Read Online River of The Dead by Barbara Nadel - Free Book Online Page B

this brothel. Psychopathic he might be, but Kaya was far too devious to make the mistake of staying with someone as obvious as Anastasia.
    In truth, Süleyman was still puzzling over what the old woman at the Zeytounian house had meant by the ‘Cobweb World’. If it was that such places were stuck in the past by virtue of neglect, he could understand it. But whether intended or not there had been, he felt, something more esoteric behind what she had said. Unlike Çetin İkmen, who had a natural sympathy with and understanding of things unseen, Süleyman was far from comfortable with the metaphysical, in spite of the old woman’s words. And yet he’d felt something in that room beyond natural curiosity, and the old woman had said that going to Mardin was going to expose him to more of the Cobweb World. The thought of it made him shudder. Now that Kaya was not, it seemed, in Gaziantep, it was very probable that he’d gone back home to his dreadful clan in Mardin, apparently the epicentre of the Cobweb World. In his mind he conjured pictures of his befezzed Ottoman ancestors. Would he feel them at his side when he went to Mardin? Was the Cobweb World a kind of permanent and possibly tangible haunted state of being? He was linking that thought to why, possibly, Inspector Taner had been so keen to get him out of the Zeytounian house when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
    ‘She’s not right, you know.’ Anastasia Akyuz blew a lungful of cigarette smoke into his face.
    ‘I’m sorry?’ It was like waking violently from a very peculiar dream.
    ‘Edibe Taner,’ the woman continued. ‘I knew her at school. She wasn’t right there either.’
    Süleyman frowned. ‘What?’
    ‘Well, why would she want to go and join the police? Why would any woman?’ Anastasia moved in closer to Süleyman and looked him critically up and down. ‘I heard her say you are from İstanbul.’
    ‘Yes, I am.’
    ‘You know Yusuf.’
    ‘Yusuf Kaya is known to me,’ he said. He didn’t tell her he’d arrested him.
    ‘Edibe thinks that I still keep in touch with him, but I don’t,’ she said. ‘Why does she think that I send my daughter to university in Syria? I am Suriani, yes, but Turkey is my country. I send Gülizar to study in Damascus because I don’t want her father to find her. I know what Yusuf is, even—’
    ‘Anastasia!’
    She looked up. The voice came from the top of the tatty stone and mud brick house. Inspector Taner was waving what looked like a small piece of paper at her.
    ‘You need to see this.’ She disappeared from the window.
    Anastasia shook her head and closed her eyes. ‘God!’ she murmured.
    Outside with Süleyman and the brothel keeper again, Taner pushed the paper underneath Anastasia’s nose.
    ‘Why is there a photograph of Yusuf Kaya underneath your bed, Anastasia? I think it was taken recently, and it was taken here in this house.’
    Briefly, the brothel keeper put her head in her hands. Then she looked up and said, ‘Look, Yusuf came here last year, I admit it. Maybe two months before he was arrested. I . . . Look, Edibe, I admit I still had a thing for him then, we went to bed . . . but I don’t let him see Gülizar and I don’t know where he is now. I haven’t seen him since that time, I swear to God.’
    ‘Why should I believe you?’ the Mardin policewoman said. ‘You told me you hadn’t seen Yusuf for years. That was a lie.’
    Anastasia groaned. Edibe Taner put the photograph into a small plastic bag and slotted it into her handbag.
    ‘Miss Akyuz,’ Süleyman said urgently, ‘if you know anything at all about where Yusuf Kaya might be you must tell us – now. Aiding and abetting an escaped prisoner is, as I am sure you know, a very serious offence.’
    The woman’s dark, make-up-smudged eyes darted round nervously for a moment until she said, ‘I haven’t seen Yusuf this year, I swear. I swear! But I know that one of his aunts lives at Birecik. She broke from the Kaya clan