Deep Waters Read Free Page B

that over to Him. I must confess, I thought that was what all you religious types did anyway.’
    ‘The earthquake has tested us all, Çetin.’ Breaking free from her husband’s arms, Fatma sat down on the edge of the bed, her head bowed. ‘Even Auntie Arın, who is the most pious person I know, slept out in the street for weeks after the soldiers told her she could go back into her house.’ She looked up sharply into her husband’s face. ‘She said it wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in Allah, it was that the earth had let her down. And that is how I feel. I feel let down and scared and even when my mind is no longer panicking, my heart keeps on pounding. I want to be safe, Çetin! I want my children to be safe!’
    With a sigh, he sat down next to his wife and took one of her hands in his. Although he could fully appreciate what she was saying, he could not, he knew, do anything real to lessen her anxiety. Moving was impractical, the older children were opposed to it anyway, and without the slightest clue as to when or even if the next big earthquake might occur, speculation was pointless. There was nothing he could even say beyond, ‘Look, Fatma, keep the hamster if it makes you happy.’ And although this did seem to cheer her, as evidenced by the thin smile that ghosted across her face, when a few silent minutes later he got up to leave for work, her eyes followed him with a troubling intensity.
    It was, he thought later, as if she were trying to etch every inch of his features onto her memory.
    Nobody knew how long it had been there. Haluk the taxi driver, who the others were rapidly concluding was the sort of person who liked people to think he knew everything, gave his opinion that it must have been there for some time.
    ‘Just the bruising will tell you that,’ he said as he pulled at the dead man’s shirt. ‘See?’
    ‘Put that down!’ cried Beyazıt, the now outraged bus driver. He attempted to snatch the taxi man’s hand away from the body. ‘The police might take fingerprints off that and if they find your marks—’
    ‘Oh, like they’re going to take prints off cloth?’ Haluk said contemptuously. ‘What kind of idiot do you take me for?’
    One of the assorted Eminönü fishermen who had come over to what was now developing into quite a crowd on Reşadiye Caddesi rather volubly agreed with the bus driver. And seeing as the fisherman was considerably bigger than he was, Haluk for the moment kept his counsel.
    Just ten minutes before, Haluk’s car had hit what he had thought at the time was a particularly hard bundle of rubbish. He stopped to check his taxi for damage, intending to give the pile only a cursory glance, until he saw that it had a human face.
    At first Haluk had thought that perhaps he had actually killed the man himself. After all, his car had made contact with him. Indeed, with this in mind, the taxi driver’s first instinct had been to run away. But then as the knowledge began to sink in that when he had stopped, so had the bus behind him, not to mention the appearance of the bus driver and several passengers, Haluk changed his mind. After all, even if he had killed the man, he must have been lying in the gutter at the time, which was not the kind of behaviour a sane person would exhibit. And given the man’s bundled appearance, it could surely not be his fault if he had hit him.
    ‘Some of this blood is very dry,’ said another, smaller fisherman as he bent over and peered at the body. ‘He could’ve been here for some time. Probably got hit before the fog cleared. There was no way a man could see his path in that.’
    Several people muttered in agreement. As they all knew only too well, the previous night had been filthy and impenetrable. It had been the sort of night when their ancestors would have said that witches, djinn and all sorts of other supernatural horrors walked abroad. Not that that made the death of what was, by the look of what was left of him,