‘The man I think my wife may have been seeing was, I believe, as I’ve said before, someone from our past,’ Ahmet Aksu said as he watched Süleyman sit down and then light a cigarette. ‘I don’t know who, although I understand that Inspector İkmen has been looking into my wife’s old contacts.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Not easy for me. A past I… well…’ Ahmet Aksu sighed. ‘But there’s something else. Something that may or may not be of any significance.’

  Süleyman nodded. ‘Anything you can tell us, Mr Aksu, is most welcome. Sometimes things that one may perceive to be entirely unconnected may indeed have an important, if not a vital, part to play in the solution to a crime or a disappearance like this.’

  Although slightly pale, most probably due to lack of sleep and possibly too many cigarettes, Ahmet Aksu was an attractive and very well-groomed man. As stylish as his state-of-the-art home, he also moved with a fluid grace that impressed the much younger and considerably less graceful Süleyman. Ahmet Aksu moved towards the set of thick floor cushions opposite Süleyman and sat down.

  ‘In the weeks leading up to her disappearance, Emine laughed a lot more than usual,’ he said as he, too, lit up a cigarette.

  ‘She laughed.’ If, Süleyman thought, he’d come all the way over to Haskoy just to talk about a middle-aged women being a bit happier than usual, he wasn’t going to be too pleased.

  ‘As if she were responding to some sort of private joke.’

  ‘And was she? Did you ask her?’

  ‘No. I found it a little odd and disconcerting, maybe, too, but it didn’t bother me. No, of her own volition, Emine supplied a partial explanation for her mood.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘She said she’d been “hanging around”, to use her own words, with someone she knew and I would never guess whom.’ Süleyman frowned.

  ‘She didn’t say whether it was a man or a woman or whether or not she was sleeping with this person. So I don’t know if the person I am talking about now is relevant to her disappearance. What I can say with some certainty, however, is that the person who made her laugh was someone we had known and laughed at before.’

  ‘When you were young hippies?’ Süleyman asked.

  Ahmet Aksu shrugged. ‘Maybe. We knew lots of odd and sometimes really quite pitiful people back in those days, Inspector. So many kids - not just rich ones like Emine and me - wanted to get in on the hippy scene; children of religious people, mummy’s boys, the mentally ill, the sexually desperate maybe even deranged… Emine promised to tell me whom she’d come across soon. She said I’d laugh my head off when I found out who it was.’

  ‘But you didn’t take too much notice?’

  ‘No. I will always freely and openly admit to being a hippy when I was younger. But it’s over. I am a businessman now. That’s all.’ Ahmet Aksu lifted his arms up helplessly and then let them drop to his sides. ‘I knew that she was seeing someone romantically and this just seemed like a rather irrelevant little sideline. But now that I think about it, now that I think about every word we spoke to each other over those last few weeks, I have to consider that the person at whom she was laughing may also have been the man that she was bedding, too.’

  ‘Yes, but sir, if your wife had contempt for this person, would she have found such a thing exciting with someone who was so risible? You said yourself that this last affair was one that she was finding very exciting.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have said so, no,‘Ahmet Aksu replied. ‘But who knows? Maybe this old acquaintance had changed. People do. Maybe that was the surprise, that someone like Murad the Mummy’s Boy or that terrible little dope-head, Erdogan something or other, had transformed into a rich, attractive, desirable citizen.’

  ‘Like you?’

  Ahmet Aksu smiled. ‘You mean, Inspector, that my wife was looking for adventure and all she found at the end of it was her husband or a facsimile thereof?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Süleyman also smiled. ‘Mr Aksu, as you know, Inspector İkmen, has interviewed several of your male friends who shared your unconventional past. None of them have seen Mrs Aksu for quite some time - or rather, that is what they would have us believe, and in truth we have no reason so far to doubt their stories. Inspector İkmen is at this moment with some of your more distant acquaintances, a man called Kadir—’

  ‘That junkie!’ Ahmet Aksu shook his head in disbelief. ‘Now there is a breathing joke if ever there was one!’

  ‘So maybe—’

  ‘Emine and Kadir? Impossible! Inspector, Kadir shoots up heroin, has done for years. And if there is one thing that Emine and myself agree upon it is that we never, ever sleep with junkies. The risk of disease is just too high!’

  ‘Yes.’ AIDS being the most awful possible result of such a mating as Süleyman knew only too well. Although entirely clear of the disease himself he had, some years before, had sex with a prostitute who had been an HTV positive heroin user. He had done what he did in a moment of great weakness for which he had nearly paid with his life.

  Never again. He could fully understand how Aksu and his wife felt on this issue.

  ‘So if not this Kadir, is there anyone else in your old circle of friends whom you can name that was odd or awkward in some way?’

  Ahmet Aksu thought for a few moments before replying. ‘I can’t remember them all. I know there was an Armenian boy - he had a horse - but I can’t recall his name to save my life. However, what I can recall… mmm …’ He sighed. ‘I’m not saying that any of these really quite pathetic specimens as I knew them, have harmed Emine in any way …’

  ‘But they might know whom she is with or whom she was seeing when she left?’

  ‘Exactly.’ He first put his fingers up to his lips and then said, ‘Well, there was a boy called Bekir who had terrible acne. We used to call him “Mountain Face” on account of his appalling spots. I think he came from Bebek. His father was a doctor, which just added to his problems because the rest of us found the idea that he could have a face like that with a doctor for a father very funny. Talk about a bad advertisement. Mountain Face fancied Emine, badly, but then who did not? There was a boy from Aksaray, I can’t remember what he was called, but he walked with a limp and took far too much acid. I think he ended up in an institution…’ He paused. ‘Inspector, there were so many creatures like this. Tea boys who wanted to get high, randy taxi drivers …’

  ‘The son of the doctor should be easy enough to find,’ Süleyman said. ‘I know there are quite a few medics in Bebek, but they all know each other…’

  ‘An older man whose name was something like Abdullah …’

  ‘But not Abdullah?’

  ‘Abdulrahman. That was it! Abdulrahman! He must have been about thirty in the late sixties. But he could speak English and he hung around the Pudding Shop just like everyone else. He must be getting on now. He liked Emine. They used to talk philosophy together. I assume he wanted her body as well as her mind and maybe he even got it. But we used to laugh at him, too. He seemed old to us.’ He paused for a second before continuing, his face marred just slightly by a frown. ‘There was also a Jew,’ he said. ‘Clever.’

  ‘Was he, this Jewish man, old?’ Süleyman asked.

  Still frowning, Ahmet Aksu said, ‘No. Although he seemed it. He was actually young like the rest of us. But his conversation was so learned and his clothes so very conventional that he gave the impression of being older than he was. Now what was his name?’

  ‘Do you know where this Jewish man came from?’

  He answered immediately. ‘Balat,’ he said. ‘There were still a lot of Jews there in those days. Now what was his name … Spanish …’

  ‘You and your friends laughed at this Abdulrahman and the Jewish boy?’

  ‘For different reasons, yes. Abdulrahman was a little too desperate to hang on to what remained of his youth and the Jewish boy was -well, he was quaint. I liked him. He was clever, serious and, well, quaint.’ And then suddenly Ahmet Aksu’s eyes shone with recognition. ‘I have it!’ he said. ‘The Jew’s name. It was Edmondo! Edmondo Loya.’

  ‘There were so many takers. Even in the old days,’ the middle-aged man with the half-closed eyes said to İkmen. ‘People who didn’t know Ginsberg from a hole in the road.’

  ‘And do you, Mr Özal?’ İkmen asked. ‘Do you know your Ginsberg from a hole in the road?’

  Kadir Özal turned a lizard-like eye upon his interrogator and answered with a very slow and bad tempered, ‘Yes.’

  Roughly İkmen’s own age, Kadir Özal saw himself as the apogee of hippy life in Istanbul. Clearly stoned on something (hashish, from the smell of his place, but heroin from the look of him, İkmen felt), he was listening to Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ on the antiquated stereo that fitted very well into his Afghan rug-covered flat in Sultanahmet. In fact, Kadir only lived around the corner from İkmen’s own apartment on Ticarethane Alley. That ‘hippy central’ had been not only down the stairs from his own apartment but also just across the road from police headquarters had always been something that had amused the inspector greatly.

  ‘So, Emine Aksu,’ İkmen said as he continued the conversation they had been having earlier, ‘what was your relationship with her?’

  Kadir shrugged. ‘She was cool, back in the day. Very flirty, liked to stir things up, make a bit of trouble from time to time. We had a thing together for a while.’

  ‘You had a relationship with Mrs Aksu - or Miss Oz, as she was then?’

  Kadir Özal smirked, rather unpleasantly, İkmen felt. ‘We had sex,’ he said. ‘I see.’

  ‘Then she went off with Ahmet Aksu and they got married.’ It was said with ill-disguised disgust. ‘Not cool. I know that Emine and Ahmet still sleep around, but even so … hardly the action of people “mad to live” as Kerouac put it.’

  ‘Maybe they just grew up,’ İkmen couldn’t resist saying.

  Kadir Özal viewed him acidly over the top of his round, pale blue spectacles and said, ‘That was a cheap shot, Inspector.’

  ‘Yes, I know I—’

  ‘Listen, man, I choose to live like this,’ Kadir said in the heavily American-accented English he liked to use. ‘When the hippies came here to Turkey it was, for me, like someone turned the light on. Know what I mean?’

  In a way İkmen did. Although not nearly as outre as Kadir he was fully aware of the contribution those early Western visitors had made to his city.

  ‘Emine Aksu is missing,’ İkmen said. ‘We have reason to believe that she may have gone off with someone from her past.’ ‘Not me,’ Kadir replied with a very final tilt of his head. ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled. ‘Without wanting to cause offence, Emine and women of her age, they don’t do it for me. I mean, why have a hen when you can have a chick?’

  Like a lot of the old hippy men whom İkmen had met over the years, Kadir preferred young girls. It was understandable, from the hippy’s point of view. What İkmen could never, however, really appreciate was what the girls saw in such men. Old and drug-raddled, they were not often wealthy (although Kadir Özal was, or so it was said) and they were probably more patronising to the girls than even the oily carpet dealers in the Grand Bazaar. Maybe it was the romance of the ‘old days’ that attracted them? All this vinyl instead of CDs, talk of Ginsberg and Kerouac, not to mention the perception-altering properties of the drugs on offer was very much at odds with a world that İkmen recognised and acknowledged as superficial. For the more spiritual young person the modern world was extremely daunting and some wanted to hark back to what had been a much simpler time. Some of them, of course, just wanted to get high, but then that wasn’t a topic that İkmen wanted to explore even in his own head just at that moment. He had his own issues with youngsters, young men, getting high.

  ‘Have you seen Mrs Aksu around and about in Sultanahmet of late?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘I saw her walk past the Pudding Shop with a boy about six months ago.’

  . ‘Did you speak to her at all?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘I asked her who her “friend” was and she said he was a twenty-four-year-old Italian.’

  ‘She was sleeping with this boy?’

  ‘What else would she be doing with him?’ Kadir said. ‘Just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean that Emine cannot like young flesh just like me.’

  ‘Her husband thinks that the man she was going to meet when she disappeared was an older man, someone from their past.’ ‘Who she was sleeping with?’ ‘Yes.’

  He shrugged. ‘It is possible, I guess, but I don’t know of such a person.’

  ‘Do you see that many people from the “old days”?’ İkmen asked.

  Kadir Özal looked down at the floor with a grave expression on his face. ‘No. There are not that many of us left, to be honest. Life in Sultanahmet, even sanitised as it is now, can be … tough…’

  ‘A lot of drug casualties,’ İkmen said as a statement of fact.

  The hippy looked up at him with undisguised fury in his eyes. ‘People have to die from something,’ he said. ‘Why not the trip of a lifetime? I can think of worse ways to die!’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yeah!’ He pushed a great hank of grey-black hair over his shoulder and then said, ‘Don’t judge what goes on here, Inspector. Don’t lay any of your moral and religious—’

  ‘I am not and never have been religious, Mr Özal,’ İkmen replied. ‘In fact, with the exception of your reliance upon body- and mind-destroying drugs, I am very much impressed by many of the things that hippies regard as important. I love the idea of physical travel as well as the exploration of the mind…’

  ‘But not through drugs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, Mr Özal,’ İkmen said, ‘as you yourself intimated, many of those on drugs are now dead. And -‘ Luckily he stopped himself from saying what was far too personal to be professional, just in time. ‘-it is illegal.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But anyway, Mr Özal, there are few older people, like yourself, in or around the hippy scene in Sultanahmet these days?’

  Kadir Özal slipped into what turned out to be very cultured Turkish and said with some bitterness, ‘As you have observed, Inspector, most of us are dead now. Emine Aksu, to my knowledge, amused herself with boys. That’s all.’

  And in part it was true. Emine Aksu did like young men. But given even the slightest opportunity with an older man, she was accustomed to taking that too. Ali Tevfik and his encounter with Emine at the Pera Palas Hotel was a case in point. Basically, the woman went with almost anyone and had to be as a result, or so İkmen felt, really quite jaded sexually. That said, Ahmet Aksu had been very adamant on the fact that his wife was excited by this latest lover; someone from her past…

  At the beginning of their interview, İkmen had asked Kadir Özal where he had been on the day that Emine had disappeared. He’d said he’d been with a ‘friend’, some child half his age, in the lovely Bosphorus village of Yenikoy. So İkmen now asked for her name and address and also requested that Kadir tell him what they had been doing in such a pretty and select place.

  The hippy lowered his head for a second time as he said, ‘I took her to visit my mother. She’s got, er, we have a… it’s a kind of a palace and …’

  So it was true what was said about Kadir Özal and his wealthy background.

  When he finally left the small dope-and-joss-stick-scented flat in Sultanahmet, İkmen couldn’t resist observing that perhaps not all of Kadir’s life could be described as ‘rock and roll’. The hippy viewed him with some malice as the policeman disappeared out into the hall in front of his apartment. He then took his mobile phone out of the pocket of his kaftan and made a call.

  The body that Arto Sarkissian had dubbed the ‘Kamondo Stairs Lady’ lay curled up on the pathologist’s dissection table like one of those ancient ‘bog’ people from Scandinavia. Brown with age and stripped of whatever bits of clothing it had once possessed by the forensic scientists, the Lady was now the preserve of the Armenian, his assistant and a rather reluctant-looking Sergeant İzzet Melik.

  ‘The forensic institute found a little soil on the corpse,’ Arto said as he made a preliminary sweep of the body with his eyes. ‘It would seem that it came from the flower container she was found in on the Stairs.’

  ‘Not from a grave?’ İzzet asked.

  ‘No.’ The Armenian sighed. ‘And there is also the issue of her head to contend with, too.’ ‘Her head?’

  ‘At some point it has either been removed or, more likely, knocked from its bed at the top of her spine.’ ‘But…’

  ‘It is where it is now, Sergeant, due to the application of superglue,’

  Arto said. ‘Applied quite deliberately and, I must say, liberally to the base of the skull. Possibly the person who knocked her head off did not want that to happen again.’ He smiled. He often smiled at what seemed to the rest of the world inappropriate moments, like now. ‘Maybe it would have disordered his “display”, as Inspector Süleyman put it, of her.’

  ‘You think that this person, whoever put her there, is very disturbed?’

  ‘How should I know?’ the Armenian responded lightly. ‘I deal with physical reality not psychological mumbo jumbo, Sergeant. Solving crimes is your job, not mine, thank God.’ He sighed. ‘I just cut up what other people have killed and tell you about the beastliness I have observed.’

  For a moment he looked quite sad. Completely unlike his usual light and often irreverent self. But then, as Süleyman had once told him, İzzet Melik knew that Dr Sarkissian had been a police pathologist for a very long time. Like İkmen, in his late fifties, the Armenian had to have seen more than his fair share of ‘beastliness’ over the years. Maybe it was finally beginning to get to him. But then again maybe he had other problems the policeman knew nothing about. Also it was almost five o’clock now and the doctor as well as Melik and everyone else associated with this desiccated body had been awake and busy for a very long time.