A Noble Killing Read Free Page A

the doorway and down to his left. There were all sorts of shapes down there. Blackened lumps at eccentric angles, textures of darkness that went from the shiny to the viscous to the granular and the rough.
    ‘I know that everything will just look like charcoal,’ the fire chief said, ‘but if you look, you’ll see a row of sticks. They curve slightly.’
    At first İkmen couldn’t see anything like curved sticks. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the light from the torch contrasted against the various grades of black in the room, something that resembled what the chief had told him about came into view.
    ‘There?’ He pointed downwards.
    İkmen was a short, thin man and so it was quite easy for the burly fire chief to see over his shoulder. ‘Yes,’ the chief said, ‘that’s them. Ribcage. Underneath all the soot, the legs appear to be intact. If you get down low you can see the head. It isn’t pretty.’
    Çetin İkmen bent at the knees and leaned into the blackness. Above the ribs was something ball-like. Frowning, he said, ‘So do you think that this person set the fire?’
    ‘We won’t be able to say for sure until the scene has been investigated.’
    Moving the torch from side to side, İkmen thought that he had managed to pick out where the body’s nose had been. He stood up and handed the light back to the fire chief. ‘So the fire had well and truly taken hold when you arrived?’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ the fire chief replied. ‘Bedrooms, which is what this seems to be, catch quickly. Soft furnishings burn easily. Contained in this room, and to a lesser extent out here in the hall, the blaze wasn’t obvious to people passing by in the street. The American who lives upstairs reported it. Smelt smoke in the lobby outside.’
    ‘From your experience,’ İkmen said, ‘what do you think are the likely causes of the blaze?’
    The fire chief shrugged. ‘We’ll have to mount a full investigation. Faulty wiring, faulty appliances, burning cigarette. Who knows?’ He frowned.
    İkmen said, ‘You don’t list arson, and yet you were pleased to see me when I told you I was a police officer. Is there something on your mind?’
    The fire chief sighed. ‘Come on,’ he said as he took one of İkmen’s arms in his, ‘let’s go outside.’
    He led the policemen away from the other fire officers inside the building, away from the crowds at the front, to a small, shabby yard around the back. A couple of people in one of the apartments opposite were looking out of their windows to see if they could discern anything of the commotion surrounding the fire, but otherwise the two men were alone. Significantly they could not, it seemed, be overheard.
    ‘There was a fire in a block like this up on Mecit Ali Street just over a month ago,’ the fire chief said. ‘Started in a bedroom, one victim, just like this. On that occasion the victim turned out to be a girl of fifteen. Her family had only been in Beşiktaş for a year, and the story went that she was homesick for her old village just south of Van. That, it was said, was why she poured petrol over herself and took her own life. Just like this, the incident happened when the girl was on her own in the apartment, family out and about and no witnesses.’
    ‘You think that the victim here is a girl?’ İkmen asked.
    ‘I don’t know yet. But if it is . . .’
    ‘You think suicide could be a possibility?’
    The chief sighed, took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, offered one to İkmen and then lit up. ‘You a religious man, are you, Inspector?’ he asked.
    İkmen eyed the chief very narrowly. If this was a precursor to a discussion about suicide and the possible torments of hell that some believed followed such an act, he was going to have to beat a hasty retreat. But he had to answer one way or another. ‘No,’ he said gingerly. ‘Er . . .’
    The fire chief smiled. ‘I wish in a way I could be like that too,’ he said. ‘Secular. But I