Arabesk

Once Latife Emin had settled herself into her chair she spoke her name and age clearly for the purposes of the tape. She was, she claimed, fifty-two; which provoked a small flurry of speculation on Ìkmen's part as to the real age of her older sister, Tansu.

Suleyman, sitting directly opposite Latife, began the interrogation immediately. 'When did you first meet Ruya Urfa, Miss Emin?'

'A year ago, maybe a little more,' she replied. 'She was pregnant at the time. Sweet girl.'

'Did you talk to her?'

'Yes. My sister was pointedly ignoring her. I felt sorry for her.'

'What did you talk about?' Ìkmen asked as he removed his jacket in the face of the growing heat within that room. 'Can the sister of Erol's lover and his wife have anything to talk about?'

Latife smiled. 'We talked about education actually,' she said. 'Ruya was worried in case she let bom Erol and her unborn child down.'

'Why? Why should she let them down?'

'She was illiterate.'

Suleyman looked knowingly at Ìkmen and then said, 'Did you meet her again?'

Latife Emin shrugged. 'She said that she wanted to learn to read and write and I said that I'd help her. It was her idea to keep our lessons a secret from Erol. She wanted to surprise him. He was rarely at home with her and so sometimes we would meet at her apartment and sometimes in a park or pastane.'

'You liked her?' Ìkmen bit his lip and then frowned.

She replied very simply, 'Yes.'

'And so when,' Suleyman said as he took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and then lit one, 'did your liking of Ruya Urfa turn into something more malignant?'

'Never. I always liked her, she was sweet'

'And so…'

'It was only when I'd put the extra pieces together to confirm what I had suspected some time before that I decided to, er…' She looked down at the floor before composing herself once again. 'I knew that Ruya would be alone on the night of the football game. I suggested we use that time to improve her skills and she agreed. I had access to Re§at's cyanide which I drizzled onto a block of almond halva, knowing that the sweet would disguise the smell.' She looked straight into Ìkmen's eyes as she spoke. 'She struggled for what seemed like hours even though it can only have been a few moments. I didn't intend for her to suffer.'

It had all been recited so coldly, almost like an exercise in linear thinking, that for a moment Ìkmen found himself quite lost within the horror of it all. If she had not spoken again almost immediately, neither of the men would have uttered a word for some time.

'When it was over I left,' she said. 'I picked up what remained of the halva, I took off my shoes so I wouldn't make any noise on the stairs and I started to go.'

'But?'

'But just as I was opening the door I remembered Ruya's pen. Anyone who knew Ruya would know that she would never use such a thing and so I went back into the kitchen to get it. If I hadn't heard the idiot man behind me when I was halfway back, I would have got it. But he gave me a fright and so I just ran.'

'Leaving the pen and Cengiz inside the apartment.'

'With Merih, yes.'

'So you must have left the front door open in order for Cengiz to…'

'Yes. I thought I had time and that no one was about.' She shrugged. 'I did intend to remain undetected if I could. Fate, maybe.'

'So how,' Suleyman, ever the stickler for detail, asked, 'did you get from your sister's house to Ìstiklal Caddesi without being seen?'

Latife Emin sighed. 'If you walk out around the back of the house and then make your way through the trees on the left-hand side, no one is going to spot you easily, especially if you wear black and cover your head. The reason I wore the particular, coat of Tansu's I did was firstly because it was long and so it covered my feet and secondly because it has a black lining which I made the most of, together with a dark scarf, when I was amongst the trees. I would never normally wear such a thing. As I know you know, our security cameras contain no tape and besides, no one in our household would even think of looking for a person on foot. My siblings barely cross rooms without their cars.'

'But then you are a country girl at heart, are you not, Miss Emin?' Ìkmen asked wryly.

'Yes,' she smiled. ‘I like the garden and the greenhouse. I'm happy to walk from the house to the road to get a taxi into the city.'

'Even with bare feet?' Ìkmen enquired, wincing at the thought

'Yes,' she smiled. 'When I was young, Inspector, shoes were a rarity.'

Her smile, seemingly frozen across the mask of her face, for a moment held both men entranced. Whether this hold was benign or malignant or a little of both, neither man would have been able to say. All they knew was that for this small space in time they had shared with Latife Emin the magnetism of her personality, and however warped that might be, it had held them both in far greater thrall than her sister could have hoped to exert in ten lifetimes.

'So,' Ìkmen said slowly when he did finally rouse himself from his reverie, 'we know you killed Mrs Urfa, but I still don't think I understand why.'

'No,' Suleyman agreed. 'You have yet to tell us that, haven't you, Miss Emin?'

'Yes.'

Ìkmen shrugged. 'And so?' 'It's complicated.'

'I feel you are rather a complicated person all round,' Ìkmen said. 'Perhaps you're not unlike the late Marilyn Monroe in that respect, Miss Emin.'

She smiled. 'Like me, Marilyn had talents that went unrecognised, yes.' Then looking down at the floor once again, she murmured, 'We could have learned so much, Marilyn and me. Poor women.'

In an effort to catch her eye and so keep to the subject in hand, Suleyman bent his head towards Latife's, 'Miss Emin?'

'Ah.' The sight of his eyes so close to hers brought Latife to herself once again. She looked up and then leaned back into her chair. 'Ruya. Yes.' She wiped away some sweat that had gathered above her eyebrows and continued, 'In order to understand why I did… this, you have to know how it is with my sister. Tansu, though very generous, doesn't take kindly to people doing things she doesn't approve of. Because she thinks it is a good idea, she and I share the same hairdresser, the same couturier and the same plastic surgeon. If one of my brothers wants a car, he can have one provided it is one of which Tansu approves. If any of us forms a relationship of any sort, it is subject to the approval of Tansu and if she doesn't like that person then that person goes.'

Suleyman, his face a picture of disbelief, frowned. 'But why?'

'Because she has control of all the money,' Latife said simply. 'All she has ever wanted to do is make us all happy but, Allah forgive her, she has to do it in ways that she likes and understands. She is, in this, like a man, a father, you know. If one doesn't conform then one is thrown out into the world with nothing. And we were all born to such poverty

'But if your sister denied you something that you really wanted,' Ìkmen said, 'then surely killing Ruya Urfa was no punishment for that Tansu hated the girl.'

'Yes. Like I said, you have to understand my sister and my family in order to understand why this happened. You also have to know just how clever I am. I do hope that you gentlemen have a lot of time to spare.'

'My parents were living in Adana, the biggest village in Turkey, when we were born. My father worked packing fruit. We were very poor – poor Kurds. But then just after Yilmaz was born, when I was twelve, my father died and we became still poorer.

'At the time and in fact for some few years previously, my sister Tansu who was then sixteen had been having singing lessons from an old Armenian woman who lived down by the Ulu Cami. My sister's talent had, so my mother always said, been apparent almost from birth. It is said that before I was born, an asik who came to our quarter in order to play and sing the songs of the people heard my sister's voice and predicted a great future for her. So the singing lessons were of great importance even when we were destitute after my father's death. The singing had to go on.