There was a long silence as the two policemen, at least, absorbed what this might mean.

  ‘For how long?’ İkmen said. ‘You took her home for how long?’

  Another silence. Süleyman lit a cigarette. He’d have to share all this with Zelfa. Was it fetishism or…

  ‘SHE GOT SICK. I DID WHAT I HAD TO. SHE WAS IN PAIN.’

  After a few seconds during which he took in the information he had just been given, İkmen said, ‘Ali Paksoy, are you telling me that you killed Charlotte Lloyd?’

  ‘Dad was dead by then. Rafik didn’t yet work at the shop. But if somebody heard… I COULDN’T LET THE DAISY-COVERED SHOES GO. SHOES HAD NEVER TURNED ME ON BEFORE. SHOES WERE WEAPONS.’

  ‘Weapons?’

  Suddenly Ali Paksoy laughed. ‘And then, just a few months ago, my stupid nephew goes and sells them!’

  Even Dcmen was struggling to keep up now. A form of mania appeared to be taking hold. Eyes bright and shiny, words, from whichever source, tumbling wildly.

  ‘Rafik. Sold the shoes.’ ‘How … ?’

  ‘IT WAS MY FAULT. I CLEANED THEM. I ALWAYS DID, YOU HAVE

  TO LOOK AFTER SHOES. I GOT DISTRACTED. HE SOLD THEM! RAFIK.’

  He sighed. ‘And then it wasn’t the same. Then I couldn’t love her.’ ‘Who?’

  ‘My hippy. My... CHARLOTTE.’ He looked down at the floor.

  Çetin rkmen had always had a strong stomach, but the sight of this man being sad about his impotence with a corpse was something he was having to look away from just temporarily.

  ‘How did you get, er, Charlotte down into the well?’ Süleyman asked.

  Ali Paksoy’s face instantly brightened. ‘Oh, she wanted to go there with me!’ he said. ‘We were very quiet going down there so as not to disturb my father - he was sick. But once the door of the church was closed we had a fine time!’

  ‘Yes, but getting down to the shaft…’

  ‘Oh. OH. Well, I took her down there. SHE WANTED TO GO BACK

  ON THE ROAD. I COULDN’T HAVE THAT. WE WERE GOOD TOGETHER. I

  could, I could … I made chains to bind her. SEX WORKED.’ ‘It hasn’t “worked” before?’

  ‘No. Yes! FATHER WAS A WICKED BASTARD, HE …’ He swallowed hard and then said, ‘I looked after Charlotte. I fed her and kept her calm and I cleaned her little shoes and then when the pain became too much for her to bear I put her out of it. You put animals down when they are in pain.’ His eyes dripped with tears.

  ‘But then you kept her body and her shoes,’ İkmen said,’ and—’

  ‘I HAVE NEEDS, INSPECTOR!’

  ‘And so what about Mrs Aksu?’ İkmen said. ‘How did you come to light upon her?’

  ‘EMINE WAS NEVER A HIPPY, JUST A TROLLOP! She was a hippy but a very selfish one.. HER SHOES WERE AMAZING, I…’ He put his head down as if in shame.

  ‘The Eiffel Tower shoes?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘They aroused you, sexually?’

  Another silence and then, ‘SHE WAS CHEAP! SHE LET ME USE HER SHOES, ON MYSELF. SHE WATCHED,’ he laughed. ‘SHE SAID SHE WASN’T TELLING HER HUSBAND AHMET ABOUT US, SAID HE’S BE SO SHOCKED! IT WAS OUR SECRET.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Süleyman asked. ‘Why did you imprison Mrs Aksu?’

  ‘BECAUSE SHE WAS GOING TO TELL AHMET! SHE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY! LIKE SHE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY WHEN SHE REJECTED EDMONDO LOYA YEARS AGO.’

  ‘You didn’t want to lose her?’

  ‘IT WASN’T WORKING WITH CHARLOTTE ANY MORE! BUT WITH EMINE …’ His eyes glazed over, this other, slightly more punitive voice. ‘BOTH OF THEM!’ He shuddered. ‘IF ONLY EMINE HADN’T BECOME so JEALOUS.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ İkmen said, looking at the face of Mr Eker who was truly, truly horrified.

  ‘EMINE BECAME JEALOUS, TOLD ME TO GET RID OF CHARLOTTE,’ he said. ‘Not that Emine was uncaring. THE KAMONDO STAIRS LIKE AN

  ART EXHIBIT, SHE SAID. BEAUTIFUL. IT WAS FITTING, RIGHT.’

  ‘And then it was just you and Mrs Aksu,’ İkmen said. ‘You know, Mr Paksoy, I know you know that Edmondo Loya confessed to the murder of Emine Aksu. He was your friend.’

  ‘THERE ARE NO FRIENDS WHERE LOVE IS CONCERNED.’

  ‘Mr Loya was coming to see you just after I released him from police custody,’ İkmen said. ‘I think my presence prevented him from doing so. We know, because he has admitted as much to us, that he saw Mrs Aksu on the day of her disappearance. She told him she was going to see you. She taunted him with that information. When he confessed his “crime” to us, Mr Loya suspected that Mrs Aksu might still be with you - or rather, that is what he has told us. After you took Mrs Aksu, for want of a better term, did Mr Loya at any time have certain knowledge of that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he ask you about her?’

  ‘No! AND EVEN IF HE HAD, I WOULDN’T HAVE TOLD HIM,’ Paksoy said. ‘EMINE WASN’T FOR HIM! HE FANCIED HER! WHY WOULD I WANT

  HIM TO KNOW WHERE SHE WAS?’

  ‘You were quite happy to let Edmondo Loya take the blame for a murder that you knew had never happened though, weren’t you?’ Süleyman said.

  Ali Paksoy, impassive, looked down at the floor in silence.

  ‘Edmondo Loya is your friend,’ İkmen said. ‘You used to let him sit in that old car of yours, didn’t you? That helped you, didn’t it? When we found Edmondo’s prints on your car, you told us he was never ever in it. But as we now know, you used to let him sit in it from time to time. He was, and remains, pathetically grateful for it. So it wasn’t easy telling him you tried to lead us to believe it was he who had broken in and possibly stolen your car, he who maybe dumped the Kamondo body. Edmondo Loya cannot even drive!’

  But nothing except a cold, fish-like stare met his gaze. ‘FATHER NEVER LET US HAVE ANY FRIENDS,’ Ali Paksoy, the shoe seller of Balat, said.

  Chapter 23

  They all met up at Balthazar Cohen’s house, or rather in his garden. Spring was rapidly transmuting into summer and it was far too hot to be indoors. The ‘guest of honour’ was Süleyman’s wife, Dr Zelfa Halman, psychiatrist.

  ‘Haven’t you had enough of them over the past week?’ Balthazar said to İkmen as he pointed Zelfa towards a chair beside her husband. She had just finished one of her clinics and was a little tired and hot after a long, traffic-choked taxi ride over from Taksim to Balat.

  ‘Those visiting Mr Paksoy only do so at the behest of his defence,’ İkmen said. ‘They don’t want to say anything to me. Not now.’ He sighed. ‘Dr Halman has agreed to talk to us - unofficially, of course - because I think that after what we’ve all been through with the shoe seller we need a bit of professional insight. Mr Cohen here is included because he is a friend of Edmondo Loya - and of course he is a genuine man of Balat and so has an interest in local affairs.’

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu and İzzet Melik made up the party and, after Balthazar’s wife had served them all with tea and fresh water, the six of them were left to their own devices.

  ‘Dr Halman?’

  Unusually, when in a professional situation, Zelfa Halman didn’t have any notes or files in front of her. All the information that she had about Ali Paksoy had come, unofficially, from either her husband or İkmen. No records, of either her opinions or even this meeting, were ever going to be made. Judges would decide Ali Paksoy’s fate, but those who had been involved in his apprehension needed what Zelfa, İkmen knew, would call ‘closure’. It was not every day, thankfully,

  that one came across a person whose life had telescoped down to just sick or pathetic fetishes.

  ‘In order to understand Ali Paksoy we have to have a notion of what his parents were like,’ Zelfa said. And then, waving away a somewhat doubtful look from Balthazar, she went on, ‘I’m not getting Freudian on you, don’t worry! How they were with their children explains a lot. Now, Inspector Süleyman,’ she used his title because his subordinates were present, ‘you interviewed Handan Sangul, Mr Paksoy’s sister.’

  ‘Yes.’ He took a long drag from his cigarette and then leaned back in his chair. ‘The Paksoys came to Istanbul back in the fifties. Old Mr Paksoy was a shoemaker from Bursa, very skilled; his dream was to have several shops staffed by dedicated artisans. Mother died when Handan and Ali were very young, the father, Faruk, basically raised the children alone. It wasn’t easy. They were young, he was alone in a new city, and the world had started to change.’

  ‘In what way?’ İzzet Melik asked.

  ‘This country began to open itself up to foreign markets,’ Süleyman said, ‘Imports from abroad and tourists, early on in the shape of, generally Western European, cultural tourists, then the influx of hippies in the sixties and the importation of new ideas and philosophies, even a new morality of sorts. Old Mr Paksoy was very threatened by all of it. He tried to keep his children away from it by forbidding them to have friends, by not marrying off his daughter, and by keeping his son where he could see him. But he became ill towards the end of the sixties and so Ali, at least, made a bid for freedom. He made friends with some other boys, including Edmondo Loya, and became one of those Turkish kids who hung around with the foreign hippies. One of old Mr Paksoy’s last acts was to buy that 1972 Fiat 124 for himself and his son to drive around in. It was done to show people, and himself too, I imagine, that he wasn’t a failure.’ He looked across at his wife who continued where he left off.

  ‘But Faruk Paksoy was a disappointed man,’ she said. ‘People didn’t want hand-made shoes any more and so his skills were, as he perceived it, wasted. To Faruk, a hand-crafted shoe made of top-class materials was the most beautiful thing in the world. He did indeed pass on this enthusiasm to his son Ali, but unfortunately the boy had even less opportunity to practise his skills than his father. So in the Paksoy house what did we have? The old man seething with disappointment and the two children, motherless, but young and desperate for life. Paksoy senior was, I believe - and quite understandably -jealous. He was Mr Charm himself to all his neighbours and customers, but to his children he was a nightmare. In order to spend hours and hours learning a rapidly dying craft, Ali was made to sacrifice all friendships. He was alone for unreasonable amounts of time for a child! That other voice he uses isn’t so much, from what I can deduce about it, another personality - it’s company. He talks like that, I think, in order to stop the silence from crushing him. Handan was now the “mother” of the household, always away in the kitchen, and so she couldn’t possibly marry or go out either. The slightest murmur of dissent on the part of either child was punished with a beating -generally with a very stoutly and expertly made shoe. Luckily for Handan she married very soon after her father died in 1973. Ali was happy to give her away, to the boy who had always been her secret sweetheart, the son of the baker next door. She didn’t manage to conceive a child for many years after that but eventually her only son Rafik was born in 1987.’

  ‘What about this Welsh girl?’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu asked.

  ‘I’m coming to Charlotte Lloyd,’ Zelfa said. ‘From what Inspector Süleyman has told me, I’ve come to the opinion that Ali Paksoy, maybe as a result of the way he was treated by his father, which, no doubt, induced low self-esteem, suffered from sexual dysfunction. I don’t think that his sexual experience pre-Charlotte Lloyd was extensive, but whatever it was, it was unsatisfactory. Then suddenly there is Charlotte, pretty, young and, most importantly for him, wearing shoes that are beautiful in both design and manufacture. They, as much as her, turn him on. Success in his mind has always been attached to well-produced shoes, so of course he can perform sexually with Charlotte and of course it is, in his mind, utterly perfect. It is his moment of revelation, everything he does from then on proceeds from it. When his father buys a new car in order to show off to the other tradespeople in Balat, Ali takes Charlotte out in it with his father’s blessing. Not that the car is about the strange foreign girl at all to Faruk; it’s about him and his wealth. He had cancer by this time and knew that he was dying; he had to get that showing off done and at any cost - even with a foreigner involved!’ She, a half-foreigner herself, looked across at her husband with amusement and said, ‘We do have our uses from time to time.’

  ‘So what happened when Charlotte decided to defect back to the hippy trail, Dr Halman?’ İkmen said as he lit up a cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, of course,’ Zelfa said, ‘only Ali Paksoy will really know the answer to that question. But conjecture? By his own admission he didn’t want to let Charlotte or her shoes go. His father was dying, he knew his sister should marry when that happened, and he was afraid of that silence again, I think. He also feared the prospect of trying to have sex with someone other than Charlotte and failing. He drugged her…’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘He says large amounts of cannabis did the trick, but we can’t be sure of that now,’ Zelfa said. ‘Carried her down to the well, he claims.’

  ‘And then had his way with her until her death?’ İzzet Melik asked cringing and then correcting himself, ‘Sorry, after her death.’

  ‘I don’t know how often or for how long he bound and gagged her,’ Zelfa said. ‘He fed her and, it’s possible, eventually she adapted to the situation. Hostages can, the so-called Stockholm Syndrome takes effect, where the victim identifies and sympathises with the offender. Maybe this happened, we don’t know. What we do know, however, is that at some point towards the end of the seventies, Charlotte became sick. She had bowel cancer and she must have lost a lot of weight as well as her youthful looks. Ali killed her - he stabbed her, he says - in order to put her out of her pain. This may well be so, but what has also occurred to me is that maybe around about the same time as Charlotte’s physical beauty faded, Ali came to realise that she wasn’t that important after all. The shoes, her shoes, were important, and as long as he had them and also some object upon which to focus the sexual effect from them, a live woman did not, as such, matter.’

  ‘So her death changed very little?’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Weird bastard,’ Balthazar muttered under his rasping, cigaretty breath.

  ‘Ali had seen his father suffer. He knew that was a bad thing. He convinced himself he’d done Charlotte a service. Where he stands upon right and wrong and whether he retains any religious values, I don’t know,’ Zelfa said. ‘This is, I think, one of those cases where the sanity of the offender is difficult to assess. From what I’ve been told he possesses insight into what has happened and what he has done so …’ She shrugged. ‘Over the years Ali carefully maintained Charlotte’s beloved shoes until one day, for some reason he left them somewhere he shouldn’t and nephew Rafik sold them to some very grateful lady. From what I’ve been told the usual stock in that shop was either cheap or boring or both. Ali’s days of necrophilia and even probably masturbation are over.’

  ‘He can’t, er…’

  ‘Get it up without shoes? No,’ Zelfa said. ‘He’s a shoe fetishist. He isn’t strictly speaking a necrophiliac because dead bodies are not the prime focus of his libido. He generalises to necrophilia. Shoes are important, the holes he puts himself into whilst looking at shoes are not. So when he met his old acquaintance Emine Aksu it was not her appearance that instantly turned Ali Paksoy on but those very pretty, saucy little shoes of hers. He’d missed sex and so he really went for it with Emine.’ She sighed. ‘Then she went and spoiled it all by telling him she was going to let her husband in on their secret. Ali, of course, knew Ahmet Aksu from when they were all young and he knew that he and Emine always liked to sleep with all sorts of people. He didn’t want anyone else involved in his fantasy, so he decided to have Emine, together with what remained of Charlotte, all to himself. Of course he’s not worked out that space will be tight down there and so when he and Emine have what she thinks at first is a bit of fun, he is doing this with his back to Charlotte. But that, too, is exciting.’

  ‘Do you think, Dr Halman, that Paksoy would have kept the body if Mrs Aksu hadn’t claimed to, as he says, have become jealous of it?’ Ayşe asked.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Zelfa replied. ‘Mrs Aksu’s statement contains details about Paksoy taking great pleasure in having them “both”. Her “jealousy” was a very smart, albeit desperate move on her part and also demonstrates how far removed from reality Paksoy had become.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The risk involved in taking out that old car of his and giving Charlotte probably the most outre send off I can recall in my entire psychiatric career! Emine Aksu was quite correct, he could have very easily been picked up by the police. He wasn’t’ - she shot both İkmen and Süleyman an accusatory glance - ‘but he could have been. Apart from anything else he could have lost his nerve at any time. Although I think that he dealt with that by inserting the other “him” into his vocalisations that night. Didn’t witnesses report hearing two men talking to each other?’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said, ‘they did.’

  A short silence followed while all concerned attempted to absorb the strange facts and theories they had just been exposed to.

  ‘But what about my friend Edmondo?’ Balthazar said at length. ‘What about him?’

  Zelfa sighed and shook her head sadly.

  ‘The Aksus are not proceeding with charges against him,’ İkmen said. ‘Mr Aksu appreciates that Edmondo, rather than needing prison, requires treatment of some sort. We, however, will have to take action. He withheld information that could possibly have resulted in the death of Mrs Aksu. For the moment, however, he is entrusted to the care of his brother.’

  ‘Maurice!’

  ‘Yet another thoughtless bully,’ Zelfa said. ‘Chipping away at Edmondo’s self esteem year in and year out! Edmondo didn’t just admit to killing Emine in the hope that his friend Ali would teach her a lesson. He did it also to prove to Maurice that he could be a man - with sex and women and passion and everything.’