The House of Four by Barbara Nadel

Author:Barbara Nadel [Nadel, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472234667
Publisher: HeadlinePublisher
Published: 2016-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Were she to die, then we could return to how we were . . .

Had the brothers killed Fatima and then killed themselves? Dr Sarkissian had ruled out suicide, but had he been right to do so?

That communication had gone from Kemal to Yücel in 1963. Clearly if they had killed Fatima they had waited a long time to do so. Barçın didn’t find a reply. That didn’t mean there wasn’t one; some letters might have been lost. Kanat particularly had lived in filth and chaos, and a lot of the pages that had been found in his apartment were too badly defaced to read.

She’d spoken about this job to Turgut, after he’d railed for a good hour about how the security situation was deteriorating in the east. His father had been arrested for something and held for two days at his local police station before being released without charge. Turgut had declared that he was going back to Diyarbakır as soon as he could. What he’d do there, he hadn’t said. But Barçın had noticed how he kept on talking about ‘us’, and what ‘we’ must do to rectify the situation. He was far more Kurdish than she was and he knew it. He’d said, ‘Of course you’ll stay here,’ as if he’d had a bad smell under his nose. It had made her feel like an outcast. She’d changed the subject to the Rudolfoğlus.

Going into the complexities of the relationships between the siblings and their parents had taken almost an hour. Turgut, as was his way, had listened in silence.

She’d said, ‘It’s as if an avenging angel came down and did away with them.’

Surprisingly for him, Turgut had said, ‘Maybe that is what happened.’

Barçın had been staggered. Turgut didn’t believe in anything supernatural.

Then he’d said, ‘You have referenced several people who knew about the animosity between these siblings. The house may have been hidden by undergrowth but it was and still is there. People know. They know about the father who courted the Devil, about the daughter who was abused by that father . . .’

‘We don’t know he actually had sex with her.’

‘Seems likely,’ Turgut had said. ‘The way he got her to love him so obsessively is part of how paedophiles operate. She was a child. When her daddy did things to her, even if she didn’t like them, it made him happy, and the happier he became, the more he claimed to love his little girl. When he died, she got everything. Putting all the ridiculous Devil stuff to one side, Rudolf Paşa was a control freak. Alive or dead. And although İkmen may trust those privileged arseholes at the Oriental Club, I don’t. Rudolf was a member, and I’d put money on the notion that at least one of the other members knew what he was really like.’

‘But why kill them now?’ Barçın had said. ‘If someone knows all this, why now? The Club doesn’t need the money.’

‘How do you know? A lot of those old secular organisations are struggling these days.

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