quite so large seemed wrong and even puzzling. But then Zelfa had both craved and eaten an enormous amount of chocolate during her pregnancy, which had seemed preferable to her usual cigarettes.
‘I’m like one of those toys,’ she said as she lumbered, with her husband’s help, towards the bedroom door. ‘One of those fat clowns that won’t fall over, keeps on bouncing back.’
‘When our son is born you will feel better,’ Mehmet said. Inside his heart beat fast and his flesh trembled inside his skin. His son! At last he would be born, bringing an intense feeling of joy but also of great apprehension. Even now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a proportion of babies still died at birth. And Zelfa was, after all, nearly forty-eight and this little boy was her first and probably her last child.
As they descended the stairs Mehment hugged both his wife and his child tightly to his body.
‘The doctor says that they belonged to a girl who was not yet fully developed,’ Orhan Tepe said as he placed the photograph of pelvic and femur bones in front of his superior, Çetin İkmen.
‘OK, so you’ll need to check out the lists of missing earthquake victims in that sector,’ İkmen replied. It wasn’t the first time they’d had to try to marry up discrete body parts with names of those whose bodies had never been recovered in the wake of the 1999 catastrophe. Nearly two years on, traumatised survivors were still being shocked by the bones and flesh of the dead that their gardens and car parks kept on revealing to them. There was also the possibility that these fragments held more sinister secrets. After all, where better to hide a murder victim than in those parts of the city that were effectively graveyards? This was why İkmen and his colleagues became involved in these matters. Unlawful death was his speciality and the fight to bring those who had committed such acts to justice had been his professional mission for almost all of his working life.
At fifty-four years old, Çetin İkmen was undernourished (due to pain from his numerous stomach ulcers), underpaid and smoke-dried. In spite of these drawbacks he was passionate about his work, possessed a loving and supportive wife and nine healthy, if at times problematic, children. Over the years his formidable detective skills and keen intellect had afforded him considerable success within the İstanbul police department. This combined with the incorruptible honesty he demanded of both himself and his officers had provided him with the kind of legendary status that occasionally allowed certain breaches of procedure to be performed without comment from those above. In short, İkmen was a phenomenon and as such he was admired and even courted by others. This was not always easy for those around İkmen. His current junior, Sergeant Orhan Tepe, frequently felt that rather more was expected of him than was reasonable. It was not an attitude that had afflicted İkmen’s previous sergeant, Mehmet Süleyman, now promoted to inspector. But then as Tepe frequently observed to himself, İkmen and Süleyman were two of a kind. He was different. It was not something that made him happy. Nothing much did nowadays.
As the list of missing persons for the Ataköy area flashed up on Tepe’s computer screen, he put such personal thoughts aside and concentrated on his work. On the other side of the small, cluttered office, İkmen frowned at a pile of papers until he was interrupted by the ringing of his telephone.
He picked up the receiver. ‘İkmen.’
‘Dad?’
It was Hulya, and from the tremor in her voice, she was nervous about something.
İkmen lit a cigarette. ‘Hello, Hulya, what can I do for you?’
‘Dad, I’ve just seen Mrs İpek and she says that Hatice still isn’t home.’
‘Oh?’ Could it be that his daughter was finally going to tell him exactly what had happened when she and her friend had parted the previous evening? İkmen suspected that