When, after what seemed like a considerable number of minutes, one of the car’s doors opened, Enver took evasive action and, with remarkable agility, skipped lightly into the underpass beneath the Galata Bridge. There, his breath now coming in short rasps, he waited for the sound of ‘official’ voices, his ears almost reaching out from the side of his head in order to catch them.

  But they never came. Only a dull thud, like the sound of something heavy being flung to the ground, registered on Enver’s straining ears. No voices, no guns, just a thick and, to him, quite muffled thump. Without voices, it signified nothing, and when he heard the car door shut once again and the engine roar off first towards him and then over the bridge, he assumed that whoever had been in the car had now done what they wanted to in Eminönü. He was just glad that whatever it was had not involved him.

  Still, he did leave it quite some minutes before he dared to step out of the underpass and back onto the street. Rather than go back to his musings by the water, Enver decided to make his way home again. There was little to see in all this fog, which was now really spooking him. And so with half an eye out for policemen, soldiers or thieves, Enver made his way warily back across Reşadiye Caddesi. As he went, he observed that whatever had thumped out of that mysterious vehicle was no longer around. At least not in his immediate vicinity. For Enver, that was quite good enough.

  For the last hundred metres of his journey, Enver closed his eyes and imagined the smell of his son’s delicious coffee guiding him home.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  When Fatma İkmen woke to yet another bone-chilling dawn, she found her husband not beside her in their bed but over by the window. Already dressed and smoking heavily, Inspector Çetin İkmen turned to his wife as she sat up and levelled an accusatory cigarette in the direction of a small cage that sat on the floor beside the bed.

  ‘I’m going to end up dying from lack of sleep because of that animal,’ he said sternly. ‘I want it gone.’

  Fatma pushed her long black and grey hair back over her shoulders before calmly replying, ‘Hamsters can tell when the earth is going to move before we can. My little friend is simply an early warning system, as I have told you many times before.’

  ‘Yes, and as I have told you many times before,’ Çetin said, his voice rising with his increasing anger, ‘these buggers are nocturnal. They move around at night, Fatma! Earthquake or no earthquake, the bastards get up when the sun goes down and go to sleep when it rises!’

  ‘I don’t care. I would rather be awake for the rest of my life than have my children die underneath the ruins of this building. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Of course I would,’ he said as he braced himself via one thin hand against the damp window frame. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Fatma, but I thought that our early warning pet was supposed to be the cat, not that—’

  ‘Oh, the cat that sleeps both day and night, much use he is!’ Fatma said as she swung her short plump legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

  Her husband rubbed the deepening lines in his face with his hands in an attempt to wake himself up. ‘Marlboro can make enough noise when he wants to.’

  ‘Oh, yes, when he’s courting!’ Fatma replied tartly. ‘Out amongst the rubbish he’s quite the hero, but in here? In here we need something we can rely on to wake us up, and that thing is my friend Squeaky and his little metal wheel.’

  Gently, due to the rheumatism this damp weather encouraged into the bones in her back these days, Fatma bent down across the cage and whistled softly at the sleeping form of the hamster inside.

  Seeing this made her husband rage yet again. ‘Oh, for the love of Allah,’ he said angrily. ‘If we have this monstrous earthquake some seismologists are predicting could happen, the whole city will fall into a massive fault and we’ll all be dead within seconds. And that will include little Squeaky and his fucking little wheel!’

  ‘Oh?’ His wife, rising slowly from her crouched position, put her hands on her hips and looked Çetin İkmen straight in the eye. ‘If it’s that bad, why won’t you let us move to another city? Well?’

  İkmen, his usually thin patience stretched to its limit, exploded. ‘We’ve discussed this! The whole country’s on a fucking fault line, where in the—’

  ‘Konya isn’t. I’ve looked at where the faults are on a map. It’s a very safe place. They need good policemen there. You could apply.’

  ‘Oh, I could, Fatma, yes.’ He moved his thin body forward to meet her more voluptuous form. ‘But,’ he suddenly and violently flung his arms high above his head, ‘for an atheist drinker like me, life in our most religious city would be like a living death. I would far rather face the earthquake and die quickly than endure so much as a day in that place!’

  ‘But the children, Çetin,’ his wife pleaded, her hands held in what appeared to be a gesture of supplication against his chest. ‘What of the children?’

  Just for a moment, it seemed to Fatma that her husband was, unusually, lost for words. His breath came in gulps, his face visibly changed from white to grey before Fatma’s eyes; a change that caused her to place a concerned hand upon his cheek. He’d been this colour the day after the big earthquake, the day when his friend Dr Arto Sarkissian had ‘joked’ that if all the cardiograph machines in the city had not been either destroyed or in use, he’d really like to hook Çetin up to one for a while. And that was before they’d received the news about one of Çetin’s colleagues’ horrific injuries. After that, Fatma clearly recalled, her husband had cried in his sleep.

  ‘Çetin . . .’ she began.

  ‘I just don’t think that the children will get what they need in a place like Konya,’ he said, slightly mollified by his wife’s soothing touch. ‘I haven’t worked like a slave all these years to see my younger children waste themselves in the country. All the older ones want to stay here anyway and,’ he sighed deeply and with tremendous weariness, ‘oh, I just feel that I’d rather we were all together somehow. I mean, how would you feel if we left here with the little ones and then the quake came and Sınan, Orhan, Çiçek and Bülent all died? I mean—’

  ‘Don’t!’ As if blocking out these hypothetical events, Fatma put her hand up to what was on the point of becoming a tear-stained face. ‘Don’t talk of such things, Çetin! Allah was so merciful to this family last time. It must have been written that we should all be spared.’

  ‘And anyway, how we would afford to move to another city, I don’t know.’ Çetin placed a loving hand on Fatma’s shoulder. ‘My brother has paid for so much that this family has needed, I can’t ask him for anything more.’

  With tears still standing in her eyes, Fatma wrapped her arms round her husband’s neck. She squeezed him as tightly as her plump stomach would allow, and received a comfortingly familiar kiss on the back of the neck.

  ‘Oh, Çetin,’ she whispered softly just in case one of the children might be passing the door of their room and hear what she was about to say. ‘I’m so scared all the time! Every time one of the children bounces on the floor, my heart flies into my throat thinking it might be the earthquake again. Sometimes my heart can take hours to settle down and,’ she pulled his head out of her hair so that she could see into his eyes, ‘sometimes I think I’m going to have a heart attack because of all this – that or go mad!’

  Çetin smiled and then kissed her lightly on the cheek. ‘You know, I think that for once I must advise you to take refuge in your religion, my darling. If you leave things like earthquakes in the hands of Allah, it means you can kind of hand the worry about that over to Him. I must confess, I thought that was what all you religious types did anyway.’

  ‘The earthquake has tested us all, Çetin.’ Breaking free from her husband’s arms, Fatma sat down on the edge of the bed, her head bowed. ‘Even Auntie Arın, who is the most pious person I know, slept out in the street for weeks after the soldiers told her she could go back into her house.’ She looked up sharply into her husband’s face. ‘She said it wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in Allah, it was that the earth had let her down. And that is how I feel. I feel let down and scared and even when my mind is no longer panicking, my heart keeps on pounding. I want to be safe, Çetin! I want my children to be safe!’

  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—’