Ayvansaray was not a place that Süleyman visited frequently. One of the first cases he had worked on with İkmen, back in the days when he had been the older man’s sergeant, had taken place on the edge of this district. But it wasn’t somewhere that he knew well. Balat, on the other hand, was somewhere he was familiar with. It was also a place that, in spite of its connection to several murder cases he had worked upon over the years, was a district of which he was very fond. Until comparatively recently, it had been a predominantly Jewish quarter and it still, if one looked hard, possessed a considerable number of synagogues both large and small. Now, however, Balat was a district in transition. There were and had been for some time a large number of migrants from central Anatolia in the area. They were now being joined by certain rather bold members of the artistic middle classes. By dint of a large grant from UNESCO, Balat had been designated a world heritage site and was, so some believed, on the up.

  However, Mehmet Süleyman in his smart dark suit still looked out of place. Children of dubious cleanliness eyed him suspiciously. He imagined quite a few of them were gypsies. In fact, several of the children were familiar to him for just that reason. One of the more recent incomers was a gypsy artist called Gonca. Tall, big-boned and beautiful, Gonca was also the mother of twelve children, most of whom looked vaguely hostile much of the time. But that was understandable. Mehmet Süleyman had had a brief but intense affair with their mother some years before. However, as he looked around at the listing buildings hung with great swathes of dark green creeper, he put Gonca and her delights firmly from his mind. The task at hand was to look around and talk to people about Mrs Aksu who must have looked, Süleyman felt, just as out of place in this environment as he did.

  He went into a small grocer’s shop, passing as he did so an old flat-capped man snoring in the evening sunshine on a low stool outside. Just like village shops all over Anatolia, which always had at least one elderly man lurking around outside, this establishment sold everything from vine leaves to plastic toys and smelt strongly of bread and spices. As he entered, another flat-cap-wearing man behind the counter ushered his heavily veiled wife into a dark room at the back of the premises. Probably her husband, he was obviously protecting her from the gaze of the strange suited outsider who had just come into the shop.

  The man, who was old, looked at Süleyman with an expression of open suspicion on his face.

  The policeman in his turn, smiled. ‘Good evening, uncle*,’ he said as he picked a packet of Winston cigarettes up from the counter in front of its elderly owner. ‘I’d like to buy these cigarettes please.’

  The old man shrugged and named his price and, as Süleyman passed the bank notes over to him, he showed him his police identification. The grocer swallowed hard. Traffic cops and the occasional passing uniformed officer were rare, but a smart man in plain clothes with a very posh accent was distinctly worrying. Such officers were,

  *“Uncle’ is used by Turkish people as a term of respect for their male elders.

  or could be, so he had heard, concerned with very frightening things like terrorism or the pursuit of traitors.

  ‘Sir, I don’t know what you want—’ the old man began.

  ‘We’re looking for this woman,’ Süleyman said as he placed a copy of the picture Ahmet Aksu had given to the police of his wife on the counter in front of the shopkeeper.

  ‘Mmm.’ Elderly eyes coped better when assisted by spectacles which the shopkeeper put on now. ‘An attractive lady,’ he said. ‘Very wealthy, by the look of her. Not like the ladies who live around here.’ He handed the picture back to Süleyman.

  ‘This lady, Emine Aksu, doesn’t live here,’ Süleyman said. ‘But this area is where she was apparently due to meet someone when she was last seen.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Two Mondays ago, 9 May. In the afternoon or early evening, we think’

  The old man, still looking at the photograph in front of him, shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t get ladies like her around here.’

  ‘Not even amongst the artists who’ve come to live in the area?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘They don’t come into shops like this,’ the shopkeeper responded darkly. ‘They get what they need in the smart shops on Istiklal Street or in one or other of those mall places they have these days.’

  ‘Maybe, but you’d see such people on the street nevertheless.’

  ‘Possibly. But’, the old man said with what sounded like considerable certainty in this voice, ‘not this woman in the photograph.’

  Süleyman tried another tack, something İkmen had told him the woman’s husband had spoken to him about. ‘This lady was wearing very distinctive shoes …’

  ‘Shoes or no shoes, I’ve not seen her.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  The shopkeeper said that he was, and, in fact, he wasn’t the only Balat resident to deny having ever seen Emine Aksu. Süleyman found that those who deigned to speak to him appeared to be almost disgusted by the photograph in his hands. Traditional country values

  and moralities were obviously very powerful forces in modern Balat. But then in all probability wherever Emine Aksu had gone on that fateful afternoon in May it had to have been to someone or some people like herself. Recent Anatolian migrants to the old Golden Horn districts were unlikely to have attracted a woman like her.

  Süleyman left the shop, opened his new packet of cigarettes, lit up with a sigh, and then began the long climb to the top of the hill and the more ‘artistic’ inhabitants of the area.

  There was and had only ever been room for one. Now that there were two, everything was impossible. There wasn’t room - at least, not enough to be able to move around easily. And one had to be practical. He’d been a fool and he said so in no uncertain terms.

  The reply when it came nevertheless was not unexpected in any way. ‘I had to.’ It was true.

  ‘BUT NOW THERE’S A PROBLEM. YOU MUST SEE THAT SURELY. ‘

  ‘Of course I do!’

  ‘WELL THEN YOU’LL HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, WON’T YOU? ‘

  ‘We will. We will have to do something about it.’ That, too, was true.

  Chapter 2

  Hulya İkmen Cohen was so tired by the time she got home that even the sight of her little boy Timur, his arms spread wide to cuddle his mummy, couldn’t cheer her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my soul,’ she said as she bent down to kiss the child lightly on his forehead, ‘I’m too tired to pick you up. Mummy’s exhausted.’

  Standing up, she took the glass of tea her mother-in-law was offering to her with gratitude. ‘Thank you.’

  Just the look of Hulya these days made her mother-in-law, Estelle, want to weep. Prior to the synagogue bombings of 2003, Hulya had been a beautiful and blooming young wife and mother. Her husband, Estelle’s son Berekiah, had a good job as a jeweller in the Grand Bazaar and life was very pleasant. But now that Berekiah was effectively crippled, everything had changed. Ever since the great earthquake of 1999, Estelle’s own husband, ex-Constable Cohen, had been unable to work due to the injuries he had sustained during the course of that natural disaster. He had lost both his legs. Estelle had adjusted to it, and had taken work as and when she could. But now that Berekiah was unfit for work the pressure had increased. Now Hulya was the main breadwinner for the family and she did this by holding down a variety of jobs. First thing in the mornings she served breakfast to tourists at a small pansiyon in Sultanahmet; this was then followed by clerical work for the rest of the day at a travel agency in Beyoglu. Then, twice a week, as on this particular occasion, she did a short stint waitressing at one of the bars on Nevizade Alley, behind the old fish market up in Beyoglu. She was still very young and there could be quite an exciting buzz to working in the Kedi Bar even on the early evening shift. But it could also be rough and sometimes she got groped - usually by severely intoxicated customers from former Eastern bloc countries. Not that she told her husband, who would have been both furious and humiliated in equal measure. And besides, she was a policeman’s daughter and so, for all her tiredness and fragility, Hulya could handle herself. She sat down just as her husband, Berekiah, walked into the room. Instinctively, she made to rise and go to him.

  ‘Oh, don’t get up, my love,’ Berekiah said as he watched his mother go into the kitchen to begin preparing Hulya’s evening meal. ‘You’re tired.’

  He lowered his head briefly in order to kiss her lightly on the cheek and then sat down in a chair on the other side of the room. Hulya and Berekiah rarely sat close to one another these days. She watched him as, smiling at the child playing in the middle of the room, her husband leaned back and let his all but useless arms flop heavily to his sides. The fanatics who had blown up the Neve Salom Synagogue as well as all the homes and businesses that had surrounded it had also, Hulya bitterly observed, taken the physical side of her marriage away with all that death and destruction. If things didn’t improve, Timur would be the one and only child they would ever have.

  But as usual, none of this was talked about and the couple just spoke of this and that, the minutiae of their respective days, until, at just past ten o’clock, Berekiah’s father Balthazar called out from his accustomed position in the little room with the television, nearest the front door.

  ‘Someone’s in the garden!’ he called out huskily through a deluge of cigarette smoke. ‘Estelle! Estelle!’

  Even since the bomb attack Balthazar, who now lived for little beyond idle gossip and the television, had become obsessed with security. ‘Quick!’ he shouted, panicking. ‘I think whoever it is, is at the door!’

  With a sigh of impatience - such incidents happened all the time these days - Berekiah rose painfully to his feet and said, ‘It’s all right, Dad. I’m coming.’

  ‘If it’s one of those bloody terrorists, I want to see his face before he tries to kill me this time!’ Balthazar shouted.

  But, just as Berekiah knew it wouldn’t be, the person outside the front door was not a terrorist. It was Mehmet Süleyman.

  ‘I was in the area and so I thought I’d come and see how everyone is,’ the policeman said as he first embraced Berekiah and then kissed him on both cheeks.

  ‘Oh, it’s so good to see you!’ the younger man said. ‘It must be—’

  ‘Who is it?’ Balthazar Cohen called from his TV room by the door. ‘What does he want?’

  ‘It’s Mehmet, Dad,’ Berekiah replied.

  ‘Mehmet? My Mehmet? Mehmet Süleyman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, Mehmet!’ A woman’s voice, elderly but full of life, now joined in what was becoming an entire chorus based around just one name. ‘Estelle!’

  She rushed forward, took the tall, handsome policeman in her arms, and kissed him hard on both cheeks. ‘Oh, Mehmet, you’ve come at just the right moment,’ Estelle said. ‘I’m preparing food for Hulya, who has been working all day and half the night, poor girl. You must join us!’

  ‘Er…’

  Many years before, when the Cohens were still living back in Karakoy, Mehmet Süleyman had lived with them in their small and often riotous apartment. When his first marriage to his cousin Zuleika came to an end, he was both in disgrace with his own family and broke. Estelle had taken him in and cared for him as one of her own for several years while he got back on his feet again. Then, later, it was Mehmet who had been instrumental in helping to rescue Balthazar, Estelle and Berekiah from their shattered apartment opposite the bombed Neve Salom Synagogue. Such vast and deep history meant that all and any contact between them was significant. Also Mehmet knew of old that getting away from the Cohen household without sharing a meal with them was impossible.

  ‘Let me just go and see Balthazar and then I promise I’ll be in to eat your food immediately,’ Mehmet said as he kissed Estelle on her cheeks and then pinched her chin lovingly between his fingers.

  ‘It’s only bulgur and a little chicken,’ Estelle said as she made her way back towards her kitchen. ‘If only I’d known that you were coming, Mehmet!’

  ‘It’s not a problem, Estelle, it—’

  ‘Mehmet! Mehmet!’ Balthazar called. ‘Stop talking to women and get in here with me!’

  It wasn’t always easy for Mehmet Süleyman having what amounted to a second family. His own blood relations and his wife could be quite difficult enough to deal with on their own without the problematic and demanding Cohens in his life too. But he loved them and so, after taking his leave of Estelle and Berekiah, he went into the smoke-filled television room that was home to his old friend Balthazar.

  Roughly the same age as Çetin İkmen, Balthazar Cohen nevertheless looked a good ten years older. Even allowing for the fact that both his legs had been amputated due to the injures he had sustained in the earthquake, ex-Constable Cohen was a small, thin man. His skin was heavily lined and coarsened by constant smoking, and he now bore little relation to the rather piratical and very funny man Mehmet Süleyman had patrolled the streets with at the beginning of his career. Back then he’d had a cheeky swagger and intense, sparkling black eyes which his many, many mistresses had found irresistible. Now his injuries and the bitterness that had resulted from them had reduced him to an angry and frustrated creature still hankering after his long lost sexual glory days.

  ‘Mehmet! Mehmet!’ he said as his friend bent down to kiss him on both cheeks. ‘We haven’t seen you for a long time! To what do we owe the pleasure now?’

  ‘I was just passing.’ Süleyman sat down in the chair opposite his friend and lit up a cigarette. Balthazar, as usual, already had a smoke in one of his yellow, clawed hands.

  ‘Passing? You? Up here?’ Balthazar narrowed his eyes. Süleyman lived out in the smart Bosphorus village of Ortakoy. He was hardly likely to be ‘just passing’ any of the old neighbourhoods along the Golden Horn at this time of night.

  Seeing the look of suspicion on his friend’s face made Süleyman smile. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m working.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was said in such a way as to indicate interest of a mild nature.

  But Süleyman knew that Balthazar’s curiosity about his old profession was very far from being unenthusiastic. Balthazar loved hearing about his old work and the lives and loves of his old colleagues. And so, because Emine Aksu’s disappearance was now a recorded fact, he told Balthazar about it and even showed him a photograph of the woman. After all, being housebound, Balthazar sometimes spent long periods of time staring out of the window watching the world go by. He could possibly have seen Emine Aksu. Not that Süleyman had come to the Cohen house to question its occupants. He had just literally dropped in on his way back to his car after what had been a very fruitless afternoon and evening. Emine Aksu, it seemed, may well have disappeared into thin air somewhere along the Golden Horn Bridge.

  ‘Nobody’s seen or heard anything about this woman, I suppose,’ Balthazar said, more as a statement than a question.

  ‘No.’

  ‘This area doesn’t change,’ the older man said darkly. ‘When my brothers and I used to scream in terror because our drunk of a father beat us senseless, no one ever heard or saw a thing. These neighbourhoods have always been close and that is irrespective of the type of people who might live here. When I was a kid all of our neighbours were also Jews, but these Muslims from Anatolia are no different. Hear, see and say nothing. If it was a definite murder now that may be different, but…’

  Mehmet Süleyman knew that his friend had been born in Balat but that he had then moved with his father and brothers to Karakoy when he was a youngster. Now that he was almost back to where he had started, it was obvious that Balthazar still retained many negative feelings about the place.

  ‘Are many of your friends from your childhood still in the area?’ the policeman asked once Estelle had been in to remind him that his food was nearly ready.

  ‘No.’ Balthazar shook his head. ‘There’re a few. Old Esther Sinop still lives down by the Ahrida Synagogue. Then there’s Mose Levi, whom I went to school with. He’s still around. The Loya brothers… there were still a few shops in Jewish hands until recently - maybe there still are - clothing and shoes, mainly. But I don’t see anyone and no one bothers to come and see me.’

  Ignoring this brief foray into self-pity, Mehmet asked Balthazar what the district had been like in the 1960s. They were, after all, talking about Emine Aksu whose glory days the sixties had been. Not for the first time it occurred to Süleyman that perhaps the reason why Emine had gone to meet her paramour in this area was because it was in Fener/Balat that she had originally met him back in her hippy days. Her husband had, after all, been given the impression that his wife was going to meet someone from her past.

  ‘Ah, the 1960s!’ Balthazar smiled. ‘Now that was my era, Mehmet.

  Sultanahmet alive with girls with long blonde hair, vans full of hippies singing Rolling Stones songs driving by, and me - young, fit and very interested in that “free love” thing they all spoke about!’ He laughed.

  ‘Yes, but Balthazar here in Fener—’

  ‘What, hippies here in these neighbourhoods? No. They might have passed through here, but… even now people don’t stay in Balat, do they? We’ve one hotel here in Fener down by the Golden Horn, but this generally isn’t a tourist destination, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Although I suppose it’s possible that your missing woman, because she is Turkish, may have met her lover back here in the 1960s. You don’t know if he was a Jew or… ?’

  ‘We have no idea who he is or even if this idea of Mrs Aksu meeting an old lover from the past is accurate,’ Süleyman said. ‘Çetin İkmen is working his way through her known contacts, although as yet he’s not come up with very much.’