‘Hello, Ayşe.’
She looked up into a pair of large, dark eyes.
‘Hulya. What are you doing here?’
Hulya İkmen, seventeen and sweetly pretty in her thin summer dress, sat down beside her.
‘We’ve just been to visit Berekiah’s aunt at Rumeli Kavaǧi,’ she said as she brushed a great swathe of black hair out of her eyes.
Ayşe had decided to sit outside in order to smoke. What Hulya was doing out in the warm but strong wind she couldn’t imagine. One could just as easily admire the view from inside the ferry, far away from the wind and occasional splashes of spray.
‘Berekiah’s just coming. He wants a cigarette,’ the girl said in reply to Ayşe’s inner musings.
‘Oh.’
Berekiah Cohen was a nice young man. The son of Ayşe’s old colleague Balthazar Cohen, he worked for one of the better jewellers in the Grand Bazaar. As he walked somewhat unsteadily towards the two women, Ayşe noticed how his gold Star of David medallion smacked against his face in the wind. She wondered how that went down with Hulya’s mother, whom she knew to be a very devout Muslim.
‘So you’re not with my dad today,’ Hulya said as she watched Berekiah sit down and then took one of his hands in hers.
‘No,’ Ayşe replied, ‘I had business in Sarıyer.’
‘Oh.’ Hulya, like the good policeman’s daughter she was, didn’t push for any further details.
Ayşe looked across at Berekiah and smiled. ‘How’s your father, Berekiah?’
The young man smiled sadly. ‘Oh, as well as we can expect,’ he said. ‘He’s going to try false limbs soon. He’s never wanted to before, but he’s so restless.’
Balthazar Cohen had lost both of his legs from just below the knee in the hideous earthquake of 1999. Unable to work either in or out of the police force since, he had existed on painkillers and a seemingly endless stream of gossip supplied to him by his friends and family. It was said that he strongly disapproved of his son’s relationship with Hulya and had even fallen out with İkmen, whose philosophy stated that if people loved each other they should be allowed to be together, because of it. Perhaps he now wanted legs so that he could, literally, stand up to the Inspector.
‘I do hope that he gets on well with them,’ Ayşe said.
‘Thank you.’
Berekiah lit his cigarette and then leaned back against the ferry cabin to admire the view. They were passing Yeniköy now, with its pretty waterfront characterised by pastel-coloured nineteenth-century villas. The young man breathed in deeply and then exhaled on a sigh.
‘I love it up here,’ he said as he closed his eyes with pleasure. ‘It’s so clean.’
‘Maybe we’ll live here one day,’ Hulya said. ‘It certainly would be nice.’
‘Yes.’
Ayşe turned away to light a cigarette of her own. Much as she liked them both, she didn’t want to get involved in their future-planning conversations. Such things were private and, besides, with these two, they were contentious also. The Jewish boy and the Muslim girl . . . OK, it happened but not usually to old Balat families like the Cohens. They were fiercely proud of their heritage, and even though she knew that Fatma İkmen and Cohen’s wife, Estelle, were firm friends she also knew that the last thing they would want was to be related.
However, this line of thought led to another. Melih Akdeniz’s family had, so it was said, converted to Islam from Judaism. When, she didn’t know but perhaps that was where Melih’s isolationism had stemmed from. Neither Jew nor ‘real’ Muslim, maybe as a youngster he had been rejected by his peers. It was well known that he had been a very odd and lonely child. Maybe his ‘difference’ was what had spurred him on to prove himself so dramatically in the art world. Perhaps that was why he didn’t seem to like or admire anyone except himself. Low self-esteem. She remembered a talk she’d attended some months ago about crime and mental illness. It had been given by Inspector Suleyman’s wife, Dr Halman. She’d made a list, Ayşe recalled, of those traits that could indicate a vulnerability to mental ill health. Low self-esteem and self-isolation were two of them.
But then it probably wasn’t wise to read too much into her memory of one distant lecture. If she’d paid complete attention to it then maybe, but she had, as ever, spent most of her time looking at Dr Halman’s husband. She’d loved Mehmet Suleyman once, but now that was over – for him, at least.
Ayşe put her head back and dismissed that unhelpful thought from her mind on a sigh.
By the time Yiannis Livadanios managed to get over to the mortuary, dusk had arrived. A dapper and immaculate man, he had only recently taken over the family business from his father who, at ninety, had finally decided to retire to his villa on Burgazada in the Sea of Marmara.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come before,’ he said as he shook Arto Sarkissian’s hand, ‘but we’ve had two interments today and I had to go back to the families’ homes,’ he smiled. ‘So much ouzo! Must be why Papa has lived so long – preserved in the stuff!’
Arto laughed. ‘Talking of preservation,’ he said as he led the undertaker through into his office, ‘that is, of course, why you are here, Yiannis.’
‘Yes. Your message was very intriguing,’ Yiannis said. ‘A young man found in an apartment . . .’
‘In what I think might be a most advanced state of preservation,’ Arto said as he handed Yiannis a white coat and a pair of latex gloves.
‘So a sagging but recognisable mummy then,’ the undertaker replied.
‘No.’
Yiannis frowned. ‘No?’
‘Put your coat and gloves on and follow me,’ Arto said as he moved towards the door of his laboratory. ‘You’ll see.’
The body, which was laid on a table in the centre of the laboratory, was covered with a white sheet. Only the feet could be seen, strangely supple-looking things. Arto stood to one side of the table and instructed Yiannis to stand opposite. He grasped the top of the sheet and then said, ‘I believe he’s about twenty years old. See what you think.’
The Armenian folded the sheet down to the top of the dead man’s hips. And for just a moment there was nothing – no sound, no movement, barely even a breath.
‘My God!’ The Greek placed a hand up to the tautly sculpted face, and then just gently he palpated the flesh.
‘That’s supple,’ he said as he looked up into Arto’s eyes. ‘It’s very good, starting to degrade a little now . . . Are you sure he isn’t recently deceased?’
‘Yes,’ Arto sighed. ‘I wish it were that simple. But even I, with my rudimentary knowledge, know when a body has been preserved over a considerable period and this one has. The arterial formaldehyde solution used was in strong concentration and we’ve got glycerol and ethanol present. In addition the glass eyes have been fixed with mortuary paste.’
‘So when did he die?’ Yiannis said as he still gently touched other parts of the man’s body.
Arto shook his head sadly. ‘I have no idea,’ he said, ‘but I think some time ago.’
‘Mmm,’ the undertaker sighed, ‘that is possible. However, if you found him, outside of a controlled environment, there has to be something else present too.’
‘What do you mean?’ Arto enquired. ‘Like Lenin in his mausoleum?’
The Greek threw his arms dismissively in the air. ‘Lenin? Pah! That body doesn’t need a germ-free environment, it’s ninety per cent wax dummy! They’ve been shoring him up for decades!’
‘So . . .’
‘There needs to be some sort of barrier between the skin and the atmosphere. Internal treatment can only do so much. If insects get into the skin they will destroy it.’ He bent down to look closely at the dead man’s face. ‘And this is just starting to happen, so whatever that barrier was, it’s degrading. What was he wearing, if anything, when he was brought in?’
Arto, unsettled that they were talking over such a disturbingly live-looking subject, pulled the sheet back up once again.
‘A mil
itary uniform,’ he said. ‘It was one that neither I nor the policeman who brought him in recognised. My assistant investigated and we discovered that it dated from the nineteen fifties.’
‘So maybe he or his relatives favoured antique clothes,’ Yiannis said with a smile. ‘A lot of young people wear very bizarre things these days. Was there anything actually on the skin? Perhaps polythene or cream . . .’
‘There are traces of an emollient.’ Arto took his gloves off and threw them into one of the rubbish bins. ‘A grease, I’m not sure quite—’
‘An emollient could provide the necessary barrier,’ Yiannis replied. ‘It would have to be a good one if he’d been unattended in that apartment for some days because he’s only just now beginning to degrade.’
‘Mmm. How often would such an emollient have to be applied then, Yiannis? In order to maintain perfect preservation?’
‘Oh, daily.’
‘Across the whole skin surface?’
‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘Provided an appropriate emollient was used, anyone could do it. What just anyone couldn’t do is apply the occasional injections of disinfectant that would be needed to keep this young man wholesome – that and do the odd little bits of restoration to the facial tissues. Also the emollient would have to be excellent. Something produced, again, professionally.’
‘OK,’ Arto started moving back towards his office, ‘so a professional must have been involved in his care?’
‘Undoubtedly.’ The Greek threw his gloves into a bin as he joined Arto on his way out of the laboratory. ‘But not any of mine.’ He looked back at the now covered corpse and smiled. ‘I’d know about something like him,’ he said, and then cleared his throat. ‘So, this military uniform, did you find out what it was?’
‘Yes. My assistant did an Internet search, which is why we know that it dated from the fifties.’
‘So what was it?’
‘A lieutenant’s uniform. Argentine. The woman we found this body with was originally Argentinian. She came to İstanbul in the nineteen fifties.’
It was only when he had finished speaking that Arto realised that Yiannis was no longer following him. Confused, he looked back at the figure of the undertaker, which was perfectly still in the middle of the room.
‘Yiannis?’
‘Are you sure that the uniform was Argentine?’
‘Yes.’
‘One hundred per cent?’
‘Yes, what . . . ?’
‘Give me another pair of gloves,’ Yiannis said. ‘I have to look at him again.’
Wordlessly, Arto reached on to one of the benches and retrieved a pair of gloves, which he gave to the undertaker.
‘Have you thought of something or—’
Yiannis hurriedly put the gloves on and then scuttled back to the body on the table. He pulled away the sheet with a flourish like a conjurer and then stood back and looked at the body with a fierce intensity.
‘Yiannis . . .’
‘Arto, I can’t be certain, and so I will have to take advice from colleagues but . . . but I think you may have something absolutely extraordinary here.’ He looked up into the Armenian’s eyes and then licked his now bone-dry lips. ‘The police don’t happen to have found the emollient that was used on this boy, do they?’
‘Not that I know of. Why?’
‘Because if it’s the same emollient Ara used on Eva, then . . .’ The undertaker took his gloves off, flung them to the floor and walked up to Arto, took his shoulders between his hands and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Then that means your boy could be older than you, and we could be in the presence of a miracle,’ he laughed.
Arto, confused, looked from the dancing eyes of the animated undertaker to the corpse on the table and then back again. OK, so the boy was wearing clothes from the nineteen fifties, but for that body to be older than his own was surely not truly possible. However, if Yiannis was talking about miracles . . . So the man had been dead for a very long time . . . But then if that were so, why had he been preserved so well when Lenin, who had to have been attended by the best embalmers in the business, had needed wax to keep him together?
CHAPTER 5
Uncharacteristically for İkmen, he decided to have an early night. After a dinner of mixed vegetables and bread and a couple of games of tavla with his brother-in-law Talaat, he made his way wearily into his bedroom and lay down.
Today was one of those days – the days when he noticed things, became aware of thoughts and feelings in his own head. Talaat’s hands had been thin and yellow for some time, but today was the first time he’d seen them shake. Hardly able to lift the counters off the tavla board, sometimes even dropping them. It wouldn’t be long now – they’d be playing tavla on his hospital bed, Talaat’s arms and hands riddled with needles hooked up to tubes connected to machines dispensing drugs . . .
Poor Fatma. Both her parents had been dead for years, and although she still had two sisters and an older brother, it was her little brother Talaat who had always been her favourite. It had been Fatma who had to all intents and purposes raised him – bathing and feeding him while that monstrously fat mother of hers lay on her bed slowly killing herself with a mixture of lokum and sherbet. Somehow he’d have to make time to care for Fatma properly, with something approaching full attention, once Talaat had gone. But if he were honest with himself it wasn’t either Fatma or Talaat that was on his mind at the present time. It was the Akdeniz twins.
In one of the pictures Melih had given the police of Yaşar and Nuray, they looked so alive; sitting in their garden, playing with puppets and laughing at the antics of the local cats. İkmen wanted, more than anything else, to find them, to bring them back unharmed. He could even see it in his mind, the children running into the garden, into the arms of their tear-stained mother. But as tears started to rise in his own eyes, he knew it was only a vision, it wasn’t true. The truth was much darker than that, something that damned gypsy had leeched from inside his body. The children were in torment. As sure as the sun rose in the east and set in the west . . . The card had confirmed it. People could say as many fluffy things as they liked about modern interpretation of tarot, about the ‘Lightning-Struck Tower’ card representing change . . . But the turn of a single card that showed the ruined tower, its occupants flung down from heaven into hell, meant only one thing. After all, as his mother had always said, the possibility of a descent into hell, whether metaphorical or physical, is always a risk, and if a person can’t face that then that person shouldn’t be looking at cards. Not, of course, that İkmen had actually wanted to look at cards on this particular occasion.
But then if the Akdeniz children were being tortured, in whatever sense of the word somewhere, shouldn’t he be acting? In a way, through the card they were crying out to him.
But where to start? He couldn’t say anything about his intuitions to any of his colleagues; they would think he was insane. How could he proceed with more rapidity? He needed to move fast. Not that there was anything to proceed with. House-to-house had yielded nothing, ditto interviewing known child molesters. Ayşe had come up with nothing useful in Sarıyer . . .
All they had was the children’s home, their personal things and the unsubstantiated contention of Melih and Eren Akdeniz that the children had left the house at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning. They, well-known and gregarious children, had been seen by no one at that time. In fact the only out-of-the-ordinary incident that had occurred had been the appearance of the blue van Brother Constantine had reported seeing at the house late on the Friday night. Melih Akdeniz, a non-driver himself, had explained this quite satisfactorily. Late on Friday night his brother-in-law, Reşad, had visited to pick up a canvas for one of Melih’s many wealthy admirers. Roditi had phoned to check this out with the brother-in-law, and it had held up. There was no reason to doubt anything the Akdeniz couple had done or were saying. But İkmen did.
Of course they wouldn’t, couldn’t harm their own children. Akdeniz was an odd man, to say t
he least, but he was obviously very upset and anxious about what was happening. His wife, a sleepwalking figure, existed almost exclusively on tranquillisers – or so it appeared. No, it couldn’t be them, but there was something . . . Something else they knew, something they were burying . . .
The house. Solid and immutable, packed with everything, strange or not, that the children had ever known.
İkmen picked his mobile telephone up off the floor before he had a chance to change his mind. He punched a number in and waited for the recipient to answer. When she did she sounded a little surprised.
‘Oh, hello, Inspector,’ Ayşe said. She wasn’t yet accustomed to his ways, which included phoning his inferiors out of hours, sometimes at very peculiar times.
‘Ayşe, I’m going to order a full forensic examination of the Akdeniz house.’
‘Why? Do we think the parents are suspects? How could they have kidnapped their own children? Where would they be hiding them? Melih Akdeniz never goes out.’
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