‘Mrs Aksu,’ İkmen said, ‘Jewish people are protected under the law, you—’

  ‘Two thousand and three.’ She raised a warning finger up to him. ‘One synagogue in Karakoy, one in Sisli, blown to bits!’

  İkmen nodded his agreement. After all, his son-in-law Berekiah had been one of the victims of the Karakoy explosion.

  ‘I’m only telling you about my own family now so you’ve absolutely everything you could possibly need to hang this bastard!’

  ‘Mrs Aksu, capital punishment is no longer employed in the Republic’

  ‘More’s the pity!’ And then suddenly and dramatically she broke down into torrents of real, no-holds-barred tears. ‘That, that fucker raped me again and again and again! With that… body still clinging to him!’ And then looking up suddenly she shouted, ‘Why am I not mad with it, eh? Why? I want to be mad! I must go mad to forget! I must!’

  ‘Izzet!’

  She had clearly been in the middle of writing something down when he came into the room. Now she was flying towards him, stopping only when she got really close, and putting her hands firmly behind her back.

  İzzet? Sergeant Farsakoğlu never called him ‘Izzet’.

  ‘Ah, did you enjoy the match last night?’ she said as she looked up at him with a sort of half-smile on her face. Maybe spending much of the previous evening, so he had been told, watching İkmen sway about on an ancient ladder halfway down a well had done something to her brain?

  ‘Er, yes,’ he said, ‘thank you, Sergeant Farsakoğlu, I had a very nice time.’

  ‘I heard it was a very good match. You didn’t have any, um, any trouble…’

  He sat down in what was usually İkmen’s chair. ‘There wasn’t any trouble, not really. And anyway, I was with Dr Sarkissian’s brother and his friends. Posh people, posh seats.’

  ‘So you didn’t have any … ?’

  ‘No, I didn’t have any trouble. What… ?’

  She cleared her throat nervously. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we were very busy here last night, Inspector İkmen, Inspector Süleyman, me.’

  ‘You have Mr Paksoy the shoe seller in custody.’

  ‘Yes.’ It was still as if she was waiting for him to say something, to confess, even. Why, he couldn’t imagine, unless …

  ‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu, have you spoken to Dr Sarkissian this morning?’

  ‘Our Dr Sarkissian?’

  ‘Either.’

  He looked stern and so Ayşe turned her head away. ‘Our doctor is due to come in soon,’ she said. ‘That body on the Kamondo Stairs, it may have been a foreigner. The police in Cardiff in Wales have faxed us through some photographs of a woman. Dr Sarkissian is coming in to—’

  ‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu, has anyone spoken to you about my being at the match last night with Dr Krikor Sarkissian and his friends?’

  He’d heard what Krikor had said to Natasha, how he had warned her firmly away from him. OK, in a sense it was treating him like a helpless idiot, but it was, he knew, well meant. Natasha Sarkissian was a very attractive woman whom he could have bedded very easily, but to do that would hardly have been professional and if Natasha really were a professional heart-breaker…

  ‘No one has spoken to me about anything except work!’ Ayşe said angrily now, her hands on her hips. ‘Why should they?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Ah, Sergeant Melik, I understand you had a wonderful time at the Olimpiyat Stadium last night.’ It was a familiar, male voice and it very successfully dispersed all the tension in the room.

  ‘Yes, Doctor, it was great,’ İzzet said as Dr Arto Sarkissian lumbered into the room.

  ‘Good,’ the doctor said and then he turned to Ayşe. ‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu, do you have those photographs for me?’ ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  She handed him a sheaf of papers and then went and sat silently down behind her desk, İzzet, after a short pause, left both her and the doctor to their own devices. Absorbing the fact that she’d looked, for just a moment, as if she was about to hug him was enough for his brain to consider for the moment.

  ‘You are beyond belief!’ Maurice Loya said as he watched his brother weep softly as he lay on top of his hospital bed. ‘You lied to me, you lied to the police. A woman you actually know was in danger because you wouldn’t tell anyone where she was!’

  ‘I didn’t think that Ali Paksoy would hurt her!’ Edmondo said. ‘I thought he might teach her a lesson …’

  ‘Teach her a lesson! Teach her a lesson!’ his brother cried. ‘Edmondo, by your own admission, you’ve had your suspicions about this man for thirty years! You express your fears in your suicide note! You should have told the police!’

  ‘He was my friend! Sometimes he let me sit in his car. It’s a classic’

  ‘He is a raving lunatic if the police are right about him! You knew he was a fetishist yourself! A fucking weirdo!’ Maurice said. ‘Not to mention that he used the fact he did occasionally let you sit in the car to indirectly incriminate you. You could have been accused of necrophilia! He’d imprisoned that woman down a well underneath his shop!’

  ‘I didn’t know that Ali had a well. His dad would never let Ali have friends in the house.’

  Maurice ran over, sat down beside his brother on the bed, and took one of his hands. ‘Edmondo,’ he said breathlessly, ‘for God’s sake, will you listen! This is no longer 1955. Nor is it 1972. You are neither a child nor hanging around with hippies any more. You have lied to the police - up to and including throwing one of our daggers into the

  Golden Horn - which has almost resulted in the death of a woman, you have tried to kill yourself and nearly given me a heart attack and for what? Eh?’

  ‘Maurice!’ Edmondo began to cry again.

  ‘Did you want people to think that you were a big, sexy man, is that it? Crime of passion? Oh, that’s a really sexy thing to do, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maurice!’

  ‘It’s squalid! Like all those bloody fuck books I found, with the police in tow, down in Father’s old bunker. Your fuck books, Edmondo! What were they doing down there in that place of grim old memories and dark artefacts from the past? Did you think it was romantic to do that down there, eh? Why didn’t you have your books in your room like a normal person?’

  ‘Because, because I thought that you might come in and—’ ‘Well, if I had, then I would have soon gone out again, wouldn’t I!’ ‘But Maurice, books no normal man—’ ‘Oh, normal men look at fuck books, Edmondo!’ ‘But you have girlfriends and women who go to bars with you and—’

  ‘And I also use books from time to time, too,’ Maurice said. ‘I’ve used prostitutes! It’s legal in this country, so what of it?’

  ‘And if you had found out?’ Edmondo said. ‘Always laughing at me, Maurice! How could I? How could I ever do anything with you laughing at me?’

  Maurice Loya sighed. He hadn’t known that this particular day would come but he had often speculated about something of this sort. His brother was a pain, a worry at times, and an almost constant embarrassment. And he, Maurice Loya, had never been one not to express his impatience. Even when their parents had been alive and they had attended to most of Edmondo’s quirks and peccadilloes, Maurice had still seethed every time his brother so much as spoke. He was embarrassing! Gauche and over-intellectual and scruffy. Living with him was impossible even if, as Maurice would have been the first to acknowledge, living without him was unthinkable. ‘Edmondo,’

  he said shaking his head slowly as he spoke, ‘the police will be here soon.’

  His brother’s eyes filled with fear. ‘Are they going to arrest me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maurice said. ‘I have no idea about what action or actions they may take against you.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But whatever comes, Edmondo, I want you to know that I will not desert you.’

  Edmondo’s eyes widened. ‘After what I… I only wanted to disappear down the rabbit hole, Maurice. Like Alice. I knew I’ve always been in the rabbit hole in a sense, in another place from everyone else.’

  ‘Yes, but… you are my brother.‘Amid some awkwardness Maurice reached across the bed and placed his arms gingerly around Edmondo’s shoulders. ‘Whatever “Wonderland” you may inhabit, you are still my brother and I love you.’

  ‘Oh, er, er…’ Edmondo found this physical closeness as difficult if not more so than Maurice. But he understood his brother’s sentiment - just. ‘Maurice,’ he said, ‘it’s just been us since Mother and Father died, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Edmondo,’ Maurice said as he gently disengaged himself from his sibling. Whether he would have married had Edmondo never existed, Maurice Loya would never know. But because his brother was as he was, that had never ever been a serious option. Now, unless he wanted his entire family life to be a total waste, he had to support his brother no matter what. ‘Try not to worry about it,’ he said gently. ‘Just, er, just get better…’

  A knock at Edmondo’s hospital room door made both of them start. The door opened.

  ‘Police here to see you,’ the thin, lugubrious doctor said.

  Maurice looked across at Edmondo, took a deep breath in, and then said, ‘Send them through, Doctor. We’re ready.’

  Chapter 22

  İkmen knew that legally he couldn’t prevent Ali Paksoy from having his lawyer, Mr Eker, with him during questioning. The attorney was an essential source of advice and support for his client. But as an officer of the law İkmen was not obliged to either talk or listen to Mr Eker. And so, before they began to question Paksoy in earnest, both Demen and Süleyman agreed that Mr Eker should be treated as, at best, a slightly annoying sound and, at worst, a piece of irrelevant furniture. Above all, İkmen wanted to see Ali Paksoy effectively alone and exposed. He wanted to hear for himself the two voices heard by Emine Aksu and the two witnesses who had seen the shoe seller’s Fiat by the Kamondo Stairs on the night that poor old skeleton was propped up there. Stepping into the arena of the really, really strange.

  Just before he and Süleyman went in to Interview Room 2, Ayşe Farsakoğlu handed him a printout of a photograph of a girl. ‘Charlotte Lloyd,’ she said, ‘from Cardiff.’

  İkmen raised a questioning eyebrow.

  ‘Eighteen years old,’ Ayşe said. ‘According to the police in Cardiff she disappeared sometime during the course of a backpacking holiday in 1972.’

  ‘Nineteen seventy-two?’ İkmen frowned. ‘Didn’t Dr Sarkissian place the approximate time of death …’

  ‘Late seventies, early eighties,’ Süleyman cut in as he took the photograph from his colleague and looked down at it. ‘Yes, and the age of the victim was approximately early twenties.’

  ‘So yet another girl?’

  ‘Or,’ Süleyman said with a shrug, ‘maybe the same girl. Maybe Mr Paksoy has had rather more than just water and rats down his well for a very, very long time.’

  İkmen put Charlotte Lloyd’s picture into the file with Ali Paksoy’s name on it and then he and Süleyman walked into the interview room. Ali Paksoy and Mr Eker were both looking very relaxed.

  İkmen, smiling, sat down opposite Ali Paksoy and looked straight into his face. ‘All right, Mr Paksoy,’ he said, ‘let’s not waste time haggling about as yet unknown elements and speculation. I’m going to tell you the facts that I have before me so far - things verified by witnesses and/or supported by scientific evidence. Then and, I suggest only then, we will talk.’

  ‘Inspector İkmen—’ the lawyer began.

  ‘If you wish you can listen too, Mr Eker,’ İkmen said.

  ‘But—’

  He ignored him. ‘What is known is this,’ he said. ‘You were certainly having a sexual relationship with Mrs Aksu. She was witnessed going to meet you and then again together with you in your premises on the day that she “disappeared”. I found Mrs Aksu chained to the wall, with you by her side, in a maintenance shaft attached to a Byzantine well underneath your shop.’ He put a hand up to his head before continuing, ‘I’m sorry, but even by the standards of my career, that particular sight was odd almost beyond belief. However… Mrs Aksu, according to her doctor, was suffering from dehydration when we found her. She had also been sexually brutalised over a considerable period of time.’ Seeing that Ali Paksoy was about to protest, he held up a hand to silence him. ‘That is what Mrs Aksu’s doctor has observed, Mr Paksoy. The lady has sustained laceration and bruising that are, so her doctor asserts, consistent with resistance to sexual assault. Should your DNA match that of the semen found inside the victim you will, Mr Paksoy, be held responsible for those assaults.’

  ‘Emine Aksu’, Eker began, ‘is a woman known to be free with her favours…’

  ‘Irrelevant.’ İkmen dismissed the lawyer with a wave of his hand. ‘Other realities, Mr Paksoy, include the fact that you tried to prevent myself, my colleagues and members of the fire service from getting Mrs Aksu out of the well. You assaulted one of the fire officers …’

  ‘I was frightened!’ His little eyes began to fill with tears as his big face reddened.

  ‘So you say, but that isn’t a fact,’ İkmen said. ‘We are dealing in fact here and only that.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Apart from your family members and those of the previous owners of the shop, now, I believe, resident in Israel, no one knows about the well underneath your premises. This being the case, and provided the DNA testing on your sample proves positive for the semen inside Mrs Aksu, it would seem that you are the only logical culprit thus far.’ He looked across at Süleyman. ‘Inspector?’

  ‘Mr Paksoy, do you own a 1972 Fiat 124?’

  ‘You know that he does,’ his lawyer replied.

  ‘I would like him to reiterate it,’ Süleyman said. ‘Mr Paksoy?’

  He was crying. ‘You know that we do! We forgot to lock it up! You found it! You!’

  İkmen hardly dared to breathe. Had Paksoy just made a mistake or was some sort of separation taking place inside his mind? Would they soon hear two distinct and separate voices?

  ‘Tissue fragments recovered from that vehicle committed for DNA testing match that of the corpse found on the Kamondo Stairs last week,’ Süleyman said. “The laboratory is also looking at samples taken from the maintenance shaft of your well, semen found on the Kamondo Stairs corpse and attempting to establish whether the cadaver is this woman.’ He stretched over and flipped open the file that was in front of Çetin İkmen. A head-and-shoulders photograph of a young girl smiled into the room. ‘Charlotte Lloyd. Originally from Cardiff in Wales. Officially missing since …’

  But Ali Paksoy was crying hard now, weeping in an hysterical, almost child-like way.

  ‘Inspector İkmen!’ Eker said as he attempted to calm his client. ‘This is too much!’

  But he was ignored.

  ‘Charlotte Lloyd went missing in 1972,’ Süleyman said. ‘The body on the Kamondo Stairs died in the late seventies, early eighties, according to our doctor. We will find out anyway, Mr Paksoy, but can you tell us whether the Kamondo Stairs body and Charlotte Lloyd are one and the same? Did you keep Charlotte in that well, like you kept Mrs Aksu?’

  ‘Or is the Kamondo Lady someone else?’ İkmen said. ‘She had, so our doctor tells us, cancer when she was killed.’ He leaned forward, across the desk, towards the crying man seated there. ‘Because she didn’t die of cancer, Mr Paksoy,’ he said, ‘she was stabbed. Murdered. I can’t tell you why, because I don’t know. DNA from that body will be compared to that of any family Charlotte Lloyd may still have and…’ He watched the round childlike face sob. ‘We’ - he had referred to himself as ‘we’. ‘Ali,’ İkmen said rather more softly than he had before, ‘you need to talk to us. You,’ he took a risk, ‘both of you, have kept all of these secrets for far too long. It’s time to—’

  ‘Mr Paksoy,’ the lawyer said, ‘I would very strongly recommend that you make no further statements until we have spoken.’

  ‘Ali,’ İkmen smiled, ‘tell me about the shoes. We’ve been speaking to an old friend of yours today. Back in the sixties and seventies when all the hippies began to arrive, one of the things that you really liked about them was their crazy shoes. Very pretty, some of the girls’ shoes were, as I remember them.’

  The crying hadn’t stopped but it was abating now. Sniffing rather than crying - again in a very childlike manner, wiping his nose on the cuff of his shirt.

  ‘Why don’t we talk about shoes?’

  ‘In this country back in the sixties and seventies, shoes were just like boxes. My father said that was how shoes should be.’ The ‘other’, the personality or aspect of Ali Paksoy that was somehow detached from the rest of him, didn’t speak in another or different voice. It just conversed with him while he remained fully conscious of it; it was just simply a part of him. It was a way of speaking, İkmen imagined, that had evolved out of very great loneliness. ‘But I disagreed. NEVER TOLD HIM THAT. No, one didn’t disagree with my father. WENT OFF

  TO LOOK AT ALL THE FOREIGN KIDS. SO MANY OF US WERE CURIOUS

  ABOUT THEM IN THOSE DAYS. They were beautiful. But it was the shoes that attracted me most of course. YES.’

  Süleyman, fascinated, leaned across the desk and said, ‘Ali, Charlotte? Charlotte Lloyd?’

  ‘SHE WAS A HIPPY. She was beautiful. SHE GAVE HERSELF TO ME THE VERY FIRST TIME WE MET. She wore shoes that had pretty yellow daises on them. Cut out of the softest suede, stitched on to the leather covering the toes. MADE ME FEEL DIFFERENT, THOSE SHOES. I COULD … We all had girls back then, except Edmondo Loya.’

  Mr Eker, now very much out of his depth, in fact frowning with the strain of trying to follow what was happening, said, ‘Mr Paksoy, I must reiterate, you and I do have to talk.’

  For a moment it looked as if his client might have heard him, but if he did, he chose not to acknowledge the fact. ‘When Charlotte wanted to go back on the road again, I didn’t like it. I TOOK HER HOME.’