Death by Design Read Online Free Page A

London, Mr Nightingale. You will have the full assistance and cooperation of my department.’
    Mr Nightingale smiled one of his thin, dark smiles and then left without another word.

Chapter 3
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    The following Monday morning, Çetin İkmen went to work as usual. He was still sore in places and he wore a large plaster to cover the wound to his cheek. But apart from that, physically he was fine. And once he was outside his apartment, things improved psychologically too. Not that he could entirely forget how cold his wife was to him, but at least at work he could distract himself with other things.
    On his way to the police station he gave his present domestic situation some thought. It had been six months since his son Bekir had died. It still hurt to think about; it always would. Within the İkmen family, Bekir had been the one who got away. Instilled from an early age, mainly by their father, with the idea that a person’s goals can be achieved, albeit usually with some difficulty, the İkmen children were generally successful. Among them were doctors, flight attendants, A-grade students and a young parent, Hulya, who struggled to support her child and her disabled husband. At much cost to herself, Hulya did what she did well and her parents were immensely proud of her. Bekir had been quite different from the others. Bekir, his father now recalled, had been a lovely and loving child who had grown into a nightmare of a teenager. Some of his other boys had experimented with drugs and Bülent in particular had not had an easy adolescence. But Bekir had been on a different level. Not only had he taken drugs as a youngster, he’d also stolen from shops and even his own family in order to get cash for his habit. At fifteen and with the tacit agreement of his exasperated father, Bekir had left home. And although Fatma had cried for her absent son, everyone else in the İkmen apartment had breathed a sigh of relief.
    But then, after seventeen years without any contact or news of him, Bekir İkmen returned. His mother cried, and his brothers and sisters listened awestruck – and with some scepticism – to his stories about begging, fighting with gypsies and battling drug dealers and his own heroin addiction. Only Çetin had totally distrusted Bekir. And Çetin had been right. Bekir had come home in order to hide from his father’s colleagues, the police. Not only had he helped to spring a convicted murderer and drug dealer, Yusuf Kaya, from prison, Bekir had also been involved in large-scale dealing himself. Almost the last act Bekir İkmen performed on earth was to kill an entirely innocent man who opposed him. That was why the Jandarmes in the eastern town of Birecik, to where Bekir and his fellow criminals had been tracked by İkmen’s colleague Süleyman, had shot him. For some reason that Çetin İkmen could not fathom, his son Bekir had gone wrong. To Çetin’s recollection, he had never treated Bekir any differently from his other children – at least not until the drug taking and stealing began when he was a teenager. His wife Fatma disagreed.
    ‘You always treated him badly,’ she would say whenever the rein by which she held in her emotions snapped. ‘You hated him and he knew it!’
    Fatma blamed her husband entirely for what had happened and when she did not berate him, she was silent and broodingly resentful of his every breath. Their children, with the exception of the youngest Kemal who had been somewhat glamoured by his bad-boy older brother, supported their father’s point of view with regard to Bekir. But they could do nothing to move their mother who now, or so it seemed, hated their father with the same passion with which she had once loved him. Not even nearly getting blown to pieces in an illegal handbag factory in Tarlabaşı had, apparently, moved İkmen’s wife to even a little sympathy for him. She did not visit him in hospital and when he came home, it had not been Fatma but her daughter Gül