Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  But of course İkmen’s need to help Suzan Arslan was not just about her or her situation. This was Çetin attempting, in some small way, to impose control over a situation that was running out of control. Including Hatice Devrim and Şukru Şekeroğlu, İkmen and Süleyman had been confronted with six unsolved murders since the beginning of the year, and so far there had been no breakthrough. It was a beautiful İstanbul May and İkmen was due to retire at the end of the year. Arto knew that he would hate to leave on what he would consider a failure.

  A knock on the laboratory door roused the pathologist from his gloom and he said, ‘Come in.’

  The professor’s home was on the other side of the Greek Orthodox church of the Taksiyarhis from where Süleyman’s parents lived. So he knew the area well, even if the smart as well as stunning facade of the academic’s house was not one he recalled having taken notice of before. Unlike his parents’ home, this wooden building was freshly painted and its delicate fretwork had either been well preserved or very expertly restored.

  When he’d found out where Atay lived, he’d parked his car in the bay that he usually used outside his parents’ house and walked the two short streets to his destination. In spite of its almost semi-rural atmosphere, Arnavutköy was fashionable and popular and so parking was always difficult. He pulled on an old-fashioned bell cord and waited in the hot afternoon sun, sweating. After what seemed like a long time, but was only seconds, the professor opened the door.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘come in.’

  The hall was cool with marble and there was a small, silent Greek fountain in one corner. And although Süleyman instantly felt cooler once he was inside, he did also feel compelled to ask his host whether he could freshen up a bit before he followed him out into his garden.

  ‘Of course,’ Atay said. ‘My bathroom is up on the second floor, first door on the right.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Old Ottoman summer houses like this one had few rooms on each floor, and Süleyman noticed that there was only a hall and a kitchen on the ground floor. As he ascended, he passed a very pleasant living room, plus a shut door that concealed either another living room or a bedroom. On the second floor he found the bathroom. Opposite that was a room he could see was lined with books.

  ‘I’ve made a small meze,’ the professor called up from the kitchen below. ‘I do hope you’ll join me.’

  Süleyman didn’t really feel like eating; he hadn’t been to sleep for well over twenty-four hours and couldn’t really contemplate anything beyond tea and cigarettes, but he said, ‘Thank you, that would be nice.’ Then he went into the bathroom.

  His sleepless image in the mirror was even more horrible than his imagined notion of it. Not only were his eyes shadowed with skin that was almost purple, but his face was both white and blotched with red patches. Once he’d been to the toilet, he splashed his face with cold water and then washed his hands with the fine pistachio soap the professor had laid out on the sink. He finished off by dragging some lemon cologne that he always kept in his jacket pocket through his hair. He looked at himself again, decided that he didn’t look quite as bad as he had, and left the room.

  For a moment he stood quite still on the landing, looking into what was clearly a study and listening to the sound of the academic moving around in his garden. However suspicious or otherwise of this man he might be, he knew that he had no right to enter the study without his permission, but that was what he did.

  As well as books and what looked like the sprawling first draft of a manuscript, complete with red-penned edits, on a large wooden desk, the main thing he noticed about the room was the preponderance of statues and pictures it contained. And while the statues were mainly classical or what he imagined were probably Mesoamerican in character, the pictures were almost exclusively late Ottoman oil paintings of the Bosphorus and the Old City. One of them he thought represented the nineteenth-century waterfront at Arnavutköy when it had been a mainly Greek village. He was advancing to look more closely at it when his jacket caught the edge of the door to a full-length cupboard or wardrobe that stood next to the painting. Embarrassed by his own clumsiness, Süleyman stopped to close the door, but he couldn’t help but have a look inside.

  Adrenalin spiked up from his gut to his head in a jagged, hot rush. He touched the cloak and the ghastly mask that sat on top of it with shaking hands. It was monstrous. And when he felt the feathers framing the face that looked so much like the idols of the Americas that sat on every surface around the room, he began to feel sick.

  ‘Inspector, can I help you?’

  The cupboard door wasn’t quite shut and his hand had moved out of it, he thought, just in time when the professor’s voice interrupted him. He looked round and felt his face drain.

  ‘I was just looking at this picture,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, Arnavutköy in 1900,’ the professor said with a smile. ‘Yes, its style is after the Ottoman court painter Fausto Zonaro, as I am sure you recognise.’ He stood to one side so that Süleyman could pass out of the study and into the hall. ‘Shall we take tea? Then I shall gladly answer your questions.’

  Chapter 29

  It was late afternoon when Ayşe Farsakoğlu knocked on Mehmet Süleyman’s office door. İkmen was at home resting and she wanted to see whether, in his absence, Süleyman would check the notes she had taken pertaining to the transfer of Suzan Arslan to prison where she would await trial. But it was Ömer Mungan who answered the door.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘is …’

  ‘Still out,’ Ömer said. ‘Can I help you, Ayşe Hanım?’

  ‘No, not really, but … Why aren’t you with him?’

  He let her into the office. ‘Oh, it’s this Hatice Devrim thing. I don’t have to tell you, it’s stretching us all to the limit. The inspector is out interviewing and I went over to see Dr Sarkissian. Sit down.’

  He motioned towards Süleyman’s chair.

  ‘What, in …’

  ‘He’s not here, is he?’ Ömer said.

  Ayşe sat down. ‘So what did the doctor have to say?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s got a theory, which he can’t as yet prove or disprove, that the knife that killed Hatice Devrim may also have been used on some of our twenty-first of the month victims. Don’t get me wrong, Ayşe Hanım, I can see his point, but when he was showing me photograph after photograph of cuts to neck veins and internal organs, I didn’t really know what I was looking at.’

  She smiled. Dr Sarkissian was a very clever man, but sometimes his absorption in the minutiae of forensic work did leave others at a loss as to just what he was seeing that they were not.

  ‘He’s as desperate to make sense of all this as we are,’ she said. ‘If somehow all these deaths are connected to or were perpetrated by Hatice Devrim …’

  ‘But Dr Sarkissian is certain she couldn’t have killed herself.’

  Ayşe, distracted slightly by a disc on Süleyman’s desk, said, ‘Maybe whoever killed her wanted to put a stop to her activities.’

  ‘The old Şafak man was her relative.’

  ‘Yes, but …’ She picked the disc up. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘That? Oh, it’s a film of the gypsy Şukru Şekeroğlu,’ Ömer said. ‘I don’t know how he features in it. The inspector tracked it down for the family.’

  He had been very careful not to say Gonca’s name and Ayşe was grateful for that.

  ‘We saw the family earlier on and the inspector was annoyed with himself because he forgot to take it with him,’ Ömer continued. ‘Those poor people.’

  ‘The family …’

  ‘The gypsies in general,’ he said. His face suddenly became red. ‘Nobody should be marginalised like that. Nobody!’

  Taken aback by Ömer’s sudden flight into passion, Ayşe looked down at the disc again and said, ‘Have you watched it? The film?’

  He took a moment to calm himself. ‘No.’

  She shrugged. ‘You can play it on your laptop, can’t you? W
hy don’t we have a look at it?’

  ‘Well, because the inspector—’

  ‘He isn’t here.’

  ‘No.’ But he still paused for a moment before he took the disc from her. ‘Well I suppose if it was on TRT …’ he said.

  Although he could drink, eating was impossible. There was too much adrenalin in his system. If the man he was with was what that costume in his office seemed to indicate, then he was highly dangerous. And if he knew that Süleyman had seen it …

  ‘I do accept, Inspector,’ Cem Atay said, ‘that physically I could have left this house and gone back to Bebek and killed Hatice. Arnavutköy is quite an isolating place these days, what with all the new rich incomers, not to mention the foreigners, so I don’t know my neighbours and they don’t know me. But why would I do that? I loved Hatice; her death has left me shattered.’ Noticing that Süleyman’s glass was empty he said, ‘Would you like more tea?’

  It was a little bit stewed, but since he hadn’t been able to eat anything, Süleyman felt obliged to say, ‘Yes.’

  The professor poured tea from the pot on top of the samovar for the policeman while Süleyman said, ‘Professor, I am not saying that I believe you killed Hatice Devrim, but I do have to cover every eventuality.’

  ‘Well I can’t add anything else to what I’ve already said. I found Selçuk with the body as I described it to you, Inspector. I’m not prepared to make any sort of judgement about him based on that.’

  ‘No …’ Oddly the feeling of raw fear that had overcome him in the study had left him now. In its place was a slightly disconcerting calm.

  ‘It has to be possible that someone else entered the premises before Selçuk and killed Hatice. But that person wasn’t me.’

  He was rather matter-of-fact about his lover’s death now that the initial shock had passed. But then if he had killed her …

  ‘Who could it have been?’ Süleyman asked. ‘You knew Mrs Devrim. Did she have any enemies?’

  She’d killed or been instrumental in arranging the murder of Abdurrahman Şafak, and so she had clearly had an issue with him. Had those around him, albeit distant relatives, had an issue with her? Süleyman wondered why he was even thinking about such things. This was the man he had reason to fear, this academic he was sitting with now. But his mind didn’t seem to be processing anything as quickly as it normally did. He thought, I must be sick. And that thought made him anxious.

  ‘Everybody loved Hatice,’ Atay said, ‘because she was such a loving person herself. She’d do anything to help people, and the lengths she would go to to save someone’s feelings were quite extraordinary.’

  ‘Oh?’ A thought crept into Süleyman’s brain. It was something to do with a notion he’d just developed that Levent Devrim had possibly known about Hatice and Atay’s affair. But he couldn’t put it into words for some reason. His eyes began to close.

  He heard the professor say, ‘Are you all right, Inspector?’

  He mumbled something that might have been No, not really. But he didn’t know.

  ‘Inspector?’

  He felt something. A slight pain in his shoulders maybe? And then there was nothing.

  It started off being all about Jews. An elderly Turkish Jewish academic who they both recognised, told the story of how his people had escaped from Spain and Portugal to the Ottoman Empire in 1492 at the invitation of Sultan Beyazıt II. It was a familiar tale of Sephardic Jewish survival, known to most Turks. The academic wandered around synagogues in places like Balat, Karaköy and Ortaköy talking to people. Next there was a bit on the Greeks and then the documentary moved to Sulukule, the old gypsy quarter as it had been before the demolition. And there was Şukru Şekeroğlu, a cigarette in one hand and a halter attached to the muzzle of a dancing bear in the other.

  ‘Whoa!’ Ömer Mungan said. ‘Wasn’t bear dancing outlawed decades ago?’ Officially the practice had ceased in 1988, but unofficially it had carried on well into the twenty-first century.

  ‘It was their livelihood,’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu said. Watching Şukru on the laptop screen brought old Sulukule flooding back to her. Ömer of course didn’t remember it. Whatever the ethics of things like bear dancing and drinking dens, when the gypsies had been allowed to ply their traditional trades they had been happy. They’d had some pride, too, which was written all over Şukru Şekeroğlu’s thin, arrogant face. Looking at him made Ayşe smile in spite of herself. She’d never had anything against the Şekeroğlu family; in fact she’d always had a sneaking regard for them as lovable rogues. It was only Gonca that she took issue with, and that was only because she loved the man that Ayşe loved. That men like Şukru had been reduced to recruiting kids for pickpocketing rings run by foreigners was tragic.

  A voice behind the pictures on the screen said, ‘This is Şukru Şekeroğlu, gypsy, bear man and ex-professional grease wrestler.’ And then a figure came into shot, and it was one that, though younger in the film, was still instantly recognisable. ‘Şukru, tell us about Sulukule,’ Professor Cem Atay asked. ‘How long have your people lived here?’

  Ayşe looked at Ömer. They both heard Şukru say, ‘A thousand years.’

  ‘You were in this city before the Turks?’ the professor said.

  ‘We’ve always been here,’ the gypsy replied. ‘Our blood runs in these waterways, along the walls of these houses the Turks want to demolish.’

  The camera panned – a shot of the houses, cafés and drinking dens of Sulukule.

  Ayşe said, ‘Did we know that Professor Atay knew Şukru Şekeroğlu?’

  ‘I don’t know that we ever asked,’ Ömer said. ‘But just because he’s interviewing him …’

  ‘Professor Atay was Hatice Devrim’s lover. She was connected to Levent Devrim, our first victim, by marriage, and to our fourth victim, Abdurrahman Şafak – who she may have killed – by blood. He was in turn related to our third victim, John Regan.’

  They looked at each other while the younger professor on the screen said, ‘The Roma or gypsy community of İstanbul are one of the most fascinating and mysterious minorities we have. In Ottoman times their women were welcomed into harems, including the Imperial harem, as purveyors of perfumes and aphrodisiacs and as fortune-tellers par excellence.’

  ‘But what about Leyla Ablak?’ Ömer said. ‘He didn’t know her.’

  ‘She was his brother-in-law’s mistress,’ Ayşe said. ‘Remember?’

  Frowning, she paused the documentary and said, ‘We should tell Inspector Süleyman. Where is he?’

  ‘Oh, he’s with Professor Atay,’ Ömer said.

  He felt a vibration against his leg, and it occurred to him that it was probably his phone, which was on silent, but it was very far away. He felt heavy and a little sick and he had to lean on the professor, who he knew was dangerous even if he couldn’t care about that now, in order to get inside the house and walk down the stairs.

  Down the stairs to where? Why inside the house?

  He didn’t know. All he wanted to do was lie down.

  He heard a voice say, ‘I expect you just need a rest. How did you get here, Inspector? I didn’t see your car.’

  He heard himself say, ‘No.’ But he couldn’t say any more. He’d left the car at home …

  ‘Where is your car? Did you leave it at Arnavutköy police station?’

  But he just said, ‘Home.’

  ‘Home?’ The word echoed through his brain as if his head was inside a kettle. ‘Where is home?’ And then it was as if he was under water, in a full kettle, fighting for his breath. He fell backwards on to something that was softer than a floor, and then he didn’t know anything else.

  Professor Atay wasn’t at the university. Apparently someone had phoned from the police earlier and the professor’s secretary had told him that the academic was at home in Arnavutköy. Again Ömer Mungan called Süleyman’s mobile, but to no avail. But then sometimes he did turn it to silent when he was interviewing someone.

  ‘We’ll have to call Profes
sor Atay,’ Ömer said, looking up the professor’s home phone number on Süleyman’s computer.

  But Ayşe put her hand on his. ‘Do you think we should?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, if we call him and he is implicated in some way …’

  ‘If he’s dangerous, we need to warn the inspector,’ Ömer said.

  ‘Yes, but we can’t warn him through the professor, and what if—’

  ‘Atay won’t know that we’ve seen this film,’ Ömer said. ‘What he does know is that we have our suspicions about him with regard to Hatice Devrim, and of course Inspector İkmen did question him about Leyla Ablak. But what else he may have deduced …’ He shrugged. ‘Ayşe Hanım, we have to call or go to Arnavutköy. Even allowing for terrible traffic, the Inspector should have been back by now. He would have phoned me anyway.’

  The office phone began to ring.

  ‘Maybe that’s him,’ Ayşe said.

  Ömer picked it up. ‘Hello, Inspector Süleyman’s office.’

  The voice, when it came, was old and female and tetchy, and Ömer Mungan recognised it. ‘Where is my son?’ Mrs Nur Süleyman asked.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Süleyman.’

  Ömer looked at Ayşe Farsakoğlu, who rolled her eyes. He’d been told she knew the inspector’s mother and didn’t like her. Now he knew it.

  ‘Do you know why my son’s car is parked outside my house?’ the old woman continued. ‘We haven’t seen him and yet it sits there.’