Arabesk

Chapter 17

Unusually, Inspector Ìkmen asked that Interview Room 3 be thoroughly cleaned before he and Inspector Suleyman took the small, platinum-blonde woman into it. Quite why, the two young constables charged with this task didn't know. But then Ìkmen could be very odd at times, and even though they knew that officially he was not supposed to be at work, the constables did as he instructed, albeit slowly. It was not, they knew, a good idea to do otherwise.

Once Latife Emin had settled herself into her chair she spoke her name and age clearly for the purposes of the tape. She was, she claimed, fifty-two; which provoked a small flurry of speculation on Ìkmen's part as to the real age of her older sister, Tansu.

Suleyman, sitting directly opposite Latife, began the interrogation immediately. 'When did you first meet Ruya Urfa, Miss Emin?'

'A year ago, maybe a little more,' she replied. 'She was pregnant at the time. Sweet girl.'

'Did you talk to her?'

'Yes. My sister was pointedly ignoring her. I felt sorry for her.'

'What did you talk about?' Ìkmen asked as he removed his jacket in the face of the growing heat within that room. 'Can the sister of Erol's lover and his wife have anything to talk about?'

Latife smiled. 'We talked about education actually,' she said. 'Ruya was worried in case she let bom Erol and her unborn child down.'

'Why? Why should she let them down?'

'She was illiterate.'

Suleyman looked knowingly at Ìkmen and then said, 'Did you meet her again?'

Latife Emin shrugged. 'She said that she wanted to learn to read and write and I said that I'd help her. It was her idea to keep our lessons a secret from Erol. She wanted to surprise him. He was rarely at home with her and so sometimes we would meet at her apartment and sometimes in a park or pastane.'

'You liked her?' Ìkmen bit his lip and then frowned.

She replied very simply, 'Yes.'

'And so when,' Suleyman said as he took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and then lit one, 'did your liking of Ruya Urfa turn into something more malignant?'

'Never. I always liked her, she was sweet'

'And so…'

'It was only when I'd put the extra pieces together to confirm what I had suspected some time before that I decided to, er…' She looked down at the floor before composing herself once again. 'I knew that Ruya would be alone on the night of the football game. I suggested we use that time to improve her skills and she agreed. I had access to Re§at's cyanide which I drizzled onto a block of almond halva, knowing that the sweet would disguise the smell.' She looked straight into Ìkmen's eyes as she spoke. 'She struggled for what seemed like hours even though it can only have been a few moments. I didn't intend for her to suffer.'

It had all been recited so coldly, almost like an exercise in linear thinking, that for a moment Ìkmen found himself quite lost within the horror of it all. If she had not spoken again almost immediately, neither of the men would have uttered a word for some time.

'When it was over I left,' she said. 'I picked up what remained of the halva, I took off my shoes so I wouldn't make any noise on the stairs and I started to go.'

'But?'

'But just as I was opening the door I remembered Ruya's pen. Anyone who knew Ruya would know that she would never use such a thing and so I went back into the kitchen to get it. If I hadn't heard the idiot man behind me when I was halfway back, I would have got it. But he gave me a fright and so I just ran.'

'Leaving the pen and Cengiz inside the apartment.'

'With Merih, yes.'

'So you must have left the front door open in order for Cengiz to…'

'Yes. I thought I had time and that no one was about.' She shrugged. 'I did intend to remain undetected if I could. Fate, maybe.'

'So how,' Suleyman, ever the stickler for detail, asked, 'did you get from your sister's house to Ìstiklal Caddesi without being seen?'

Latife Emin sighed. 'If you walk out around the back of the house and then make your way through the trees on the left-hand side, no one is going to spot you easily, especially if you wear black and cover your head. The reason I wore the particular, coat of Tansu's I did was firstly because it was long and so it covered my feet and secondly because it has a black lining which I made the most of, together with a dark scarf, when I was amongst the trees. I would never normally wear such a thing. As I know you know, our security cameras contain no tape and besides, no one in our household would even think of looking for a person on foot. My siblings barely cross rooms without their cars.'

'But then you are a country girl at heart, are you not, Miss Emin?' Ìkmen asked wryly.

'Yes,' she smiled. ‘I like the garden and the greenhouse. I'm happy to walk from the house to the road to get a taxi into the city.'

'Even with bare feet?' Ìkmen enquired, wincing at the thought

'Yes,' she smiled. 'When I was young, Inspector, shoes were a rarity.'

Her smile, seemingly frozen across the mask of her face, for a moment held both men entranced. Whether this hold was benign or malignant or a little of both, neither man would have been able to say. All they knew was that for this small space in time they had shared with Latife Emin the magnetism of her personality, and however warped that might be, it had held them both in far greater thrall than her sister could have hoped to exert in ten lifetimes.

'So,' Ìkmen said slowly when he did finally rouse himself from his reverie, 'we know you killed Mrs Urfa, but I still don't think I understand why.'

'No,' Suleyman agreed. 'You have yet to tell us that, haven't you, Miss Emin?'

'Yes.'

Ìkmen shrugged. 'And so?' 'It's complicated.'

'I feel you are rather a complicated person all round,' Ìkmen said. 'Perhaps you're not unlike the late Marilyn Monroe in that respect, Miss Emin.'

She smiled. 'Like me, Marilyn had talents that went unrecognised, yes.' Then looking down at the floor once again, she murmured, 'We could have learned so much, Marilyn and me. Poor women.'

In an effort to catch her eye and so keep to the subject in hand, Suleyman bent his head towards Latife's, 'Miss Emin?'

'Ah.' The sight of his eyes so close to hers brought Latife to herself once again. She looked up and then leaned back into her chair. 'Ruya. Yes.' She wiped away some sweat that had gathered above her eyebrows and continued, 'In order to understand why I did… this, you have to know how it is with my sister. Tansu, though very generous, doesn't take kindly to people doing things she doesn't approve of. Because she thinks it is a good idea, she and I share the same hairdresser, the same couturier and the same plastic surgeon. If one of my brothers wants a car, he can have one provided it is one of which Tansu approves. If any of us forms a relationship of any sort, it is subject to the approval of Tansu and if she doesn't like that person then that person goes.'

Suleyman, his face a picture of disbelief, frowned. 'But why?'

'Because she has control of all the money,' Latife said simply. 'All she has ever wanted to do is make us all happy but, Allah forgive her, she has to do it in ways that she likes and understands. She is, in this, like a man, a father, you know. If one doesn't conform then one is thrown out into the world with nothing. And we were all born to such poverty

'But if your sister denied you something that you really wanted,' Ìkmen said, 'then surely killing Ruya Urfa was no punishment for that Tansu hated the girl.'

'Yes. Like I said, you have to understand my sister and my family in order to understand why this happened. You also have to know just how clever I am. I do hope that you gentlemen have a lot of time to spare.'

'My parents were living in Adana, the biggest village in Turkey, when we were born. My father worked packing fruit. We were very poor – poor Kurds. But then just after Yilmaz was born, when I was twelve, my father died and we became still poorer.

'At the time and in fact for some few years previously, my sister Tansu who was then sixteen had been having singing lessons from an old Armenian woman who lived down by the Ulu Cami. My sister's talent had, so my mother always said, been apparent almost from birth. It is said that before I was born, an asik who came to our quarter in order to play and sing the songs of the people heard my sister's voice and predicted a great future for her. So the singing lessons were of great importance even when we were destitute after my father's death. The singing had to go on.

'In order to support this, my mother started working in the fields. It took her two hours to walk to her work and then two hours to come home again. Galip, who was about eight left school in order to shine shoes. I left school too. Suddenly my classes in mathematics, Turkish, history and all the other subjects I had come to love stopped while I stayed at home raising my brother Yilmaz. But still the singing lessons continued. At the end of every week Mother, Galip and Tansu herself, who was now singing occasionally in dubious gazinos, would put all their money into a cup and take out what was needed for various costs. The money for Mrs Nisanyan, the singing teacher, would always come out first.

'But later on that year, my mother's hopes for a glittering career for my sister nearly came to an end. Tansu, who had become fascinated by a married man she met at one of her engagements, became pregnant. You have, I imagine, heard about her son, whom she thought she had paid off years ago. But… So then I went off to work in the fields while Mother tended the baby. Tansu went on as before.

'With absolutely no dowry money for either of us, not to mention the loss of my sister's virginity, the idea of either of us marrying was ridiculous. But as Tansu became more and more noted in Adana, and her engagements got bigger and more prestigious, things did start to improve. As the most literate member of our family, I even wrote some lyrics for her, suggesting that she might like to get one of her musician friends to set them to music. But she never did. Of course when she first came to Istanbul in 1970, she was more prostitute than singer. She met her manager, Ferhat Göktepe, in some Karaköy brothel. Not that he didn't know a good thing when he saw it. As soon as he heard her sing he moved his attentions from her body to her throat and from there the Tansu legend was born.

'The following year, when she had made enough money, Tansu sent for Mother and merest of us, except for her son, of course. One of my aunts raised him from thereon. Tansu had just a small apartment in Besiktas in those days, but it was like a palace to us. She even had a radio on which I used to listen to the BBC. Between that and talking to some of the local children who were having lessons, I became quite good at English. I even thought that perhaps one day I might be able to have private tuition and apply to university somewhere -Tansu had always said that if she ever made a lot of money she would give us all what we wanted. After all, we had all made sacrifices for her.

'But as her career garnered pace, so did her commitments. Records, radio interviews, television, films, tours. We moved to the house in Yeniköy which was a place she rarely came to in those days, what with her engagements and her many lovers. But with regard to us, she paid for everything. If one of my brothers wanted new clothes, she had a tailor come and measure him up and within a few days suits would arrive. Whenever she bought clothes for herself, she would buy an identical set for me. She was very, very generous, we wanted for nothing. So much so, in fact, that for a considerable number of years I held off from asking her about tuition for university. It seemed so ungrateful in view of all she had done.

'And then one day I was thirty. Thirty years old, still interested in everything, like a child. Reading, reading, reading in order to educate myself – painfully aware of my own shortcomings. But with no money of my own, I had no choice but to ask Tansu to help me with my ambitions. I was sure that she would. 1 was wrong.

'"If you go to university at your age, everyone will laugh at you and at me," she said when I put it to her for the first and only time. "And besides, while I keep you, you won't need to know anything, will you?"

'"But Tansu," I said, "I want to do something with my life. I want to achieve…"

'"Well, why don't you write some nice new songs for me?" my sister said, as she in effect sent me on my way. "That will give you a great achievement in your life."

'And so I did just that. I both hated and loved my sister because of it and I exacted a small revenge upon her by frequently using words I knew she would not understand. But then her interpretation of words was never very good anyway. The sweetness of her tone and her large breasts are what Tansu Hanim has always been about The songs were always credited to her anyway.

'So years came and went, and as my sister's career began to fade, so did my chances of finding a man to love. Yilmaz married briefly back in the 1980s, but his wife never did get on with Tansu and so that didn't last By the time Erol Urfa came into my sister's life, my brothers and I were idle, uneducated and useless. We were like soft, soporific odalisques. Fresh from the countryside, this young man woke me up in ways he could never have imagined.

'I suppose that in retrospect I was a little in love with Erol myself. Perhaps he represented the kind of man I could have had, had things been different Tansu, of course grateful, treated him like a Sultan sometimes and like her personal slave at others. She would still pick up young boys on the streets on occasion too, like she did the night that Ruya died. Not that she has ever been caught doing this. I, meanwhile, just did sad, spinsterly things like look up where Erol came from on the map – some nowhere place up near the Iraqi border. I have always been interested in my country and its various regions but this area seemed to have little to recommend it With the exception of the devil worshippers.

1 read so many things, some true and some false, that at times they made my head hurt Some books accused the Yezidis of human sacrifice, rape, infanticide, while others said that they were simply misunderstood people who worshipped a deity called the Peacock Angel. They were Kurds, like me, but Kurds who would not eat chicken or wear blue or marry anyone other than their own kind; Kurds who lifted up their eyes to pray not to Allah, but to the setting sun. And it was not long after this that I first saw Erol standing in the trees to the side of our house, his arms raised in honour of the great golden ball setting over the Bosphorus.

'I started to think and to watch. And no, Erol didn't eat chicken, he didn't wear blue, but… It was only when I started to include references to the peacock as lover in the lyrics that Tansu passed off as her own that I knew. His expression as she innocently and without any trace of intelligent thought sang those words… He knew she couldn't know, and her thoughtless words confused and confounded him.

'I, meanwhile, remained silent While Tansu screamed on about how Erol would marry her in an instant if Ruya were not around, I thought about how much my sister had become like a child – and about how devastating it would be for her should something happen to Ruya and Erol then not marry her. It's not, as we know, good to be known as a devil worshipper and so Erol would, I knew, never tell Tansu why he would have to return to his village and marry another child-woman instead of her. Tansu would just simply be denied what she most wanted, seemingly on the whim of another. Just like I had been. Then she would hurt just like me. Then she would become that sad, old odalisque that I have been for so many years. Then I would be content and so I am.'

A few moments of stunned silence passed until Ìkmen eventually said, 'But didn't your sister, once she knew that you were responsible for Ruya Urfa's death, try to get you out of the city in her car?'

Latife Emin smiled. 'Oh, yes. She loves me. She was prepared to deceive you for me. She thought that

I'd killed Ruya in order to tree up Erol. for her. She was very grateful.' 'But

'She's going to be really very badly hurt when she learns the truth.' She smiled again, broadly.