Deep Waters Read Free

eyesight.
    When, after what seemed like a considerable number of minutes, one of the car’s doors opened, Enver took evasive action and, with remarkable agility, skipped lightly into the underpass beneath the Galata Bridge. There, his breath now coming in short rasps, he waited for the sound of ‘official’ voices, his ears almost reaching out from the side of his head in order to catch them.
    But they never came. Only a dull thud, like the sound of something heavy being flung to the ground, registered on Enver’s straining ears. No voices, no guns, just a thick and, to him, quite muffled thump. Without voices, it signified nothing, and when he heard the car door shut once again and the engine roar off first towards him and then over the bridge, he assumed that whoever had been in the car had now done what they wanted to in Eminönü. He was just glad that whatever it was had not involved him.
    Still, he did leave it quite some minutes before he dared to step out of the underpass and back onto the street. Rather than go back to his musings by the water, Enver decided to make his way home again. There was little to see in all this fog, which was now really spooking him. And so with half an eye out for policemen, soldiers or thieves, Enver made his way warily back across Reşadiye Caddesi. As he went, he observed that whatever had thumped out of that mysterious vehicle was no longer around. At least not in his immediate vicinity. For Enver, that was quite good enough.
    For the last hundred metres of his journey, Enver closed his eyes and imagined the smell of his son’s delicious coffee guiding him home.

Chapter 2
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    When Fatma İkmen woke to yet another bone-chilling dawn, she found her husband not beside her in their bed but over by the window. Already dressed and smoking heavily, Inspector Çetin İkmen turned to his wife as she sat up and levelled an accusatory cigarette in the direction of a small cage that sat on the floor beside the bed.
    ‘I’m going to end up dying from lack of sleep because of that animal,’ he said sternly. ‘I want it gone.’
    Fatma pushed her long black and grey hair back over her shoulders before calmly replying, ‘Hamsters can tell when the earth is going to move before we can. My little friend is simply an early warning system, as I have told you many times before.’
    ‘Yes, and as I have told you many times before,’ Çetin said, his voice rising with his increasing anger, ‘these buggers are nocturnal. They move around at night, Fatma! Earthquake or no earthquake, the bastards get up when the sun goes down and go to sleep when it rises!’
    ‘I don’t care. I would rather be awake for the rest of my life than have my children die underneath the ruins of this building. Wouldn’t you?’
    ‘Of course I would,’ he said as he braced himself via one thin hand against the damp window frame. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Fatma, but I thought that our early warning pet was supposed to be the cat, not that—’
    ‘Oh, the cat that sleeps both day and night, much use he is!’ Fatma said as she swung her short plump legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
    Her husband rubbed the deepening lines in his face with his hands in an attempt to wake himself up. ‘Marlboro can make enough noise when he wants to.’
    ‘Oh, yes, when he’s courting!’ Fatma replied tartly. ‘Out amongst the rubbish he’s quite the hero, but in here? In here we need something we can rely on to wake us up, and that thing is my friend Squeaky and his little metal wheel.’
    Gently, due to the rheumatism this damp weather encouraged into the bones in her back these days, Fatma bent down across the cage and whistled softly at the sleeping form of the hamster inside.
    Seeing this made her husband rage yet again. ‘Oh, for the love of Allah,’ he said angrily. ‘If we have this monstrous earthquake some seismologists are predicting could happen, the whole city will fall into a massive fault and