‘Mr Osman lives at the house on Midilli Lane …’

  ‘Just above Voyvoda Street, yes,’ Mr Emin said. ‘Where that body was put. Not that I saw it with my own eyes, thanks be to God.’

  He wore the knitted woollen cap, so often sported by those of a religious turn of mind. He also invoked or thanked God at every available opportunity as he spoke.

  ‘So what did you see or hear, Mr Emin, on Thursday night that made you telephone the police station now?’

  Bülent Emin sighed. ‘Not a lot, I’m afraid, officer,’ he said. ‘I was in a hurry, to be honest. Rushing to get home to the comfort of the bed God sees fit to allow my poor old body to rest upon. Leaving Adnan’s house I go down on to Voyvoda Street on my way back to the Galata Bridge and home.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘That was suspicious? Nothing,’ Mr Emin said with a smile. ‘As I told you, officer, I saw nothing bad going on. What was a surprise, however, was the vehicle that I saw on Voyvoda Street that night.’

  ‘Vehicle?’

  ‘A 1972 Fiat 124 BC. Beautiful car. I used to have one myself! In my younger days I was very enthusiastic about cars,’ he said, his smile broadening as he obviously warmed to his subject. ‘And this Fiat was in wonderful condition for its age. In fact, I would have, in spite of the lateness of the hour, gone up and had a closer look had it not been for the arguing.’

  ‘Inside the vehicle?’

  ‘Yes. Men’s voices,’ Mr Emin said with a frown. ‘That time of night, who knows what might happen if one talks to strangers? These days you hear such stories! I just walked on. But it was very unusual, the Fiat 124, very unusual.’

  ‘And there were definitely two men in the car, arguing?’ İzzet Melik asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Biilent Emin replied. ‘I didn’t see them, you understand; I didn’t get that close. My eyes are not so good…’

  ‘What were they arguing about? Do you know?’

  Biilent Emin smiled again. ‘My ears are not so good either,’ he said. ‘I’m seventy-five years old!’

  ‘And yet you knew the car. You appreciated the car.’

  ‘Oh, I would know a 1972 Fiat 124 in the dark, officer,’ the old man said. And then, looking from side to side to make sure that no one else had come into the room without his knowledge, he added, ‘You never forget the car that you really, truly loved, do you? I laugh behind my hands at people like Adnan, who loves his buttons with a passion. Sometimes I admonish him that he is practising a form of idolatry. The Koran is very clear upon the fact that good Muslims should not be in thrall to material things. And we all try to be good Muslims but… that car was my god. I once took a lady, a Spanish tourist, for a ride in it many years ago. She took a shine to me and although nothing improper happened - well, it is a memory that I treasure.’ He then looked up with a very serious expression on his face and said, ‘Officer, I would know a 1972 Fiat 124 if I was dead. And there was one on Voyvoda Street at just past two o’clock last Friday morning.’

  As far as Ahmet Aksu could remember the last man his wife Emine had undoubtedly been with was the young Italian whom the hippy Kadir Özal had told İkmen about.

  ‘His name is Francesco Vitali,’ Ahmet Aksu said. ‘He came to live with us for a time, when Emine’s passion for him was at its height.’

  ‘One of the sources you yourself named, a Kadir Özal, said that your wife was stepping out with an Italian boy about six months ago,’ İkmen said. ‘Same or different boy, Mr Aksu?’

  He sighed. ‘Oh, same one. Francesco was very attractive and athletic, according to Emine.’

  ‘Kadir Özal said he actually saw the Italian with your wife about six months ago.’

  ‘Francesco went back to Venice three months ago,’ Ahmet Aksu said.

  ‘So your wife, by your own admission a sexually predatory woman, didn’t see anyone after—’

  ‘Oh, she wasn’t on her own for very long!’ Aksu said with some bitterness in his voice. ‘This “thing” with this unknown man has, I reckon, been going on for two months.’

  ‘So your wife took cocaine for, or with, this new man?’

  ‘My wife took cocaine with anyone and everyone who had her!’ He crossed his arms angrily over his chest. This marriage of the Aksus was not as ‘open’ as, İkmen felt, they might like people to think. He suspected Mr Aksu was unfashionably jealous.

  ‘And you yourself do not take, and never have taken, cocaine?’

  ‘I’ve told you, no!’ he snapped. ‘Emine took it, she needed to. I neither want nor need the filthy stuff!’

  ‘We can run blood tests

  ‘Well, run your fucking blood tests and have done with it!’ Aksu said. And then as he slumped back into the hard, straight-backed station chair he murmured, ‘Just tell me about this person who has confessed to her murder and let me get out of here. That is all I ask.’

  Unbeknown to Ahmet Aksu, the slumped little Jewish man in interview room 2, the room right next door to where he and İkmen were now sitting, was the person who had confessed to the murder of Emine Aksu, his once darling wife. Although by no means an open and shut confession, Edmondo Loya had given İkmen such an accurate description of the clothes that Emine had been wearing when she disappeared that he had to take what he had said seriously. The clothes concerned had been so particular, so very individual, especially the shoes. There was, as yet, no body, but then if Edmondo had indeed consigned Emine to the waters of the Golden Horn she could be almost anywhere. Bodies not quickly picked up in the Horn could be swept out into the Bosphorus or even the Sea of Marmara. From then on they were usually lost. Soon İkmen would have to tell Ahmet Aksu who had confessed and why. They knew or had known each other. It was not going to be easy. And even though it was Ahmet Aksu himself who had given the name of Edmondo Loya to Mehmet Süleyman, İkmen doubted whether he had seriously considered the Jew to be her killer, İkmen himself was struggling with the idea.

  ‘Speaking of tests, Mr Aksu,’ İkmen said, ‘we are still going to run them on the blood traces found in your kitchen and bathroom.’

  ‘Just because you have a confession doesn’t mean that you rule out - what is it you call it, “other lines of inquiry”?’ Ahmet Aksu leaned across the table wearily. ‘I can understand that. Inspector, have you found Emine’s body?’

  İkmen shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘So it will be difficult to decide whether this person who has confessed to her murder is telling the truth or not?’

  ‘We have been given, by this person, a certain scenario and a possible site for the disposal of the body …’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Mr Aksu,’ İkmen said, ‘all I can tell you at this point is that the person who has confessed to your wife’s murder says that the body was dumped in water.’

  ‘In the bloody Bosphorus!’ Ahmet Aksu flung his long, slim arms in the air in exasperation. ‘So it’s lost? How will you find it with the current and tides …’

  ‘Sir

  ‘God!’ He stood up and, weeping now, put his head in his hands.

  İkmen let him cry. If his tears were genuine, then he had a lot to shed them over. His wife was in all probability dead, and recovering her body from any of Istanbul’s great waterways was indeed very unlikely. However, he did now know where Edmondo Loya claimed to have dumped the body, to the side of the Fener ferry stage, and so he would be sending divers down into the immediate vicinity. But if that proved fruitless he would just have to wait and see what the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara produced. He would, however, in nearly three weeks since her disappearance, have expected something of Mrs Aksu to appear somewhere by now. One of her Eiffel Tower shoes caught up in a fishing net, perhaps? But then İkmen was not wholly convinced by Edmondo’s story. In its favour was the ancient grudge he so obviously still held against her combined with the intimate knowledge he had of her clothing on the day that she disappeared. But, on the other hand, there was Edmondo’s physical frailty plus his inability to adequately describe the act of murder itself. The precise details remained fudged.

  ‘I am going to send divers down,’ İkmen said as he offered Ahmet Aksu a cigarette from his almost empty packet of Maltepe. ‘But sir, about the blood in your house, I must ask you if you know—’

  ‘No,’ he wiped the tears away from his eyes with the cuff of his crisp, white shirt and then took a cigarette from İkmen, ‘No I don’t know how it got there,’ he said. ‘Maybe Emine cut herself.’

  ‘In the kitchen, yes,’ İkmen said as he lit both his own and Ahmet Aksu’s cigarettes. ‘But in the bathroom? Underneath a floor tile?’ It smacked of concealment.

  ‘Well, maybe it’s my blood,’ Aksu said as he sat down, a little calmer now. ‘I cut myself shaving occasionally. At my age I know how inept that sounds but… or maybe the blood is Emine’s. Or even Francesco’s.’

  ‘The Italian cut himself shaving?’

  ‘Or maybe his sexual athleticism caused him to fall,’ Ahmet Aksu momentarily closed his eyes against the vision this idea was producing. ‘Sometimes Emine and Francesco would … I would hear them in the bathroom…’

  ‘You know, Mr Aksu,’ İkmen said, ‘we are going to have to contact this Francesco Vitali.’ He took his notebook out of his pocket. ‘Venice, did you say?’

  He sighed. ‘Yes. I don’t know his address, but I’m sure I can find it amongst my wife’s things.’

  They looked at each other, the policeman and the arbiter of modern taste. Both of them were connected by the fact that they had individually sorted through the effects of the same woman, now thought to be dead. Nothing else tied them to each other; in every other way they were worlds apart. And indeed this sudden, unlooked-for closeness would have been even more intense had the one not suspected the other. Edmondo Loya’s confession could be one hundred per cent genuine, for all İkmen knew, but while he didn’t actually know it to be so, anyone and everyone was fair game. And that included Ahmet Aksu, the missing woman’s husband, the rich man, the cuckold.

  ‘Thank you,’ İkmen said as he steadily observed the shifting eyes of the man in front of him. ‘That will be most appreciated.’

  Chapter 8

  Zelfa Süleyman was only half Turkish. Her mother, Bernadette, had been Irish and Zelfa had herself been brought up in Dublin. Back there she was still known as Brigit and, in spite of the fact that her father was Turkish, she had been raised a Catholic. Not that she went to Mass these days. The son she had with Mehmet Süleyman was, like his father, being raised a Muslim. She was also, by her own admission and like many psychiatrists, an agnostic. And so it was with some surprise that Mehmet saw his wife coming out of the Catholic Church of St Anthony of Padua on Istiklal Street.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked as he watched her take a scarf off her head in the lee of the red-brick gothic building. Set back from the road behind a gateway, as nineteenth-century Ottoman law demanded churches to be, St Anthony is nevertheless one of the largest and most visible Christian centres in the city.

  ‘I went in with them,’ she said as she tilted her head towards a small group of red-shirted skin-heads who had also just come out of the church. Then, switching into English, she held one thumb up to the men and said, ‘Well, now we’ve the Blessed Virgin on our side, we can’t help but win, can we?’

  ‘I’m made up, darling!’ One of them answered back a little drunkenly. ‘Proper made up, me!’

  ‘Ah, God love you and bless the dear boys!’ Zelfa said.

  Mehmet Süleyman frowned. ‘You don’t support Liverpool Football Club,’ he said. ‘They’re an English team.’

  ‘Yes, they’re English, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  Under the now very watchful gaze of her husband, Zelfa’s erstwhile football friends were walking back on to the main street once again.

  Zelfa stopped in her tracks, put her hands on her hips and sighed. These foreigners, her father included, just didn’t understand. And when they were young like Mehmet, too, well… ‘Look, if you live in Liverpool you either support Liverpool or Everton,’ she said. ‘It’s very old and very complicated but basically if you support Everton you’re a Protestant and if you support Liverpool you’re a Catholic of Irish origin.’

  ‘But you are not from Liverpool.’

  ‘No, but I am Irish and so I have a duty to support other Irish Catholic teams.’

  ‘But you are not religious.’ He took her arm, steering her away from a group of rather loud Italians who had also just left the church. ‘And these Italians, they are Catholics too …’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Zelfa you don’t even like football!’ Mehmet said. ‘You laugh when your father watches it on the television.’

  ‘That’s Turkish football,’ she said as, once out of the church precinct, she took a cigarette out of her handbag and lit up. ‘This is Liverpool and AC Milan. Liverpool Irish against the world. This is serious.’

  Mehmet didn’t know a lot about football, especially not about foreign teams. But what he did know was that not many Liverpool players were actually from Liverpool. Most of them, like so many players in a lot of the big English teams, came from places like Brazil, Russia and even, sometimes, Turkey. But then, like so many aspects of life in Western Europe, it was something he found hard to understand. Zelfa’s past life in Dublin was, when she occasionally spoke about it, a bit like a somewhat labyrinthine and dark fairy tale to Mehmet. Peopled by black-clad priests, enormous families of poor folk and decorated with numerous statues of the Madonna and the saints, Dublin in the fifties and sixties was a place that, in spite of his wife’s descriptions, Mehmet found hard to even imagine.

  ‘Ah, well, all the lads and lasses are arriving for the match in force now,’ Zelfa said as she looked at the growing number of people in football shirts on Istiklal Street. ‘By Wednesday we’ll be full to bursting.’ She looked quite pleased about something her husband so obviously viewed with horror. ‘What are you doing up here, Mehmet?’

  Her practice office was up near Taksim Square in the centre of the relatively new and largely nineteenth-century part of the city. Her husband, based over in old Sultanahmet, was often across the Golden Horn in Beyoglu or Karakoy, but it wasn’t every day that he managed to see Zelfa. In fact, working on a Saturday as he was now, seeing her was even less likely. But she did on occasion, as today, have the odd patient or two booked in at the weekend.

  ‘Officially I’m at lunch,’ he said. ‘I came over to pick up a book in English about Ottoman armour for my father. They’re holding it for me at Robinson Crusoe bookshop.’ Mehmet’s father, the old prince, was retreating ever further into the once-glorious world of his ancestors. ‘Actually, Zelfa, if you have time, would you like to have a coffee with me?’

  She knew he had an ulterior motive, she’d always been able to read him, and he knew that she knew it. He bent down to kiss her and said, ‘I won’t waste either your time or mine taking you to a cheap place.’

  ‘You’d better not,’ Zelfa replied. ‘If this doesn’t mean Patisserie Markiz, then I’ll be charging you the same hourly rate as my patients.’

  ‘Fetishism is not what you think it is,’ Zelfa said as she spooned the froth from the top of her cappuccino into her mouth.

  Mehmet stirred his plain black coffee and said, ‘You don’t know what I think fetishism is. I haven’t said.’

  ‘No. That was unfair of me,’ Zelfa replied. ‘You’re not thinking about voluptuous women dressed in leather, are you?’

  ‘I may be thinking about you like that,’ he said with an entirely straight face. ‘It’s an idea.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m glad we’re holding this conversation in English,’ she said.

  ‘I am glad that you mentioned voluptuous women in leather.’ Still laughing, she shook her head. Probably over half of the smart, well-heeled people in Patisserie Markiz could understand every word of their conversation. But it didn’t matter. Markiz people were generally not shocked by much. Those devoted to delicious cakes and dark, sinful coffee rarely are. Patisserie Markiz was original Art Nouveau; the age of Toulouse Lautrec, of absinthe and of young Ottoman princes dying of their self-imposed vices. A little sexual deviance was not going to bother these descendants of the Istanbul demimonde.

  ‘The oldest and, for want of a better expression, traditional meaning of “fetish” is that it is an inanimate object its owner believes procures the services of some god or spirit within it. The owner or keeper of this thing treats it with almost irrational reverence, to the point and sometimes beyond of worship.’

  ‘So, if a fetish is a religious object, why does everyone always talk about sex?’

  Zelfa sighed. ‘There has probably always been a sexual element to reverence for inanimate objects. For instance, some of the dances that people like the Dogon of Mali perform in the presence of their elaborate carvings look, to us, Very sexual. Having said that, most things do look sexual to tight-arsed monotheists.’

  It wasn’t often that Mehmet’s comprehension of English failed him, but this was one of them.

  ‘Monotheism,’ Zelfa explained. ‘Worshipping one God as Christians, Muslims and Jews all do. We’re all a bit puritanical, especially when it comes to sex. The Hindus are a lot more relaxed about such things as are many of the animistic faiths. But that aside, sexual fetishism in the modern psychitric sense of the term is all about a pathological sexual attachment to an inanimate object.’

  ‘The object has to be inanimate?’

  ‘Yes. Clothes are very popular, particularly shoes, for some reason. Childhood toys, jewellery, grooming equipment like a hairbrush or nail extensions. Generally fetishism is a solitary and harmless pursuit.’

  Mehmet Süleyman looked down at the highly polished wooden table and, for once, felt glad that he hadn’t bought one of the patisserie’s wonderful cakes on this occasion. ‘What about fetishism of the dead?’ he asked.