A Passion for Killing by Barbara Nadel

about what he had just been told before getting out of the car and going towards his parents’ house. Deniz Koç had been, apparently, ‘mad’, although quite what his actual diagnosis had been, he didn’t know. Out in the wild and remote east maybe he didn’t even have a diagnosis. After all, Cabbar and Emine Soylu must have put him in that place towards the end of the seventies or early eighties at the latest. A time when things had been very bad, very violent all over the country. Political unrest of the rightists, leftists and the Kurdish population had culminated in the imposition of martial law in 1981. Süleyman remembered it well. Cabbar Soylu’s early years in İstanbul must have been tough, he’d subsequently done very well for himself. His success, however, could not, by its very nature, be applauded. Soylu had been a gangster and a thug and his life was not going to be any great loss to anyone beyond his family. If the peeper had killed Cabbar Soylu, did this mean that the peeper, as well as disliking homosexuals, hated gangsters too? Süleyman got out of his car and wondered about the types of people the peeper could conceivably dislike and how Mürsel could possibly know about that.
    Mr Wilhelmus Klaassen of the consulate of the Netherlands in İstanbul was an extremely tall, dark-haired man in his late forties. Like most Dutchmen he spoke flawless English but, in addition, he spoke Turkish too, which was quite a treat for İkmen. Mr Klaassen’s Turkish was the best the policeman had ever heard coming from the mouth of a foreign national.
    ‘How long have you been in Turkey, Mr Klaassen?’ İkmen asked as he followed his host into the latter’s enormous modern home.
    ‘Three years now,’ Mr Klaassen replied. ‘And you don’t have to be formal. Call me Wim, please.’
    Wim. He was so friendly and seemingly open that İkmen was almost tempted to ask him to call him ‘Çetin’. But thirty years plus of maintaining a professional distance from ‘the public’ militated against it and so he just smiled as he sat down in a very large chair beside a very bright window.
    Wilhelmus Klaassen and his wife Doris lived in one of the higher up and more prestigious parts of Peri. Their property consisted of a two-storey house with four bedrooms and two bathrooms as well as a considerable garden with a swimming pool. Every room afforded spectacular views of the Belgrad Forest, like the one İkmen was gazing at now. Stunned, he was still trying to take in the knowledge that ‘Wim’ had only started to learn Turkish one month before his posting to İstanbul when ‘Doris’ brought him a very welcome glass of tea.
    ‘We have to learn other languages, Inspector,’ she said as she handed the glass and saucer over to him with a smile. ‘No one but the Dutch speaks Dutch.’
    ‘Not many people outside Turkey speak Turkish, present company excepted,’ İkmen said and then with a view to just getting the next question over with because he had to, he said, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
    Western people, especially Americans and Canadians, didn’t generally like smoking and so he didn’t have very high hopes. But he was to be pleasantly surprised.
    Wim laughed. ‘Oh, you look so worried, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Don’t be.’ He took an ashtray off one of the many coffee tables in that vast living room and gave it to İkmen. ‘I am a Dutchman, I smoke cigars. It’s what we do.’
    The three of them passed pleasantries then about the house, the view and the various lovely things the Klaassens had in their home before they got down to what they all knew they had to talk about.
    ‘How well did you know Yaşar Uzun?’ İkmen asked as the couple both surveyed him sympathetically with their big, blue eyes.
    ‘Not very well,’ Wim replied pulling on a long, black cheroot as he did so. ‘We know Raşit Bey. We were introduced to him and his shop by the previous Dutch consul who did a lot of business with him.