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mansions over in Brush Park. Zeke reckons he killed Elvis.’
    ‘Is there any evidence for that?’ İkmen asked.
    ‘No. Not that I know of.’ He sighed again. ‘What you have tounderstand is there was a lot of unrest here back in the sixties and seventies. Racial stuff. And being a Melungeon . . .’
    ‘Being a Melungeon?’
    Diaz smiled. ‘It’s a bit like being Hispanic; it depends on who you talk to,’ he said. ‘To the Anglos, Melungeons, like Hispanics,
     are just short of being black. Not black, but definitely not white, mixed race. And to blacks, it’s the same. Melungeons aren’t
     black but they aren’t white either. It means a double dose of prejudice and without the backing of the numbers that we Hispanics
     have. I feel sorry for them. They’re a real minority in this country, and they’re a minority without even one consistent identity.’
    ‘But if Melungeons come from the south, what is Mr Goins doing all the way up in the north here?’ İkmen asked.
    ‘Oh, he came, like all the southerners did, for work,’ Diaz replied. ‘Goins’ family, and Martha’s, and my own people all came
     to the Motor City a long time ago, for work.’
    The internet was a wonderful thing. İkmen didn’t have any idea about how it worked or why it had come into being, but he approved
     of the instant access it could afford to information, even if his views on social networking were somewhat jaded. His younger
     children spent far too much time communicating on line about basically, in his opinion, not very much.
    As soon as they’d returned to their hotel suite, Süleyman had wanted to go straight to bed. Jet-lagged and exhausted, he’d
     nevertheless got it together enough to clean the bathroom, and had then had a shower. In the meantime, İkmen had availed himself
     of his colleague’s laptop computer.
    Lieutenant Diaz had told him something about how Detroit had come to be home to so many migrants from the southern states.
     Almost as soon as the motor plants were first built at the beginning of the twentieth century, they had needed more workers
     than the local area could provide. To make up the shortfall, labour was recruitedfrom the poor southern states, where segregation of whites and blacks was still harshly enforced. And so white ‘hillbillies’
     and the black descendants of slaves came north to work in factories that were not strictly segregated and which paid more
     money than anyone from south of the old Mason-Dixon Line could ever have dreamed of earning. But money wasn’t always everything
     to everyone, and some of the new arrivals from the south were loath to work with each other. White and black, the ‘hillbillies’
     and the ‘niggers’, began to clash. Acts of cruelty and discrimination and riots ensued. And yet still the ‘Big Three’ motor
     companies – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – kept on recruiting from the south well into the 1960s, when Ezekiel Goins
     and his family had arrived.
    İkmen looked up the word ‘Melungeon’. To his surprise, there were lots of entries. One of these told him about a delegation
     of Melungeons who had visited Ankara. Another told him about some genetic research that ‘proved’ that the Melungeons were
     in fact Turks. It was a whole new world to him, and, what was more, it seemed to be one based upon few facts and a lot of
     speculation. Of course the story about the shipwrecked Ottoman sailors could be true. İkmen knew that because he was aware
     that anything was possible. But he doubted it. Melungeons, as far as he could tell, were or generally had been illiterate
     mountain people. Originally centred around the Appalachian Mountains, their communities claimed many and various heritages,
     as Diaz had indicated. The only thing they had in common was their status as Melungeons, which made them all outcasts. And
     as İkmen ploughed through the available literature, he discovered that things hadn’t improved when they’d moved