some of the time, yes.’

  İkmen regarded the man in front of him with a critical eye. ‘Some of the time?’ ‘Well…’

  ‘Your wife took cocaine for her lovers, didn’t she, Mr Aksu?’ İkmen said. ‘Not for you. She rarely bothered with you.’

  He turned his face slightly away to one side. ‘I have other women, pretty girls …’

  ‘Yes. And so why carry on with a middle-aged woman who no doubt costs you money for clothes and certainly costs in terms of her cocaine habit? I know that you were both hippies when you were young, but this is still Turkey, Mr Aksu; your wife cuckolds you, she is a drug addict—’

  ‘I love her.’ It wasn’t said emotionally but it was said with a warmth that was unmistakably genuine. ‘You can’t be expected to understand our lives now, or our past,’ Aksu said. ‘But Emine and myself, although, OK, we don’t sleep together and, in fact, rarely even touch, still care about each other, and my life without her is, believe me, nothing. It is she who has given me the courage and the dedication to do what I do. Without Emine I am nothing.’

  ‘And yet you didn’t try to get your wife to stop taking cocaine? That stuff can kill you! You didn’t try to save her life?’

  ‘Oh, I tried all right!’ He flicked his handsome head impatiently to one side. ‘But when Emine wanted something she always got it. It was always that way. She was, she is, very strong willed.’

  For a moment İkmen just sat and listened to the sound of what remained of old Haskoy around him. The simit* seller, shouting out the name of his seeded bread rings to the residents of the district, the

  * Simit is a bread ring covered in sesame seeds. It is a popular snack in Turkey.

  seller of cherries with his handcart piled high with a pyramid of deep black fruit from the orchards around Izmir, the excited babbling sound of a passing group of colourful gypsy dancers. These people, the Aksus, and those like them, wanted to change for ever the nature of old neighbourhoods like Haskoy. They wanted to gentrify them, render them ‘cool’ and clean and neutral. But then maybe that was and always had been the end point of the hippy, multicultural, free-love ethos? Maybe in a sense it wasn’t quite such a bad thing. At least, maybe it wasn’t provided you were not poor…

  İkmen hit his host with what only he and the young man who had been working with him knew. ‘Mr Aksu,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you that Constable Yildiz found traces of dried blood at the back of one of your kitchen work surfaces and under a tile on your en-suite bathroom floor. We will be comparing the DNA found in the blood against your wife’s DNA which we have already sampled from her clothes. Lying to me about this would therefore not be very intelligent. Now—’

  As he looked into what was now the open-mouthed face of Ahmet Aksu, İkmen’s mobile phone began to ring. ‘Excuse me,’ he said as he took the telephone out of his pocket and answered the call.

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘Ikmen,’ the policeman said. He was then silent, listening for a least five minutes. Ahmet Aksu saw the man who had been his increasingly aggressive interrogator turn a rather alarming shade of grey. And even when he had finished the call, İkmen, or so it seemed, needed several moments to gather his thoughts before he spoke again.

  ‘Inspector?’ Ahmet Aksu said. ‘What—’

  ‘Mr Aksu,’ İkmen said as he rose swiftly to his feet, ‘there is no easy way to tell you this. Someone has confessed to the murder of your wife, Emine.’

  Ahmet Aksu’s eyes widened as he clapped a hand over his mouth in order to stifle his scream.

  Chapter 7

  Edmondo Loya did not, he said, either want or need a lawyer.

  ‘I did it, and so there’s nothing to discuss,’ he told İkmen as the latter sat down in front of him in interview room number 2. Across the coffee- and cigarette-ash-stained table, underneath the naked 40-watt light bulb, the man whom İkmen knew as a friend of Balthazar Cohen looked pale and exhausted. Dressed in a frayed brown raincoat, with an equally dishevelled beret on his head, Edmondo Loya was the very picture of a man at the end of his tether.

  ‘You should still seek professional representation,’ İkmen said as he motioned to Ayşe Farsakoğlu to sit down in the chair beside him.

  ‘Professional representation!’ Edmondo Loya snorted. ‘By this I take it you mean some over-paid, sharp-suited creature who will charge me a fortune to tell me that “everything will be all right” provided I say nothing.’ He shrugged his arms in the air and said, ‘I’ve come to confess. There’s nothing more to be said.’

  ‘Confession or not, you still have rights of which your lawyer, should you appoint one, will make you aware,’ İkmen said. ‘Now—’

  ‘Emine Aksu decided, out of the blue, that it would be a tremendous laugh to humiliate me all over again; I couldn’t take it and killed her. I threw her body into the Golden Horn. End of story,’ Edmondo Loya said without, İkmen noted, even the slightest shred of emotion.

  ‘In addition, from our side of things, we have to be certain that you really have committed this offence, that it was not committed under duress—’

  ‘I killed her,’ Edmondo Loya cut in simply. ‘Me. Edmondo Loya. I killed Emine Oz and threw her body into the Golden Horn.’

  He didn’t look as if he could easily carry an ordinary-sized briefcase much less a really rather meaty middle-aged woman. But then, as İkmen knew only too well, people in the grip of strong emotions could often do very surprising and out-of-character things.

  ‘Why?’

  The middle-aged Jew squinted over the table at İkmen. ‘Why what?’ ‘Why did you kill her, Mr Loya?’ ‘Well, because she humiliated me, I—’

  ‘No. No,’ İkmen said. ‘That she humiliated you, I think Sergeant Farsakoğlu and myself understand. What I’m asking, Mr Loya, is what exactly triggered off the attack or action that caused Mrs Aksu to die. You do not strike me as a violent man. Something must have caused you to lose your temper, to snap…’

  ‘I am a man and I will not be trifled with,’ Edmondo Loya said as he sat up straight in his chair. ‘Emine tempted me, as she had done in the past, and then she failed to deliver.’

  ‘She offered sex and then changed her mind?’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at her and then looked away very quickly as if embarrassed. ‘She had no right to do that! Men have needs, animal needs!’

  ‘Yes, and women have the right to say “no” if they feel threatened or exploited,’ Ayşe responded hotly. She wasn’t the only feminist in the station but she was probably the most vocal. İkmen actively encouraged her to be vocal, although not on this occasion. On this occasion he wanted to work his way towards the truth. He was finding it difficult to believe that mild-mannered Edmondo Loya could so much as kill a rat, much less a human being.

  ‘Edmondo,’ he said as he placed a restraining hand briefly over Ayşe’s wrist, ‘tell me how you killed Emine. Tell me the sequence of events.’

  ‘I stabbed her…’

  ‘No, no, not how you did it, how it happened,’ İkmen said. ‘Emine did what? She took her clothes off, you got on top of her, she changed her mind and tried to get up, you hit her… ?’

  ‘I, well I, I started, you know, to..He looked first at İkmen, then at Ayşe Farsakoğlu, then back at İkmen again. ‘Couldn’t we have a male officer?’

  ‘No.’ If Edmondo was lying, İkmen was disinclined to do anything to help him and if he really was a murderer he deserved precious little in the way of concessions. Let him feel uncomfortable around a woman! It was after all nothing compared to the discomfort he was going to feel in prison. ‘Please continue, Mr Loya, if you will.’

  Edmondo Loya, momentarily taken aback by İkmen’s aggression, cleared his throat. His old friend Balthazar had worked with this man for many years and only had praise for him. Why, he couldn’t understand, İkmen seemed now to be nothing other than an insensitive bully.

  ‘I, well, yes, as you say, I tried to er, get on top of - I tried to enter Emine, as it were …’

  ‘You attempted intercourse,’ İkmen said. ‘Were you aroused?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course I was!’ his face was suddenly puce to the ears.

  ‘Just checking.’

  ‘Sometimes men kill because of their own impotence,’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu said. ‘Their own inability to maintain an erection causes them to become angry and to lose control.’

  ‘Yes, well, I don’t have any trouble keeping an - what you said, an … Emine suddenly refused to go on with it,’ he said. ‘She said she’d only been teasing and that she wanted to go home to her husband. She laughed. She got up and she actually laughed!’

  İkmen opened up the file on the desk in front of him and said, ‘What was she wearing, Edmondo, on the day that you killed her?’

  ‘What?’ He looked both strained and puzzled which is exactly what İkmen wanted him to be. The inclusion of sudden, factual, if seemingly trivial, questions in an interrogation was a recognised way of checking the veracity of a suspect’s story.

  ‘Emine,’ İkmen said as he looked down at the file that was now in his lap. ‘What was she wearing on the day that you killed her?’

  ‘Oh, er…’

  ‘Was it a dress? Or trousers? Blue? White? Black? Did she wear shoes or—’

  ‘Oh, she wore shoes all right,’ Edmondo said. ‘Little black peephole toe things with high, transparent heels. Her dress was pink, showed her curves, and she wore a shawl just as she always had done when she was young. Black again, but sparkly with sequins or something.’

  İkmen, still looking down at the file in his lap, said, ‘Going back to the shoes, Edmondo, was there anything else, anything unusual…’

  ‘You mean what was in the transparent heels? Floating in some sort of liquid, I think?’

  Yes?’ İkmen looking up now viewed Edmondo Loya closely. ‘In the heels, in liquid …’

  ‘Little models of the Eiffel Tower!’ Edmondo Loya said. ‘Yes! They went up and down as the shoes moved! A gimmick, a…’

  İkmen passed the file over to Ayşe and pointed silently to something on the page he had selected.

  ‘… a designer gimmick. Silly.’

  She looked up at İkmen and then at Edmondo Loya with an expression of shock on her face.

  Mr Bülent Emin was no longer a young man.

  ‘I gave up going to prostitutes before you were bom,’ he said in answer to İzzet Melik’s slightly veiled question regarding what the old man had been doing in Karakoy on Thursday night and Friday morning. ‘Last time I went to a whore I think I was probably still in the army. I wasn’t even married then, I don’t think.’

  The policeman was with Mr Emin in a small office at the back of his shop on Hasircilar Street which ran at a ninety-degree angle away from the Spice Bazaar and parallel with the shore of the Golden Horn. The shop was like many of the smaller premises in the teeming ancient streets around the Spice Bazaar in that it specialised in only one product. In the same street there were shops selling ladies’ corsets, cigarette lighters and their various fuels, and foreign perfume that was almost certainly fake. Bülent Emin’s shop specialised in buttons.

  Every shape, colour and size imaginable was contained in his seemingly endless array of cardboard display boxes. Buttons could be made, İzzet Melik had discovered since his arrival, not only from materials one would expect to see, such as bone or plastic or metal, but also from materials that one would not immediately think about, such as stone or human hair.

  ‘In countries like England and France in the nineteenth century, people made a big thing of funerals,’ the old man had said when he showed İzzet an example of a button made from human hair. ‘Mourners would put on black sometimes for years and have special jewellery made for the funeral, often containing clippings of the dead person’s hair. They also made buttons, like these, with hair embedded in a glass capsule on top of the piece. To good Muslims this is very strange, but to Christians who sometimes do not bury their dead for weeks, it is quite normal.’

  İzzet had been appalled, especially when Mr Emin had told him that demand for such grisly oddities was high. ‘Collectors of buttons, like collectors of anything, can be odd,’ he said as he led the policeman out through the back of his shop and into his office. Now, a glass of tea, several cigarettes and a lot of buttons later, İzzet was asking Mr Emin to remember everything that he could about the night in question. Mr Emin had not been over in Karakoy for what many would regard as ‘normal’ business at a ‘normal’ time of day.

  ‘I was with one of the button lunatics I told you about,’ Emin said with a wave of a nicotine-stained hand. ‘He has buttons from everywhere. One of Sultan Resad’s buttons from one of his shirts, a button from a dress that belonged to Marilyn Monroe, a row of tiny pieces from a glove worn by Queen Victoria of England… He is obsessed.’ He shrugged. ‘But old. Even older than me, may God protect him. From time to time I take him pieces I come across that he may be interested in and we talk. I generally go over to see him about once every three months and I always go in the evening when the shop has closed. Sometimes we go on a bit; he sees very few people now and is quite disabled. I must have finally got away at about 2 a.m.’

  ‘Your friend, Mr—’

  ‘Mr Adrian Osman.‘And then, having given his friend’s name away, he said, rather guiltily, ‘You won’t need to speak to him…’