Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  Peri was Ömer’s older sister. She’d come to İstanbul three years before to work as a nurse in the German Hospital in Taksim. Like her brother, she was multilingual in the languages of the far south-east, and they conversed, as they usually did when they were alone, in Aramaic, the tongue they had grown up speaking.

  ‘The government want to develop the area,’ Ömer said. ‘Knock down unviable buildings and replace them with family homes.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Peri frowned. ‘Nice homes for “nice” people.’

  ‘The current residents will be relocated.’

  Peri looked at a very tall man dressed in a woman’s fur coat smoking a joint on a broken doorstep. ‘Like him? Where’s he going to find work away from the clubs of Beyoğlu?’ She shook her head. ‘When they moved the gypsies out of Sulukule to make way for “nice” families, they relocated them so far outside the city they couldn’t afford to commute, and so most of them came back into the city centre to live in squats. There’s nothing for anyone to do out on those new housing estates. No work.’

  ‘I know,’ Ömer said. ‘But what can you do?’

  Peri pulled her coat tightly around her body and said nothing.

  ‘This murder hasn’t helped.’

  ‘You think?’ Peri shook her head. ‘Ömer, you have to get out of the habit of stating the obvious. This is İstanbul; we know. We’re quick.’

  He ignored her slight. ‘Nobody’s actually said anything, but there have been plenty of implications, particularly from the gypsies.’

  ‘That Mr Devrim may have been killed by shadowy agents of progress?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can see their point.’ She looked in the window of a tiny basement shop entirely filled with screwdrivers slung in at every conceivable angle. To Peri and her brother, Tarlabaşı was very familiar territory. Very Mardin. ‘The people here are happy in what some may consider their poverty. If you’re a transsexual or a gypsy or a recent immigrant, you can live here unmolested by those who might think you immoral, and that’s worth something.’

  ‘Yeah, but don’t romanticise it too much. Drug dealers and gangsters live here too.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Where you from?’

  A small girl, her hair tied up in thick brown bunches, spoke to them in perfect Aramaic. Without even noticing, they’d found themselves in the vicinity of the Syriani church of St Mary the Virgin. And because it was Sunday and they had just been to church, all the Syrian Christian children looked especially, neat, clean and smart.

  Peri smiled. ‘We’re from the city of Mardin,’ she said. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Here.’ The girl sucked her thumb.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  She pointed at Ömer. ‘Is he your husband?’

  They both laughed. Angular and tall, Peri was almost the image of her brother.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ Ömer said.

  ‘I’m a Christian,’ said the child. ‘What are you?’

  And it was then that Ömer and Peri became aware of the difference they knew their ID cards belied. Even in rackety, multicultural Tarlabaşı, suddenly they felt very alien.

  Chapter 4

  There were worse jobs than pandering to the health and beauty fancies of the rich. In the past, Esin Nadir had waited at tables and even worked in the hotel’s kitchens. Now all she was doing was placing hot stones on rich women’s backs and stomachs, repeating parrot-style what Faruk Bey had told her about chakras. There was nothing on chakras in the Koran; it was apparently some Hindu thing and so they couldn’t really exist. But while rich women paid a hundred dollars an hour to have them aligned, who was Esin to argue?

  Another day at the Great Palace Hotel’s Wellness Spa dawned. Esin turned all the lights on and made sure there were plenty of towels and robes for the customers, and that the aromatherapy jars were topped up with essential oils. Faruk Bey the chief masseur and director of the spa, would be in soon, and he was a stickler for detail. She’d have to turn the steam on in the steam room, top up the magazines in the waiting area and make sure that the plunge pool was clean before he arrived.

  Esin put the steam on and then went to the broom cupboard to pick up a mop and a net. The plunge pool, an ice-cold artificial pond used for closing the pores after they had been opened by either the sauna or the steam room, often needed skimming for flakes of dead skin and hair. The tiles around it also needed mopping frequently, even when the pool hadn’t been in use. Unmopped, they looked dull and could appear grubby. She opened the door to the pool room and smiled as the thin February sunlight haemorrhaged through the curved glass patio doors that made up three quarters of the wall space. At this time of year the pool was not terribly inviting, but in the height of summer there were few places better to be, and Esin had been known to get into the pool after work almost every day in July and August. She rested the mop against the door – she’d wash down the tiles once she’d finished everything else – and moved towards the pool with the net. Then she stopped.

  Originally from the rough city-wall district of Edirnekapı, Esin was no stranger to tragedy and violence, but when she saw that body floating in the pool surrounded by a cloud of its own blood, she couldn’t stop herself screaming.

  Çetin İkmen watched Arto Sarkissian, together with two of his orderlies, lift the woman’s naked body out of the pool and place it on a plastic sheet they had spread on the tiles. Standing in the open patio doors, İkmen smoked while noting with a feeling of revulsion that the woman’s breasts did not fall down flat as they laid her on her back. Implants beneath the breast tissue showed themselves for what they were: oval bags with distinct edges. He wondered how old the almost waiflike figure in front of him might be, and decided that there was probably no way that he could know.

  The pathologist hunkered down on his knees and put a gloved hand up to the woman’s throat. Before anything else could happen, he had to declare life extinct, which he now did. He then began a slow visual examination of the body while directing the police photographer to record every aspect of the subject in minute detail. After watching him for almost ten minutes, İkmen said, ‘Any idea about age, Doctor?’

  There was a pause before the Armenian said, ‘Forties or fifties, but well maintained, I’d say. A lot of work on the face, particularly around the chin.’

  ‘So well off?’

  ‘Or rich husband or boyfriend.’

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu, who was standing beside İkmen, said, ‘Doctor, the blood …’

  Still looking down at the corpse, he said, ‘There’s a wound to the forehead. I think that’s the source. Or rather, it’s a possible source.’

  Esin Nadir had completely bypassed her superiors at the Great Palace and called the police as soon as she’d seen the dead woman floating in the plunge pool. When Ayşe Farsakoğlu had briefly interviewed her, she’d said she knew the woman by sight but didn’t remember her name. All she knew was that she was a client rather than a member of staff.

  Arto Sarkissian rose heavily to his feet and instructed his orderlies to turn the corpse over.

  ‘My rough guess, and it is rough, is that she’s probably been in the water at the most five hours,’ he said.

  ‘So she died today.’

  ‘In the early hours of this morning.’ The doctor lowered himself down again with a grunt and began looking closely at the woman’s back.

  İkmen turned to his sergeant. ‘Who has keys to this place?’

  She consulted her notebook. ‘The therapists, Esin Nadir—’

  ‘Who found the body.’

  ‘Faruk Genç, who is also the manager, Maryam Eminoğlu, who runs fitness classes, a British aromatherapist and homeopath called Suzy Greenwood and the hotel security guard, Bülent Eğe. Greenwood and Genç are already here.’

  ‘Good. We’ll need statements from all key-holders.’

  ‘Sir.’

  İkmen looked back towards the pool. ‘So, Doctor, accident, suicide or—’

 
The Armenian held up a hand, which İkmen knew of old was his cue to fall silent. Several minutes passed during which the inspector had another cigarette and Ayşe Farsakoğlu looked with some admiration at the hotel’s grounds. When she was a child, this part of old Sultanahmet had been the almost exclusive preserve of drug addicts and backpackers on what had remained of the old hippy route to Kathmandu. The Great Palace, if she recalled correctly, had been an old fleapit boarding house called the Hotel Stay. The spa had been a hamam which must have been derelict for twenty years before the owners of the Great Palace converted it. Now equipped not just with the spa, but a gourmet restaurant and Wi-Fi too, the place was one of the chicest venues in town. How long it would retain its good reputation when word got out about a dead body in the plunge pool, Ayşe didn’t know. It probably depended on the circumstances of the death, whether it was accident, suicide or …

  ‘Murder,’ the Armenian said. He looked up into Çetin İkmen’s eyes. ‘Possibly. I may be wrong, but she’s got heavy bruising on the back of her neck which I think may well have happened as a result of her head being smashed down forcefully on a hard surface.’

  ‘Like tiles.’

  ‘Like tiles, yes,’ he said. He stood up slowly. ‘No guarantees until I get her on the table, but I don’t think your journey has been wasted this morning, Inspector.’

  Sometimes İkmen’s fluency in the English language could work against him. This was one of those times. Suzy Greenwood, the hotel’s resident homeopath and aromatherapist, didn’t speak much Turkish, and so it was only sensible that he should interview her. However, although he wanted to hear her evidence, if she had any, he didn’t want to hear about her job, which he regarded, along with religion, as nonsense. He therefore went into his interview with her somewhat tentatively.

  It was quickly established that Suzy, a woman in her mid forties, hadn’t been at work for a week because she’d been on holiday.

  ‘I went to Greece,’ she said. ‘You can check my passport.’

  He did. She wasn’t lying.

  ‘I went to a homeopathy conference in Kavala,’ she said. She looked İkmen up and down. ‘I smell you are a smoker, Inspector; you know that I could help you with that.’

  ‘Could you.’ In retrospect, he should just have cut her off there, but Suzy Greenwood took his response as an invitation to climb aboard her hobby horse and ride it for all it was worth. A deluge of ‘facts’ followed – to İkmen entirely lacking in any sort of scientific veracity that he could recognise. Apparently the key to his smoking cessation lay in the idea that water, somehow, had a ‘memory’. He’d never viewed water as a sentient being before and he wasn’t sure that he did so now. Sadly for Suzy, her words just served to enhance the prejudices İkmen already had against homeopathy.

  ‘Inspector!’

  Mercifully, Ayşe Farsakoğlu had come into the small conference room the hotel had given him to interview staff.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Greenwood,’ İkmen said with a smile. ‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu?’

  ‘Sir, I think you need to hear something,’ she said.

  ‘OK.’ He looked at the Englishwoman and extended his hand. ‘Well, thank you very much for your assistance, Miss Greenwood,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we will need to speak to you again, but of course I will contact you if anything changes.’

  She smiled. ‘Of course.’ And then as he began to leave with Ayşe Farsakoğlu she added, ‘And don’t forget I’m always here if you need a consultation.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Ayşe led İkmen along a corridor back towards the spa. He said, ‘Why are “alternative” people such damned hard work? That woman was like some sort of religious fanatic. And it was all rubbish.’ His phone rang and he stopped and answered it. ‘İkmen.’

  He listened to the caller for a few moments while Ayşe stood in front of a door and watched him. When he finally ended the call he said, ‘That was Dr Sarkissian. Our victim was murdered. He has confirmed it. He reckons her head was smashed against the bottom of the plunge pool.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been an accident?’

  ‘No. Her neck was held and constricted while her forehead was forced down on to the pool floor.’

  ‘So we’re in business.’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  Ayşe opened the door of the spa manager’s office, where İkmen saw a man of about forty sitting behind a very ‘designed’ glass desk.

  ‘Sir, this is Faruk Genç.’

  İkmen tipped his head. ‘Mr Genç.’

  ‘This is my superior, Inspector İkmen,’ Ayşe said to the spa manager.

  After over forty years in the İstanbul police force, İkmen knew a worried expression when he saw one, and Faruk Genç had one all over his face.

  ‘Please, do sit down, Inspector,’ he said.

  İkmen sat.

  ‘Could you tell Inspector İkmen what you told me?’ Ayşe said.

  Genç sighed. ‘I know the dead woman. I wondered what had happened when I saw that her car was still here this morning.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘She’s called Leyla Ablak,’ he said. ‘You’ll find her clothes and ID card, car keys, handbag in one of our lockers. I have a master key.’ He looked down at his blank glass desktop.

  ‘How did you know Leyla Ablak?’ İkmen asked. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ayşe raise an eyebrow.

  Faruk Genç did not look up. ‘She was a client and, er, we’d been having an affair for almost a year,’ he said. ‘She’s, er, Leyla was married, and so am I.’

  To say that İkmen was shocked by Genç’s candour would have been an overstatement. But he was surprised. Men who were unfaithful to their wives didn’t usually own up to their infidelity so readily. But then death had become involved here, and Mr Genç, sensibly, probably wanted to get his story out before anyone else did.

  ‘Were you here with her last night?’ İkmen asked. There was little point in minutely investigating their relationship until he had established where Genç had been when Ablak died.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The spa closes at seven. We met at midnight. I gave her a massage, she liked that.’

  ‘Did you also make love?’

  He looked up. ‘Of course.’

  ‘So how did she end up dead in your plunge pool, Mr Genç?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He put his head down again. ‘When I left her, she was alive.’

  ‘In the plunge pool?’

  ‘No, in the shower.’

  ‘You left before her?’

  ‘Well we couldn’t leave together. We might have been seen. We always met late as it was, in the hope that most people would be in bed around here, especially at this time of year.’

  Those bars and nightclubs that did exist in Sultanahmet were quiet during the winter months and tended to close early.

  ‘But you manage this spa, Mr Genç,’ İkmen said. ‘Why did you leave Mrs Ablak here alone?’

  He sighed again. ‘She had a key. I gave it to her. Sometimes she would be able to get away before me. The key enabled her to let herself in and wait for me. Last night I had to get home. I left Leyla to have her shower and then jump in the plunge pool. That was her routine. She did it to close her pores. We were … I cared for her, you know. I would never have done anything to hurt her.’

  ‘Mmm.’ İkmen put his chin in his hand. Genç didn’t really give the impression that he was particularly heartbroken by Leyla Ablak’s death. There were no tears in his eyes. ‘You say you had to get home, Mr Genç. Why was that?’

  ‘My wife called. She has cancer, Inspector. I know it sounds bad.’

  The small office became silent for a moment, and then İkmen said, ‘So tell me, Mr Genç, how did you manage to get away from your very sick wife to come here and have sex with Mrs Ablak?’

  He loosened his tie. ‘Well, er, Hande, that’s my wife, she … we sleep separately now and she goes to bed early. She, um, she takes a lot of pain medicatio
n. If she wakes and she needs more in the night, she calls my mobile phone and I go and give it to her. We keep our phones by our beds.’

  ‘Yes, but you weren’t at home, were you, you were—’

  ‘Hande knows that I have friends and she is aware that I have to see them sometimes. I … I told her I was out. She knew I’d be a little time.’

  ‘In pain,’ İkmen said. ‘She knew you’d be a little time while she was in pain.’ Again the small office became silent around İkmen’s anger, and then he said. ‘Well, Mr Genç, I will need the clothes that you were wearing when you came here last night, plus a sample of saliva for DNA testing. As you had sex with Mrs Ablak, I will also want semen. There may be some residual seminal fluid inside her body we can compare it to. I will also need to speak to your wife.’

  ‘My wife?’

  ‘In order to discover when she called you and what time you subsequently arrived home.’

  Faruk Genç jumped up from his chair and began to walk backwards and forwards very quickly behind his desk. ‘Can’t I just bring you her phone?’ he said. ‘She’s very sick.’

  ‘No, her phone won’t do,’ İkmen said. ‘It may tell us when she called you, but it won’t tell us when you got home.’

  ‘Yes, but I can work that—’

  ‘No, sir, we need to be precise,’ İkmen said. ‘Our doctor will determine a time of death for Mrs Ablak, and in order to eliminate you from our investigation, we will need some proof that you left here before that time. We will have to speak to your wife.’

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu regarded the expression on İkmen’s face and detected in it something she could only describe as satisfaction. A weak man, who might or might not be a murderer, had done a bad thing and been caught out in it. And now İkmen was making him pay.

  It was midday by the time the news broke about the death of Leyla Ablak. And although the dead woman’s name was not released to the press, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman’s mother, Nur, knew exactly who the victim was.