Free River of The Dead by Barbara Nadel Page B

‘I’ll go and telephone the dentist. Cancel.’
    Without another word, she left the room. This, Bülent knew, was not healthy. His mother wasn’t leaving the apartment in case her prodigal son suddenly upped and disappeared again. Bekir knew it too, Bülent felt. In spite of his soothing words Bekir was sitting across the table from him looking very smug. Bülent knew he’d have to speak to his father about it soon, and also about that quite irritating musty smell that seemed to be all over the apartment these days.

Chapter 5
----
    About an hour’s drive to the east of Gaziantep (or forty minutes with Inspector Taner behind the wheel) is the town of Birecik. Sitting astride the Euphrates river, Birecik is famous for two things: the dam of the same name that lies to the north of the town and the fact that the shores of the Euphrates at this point are home to a particularly ugly, if rare, bird called the bald ibis. So unusual is this creature that every year people come from all over the world to see it. Not so the dam, the building of which necessitated the flooding of numerous local villages including the site where the fabulous mosaics of Zeugma, now in the Gaziantep museum, had been discovered. As they drove at lightning speed towards the town, Süleyman thought gloomily that he’d never managed to get to the museum on Zelfa’s behalf. Even though he knew that his wife had only mentioned Zeugma as a distraction from the fear she felt at his going away, he was sorry he hadn’t been able to see the mosaics. Now he didn’t know whether it was ever going to be possible. He and Taner had brought all their luggage with them on this trip. Chances were they were either going to stay in Birecik or move on eastwards.
    It was midday by the time they reached what was a rather scruffy town, albeit one with a fabulous Roman fortress that Taner told him had been captured by Christian crusaders in the tenth century. Not that such a span of time was considered to be that vast in the east. As the Mardin policewoman was very quick to point out, her father had older things in his yard back home.
    The Euphrates river is to the west of the town and is spanned by a bridge that was constructed back in the 1950s. It was in a teahouse on a cliff overlooking the bridge and the river below that Taner and Süleyman met the captain of the local Jandarma. Clad in the familiar green uniform of the paramilitary force that polices many rural areas in Turkey, Captain Hilmi Erdur, whom Taner had contacted by telephone earlier, was young and very tired-looking.
    ‘Sir, madam,’ he said, bowing to both Süleyman and Taner as they approached him, ‘I do apologise for my appearance. I’m afraid we had an incident last night and as a consequence I have not slept for almost two days. Please . . .’
    He pulled out chairs for them and then called for tea and a clean ashtray.
    As usual, Inspector Taner got straight to the point. ‘Captain, we’re looking for a woman called Bulbul. She comes originally from my city of Mardin and she is the aunt of the escaped convict Yusuf Kaya. I don’t know her exact age but I made a call back to the station in Mardin just before we left Gaziantep and a colleague there reckons she must be somewhere in her sixties. He, my colleague, thinks that Bulbul is probably the sister of Yusuf Kaya’s father. Apparently, or so it is said, she met a Birecik man in the bazaar in Mardin back in the late fifties and love blossomed. She left with him, and there was quite a scandal at the time. I don’t know the man’s name; apparently it is not spoken of in Mardin. All that is known is that he is a farmer and he is a lot older than his wife.’
    Captain Erdur looked grave. ‘Like everyone else, I have heard of Yusuf Kaya, and I know that his family are powerful and dangerous. I didn’t know that his aunt lived in Birecik.’
    ‘You know a lady fitting this description?’
    ‘A Mrs Bulbul Kaplan lives with her elderly