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their fortunes in the big city. Unfortunately, her sadness had caught the attention, and inflamed the affections, of the owner of one of the small pidecis down below the apartment building on Divanyolu. Mr Emin, at seventy-six, was in love – it was something he demonstrated all the time via his daily shouting sessions with Halide’s father.
    ‘I’m a man of means, I’ll provide well for her!’ Mr Emin shouted through the closed front door of Mr Gören’s apartment.
    ‘My daughter is fully occupied looking after me, her father, thank you,’ Mr Gören responded.
    ‘But you must want your daughter to be married! It must be a worry for you! She is no longer young! An old maid . . .’
    In spite of the heat, İkmen shoved his head under his pillow and sighed. Marriage, sex, sex, marriage – it was all he’d heard about, thought about for months. Young girls getting married, older girls not getting married. And now Çiçek, suddenly made aware of her age by the occasion of her sister’s marriage, rekindling her teenage crush on Mehmet Süleyman. Poor Çiçek, İkmen’s beloved ‘old maid’, glamoured by a man possibly infected with AIDS . . .
    Allah, but it would be good to get back to police work again in the morning! But what a shame it was that someone had to die in order for the adrenaline to really get going. Unless, of course, that person were either Mr Gören or Mr Emin.
    ‘What do you mean, “what did he do”?’
    ‘I mean, Mr Ataman, what were your son’s interests? Who did he associate with?’
    Giving the Atamans the news about their son’s yet again delayed burial was proving, if anything, even more distressing than telling the Arat family that their daughter had been found dead. At least at the Arats’ the girl’s young brother had cried . . .
    ‘You saw the note. Consorting with “devils”, apparently.’ Mete Ataman threw his long arms petulantly into the air. ‘He was eighteen and chose to give his life, seemingly, to something entirely fictional! What else do eighteen year olds do, Inspector Süleyman? You tell me.’
    ‘If I hadn’t been in my office day and night, we might have been able to stop him doing this terrible thing to himself.’
    All heads turned towards the thin woman in black, sitting, dead-eyed, beside a window that looked out directly across at the Galata Tower.
    Ataman, his face now red with fury, bore down upon her, one finger wagging violently into her face. ‘You said you wanted to be independent, Sibel! I gave you that job, I made it happen! It’s what you wanted!’
    ‘I know! I know!’
    ‘So don’t pretend you would have enjoyed being around for your son—’
    ‘I’m not pretending! I’m just . . .’ She looked up at Süleyman, her eyes wet. ‘So unhappy, my son! So morbid! You know, he used to cut his arms—’
    ‘Sibel!’
    ‘Yes, we do know that your son did harm himself, Mrs Ataman.’
    ‘Just about cut the skin, you mean!’ Mete Ataman put in acidly. ‘All for effect! Like those so-called Gothic freaks up in town! All for attention!’
    ‘Be that as it may,’ Süleyman said, ‘I would like your permission to search your son’s room, Mr Ataman. I—’
    ‘You’ve looked at his things!’
    ‘In light of this other, similar incident, I would like in particular to have access to your son’s computer . . .’
    Only fifteen-year-old Nurdoğan Arat had had any idea what his sister, Gülay, liked to do. ‘She liked her computer,’ he’d said as his parents, two middle-aged socialites, reeking of alcohol, looked on blankly. ‘She spent hours on it.’ Locked into her room apparently, doing what Nurdoğan could only describe as ‘something’. But it was a start. Maybe, via the computer, Cem and Gülay had come into contact with each other. After all, or so it would seem, they had at one time, at least, shared rather dark interests.
    ‘He only played games on it.’ Ataman threw himself down into one of his leather