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time during which İkmen briefly closed his eyes to gain some sort of respite from what he was increasingly viewing as an extreme case of the irrationality of grief.
    ‘Murder is a crime,’ he said slowly as if he were speaking to a group of children, ‘and as policemen it is our job to investigate it and, if possible, arrest the person responsible.’
    ‘Back home men resort only to the police if they are without family,’ Rahman Berisha said with some passion. ‘We make our own arrangements.’
    From the little he had learned from his Albanian relatives, İkmen knew that even with the fall of Albania’s corrupt communist regime in 1992, the country was still pretty much without coherent law enforcement. One of the few things he could recall his late father telling him about his mother was her amusement at even the idea of an Albanian legal system. Such a thing was, she had apparently said, a contradiction in terms.
    ‘Well, sir,’ İkmen said, ‘that may be so in Albania, but this is Turkey. And in Turkey if a man dies in mysterious circumstances, policemen like Inspector Suleyman and myself are obliged to investigate.’
    ‘If it is your will,’ Rahman Berisha said with a shrug.
    ‘Oh, it is,’ İkmen replied as he moved towards Engelushjia Berisha. ‘It is my will, Mr Berisha, of that you can be certain.’ He put his hand out to the girl. With a quick glance at her father, she took it and left the apartment with the officers.
    Not another sound was made until Engelushjia and the policemen had gone. Then, her mouth stretched wide with pain, Aliya Berisha let out the kind of scream that freezes blood.
    The two orderlies had to use some vigour to get the stretcher up onto the table. This was not unusual. The orderlies knew that death tended to increase both the weight and the unwieldiness of bodies. Even small children could, on occasion, prove problematic – an unpleasant experience that all but one of those present in the room had been through several times.
    The older of the two orderlies unzipped the bag and the younger one pulled the two sides apart to reveal what remained of the young man inside. Then Arto Sarkissian moved a metal gurney into position beside the table. Looking at the two orderlies, he said, ‘Lift on three?’
    ‘OK, doctor.’
    ‘One . . .’
    The two men slipped their hands underneath the body and braced themselves.
    ‘Two . . . Three.’
    With one smooth, breathless movement, the body almost seemed to float out of the bag and onto the gurney, the tatters of its once white shirt flapping briefly before the corpse came to rest on the metal trolley.
    ‘Good,’ Arto said. He moved into position beside the corpse.
    ‘Do you want us to get ready, sir?’ asked the older assistant, Ali Mertez.
    ‘You can,’ the doctor replied as he adjusted his spectacles to look closely at the corpse, ‘although best keep out of the way until I call you. We can’t start straight away. Inspector İkmen is bringing this boy’s young sister in to do the formal identification. They should be here any time now.’
    ‘Shouldn’t we clean him up a bit for her then?’ the younger man – who was Ali’s nephew, İsmet – said.
    ‘Don’t be stupid,’ his uncle began. ‘You—’
    ‘Sadly, Miss Berisha will have to see her brother in this state,’ the doctor said, looking rather more kindly upon İsmet Mertez than his uncle was. ‘This looks like a murder and so we must treat the corpse as a source of forensic evidence. All we can do is place a clean sheet across it. As long as Miss Berisha can see her brother’s face . . .’
    ‘I’ll get you one, doctor,’ Ali said and quickly left the room.
    Now alone with the Armenian and his charge, Ali’s nephew felt both awkward and stupid at his naïveté and said, ‘I’m sorry, doctor, for being a bit slow about this being a murder and . . . well . . . I am new. I mean, I find the work interesting . . .’
    ‘That’s