River of The Dead Read Free Page B

women were joining the Turkish police all the time, Ayşe still found some male members of the public very patronising. This man wouldn’t have dreamed of doing his awful demonstration for either of the young male constables who were looking round the apartment with her. But for her, their superior, Mr Lale obviously felt he had to make himself plain. After all, Ayşe was an attractive woman in her early thirties, so it was almost unthinkable that she wasn’t stupid.
    ‘What someone in his profession was doing lifting weights, I don’t know,’ Mr Lale said as he lit up a cheap, rank Birinci cigarette. ‘I mean a nurse, I ask you! What kind of job is that for a grown man?’
    Suspecting that this overtly macho attitude towards nursing was allied to a few other prejudicial feelings, Ayşe said, ‘So would you want to be handled by a woman if you were in hospital, Mr Lale?’
    ‘I’ve never been in a hospital in my life!’ He relayed this fact as if it were some sort of badge of honour.
    ‘Yes, but if you did have to go in . . .’ Ayşe, seeing the look of hostility on the landlord’s face, decided to give up. After all, his attitude towards this İsak Mardin was irrelevant. Where Mardin was now, what he was doing and what he had done were the only subjects she should be concentrating on now. After all, this man could have just murdered a prison guard, or one of the unfortunate police officers who had accompanied Yusuf Kaya to the Cerrahpaşa. One of their own . . .
    ‘Mr Lale,’ she began.
    ‘Sergeant!’
    A call from what had apparently been İsak Mardin’s bedroom caused Ayşe to excuse herself to go and see what Constable Yıldız wanted.
    The room, which contained little beyond an ancient-looking metal bedstead and the built-in cupboard Yıldız was looking into now, overlooked the Golden Horn. The nineteenth-century wooden house had five storeys and this apartment was on the fifth. So even though there were buildings behind the house, because they were smaller than Mr Lale’s place İsak Mardin had had a wonderful view. Even with the thunderous traffic on the Atatürk Bridge pounding across to hip and happening Beyoğlu over the water, the sight of the great inlet with the European city beyond was still absolutely breathtaking. And on a wonderful spring day like this one it would, under normal circumstances, have made Ayşe want to sing and shout from the sheer joy of simply being alive in such fabulous weather. But the circumstances were far from normal.
    ‘I found this in this cupboard,’ Constable Yıldız was holding a thin red and gold scarf very gingerly by one corner.
    ‘That’s a Galatasaray scarf,’ Mr Lale said from the doorway, once again anticipating complete ignorance on Ayşe’s part. ‘He supported that lot.’
    Mr Lale, by referring to what is probably İstanbul’s most famous football club as ‘that lot’, signalled that it was not a particular passion of his own. Ayşe, whose brother was a fanatical Galatasaray fan, smiled.
    ‘Bag it up for forensic, please, Constable,’ she said to Yıldız. ‘Thank you for that, Mr Lale.’
    Any examples of DNA found on the scarf or indeed on the bedding or the other, very few, items in the apartment could be useful; although, as her boss Inspector İkmen had told her earlier, İsak Mardin was probably a pseudonym. Yıldız had just put the scarf into a bag when İkmen, his thin face red and flustered, arrived.
    ‘I apologise for being late, Sergeant,’ he said to Ayşe Farsakoğlu as he tipped his head in greeting to Mr Lale. ‘But I’ve just had a telephone call from Commissioner Ardıç. We need to get back to the station – now.’

Chapter 2
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    Try as he might, İkmen couldn’t get away from the fact that the man on the screen had to be Yusuf Kaya. ‘Where did this film come from?’ he asked as he watched again the short movie footage of Yusuf Kaya eating a plate of pastries.
    ‘A patisserie called the Nightingale is