Rafik picked up the papers and smiled. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Inspector, see you later, Uncle Ali.’

  And then he left, putting a ‘Closed’ sign up at the door as he did so. İkmen lit a cigarette and then said, ‘Mr Paksoy, I will come straight to the point. This being Balat, I am sure you know that I released Edmondo Loya from my custody yesterday.’

  The shoe seller sat down, but without giving any indication as to whether he knew about this or not.

  ‘I released Mr Loya,’ İkmen continued, ‘because in spite of his confession, I cannot find any actual proof that he killed anyone, much less Mrs Emine Aksu. Now, Mr Paksoy, I understand that you were part of the group, which included Mr Loya, who used to meet in Sultanahmet in the late sixties and early seventies.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are in fact the last living member of that group whom I have interviewed,’ İkmen said. ‘Apart from yourself, Mr Loya and the Aksus, there was also Garbis Aznavourian, Ali Tevfik and Kadir Özal. Mr Loya’s older academic friend has passed on …’

  ‘There were a lot of foreigners about, too,‘Ali Paksoy said. ‘It was really to meet with them that we all used to go to the Pudding Shop back in those days. Anyway, what’s that old history to do with anything now? Is this all because Edmondo confessed to killing Emine?’

  ‘In part yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Mrs Aksu, prior to her disappearance, told her husband that she was seeing someone from their hippy past. She didn’t say who it was. Just to clarify, Mr Paksoy, the Aksus.have a so-called “open” marriage with—’

  ‘I know what an open marriage is, Inspector,’ Ali Paksoy said. ‘We used to talk about things like that as part of the Utopian world we wanted to create back in the sixties. You think that someone else in the old group may have done something to Emine?’

  ‘It’s a line of inquiry,’ İkmen said. ‘As I say, I’ve spoken to Messrs Aznavourian, Tevfik and Özal and so far their alibis for the day on which Mrs Aksu disappeared check out. What were you doing on the afternoon and evening of Monday the 9th May, Mr Paksoy?’

  ‘I was here at the shop,’ Ali Paksoy said. ‘We many not have many customers, but just keeping the stock tidy is a full-time job. I’m always here.’

  ‘Can anyone substantiate that?’

  Ali Paksoy shrugged. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I did have customers that day. I can look at my sales receipts.’ ‘And your nephew?’

  ‘Rafik always has Mondays off. Although I imagine I must have seen him once or twice during the course of the day, I generally do. Inspector, are you saying that you no longer believe Edmondo’s story, that you suspect other members of that ancient group of ours?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘There are aspects of Mr Loya’s confession that make me wonder whether it is true and aspects that seem to me to be utterly impossible. I don’t even know whether this line of inquiry is even valid. Mrs Aksu could have been lying about who she was seeing. All we do know is that the last time she was definitely sighted she was moving towards this district on the afternoon of the 9th May, ostensibly to see an old flame from her past. After that she seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see her,’ Ali Paksoy said. ‘And even if I had, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with her.’

  İkmen leaned back in the rather uncomfortable chair Mr Paksoy usually gave to his customers and said, ‘You didn’t like Mrs Aksu?’

  He put his head down and said, ‘Not really.’

  ‘Why? Most of your friends—’

  ‘They all - except Edmondo - slept with her, yes. But I didn’t either. I didn’t want to.’

  Garbis Aznavourian had said Ali Paksoy hadn’t wanted Emine. ‘You had someone else?’

  ‘Yes.’ He said it without any further elaboration. ‘And there was the shop, too. My father was alive then. We used to make the shoes. And although they were always very plain things, our shoes were well made, with good leather. My father and I would put in extra padding for comfort, soft leather tongues, things like that. It took up a lot of my time.’

  ‘It must have done.’ İkmen looked around again at the ranks of cheap, mainly plastic shoes on the shelves. He knew they were mass produced without being told.

  ‘To be well shod is important,’ Ali Paksoy said. ‘And shoes that are beautiful as well as being expertly made are rare and fabulous things.’

  ‘You know that Mrs Aksu was^wearing a very unusual pair of shoes when she left her home last time?’ İkmen said. ‘Was she?’

  ‘Yes. High-heeled pumps with, so her husband has told me, little replicas of the Eiffel Tower suspended in some sort of solution in the heels.’

  Ali Paksoy shook his head in disbelief, but he was smiling, too. ‘God, the things they think of these days!’ he said. ‘So cool! When I was young the most you could put on to a woman’s shoe was a fancy buckle. But now … That’s why the hippies were a revelation to me, you know.’

  “Their shoes?’

  ‘Marvellous!’ the shoe seller said. ‘All kinds of styles and colours and little cut-outs and leather trimmings! Innovation, that’s what I admire! I would have loved to have been able to make such things!’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ İkmen asked as he stubbed his cigarette out into the ashtray Ali Paksoy had given him.

  ‘Oh, it’s not a big thing,’ the shoe seller laughed. ‘My father would only make very plain shoes, he was a very plain and traditional man. Then after he died, well, the industry changed and everyone began to want shoes from abroad, Eastern Europe mainly. Cheap shoes.’ No longer cheerful, he shook his head sadly. ‘Things that are both ugly and poorly made are truly worthless. Depressing.’

  And in truth, even in the twenty-first century there wasn’t much that was lovely in his shoe shop. Up in Beyoglu and in the various malls that had sprung up over the years, the shops were crammed with gorgeous, expensive and lovingly made designer shoes. But Ali Paksoy and others like him couldn’t possibly complete with them. The man and his shop had long since been left to tending only to the very poorest people in what was still, in places, a very poor district.

  The mood in the shop had taken a distinct turn towards the miserable; it had also wandered way off the point of why İkmen was there.

  In order to regain Mr Paksoy’s attention, İkmen cleared his throat. ‘So, Mr Paksoy,’ he said, ‘you haven’t seen Mrs Aksu for… ?’

  ‘Years,’ Ali Paksoy responded gloomily. ‘Edmondo Loya comes into the shop from time to time because he lives locally. Garbis I still see sometimes, too. But the others? Kadir, Ahmet and Emine came from a different world to the rest of us. Rich people from smart parts of the city, they don’t see us any more. Ali Tevfik, too. He was just messing around with the likes of us. He took a lot of drugs and got into a bit of a mess, but he’s a big businessman now.’

  ‘And the foreigners?’ İkmen asked. ‘You hung around in the Pudding Shop with foreigners. You had a girlfriend or… ?’

  ‘Years and years and years ago!’ Ali Paksoy shook his head while looking fixedly down at the floor.

  ‘Who was the girl? I understand you were very taken with her,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Who told you that?’ He frowned. ‘Which girl?’ ‘Garbis Aznavourian told me you were very fond of a girl from Wales,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Wales?’ The shoe seller looked genuinely nonplussed. ‘Which girl?’ ‘I—’

  ‘You know, Emine aside, most of us had a lot of girls, Inspector. Foreign girls, we preferred them. They would…’ Strangely he blushed, giggled just a little and blushed. ‘They would do things … you know… but it was not serious, ever. Maybe there was a girl from Wales at some point whom I said I loved to Garbis.’ He laughed. ‘You know how young people are.’

  İkmen did. He’d been there himself around about the same time. In love, if not in a physical way, with lovely blonde Alison from England. She, too, had worn extraordinary shoes - pink army boots - she had, she’d told him, coloured them herself. The hippies, yes the hippies had been inventive. If something didn’t exist, they had made it. It was a pity that the poor frustrated shoe maker whom Ali Paksoy had once been hadn’t rebelled against his father and made the shoes he had so obviously wanted to produce. It was then that İkmen glanced towards the shop window and saw a very white-faced

  Edmondo Loya looking in. Less than a second later his mobile phone began to ring. It was Ayşe Farsakoğlu. ‘Edmondo Loya’, she said as İkmen looked into that very man’s haunted little eyes, ‘is looking in the window of Paksoy’s shoe shop.’

  Chapter 14

  They had remained friends - Ali Paksoy and Edmondo Loya, and, to a certain extent, Garbis Aznavourian, too. It was understandable, İkmen said, that Edmondo should visit Ali so soon after he was released from police custody. After all they had both known Emine, if not in a sexual sense.

  ‘Unlike the rest of the city,’ Mehmet Süleyman said as he fingered the thin piece of paper that İzzet Melik had taken off the fax machine and then given him just minutes earlier. ‘Odd hippy people.’

  ‘A long time ago,’ İkmen said.

  It was early in the morning, but the three men were already in the station for various reasons - İkmen because he couldn’t sleep, Süleyman because he was due to search Ali Paksoy’s premises in less than an hour, and İzzet because he was leaving early that day in order to see the Liverpool/AC Milan football match.

  ‘This fax’ - Süleyman held the paper aloft for İkmen to see and continued - ‘is from the forensic institute. It tells me that the Kamondo Lady was definitely in Mr Paksoy’s car.’

  ‘Although whether he put her there—’

  ‘Or whether the car was indeed stolen as he asserts,’ Süleyman said, ‘is a good point. There are some other prints on the car, apart from those of the two Italians.’ He sighed and then leaned across the desk towards İkmen. Ever since the results had come through he had been dreading this moment. ‘Cretin, they’re Edmondo Loya’s prints.’

  ‘Edmondo’s!’ İkmen frowned and shook his head at the same time. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Certain.’

  İzzet Melik, leaning against a filing cabinet across the other side of Süleyman’s office, gave his superior a significant look. Their guest in the office this morning had only just let this Edmondo Loya go.

  İkmen sighed and then leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. ‘It still doesn’t mean that Edmondo had anything more to do with the Kamondo Lady than Ali Paksoy.’

  ‘No,’ Süleyman replied. ‘The car could indeed have been stolen as Ali says. But this morning, as planned, I am going to search Mr Paksoy’s shop, his garages and his apartment.’ He then looked across at İzzet and said, ‘We’ll have to ask Mr Paksoy for a DNA sample now, too.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Yes.’ İkmen shook his head, still not really quite believing what he had heard. ‘My sergeant is assisting, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a big job; it was very good of you to volunteer her, Çetin.’

  ‘Well, I’ve little myself for her to do,’ İkmen said. ‘With the exception of Mr Aksu, I can’t definitely place any known person in Emine Aksu’s vicinity on the 9th.’

  ‘Could Mr Aksu have murdered his wife?’

  ‘In theory yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Her blood is, after all, present in their house. But then she did live there, didn’t she! People do bleed. They fought by his own admission!’ He put his head in his hands and groaned. ‘Oh, I don’t know! It’s not enough to charge him. Like Edmondo, it is a partial case, a—’

  ‘Odd the way Loya knew exactly what Mrs Aksu was wearing, sir,’ İzzet Melik said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He must have seen her on that day.’

  ‘That or she was wearing those same clothes on another recent occasion that he saw her,’ İkmen said. ‘But while the stupid man protests his guilt, what can I do? I ask him when he saw Emine and he persists in this fiction that he saw her on the 9th, when he killed her.’

  Süleyman leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Why do you think that he is confessing to this, Çetin?’

  Dcmen shook his head. ‘I don’t really know. From what I have deduced from his brother, it seems as if Maurice might have goaded Edmondo into it. Not consciously, but I know that Edmondo has problems around his masculinity. I mean, those magazines we found in his basement, they were juvenile, the sort of thing a teenage boy would have under his bed. Emine Aksu undoubtedly hurt him and I would concur with Garbis Aznavourian in that I believe that Edmondo Loya is probably still a virgin. But a killer? I still don’t really know. There’s no evidence.’ He sighed. ‘In a way, he is rather like Ali Paksoy. I can see them in a car together. Although alongside a long dead body? I don’t know. But they are both - well, not unfulfilled so much as unfinished …’ ‘Unfinished?’

  ‘Partial,’ İkmen said, ‘like incomplete paintings. I suppose I mean that in both cases their development is incomplete. Somewhere in both their pasts, they stopped, but not in a comfortable place. For all that he irritates with his Californian English the old hippy Kadir Özal is very happy in his anachronism. He embraces it and it’s really OK. Edmondo Loya and Ali Paksoy are both just stuck - in Ali’s case by the circumstance of having to care for his relatives - but it really isn’t pleasant for either of them.’

  ‘Maybe they both used the Kamondo Lady and then took her out for a spin,’ Süleyman said unpleasantly. ‘Men do that with girls.’

  İzzet Melik pulled a disgusted face.

  ‘Anything is possible,’ İkmen observed. ‘But with Edmondo I can’t see it. He’s an academic, that is his life; sex, I think, is confined to the pages of his magazines.’

  ‘And Ali Paksoy?’

  ‘The shoe seller. Mmm.’ İkmen frowned. ‘I don’t know. He is far more relaxed on the face of it than Edmondo. But… there is a tension when he speaks about the past and the opportunities that he lost. He wanted to be much more than he was, he wanted to be a maker of shoes. But first his father and then economic change were against him. I had the feeling he was angry with time. What I mean by that is that I suspect he believes time has cheated him of what he should have done or should have been.’

  The silence between them was only finally broken by the cry of the man selling simit bread rings from his cart down in the street. People were saying that soon street simit sellers were going to become a thing of the past. EU regulations apparently dictated that such practices were unhygienic and already a few dedicated simit shops had begun to appear across the city.

  ‘Do you think that Ali Paksoy is desperate enough to desecrate a dead body?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘But one question you should be asking yourself, Mehmet, is, whoever has done this, why have they given up this corpse now?’

  ‘You mean because fetishists don’t easily give up their fetishes?’

  ‘Yes, if necrophilia is a fetish, although I’m sure you’ve already checked that out with your wife,’ İkmen replied. ‘I’m no expert, Mehmet, but one thing I do know is that these people don’t give up their “things”. Whether Paksoy is your man or not, whoever is has done what he has done for a reason.’

  Having another day off was great if for no other reason than it allowed Rafik to stay in bed. Of course he did have a small twinge of anxiety about why he had been given yet another day off - Uncle Ali’s place was being searched by the police - but only a very small twinge. After all, Uncle Ali himself had said that if letting the police search through all of his things meant that they left the whole family alone in the future, then it was worth it. It also gave Rafik plenty of time to prepare for the Big Match.

  Everything had been planned some time before. His friend Adnan, who was also a Liverpool fan as was his dad, was having Rafik and another friend, Deniz, around to his place in Fener. Adnan’s dad had one of those big flat-screen TVs and the boys were all going to watch the match with him and with his brothers, Adnan’s uncles. They were all Liverpool fans, too, and so Deniz was going to be very much on his own, but then it was his choice. He didn’t have to be an AC Milan fan. He didn’t have to be anything if he didn’t want to be - except, like everyone else, he had to be a Galatasaray fan. Big though the

  Big Match was it wasn’t Turkish football and so it wasn’t really that important. It wasn’t life and death.

  Rafik shuffled the newspapers that littered the surface of his bed. That silly old Mrs Kordovi had left a load of them in the shop but now he’d brought them home. There was a brilliant picture of Steven Gerrard on the back of Hurriyet and a whole squad shot on the back of Zaman. Not that he’d put any of these pictures up on his bedroom wall, that was reserved for only one team and that was Galatasaray. But he might take them over to Adnan’s and hold them up, if Adnan’s dad would let him, when the match was on. Deniz said he had an actual AC flag that an Italian supporter had given him in Sultanahmet Square. It was possible, there were loads of fans up there, although Deniz was known to lie quite a bit about lots of things. Adnan reckoned that Deniz had probably stolen the flag from an Italian.

  ‘Ah, I think this is the police for your uncle now, Rafik,’ he heard his mother say from in front of her stove in the kitchen. Cooking up some pilav rice to stuff vine leaves for her son to take to his friend’s house later that night.

  ‘He’ll be all right, won’t he, Mum?’ Rafik called back, suddenly a little anxious. Uncle Ali was very kind, but he could have a terrible temper sometimes, and he hoped that he didn’t lose it with the police. They’d put him in prison if he did and then where would they all be?

  ‘Your uncle will be fine,’ his mother said. When Rafik was little she’d reassured him in just the same way about his dying father. Rafik jumped across the newspapers and over to his bedroom window. Outside two police cars disgorged a lot of police officers, both uniformed and plain clothed. One of them was a very good-looking woman.