‘I’m not going to trial!’

  ‘Oh, I think that you are,’ İkmen replied. ‘And if you’re thinking of harming yourself with that knife, forget it, because even halfway down this well I can save you. I may not be a doctor but I can staunch a wound and you and I both know if you cut yourself you’ll be too weak to do anything about it.’

  Ali Paksoy looked at İkmen with small eyes filled with hatred. Condensation on the side of the shaft dripped noisily into the well. ‘I could throw myself down there!’ he said.

  ‘Into the well?’ İkmen laughed. ‘Do you know how deep it is?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No. Why should I? I don’t live here.’

  It was rather like having a conversation with a truculent teenager. But then if Mr Paksoy was indeed a lover of the dead that would be consistent. The necrophiliac İkmen had come across early on in his career had exhibited, unlike this man, real arrested development, but Ali Paksoy was only a more intelligent and cunning version of that pathetic creature.

  ‘The lady who had the shop before my father said that the well went on for ever,’ Ali Paksoy said.

  ‘Yes, she probably said it to stop little children, like you as you were then, from coming down here and hurting yourself,’ İkmen replied.

  ‘My father said it went on for ever.’

  ‘Probably for the same reason,’ İkmen said. And then losing patience with what to him seemed like wilful infantilisation, he cried, ‘For God’s sake, man, nothing goes on for ever! That is a fairy tale!’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Throw yourself down there and the chances are you’ll drown if you’re lucky, but more likely you will hit whatever is at the bottom of this well and break your back! Do you want to be a cripple for the rest of your life? A cripple in prison?’

  Ali Paksoy’s face was blank. But İkmen felt that something inside him was beginning to unravel. He looked up at his colleagues at the top of the well first and then he continued. It was time to get graphic.

  ‘In prison, you know,’ he said, ‘men convicted of sex crimes can have a hard time. Other prisoners don’t like them. The guards try to do their duty and protect them, but it isn’t always easy. Let’s be honest, they don’t always want to. But if you’re reasonably fit and mobile, you can generally protect yourself. Disabled men, however, well, they are very fair game, aren’t they?’ Ali Paksoy’s eyes flickered with what could be shock. ‘If you can’t move they can do what they like to you, can’t they? You can be everyone’s “girlfriend”; a piece of meat to abuse and hurt and degrade beyond what I imagine even you can envisage, Mr Paksoy.’ ‘No.’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said. He heard that scuttling noise coming from the bottom of the well again, the one that could be the sound of a rat, and shuddered. He needed to end this thing before he went crazy himself. ‘Not funny when it’s you that’s being used, is it?’

  ‘Homosexuals!’ Ali Paksoy put his head in his hands and began to sob. ‘Unnatural!’

  Coming from someone who had allegedly had sex with a corpse, the expression of such a prejudice was laughable. But İkmen wasn’t even smiling now. Every bone, muscle and sinew was stretched to its limit as he flung an arm out to take the little skinning knife that lay in front of the weeping Ali Paksoy. Not that the shoe seller knew he had taken it until he took his hands away from his eyes and saw what İkmen was putting into his jacket pocket.

  Gambling on the hope that Paksoy didn’t have any other weapon, İkmen said, ‘Ali Paksoy, you have nowhere left to go. Let us get you out of there and then you and I can talk for a while. I need to know what has been going on here and I think that you, for once, need to face your life as a grown man.’

  Süleyman opened the plain white envelope outside the room the hospital had allocated to Edmondo Loya. In accordance with what he imagined the man would want, he’d taken him to the Jewish Hospital - it was also the nearest, being within the confines of Balat.

  The attending doctor, a tall, rather louche-looking individual, spoke to Edmondo in Ladino which he seemed to respond to with something approaching relief. Maybe it was the familiarity of the old?

  After all, someone of Edmondo’s age would probably, just, have spoken Ladino at home with his parents.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ the doctor said to Süleyman after he had finished treating the wounds on Edmondo’s neck. ‘Luckily it was a very bad attempt at self harm. Most inept. There’s no real damage done. I’ll keep him in overnight. Got a brother, hasn’t he? Where’s he?’

  Süleyman explained that Maurice Loya was currently at the football match over in Ikitelli.

  ‘No point trying to get hold of him, then!’ the doctor said. ‘Game’s gone to extra time, so I’ve heard. Three-all. Amazing! You leaving a man here tonight or something?’

  Süleyman told him that because Edmondo was implicated in a current investigation, an officer would have to be present outside his room until his discharge from the hospital. The doctor shrugged. ‘OK with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to the TV now. Want to see some of this extra time, if I can. You can see yourself out, can’t you, Inspector?’

  Süleyman said that he could, but before he left the building he read Edmondo Loya’s suicide note. It was addressed to no one in particular, but it told him about some things that he and İkmen knew or had surmised. It also told him some other things that were entirely new, if not totally unexpected.

  Once outside the hospital, he tried to call İkmen on his mobile but found that he could only get through to his voice mail. After putting a card through the letter box at the Loya house asking Maurice Loya to contact him immediately, Süleyman got in his car and drove back to the station.

  ‘Milan certainly have the best of the play,’ Krikor Sarkissian said to İzzet Melik.

  With the exception of a header from Shevchenko, which had been saved by the Liverpool goalkeeper Dudek in the 116th minute, the period of extra time had been mainly characterised by exhaustion. Two Liverpool players had been treated for cramp and now that it was both late and dark, the fans as well as the players were beginning to flag.

  ‘Sadly, I think that it’s going to have to go to a penalty shoot-out,’ Abdullah Ceylan the lawyer said. ‘That’s most unsatisfactory! So little skill involved in that. Just down to the fickle finger of fate, I always feel.’

  ‘Well, isn’t everything?’ Krikor said. ‘Good God, Abdullah, you’re a Muslim; you must believe that fate is the principal factor in every scenario, surely?’

  Abdullah Ceylan wasn’t a fool. He knew that the Armenian was only teasing him. With a very straight face he answered back, ‘Ah, but Krikor, this is football! The beautiful game, a contest of skill and endurance enacted between teams of modern-day gladiators!’

  İzzet Melik, looking on, didn’t know what to make of this till both Krikor and the lawyer laughed.

  ‘Well, at least these men are really working for their enormous salaries for once!’ the Armenian said. And then, shaking his head, he added, ‘Gladiators! Good God, can you imagine these pampered creatures fighting for their lives!’

  Natasha Sarkissian, who had been quiet until that moment, leaned across to İzzet and said, ‘I bet you that if it comes to a penalty shootout Liverpool win.’

  Frowning, İzzet said, ‘You bet me what?’

  She gripped his arm and winked lasciviously. ‘Whatever you like,’ she said.

  Chapter 20

  By the time he got back to the station, Çetin İkmen was exhausted. Grey and shaky, his appearance was, to Ayşe Farsakoğlu, cause for concern and she tried for some time on the journey back from Balat to get him to follow Mrs Emine Aksu to the hospital. But he wouldn’t and, once he’d called Ahmet Aksu to tell him the good news about his wife and had had two glasses of tea and several cigarettes, he did indeed look very much better.

  Ali Paksoy, now safely ensconced in a cell, had requested a lawyer, a Mr Eker. İkmen had never heard of him but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to offer the policeman a significant challenge. Although quite how Ali Paksoy could possibly mount any sort of defence based on anything other than insanity İkmen couldn’t imagine.

  ‘Çetin!’

  He looked up from the paperwork he and Ayşe had spread across his desk into the face of Mehmet Süleyman.

  ‘I tried to call you some time ago,’ he said as he walked into the room and then embraced the older man for a moment. ‘Now I know why you didn’t answer. You were down a well!’

  ‘A well with a very shaky ladder down one side,’ İkmen said. ‘If Sergeant Farsakoğlu hadn’t been in attendance with her bottle of hand cream when the fire service pulled me out, I think that probably my fingers would have been clawed for all time. Massaging that stuff in brought them back to life. I tell you, Mehmet, I’m getting too arthritic for this job!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ He sat down. ‘Where is Sergeant Farsakoğlu?’ ‘Downstairs waiting for Ali Paksoy’s lawyer,’ İkmen said.

  Süleyman lit a cigarette. ‘I heard you had him in custody. Found Emine Aksu alive, too, so I’m told. That must be a relief.’

  İkmen, lighting up yet again, said, ‘Yes. You know, when this investigation started, I was convinced that she was dead.’ And then, as if to himself, he added, ‘Maybe it was because she was indeed beneath the ground? In the well. It’s one explanation. Unless I’m… unless I’m losing my skill…’

  Mehmet Süleyman didn’t usually get himself too involved in İkmen’s more esoteric feelings and musings and so, sticking relentlessly to the known, he cut in, ‘Çetin, I was at the house of Edmondo Loya earlier this evening. It was fortuitous.’

  ‘Was it?’ İkmen, still distracted by his own thoughts, said, ‘I was going to go and see if I could find him myself before Ali Paksoy’s nephew turned up at Cohen’s and told us - Ayşe and myself - he’d seen Emine Aksu in his uncle’s shop. He didn’t know when but—’

  ‘Çetin, Edmondo Loya tried to kill himself this evening,’ Süleyman said.

  İkmen looked up sharply.

  ‘Tried to hang himself. Luckily he wasn’t very good at it and young Yildiz and myself managed to save him,’ Süleyman said. ‘He planned it, however.’ He pushed a piece of paper across the desk towards İkmen. ‘Suicide note. I think that you should read it before you go in to interview Mr Paksoy.’

  ‘We.’ İkmen picked the letter up from his desk and said, ‘We should interview Mr Paksoy. You and me.’

  ‘My issue with him relates to his car,’ Süleyman said. ‘Nothing so serious as the false imprisonment of a woman.’

  İkmen, reading, said, ‘No? I think you’ll find, my dear Mehmet, that it is.’ Then when he had finished the note he looked up. ‘Poor soul.’

  ‘Edmondo Loya? Yes. But—’

  ‘Emine Aksu has made an allegation against Ali Paksoy to the effect that she witnessed him having sex with a dead body,’ İkmen said. ‘I don’t know how this happened but… one doesn’t have to be a genius to realise that, given the evidence from Paksoy’s car, that poor dead body could very well be your Kamondo Lady. And she in turn, if we look at Edmondo’s note—’

  ‘Incredible!’ Süleyman put his cigarette out and then lit up another. ‘He’ll deny it, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You haven’t got a statement from Mrs Aksu yet?’

  ‘No, she’s in hospital. But I have no doubt that she will be willing to give one,’ İkmen said. ‘And forensic are already all over that well underneath Paksoy’s house. Mrs Aksu intimated that the dead body was kept in the same shaft where we found her and Mr Paksoy. This could be quite a tale, should Mr Paksoy choose to tell it to us.’

  ‘If you like that sort of thing,’ Süleyman said gloomily.

  İkmen shrugged. ‘It is our business my dear Mehmet. If people always behaved themselves and never ever gave in to their baser urges, you and I would be unemployed.’

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu first knocked on İkmen’s door and then walked in. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘Mr Eker is here. He looks a bit, well, agitated.’

  İkmen took a deep breath and looked across at Süleyman.

  ‘I wonder if he’s angry at having been kept away from that football match?’ he said.

  The entire stadium erupted. It had been 3-2 to Liverpool with AC Milan to take one more penalty to keep them in the game. As Andriy Shevchenko placed the ball in front of the Liverpool goal and prepared to take the shot, İzzet Melik covered his eyes. If Shevchenko scored, AC were still in with a chance, if he missed …

  A massive roar that mixed both pleasure and pain soared up from the crowd. Next to him Natasha Sarkissian screamed out something in English. He looked up and saw that she was smiling. Damn it!

  ‘We are the champions!’ she yelled. ‘We are the champions!’

  ‘Fabulous save by the English goalkeeper!’ Krikor Sarkissian said to İzzet. ‘It’s a pity that you missed it, although I can understand why you did.’

  ‘We lost!’

  ‘Yes, but what a great match!’ the Armenian said. ‘I can’t remember being this involved in a match and I wasn’t supporting either side!’

  In spite of himself İzzet smiled. After all it wasn’t as if it had been his own team, Fenerbahce, that had just dipped out on European honours. Italy was only his adopted second home and it had been a very, very exciting match. Out on the pitch the Liverpool players turned somersaults in delight in the churned-up grass.

  ‘Thank you so much for giving me a ticket,’ İzzet said to Krikor as they all waited for the presentation of the cup ceremony to begin. Supporters were waving dummy cups in the crowd now, but the real thing had yet to make an appearance.

  ‘It’s been a pleasure,’ Krikor replied.

  ‘And now, because WE won you must make good on our bet, Sergeant,’ Natasha Sarkissian said as she sat down beside him and took one of his arms in hers.

  ‘But we didn’t set a bet or…’

  ‘I think you should take me to dinner when we get back into the city,’ Natasha said. ‘Dinner and…’ She smiled.

  Her cousin, who had been watching her and listening to what she had been saying, asked İzzet if he would mind if he leaned across him. ‘I need to speak to Natasha.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Even though his face was not turned towards him, İzzet could see that Krikor was frowning. ‘Stop playing around, Natasha,’ he said in English. ‘You’re not in London now. This man is one of Arto’s colleagues. I know what you’re like. Leave him alone!’

  ‘Afraid I’ll break his poor little heart, are you?’ she said spitefully. ‘Oh grow up, Krikor! He’s a great big thing! He can take care of himself!’

  ‘Maybe,’ her cousin replied. ‘But you leave him alone or you’ll have me to answer to! I won’t be embarrassed by you here. In England I don’t care, but I have to live here, so leave the man alone!’

  Pouting like a child, Natasha Sarkissian turned away.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, İzzet,’ Krikor said as he moved back into his seat once again. ‘A minor disagreement.’

  İzzet smiled. He didn’t know much English but he knew enough. He had actually already got the measure of Natasha Sarkissian all on his own and in spite of that he would, he knew, have taken her very joyfully to bed. But not now. Dr Krikor was right, he was a colleague of Dr Arto’s and so to do that would be wrong. Shame. It had been a long time since …

  ‘Ah, here they come now! The gallant losers!’ Abdullah Ceylan said as the exhausted AC Milan players stepped up to take their runner-up medals.

  Krikor, enthusiastically clapping the losers, said, ‘Izzet, when we leave here, would you like me to drive you straight home or… ?’

  ‘Oh, Dr, er, Krikor, if you can take me to a tram stop that will be fine.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ he shouted above the roar of the crowd. ‘My brother told me you live in Zeyrek. That’s no problem. If you’re not going on anywhere else …’

  Natasha looked across at her cousin and smiled unpleasantly.

  ‘No,’ İzzet said. ‘I’m going straight home.’

  ‘Then that’s settled,’ Krikor said. ‘My brother would never forgive me if I just dumped you in the street to contend with public transport. The idea!’

  Of course it was what most people did have to do, İzzet on many occasions himself. But the Sarkissians, just like the lawyers and the scientists they were friends with, led a quite different kind of existence. It was one where clearly women, even when denied what they said they wanted, got over it and on to the next thing very quickly. Now that the Liverpool team were on the pitch Natasha Sarkissian was waving her arms, blowing them kisses and laughing as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

  İkmen sat down and began to read from a piece of paper that he had in his hand.

  ‘False imprisonment of Mrs Emine Aksu, sexual assault on Mrs Emine Aksu, violent assault on Mr ismail Kanh of the fire service, alleged desecration of an unknown corpse, possible murder of same …’ He looked up smiling. ‘Anything else, do you think?’

  Beside the squat and beefy frame of Ali Paksoy was a slim little man who, to both İkmen and Süleyman, looked as if he was about thirteen.

  ‘If I may answer those allegations before we proceed,’ the ‘child’ said.

  ‘Mr Eker?’ Süleyman asked.

  His voice was high and slightly tremulous, just like a very young boy. ‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘with regard to the false imprisonment and sexual assault: Mrs Aksu, the woman concerned, went to Mr Paksoy’s shop of her own volition. Sex was consensual. Mrs Aksu is a woman of a promiscuous nature who gave herself to my client willingly. The “imprisonment” was also consensual and was part of what my client has described as a “sex game”. Mrs Aksu’s assertion that my client engaged in sex with an unknown corpse is, as far as I am concerned, pure hearsay. My client does, however, admit the assault upon the fire officer, but he was profoundly threatened by your violent intervention at that time. He is, nevertheless, truly sorry for his actions.’