Harem by Barbara Nadel Page A

appetites would lead them.
    Arto considered ringing İkmen to give him the news but then thought better of it and decided to go and tell him in person. This was not, after all, just any body he had here, it was the body of Hulya’s best friend. Çetin would have to think very carefully about how to tell his daughter what the post mortem had so far found, so it was probably best to discuss it fully with him first. He would, of course, have to take him away from the apartment in order to be able to speak freely – probably, knowing Çetin, to one of his favourite bars.
    Arto scrubbed his hands and arms until they were red, put his jacket on and made his way out towards the car park. It was already gone six o’clock when he finally emerged from the confines of the mortuary. The sun was still strong, however, so he took his jacket off before he got into his car. As he fired up the engine, he flicked the switch to turn on the air conditioning – a luxury that Arto, with his palace on the northern shore of the Bosphorus and his elegant, wealthy wife, took for granted. His friend Çetin İkmen lived an entirely other kind of life and so Arto would need the air conditioning to cool him down before he toiled up the many stairs to the policeman’s stuffy, chaotic Sultanahmet apartment.
    As he walked from the kitchen into the hall, İkmen looked down at Hulya where she sat on the floor with the telephone in her lap, talking to her mother. Her little face, which now looked folded in on itself with grief, was still wet with tears. Earlier when Canan, Hatice’s sister, had returned from staying over with one of her aunts, Hulya had rushed over to the İpek apartment to comfort her. Both girls had hugged, crying with misery and disbelief. Behind them, in the dark depths of the apartment, İkmen had just glimpsed Hürrem İpek’s devastated face, now still and lifeless as if the core of her being had dried to stone. That he would have to formally interview both his neighbour and his daughter about the events surrounding Hatice’s death was not something that he looked forward to. In the meantime, however, he would let Hulya talk alone to her mother.
    ‘But, I mean, we can’t really know where people go to when they die, can we?’ he heard his daughter ask his wife. He watched as Hulya’s face briefly resolved into a frown as she listened to Fatma’s response. Just in case one or other of them should decide to draw him into the conversation, İkmen made a quick getaway into the living room and then out onto the balcony. OK, so like his late mother he might have the odd premonition, experience the occasional ghost, but the afterlife and particularly traditional Islamic concepts of it were not his province. That was Fatma’s area; she, after all, almost alone in the vast İkmen household, believed.
    Bülent was already out on the balcony when İkmen arrived. His sweet young face was tinged with gold as he turned his features up to the still fierce setting sun. His father sat down beside him and lit a cigarette.
    ‘Your mother’s helping your sister to come to some sort of peace with what has happened,’ he said as he exhaled smoke out across Divanyolu Caddesi with its teeming pavements and packed trams. ‘I’m glad it’s her. I couldn’t have done it.’
    Bülent shrugged. ‘But you see death all the time,’ he said.
    ‘Doesn’t mean that I’m inured to it,’ İkmen responded. ‘Even when it happens to people I don’t know, I’m still shocked. But when it’s someone close . . .’ He sighed. ‘You don’t get over it, you just get used to it. There are times when I think about your grandfather and the pain is so intense it feels like I’ve been punched in the stomach.’
    Bülent sipped some water from his bottle and then leaned back and closed his eyes. At eighteen he still wasn’t mature enough to be comfortable around emotions like the ones his father was expressing. And so the two of them sat in silence