‘No.’
Like all the rest of the Berishas’ responses so far, Aliya’s was heavily accented and monosyllabic. Only the blood drawn by their fingernails raking down their cheeks gave any hint of the anguish İkmen knew the mother and her daughter were experiencing. Real, if strangely silent, peasant mourning, not unlike the dramas he’d seen when Fatma’s father had died. A quick glance at a wide-eyed Suleyman told him that the younger man had not experienced as much of this sort of thing as he had.
İkmen looked at the dead man’s father, a motionless study in elderly disaffection. Not that Rahman Berisha was necessarily old. A windswept, disappointed face like that could be anything from fifty to seventy years old. ‘Anything you wish to add to what your wife has said, Mr Berisha?’
‘No.’
Even if the family’s answers had not been as suspiciously rapid and sure as they were, the look that fleetingly passed between Rahman and his daughter would have alerted İkmen to the possibility of something being amiss. It was a look, on the girl’s part at least, of almost hysterical fear. Not that İkmen, at this stage in the proceedings, gave voice to his suspicions.
‘So, what you’re saying then, Mr Berisha,’ he said, ‘is that you know everything there is to know about your twenty-five-year-old son.’
‘There are no secrets between blood,’ the Albanian replied. His use of the word ‘blood’ where İkmen would have used ‘family’ was something the policeman was accustomed to hearing from some of his own relatives. It was yet another cue for mental sirens to sound in his head. If Rifat’s murder was what it looked and sounded like, it was going to be very easy to solve. But then that was, İkmen knew from experience, all the more reason to act with extreme caution. Things were rarely, if ever, what they seemed.
After yet another pause that seemed to last several lifetimes, İkmen, now convinced that the traumatised Berishas had little more to offer on the subject of Rifat at this time, finally came to what victims’ families dreaded most. Looking at Rahman, the only contender for the task, İkmen said, ‘Of course the body will have to be formally identified.’
‘Why?’
For just a moment, both officers thought that they might have misheard, and frowned doubtfully at each other. Only when an uncomfortable length of time had once again passed did Suleyman break the silence and answer the question.
‘We must know that the victim is definitely Rifat,’ he said. ‘Even though his description and papers are consistent with those of your son, we have to be certain. People do sometimes plant false papers on dead bodies in order to confound us.’
‘So, will you bring him here then? Rifat?’ Aliya Berisha asked as she rubbed one bloodied hand across the swollen hump of her belly.
İkmen said, ‘No, madam, you will have to come to the hospital.’
‘No.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Go to the hospital, no,’ the woman said. ‘No.’
‘Well,’ İkmen said smoothly, thinking that he knew why Aliya Berisha was refusing – as a religious woman she might well object to being in the presence of a body of the opposite sex, even her own son’s – ‘I was actually thinking that your husband—’
‘No.’
‘But, madam,’ Suleyman said and leaned towards the couple, the better to impress upon them the seriousness of the issue at hand, ‘as I thought I explained to you—’
‘Engelushjia will go,’ the woman said, looking fiercely at the face of her daughter – a girl of sixteen at most.
‘But—’
‘No, I’ll go.’ Her words were firm even though both İkmen and Suleyman saw that her eyes moved uneasily as she spoke.
‘Well, if you insist, Miss Berisha.’
‘She does,’ her father answered for her.
‘Right. Good.’ İkmen looked at the Berishas; smiling at them, he had quickly discovered, had little effect. The whole family, together with the wife of their landlord, also some sort of relative, had sunk back into stone-like silence once again. Only the girl, marble-white Engelushjia, seemed alert, if terrified. In some ways, thought İkmen, it was probably best if she identified her brother’s body. He just hoped that she wouldn’t find the process too distressing, though he knew that she almost certainly would. Dead bodies were not pretty at the best of times but Rifat Berisha’s, with its head almost hanging off, was particularly unpleasant. Briefly İkmen experienced a wave of anger towards this family who were, seemingly without thought, sending such a young girl to look into the face of horror.
‘Well,’ İkmen said as he braced his hands on his knees and then stood up, ‘if we are going to go through these processes and make a start on your son’s case . . .’
‘When will we be able to bury my son?’ Rahman asked, not moving his gaze from the floor in front of him.
Knowing how important it was for Muslims to be able to bury their dead quickly, İkmen frowned as he started to tell the traumatised family why it would not be possible in this case. Murder, as both İkmen and Suleyman knew only too well, changed the rules governing people’s lives in so many ways.
‘I am afraid you will have to wait, Mr Berisha,’ he said gravely, ‘until our doctor has firstly determined cause of death and secondly gathered from your son’s body as much evidence as he can. Victims’ bodies can often provide us with enough clues to narrow the scope of an investigation down considerably. As you—’
‘If my son is dead, what is it to you?’
İkmen and Suleyman turned to look at the source of this extraordinary comment – the now slightly more animated Aliya Berisha.
‘We think that your son has been murdered, Mrs Berisha,’ Suleyman began.
‘And so?’
One of those deep, thick silences rolled into the room yet again – time during which İkmen briefly closed his eyes to gain some sort of respite from what he was increasingly viewing as an extreme case of the irrationality of grief.
‘Murder is a crime,’ he said slowly as if he were speaking to a group of children, ‘and as policemen it is our job to investigate it and, if possible, arrest the person responsible.’
‘Back home men resort only to the police if they are without family,’ Rahman Berisha said with some passion. ‘We make our own arrangements.’
From the little he had learned from his Albanian relatives, İkmen knew that even with the fall of Albania’s corrupt communist regime in 1992, the country was still pretty much without coherent law enforcement. One of the few things he could recall his late father telling him about his mother was her amusement at even the idea of an Albanian legal system. Such a thing was, she had apparently said, a contradiction in terms.
‘Well, sir,’ İkmen said, ‘that may be so in Albania, but this is Turkey. And in Turkey if a man dies in mysterious circumstances, policemen like Inspector Suleyman and myself are obliged to investigate.’
‘If it is your will,’ Rahman Berisha said with a shrug.
‘Oh, it is,’ İkmen replied as he moved towards Engelushjia Berisha. ‘It is my will, Mr Berisha, of that you can be certain.’ He put his hand out to the girl. With a quick glance at her father, she took it and left the apartment with the officers.
Not another sound was made until Engelushjia and the policemen had gone. Then, her mouth stretched wide with pain, Aliya Berisha let out the kind of scream that freezes blood.
The two orderlies had to use some vigour to get the stretcher up onto the table. This was not unusual. The orderlies knew that death tended to increase both the weight and the unwieldiness of bodies. Even small children could, on occasion, prove problematic – an unpleasant experience that all but one of those present in the room had been through several times.
The older of the two orderlies unzipped the bag and the younger one pulled the two sides apart to reveal what remained of the young man inside. Then Arto Sarkissian moved a metal gurney into position beside the table. Looking at the two orderlies, he said, ‘Lift on three?’
‘OK, doctor.’
‘One . . .’
The two men slipped their hands underneath the body and braced themselves.
‘Two . . . Three.’
With one smooth, breathless movement, the body almost seemed to float out of the bag and onto the gurney, the tatters of its once white shirt flapping briefly before the corpse came to rest on the metal trolley.
‘Good,’ Arto said. He moved into position beside the corpse.
‘Do you want us to get ready, sir?’ asked the older assistant, Ali Mertez.
‘You can,’ the doctor replied as he adjusted his spectacles to look closely at the corpse, ‘although best keep out of the way until I call you. We can’t start straight away. Inspector İkmen is bringing this boy’s young sister in to do the formal identification. They should be here any time now.’
‘Shouldn’t we clean him up a bit for her then?’ the younger man – who was Ali’s nephew, İsmet – said.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ his uncle began. ‘You—’
‘Sadly, Miss Berisha will have to see her brother in this state,’ the doctor said, looking rather more kindly upon İsmet Mertez than his uncle was. ‘This looks like a murder and so we must treat the corpse as a source of forensic evidence. All we can do is place a clean sheet across it. As long as Miss Berisha can see her brother’s face . . .’
‘I’ll get you one, doctor,’ Ali said and quickly left the room.
Now alone with the Armenian and his charge, Ali’s nephew felt both awkward and stupid at his naïveté and said, ‘I’m sorry, doctor, for being a bit slow about this being a murder and . . . well . . . I am new. I mean, I find the work interesting . . .’
‘That’s good,’ his superior murmured as, with the aid of a pair of large tweezers, he lifted strands of shredded shirt out to one side.
‘Do you—’
‘If you would just be quiet for the moment please, İsmet,’ the Armenian said, peering at what İsmet now knew they called the torso. ‘Mmm.’
Several minutes passed, during which the doctor moved in close and then away from the torso, muttering as he went. Not that he touched the body at all. Apart from exposing the skin underneath the shirt he left it alone, presumably, so İsmet imagined, until the autopsy began later.
By the time Ali returned with a sheet, Arto Sarkissian had moved away from the trolley and was leaning against one of the large medical sinks. But his eyes were still fixed to the body, as were İsmet’s – not that the latter knew why. As Ali Mertez covered the corpse with the sheet, Sarkissian said, ‘I’ve a feeling this is going to be an interesting autopsy from a medical point of view.’
‘Oh? Why’s that then, doctor?’ Ali asked.
‘Because this man has had major surgery,’ the doctor replied, ‘of a kind one doesn’t see too often.’
As Samsun Bajraktar pulled the blinds down across what she now dared to call
her
windows in
her
apartment, she thought again about just how happy she was. In nearly fifty-six years of breathing, nothing had even begun to get this close to her own personal paradise. And that it was all due to the kindness and the beauty of that great big man who was even now working for their future down in the leather shop below was just one more example of how totally and wonderfully her life had turned around.
Abdurrahman, seller of leather in every imaginable colour, ex-grease wrestler, ten years younger than she was – just his name made her heart flutter, not to mention his thick, dark muscles, his body like a glistening marble statue, his . . . No, she thought with what was really quite uncharacteristic modesty, best not think about what else she loved and desired about Abdurrahman. Later. She smiled. When the shop closed she would do what Abdurrahman most liked her to do. And in the darkness when her dress and her jewels hit the floor at the end of their bed, she and Abdurrahman would both receive and give pleasure, one to the other, as equals – as it should be, as Samsun had always dreamed.
When she had pulled the blinds, shutting out the frantic activity that always accompanied the shutting of the Kapalı Çarşı opposite, Samsun walked into the bedroom and lit the candelabra that stood on her dressing table. She then muttered, eyes closed, in a language few in this city could understand, communing with beings even fewer could imagine. Beings which, only if properly appeased, would ensure the continuance of her relationship with her lover. And although she could have been interrupted at any time during her spell weaving, as if by magic the knock at her door did not come until she had finished. When she opened the door, Samsun saw the figure of a small, rumpled individual who smiled when his eye found hers.
‘Cousin!’ Samsun exclaimed and reached down to embrace Çetin İkmen within the circle of her powerful arms. ‘This is a nice surprise. Come in! Come in!’
With a smile the policeman stepped over the threshold into the apartment, removing his shoes as he went.
‘You’re looking very well,’ he said, looking up at his relative with approval. ‘Uncle Ahmet said that you had, er, found somebody, um . . .’
Samsun giggled and visibly reddened, just like a girl. ‘Abdurrahman,’ she said, raising her voice as she spoke her lover’s name. ‘He’s working in his shop downstairs.’
İkmen, who had noticed a well-built man in the leather shop below, nodded. ‘Yes, I think I saw him as I came up.’
‘He’s very big, Abdurrahman,’ Samsun said as she led İkmen through into a room which, had it boasted a bed, would have qualified for the term tart’s boudoir. Red and black frills dominated. İkmen sat down and swallowed hard before lighting up one of his ubiquitous Maltepe cigarettes. He didn’t find being around Samsun easy, much as he liked her. For various reasons his mother’s Albanian relatives had always been difficult and although Samsun, like Ayşe İkmen before her, was a renowned soothsayer and familiar to İkmen, she was something extra too. Until she had fallen in with a notorious group of like minds in her early twenties, Samsun had been known as Mustafa Bajraktar. Now, quite a lot of expensive Italian surgery later, Mustafa was Samsun who lived with Abdurrahman, a character İkmen felt had the look of a Spanish fighting bull about him.