He smiled and then placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Yes, I understand,’ he said. ‘But I can’t let you go down into that.’ He tipped his head slightly towards the well. ‘I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to you.’

  ‘But sir, you don’t like heights!’

  İkmen stood up. ‘I don’t like murderers and rapists but I have to come into contact with them because that’s my job.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Handan Sangul said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  İkmen took a cigarette out of his packet and put it into his mouth. ‘I’m just going to take a look down your brother’s well,’ he said.

  Handan Sangul’s eyes widened. ‘You think he’s down there? Ali?’

  ‘Who knows?’ İkmen shrugged. ‘But we must explore every possibility.’ He then lit up his cigarette and swung one leg over the niche and into the well.

  ‘Mr Loya! Edmondo!’

  Only God knew how many bedrooms were in that house! When he got to seven Süleyman gave up counting. All beautifully fitted out and decorated - or rather they had been about a hundred years before; the bedrooms were uniformly huge and, even in spring, decidedly chilly.

  ‘Sir, I don’t think he’s here!’ Yildiz called up from one of the rooms below. ‘It says on the television that it’s half-time now and it’s 3-0 to AC Milan. 3-0! Amazing! Sergeant Melik will be delighted.’

  Süleyman, furious, lunged his head and shoulders over the banisters so that he could see the floor below. ‘Constable Yildiz, have you switched on Mr Loya’s television?’

  ‘Well, er, yes…’

  ‘A suspect’s things! You’re touching and using a suspect’s goods in his own home! I don’t believe you, Yildiz! You—’ ‘Sir, it’s football, it’s important!’

  ‘No, it isn’t!’ Süleyman yelled down into the dark, echoing Toledo steel-lined hall below. ‘It’s a fucking game, Yildiz! Now switch that television off and then get into that old garage out in the garden.’

  A barely audible recognition of what had been said slipped from Hikmet Yildiz’ mouth. ‘Sir.’

  ‘When I’ve done here, I’m going to the basement,’ Süleyman said. ‘I’ll see you in the garden, Yildiz.’

  Although he couldn’t exactly see what was happening, İkmen knew that the ladder he was on was very rusty. As he put his hands and feet on each rung, gritty, wispy bits kept coming off and falling silently into the water below. He knew his knuckles were white as he descended because he was gripping on so tightly that it hurt. Thank God for the cigarette that still burned brightly between his lips! At least while he was smoking he was on nodding terms with real life. Doing things on the say so of his own intuition was one thing, but to do so much on the hunch of another…

  ‘Sir, are you OK?’ Ayşe called down.

  The temptation to respond with the words ‘Never better’ was strong, but he resisted. ‘Fine,’ he mumbled through his cigarette. ‘What?’

  ‘Fine!’ he said again, louder this time, losing his precious cigarette to the oily water below as he did so. ‘Damn!’ ‘Sir?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ İkmen said. ‘I’ve just lost my cigarette, that’s all.’ ‘See anything?’

  Now that he was over a metre down he needed to get his torch in order to see anything. As his mind reeled away from the horror of what he was doing, İkmen put one shaking hand into the pocket of his trousers and withdrew his torch. Logically he knew that holding on to the aged ladder with one hand was probably no less safe than holding on with two, but it still terrified him. In fact, once the torch was switched on, he could see that if necessary he could brace himself against the opposite wall of the shaft. He could also see that the ladder was indeed covered with rust, although wear was discernible on the treads too. Someone had been down here in living memory, he felt.

  ‘So what can you see?’ Ayşe called down.

  ‘What, you mean beyond a ladder that is barely connected to the wall?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this!’ Handan Sarigul said. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ İkmen said. ‘But for once it is not I who possesses a feeling, it is my sergeant.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous!’ Her voice was further away now. She had moved back from the hated well, unable to stand it any longer.

  After a pause during which he transferred his torch from his left hand to his right and then into his mouth, İkmen began to make his way further down the ladder. If going down was this tough, what on earth would going up be like! His lungs were shot by so many years of smoking and he could hardly rely upon his poor white knuckles to take all of the strain. Had he carried on thinking about this as opposed to attending to his downward descent, he probably wouldn’t have noticed when the toes of his shoes stopped scraping against the bricks at the side of the shaft. But fortunately Ayşe prompted him with yet another of her demands for an update and he stopped.

  Moving very slowly downwards with the torch still firmly clamped between his teeth, İkmen noticed that the ladder suddenly went down past a cavity. What kind of cavity it was, wasn’t immediately apparent, but that it was there at all was intriguing. As he descended he found, at first to his relief, that the toes of his shoes hit brickwork again quite quickly. Slowly the cavity came into view and would have gone, too, if something truly extraordinary hadn’t happened. What looked like the uneven surface at the bottom of the cavity suddenly moved, rearing up with a violence that nearly made İkmen lose his footing. By the light of the torch in his mouth, İkmen could now see that the bottom of the cavity had a face and eyes that were looking into his pleadingly.

  ‘Sir?’

  Several minutes had passed since either of the women had heard anything from the well below and Ayşe, although she could still see İkmen, was concerned.

  ‘Sir, what—’

  ‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu, could you please call for back up and also alert the fire service. I think we’ll need their assistance here,’ İkmen said, his voice echoing sonorously up the shaft of the well.

  Ayşe took her phone out of her pocket and then, calling down the well once again, she said, ‘Sir, what shall I tell the station?’

  ‘Tell them we’ve found Mrs Emine Aksu,’ İkmen said. ‘We will, however, need assistance from the fire service and their lifting equipment to get her out.’

  Handan Sarigul looked across at Ayşe and said, ‘Is that the woman who was missing?’

  Ayşe said it was before she began speaking into her phone, making requests on behalf of her boss.

  Down in the well, İkmen still looked into the great dark eyes of what he could see was Emine Aksu but which possessed such a frightened, almost feral quality, that he was loath to move or even breathe too hard. God alone knew what she was doing down there, what she’d been through. But her arms were secured to the wall by what looked like a short chain. Fear and suspicion were the only emotions he could detect in her at the present. But once he heard Ayşe on the phone, he began to talk. Whether Mrs Aksu answered him or not wasn’t important. If the fire service were to have any chance of getting her out of what looked like a maintenance shaft successfully, he had to try to ensure that she was calm.

  ‘Mrs Aksu, my name is Çetin İkmen,’ he said. ‘I’m a police officer. We’ve been looking for you.’

  She didn’t move. Her still, shocked eyes didn’t so much as flicker.

  ‘My colleague at the top of the well is calling the fire service,’ İkmen said. ‘They have far more experience of getting people out of difficult situations than we do. But I’ll stay with you until they come. It’s OK. You’re safe now.’

  ‘No!’ The word came, he could hear, from a throat that hadn’t been lubricated for a very long time.

  ‘Mrs Aksu?’

  She was shaking. Her feet, which were the part of her body closest to him, vibrated, making the heels of those very distinctive shoes of hers click and clack together like castanets. For one brief moment, İkmen took his eyes off her wild and bloodied face, propped up and straining to see him through the gloom, and watched as two little models of the Eiffel Tower floated up and down in her heels.

  ‘You’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘Now!’

  ‘And leave you? I’m not leaving you,’ İkmen said as he looked down the shaft at her face once again. The chains at her wrists were shaking.

  ‘Sir, we’ve got some uniforms on their way now and the fire service,’ he heard Ayşe call down from above. ‘Good.’

  ‘Are you OK, sir? Do you want to come up and I’ll take your place?’

  He knew she knew how he was with heights. Not that she was any better, if she were honest. ‘No, Sergeant, that’s—’

  ‘You must go!’ the woman with the wild eyes said. Her teeth were clenched, muscles and veins standing out from her dirty temples. ‘Mrs - I can’t!’ İkmen said. ‘I—’

  And then as he looked at her face he began to make out something that appeared to be moving about behind her head. A dark shape against the darkness of this shaft that stretched, God alone knew how far, horizontally underneath the shoe shop and the adjacent property. For a moment he didn’t know what to do. If he told Emine Aksu that he knew she wasn’t alone, would it cause the person with her to panic, maybe do something reactive and violent to her? He couldn’t do or say nothing, but… it had been such a relief to find her alive that it hadn’t occurred to him that she could still be in danger from anything apart from her current situation in the well. But she was. Now, as he looked as hard as he could at her face, he could see that there was a hand at her throat. It held something small, but chillingly metallic. The only person, as far as İkmen knew, to have real knowledge of the well and its secrets was obviously still in residence. He decided to speak directly to him.

  ‘You know, Mr Paksoy,’ he said, ‘I realise that if that shaft you are in had an outlet into the street or even another building, you would have taken it. But it doesn’t and so you are trapped. Maybe it’s an overflow conduit for the well? Is that what it is, Mr Paksoy? Something to take up the water should the well flood, to protect the buildings up top?’

  He heard a gasp from above, either from Ayşe Farsakoğlu or, more likely, from Ali Paksoy’s sister.

  ‘The fire service are on their way to get Mrs Aksu safely out of here,’ İkmen continued. ‘If you help them it will go easier for you, I give you my word. But if you impede us… I don’t know what’s happened here, Mr Paksoy, but I must urge you in the strongest possible terms to give yourself and that knife you’re holding up - now.’

  Chapter 18

  ‘Crespo’s scored again!’ İzzet Melik was on his feet, screaming.

  ‘Unbelievable.!’ Krikor Sarkissian, like all of the Italians in the stadium, was also on his feet.

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘You couldn’t make it up in your head,’ Süleyman Arslan said. ‘It’s like some sort of football fairy story!’

  ‘The English will never, ever come back from this now!’ someone said against the deafening roars of both pleasure and pain that were coming from different parts of the crowd.

  İzzet looked down at a very crestfallen Natasha Sarkissian and said, ‘Sorry.’

  Still sitting, hunched and obviously unimpressed, Natasha Sarkissian gave him an evil glare. All around the stadium despondent Liverpool fans texted their agony back to the northwest of England.

  ‘Oh, well this is one match that is over,’ Hatice Arslan said as she sat down once again to wait for play to recommence. ‘What a shame it’s so one-sided! I was expecting more from the English, I must say.’

  As most people quietly resumed their seats and the players began to ready themselves for what was left of the first half, Natasha Sarkissian turned to her companions and said, ‘Have any of you ever been to Liverpool?’

  Krikor had once, many years before, but the closest anyone else had ever been was Manchester.

  As play began again, Natasha smiled. ‘Liverpudlians - “Scousers”, as they call themselves - don’t give up easily. It isn’t over yet, not by any means,’ she said.

  * * *

  The Loya brothers still hadn’t had the wall İkmen’s men had burst through repaired. The basement floor was covered with rubble: bricks, stone and plaster. Not that there was really very much in the basement anyway. The brothers, maybe because of its proximity to ‘that’ room that now lurked darkly at the end of the lighted basement, hadn’t put a lot down there. An old push bike, some planks of wood, and a sack of coal seemed to be the main items stored. Edmondo Loya was most certainly not in here.

  Mehmet Süleyman made his way to the end of the space and then clambered over the main pile of rubble by the wall. As he stepped through he shook his head, musing upon how so many of ‘the men’ so often left terrible messes in their wake. But then not all of their superior officers were that fussy about clearing up themselves. And, in truth, sometimes the owners of the property under investigation deserved no more than this. But not the Loyas. From what he’d seen of them they were a pair of rather eccentric, argumentative middle-aged men. Harmless, in most respects, except in Edmondo’s case, to himself. Poor strange man, owning up to a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed.

  Süleyman took his torch out of his pocket and switched it on. Now emptied of their sinister narcotic bottles, the shelves around the walls looked just like normal racks used by normal people for storing tools and car parts and bicycles. There was no sign of any of the erotic magazines İkmen had told him about on the table. In fact, the only thing on the table was a large white envelope. Frowning, Süleyman approached it. It was then that he saw the shoes, old-fashioned brown brogues, above the table. He made straight for the door into the garden and flung it open.

  ‘Yildiz!’ he yelled desperately. ‘Constable Yildiz!’

  No immediate reply came from the person who held a knife to Emine Aksu’s throat. In fact, so long did this total silence continue, that İkmen actually began to wonder whether he had been wrong to ascribe whatever was happening to Ali Paksoy. ‘Mrs Aksu…’

  ‘He’s never going to let me get out of here alive!’ she said. And then, in response to still firmer pressure from the knife, she first gasped and then became silent.

  ‘We’re all going to get out of here alive, including Mr Paksoy,’ İkmen said.

  He heard what sounded like a muffled argument from above. ‘Ayse?’

  ‘I—’ And then he heard her shout. ‘No!’ ‘Ali! Ali my brother!’ Handan Sangul yelled through her tears. ‘Ali!’

  Suddenly a face, dark with anger and meaty as a bullock, reared into İkmen’s field of vision. He can’t have heard his sister earlier. Now he had and he was trembling with the shock of it.

  ‘Mr Paksoy,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Why is Handan here?’ Ali Paksoy said as he continued to press the short skinning knife into the folds of Emine Aksu’s neck.

  ‘Your sister was concerned about you,’ İkmen said. The metal ladder he was standing on was old and thin. Both the knuckles of his hands and the insteps of his feet were beginning to hurt now. ‘We all wanted to know where you were.’

  ‘Well, now that you do, I’d be obliged if you’d take my sister away,’ Paksoy said. ‘She’s a good woman, a prayerful woman; she shouldn’t be around things like this.’ He looked down into the terrified eyes of Emine Aksu and leered.

  ‘You think that Mrs Aksu is unworthy of your sister’s attentions?’

  Paksoy looked up, his several chins wobbling as he moved. ‘She’s dirty,’ he said. ‘With her dresses and her little feet and her shoes! Makes me dirty.’ Then suddenly he shouted, ‘She thought that she could just snap her fingers at me!’

  ‘Mrs Aksu, you feel, was manipulating you?’ İkmen said.

  Somewhere at the bottom of the well something scampered into the water. Just briefly İkmen closed his eyes. He didn’t have many phobias, but if that was a rat… In fact, there was only really the one and that was, possibly, scuttling about in the water below him at that moment.

  ‘Oh, she thought she was manipulating me, but she wasn’t,’ Ali Paksoy said, his face sweating heavily as he spoke. ‘I was manipulating her. Bitch. Thinks she’s so wonderful! But I showed her!’ He looked back down at her again and laughed. ‘I showed you, didn’t I lady!’

  ‘For God’s sake, he has sex with dead bodies!’ Emine Aksu cried through shaking tears.

  Ali Paksoy, silent now, failed completely to deny her words.

  Süleyman’s investigation. Paksoy’s car had yielded evidence indicating that the so-called Kamondo Lady had been one of its more recent passengers. She had been assaulted. İkmen swallowed his revulsion and made himself look into the face of this man he now knew to be a necrophiliac. His first ever case as a detective had involved one of this kind. He, too, had been a sweaty, leering and yet timid individual. A poor, pathetic inadequate. And yet from the bloodied and terrified state of Emine Aksu, it was clear that this example was not as benign as the creature İkmen had encountered all those years ago at the beginning of his career.

  The sound of well-shod feet, as well as the deep tones of male voices coming from above, alerted İkmen to the fact that either his back-up or the fire service boys must have arrived.

  ‘Mr Paksoy,’ he said, ‘my men have arrived. Unchain Mrs Aksu and move away from her now.’

  ‘No!’ He clung still tighter to her body, the knife in his hand now drawing a small trickle of blood from her neck.

  Emine Aksu wept. ‘I’ve been such a bad woman!’ she said. ‘Oh God help me!’

  ‘Mr Paksoy,’ İkmen said, ‘you know that myself and my colleagues cannot let you leave here with Mrs Aksu as your hostage.’ He didn’t answer.

  ‘Inspector İkmen!’ The familiar voice rang down into the well from above. It was that of one of his young fellow inspectors, Metin İskender. A boy from the slums originally, Metin had risen quickly through the ranks, had taken down several major criminals, and was famous for his uncompromising attitude towards offenders, İkmen looked up and saw Metin’s young, handsome face looking down at him. He also saw the younger man’s gun which was already in his hand.