evening, Ikmen started to experience a cold feeling in his guts. Whether all of this Yezidi stuff had any direct bearing upon Ruya Urfa's death, he didn't know. But little things, like Erol's fear that his daughter might be exposed to chicken, like the rather timely departure of one of his friends in the wake of an identity card request, like Coktin's reported concern for Urfa, did seem to be at least pointing towards some sort of concealment. But was it, especially in light of the fact that Cengiz Temiz was still very much on the scene, pertinent? To open up such a contentious issue without pertinence was surely an act of madness. And anyway, hadn't Suleyman been totally satisfied with what was written on Urfa's ID card?
Perhaps prompted to movement by Ikmen's frozen position, Zelfa Halman stood up.
'There is one thing you can be sure about though, Ikmen,' she said as she retrieved her bag from the back of the chair.
Surfacing from his reverie, he said, 'What?'
'If Erol Urfa is a Yezidi, then so was Ruya. They don't marry out'
'So Tansu…'
'The only way he could marry her, although for the love of God I can't imagine why he would want to, is if she is one of them too. Assuming, of course’ she added as she moved towards the door, 'that he gives a damn about it'
Ikmen stood up to see his guest out. 'You won't tell Suleyman that, er…'
'And why should I do that?' she answered challengingly.
'Well…'
'I think you assume that I will be seeing the inspector, Inspector,' she laughed, 'which might not necessarily be so.'
Ikmen sighed. 'You know you shouldn't be too hard on him, Zelfa. Although he seems to have so much, in many ways he's very adrift in this world.'
'Aren't we all,' she replied with some bitterness.
'Yes, but…' Not knowing how much she knew about his colleague's past finally put paid to any further discussion of this topic apart from Ikmen adding, 'He must succeed with this case, you know.'
She smiled. 'Why? Because you like him? Or because you say so?'
'Because he deserves to,' he said a little sternly. 'And because whoever killed Ruya Urfa should be locked away before they can do any more harm.'
'Insallah that will happen’ she said with more than a littie irony in her voice.
Ikmen simply lifted his eyes to heaven.
'So what are you going to do now then?' she asked as he opened the door to the living room.
The onslaught of light, colour, noise and odour was stunning as children, adolescents and adults all vied for attention, television time or food and drink.
'I think,' Ikmen said, eyeing the scene before him with weary familiarity, 'that I might find a quiet place in which to listen to some Arabesk.'
For many and various reasons, sleep was not easily found by any of the actors in the Urfa saga that night. Admittedly, Cohen did, as was his custom, manage unconsciousness although the restless sounds that the wakeful Mehmet Suleyman heard from that quarter indicated that he was nowhere near peaceful. Perhaps, the younger man mused as he wandered out onto the Cohens' darkened balcony, his old friend was wondering why a once beautiful Greek had saddled herself with and then murdered a relic of the old harem system, her eunuch husband. As to why Kleopatra might have married such a person Suleyman, a relic, himself he sometimes felt, could only guess at. Eunuchs, it was said, could please women in ways other men could not. But what forces may have driven her to kill, probably no one would be able to discover. No doubt the thought that passion or jealousy may have inspired this act puzzled Cohen in a most disturbing fashion.
But Suleyman's own thoughts were upon more contemporary events. Tansu Hamm had been in a very distressed state when he had arrived at her home earlier. Why this was, he didn't know. That she had shown him all her coats, including two blonde minks, willingly had been encouraging. She had even allowed him to remove fibres which seemed to indicate a lack of fear vis-a-vis complicity in Ruya Urfa's murder. And to be fair, she didn't really, despite her obvious unpleasantness, exhibit any overt similarity to the woman Cengiz Temiz had described. Not that Cengiz described her very well, but he had failed to identify Tansu from a photograph and so that had, surely, to be significant
Suleyman wiped a thick swathe of sweat from his brow and looked down into the darkened street. There was not much to see out there. The occasional prostitute walking with difficulty across the deeply rutted road – a woman, or perhaps in this part of town a man in inappropriately high-heeled shoes, swinging a large, spangly handbag. Then, even rarer, the appearance of a strangely lonely, almost lost-looking man. Perhaps a simple migrant or a confused tourist – perhaps even a man pounding out his resentment in the hot midnight street. A man, Suleyman thought perhaps not unlike Isak Coktin, that strange, even to Isak himself, contradiction in terms – the Kurdish policeman. In bed probably by now, Coktin, Suleyman thought, was perhaps dreaming dreams that were livid- with the redness of the blood they always mourned, which spilled, so the Kurds said, so liberally upon the ground of the far eastern provinces. Whether or not Coktin had actually ever been to the east, Suleyman didn't know. If he hadn't then perhaps the fact that Erol Urfa came from there had been the root of the attraction they obviously had for each other. Perhaps the singer had told Coktin yet more lurid and detailed stories of the hardship and suffering they all seemed to value so highly. Not of course that an Ottoman could even begin to understand such a thing. Suleyman closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair as he contemplated the depth of his own, idiosyncratic, resentments.
But thoughts being, as they often are, quite different to facts, Suleyman was wrong about Coktin. Far from being home alone in his bed, he was in fact over at the surprisingly modest apartment Ibrahim Aksoy had procured for Erol Urfa in §i§li. With the baby Merih now asleep, both men sat companionably in front of the open patio doors, talking, drinking tea and, occasionally, laughing softly at each other's quietly spoken words. Not once did the name Tansu pass either of their hps. That every light in the house of that lady burned fiercely that night was unknown to either of them.
Less comforting than any of these, admittedly restless, scenes was the one-that was currently assailing the tranquillised eyes of Cengiz Temiz. Although still incarcerated in a police cell, it was not the unpleasantness of his surroundings, or even particularly the heat, that was causing his drug-fuddled brain to remain awake. In his mind, devils and djinn lurked in corners where, in the daylight hours, housewives went about their domestic cleaning business. Red in the mouth and covered with thick white hair, the demons screamed at him with the faces of murderous women. And although they made him quiet, the drugs the woman who now wept alone in her sterile bed had given him did not expunge the hated, fearful images from his mind. Perhaps his precious love, Mina, could have done that had she been with him. But Cengiz had no idea where she might be now. Poor Mina with her frightening English boyfriend and her ruined womb.
In contrast to all mis soporific restlessness, there were some whose thoughts were rather more focused. Tansu's ex-servant was one of these. As she sat alone waiting for the arrival of the laboriously slow Dogu Ekspresi to take her, via Ankara, back to her parents' home in Sivas, her thoughts were not of her relatives. To be dismissed by one's employer for what amounted to no good reason was bad enough, but to be shunned by a woman she had once idolised was intolerable. There had been a time when Belkis would have cheerfully died for her mistress – foolish, foolish girl! The woman obviously loathed the sight of her and, in sharp contrast to one of Bellas's more extravagant dreams which involved being on stage and singing with Tansu, the woman had both abused her and rendered her unemployed. Had Miss Latife not given her a little money just before she left, Bellas wouldn't have even had enough cash to buy her ticket home. But then Miss Latife did most things that Tansu didn't want to or couldn't. She even lied for her. Yes, she did, didn't she… Slowly at first, but then with increasing power, Bellas' s heart started to thump as something extremely interesting came back to her. Something perhaps even those investigating Erol's wife's death might find useful. As the train pulled into the station, Bellas worked hard to remember the name of the policeman she had seen that afternoon, just before she was asked to leave. But search her mind as she did, for the moment she couldn't recall it. When the train stopped and the passengers got out, Bellas looked up at the station clock. Ten minutes to go. Ten minutes to remember the tall, good-looking inspector's name. Ten minutes that would decide where she went and for what reason.
Tansu was very much in Cetin Ikmen's thoughts too at that moment. Once again he had been listening to both her songs and those of Erol Urfa. And though it had to be said that in the case of the latter, there was nothing
