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chairs and lit a cigarette. ‘I tried to teach him how to use spreadsheets, preparing him for some level of responsibility in my business, but he wasn’t interested.’
    ‘Our son was a very . . . self-contained boy, Inspector,’ Sibel Ataman said gently. ‘He felt that our work was trite.’ She turned her head and looked hard at the tower beyond the window. ‘Which it is.’
    Her husband first threw the back of her head a murderous glance and then looked back at Süleyman. ‘As far as I’m concerned you can take anything you want,’ he said, and then with his voice breaking he continued, ‘My son is dead, I have no use for childish things.’
    ‘Thank you, Mr Ataman.’
    ‘Just let us know as soon as you can when we can bury him.’
    ‘Of course.’
    Süleyman and Çöktin stood up. Sibel Ataman turned back from the window to smile at them.
    ‘Tell me, gentlemen,’ she said softly, ‘do you believe that our Muslim death traditions are indeed fact . . .’
    Her husband put his head in his hands and groaned.
    ‘. . . that the soul of the deceased is in torment until the body is buried in the ground?’
    ‘Mrs Ataman, I can’t really—’
    ‘For the love of Allah, Sibel, will you stop?’ Ataman, his face puce now with both rage and suppressed despair, shouted. ‘Your son is dead, you’re too old and too frigid to have any more children! Your son is dead! He’s dead! He’s gone! My son . . .’
    And then he began to cry.
    Süleyman and Çöktin removed themselves to Cem Ataman’s bedroom, leaving his father weeping in his antique-stuffed living room. Sibel Ataman did not move to comfort or even look at her husband.
    Night had fallen by the time Gülay Arat’s body entered the mortuary. Her father, a hard, thuggish-looking man in his mid-forties, arrived to identify her formally, after which she entered the care of Arto Sarkissian. In spite of the lateness of the hour, he had decided to begin his examination of the corpse immediately. As he told Constable Hikmet Yıldız, who had accompanied the body from Anadolu Kavaḡı to the mortuary, ‘Inspector Süleyman is very keen for me to compare this girl’s body to that of the boy we found in Eyüp,’ and then turning to one of his technicians he said, ‘Ali, I’ll need the subject in number five, please.’
    ‘Yes, Doctor.’
    The technician disappeared into another room from which, a little later, Yıldız heard grinding, metallic noises.
    ‘I take it you’re staying with us, Constable?’ the doctor said as he arranged an alarming selection of instruments on a table beside the still-covered body of the girl.
    ‘Until either Inspector Süleyman or Sergeant Çöktin arrives, yes, sir.’ Süleyman in particular, praise be to Allah, always preferred to attend these things personally as opposed to letting some subordinate, like young Yıldız, do it for him. But he and Çöktin hadn’t yet returned from either the Atamans’ or the Arats’.
    ‘Well, it isn’t like you haven’t seen anything like this before,’ Arto said as he pulled the bloodied sheet from Gülay Arat’s greenish-white body.
    Yıldız swallowed hard. ‘No, sir.’
    The technician returned with the sheet-covered occupant of ‘number five’. Thin tendrils of water vapour, from the refrigeration process he had undergone, rose from the anonymous lump that had been Cem Ataman.
    ‘All right, Ali, uncover him, please,’ Arto said with a smile.
    The middle-aged technician did just that, and Hikmet Yıldız felt his lunch, which had been his favourite kokoreç (grilled sheep intestines) begin to move in an upward direction. If there was another colour beyond green, Cem Ataman’s body was that colour. Yıldız looked away while Arto Sarkissian began his examination of the wound in the girl’s chest whilst simultaneously referring to Cem Ataman’s file.
    ‘Unlike the Ataman boy, we have no weapon,’ he said, ‘and this body had been disturbed.’
    He moved