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‘Killed herself.’
    ‘Yeah.’ She’d taken off all her clothes to do it and laid them very neatly in a pile at the edge of the clearing. She’d even put a lump of what looked like crystal on top to hold them down. Hamdı frowned. Something similar had, he was certain, occurred somewhere else in the greater city area . . .
    ‘Choosing to send her own soul to damnation.’ Ayla stuck a cigarette into his narrow, fat mouth and shook his head. ‘Can’t understand it.’
    ‘No.’ Although, good Muslim lad that he was, it wasn’t the dead girl’s soul that was exercising Hamdı’s mind at this precise moment.
    Ayla, his large almost womanly bottom wobbling as he walked, stomped over to the pile of clothes at the edge of the clearing.
    ‘All we can do is find out who she was, get a doctor to look at her, and then return her to her family,’ he said.
    And yet the way she had killed herself, if indeed that was what she had done, was so violent, so bizarre, and there was that other case, involving a boy, if Hamdı remembered correctly . . .
    ‘No,’ he said, holding his hand up to stop his colleague from disturbing the girl’s clothes, ‘no, I don’t think we should touch anything, Fuat.’
    ‘Why not?’
    Hamdı shrugged. He didn’t actually know why he felt so edgy about this suicide – Allah knew that he didn’t want the aggravation – but there was something just too weird about it all.
    ‘I think we should get help,’ Hamdı said after a pause. ‘I think we should get someone over here who knows what he’s doing.’
    The girl’s identity card stated that her name was Gülay Arat. She was seventeen. Sergeant İsak Çöktin held it up for his superior to see, but Süleyman just flicked his eyes up at it without comment. Over by the trees the two local cops, the old fat one and the young sleepy-looking one, stared down at the site, smoking in that silent, concentrated fashion so typical of those raised away from the bustle of the city.
    ‘I’ll need a doctor to look at her before I make any sort of judgement,’ Süleyman said as he rose, rather grey-faced Çöktin thought, to his feet, ‘but I think it’s the same as Cem Ataman.’
    Çöktin, unaware of what his out-of-town colleagues should and should not know, lowered his voice. ‘Stabbed herself through the heart.’
    ‘She or someone did.’ Süleyman took his mobile phone out of his pocket and searched through his directory for a particular number.
    ‘How could she do it?’ Çöktin said, shaking his head as he looked down at the blood-soaked corpse spread-eagled on the earth before him. ‘She’s only a little thing. You need to exert tremendous force to stab through the chest. What state of mind must she have been in?’
    Süleyman shrugged. ‘We’ll need to get a team up here as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘I just hope that our local friends there,’ he tipped his head in the direction of the two Anadolu Kavaḡı cops, ‘haven’t disturbed the site too much. The word as well as the concept of procedure is, more often than not, unknown to people like them.’
    ‘Right.’ Çöktin, who didn’t always share Süleyman’s views about the ignorance of ordinary folk – he was, after all, a working-class Kurd himself – did grudgingly have to concur in this case. The two locals, with their scruffy uniforms and slow, country ways, did appear to be less than well informed.
    ‘Ah, Dr Sarkissian . . .’ Süleyman said into his telephone, turning aside in order to gain some privacy as he did so.
    İsak Çöktin had attended the scene when Cem Ataman’s body had been discovered in Eyüp Cemetery. Slumped behind the tall, uninscribed gravestones of several Ottoman executioners, the eighteen-year-old’s torso had been folded over the arm carrying the knife that had taken his life away. And although his upper body was bare, he had been wearing trousers and underwear when he died. Cem, though not big, had been far larger and