A Noble Killing by Barbara Nadel

Author:Barbara Nadel [Nadel, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2011-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

* * *

Cahit Seyhan went to work early that morning leaving his wife asleep on the floor of his sister’s living room. Saadet woke as soon as her son and her nephew came into the room and put the television on. This was nothing unusual, and so she did as she usually did and left as quickly as she could to go to the bathroom. As soon as she locked the door behind her, she heard her sister-in-law Feray snort with frustration back in the hall. She always hated Saadet getting into the shower before her. As if she couldn’t bear to wash after such a dirty person. But Saadet ignored her.

Once washed and dressed, it was time for someone to go down to the baker’s on Macar Kardeşler Street and buy bread for the day. None of the men would do it and Nesrin, Feray’s daughter, was far too lazy to even get out of bed. Feray herself was now in the bathroom, and so Saadet put her coat and her headscarf on and let herself out of the apartment. Of all the chores she’d had to do since arriving in Fatih, going to get the bread was her favourite. It gave her, albeit briefly, the feeling that she was still an ordinary housewife, with her own apartment and family, and not what she really was, a grieving mother and unwelcome guest in her sister-in-law’s home.

She walked out of the apartment building into bright sunlight. All around her, other women in various degrees of covering passed by clutching bread, and sometimes bags of tomatoes, cheese and olives too. The usual breakfast ritual. The baker, a small toothless man in his sixties, handed Saadet her order of three loaves and she in return wordlessly proffered the correct amount of money in payment. It was as she left the baker’s shop that everything suddenly became strange and frightening. A man she had never seen before bundled her into an old Fiat car, and yet another strange man drove her away.

‘You’re not eating your breakfast,’ Hikmet Yıldız said as he watched his brother İsmail stare into space over his untouched bread, butter and tomato. ‘If Mother was here, she’d make you eat it.’

‘What?’

‘Your breakfast,’ Hikmet reiterated. ‘Eat it!’

‘Oh.’ İsmail looked down at his plate for a second or so, and then began staring into space again.

‘Allah!’ Hikmet had taken the trouble to prepare breakfast that morning because İsmail had got in so late the night before. He’d gone to the mosque for sunset adhan and then apparently moved on somewhere else afterwards. Hikmet neither knew nor cared where. ‘I have to go to work now,’ he said as he put his police cap on his head and then bent down to put his boots on. ‘I’ll be back at about six.’

As he walked across the kitchen, adjusting his gun holster as he went, İsmail said suddenly, ‘Don’t go.’

Hikmet turned and looked at his brother with an expression of exasperation on his face.

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