River of The Dead by Barbara Nadel Page A

intractable. He could no more imagine Yusuf Kaya and Bulbul Kaplan cosying up after such an incident than he could see the convict figuratively in bed with her husband.
    Bulbul Kaplan looked down at the floor. ‘Gazi was in hospital at the time. His eyes . . . He has operations from time to time . . .’
    ‘So Yusuf Kaya came to visit you when your husband was in hospital,’ Taner said. ‘Did it not occur to you, Mrs Kaplan, that perhaps that was planned? For Yusuf to see you alone? To accept your hospitality . . .’
    ‘Yusuf appeared and I have no doubt that it was planned, but . . .’ She smiled a little. Her face was round and pleasant, only her amazing blue eyes giving a clue as to the beautiful girl she must once have been. ‘My husband’s family have been good to me, but they are not my blood. Yusuf,’ she looked up and said simply, ‘is. He’s a nice man, at least he was to me. What he has done—’
    ‘Yusuf has killed people,’ Süleyman said. ‘Until we arrested him he was one of the most powerful drug dealers in İstanbul.’
    Bulbul Kaplan shrugged. ‘He is my nephew. When I spoke to Yusuf it was like talking to my father once again.’
    ‘Did he ask you for money?’
    ‘I gave him food and drink, he stayed one night,’ she said. ‘He came because he was curious to meet me, that was all.’ She sat up straight and added, ‘I appreciated it too. But I haven’t seen him since. I couldn’t allow it anyway, not with Gazi . . .’
    ‘No.’
    She seemed to be genuinely sad about not being able to see her nephew again. They must have got on well but, as Süleyman at least knew only too well, whatever their relationship might be it was purely on Yusuf Kaya’s terms. Bulbul Kaplan might think that Yusuf Kaya loved her, but that was unlikely. Yusuf Kaya loved only himself. He’d come to her in all probability because he needed somewhere in the Gaziantep area, apart from Anastasia’s brothel, to hide out at the time.
    After they left, Inspector Taner confirmed his suspicion. ‘Kaya was seen back in Mardin in March of last year,’ she said. ‘We received a report that he and his brother Metin, another delightful character I do not think, were doing drug deals with some of the gypsies out on the Ocean. But when we arrived the two men had gone and we were left with one young boy with powder round his nose and a woman out of her mind on ketamine. I assume Yusuf headed up here after that.’
    ‘He wasn’t seen again in Mardin?’ Süleyman asked.
    ‘No, but Metin was,’ she said. ‘I found him myself with his head down the toilet of a local restaurant. Dead.’
    ‘Dead?’
    ‘Coke overdose. That or his brother made him snort enough to kill him. That would not be outside Yusuf’s range of behaviours, as you know. Not of course that his family would ever believe that.’
    Süleyman looked up above the olive trees outside the Kaplan house towards the now darkening sky. It had been a long and ultimately frustrating day. ‘What now?’ he said to Taner as she fired up the engine of her gutsy Volkswagen Golf.
    Taner lit a cigarette and said, ‘If Kaya isn’t in Gaziantep any more and he isn’t here . . .’
    ‘You don’t think he’s here in Birecik?’
    She shrugged. ‘Bulbul Kaplan could be lying. She did lie, as we know, when we first spoke about Yusuf. Her relationship with him, if it indeed exists, is odd for those involved in clan business. I will ask Captain Erdur to keep watch on Bulbul Kaplan and her farm.’
    ‘And so . . .’
    ‘And so on to Mardin,’ Taner said with a smile. ‘As far as we know Kaya has not left the country and if he hasn’t done that then he’ll be with the people who love him most. His family.’

Chapter 6
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    There was no way anyone could have got any sort of idea what the Mesopotamian plain looked like under cover of darkness. All Süleyman knew as he sat beside Taner as she wrestled her car over uncomfortably rutted road surfaces