Read A Noble Killing for Free Online

child. She’d been old back in the 1960s, when Mehmet’s mother had first engaged her to look after her two boys. Zoë, he recalled, had been a Phanar, a native İstanbul Greek. In common with the Süleyman family, she had been a relic from a long-gone past. Like the Phanar Greeks, the Ottoman Turkish Süleyman family were a diminishing breed. With no sultanate or empire to serve, as well as no money to speak of, families like the Süleymans were in an unstoppable decline. Nobody in modern Turkey cared that Mehmet’s grandfather had been a prince. His own son, Yusuf, admittedly still a small child, didn’t even know. Mehmet’s own upbringing had been very different. He had known who and what his grandfather had been almost with his first breath.
    The old woman turned and muttered something that sounded rough and countrified and was most certainly not Greek. A Kurdish dialect, maybe? As she went back into her apartment, so the door to the apartment he had been knocking on opened.
    ‘Mr Ford?’ he asked the tall, ginger-haired man who stood in the doorway. He spoke in English, which, he imagined, would be rather more comfortable for this man.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I am Inspector Süleyman of the İstanbul police.’ He extended a hand, which the other man shook. ‘You reported the fire down in the Seyhan apartment yesterday.’
    ‘Yes.’ Richard Ford, an American, was probably in his early forties, Süleyman’s own sort of age. ‘Is there a problem?’
    ‘No.’ Süleyman smiled. ‘May I come in, sir?’
    ‘Oh, yes.’ For a moment the American looked a little flustered, but then he stepped aside to allow Süleyman in and said, ‘Please . . .’
    Like the Seyhans’ apartment, Richard Ford’s was centred around a large square hall. In common with Turkish homes, it had a small mat behind the front door covered with pairs of discarded shoes. Süleyman duly slipped his own shoes off and then followed the American into a big, light living room. In front of one of the two large picture windows at the back of the room he saw a small woman sitting at a computer screen. She looked up, smiled and said, ‘Hi.’
    ‘My wife, Jane.’ Richard Ford gestured towards a large red sofa and said, ‘Please, take a seat.’ He looked over at his wife as Süleyman sat. ‘This man is from the police,’ he continued. ‘About the apartment downstairs.’
    ‘Oh, right.’ Jane Ford stood up. She was tiny. Short and thin, she wore camouflage combat trousers and a sleeveless red T-shirt. She was, Süleyman reckoned, about ten years younger than her husband.
    ‘Mr Ford,’ Süleyman began, ‘we do not yet know what started the fire down in Apartment A, but the fire investigators, as well as our own people, are trying to find out. Can you please tell me how and when you first noticed it?’
    Richard Ford told the same story he had told to the fire chief. He’d been coming back to his apartment when he saw smoke curling out from underneath the Seyhan’s front door. He’d called the fire brigade. ‘I’d seen the two Seyhan boys go off to work when I looked out the window at about six thirty. I went out to get bread at around eight,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see the parents or the girl and so I didn’t know who might be in there.’
    ‘They have a very pretty daughter, don’t they?’ his wife said. Much darker than her husband, she had short black hair cut into a pixie style. She too, Süleyman thought, was pretty in her way. ‘Is she OK?’
    After a not inconsiderable amount of coaxing, the fire chief had eventually managed to get the name of Gözde’s dentist from her family. With any luck he or she was now checking the girl’s records.
    ‘We heard the firemen found a body,’ Jane Ford continued. ‘Is that the daughter? Is it Gözde?’
    Süleyman couldn’t tell them what he, at least officially, did not know. ‘The body is as yet unidentified,’ he said. ‘Mr Ford, Mrs Ford, do you know the Seyhan family? Do you