aristocratic sons should want had over the years poisoned her relations with both of them. Strange, really, considering that it was her husband who had the aristocratic background. Nur herself was actually from a rather ambitious peasant family. Muhammed smiled to himself. Of course he should have been firmer with her years ago but . . .
Dr Halman smiled as she ushered the toothless hag into her office. She did briefly glance towards Muhammed as she moved back into her room but not, he thought, with any sense of recognition. It wasn’t a bad face. And although she was obviously middle-aged, Muhammed could see that Zelfa Halman was still an attractive prospect. Whether or not she was worthy of his son, though, he would not be able to deduce until he spoke to her. Although, of course, worthy or not, if Mehmet loved her then that would be that. His lovely little boy had, Muhammed mused rather sadly, grown into early middle age almost without his noticing. He was still handsome, but Mehmet’s eyes had, on the few occasions Muhammed had seen them lately, shown signs of having looked upon more than was good for them. Working with death for all these years cannot have helped, and then when the earthquake came, well . . . Muhammed, like so many other inhabitants of the north-western corner of the country, turned away from what was an almost unbearable memory. But when the small blonde woman came out of her office again, this time to usher the strange man and his mother into her room, Muhammed considered that perhaps such a soft and curvy little thing was just what his son needed to keep the spiky ghosts of the past at bay. And when Dr Halman smiled at him, Muhammed found himself smiling back with some enthusiasm.
Just after the smile, though, he left. One always thinks that courage should be natural to princes. But in this case it was not so.
Chapter 4
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‘Do you have any ideas about who might have wanted to harm your son, Mrs Berisha?’ İkmen asked when the ticking of the old clock in the corner of that darkened room threatened to damage his sanity.
‘No.’
Like all the rest of the Berishas’ responses so far, Aliya’s was heavily accented and monosyllabic. Only the blood drawn by their fingernails raking down their cheeks gave any hint of the anguish İkmen knew the mother and her daughter were experiencing. Real, if strangely silent, peasant mourning, not unlike the dramas he’d seen when Fatma’s father had died. A quick glance at a wide-eyed Suleyman told him that the younger man had not experienced as much of this sort of thing as he had.
İkmen looked at the dead man’s father, a motionless study in elderly disaffection. Not that Rahman Berisha was necessarily old. A windswept, disappointed face like that could be anything from fifty to seventy years old. ‘Anything you wish to add to what your wife has said, Mr Berisha?’
‘No.’
Even if the family’s answers had not been as suspiciously rapid and sure as they were, the look that fleetingly passed between Rahman and his daughter would have alerted İkmen to the possibility of something being amiss. It was a look, on the girl’s part at least, of almost hysterical fear. Not that İkmen, at this stage in the proceedings, gave voice to his suspicions.
‘So, what you’re saying then, Mr Berisha,’ he said, ‘is that you know everything there is to know about your twenty-five-year-old son.’
‘There are no secrets between blood,’ the Albanian replied. His use of the word ‘blood’ where İkmen would have used ‘family’ was something the policeman was accustomed to hearing from some of his own relatives. It was yet another cue for mental sirens to sound in his head. If Rifat’s murder was what it looked and sounded like, it was going to be very easy to solve. But then that was, İkmen knew from experience, all the more reason to act with extreme caution. Things were rarely, if ever, what they seemed.
After yet another pause that