Free A Noble Killing by Barbara Nadel Page A

kidney-shaped dressing table and said, ‘Well?’
    ‘Sir, this is quite an easy-going building,’ İzzet said. ‘You know how posh they are over here.’
    Süleyman did. Aristocrats they generally were not, but Şişli people were nearly always well-to-do, and they guarded their goods and their privacy jealously.
    ‘People come and go without hindrance,’ İzzet continued. ‘The kapıcı only challenges tradesman, police, gypsies.’
    ‘Yes, but he usually knows who comes and goes, even if he is instructed to look the other way,’ Süleyman said.
    ‘Yes, well we did get to that,’ İzzet said.
    ‘Good.’
    ‘And none of Mr İdiz’s regulars came to the apartment either last night or this morning. A young man of about twenty-five came to visit someone this morning, and then there was a gypsy last night, but the kapıcı got rid of him. All the other visitors were women.’
    ‘Could have been a woman,’ Süleyman said as he put on a pair of plastic gloves and then began to look in a small bookcase that was beside the dressing table. ‘Go and get descriptions from him, İzzet. Men and women. Just because the man was homosexual doesn’t rule out his being killed by a woman. His sexuality may very well have been irrelevant to his death.’
    İzzet Melik left to go down to see the kapıcı . Süleyman riffled through Mr İdiz’s many books by luminaries such as Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis and Iris Murdoch. Mr İdiz it seemed, had liked to read, if not as passionately as he liked to listen to music. His collections of CDs and sheet music were both vast. In addition, all of this material was well-thumbed, indicating that as a teacher of music he was clearly very busy.
    Sergeant Melik came back into the room and said, ‘ Kapıcı is going to make a list, with descriptions of as much as he can remember.’
    ‘Good.’ Süleyman scanned the room and then said, ‘Any sign of any sort of diary or appointment book? He was a private teacher; he must have had some sort of schedule.’
    ‘Not yet, sir, no,’ İzzet replied.
    ‘Well, then maybe once the doctor has arrived, we should make that our priority,’ Süleyman said. ‘If nothing else, we will have to contact his pupils to let them and their families know that Mr İdiz is no longer giving piano lessons.’
    Inspector Metin İskender looked at İkmen over the top of the very thin and expensive reading glasses he had only recently started wearing. ‘My experience of the sexting phenomenon usually involves rings, as in groups of males, targeting one or more lone female,’ he said. ‘They threaten, exploit, usually blackmail and then move on.’
    Metin İskender was much younger than either İkmen or Süleyman. In spite of coming from a very poor background, he had married well and risen through the ranks of the police very quickly. He was clever, arrogant and sometimes charmless, but he was totally committed to his job and he was good at it. In recent years he had been given the task of trying to combat the rising number of crimes perpetrated using mobile phone technology. This had taken him into some very outlandish corners of the human psyche.
    ‘A sexting operation will generally start just with one boy and one girl,’ he continued. ‘The girl will either come from a very traditional family or a semi-liberal background. She will almost never, in my experience, come from the academic elite or even from the social elite.’
    ‘Because parents in those groups are too liberal about sexual matters?’
    ‘In reality they may or may not be, as you know, Inspector,’ İskender said. ‘But the sexters dare not take that risk. Traditional girls are much easier to blackmail. So this boy will basically groom the girl by telling her that he loves her, and eventually he will ask her to send him photographs of herself. Clothed at first, but later semi- and then totally naked. He may even ask her to abuse herself on camera.’
    İkmen shook his head. ‘What can you