Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Mystery; International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Death walks the streets of Istanbul... Follow Inspector Ikmen into the dangerous streets of Istanbul in the thrilling crime novel from Silver Dagger Award-winning writer Barbara Nadel. Perfect for fans of Donna Leon and Mario Giordano. 'Gripping and unusual detective story, vivid and poignant' - Literary Review Any bloody death will lead Inspectors Çetin Ikmen and Mehmet Süleyman out onto the dark streets of Istanbul. On 21 January, a half-decapitated corpse in the poor multicultural district of Tarlabasi poses a particularly frustrating and gruesome mystery. But as the months pass and the violence increases, it turns into a hunt for that rare phenomenon in the golden city on the Bosphorus: a serial killer. Desperate to uncover the killer's twisted logic as the body count rises, Ikmen and Süleyman find only more questions. How are the victims connected? What is the significance of the number 21? And how many Istanbullus must die before they find the answers? What readers are saying about Body Count : 'Barbara Nadel has written another fascinating story in her addictive series of Cetin Ikmen' ' One of the best in this excellent and unusual crime series ' 'If you like intrigue and mystery this book is for you'

Release date: January 2, 2014

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 418

Sample

When Şukru saw him, the kid was poking a stick in the man’s wound. It made the body’s head move almost as if it were still alive. For a few moments Şukru just watched, mesmerised by the child’s apparent lack of either fear or empathy for the dead man. Ever since İstanbul’s Roma gypsies had been evicted from their traditional quarter of Sulukule three years before, life had been tough and it was the kids who had suffered the most. This kid, like Şukru, was Roma. Şukru knew him – he knew the whole family. His mother, once madam of a good-sized brothel back in the old quarter, now sometimes sold her body to poor immigrants on Taksim Square. The mother had little pride and so she beat the child, taking it out on the son, who in his turn poked a corpse with a stick.

The child – he was twelve at the most; no one including the kid himself knew his age for sure – didn’t see the middle-aged man approach. It was still dark and the ground was covered in a thick wadding of newly fallen snow – powdery, pure white and silent. As Şukru moved closer, he saw that the child was shaking. Was he cold, or frightened, or both? The government were moving the Roma on from this district, Tarlabaşı, now too. Houses were being demolished to make way for ‘better’ homes for people who were not Roma and everyone was scared all the time. Just as they had been back in Sulukule. As a child with no father and a whore for a mother, this kid was shunned and Şukru felt sorry for him. The boy poked the man’s wound again, but this time with his finger. Şukru cleared his throat. The kid, alarmed, looked up at Şukru Şekeroğlu, one-time grease wrestler, one-time king of the gypsy dancing-bear men. Trembling still harder now, he raised a hand in greeting. ‘Şukru Bey!’

Şukru Şekeroğlu tried not to show on his face how much he pitied the boy. He put his phone to his ear and waited for an answer.

‘Who you calling, Şukru Bey?’ The child, still apparently oblivious to how macabre his situation was, spoke with a frozen frown on his face.

‘You’d best get away from here now,’ Şukru said.

‘Why?’

No one was answering the phone, but Şukru persisted. ‘Well, do you want the police to think that you killed Levent Bey?’ he asked.

The child frowned. ‘I didn’t. I’ve killed no one.’ He put his head to one side and regarded Şukru closely. ‘You calling the coppers now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because sometimes that is all that is left to do,’ Şukru said. And then as someone finally answered his call he said to the boy, ‘And Levent Bey was not one of our own; he was one of theirs. Now they have taken him back.’

Police sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu knew that all she had with and of the man who was making love to her was sex. No words of affection passed Mehmet Süleyman’s lips as he took her up against the wall of her shower room. When he came, it was Ayşe who panted with spent lust – he simply grunted and then immediately washed himself without looking at her. She, however, looked at him. Although middle-aged now – Ayşe had first met Inspector Mehmet Süleyman when he was twenty-nine – he was still slim, handsome and very aware of his power over women. The scion of an old Ottoman family related to the sultans, Süleyman was as mercurial as he was beautiful and Ayşe had been besotted by him for over a decade. Less than a year ago she’d passed up what might have been her last opportunity to marry a man who had really loved her for Süleyman. She was forty, and although she was still beautiful, her face was lined. Her eyes, for just a moment, became sad. But he didn’t notice. Married unsuccessfully twice and with a trail of failed affairs and one-night stands behind him, Mehmet Süleyman was unreliable, promiscuous, obsessed with his job and a thoroughly bad prospect. She loved him.

As he stepped out of her shower room, his phone began to ring. It had to be the station. No one else called before six in the morning. Ayşe walked back into her bedroom naked, hoping that maybe the sight of her tall, slim, slightly bronzed body would arouse his passions once again, knowing that if she had to compete with his work she was on a hiding to nothing. And she did have to compete with his work. She heard him say, ‘OK, I’ll be there’ – he looked briefly down at his watch, which was lying on her bed – ‘in ten minutes at the most.’ He didn’t tell whoever was on the other end where he was coming from and she didn’t know where he was going. Leaning against the door frame of her bedroom, Ayşe watched him dress quickly and tried to remember how many times she’d seen him do that in the past. Eventually she said, ‘What’s going on?’

‘A partially decapitated body in Tarlabaşı,’ he said.

She said nothing. He continued dressing with care, making sure that his shirt was crease-free, his tie just so. He used cologne on his face and through his hair and he even ran a finger across his teeth to make sure that they were perfectly clean. How could such self-absorption be attractive? And how could Ayşe concentrate on such irrelevances when apparently someone had been killed over in the poor district of Tarlabaşı?

She sat on her bed. ‘Who called?’ she asked.

‘Sergeant Mungan.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I have to go.’

He didn’t bend down to kiss her goodbye and it wasn’t just because he was in a hurry. He rarely kissed her. Since their on/off affair had resumed in December 2011 when Ayşe had given up İzzet Melik, the man who had loved her so much, there had been sex but no passion. Even when he was inside her, he was as cold as winter. She watched him leave the room and then stood by her bedroom window so she could see him get into his car in the snowy street below.

Mehmet Süleyman didn’t like Tarlabaşı any more. From a professional point of view it had been trouble for years. Anywhere that was poor had problems. But the district’s poverty notwithstanding, and including its great brotherhood of drug dealers, was not why he disliked it. He objected to how it was being changed, which was against the will of the majority of its people.

Those who wanted to redevelop the area – construction companies approved by the government – had tried to put a positive spin on the demolition of an established nineteenth-century central İstanbul neighbourhood. But they’d failed. The locals – mainly Kurds, foreign immigrants, Roma, transsexuals and prostitutes – were not easily convinced. They knew that the brand-new flats they were being offered as compensation were in tower blocks thirty kilometres outside the city, because that was exactly what the deal had been when the Roma had been evicted from Sulukule. And that was why so many of them had subsequently moved out of those new flats and into the urban stew that was Tarlabaşı. In spite of the presence of the very obvious wrecking balls and earth-movers, Süleyman didn’t blame them. He’d heard stories about those tower blocks; about how people cried when they moved into them because they missed their communities. And what was it all for anyway?

He pulled off Tarlabaşı Bulvari on to some nameless street he knew would take him where he needed to be and briefly looked over his shoulder towards the back of İstiklal Caddesi, the very heart of the vibrant part of İstanbul known as the ‘New City’. Land there was worth a fortune. Land there was what Tarlabaşı, once it was remodelled for the new urban middle classes, was going to become. His car bumped down what quickly turned into an unmade track, past a shop selling nothing but plugs, which was next to a derelict house that had clearly been decorated by Tarlabaşı’s only recent new tribe of residents, street artists. What once had been a kitchen was now spray-painted with images of government ministers dressed as Nazis. Süleyman shook his head. Not so many years ago the only people ever portrayed as Nazis were the military. Now contained and curtailed by the Islamically inspired government of the AK Party, the army were not the bogeymen any more. In fact, an ongoing investigation into Ergenekon, a plot that had allegedly been devised by the generals to undermine the AK government, had made those who had once ruled into those who were now hunted. The military coups that had happened in the past in defence of Atatürk’s secular state were now no longer possible. But what had taken their place was, it seemed to Süleyman, gradually turning sour also. That was certainly the view from somewhere like Tarlabaşı, as well as, he imagined, from the prison cells of the generals who had already been locked up pending trial for treason.

He got out of his car and walked over to where a group of people – police officers and civilians – stood and squatted in the snow.

‘This man found the body.’

Ömer Mungan was new to the department as well as to the city, and he was eager to please. He had a tendency to pull Süleyman towards whatever it was he wanted him to see, whoever he needed him to meet. It didn’t help to endear him to his new boss.

‘Yes, thank you, Sergeant,’ Süleyman said as he extricated himself from Ömer’s nervous grasp. He walked alone towards the very tall, grizzled man, whom he knew, if not well, then well enough. Şukru Şekeroğlu had always had something of the look of his sister Gonca. Coming upon him and that look suddenly made Süleyman’s heart squeeze. Gonca the gypsy artist had once – and in reality, still – possessed his soul.

‘Hello, Mr Şekeroğlu,’ he said. But he didn’t extend his hand in greeting.

Şukru looked up at him from underneath tangled eyebrows. ‘Inspector Süleyman,’ he said.

‘You found the body.’

‘Half an hour ago.’

‘Where were you going?’

‘You know how cold it’s been.’ As if to illustrate this point, he stamped his feet on the snow to warm them. ‘This place is a building site now; I was out collecting anything I could burn to keep my kids and my father warm. Then I saw this …’ He waved a hand towards what was now a small white tent. ‘Him.’

Süleyman rubbed his gloved hands together and looked up into the lightening grey morning sky. ‘My sergeant says you knew the dead man,’ he said.

‘I knew of him,’ Şukru corrected. ‘Everyone round here did.’

‘So he was a local …’

‘He was a nutter.’

Süleyman lowered his gaze and looked into Şukru Şekeroğlu’s eyes. They were just as hostile as he remembered. Back when Süleyman had loved Şukru’s artist sister, Gonca, Şukru had used those eyes as a weapon in his armoury to try and terrify the policeman away. He’d never succeeded. When their affair had finished it had been because Gonca, finally bowing to family pressure, had ended it. Even in the bone-freezing cold of a January morning, with a dead body awaiting his attention, Süleyman knew that in spite of everything, he’d still smile if he saw his old gypsy lover turn the corner. He looked back at her brother. ‘Mad.’

Şukru shrugged. ‘He made films. Not with a video camera, with an old film camera.’

Süleyman took out his notebook. ‘Films of what?’

‘Of Tarlabaşı. The streets, the people, I don’t know.’

‘Do you know his name?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Levent Devrim. Did you know him?’

Süleyman frowned. ‘No. Why should I?’

Şukru shrugged again. ‘He was like you.’

In view of the fact that Şukru had recently described the dead man as ‘a nutter’, this was hardly complimentary.

‘Posh,’ Şukru said.

‘In what way?’ Out of the corner of his eye, Süleyman saw a car draw up and then a large, very familiar figure haul itself out of the driver’s seat.

‘Spoke nice. I dunno,’ Şukru said. ‘Talked about stuff people round here don’t know anything about.’

‘Like?’

‘Books … art … alternative things …’ He shook his head. ‘Like those kids who come and graffiti walls with anti-government slogans. All about saving the district. It’s impossible. Why bother?’

A lot of intellectuals and artists had become very vocal about the fate of Tarlabaşı and its inhabitants in recent years. They knew that since the razing of Sulukule it was the only place actually in the city where Roma and other poor people, including a small long-standing Syrian Christian community, could afford to live.

‘Do you know how long Levent Devrim had lived here?’

‘No. But it was well before the rest of them came and scrawled up pictures of Che Guevara and politicians dressed as fascists on old brothel walls.’

‘Do you know anyone who might know?’ He heard footsteps behind him, heavy and weary as they trudged through the snow.

‘Sugar’d know,’ Şukru said. ‘She’s an old whore, a Kurd, lives up by the Syriani church.’

‘Do you know her address?’

Şukru tipped his head back. ‘No. But you can’t miss her place. She can’t work any more because she’s too old, so now she sells sex stuff – underwear, dolls, things like that. Look for a ground-floor flat with whips hanging in the window.’

It was an exotic thought. ‘Thank you, Mr Şekeroğlu, I will,’ Süleyman said. Then, in response to a light touch on his shoulder, he turned and looked into the face of Arto Sarkissian, the police pathologist. ‘Good morning, Doctor.’

The Armenian shook his head. ‘Well it is morning, Inspector, although whether it is good or not …’ He looked over at the small tent that had been erected over the body of the dead man. ‘Throat wound …’

‘His head’s almost off,’ Şukru put in baldly.

‘I see.’ The Armenian didn’t ask how he knew or even who Şukru was. He headed out across the snow-capped rubble and into a building entirely devoid of frontage. On one of the few pieces of masonry still standing was the image of a man Süleyman recognised as one of the high-profile developers involved in the district’s ‘regeneration’, dressed as Mussolini.

Süleyman turned back to Şukru Şekeroğlu. ‘Did you see anyone in the area when you found the body?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s snowing, if you notice. If I hadn’t been desperate for fuel, I’d’ve been in my bed. People round here don’t have too much to get up for, especially when it’s this cold.’

Şukru’s hostility wasn’t easy to stomach, especially so early in the morning. But as a resident of Tarlabaşı, he did have a point about having little to get up for. Few people in the area had legitimate jobs, and the wrecking ball that acted as a soundtrack to their lives had robbed them of whatever hopes they might have had for a future in the city. As Gonca’s brother, however, he aroused less sympathy in Süleyman, who knew that, left to herself, Gonca would still be with him and he, consequently, would be happy. But the father for whom Şukru Şekeroğlu had gone out collecting wood had forbidden it, and his lover had had to comply or be killed.

‘You called us immediately?’

‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I?’ Şukru said.

‘I don’t know, Mr Şekeroğlu,’ Süleyman replied. ‘Maybe—’

‘Maybe you don’t trust me. I don’t know.’

The implication was that Süleyman didn’t trust him because he was a gypsy. He ignored it.

Süleyman looked away, across the other side of what passed for a road, at Ömer Mungan, the thin, hook-nosed young man so recently promoted, who had come to him from the far eastern city of Mardin. Once, a few years before, Süleyman had been sent to that city in pursuit of an escaped prisoner. What he’d found when he got there had been a marvellous honey-coloured hill town full of old mosques and ancient churches and with its very own indigenous pagan goddess, the Sharmeran. He wondered whether Ömer loved ‘his’ Sharmeran as they all seemed to out there, or whether the civil war in nearby Syria and the refugees who had poured across the border into Turkey had shaken his faith in everything he had ever held dear.

Süleyman said to Şukru, ‘I’d like you to give a statement to Sergeant Mungan.’

Şukru shuffled his feet in the snow and said, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I,’ Süleyman said, ‘am going to look at what you’ve already seen, Mr Şekeroğlu. A man with his head almost severed from his body.’

Nobody, except for the very poorest, had a soba any more. The large wood-burning stove that stood in the middle of the İkmen family’s hall was a constant bone of contention. Fatma İkmen, a stout but shapely woman in her mid fifties, was nearly always the one who got up early in the morning to feed the soba with wood, and she was sick of it.

‘Peasants in the country have sobas,’ she shouted, knowing that her husband Çetin, who was in the shower, wouldn’t be able to hear her. ‘People in cities have central heating.’

She threw some logs into the belly of the beast and then shut the fire door. She sniffed. And it smelt – mainly of smoke, which was to be expected, but she still didn’t like it. To be fair to him, her husband probably didn’t even notice the smell. He smoked more cigarettes than Atatürk himself was reputed to have done. Although because in recent years they had gone up in price so much, he was trying to cut back – when he remembered.

‘Çetin!’

He didn’t answer. All she could hear of him was the sound of the water from the shower and some tuneless singing. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of tea from the samovar. From her kitchen window she could see three of the major İstanbul monuments – the Sultanahmet or Blue Mosque, the Hippodrome, and, just about, Aya Sofya, once the greatest church in the world. Fatma lived at the very heart of the old city in a large apartment with her husband, who was a successful inspector of police. In many ways she was a fortunate woman. So why did she not have central heating?

A short, thin middle-aged man with wild grey hair burst into the kitchen simultaneously knotting his tie and smoking a cigarette.

‘Çetin.’

‘Yes?’ He smiled and she almost, almost felt herself fall into the charm of his smile.

‘Çetin, why do we still have that soba? Please tell me.’

Çetin İkmen rolled his black, heavily lashed eyes and puffed on his cigarette. This was an old and to him boring conversation. ‘I’ve told you, Fatma,’ he said, ‘that once I have retired we will get central heating.’

‘In a year’s time.’

‘Yes, in a year’s time,’ he said. ‘One more winter, that’s all. Allah, if I could be here now I would have it put in today! But what do you want to do, eh, Fatma? You want a house full of workmen pulling up floorboards all on your own?’

‘Well, no …’

‘And this place is full of stuff.’ He sat down at the kitchen table and she brought him over a glass of tea into which he threw four sugar cubes. ‘We’ve had nine children here, Fatma, most of whom seem to have left the majority of their possessions behind them in this apartment. We have to plan. We have to get the children to take their things away.’

‘Mmm.’ She leaned against the cooker. She knew that he was right about the clutter, but she also knew that he didn’t want to tackle it any more than their children did. It was a massive job and he always had something better to do and somewhere else to be. His phone had rung at just after seven, which had to be to do with his work. He had also sung in the shower, which usually meant that some sort of challenge was on the cards.

‘So what was your call about this morning?’ she asked him.

İkmen put one cigarette out and then lit up another. ‘An incident, possibly a murder, has taken place in Tarlabaşı,’ he said. ‘Mehmet Süleyman’s out there now.’

Fatma shrugged. ‘Tarlabaşı. What is it, gypsies?’

İkmen turned towards her, fixing her with one of his disapproving stares. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Eh.’ She turned away from him to cut bread into slices. Fatma İkmen was a good, kind woman – a pious Muslim, too – but she had prejudices that İkmen found unacceptable. Roma gypsies was one. They had no recognisable religion and they drank and so they were automatically ‘bad’. Over the years he’d tried to talk her out of such nonsense, but she had stoically refused to change. Just like he had refused to change his mind about people he liked to call ‘holy sheep’, pious people who did whatever the Koran, the Bible or whichever belief they adhered to told them, without question or thought. To İkmen, an avowed agnostic, their apparent mindlessness was not only incomprehensible; it was also, he felt sometimes, dangerous. Those not like oneself could all too easily become ‘the other’ – despised creatures to be casually discarded, ignored or blamed.

İkmen threw what was left of his tea down his throat and stood up.

Without turning around, Fatma said, ‘If this is Mehmet’s case, why are you involved?’

He didn’t respond, but she knew what his answer would have been had he given it. He was always ‘involved’. She turned to look at him. ‘Çetin,’ she said, ‘are you really going to retire at the end of the year? Are you?’

Çetin İkmen put his jacket on, stuck his cigarettes in his pocket with his car keys, smiled and failed to answer her question. ‘As the great Sherlock Holmes once said, Fatma, “The game is afoot!”’

The late Levent Devrim was, or had been, fifty-five years old, according to his identity card. A spare, almost ascetic-looking man, he had also been rather handsome before someone had tried to hack his head off. Arto Sarkissian put a hand inside Devrim’s coat, under several layers of woollen jumpers, and felt the dead man’s bare flesh. He was as cold as the snow underneath and on top of him. He looked at the wound again, photographed it and then took a small sample of desiccated blood from the very far left-hand side of the cut. Both the carotid artery and the jugular vein had been severed, which was what had killed him, but then the murderer had gone on to apparently saw at his neck vertebrae too. When the gypsy had told Mehmet Süleyman that someone had tried to decapitate Devrim, he had not been lying.

‘Morning, Arto.’

Sarkissian looked around; crouched uncomfortably in what was only a small tent, there was little room for an overweight man like the doctor to manoeuvre. But he could move enough to see that Çetin İkmen had just arrived.

‘Çetin, what are you doing here? Inspector Süleyman …’

‘Oh, I was just—’

‘Passing? No you weren’t,’ the pathologist said. ‘Who told you about it?’

‘Mehmet.’

‘Mmm. Inspector Süleyman still on your leash.’ He turned uncomfortably to look at him again. ‘He’s a big boy now, you should leave him be.’

‘I’m not interfering.’ İkmen held his hands up in the air, all innocence.

‘Much.’ The Armenian turned back to the dead man. He and Çetin İkmen had been friends for many years, even before they started working together – in fact, since childhood – and Arto probably knew more about the inspector than anyone else, including his wife. He didn’t believe for a minute that İkmen was going to retire. He’d find some way to stop the process, even though he was, like Arto himself, well past retirement age already. But then something caught the doctor’s eye that took his mind quite away from Çetin İkmen. There were fragments in Levent Devrim’s wound. He picked up a pair of surgical tweezers from out of his instrument roll and gently nudged at one of these anomalies.

‘What is it?’ İkmen asked as Arto lifted the tweezers up to the light.

The Armenian squinted. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Sugar’s real name was Tansu Barışık, and she said she was seventy years old. Süleyman thought that perhaps she was being a little bit economical with the truth, but he didn’t ask to see her ID card. Everyone, after all, knew who she was. Following Şukru’s tip, he’d been brought to her door by a man dressed in the full ecclesiastical robes and regalia of the ancient Syriani church, who had been rather less fazed than Süleyman himself had been by Sugar’s whips, rubber dolls and dildos and a strong smell of cat pee.

Sugar set a tiny cup of coffee down in front of the policeman and then sat in a vast, broken armchair. She was fat, with feet that spilled over the sides of her flowery carpet slippers. ‘Levent was odd but harmless,’ she said. ‘But then often that’s the way with very clever people, isn’t it?’

‘He was clever?’ Süleyman took a sip from the cup. Turkish coffee – hot, thick and medium sweet, just the way he’d told her he liked it.

‘He went to Galatasaray Lycée,’ she said, as if there was some sort of connection between İstanbul’s most famous school and natural intellectual acuity. Süleyman, who had also been to the Lycée, knew for a fact that it was not necessarily the case. All you really needed were parents who were willing and able to pay the enormous fees. At least that was how it had been when he had attended the school and also, probably, when Levent Devrim had been there. But however clever or otherwise he had been, one thing was for sure: Devrim was no run-of-the-mill Tarlabaşı resident. What had brought such a person to such a place?

‘I heard that Levent Bey liked to make films,’ Süleyman said. ‘Was that his job?’

Sugar smiled, idly and thoughtlessly fiddling with a nearby dildo as she said, ‘Levent didn’t work. I don’t know what he lived on. The camera was a hobby. Just little bits of film of the kids in the street, the buildings and the market, you know. He thought he was Stephen Spielberg, I think, but …’

‘Did anyone ever object to him filming their home or their children?’

‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘He was just Levent Bey, you know? A bit strange, spoke a bit posh – bit like you, as it goes – wore clothes even the Roma beggars wouldn’t touch …’

‘He didn’t care about his appearance?’

‘It meant nothing to him!’ Suddenly realising what she was doing with the dildo, Sugar threw it down. Süleyman saw a rat scamper past where the sex toy had landed. His hostess appeared completely oblivious. ‘Levent didn’t want or need nice clothes, just like he didn’t want or need nice food, drink or women.’

‘So what, Sugar Hanım, did he need?’

Before she spoke, she paused, and then she said, ‘You say he’s dead, right?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

She sighed. ‘Levent liked a smoke, and I don’t mean tobacco. Allah alone in His wisdom knows what brought him to Tarlabaşı in the first place, but I know what kept him here.’

‘Cannabis.’

‘I’ve never known such a massive pothead! Day and night! I don’t think I can remember him straight in what has to be twenty-five years since I’ve known him.’

‘He was young when he came here?’

‘Yeah. But as I say, I don’t know why he came. That’s one of the great things about this place: no one asks you where you’ve been, where you’re going or what you do. It’s the end of the line, or it was until they started knocking it down.’

‘Do you know who his dealer was?’

She shrugged. ‘Pick any kid on a street corner,’ she said. ‘Drugs were never my thing. I spent time with Levent, but I never smoked with him.’

‘What did you do with him?’

Sugar looked at the very handsome man sitting in her house and she said, ‘We talked, and sometimes, yes, I fucked him. When we first met, I didn’t look like this and he was a nice-looking young man. He didn’t treat me like shit and I could talk to him, which was nice.’ She leaned forward, her shoulders straining as they pushed down against her enormous bosoms. ‘I told you that Levent was clever, but I’m no slouch myself. I finished high school, even if it was in the back of beyond.’

‘Where?’

She named some town he didn’t recognise, which she told him was in the far eastern province of Van. Kurds often came from places no one else had ever been to except other Kurds.

‘Then when I got sick, he looked after me,’ Sugar continued. ‘In 2003 I got diabetes. Speak to people here and they’ll tell you that if Levent Bey hadn’t looked after me, I would have been dead. He took me to hospital, wouldn’t leave me until they’d found out what was wrong with me.’ For the first time since she’d been told of Levent Devrim’s death, Sugar’s eyes filled with tears.

Süleyman let her have a moment to herself, and then he said, ‘Did he have any enemies?’

‘No.’ She wiped a couple of tears away from her eyes with the sleeve of her holey cardigan. ‘Or rather, not that I know of. Maybe one or other of the dealers had a grudge because he couldn’t pay for his smoke, but I never heard anything like that.’ She shook her head. ‘He was always kind and polite, he never robbed anyone, never slept with anyone’s wife, never lost his temper … Oh, except for once, but that was years ago.’

‘It must have been significant for you to remember it,’ Süleyman said. ‘Who did he lose his temper with?’

‘I don’t know. A man, about sixty I suppose, came to see him one day at his flat. I didn’t recognise him and he wasn’t from round here. I’d baked Levent Bey some börek, which he always loved, and I was taking it round as the man was leaving. Levent was like a lunatic, shouting at the man to fuck off and leave him alone. The man didn’t reply; he just went.’

‘Did you ask Levent Bey who the man was?’

‘He pre-empted me,’ she said. ‘Took the börek from my hands,