Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  He smiled. In spite of her large size, and her age, he imagined that Sugar had been quite a looker and a charmer in her youth. He might even have paid for her services himself back in her heyday. He’d always been turned on by amusing women, even if they were streetwalkers. In fact, some of the best sex and the most fun he’d ever had with women had been with prostitutes. Briefly his thoughts turned towards Ayşe Farsakoğlu and the empty sex he’d had with her that morning. Her eagerness was beginning to repel him.

  ‘Have you been to his flat yet?’

  He looked up at her and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I’ve a key if you want to use it,’ she said. ‘Save you kicking the door in.’ She hugged herself against the cold that, in spite of the hissing soba in the corner of her shop, wound its way around legs and up into fingers, chests and faces.

  ‘That would be very useful.’

  ‘OK.’ She stood up and walked over to a shelf that held fur-covered handcuffs and a bowl decorated with the image of a woman giving a man oral sex. She took a large black key out of the bowl and handed it to him. ‘Whatever you find in there will be interesting,’ she said. ‘But it won’t necessarily be pretty, and I won’t be able to tell you what it means.’

  The way the Tarlabaşı kids behaved was familiar to Ömer Mungan. Even in the snow they still begged, hassled and dogged the steps of every outsider they could find – just like the poor kids in Mardin.

  ‘You’re a policeman. You have a gun. Let me see your gun,’ one hoarse-voiced young Roma kid begged.

  Ömer walked on in spite of the children; he knew better than to react.

  ‘You have money. I’m poor, give me money for food. Allah will bless you!’

  ‘Please, brother, a few kuruş.’

  Then a tug at one of his sleeves. ‘You see how cold it is? I have no shoes!’

  Briefly he looked and saw that the child did have shoes. Inadequate and probably leaking, but he was far from barefoot.

  ‘You have shoes,’ Ömer said.

  The child looked up at him with big brown eyes. ‘Do you have no heart, policeman bey?’

  Ömer didn’t answer. Sure he had a heart, but he employed it sparingly. Walking to meet up with Süleyman, who was now apparently inside the dead man’s apartment, he was also trying to get out of his mind the vision of how Levent Devrim’s head had looked when the orderlies from the mortuary had put him on a stretcher. For a moment the wound in his neck had stretched and opened, and Ömer had feared that his head might fall off. Dr Sarkissian, seeing the look of horror on his face, had assured him that it would not, and he had been proved right, but it had been an uncomfortable moment. Another one to add to all the others.

  When the kids finally gave up on him and Ömer was alone, he allowed himself the luxury of morbid thought. There was no getting away from it: in spite of being lucky enough to have a sister living in İstanbul who he could talk to, Ömer was lonely and homesick. He’d known everyone in Mardin – Turk, Kurd, Syriani, Christian, Muslim, fire-worshipper. He’d even known some of the Turkish troops stationed in the city. Everyone had known his name and he’d known theirs. He’d also known a bit and sometimes a lot about the people. He had understood them.

  But here in İstanbul, he was lost. In İstanbul there was not just the odd eccentric or aggressive person to deal with; there were thousands of them. What was more, he didn’t know them or their families and so he was completely incapable of predicting their possible behaviour. But then that went for his new boss, Mehmet Süleyman, too. A good-looking, arrogant, clever but also sad man, he felt. Ömer had caught whispers around the station that Süleyman had fallen out with his last sergeant over a woman. He’d overheard one constable say that the woman was Ayşe Farsakoğlu, Inspector İkmen’s sergeant. But that could merely be gossip.

  It hadn’t just been ambition that had brought Ömer Mungan to İstanbul, although that was certainly part of his motivation. Mainly it had been about money. Like his sister, the higher wages in the city had not only attracted him but had been necessary to help retain his ageing parents’ big house in Mardin. Now that his father had arthritis and couldn’t work any more, it was up to the Mungan children to secure the family home and, if necessary, pay for their parents’ medical treatment too.

  When Ömer had flinched as the dead man’s head had looked as if it might fall off, Inspector İkmen had put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. He was a nice man, old – he was retiring at the end of the year – but easier to approach than Süleyman. Sometimes speaking to his boss if he was agitated or upset was hazardous. First there would be a dark glower, a look of disdain, and then, if he was lucky, a barked-out order. If he wasn’t lucky he’d be treated like a servant, sometimes for painfully protracted amounts of time. As he walked towards the address Süleyman had sent him on his phone, he hoped that this day would be a good one.

  Some people lived in a state of ordered minimalism, some in complete chaos, and some – a few – in a fantasy world. Süleyman had seen one or two of the latter over the years, but never one as extreme as Levent Devrim. Ömer Mungan arrived to join him and together, for a moment, they looked around the apartment, saying nothing. After about a minute of this, Ömer said, ‘Did he work with numbers, do you know, sir?’

  ‘He worked with nothing, unless you count an old camera,’ Süleyman said. ‘He was unemployed.’

  ‘So what is all this about?’

  They both looked at what to them was just an endless succession of numbers. Pencilled on walls, scratched into the surfaces of ancient chests of drawers, painted on the ceiling and on probably thousands of pieces of paper scattered all over the tiny apartment, even in the bathroom and kitchen. Many were expressed in the form of equations, and neither Süleyman nor his deputy had the slightest idea what they were meant to be solving – if anything.

  ‘He lived here alone, sir?’ Ömer asked.

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Did he have visitors?’

  ‘I’ve been told rarely,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Do you think he might have been one of those mathematical geniuses you hear about sometimes, a sort of … I don’t know what you’d call it …’

  ‘Savant.’ Süleyman shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  Süleyman walked over to one of the pencil-scarred walls and said, ‘What on earth was he trying to work out?’ He turned to look at Ömer. ‘It’s times like this I wish I’d paid more attention in mathematics classes at school. Do you …’

  ‘No, sir, sorry,’ the younger man said. ‘History and Turkish, yes, some English …’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Süleyman waved a hand. ‘It’s easily organised.’

  Ömer made a point of looking at things in the room that were not equations. There was some thin bedding, a few clothes, a plate, a tea glass, some blank sheets of paper and several pairs of slippers. On top of a short row of what looked like leather-bound books was a large movie camera.

  Süleyman’s phone rang. ‘Hello, Doctor,’ he said, ‘what have you got for me?’

  While Süleyman talked to the pathologist, Ömer Mungan looked closely at the camera. On the case was one word, Zeiss. A book underneath the camera was called The Homeopathic Bible and was written in English.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Süleyman said. He ended the call and turned to Ömer. ‘Levent Devrim was killed by a straight-edged blade – a cleaver or a machete. The doctor thinks the murderer was either disturbed before he could remove the head completely or he lost the stomach for the job. There are also small wood fragments in the wound that were inserted post-mortem.’

  Ömer shrugged. ‘By the gypsy? Why?’

  ‘Şukru Şekeroğlu? Why would he do something like that?’

  ‘To see if he was dead?’

  Süleyman shook his head. Şukru Şekeroğlu might be a man he didn’t like, but he was neither mindless nor a fool. ‘No.’

  ‘So …’

  ‘So who might disturb a dead body and not call us? Who might even
have seen something that could prove significant? A street urchin? A madman? A drug addict?’

  ‘That’s a wide field in this area,’ Ömer said. ‘Doctor say anything else, sir?’

  ‘Devrim had some furring of the cardiac arteries.’

  ‘A heart condition.’

  ‘In its early stages.’ Süleyman turned back to look at the equations on the walls. ‘We had better leave here soon and return to the streets.’

  Chapter 3

  The water was ice cold, so in no way did it soothe her as the hot shower had done. But it closed the pores of her skin, which prevented both breakouts and the ingress of infection. It was also a punishment.

  Although intellectually Leyla knew that her vast family wouldn’t even exist were it not for lust-filled men and sexually ambitious women, she knew that what she’d just done had been wrong. She had a husband; why did she need to take someone else’s too? But then she knew the answer to that question. She looked down at her beautiful body, floating naked on top of the water, and was pleased with what she saw. No man, unless he was gay, could resist her charms, even at her age. But simply contemplating her actual years, as opposed to the ones she admitted to others, depressed her. As if blocking out the truth, she closed her eyes.

  Ageing was horrible. On the rare occasions when her husband undressed in front of her, it was like watching an ancient snake shed its skin. She tried to focus on the sex she’d just enjoyed with someone else, and to anticipate, possibly, more sex to come that night, but she couldn’t. Suddenly she repelled herself, and with her eyes still closed, she turned over in the water, exposing her breasts to the sharp bite of the cold water in the pool. Shocked at the frigidity on her nipples, she turned quickly on to her back again and tipped her head lightly backwards.

  Was it self-indulgent to consider how people would feel should she drown in the plunge pool? Leyla wondered. She decided that it probably was. Besides, if she died, especially in such erotically charged circumstances, her husband’s enemies would enjoy it all too much. They’d talk about ‘the traitor’ and his ‘immoral’ wife, and how she’d probably killed herself because she couldn’t take being married to such a person any longer. Then they’d go on about how she’d finally seen the light of religion, which had left her no choice but to commit suicide. Leyla shook her head. No, that would never do! She might not want her husband sexually any more, but she would never tire, for as long as he had it, of his exalted position in life or of his money.

  With her eyes still closed, Leyla heard one of the patio doors that surrounded the pool open, and her thoughts immediately jumped to other things. More pleasure. She straightened her neck and swished her hair through the water. Then she smiled.

  The equations meant nothing. Colleagues versed in the ways of mathematics told him so, as did a professor of mathematics from İstanbul University. Levent Devrim’s only living blood relative, his brother, Selçuk, confirmed what had already been said when he finally arrived at police headquarters almost four weeks later, just as the snow was beginning to melt. He’d been in Russia, supervising the cabling of some Siberian city on the edge of nowhere, and had been snowed in.

  Five years younger than Levent, Selçuk Devrim was a smart, well-spoken man who worked in the booming Turkish telecommunications industry. There was also, Süleyman felt, something familiar about him. Like Levent, he had been to the same school as Mehmet Süleyman, but was too old to have still been at the Lycée when the policeman joined.

  ‘He was mad,’ Selçuk Devrim said simply. ‘Delusional. Thought he could do all sorts of things that he couldn’t.’

  ‘Like mathematics?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And film work?’

  Selçuk Devrim rolled his small blue eyes. It had been quickly established that there was not and had never been any film in Levent’s old Zeiss Super 8 camera.

  ‘My father went to his grave in despair.’

  ‘Over Levent?’

  Selçuk looked out of the window at the frigid grey sky outside. Even in this weather, his dead brother had been kept in a freezer. ‘He got to eighteen quite normally, and then he went mad,’ he said.

  ‘In what way?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘Every way. Promiscuous behaviour, bizarre beliefs in nonsensical theories, the mathematical rubbish …’

  ‘Do you have any idea what your brother thought he might be calculating, Mr Devrim?’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Like?’

  He breathed out and shook his head. ‘Can’t say I really know, except that it was something to do with astrology. He believed in all that Aries, Pisces rubbish. I can’t tell you anything more than that. My brother was big on destiny.’

  ‘His own, I take it.’

  ‘Inasmuch as he felt he had one, yes. I saw him once or twice going into some of the trendy bookshops on İstiklal Caddesi that peddle New Age rubbish. Such nonsense! Personally I think that life is just what you make it yourself.’

  There were echoes in Selçuk Devrim’s description of his brother of fatalistic, possibly Islamic thought. ‘Was your brother religious?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘What, with Gemini and Sagittarius on his mind? I don’t think so. No, it was all sort of hippy cod-philosophy with him. Why do you think he left the nice comfortable home my parents provided for him and went to live in that shithole?’

  ‘Tarlabaşı?’

  ‘Inspector, if you ever find a place more tightly packed with nutcases, thieves, charlatans, prostitutes and drug addicts, I’d like to know so that I can avoid it. I visited him there a few times. Once, when my father had just begged him to come home and Levent had abused him, I went there to give him a piece of my mind. When I turned up, though, he was off his head on I don’t know what, curled up in the arms of some ancient tart, and so I left. What was the point of talking to him in that state?’ He shook his head. ‘On the other hand …’ He looked up, and Süleyman noticed for the first time just how grey his face was. ‘Levent, to my knowledge, never hurt anyone. He was a gentle soul and I would have taken him into my home, much as my wife would have hated it, had he ever asked. He was my brother, and I loved him.’

  ‘Did no one ever think of getting him psychiatric help?’

  ‘Oh, we thought of it, but my mother wouldn’t have it,’ he said. ‘She had a bit of a thing about psychiatrists, mainly because her father had been put in an institution when she was a child. No, Inspector, Levent was “eccentric”, according to my parents, and only that.’

  ‘You can’t think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt your brother?’

  Selçuk Devrim’s eyes glittered, then tears trickled down his cheeks. But he didn’t sob. ‘I don’t know who he mixed with in that awful place, who he took drugs from or with. All I saw was that old woman he was—’

  Sugar. ‘We’ve spoken to the lady I think you refer to,’ Süleyman said. ‘She was very close to Levent, and in fact it was …’ he consulted his notes to find Sugar’s real name, ‘Miss Barışık who gave us the key to your brother’s flat. We found a sum of money underneath the bed in a tin box, just under three hundred lira. There was also a bank card …’

  ‘Yes, Akbank.’ He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. ‘Our father used to put five hundred lira into his account every month.’

  ‘In spite of their row?’

  ‘He loved him, he was his son. One of the things I had to do when Father died was make sure that what little money he had left went to Levent. Then when that ran out, I paid it.’

  ‘So that was your money?’

  ‘Yes. As you probably know by now, Levent had a heart condition, which complicated matters still further. How could I leave him without money? What if he fell sick? It wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford it. I earn well. And in spite of the money I gave to Levent, my wife still managed to give up work last year. Money isn’t an issue.’

  ‘Did your brother know that you were funding him?’

  ‘He knew that Father had di
ed. Allah alone knows where he thought the money was coming from.’

  ‘And yet your father bought him what I am told was, in its day, a very fine camera. And you both attended Galatasaray Lycée.’

  Selçuk Devrim smiled. ‘Oh Inspector,’ he said, ‘what can I or any of us say about the impoverished former elites in this country, eh? My father bought expensive cameras and didn’t buy a house. He was a silly, silly old man who lived in the past.’

  And then Süleyman knew exactly why Selçuk Devrim had seemed familiar.

  That no one in Tarlabaşı admitted to having seen anyone or anything unusual or suspicious either before or after Levent Devrim’s death was not wholly unexpected. Ömer Mungan knew that in general the police were not welcome in the district and people limited contact with them as far as they could. However, most locals admitted to at least some affection for Levent Devrim, which meant that they probably did care about whether his killer was caught or not. But nothing was forthcoming, and the heavy snowfall on the night of his death had covered any footprints that might once have existed. Forensic evidence was scant. A hair on Devrim’s shirt that was not his own had turned out to belong to Sugar Barışık.

  As was his apparent custom, Devrim had been stoned when he died. He’d also had a small quantity of rakı in his system. There had been no alcohol, or even any empty bottles in his flat, and Sugar Barışık had stated that she hadn’t given him any. She hadn’t seen him the night he’d died at all. Where had he got the rakı from?

  As Ömer walked the streets of Tarlabaşı, he wondered how a man could have been almost decapitated and no one know about it. While he was still capable of doing so, Devrim must have howled in pain or fear – probably both. He hadn’t been that stoned. Dr Sarkissian had stated in his report that the victim had soiled himself before he died and so had been clearly very afraid. Ömer felt rather than saw hostile eyes on his back. The woman at his side, apparently oblivious to the eyes, said, ‘I don’t get it. Why are they knocking this place down again?’