Mr Eker might look like a child, but that wasn’t, as İkmen would have been the first to admit, a bad start. He looked over at Süleyman and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Inspector İkmen?’ Not a patient man, Mr Eker.

  ‘Well, Mr Eker,’ İkmen said, ‘what can I say? I am of course delighted that your client has admitted to the assault upon Mr Kanh. I am sure that all fire officers everywhere will feel reassured by his statement of contrition. But with regard to Mrs Aksu, who, by the way, has agreed to make a statement to me in the morning, I must take issue.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well firstly,’ İkmen said, ‘this lady’s alleged immorality is irrelevant.’

  Mr Eker shook his head. ‘Inspector İkmen, I’m sorry but—’ ‘We know from testimony given to us by an independent witness that Mrs Aksu went to see Mr Paksoy willingly,’ İkmen said. ‘We know, from your nephew who saw you with Mrs Aksu in the basement of your shop, Mr Paksoy, that sex at that point was consensual.’

  ‘What independent witness?’ Ali Paksoy asked. ‘Emine was very careful that no one saw her when she came over!’

  ‘It was someone who knew Mrs Aksu from your shared past in the hippy hang-outs of Sultanahmet,’ Süleyman said. ‘Mrs Aksu was, it is true, being very discreet when she travelled over the Golden Horn to see you. She wore a long black coat and a plain green headscarf. But then Balat is a place where one is better off appearing modest, isn’t it? We don’t yet know where or when she put them on over the gaudy clothes she left her home in. But she showed what she had on underneath to this man because, he felt, she wanted to taunt him. She told him she was going to have sex with you, too, Mr Paksoy.’

  ‘Which proves consent,’ Mr Eker put in.

  ‘At that point in time, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Or so it would seem.’

  Ali Paksoy, who had been quietly agitated by what had just been said, blurted, ‘Who? Who said he saw Emine? Where?’

  ‘I don’t know where he saw Mrs Aksu but see her he did on the day of her disappearance,’ Süleyman said. ‘It was his description of her clothing that caused us to almost believe that he had killed Mrs Aksu.’

  ‘Edmondo…’

  ‘Edmondo Loya tried to kill himself earlier this evening,’ Süleyman said. ‘Fortunately for his family he did not succeed.’ ‘Typical Edmondo …’ ‘What do you mean?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘He never succeeds at anything,’ Ali Paksoy said. ‘Never has.’

  ‘He nearly took a murder charge for you!’ İkmen said suddenly angry with this large, unpleasant man. ‘Whether you were in fact imprisoning Mrs Aksu or not, you allowed him, your supposed friend, to admit to a crime you knew could not have taken place! Now why would you do that, Ali, if all you were up to with Mrs Aksu was just a game?’

  Mr Eker was very quick to cover his client’s sudden plunge into confusion. ‘You don’t have to answer that,’ he said.

  They all sat in silence for a few moments while İkmen considered where his questioning might go next. There was something else Edmondo Loya’s suicide note had said …

  ‘Mr Paksoy, Mr Loya named you as the possible murderer of Mrs Aksu.’

  ‘But she’s alive,’ Eker said.

  İkmen raised a hand. ‘Hear me out, please,’ he countered. ‘He named your client, Mr Eker not just because he knew that Mrs Aksu was going to see him. He named him because Mr Loya, though possessed of no proof at all in this matter, has never been comfortable with the sudden disappearance of an old girlfriend of yours back in the early seventies.’ İkmen looked down at the paper in front of him again and read out what was written on it. ‘Charlotte Lloyd from Cardiff, which is in Wales, I believe.’

  Ali Paksoy made no sound or movement, in fact no response whatsoever. ‘Charlotte left,’ he said, ‘went off with a whole load of other foreign kids to Iran.’

  İkmen shrugged. ‘Well then, maybe Mr Loya was wrong,’ he said. ‘I have to tell you, however, that Mr Loya was sufficiently disturbed by the fact that a dead body may well have been transported in a car he knew you possessed to cite it in his suicide note.’

  The shoe seller’s lawyer just very briefly smiled at his client. ‘It means nothing.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we will be contacting the police in Cardiff, just to make sure that Miss Lloyd did indeed make it home safely,’ İkmen said with a smile. ‘For the sake of completeness.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mr Eker said brightly. And then suddenly frowning he said, ‘This Mr Loya, why—’

  ‘Did he confess to a murder he clearly didn’t do?’ İkmen said. ‘Mr Eker, that is confidential information - between ourselves and Mr Loya - that I cannot discuss with you. I’d ask your client, he’s known Mr Loya for years.’

  Mr Eker looked across at Ali Paksoy who said, ‘Edmondo is … he’s never had a girlfriend …’

  ‘An inadequate living in fantasy much of the time, given to lies that aggrandise his miserable existence,’ Mr Eker said. And then, with a wave of his thin little hand, he added, ‘Hardly a reliable source of information.’

  Süleyman inwardly smiled. The ‘kid’ sounded just like his wife for a moment. Clearly an armchair psychologist as well as a lawyer.

  ‘We’ll find that out when Mr Loya’s doctor allows us to interview him properly,’ İkmen said. And then, leaning across the table towards the shoe seller, he continued, ‘Mr Paksoy, I am going to conclude this interview now. It is late, I am exhausted and tomorrow my colleagues and I will see Mrs Aksu and Mr Loya, when I hope to have at least some of the forensic results from material found in your well back from the laboratory.’ He fixed him with a hard gaze. ‘You and I both know what was said in that well. We know what passed between us. Mr Paksoy, you are facing serious charges and could be looking at trial by multiple judges. Their opinions frequently divide…’

  ‘Inspector İkmen!’

  ‘But real contrition is always taken into account,’ İkmen stood up and put his copy of Edmondo Loya’s suicide note into his pocket. ‘Always.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Mr Eker said quickly to his client. ‘He’s only trying to frighten you.’

  And from the look on Ali Paksoy’s very white face, he had succeeded.

  Chapter 21

  The principal ‘casualties’ of the previous night’s footballing celebrations were very big hangovers. There were fights at various points across the city, but nothing serious and most of the broken bones seen in hospitals resulted from drunken falls rather than aggression. Most of the fans were leaving the city that day or on the Friday and, with their departure as imminent as summer, Commissioner Ardiç had, apparently, been seen smiling as he fed the pigeons at his office window that morning. International football and not so much as a complaint about the noise! Soft policing at its finest! Who said that Istanbul wasn’t up to it?

  Ardiç wasn’t the only one smiling that morning. Strangely, Emine Aksu beamed at both İkmen and, especially, Süleyman from her hospital bed. The indomitable human spirit in all its wonderful glory.

  ‘Gentlemen!’ she said as they entered her expensive private room at the International Hospital.

  ‘A step up from the Taksim,’ İkmen said as he settled himself down into one of the comfortable leather chairs beside her bed.

  ‘It was very nice of those gorgeous fire officers to take me there,’ she said. ‘But Ahmet, my husband, insisted I transfer here.’

  Money talking. Süleyman, who knew of money, smiled. İkmen, who had no relationship with it at all, also smiled.

  ‘Mrs Aksu,’ İkmen said as soon as his colleague had sat down

  beside him, ‘I understand you wish to make a statement.’

  Her face, which had been bright, now darkened. ‘About Ali Paksoy? Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, I do.’

  ‘Mrs Aksu, we realise that you’ve been through a terrible—’

  ‘If it puts that bastard away, it all will have been worth it,’ she said. And then propping herself up on her pillows as comfortably as she could, she looked over at the two men and said, ‘Gentlemen, take full and careful note of what I say; this is quite a story.’ And then, as an afterthought, she added, ‘I do hope your stomachs are as strong as I suspect and hope your arms might be.’ She laughed then. ‘I expect you find me very forward, liberated, coarse - however you may wish to couch it.’

  ‘We know something about your history, Mrs Aksu,’ İkmen said. ‘Inspector Süleyman and our team have spent many hours talking to your husband and your friends during the time that you were missing.’

  ‘Yes.’ She laughed again. ‘You know I never meant to have anything to do with Ali Paksoy. I’d all but forgotten that he existed, to be honest with you. But then one day, about a week or maybe two after… I had this Italian lover…’

  ‘Yes, we know.’

  She acknowledged this statement with a nod. ‘He left. I wasn’t happy.’ And then seeing what she imagined was a distinct lack of sympathy on the faces of the men in front of her, she said, ‘If Ahmet has told you that he and I just swing for the hell of it, then you should know that he is lying. There was a time, yes, but not now. My husband is impotent, has been for years. He runs the business, can’t stand any kind of intervention from me. I’m bored! When we were young we used to hang out with all the foreigners and the freaks in Sultanahmet, but I’m too old to do that now. So many of the people from those days are dead and those who aren’t should be. I met up again with Ali quite by chance.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Oh, yes. None of what happened was, I think, actually intentional,’ she said. ‘It became so, but… apart from that creepy Edmondo Loya, Ali Paksoy was the only boy in our group who never wanted to be with me. OK, when I met him again he was older and fatter and even, at the start, a little weird, but I am, gentlemen, a rich, bored middle-aged woman. To me he was unfinished business, a challenge. I threw myself at him, I admit it, and he reciprocated with some very animalistic sex in the basement of his shop. He was very conscious of the fact that his sister lived next door and so I’d turn up, generally on Mondays when his nephew had the day off, covered in an ugly old coat and headscarf with my “finery” on underneath. Not that Ali bothered that much about my clothing, with the exception of my shoes.’ She looked across the room to where her Eiffel Tower shoes stood below the window. ‘He insisted I always wear those.’ ‘Mrs Aksu—’

  ‘As a lover he was appalling,’ she said. ‘Didn’t have a clue about how to pleasure a woman. I had to teach him. Nothing too odd there, though, as I trust you will agree. How many men know exactly “what to do”, eh?’

  İkmen looked at Süleyman, who was gazing very fixedly down at the floor.

  ‘Being with Ali, however, wasn’t just about sex. It was about flattery. He always shut the place up when I arrived and we had sex in the basement which was childish, funny and exhilarating. Also having him, an old friend, as a secret from Ahmet was delicious. I was going to tell him in the end, of course. I knew he’d laugh at the idea of my going with “soft” Ali.’

  ‘“Soft” Ali?’

  ‘Yes.’ She frowned now. ‘He had this girlfriend back in the old days, a European. Totally love struck, he was. Didn’t even know I existed. When she left, he was very quiet, for a bit. All his friends worried - needlessly, as it happened.’

  There was a silence after that, as Emine Aksu appeared to have to get her thoughts together once again. İkmen wondered whether this ‘lost’ girlfriend was the woman Edmondo Loya had referred to in his suicide note.

  ‘On that “last” day when I went to see Ali, I met Edmondo Loya at the bottom of the hill,’ she continued. ‘Such a freak! He started in immediately about how the fact that I had rejected him back in the seventies had ruined his life! My first thought was to just tell him to pull himself together, but then I thought it might be more fun to rub a little more salt into his old, old wound. I opened my coast so that he could see my revealing little outfit and then I told him I was off to have sex with Ali Paksoy. I told him that he was now the only member of our old group that I hadn’t slept with. When I left him I was laughing.’

  ‘Mrs Aksu,’ Süleyman said gravely, ‘at the end of last week Mr Loya confessed to your murder. Then last night he attempted suicide.’

  She looked down at the covers on her bed and shook her less than expertly coiffured head. Without make-up she looked plain and even quite old. ‘I’m sorry for that,’ she said. ‘God, why did he confess to my murder? He knew I was with Ali Paksoy!’ She looked up, her face furious now. ‘He could have told you that! I could have been spared that hideous … Little bastard!’

  ‘We have yet to speak to Mr Loya,’ İkmen said. ‘For the moment, however, we must concentrate upon you and your ordeal, Mrs Aksu. Mr Paksoy has engaged a very vocal and punitive lawyer and so we must gather as much evidence as we can in order to make our case stand up to his scrutiny.’

  ‘I understand.’ She swallowed hard. This was where, İkmen imagined, her story was going to get tough. ‘On that day… when I disappeared, Ali took me down to the basement as usual, but then he asked me if I wanted to see what was below it. I said yes, provided it was somewhere we could, you know, have…’

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Yes. And so there’s this Byzantine church.’ She shrugged. ‘Pretty groovy. I start to do my thing, strip off… but then Ali said there was an even better place.’

  ‘Down the well?’

  She put her hands up to her head and said, ‘What was I thinking? I am a risk taker, but…’ She shrugged. ‘He made me climb down that ladder in those shoes! He went first, looking up my skirt and at my feet, mainly my feet. There wasn’t much room in that tunnel thing, but we managed to do it and it was kind of exciting having sex with your head over a great, big, deep well. Call me a bored spoilt rich girl if you must, but…’ A tiny laugh was followed by a shake of her head. ‘But then it got dark.’

  ‘Dark?’

  ‘Ali suggested we do a little bondage. I’ve been tied up before, I get it, you know?’

  ‘But this was different?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘He had chains, you know, there already. He started talking, as he was chaining me up,’ she said. ‘Referred to himself as “we”, answered his own questions. For instance, “Do we think that’s tight enough?” “Yes, I think it is.” Then he’s talking, to himself, about the “other one”. “You have her, I’ll have the other one.” I was scared then and losing track of who was where, who was who, and exactly how many people there might be in that terrible dark place. I told Ali I wanted to go home. His response was to smack me so hard across the head that I lost consciousness.’ She swallowed hard. ‘When I came to, he was puffing and panting on top of something I couldn’t see at the back of the shaft. But in the days that followed, I discovered what it was.’

  ‘This dead

  ‘He as one of “himselves” had me, and then the “other one” gave it to the skeleton. We were side by side, myself and the corpse. I was in my very own horror movie.’ Only now did she begin to cry, stopping herself almost immediately after she had started. ‘Silly bitch!’

  ‘No.’

  She ignored İkmen’s one word of support and said, ‘I had plenty of time to look at that skeleton as I lay chained up and gagged for hours, days on end. He never said who it was, but I think maybe it could have been that old girlfriend of his from the seventies. Some of the fragments on the body looked as if they came from that time. His girlfriend left very suddenly and, as we now know, Ali Paksoy is a terrible, twisted little man. He could have killed her. He could have killed me!’

  ‘What happened to the body?’ İkmen said.

  ‘Apparently he liked me more than “it”,’ she said. ‘My being fresh and alive, I guess, was a novelty. But anyway, there wasn’t much space and he wanted to be able to manipulate himself with my feet in those shoes; he liked that. I also told him at one point, I think, that I was jealous of the thing. I wanted it gone, as you can imagine!’

  ‘Mr Paksoy was a shoe fetishist, would you say?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘Oh the shoes did it for him all right,’ she replied. ‘The thing about the body involved him and his alter ego chattering on about how “she” didn’t have any shoes any more. I think that’s maybe why she went.’

  ‘Do you know where “she” went?’

  ‘Maybe. Not that we talked a lot, he and the other he and myself, you understand,’ she said. ‘But when “they” said that maybe she should be moved and “discussed” where she might be transported to, I “gave” them a suggestion.’

  İkmen frowned.

  ‘I thought that if I could get him out of there and into the open with her, maybe he’d get picked up by the police. He was worrying about what to do with her, what might be appropriate, because he still loved her and so on and so on. I suggested he take her somewhere I used to go to when I was a child.’

  ‘The Kamondo Stairs,’ İkmen said.

  ‘You found her?’

  ‘Yes. But we didn’t know that Mr Paksoy had put her there,’ Süleyman said. ‘We were getting close. We had found the car he took her in but…’

  ‘Why the Kamondo Stairs?’ İkmen asked. ‘Why did you suggest there?’

  ‘It’s very public. He was likely, I hoped, to get discovered there - then maybe you, the police, would find me. Cool, aren’t they, the Stairs? And arty, and a little bit Zen. An old hippy like Ali would go for that. I took a chance on the possibility the skeleton was his old girlfriend, and I said that if he, if they loved her, he should put her somewhere where her funky spirit would feel at home, make her a piece of art. He already didn’t want to bury her. He felt she’d be sad if he did that. I got taken to the Kamondo Stairs as a kid by my grandfather who used to own a bank on Voyvoda Street.’ She crossed her arms over her chest and then added, ‘And yes, my maternal grandfather was a Jew, what banker on that street wasn’t?’

  ‘Did Edmondo Loya… ?’

  ‘No, Edmondo never knew about my background. That I knew I had that one small thing in common with him was bad enough. My mother lived through the war, Inspector, when her father lost all of his money. She always told me to keep the Jewish thing dark. Maybe that was why Edmondo Loya always made my skin crawl. Maybe I was always frightened he might sniff me out.’