Deep Waters Read Online Free

quite a young man any less horrific. And indeed the fact that silence reigned amongst the crowd from then until the arrival of the police suggested that this was a feeling shared by all those present.
    The police, when they arrived, consisted of two young leather-clad ‘Dolphins’, motorbike-riding rapid-response officers, who immediately drew a large group of admiring young men around their bikes.
    The shorter Dolphin was just removing his helmet when Haluk began.
    ‘This man is dead,’ he said, waving a hand in the direction of the corpse. ‘He was dead before my vehicle even touched him.’ Then looking up at the fishermen for support, he added, ‘Is that no so, brothers?’
    ‘Well, in truth . . .’
    ‘Let’s just see the body, shall we?’ the slightly taller Dolphin, a man by the name of Rauf, replied firmly. As his partner attempted to push the crowd back, he bent down and looked at a face that appeared to be emerging from both the remnants of a shirt and large swathes of either a curtain or a bedcover. Like the fisherman before him, Rauf immediately noticed that although a lot of blood did appear to be in evidence, most of it had long since dried out. The man’s face had sustained heavy bruising, but where so much blood had come from was not immediately apparent. Rauf gently moved the man’s chin up from inside his heavily stained shirt, and all became very clear. Widening his eyes just a little in response to what he saw, Rauf called his partner over to his side.
    ‘Look at this,’ he said as he lifted the heavy chin once again.
    His partner briefly raised his eyes up to heaven before unclipping his radio from his jacket and speaking into it. He and his colleague, he said, had been called to what could be an unlawful death.
    As soon as he shut his office door behind him, Inspector Mehmet Suleyman took the packet of photographs out of his pocket and opened it onto his desk. Taking the first picture out as he sat down, Suleyman smiled as he saw the wicked little face of his friend Balthazar Cohen smile back at him. Wreathed as ever in curtains of cigarette smoke, Balthazar had his arm round the shoulders of a young, somewhat taller man whom Suleyman knew to be his friend’s son, Berekiah. Home now after finishing his military service, the young man had walked unwittingly into what had been a large gathering of his family and friends. He had, Suleyman recalled, dealt with it very well. After all, it cannot have been easy, even with prior knowledge, to confront the image of your once active father as a cripple with no job.
    Although his home had been untouched by the massive earthquake that struck İstanbul on 17 August 1999, Constable Cohen, as he had been then, had not been there at the time. He’d been staying with a recently divorced lady in one of the newer apartment blocks in Yeşilköy, out by the airport. When the earthquake came, the building collapsed like a set of badly stacked plates, and Balthazar Cohen had been trapped under the rubble, which was where he stayed for the next thirty-six hours – beside the body of his dead mistress. Suleyman, who had lodged with the Cohens in their crowded Karaköy apartment since his separation from his wife almost two years previously, noted with some admiration that not once had Balthazar’s wife mentioned the circumstances surrounding her husband’s present infirmities. But then perhaps Estelle Cohen believed, as some of her husband’s old colleagues did, that Balthazar was now well and truly paying for his sins.
    Suleyman flicked quickly through the rest of the pictures, smiling at the occasional sight of his own camera-shy face amongst their number, before putting them back into his pocket again. Estelle, he thought as he allowed himself a moment to look out of his fog-grimed window, would like them. Berekiah particularly looked well. Perhaps the young man would, in time, come round to his father’s idea of joining the police. Suleyman hoped so,