This sounded familiar, and İkmen recalled Rahman Berisha’s grave face. This in turn conjured up the look of horror on the face of Rahman’s daughter when she saw her brother’s all but severed head. A girl, little more than a child, made to follow the harsh dictates of her ‘blood’.

  ‘Whatever they tell you about it must be treated with caution,’ Samsun went on. ‘We have a saying that goes, “You are free to be faithful to your word; you are free to be faithless to it.”’ At this, Samsun laughed. It was, in spite of all the surgery she had had, a remarkably deep sound.

  After a pause during which the full import of the saying Samsun had just quoted at him sank into his brain, İkmen said, ‘Of course I’m trying not to jump to conclusions about this. The incident may be clan related, but then it may not be.’

  ‘You are right to take that line,’ Samsun said and poured what looked like about half the brandy bottle into İkmen’s glass. ‘The Berishas have been in blood with the Vlora fis for as long as anyone from Ghegeria can remember.’

  Amazed that Samsun, even allowing for her well-known ‘powers’, not to mention her addiction to gossip, would know, and reveal, such intimate details about his case, İkmen exclaimed, ‘Allah! But how do you . . .’

  ‘We are Albanians, Çetin.’ The transsexual smiled, ‘We are accustomed to tragedy. News of it travels fast. The cousin, Mimoza Özer, is telling everyone that Rifat Berisha’s head was almost severed from his body. That would point away from his death being blood related.’

  ‘Why is that?’ İkmen asked, after which he made a deliberate effort to close his mouth which was beginning to look fish-like.

  ‘Because to sever a man’s head is dishonourable,’ Samsun explained and then added with a shrug, ‘Not of course that this will stop the Berishas from avenging Rifat. In fact I expect that plans are well in hand to kill a Vlora even as we speak. I suggest that you enlist the services of a disinterested party immediately. That rather lovely Suleyman would do.’ Then leaning forward right into İkmen’s face she said, ‘You might like to think you’re all Turk, but if either the Berishas or the Vloras find out that you have “connections”, you could be in for some very big trouble indeed, my little cousin.’

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  Although the pressure of Zelfa’s warm, naked body across his chest was comforting, it did not, sadly, manage to expunge completely the image of that horrified girl’s face from Mehmet Suleyman’s mind. When Engelushjia Berisha had seen what someone had done to her brother Rifat she had first vomited and then screamed so long and hard that Dr Sarkissian had been obliged to medicate her. Poor child. It made Mehmet mad to think that one so young had been forced to do that by apparently perfectly capable parents.

  But when Zelfa started to stir from her post-coital stupor, he found his mind was, after all, ready to be fully occupied by her considerable figure.

  ‘I need a cigarette,’ Zelfa said and reared up suddenly from within a thick heap of hair and bedclothes.

  ‘Oh, don’t move yet!’ Mehmet said as he grabbed her round the shoulders and pulled her back down onto his chest. ‘I’ll get cold if you go.’

  As a sweetener, he moved her mouth down hard onto his. And all thoughts of cigarettes momentarily disappeared as Zelfa allowed herself to be tasted and explored.

  When at last he loosened his grasp on her, Mehmet, his eyes still full of lust for her, said, ‘You’re so soft and warm . . .’

  ‘I think you’ll find that’s the menopause,’ she replied, and with a laugh she rolled towards the edge of the bed and retrieved her cigarettes and lighter from the floor.

  ‘I don’t know why you bring that subject up so frequently,’ her now annoyed lover retorted. ‘It’s not romantic. Why do you do that, Zelfa?’

  After first lighting a cigarette for herself and then one for him, she answered, ‘Well, firstly, because I’m a medic and I relate to the world in medical terms.’

  ‘Yes? And?’

  ‘And, also,’ she said, moving in closer the better to see his face, ‘I want to bring it to your attention, Mehmet. This process has already started in my body; I’ve put on weight, I get hot flushes, I didn’t have a period last month . . . I’m a doctor, I know this stuff. You and I can screw like rabbits but the chances of our having children are slim, you know.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sat up a little straighter now, angry. His face, she thought, looked very sexy when it was haughtily jutting above a long cigarette. ‘But I’ve told you that I want you more than children.’

  ‘You need to be very, very sure, Mehmet.’

  ‘Yes, I know and I am,’ he said, his voice now rising in line with his increased anger, ‘although you constantly asking me to think about my commitment to you infuriates me. You seem to think I’m incapable of knowing my own mind.’

  ‘I know you’re not incapable, Mehmet . . .’

  ‘I am not one of your patients!’ Sitting up straight now, he turned the full force of his aristocratically handsome countenance on her. ‘I come from a long line of men who have known exactly what they want – they used to rule both this country and its empire! Decision-making is second nature to us and so if I have decided that I want to marry you, Zelfa, you can be pretty certain that that is what I want for myself!’ He turned aside in order, she thought, to flick ash from his cigarette into the ashtray, but when he turned back his hands were empty.

  ‘Mehmet . . .’

  With one quick movement, he hopped lightly across her body, pinning her to the bed with his tall, dark form.

  ‘Do you know how many times a day I think about making love to you?’ he said, his lips close to hers. ‘Or how often I imagine your laugh or replay your funny remarks in my head?’

  Noticing only that his eyes were fierce with passion, she said in conciliatory tones, ‘Mehmet . . .’

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I love your kindness and your intelligence and your beauty and I know you hate the little pieces of fat underneath your skin, but—’

  ‘But I must be certain you won’t leave me, Mehmet!’ she said with a desperation she had not meant to impart to him. ‘Because if we married and then you left me for—’

  ‘You don’t leave things that you worship, you stupid woman!’

  As if propelled by words that he, in his turn, had not wanted to confess to her, Mehmet threw himself off Zelfa’s body and landed heavily back on his side of the bed.

  Several minutes of silence passed as both of them stared fixedly at the heavily cracked ceiling of Zelfa’s bedroom, reminding them of the all too recent upheavals in the earth. The sombreness that this evoked brought them to rather more quiet places in their minds.

  It was Zelfa who finally broke the silence. ‘I do want to say yes, you know,’ she said softly. ‘I just need a few more days to explore all the implications.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the fact that if I marry you I’ll never live in Ireland again.’ She turned to face him with a smile. ‘I know that we can visit, but . . .’

  ‘I can’t help feeling that all this thinking you are doing means that you don’t love me,’ he said, his face now drawn and anxious.

  Zelfa placed both her hands round his jaw and kissed him. ‘Oh, but I do, Mehmet, but I have to consider all the options before I commit to anything.’

  Slowly, if sadly, he smiled at her words. ‘I know. I know.’

  ‘If you knew just how much I love you, it would scare you to death,’ she said and then, as if to underline her point, she began moving her hands down his chest, towards his lower abdomen.

  He smiled.

  It was exactly the same smile that the no-show patient with the surname Suleyman had given her earlier in the day. Mr Muhammed Suleyman’s anxiety had obviously got the better of him before his appointment – either that or the old man had decided to bottle out of meeting his son’s lover, if indeed Mehmet was his son. Oh, but with a smile like that he had to be, didn’t he? Although how the old man, who according to Mehmet had little contact with him, knew about her she didn’t know. But as she caressed her lover, Zelfa decided that perhaps now was not the time to mention such issues.

  Orhan Tepe had had a long, tiring day. As soon as he had finished securing what they now knew was not the site of Rifat Berisha’s murder but simply the place where his body had been dumped, he had followed Dr Sarkissian and the corpse over to the mortuary. Arriving just after the formal identification by the victim’s sister, he had seen İkmen only briefly before the latter, plus Suleyman, returned the distressed young woman to her home. İkmen and Suleyman, he thought sadly, looked just as comfortable together as they had when Suleyman used to work for the old man. The two of them had been a team, a real partnership in ways he knew was not the case with himself and İkmen. Not that he and İkmen had been working together for that long – just a year. But it was a year during which, Tepe felt, his superior had been mourning, for want of a better word, the elevation of his closest ally. Add to that the post-earthquake anxiety they all seemed to suffer from now and it was easy, if galling, to see why İkmen was not, for a ‘new boy’ like him, easy to reach. But this train of thought, he knew, didn’t ultimately help. İkmen would either come round to him or not, as Allah willed.

  Orhan took a sip from the glass of tea Aysel had given him before she’d gone off to try to get some sleep – before Cemal, no doubt, woke her for a feed in the early hours of the morning. Love that child as he did, Orhan couldn’t help wondering how his wife would cope should they have another highly active baby – if, of course, they could afford to have one at all. Unfortunately, living in a recently active earthquake zone didn’t mean that your rent went down or even stablised. Becoming not only a poorly paid policeman but also a policeman in the employ of the ruthlessly incorruptible İkmen had probably not been his smartest move. Not that he was known for his good decisions – the latest of which, a somewhat tawdry affair with a colleague, was causing him more than just mild anxiety. He turned his mind away from such insoluble issues.

  Although he didn’t usually attend autopsies, he had witnessed some of Rifat Berisha’s. Dr Sarkissian had spoken only to his assistants during the course of the process, but he had disclosed some of his findings when İkmen had returned from the Berishas’ home. As they already knew, Rifat Berisha had died from massive loss of blood following what the doctor said were multiple deep slashes to the throat. The weapon, which the doctor suggested could be either a hunting knife or some similar unserrated blade, had been wielded like a saw, until it almost decapitated the victim. He had suggested the assailant would have to be strong and possibly angry if not necessarily powerful. An interesting aside to this had been the small, but visible, shards of glass that were present both in the wound and in the victim’s face. Although the death blow had undoubtedly been delivered by a knife, the glass fragments had damaged Berisha’s facial skin and added to the mess that had once been his throat.

  Paucity of blood at the scene indicated that Rifat had been killed elsewhere. In addition, the battering he had suffered, either on Reşadiye Caddesi or just before, had occurred, so Dr Sarkissian felt, post-mortem. İkmen was going to appeal for witnesses who may have seen something suspicious in the early hours of the morning, although given the heaviness of the fog at that time, it seemed unlikely that many people would have been around.

  More interesting to Orhan than any of these details was the enormous scar, now also covered with bruises, the doctor had pointed out on the left-hand side of Rifat’s torso. It was consistent with the type of scar one would expect to have after kidney removal, and the autopsy had confirmed that young Rifat Berisha did indeed possess only one kidney; his body, as the doctor had put it, had almost been cut in half. To Orhan’s surprise, this was standard procedure; indeed Dr Sarkissian was full of praise for the work some unknown surgeon had performed upon Berisha. What was less clear, however, was why a seemingly healthy young man like Rifat had needed the organ removed in the first place. With no obvious sign of disease in the body, there was a possibility, the doctor had said, that Berisha had sold his healthy kidney. Orhan knew that the sale of healthy organs, usually to foreign buyers by poorer citizens of the Republic, was not unknown. Removal was usually performed abroad with the ‘vendor’ taking a short ‘holiday’ in London or Rome or somewhere else in western Europe. But such cases were difficult to prove. Police both in the Republic and abroad were faced with the fact that provided everybody in the transaction was happy, unscrupulous or simply unknowing, surgeons could carry on doing this without hindrance. And, the doctor had added, a poor Albanian like Rifat was a likely candidate for this sort of money-raising activity. For one whose mother had been, Orhan had learned just that day, an Albanian herself, İkmen’s comment on the doctor’s words had sounded rather callous. ‘What do you expect,’ he had said, ‘of a people addictively at odds with themselves?’

  Quite what this meant, Orhan didn’t know, but if Rifat Berisha had sold one of his kidneys, he and his family had to have been in desperate straits. And people in desperate straits were very vulnerable, not just to the needs of rich foreigners but also to the whims and desires of any number of less than honest types. It would be interesting to know what, if anything, Rifat had in his system when he died. The toxicology tests, when completed, would indicate whether the nagging spectre of Albanian drug-running had any substance.

  The tones of his mobile telephone broke into Tepe’s thoughts.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Orhan, it’s Inspector İkmen here,’ a familiar voice said. ‘I’m just ringing you to let you know that I’m mounting an observation on the Berisha house which I would like you to participate in. I’d like you in early.’

  Tepe frowned. To mount an observation on a victim’s home at this early stage in the investigation was most irregular. But he knew of old that to question İkmen was usually a mistake. One would generally, even in the face of the old man’s most bizarre ideas, end up feeling stupid oneself.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it in the morning,’ İkmen said and then added, a little stiffly Tepe felt, ‘An interesting autopsy, I thought.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Mmm.’ And then, or so Tepe thought, either running out of things to say or feeling awkward speaking to his inferior so late at night, İkmen concluded, ‘Very well then, Orhan, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  And with that İkmen put his phone down, leaving Tepe listening to the hum of a disconnected line. He had no way of knowing what the old man had in mind but there had to be some reason why he wanted the Berisha house watched. The toxicology reports couldn’t possibly be complete yet, but perhaps the doctor or forensic had found something that maybe implicated the Berishas themselves or possible associates of the family in Rifat’s death. After all, as Orhan knew even from his limited professional experience, the bosom of one’s family is not always the safest place to be.

  Although he thought about ringing Mehmet Suleyman as soon as he finished the call to Orhan Tepe, İkmen managed to resist the urge. The man was probably in bed by this time and besides, there was always the chance that a late call, even to Mehmet’s mobile, might wake up poor old Cohen. Completely immobile since the amputation of both legs just below the knee, ex-constable Balthazar Cohen, despite a battery of pain-killing and tranquillising drugs, slept very little these days. Troubled by tortuous visions of both past and possible future earthquakes, not to mention the spectre of his lost virility, Cohen spent his days and much of his nights in a state of unsettled angst. Even so, thought İkmen, it would be too bad to telephone just as Cohen had finally dropped off.

  Anyway, quite what he would say to Mehmet, should he speak to him, was unformed in his mind. Samsun’s revelation that the Berishas were involved in a blood feud with the Vlora family troubled him. Did this have any bearing on Rifat’s death? If it did, and if it became known that he himself was related to another Gheg fis, that could, as Samsun had said, cause problems. He would have to be careful to keep his Albanian origins a secret. İstanbul, he knew, could be a very small place at times.

  Hopefully, observation of the Berisha household would help to establish whether or not they were moving against the Vlora family. Engelushjia Berisha had not asked for her brother’s bloodied shirt. Perhaps this was a good sign – not that she would have been given it had she asked for it. If the Berishas didn’t move against their ‘enemies’, then all well and good, but if they did, he should perhaps do as Samsun had suggested and give the case to a disinterested party like Suleyman. It was crazy stuff. Although he had grown up knowing that the practice of gjakmaria existed amongst his mother’s people, İkmen had never considered that it might impact upon him personally. He knew that he had to beware of ascribing everything about this case to it, but the idea of blood revenge would not leave his mind. It was, he felt, another of those times when his late mother intruded on his mind.

  Ayşe İkmen had died when Çetin, her youngest son, was ten years old. Despite numerous attempts to recall it, İkmen could not remember anything much about her last illness. All he could now recall was how he and his thirteen-year-old brother Halil had come home from school and found their mother dead in her bed. Not that Çetin had actually seen her. Halil’s much taller form had deliberately blocked his view – the older boy protecting the younger by screaming and bullying him out of the room. Halil hadn’t realised that Çetin had wanted to say goodbye. İkmen sometimes wished that he could tackle Halil about that time. He clearly remembered how, later that afternoon, Halil had allowed the policemen to look at her. Over forty years on from those events, there were still times when, feeling Ayşe close as he did now, İkmen fancied that some long-ago intoned spell might bring her back to life. Perhaps a visit to the Karaca Ahmet Cemetery was in order. Perhaps he needed to be with his parents again.

  He lit a cigarette and looked out of his window as the gathering night-time fog started to swirl around and then obscure great hulking sections of the Sultan Ahmet Mosque.