A Passion for Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Down where? Where are we?’ Süleyman, tired from his recent ordeal at the Saray Hamam as well as not feeling entirely healthy on the painkillers he had been given, was feeling the strain.

  ‘In the bad old days, back in the seventies,’ Ardıç said, ‘we had to have more cells than we have today.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Süleyman, I know you weren’t very old back then, but you were alive!’ Ardıç blustered. ‘The 1970s? Political unrest? You must remember how the leftist and rightist factions used to shoot it out in the streets around here? Even with these cells down here we could barely contain them! Before the coup in 1980, there were thousands of suspects for all sorts of really stomach-churning crimes. You must remember!’

  ‘Sir, I wasn’t even ten when the seventies began,’ Süleyman said and then added a little sheepishly, ‘and we lived in Arnavutköy.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ardıç said a trifle acidly, ‘I forgot you come from a Bosphorus village.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘And you went to a lycée too, didn’t you?’ the commissioner said, referring to the French style of private school favoured by the wealthy and upper classes.

  With anyone else Süleyman would have spoken up proudly for his school, but with the commissioner he just mumbled, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, welcome to what was my world,’ the commissioner said as he continued along the corridor with his arms flung out at his sides. ‘Some communist, I think he was, broke my nose down here. İkmen had his nose broken too at about the same time, if I remember correctly. But that was on the street, I think. He never would properly protect himself even then . . .’

  ‘But, sir, what are we doing here now?’

  Ardıç stopped in front of a door which he looked hard at for a few moments before he said, ‘We are here, Inspector, to have a once and once only chance to speak to someone we both know rather better than we would like.’

  Ardıç pushed the door open and, as Süleyman looked over the commissioner’s shoulder, he saw what was unmistakably the figure of Mürsel sitting on a chair between two figures dressed in exactly the same black leather suits and helmets as the people who had saved his life at the Saray Hamam. Mürsel, his head low down on his chest, was handcuffed, shackled at his ankles and bleeding from cuts to his head and his mouth.

  Ardıç led the way without a word, striding into that dark, windowless, musty-smelling room and sitting himself down at one of the two chairs directly in front of the spy. After just a brief hesitation, Süleyman sat down on the other chair and then waited with his head bowed to see what might happen next. There was an atmosphere of violence – recent and long since past – in what Süleyman felt was a vile and poisoned place.

  Ardıç cleared his throat. ‘Mürsel’s superiors have agreed to our posing some questions to him, prior to his being taken –’ he looked at the black-clad men for some sort of answer, but when none was forthcoming continued – ‘somewhere. We’re not to take any of this information out of this room. This exercise is purely to satisfy our curiosity. It’s a gesture of goodwill from, er, MI . . .’

  ‘We don’t use names, do we, commissioner?’ The voice coming from the spy was much less rounded and sophisticated than it had once been. It was almost as Süleyman had heard it when Mürsel was shouting at the men in black back in the hamam. Rough and eastern. It was also a little muffled this time too. It seemed that Mürsel had lost a couple of his teeth.

  ‘I call you Mürsel, because I don’t know what else to call you,’ Ardıç responded. ‘You can call me whatever you like. Your people tell me that the peeper was called Nuri Koç.’

  Süleyman looked at Ardıç and said, ‘Cabbar Soylu’s wife was a Koç before she married him.’

  ‘Mehmet!’ Mürsel said sounding drunk as he did so. ‘So good to see you!’

  ‘Mürsel,’ Süleyman cut in quickly, ‘Koç? The name . . .’

  ‘I went to school with Nuri Koç, out in the countryside. A dirty place you wouldn’t go to, Mehmet. We did our military service together. We were both chosen, from our batch of recruits, to serve our country as a career. But when that all got far too much for Nuri, as it can for any one of us, I looked after him.’

  ‘When you say it all got far too much for Nuri, do you mean when he started looking at young men in their bedrooms?’ Commissioner Ardıç asked.

  ‘Nuri had died.’ Mürsel sucked some red-tinged drool back into his mouth. ‘In his head. People in our line of business sometimes do. We see and do things that . . . well . . . it’s sometimes difficult to retain respect for one’s superiors. Especially when such people commit acts that in “ordinary” life would land a person in prison. Nuri lost control, he did what he wanted without reference to his employers. I began to hear that he was dangerous. He was, I recognised, living inside what I knew had in the past only been his fantasies. He was both sexually attracted to and morally repelled by those not entirely in tune with accepted society. Because I was his friend, I was given the task of bringing him in.’

  ‘So why did you then collude with him?’ Ardıç said. ‘You say you were a friend but . . .’

  ‘Nuri and I were never anything more than friends, commissioner,’ Mürsel replied. ‘But I colluded, as you put it, for my own purposes. From the moment I was told that Nuri had gone mad, disappeared into his own head, whatever you may call it, I had an agenda. I never for a moment thought that I wouldn’t kill Nuri in the end.’

  ‘But he was your friend!’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Yes.’ He attempted a very small smile but then gave up when the pain became too intense. ‘But my job was to eliminate the risk from Nuri in whatever way I could. I am excellent at my job. Nuri was dangerous to the public.’

  ‘And yet, I say again, you colluded with him!’

  ‘I allowed him to do whatever he wanted provided he did some things for me.’

  ‘That was very dangerous, wasn’t it?’ Ardıç said. ‘What with your own people and later on ourselves, the police?’

  ‘I had the absolute trust of my own organisation . . .’

  ‘Except that you didn’t,’ the commissioner said. And then turning to Süleyman he continued, ‘Apart from the public nature of Koç’s crimes, we were brought in to watch Mürsel, or rather I was. Something was suspected, I wasn’t told what, and I was ordered not to even breathe such a thing to you. But then when Nuri’s brother-in-law became his victim, things began to change.’

  ‘I take it you’re referring to Cabbar Soylu?’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Nuri’s brother-in-law. Yes. You know he killed Nuri’s sister’s boy?’

  ‘My sergeant has been investigating that possibility,’ Süleyman replied. ‘So it’s Hakkari that you, a country boy, as you once said to me, come from? You, Nuri, the Soylus . . .’

  ‘Kumru, the woman I know her husband told you was called Zeynep Saban. She came to Hakkari, our city. She was a nomad from somewhere. Very pretty. She’d do anything for a handful of food and some cigarettes. I had a lot of fun with her just before Nuri and myself went to do our military service. I am Leyla Saban’s father. I met Kumru, poor soul, quite by accident shortly before her death. She recognised me immediately and told me everything. Sort of a death-bed confession I suppose. Imagine.’ It was said with tight, outraged lips.

  ‘Leyla Saban was a very accomplished young woman . . .’

  ‘Leyla Saban was a Jew,’ Mürsel replied. ‘Not that I minded her religion. No, what I minded was her existence. I’ve served my country for thirty-one years without a slip. I come, I go, I leave nothing of myself behind. Sex with Mürsel Bey is always safe sex, Mehmet Bey. I am nothing and no one and I take considerable pride in that. After all, when one doesn’t exist one is truly free and in my profession it is then and only then that one can become absolutely and without a doubt the best. I couldn’t have a daughter! What if someone found out and used my own blood against me? What if they attempted to blackmail me by threatening her? What wou
ld I do? As time passed anxieties about Leyla and what she might mean for me grew.’

  ‘And so you allowed your friend Nuri . . .’

  ‘Have you ever seen that old Alfred Hitchcock movie called Strangers on a Train?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but continued, ‘It’s about the swapping of murders. One man does a murder for the other and vice versa. Motive, opportunity and all the usual markers you people use to track murderers are therefore removed. In the movie it is only one of the men, the mad one, who wants to do this, the other, the sane man, is distinctly reluctant to comply. In the case of Nuri and myself, however, compliance and, some would say, madness existed on both sides. I killed Cabbar Soylu for him because Nuri’s sister, poor Emine, didn’t deserve to be childless. Deniz, Nuri’s nephew, was an innocent boy, but Cabbar had him put down like an inconvenient family pet. Of course even after all these years Cabbar would have recognised Nuri and so I killed him. He’d known me only slightly.’

  ‘And Nuri killed your daughter.’

  ‘Yes.’ His calmness was bald and terrifying. ‘Quickly and painlessly. I had told him I didn’t want her to suffer. Who she was wasn’t her fault. After her death I did think that Haydar and myself could take Nuri down, but as you know he killed Haydar and then I had to engage with him one more time, partly in order to kill you, Inspector Süleyman, but also so that I could finally end it all for Nuri. Haydar, by the way, never knew about any of this. As far as he was concerned we were just out to bring my friend in and that was that.’

  ‘Why did you want to kill me?’ Süleyman said as he watched the spy roll what looked like a very swollen tongue around a visibly dry mouth.

  Mürsel coughed. ‘You were to be the peeper’s last kill. You had started to make some worrying connections with my old home town and Deniz Koç, etc. But I knew that I could counter whatever you managed to dig up. No, you were just simply a body that was convenient. The peeper had progressed through frightening young men to the murder of young men to full-scale insane assassination of anyone he felt like killing – that was the idea.’

  ‘Nuri started like that.’

  ‘Nuri did indeed begin on his own from that standpoint. He was mad and alone and when I found him I knew that I could, if I was careful, use him for my own purposes. All I had to do was look after him, which I did, and then gradually persuade him to kill Leyla Saban. Her death could hopefully get lost in his long list of carnage. But as luck would have it, rumours about Cabbar Soylu and the possible unnaturalness of Deniz Koç’s death had begun to circulate. Several of our operatives in the east were talking about it. It wasn’t difficult to pass on what was family information to Nuri. He went berserk – at first. He calmed down when I told him I had a plan. He was so full of hatred for Cabbar he hardly even noticed when he killed poor Leyla.’

  Süleyman shook his head. ‘But to kill your own child . . .’

  ‘So unnatural,’ Mürsel sighed. ‘For you it must be. But for me it is different. Policing is a job. What I do, however, ah . . .’ He smiled. ‘That is something else. That is life and death to my country, that is an honour for anyone who is deemed fit to do it!’

  ‘Yes, I agree,’ Commissioner Ardıç said, ‘what you people do is vital. But when you use what you do to kill innocents for your own ends . . .’

  ‘I didn’t have Leyla Saban killed for my own ends!’ Mürsel cried. ‘I had her killed so that her existence couldn’t compromise my loyalty or bring my reputation into disrepute!’

  ‘No one would ever have known!’ Süleyman said. ‘Fortune Saban was, as far as Leyla knew, her father. He loved her and she loved him and even if she had known about you, she would never have called you Father! And besides, to allow that Nuri to do what he did to those young men . . . Mürsel Bey, you have a very twisted and evil sense of what is honourable!’

  ‘So you think that Cabbar Soylu, the killer of a poor mad boy, deserved to live?’

  ‘Yes! To stand trial and account for his crime. Absolutely.’

  ‘The state doesn’t execute anybody any more, Mürsel Bey,’ Ardıç said gravely. ‘Like it or not, that is what the State has decided and you as a servant of the State and, by your own admission, a proud one at that, must abide by its rules.’

  ‘It’s different in . . . in our line of work,’ Mürsel replied.

  Süleyman looked into the face of one of the black-clad guards – it was completely impassive. ‘Well, if it is, then it shouldn’t be,’ he said forcefully. ‘Our country is not some third-rate dictatorship, we are not some arrogant superpower! We are, Mürsel Bey, the inheritors of a fantastic civilisation and a truly great republic.’

  ‘Your patriotism is impressive, Mehmet Bey . . .’

  ‘Yes, because unlike yours it is genuine! I do not use my country as some sort of cover for . . .’

  ‘No, no, but of course you don’t.’ Ardıç put a steadying hand on to Süleyman’s arm. ‘That is not at issue, Inspector. No one could doubt your loyalty to your calling. But time is short and I am aware that our friends here are . . . needful, shall we say, of being elsewhere. Is there anything else you wish to ask Mürsel Bey before we go?’

  Süleyman thought for a few moments about all the things one might want to ask a man who had ordered the death of his own child, but then he decided that whatever those things were he neither wanted nor needed to know about them. The only thing that remained in his mind now concerned not Mürsel but Nuri Koç.

  ‘Mürsel,’ he said, ‘did Emine Koç know that her brother was in the same service as yourself?’

  ‘She knew he was successful,’ Mürsel replied. ‘They would see each other occasionally, until the last five years.’

  ‘When Nuri changed, became out of control?’

  Mürsel shrugged. ‘Yes. She was told he was missing.’

  It wasn’t going to be easy telling Emine that her brother, who was now dead himself, had killed her husband. And quite where he was going to start on the subject of Deniz, Süleyman really didn’t know.

  ‘Nice girl, Emine,’ Mürsel smiled. ‘Very accommodating. Unlike Kumru she didn’t require payment.’

  Süleyman felt his face go white. He did not, after all, know too much about Deniz Koç’s birth – apart, of course, from his illegitimacy.

  ‘You’re not saying that you . . .’

  ‘I’m not saying anything, Mehmet Bey,’ Mürsel said with absolutely no side or irony in his voice at all.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Inspector?’ Ardıç was standing now, his huge body shuffling uncomfortably about on top of his small, almost dainty feet.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We should go,’ he said. ‘I feel our time is up.’

  Süleyman looked across at Mürsel as he sat, slumped and bloodied between his captors.

  ‘What will happen to him?’ he said as he looked again into the totally impassive faces of the men who guarded the spy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ardıç replied simply.

  Süleyman stood.

  ‘But whatever it is, it was written,’ said Ardıç who was at heart a religious man. ‘Allah is merciful.’

  And then without any further conversation, the two policemen left that small hidden room underneath their familiar offices and squad rooms. As the door closed behind them, Süleyman took one last look at Mürsel and saw for the first time ever that his eyes were filled with fear.

  Ardıç, shuddering with either cold or fright or both, took hold of Süleyman’s one good arm and pulled him roughly along the corridor.

  ‘I hope never to see this place again in my lifetime,’ he said as he puffed his way back towards the stairs. ‘I pray to Allah that you never do so either, Inspector. And, by the way, Emine Soylu is never ever on any account to know that her brother was the peeper or that he arranged for the murder of her husband.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Abdullah Aydın, the only person who ever actually saw the peeper’s face, doesn’t know who he was and will be released by Mürsel’s
people soon,’ the commissioner said. ‘They will make up some name for the offender in due course and young Aydın will just tell what he saw, which was very little. Soon the whole affair will have just melted into the dust.’ But then he looked up at Süleyman’s doubtful face and added, ‘Or maybe not.’

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  Peter Melly’s office on the first floor of the British Consulate in Beyoğlu was, though not state-of-the-art, extremely large. If one ignored the scarred and battered desk, the threadbare carpet and the rather tired decoration, Melly’s office was very grand. It had to be, İkmen felt, at least four times the size of his own humble place of business. Not that the policeman looked about at his surroundings for long. As he sat down in front of the obviously hungover Englishman, he came straight to the point.

  ‘Mr Melly,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you that we have only as yet managed to account for half of the money that you gave Yaşar Uzun for the Lawrence carpet.’

  ‘Half? What? Sixty grand?’ Peter Melly sat back heavily in his chair and then said, ‘It is safe, isn’t it, the Kerman?’

  ‘I have it locked inside my office,’ İkmen replied and then thought briefly about the dingy old filing cabinet the carpet was currently locked in. Hardly where a fanatic like Melly would have put it. But then, unlike Melly, İkmen didn’t want to look at the Kerman any more than he had to. There was, he felt now, something both mesmeric and wrong about the piece. Looking at it would take up far too much of his time if he allowed it to do so. The Kerman perhaps had chosen him in that negative way it had chosen Yaşar Uzun. İkmen inwardly shuddered. ‘Mr Melly, the money?’

  ‘Oh, er . . . Well, I don’t know,’ Peter Melly said. ‘I gave Yaşar a hundred and twenty thousand pounds. How should I know what he might have done with it?’

  ‘Can you think of anyone else who might have come into possession of the money?’

  ‘No! Why should I? I gave that money to Yaşar in good faith. I don’t have a clue . . .’