River of The Dead by Barbara Nadel

doctor had called to let him have Seraphim’s details just that morning. Apparently the Syrian, like Süleyman himself, was very appreciative of old buildings.
    ‘Mrs Kaplan,’ Taner said as she took a glass of tea out of the older woman’s hands and sat down, ‘we have to talk to you about your nephew, Yusuf Kaya.’
    Bulbul Kaplan looked upwards, presumably to where her husband was sleeping, and then sat down beside Taner. She looked, Süleyman felt, strained now. Up on the cliff with a dead body below her she had been fine, but . . .
    ‘I . . . I don’t see my family, Inspector Taner,’ Bulbul said slowly. ‘There was a . . . a falling-out, as I am sure someone back home would have told you.’
    ‘I know that you left Mardin in order to marry your husband, yes,’ Taner said. ‘But, Mrs Kaplan, any enmity that might have resulted from that did not I think impact directly upon your nephew Yusuf.’
    Bulbul Kaplan looked at Taner, genuinely struck. ‘Not impact? Inspector, I left my clan! You are from Mardin – you know! I married a man they did not want me to marry! How could that not impact upon the son of my brother? I know that Yusuf is a criminal but he is still a Kaya; he still protects the family honour!’
    ‘And yet, Mrs Kaplan, we have reason to believe that you have seen Yusuf in recent times.’
    ‘Who?’ Bulbul Kaplan was indignant. Again she looked upwards. She lowered her voice before she spoke, but she was obviously upset. ‘Who says that I see Yusuf? Yusuf is in prison in İstanbul!’
    ‘Mrs Kaplan, it doesn’t matter who says what,’ Taner said. ‘Have you seen your nephew Yusuf in the last few days?’
    ‘Last few days? He’s in prison! Yusuf Kaya is—’
    ‘He escaped, Mrs Kaplan,’ Taner said. Both she and Süleyman looked at the two working, if silent, plasma television screens in the room. Bulbul Kaplan, unlike her husband, could see, and if she could see she, like the rest of the country, had to know that Yusuf Kaya had escaped from Kartal Prison the previous weekend. She was lying and Inspector Taner as well as Süleyman and Bulbul Kaplan herself knew it. Not that Taner even began to allude to such a notion.
    ‘Have you seen or spoken to Yusuf Kaya in the last few days, Mrs Kaplan?’ Taner asked.
    ‘No!’ She was trying to keep her voice down but her tone was still hurt, though quite forceful too.
    ‘So did you see him before he went to prison?’ Taner asked.
    ‘No!’ Bulbul Kaplan leaned towards the other woman and said, ‘I don’t have anything to do with my family. That all finished when I married Gazi. They don’t see me, I don’t see them.’
    ‘And yet how did our informant know about even your existence if you have no contact?’ Taner asked. She would not reveal Anastasia’s name or where she lived, but she was going to use what she had said to get the truth from Bulbul Kaplan. ‘The information we received is not from a person you could possibly know. Yusuf does know this person and through him, so this person says, he or she is aware of you and of your relationship with Yusuf Kaya. Mrs Kaplan, if Yusuf Kaya came here—’
    ‘All right!’ She flung her arms up into the air and then let them rest in her lap. ‘All right, Yusuf came here.’ It was not much more than a whisper now.
    ‘When?’
    ‘Last year.’
    ‘When last year?’
    ‘I don’t know! Last year!’
    ‘Why? Why did he come here, Mrs Kaplan?’
    The older woman sighed. ‘Yusuf was just a baby when I left Mardin,’ she said. ‘Last year he came and found me.’
    Taner frowned. ‘What for? Weren’t you worried about that?’
    ‘In case he took revenge on behalf of our clan? No,’ Bulbul Kaplan said. ‘He came offering the hand of friendship and I saw no reason not to take it from him. To me he was kind and polite.’
    ‘And your husband?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What did your husband make of that?’
    Clan rivalries, especially in the east, were notoriously