The Serenity Murders by Mehmet Murat Somer Page B

and tagged along behind me.
    Hüseyin was at my elbow before we even reached the staircase. He had a furious expression on his face.
    “Will you tell them to cut it out?” he said in a huff. “I went to the toilet to take a leak, but they wouldn’t let me do it in peace. One came to watch, another fingered me…What the hell is going on?”
    I could barely suppress my laughter. Clearly the girls were messing with him.
    I motioned to Hasan from a distance, signaling that he should look out for Hüseyin.
    “It’s taken care of, don’t worry about it,” I said, patting him on the shoulder before sending him on his way.
    Square-face had listened to us. Clearly in shock and unable to contain his curiosity, halfway up the stairs he asked, “Does stuff like that happen in the toilets?”
    Without stopping or turning to look at him, I answered, “You can go down and see for yourself in a moment, Chief.”
    “No, I didn’t mean it like that…I mean, I didn’t mean it as a member of the police. Just…I was just curious.”
    “That’s exactly what I meant,” I replied.
    I pushed open the door to the crammed storage room office and let him through. We sat down. I returned to the same seat, right opposite Ricardo’s green costume.
    “Yes, Chief, please, go ahead; I’m listening.”
    He looked at me, forcing a smile, but then soon grew self-conscious and stopped smiling; it hadn’t suited his face anyway.
    “Please, if you call me Hilmi instead of Chief, then I’d feel comfortable calling you Burçak.”
    It seemed we had on our hands yet another officer who’d learned his interviewing techniques from American television and movies.
    I didn’t answer him.
    I began tapping on the table in front of me to let him know that I was listening.
    He cleared his throat first. As if he were preparing to deliver a long sermon.
    “As you might imagine, there are fingerprints everywhere in Sermet Kılıç’s apartment. We are now certain he was poisoned. We’re looking into what it was that poisoned him.”
    “
Actaea spicata
, in other words, baneberries,” I said, interrupting his sermon. “The murderer sent me a message.”
    “You don’t say! You’ve already found him, then!”
    “No,” I said, summarizing the whole story in two long sentences.
    “So it’s more complicated than I thought,” he said finally, his voice tinged with worry.
    “What else have you found besides fingerprints?”
    “Um…there were no fingerprints on the teacup. But there is something else that’s strange,” he said. “We found a burned CD, without a label or anything, inside the stereo.”
    “What’s so strange about that? Pirated CDs are available on every street corner. They’ve got every film you can imagine. Besides, anyone who has a CD writer can copy movies at home.”
    “You see, that’s precisely what’s so strange. There’s no computer in Sermet Kılıç’s apartment. Pirate copies always have labels on them so they don’t get mixed up. And the CD was burned by you. That’s what the root record shows.”
    “I don’t quite understand.”
    “It means the CD was burned on your computer…”
    I didn’t remember burning a CD for Master Sermet. We didn’t have that sort of a relationship. But preparing special CDs for people is something I would do. Still, I would have remembered if I had. Besides, I was always careful to label the CDs I burned.
    “What’s on the CD?” I asked curiously.
    “Music,” he replied, looking at me as if
that
explained everything.
    “What music,
ayol
?”
    “Well, classical, electronic stuff. Without lyrics…”
    Well, that was quite helpful. Such a wealth of details to go on!
    He crossed his legs and pointed his eyes to the skin that now showed under his trouser hem. I looked. There wasn’t a single hair there. He couldn’t possibly be waxing!
    “This is all I have the courage to show at the moment,” he said, giggling. “But my whole body is soft and silky!”
    He