The seat of the blaze appeared to be behind some bushes at the back of the site. And although he knew that he should really wait for the fire appliances to arrive before he attempted to do any sort of investigating himself, Bedrettin began to pick his way through the wire, the needles and eventually the bushes. At first the fire was wreathed in too much smoke for him to be able to really make it out. But when the smoke began to clear and he could see the source of the smell that had offended him so much, everything he’d eaten that morning made a bid for freedom. What Bedrettin found himself looking at was a funeral pyre.
‘There’s nothing like getting your work done early,’ Çetin İkmen said to Ayşe Farsakoğlu as they watched the fire officers check what remained of the pyre for flames. It was seven thirty in the morning and both İkmen and his sergeant had been asleep when they’d got the call out to Aksaray.
‘But then that’s a salutary lesson to us, Ayşe,’ he continued as, in the face of the human-flesh-scented smoke all around him, he lit a cigarette, ‘not to underestimate our offender. Usually he strikes at night on the twenty-first of the month, but today it’s in the morning. Who knew?’
Ayşe, who was caffeine-deprived and nauseous, murmured, ‘Yes, sir.’
Once the fire chief gave him the signal that the pyre was safe, İkmen walked over to it and looked at the blackened body that lay half consumed on what remained of a considerable wood pile. Beyond the fact that it was tall and therefore probably male, there was not a lot that could be deduced just by looking at it. İkmen frowned. ‘Didn’t think the Mayans went in for cremation,’ he said.
‘Maybe the killer burned the body after death,’ Ayşe said.
‘Good point.’
Heavy feet moving slowly through the surrounding bushes signalled the arrival of Arto Sarkissian, who stopped in front of the pyre. ‘Burning. Not quite as bad as drowning, but …’ He put his bag down on the ground and began to walk slowly around the body.
İkmen moved out of his way and went back to stand with Ayşe Farsakoğlu. ‘I wonder which scion of the imperial family he was,’ he said.
‘The body?’
‘Yes. If this runs true to form, then he’ll’ve had his heart cut out—’
‘Ah well, that’s where you’re wrong, Çetin,’ Arto Sarkissian interrupted. ‘I can see the heart, such as it is, through the ribs. He’s not had his head cut off either. But I am fairly certain that he – and yes, it is definitely a man – was put on this pyre post-mortem.’
‘So dead before he was burned, but not killed in the traditional way?’ İkmen said.
‘No, I don’t think so. No signs of a struggle.’ Surgical gloves on, Arto began to gently tease at clothing fibres with a pair of tweezers. ‘I’m going to have to unwrap him very carefully when I get him back to the lab,’ he said. ‘Time of death? Who knows. Hopefully he’s got a relatively undamaged ATM card on him or something. If not …’
‘A job for DNA?’
‘And just pray for a match. Oh, and by the way,’ the doctor said as he looked down at his watch, ‘life is extinct, eight oh five.’
He shouldn’t have taken the day off. It was, after all, the twenty-first of the month. But he’d been tired, worn out from weeks of looking at endless family trees, trying to work out how, apart from by blood, their royal victims were connected. Aside from the fact that they all had secrets connected to their sex lives, they were not. And even that was tenuous, because John Regan’s homosexuality had not been concealed. Then there was the almost total lack of evidence across all four murders. They’d eventually managed to get their hands on two Bulgarian gypsy men who, it was fairly certain, ran groups of pickpockets across the city. But the old Jewish man who claimed to have seen a person like that outside John Regan’s flat just before he died hadn’t recognised either of them. Whoever was killing these people, his people, was cleaning up after himself most efficiently.
Mehmet Süleyman turned over and looked at the sleeping figure of Gonca beside him. It still struck him as odd that of all the women he’d known in his life, he should finally fall hopelessly in love with this one. She was a gypsy and an artist, who had colour and fury and a little madness in her soul, and he – well, he wasn’t any of those things. She was as different as she was unsuitable, and he found himself intoxicated by whatever it was they had together every time they met. Because contrary to what he knew İkmen thought, it wasn’t just sex, although that was a strong bond between them. Gonca gave herself to the sex act in a way that Ayşe Farsakoğlu never could, even though he knew she had tried.
Gonca turned towards him and opened her eyes. He felt her hand reach for his penis. When she found it, she smiled.
‘I think someone wants my body,’ she said as she first straddled and then mounted him. He lasted as long as he could, which was difficult. She so rarely gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his sexual control. With her he had so little.
But then as quickly as her passion had arrived, it left with the same alacrity, and after she’d made him tea and given him cigarettes, she got on with her day, which, since Şukru had gone missing, always started in the same way. She consulted the cards.
Süleyman didn’t know what she consulted the cards for – whether it was to find out if Şukru was still alive, where he might be or who he might be with. All he knew was that the last time he’d seen her do it she’d cried, and when he’d asked her what she’d seen that had so upset her, she’d said, ‘Nothing.’
On this occasion she didn’t cry, but she did look sad. He thought about not asking what was wrong, but then he decided that if he did that, he wasn’t being true to his own character. He said, ‘What now?’
Oddly, she smiled. ‘There’s nothing to be done,’ she said. ‘It’s written.’
‘What is?’
She looked confused. ‘You’re a Muslim,’ she said. ‘Everything.’
He didn’t actually believe that life was predetermined, but he knew that she did, even though she was about as far away from a practising Muslim as it was possible to get.
‘What about Şukru?’ he asked.
‘What about him?’
‘I know you look at the cards to find out if he—’
‘Ah, I have a day to get on with, don’t talk to me!’ she said. Then she looked at him still laying naked on her bed and said, ‘Now what am I to do?’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I have a grandson to help wash and dress, breakfast to make for my daughter, work to do, or …’
‘Or what?’ he said.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and then lay down beside him. ‘Or you tell me,’ she said. ‘It is your day off, after all, and you have chosen to share it with me.’
He smiled. She was no longer young. He didn’t know exactly how old she was, but then he got the feeling she didn’t know the answer to that question herself. But whatever her age, it hadn’t affected her sex drive and had only minimally compromised her beauty. He leaned over and took one of her breasts in his mouth. Gonca began breathing hard, and when he put a hand between her thighs, she groaned.
And then his mobile phone rang.
Arthur Regan looked up at the front window of Abdurrahman Şafak’s second-floor apartment and wondered what his reluctant brother-in-law was doing. Ever since the wretched man had asked him to come and visit with what existed of John’s book, and in spite of the angry words they had exchanged, he’d plagued him with phone calls about it. Arthur didn’t know how many times the old fool had read through it, but whenever he did, he just seemed to find more in it to complain about. And then there were the threats. If Arthur or anyone else published what he called ‘this trashy book’, he’d sue, and he already had a lawyer standing by, waiting to go. Arthur wished he’d just blanked the old idiot, but he had honestly thought that by engaging with him he might be able to help them both to come to terms with their pasts. What a moron he’d been! And now he’d been summoned again.
He wen
t into the building and pressed the apartment’s intercom. Almost immediately the old aristocrat answered. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Arthur Regan. You called me, remember? You said we needed to talk, and so we do.’
‘Well I’ve changed my mind. Go away!’ the old man said as he switched seamlessly into English. ‘I have nothing to say to you, sir!’
‘Well I have something to say to you. The threats have to stop,’ Arthur said. ‘My son’s UK publishers are going to give the book to another writer to finish, with or without my help, so you’d better get used to the idea.’
‘I’ve told you, I will sue!’
‘Sue away,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ve lost the only thing in life that meant anything to me. You’re welcome to what little money I have, I really don’t care.’
‘Do not worry, I will.’
Arthur Regan lost it. ‘Well fuck you!’ he yelled into the intercom. ‘Fuck you and all your fucking kind to fucking hell, you miserable, snobbish, soulless old bastard! And by the way, I’m glad you’re dying! I’m so happy you’ve got cancer and I hope to God that it fucking hurts!’
A man who passed him in the hall and who clearly spoke at least some English looked shocked. But from the other end of the intercom there was only silence. Arthur, red-faced and frankly exhausted after an outburst he had, in retrospect, being waiting over forty years to have, leaned against the wall and tried to get his heart rate down. He’d said some bloody awful things to Abdurrahman but he’d deserved every one of them. Like his father, he’d only ever cared about Betül as an object in which his own blood ran, and they had both abandoned her when she’d died. It was entirely because of them that her body didn’t lie in Turkish soil, as Arthur knew she had wanted. At the time he’d been too poor to repatriate her body himself, but they’d had money.
He wiped the sweat that had gathered on his forehead with the back of his hand and then stood up straight. He was just about to leave when suddenly the intercom crackled into life again.
‘If you come up now, we can talk,’ Abdurrahman said. ‘The girl is out so we won’t be disturbed.’
Arthur thought about it for a moment. After that outburst, Abdurrahman was the last person he wanted to see. But then he decided, Well, why not do what I came to do?
He leaned in towards the intercom and said, ‘I’ll be up.’
Süleyman, whose day off had come to a shuddering halt, looked at Arto Sarkissian across something that came straight out of a horror movie. He’d seen burned corpses before, but it was not something that got any easier over time. He kept his eyes firmly on the Armenian’s face. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.
‘Not in the least, but it is a possibility,’ Arto said. ‘Şukru Şekeroğlu is an unusually tall man. He’s the only missing person of this height that I have any information on. It could be him, but then again, it could be someone who is entirely new to us.’
‘I thought our killer only went for those of us with royal blood,’ Süleyman said.
İkmen, who was standing behind his colleague and who wanted to move the investigation forward, said, ‘Dr Sarkissian has been able to remove samples that are suitable for DNA testing, but we will need Şekeroğlu family DNA with which to compare it.’
Süleyman turned to look at him. ‘Gonca.’
‘Or any other of Şukru’s siblings or children,’ İkmen said.
Süleyman shook his head. ‘She’s convinced herself that he’s dead,’ he said. ‘With the cards and …’
‘You know her,’ Arto Sarkissian said. ‘You know how she’ll take it. You’ll know whether she is open to providing a DNA sample.’
Süleyman moved away from the corpse and leaned against one of the white-tiled walls. İkmen and the doctor followed him.
‘Do you want blood?’ Süleyman asked.
‘Ideally. But I know that sometimes people like gypsies can be superstitious about giving their blood away,’ Arto said. ‘I’d be grateful for saliva.’ He stopped and put a finger in the air as a thought struck him. ‘Even better would be a hair – with an intact follicle.’
İkmen looked at Süleyman. ‘A hairbrush?’
‘You want me to pull hair out of her hairbrush,’ Süleyman said.
‘With her permission, of course.’
‘After telling her that the burning man here just might be her brother?’
İkmen said, ‘We need to do this because of the height of this corpse, but it might not be Şukru. Whoever talks to Gonca or any other member of her family will have to emphasise that. Do you think she’ll do it?’
Süleyman thought, and then gave the only answer he could. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He looked at İkmen. ‘In a way, I think she might take such a request more negatively from me than from …’
‘Me?’ İkmen raised an eyebrow.
‘You’ve known her a lot longer than I have.’ Even saying the words made him hate himself. How could he be so cowardly? He was Gonca’s lover; why couldn’t he tell her that a hideously burned body found in Aksaray might be her brother? Because if it wasn’t, she’d be angry with him?
But İkmen, as was his wont, acquiesced. He had known Gonca Şekeroğlu for many decades. His mother had told fortunes with the gypsies of İstanbul all her life, and so when he’d joined the police they had already known and trusted him. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Do you know if she’s in Balat today?’
‘She’s out at present, back this evening,’ Süleyman said. He didn’t even try to put distance between himself and Gonca’s life now. Everyone knew. It was pointless.
‘Then I will visit her this evening,’ İkmen said. ‘Phoning her now would be insensitive, and a few hours won’t make a difference, will they, Doctor?’
‘No,’ the Armenian said. ‘I can give you swabs to take saliva from her and bags for hair samples. If she does want to give blood, then she’ll have to come and see me tomorrow. Nothing can go off for testing until then.’
‘Then that’s settled,’ İkmen said.
Süleyman smiled back when the older man smiled at him, but he felt a scintilla of disapproval too. He should have just said he’d go and see Gonca himself and taken whatever her grief and fear meted out to him. He could always change his mind … Instead he said, ‘So do you think that this … the dead man is our twenty-first of the month victim?’
‘I think so,’ Çetin İkmen replied. Then he added, ‘I certainly hope so.’
Chapter 19
The girl Suzan entered the building in what neighbours would later report was her usual state of trepidation. Everyone knew and had always known how the old man treated her, even though nobody had ever so much as thought about intervening.
Suzan entered the lift with shaking hands and knees. By the time she got to the second floor, she was sweating, and when she reached the door of the apartment, she began to feel sick. As she always did, she called out to the old man when she turned the key in the lock, ‘Abdurrahman Efendi! It’s me, Suzan!’ Then she waited for an answer, which was usually quite a long time in coming. On this occasion there was just silence.
Suzan took her shoes off and walked slowly forwards. She felt her skin go from hot to cold in less than a second. The icy silence that seemed to fill that apartment made her feel as if she was being compressed against its walls. Just like every time she returned to the apartment, she wanted to run but she couldn’t. There was nowhere to go. She had to carry on.
At the end of the entrance hall was the lounge where her employer spent most of his time. Abdurrahman rarely went to bed at night any more. He claimed that sitting up was more comfortable for him these days. As she drew closer, Suzan found herself cringing at every sound that her feet made, every creak of the apartment’s walls. She expected to hear his voice at any moment and her ears ached with an anticipation she could barely endure. And then she was in the lounge and he was there.
Suzan looked at Abdurrahman Efendi for some time and with a sense of detachment she didn’t know she had. It – he – wa
s ghastly. What had been done to him was almost beyond belief, and just on the level of pity for a fellow creature, she should have felt some sympathy for him. But she didn’t. She regarded his drained, vampire-ravaged-looking body as one might view a piece of meat. Because he’d always shown such contempt for her, because he’d used her, shamed her, she couldn’t find it in herself to feel anything but contempt for him. And now that he was dead, she could do that with impunity.
And so in the half-hour before she called the police, Suzan mocked Abdurrahman Efendi, called him rude names and told him that nothing in her whole life had made her so happy as his death.
Çetin İkmen watched the news with Gonca the gypsy on her ancient television set. In spite of the fact that a body had been found in Aksaray, TRT was still appealing for help in finding Şukru Şekeroğlu. They showed a tiny piece of film of him taken back in Sulukule some years before.
Gonca put one cigarette out and then immediately lit another. Both she and İkmen were chain-smoking, but neither of them cared. ‘I’ve felt Şukru to be dead almost from the start,’ she said. ‘My cards have been … indistinct.’
‘We don’t know the body is Şukru,’ İkmen said.
‘Because it’s too badly burned?’
‘Yes. There’s no ID on the body we found up at Aksaray. The only connection to your brother is the height, and that is why I’m here now.’
Şukru’s scowling face disappeared from the screen. Gonca shook her head. ‘He was such a life force.’
‘He may still be a life force,’ İkmen said.
She looked him in the eyes and said, ‘Don’t try to make me feel better, İkmen. I know what I know.’
He shrugged. He’d known Gonca ever since he was a young constable, and he was well aware of what he could and couldn’t say to her. He knew he couldn’t kid her.
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