The House of Four

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Yes, well I may have more work for you, Inspector,’ Şahin said.

  Süleyman frowned. ‘How so?’

  ‘Yesterday evening, the body of a young woman was brought in. She’d died aboard a packed tram that had originated at Kabataş. She was discovered at Zeytinburnu. I should say here that this woman is not the first person whose body has been delivered to me from a packed tram. People with conditions like angina and asthma do succumb in such ghastly conditions from time to time. And this woman had a heart murmur.’

  ‘What has that to do with us?’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Everything, I’m afraid,’ Dr Uslu said. ‘Because it wasn’t the heart murmur that killed this woman, but an overdose of heroin. And before you say anything, she was no user.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because the drug was, I believe, administered to her by force. I found heavy bruising on her left thigh, at the centre of which was a puncture wound.’

  ‘She was spiked?’

  ‘Through her clothing, I checked. That was where the drug was administered, and there was a lot of it.’

  ‘You’re certain it was heroin?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Could this be a third murder perpetrated in public? Süleyman put his cigarette out and then immediately lit another. Heroin? Not the drug of choice on the streets for a long time; that was a cheap synthetic cannabinoid called bonzai. Heroin was expensive.

  ‘You should also know, Inspector,’ the doctor said, ‘that the woman’s torso is covered with old bruises, possibly inflicted by her husband. Her name was Saira Öymen; she was twenty-four, covered, and had been travelling on that tram alone. The husband is keen to bury her body, but I have not released it. Perhaps your own pathologist would like to confirm my findings?’

  Chapter 6

  Although moth-eaten and cockroach-infested, the Devil’s House was not yielding very much in the way of useful forensic evidence. So far, no identifiable fingerprints belonging to anyone apart from the Rudolfoğlus and their retainers had been discovered. Or footprints. Strange that rooms so mired in filth should result in so little evidence.

  İkmen was at his usual table outside the Mosaik Bar. As ever, his cat sat in the chair directly to his right, eating small pieces of fish donated by the waiters, while İkmen drank cognac and smoked. Unusually, he was without human company, although not for long, he hoped. He was waiting for the Ottoman language graduate who worked in Traffic to turn up.

  Had this Demirtaş woman been recommended by anyone except Turgut Zana, he would have been tempted to believe the whole thing was a joke. But Zana didn’t make jokes. What was a woman who had studied something so complex and unusual doing looking at CCTV screens in the traffic division?

  ‘Inspector İkmen?’

  He’d been looking down at a kitten that Marlboro had been hissing at underneath his table, so the first thing he saw was a pair of black boots. Then he saw the biking leathers, then the face. She was very dark, but if she was a friend of Turgut Zana’s, she was likely to be. She was also very statuesque, and extremely handsome.

  ‘Constable Demirtaş, I presume.’

  He held out his hand, which she took with a smile. Her grip was firm and dry, like a man’s.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She took off her heavy leather jacket and placed it under the table with her helmet. The kitten was long gone.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Just Coke,’ she said. ‘I’m driving.’

  ‘Quite right. Where’s your bike?’

  ‘I’ve a friend who works at the Ambassador Hotel,’ she said. ‘He lets me park in front of the entrance. The boys on the desk keep an eye on it for me.’

  İkmen caught the attention of one of the waiters and ordered their drinks.

  ‘What kind of bike have you got?’ he asked.

  She smiled. ‘A Ducati Streetfighter 848. It’s my baby.’

  ‘Sounds powerful.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I may be wrong, but I don’t see your friend Sergeant Zana riding fast bikes,’ İkmen said.

  She laughed. ‘Turgut? No. He’s done the statistics and decided it’s far too dangerous.’

  ‘How do you know each other?’ İkmen offered her a cigarette, which she took.

  ‘We grew up on the same street, in Diyarbakır,’ she said. ‘He was always the go-to kid if you had trouble with mathematics, and I did. Turgut used to do my homework – and almost everyone else’s. He was easily the brightest boy in our district, and when he got into İstanbul University, well, that confirmed it.’

  Their drinks arrived.

  ‘What about you?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Languages were always my thing,’ she said. ‘At home, like most people in Sur district, we spoke Kurmanji. But of course we all learned Turkish too, and because my mother’s native tongue is Zaza, I learned that as well. I can get by in Arabic, but when I went to high school, I fell in love with English.’

  ‘Why on earth are you wasting your life in Traffic?’ İkmen asked. ‘I have enormous respect for my colleagues in that department, but your language skills, surely, must have prepared you for a career in academia or—’

  ‘It’s a job,’ she said. ‘It means I’m able to live here in İstanbul and have my bike.’

  İkmen shook his head. So much talent, just thrown away. Young people deserved better. The reality, however, was that there just weren’t enough jobs.

  ‘Turgut told me that you need someone to translate some documents written in Ottoman Turkish,’ she said.

  She obviously didn’t want to talk about her employment status, and İkmen knew that he should get to the point.

  ‘Yes. Another of your talents, I believe.’ He took a sip of cognac and then continued, ‘Why Ottoman, may I ask? Like Sergeant Zana, you’re—’

  ‘Kurdish,’ she said. ‘Why not? Our history is inescapably linked to the Turks. Whatever we may think of each other, we share a past. Also, isn’t there a saying about knowing as much as you can about your enemy?’ She smiled.

  İkmen smiled too. ‘Point taken. Well, Constable Demirtaş, do I have a puzzle for you. As I’m sure Sergeant Zana has told you, I am currently working on a case involving the murder of four people, all members of the same family.’

  ‘In Moda.’

  ‘Correct. These people, three in their nineties, one over a hundred, were siblings who didn’t speak to each other: three men and a woman. They all lived in the house where they had been raised, which at some point they had converted into four separate apartments. All four were stabbed through their hearts by an unknown killer for reasons we do not understand.’

  Demirtaş shook her head. ‘That is macabre. I heard about the deaths on the news, but of course we don’t get details.’

  ‘So far we have no witnesses, no incriminating forensics, a couple of unlikely suspects and a lot of questions,’ İkmen said. ‘What may provide some answers are letters written by the siblings, one to another. Sadly for us, they are in Ottoman. Luckily for you, given your interests, they may provide an insight into the language as written by some of the last people to employ it in the country.’

  ‘That is interesting.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ he said. ‘So if I can arrange with your superiors for your secondment to my department, will you do it? I won’t lie, I will put you under pressure. We need this information yesterday. Trust me, these killings were deliberate, ritualistic and freighted with a meaning we can’t even guess at the moment. What I can promise you in return is a cool, spacious office all to yourself, as much moral support as you require, tea—’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. Then she laughed. ‘You don’t have to beg.’ She leaned forward and stroked Marlboro underneath his filthy, whiskery chin. ‘I’m the girl who rides a Ducati Streetfighter, Inspector. Nothing makes me sweat.’ She looked up at him. ‘And I’m a Kurd.’

&nb
sp; Moda was the sort of place where Kerim Gürsel could almost be himself. Liberal and arty, heavy on coffee shops and restaurants, it had once been the home of the late great king of Anatolian rock musicians, Barış Manço. It was an easy place for a gay man to be, even if he was a police officer.

  Kerim had spent the afternoon getting into the cellar of the Devil’s House, which was no mean feat. The only entrance that was visible had been bricked up for decades, and when he and a group of constables had managed to get in, they’d found a filthy, dark, cavern-like space filled to the ceiling with discarded furniture. Had Miss Rudolfoğlu’s ‘voices’ been, in fact, this furniture shifting as the timbers supporting the house expanded in the humid İstanbul summer? Kerim didn’t know anything about acoustics, but he did know that old buildings made noises. He’d been to Inspector Süleyman’s parental home once. A nineteenth-century wooden villa in the pretty Bosphorus village of Arnavautköy, the entire structure had creaked like a sailing ship.

  Now out of the stifling atmosphere of the Devil’s House, Kerim was reluctant to go back to the small apartment in Tarlabaşı that he shared with his fake wife Sinem. His lover, the transsexual Pembe Hanım, would almost certainly be there too, but for once he wanted to be alone.

  As a child, Kerim had visited Moda occasionally with his parents. His father had an aunt who had lived in an apartment overlooking the long-disused ferry terminal on the Sea of Marmara. An elegant late Ottoman structure, the terminal had always been one of Kerim’s favourite pieces of city architecture. A bright summer evening was the perfect time to take a gentle stroll down to the old building and look at the sea. On his way back, he decided to stop for a coffee in the garden of the Koço restaurant, which was where his great-aunt used to sometimes take the family when they visited.

  He wasn’t the only loner having a drink beneath the trees and looking at the deep blue waters of the Sea of Marmara. There were plenty of couples, but also a lot of people enjoying drinks, cigarettes and sometimes books on their own. And if Kerim was hard up for company, there were always the many well-fed street cats to entertain.

  But he wasn’t to be deprived of human company for very long. An elderly man who walked with a stick was finding it difficult to lower himself into a chair, so Kerim went over to help him.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ the old man said as Kerim made sure that he was comfortable. ‘This blasted arthritis will render me housebound!’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir,’ Kerim said. ‘You just need a little help sometimes.’

  The old man put a hand on his arm. ‘Do let me buy you a drink to show my gratitude . . .’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Kerim said.

  ‘But I insist!’

  Kerim Gürsel had been brought up to respect elderly people, and so he sat down opposite the old man, Rauf Bey, and accepted a coffee from him. Rauf Bey himself drank whisky, which, he claimed, had a beneficial effect upon his joints. Before he retired, the old man had been a lawyer.

  ‘Property law was my speciality,’ he told Kerim. ‘Obtaining planning permissions and land permits. Don’t think I’d like to do that now.’

  Kerim, unwilling to get into yet another conversation about the iniquities of modern property development, said, ‘So do you live in Moda, Rauf Bey?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All my life. It’s always been a very accepting sort of place. I like that. A man like myself can live alone – with the exception of my fish – with no questions asked. I can barely believe we have a multiple murderer in our midst.’

  ‘Oh, the . . .’

  ‘The Teufel Ev, yes,’ he said. ‘I had not even realised that the Rudolfoğlus were still alive! Modern people lead such isolated existences.’

  Kerim had a choice. He could tell the old man he was a police officer involved in the investigation, or he could keep it to himself. People in smart suburbs like Moda generally disapproved of the police, regarding them as fascists. But Kerim liked Rauf Bey, and so he told him the truth.

  Rauf Bey nodded. ‘Bringing bad people to justice is a good thing,’ he said. ‘Whoever killed the Rudolfoğlus must have been an unusual character. I mean, I count myself as old at seventy-five, but they had to be in their nineties at least.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Frightening,’ he said. ‘Who would murder the frail elderly like that? Not that the Rudolfoğlus were particularly nice people. Locking themselves away with their secrets! And their father was a terrible man.’

  ‘I’ve heard.’

  ‘My father once told me that Rudolf Paşa used to whip his servants with a strap tipped with silver spikes. Can you imagine such a thing! And that youngest son of his was no better, desecrating a shrine. That house was named for the Devil for a very good reason – if one believes in such things, of course.’

  Kemal Rudolfoğlu had been the youngest of the three boys. He had also been the one that Inspector İkmen believed had practised alchemy. But when had he desecrated a shrine, and where?

  Rauf Bey was cheerfully forthcoming. ‘Oh, years ago,’ he said. ‘Before I was born. He can’t have been much more than thirteen. Not that his age is any excuse.’

  ‘Do you know what he did to this shrine?’ Kerim asked.

  ‘The story goes that when he was discovered, he was trying to dig up the floor,’ the old man said. ‘God knows why. If the old owners of the restaurant were still here, they’d probably be able to tell you. But they went back to Greece.’

  Kerim frowned. ‘This restaurant?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why? Did Kemal Rudolfoğlu desecrate their church?’

  ‘No, the ayazma of St Katherine,’ said Rauf Bey.

  ‘That’s a spring, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s in a cave where, it is said, a miracle-working ikon of the saint was discovered hundreds of years ago. And it’s right underneath this restaurant.’

  Had they lost interest in him? No one had come to peer at him through that flap for many hours. He didn’t like it when they did that, but it was still better than just him and his head. Because in spite of his best efforts to keep him out, the Devil had got in.

  He was going to carry on killing, so he said. He’d only stop when he wanted to, and anyone who tried to make him stop was a traitor. But how could you be a traitor to the Devil? The whole thing was confusing. He’d always been good, so why had the Devil chosen him?

  The door opened suddenly, making him jump. Instinctively he shrank into the one blanket they’d given him.

  A policeman in a uniform loomed in the doorway.

  ‘Inspector says you can go,’ he said. ‘On your feet!’

  He jumped up. You can come killing with me if you want, the Devil said.

  ‘No!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘No what, nutter?’ the policeman said.

  He pulled him through the door and pushed him along the corridor.

  ‘Back on the streets with you!’

  The Devil tried but failed to make him respond with Drop dead, son of a whore!

  There were taps around the walls from which, presumably, the sacred water flowed.

  ‘I’ve no idea why I never knew this was here,’ Kerim said as he looked around the tiny shrine. When the old man had taken him down the steps at the back of the restaurant, he’d realised he’d seen them many times before. What he hadn’t noticed was the doorway they led towards.

  ‘I assume your family are Muslim,’ Rauf Bey said.

  ‘Yes, but pretty secular,’ Kerim replied. ‘I’ve been inside more churches than mosques.’

  ‘Few people come here,’ the old man said.

  Dark ikons depicting St Katherine, the Virgin and Child and the Crucifixion were displayed in glass-fronted cabinets at the rear of the small chapel. Unlit candles lay in bundles beside a sand-filled trough. One lit candle stood in a second trough, a sign of a prayer offered to the saint for protection, for the dead or just out of habit.

  ‘It’s said that fishermen found this spring bac
k in Byzantine times,’ Rauf Bey said. ‘Then they found an ikon of St Katherine and someone decided that this was her sacred spring. Voilà! A shrine dedicated to St Katherine.’

  His eyes glittered in the candlelight, and there was a moment when Kerim felt as if the old man might be coming on to him. But then it passed.

  ‘So how do you know that one of the Rudolfoğlu boys tried to dig up the floor?’ Kerim asked.

  ‘I don’t know anything of the sort, young man.’

  ‘No, but you said that it was said . . .’

  ‘By a friend of my late father, yes. He was very upset about it. Konstantinos Bey was Greek, so he felt the violation acutely. Also, so my father said, it was Konstantinos Bey who found the boy.’

  Kerim shook his head. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Konstantinos Bey stopped him.’

  ‘Is there a police record of the incident, do you know?’

  Rauf Bey shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but I doubt it. Konstantinos Bey used to work for the Rudolfoğlus.’

  ‘In what capacity?’

  ‘He was their gardener. Apparently he was very good at it, too, according to my father. Quite the artist in his time, Konstantinos Apion.’

  ‘I take it he’s dead?’

  ‘Oh, long ago,’ the old man said. ‘But I believe his son still lives in the city.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘No. Why do you ask?’

  ‘The Rudolfoğlus were recluses,’ Kerim said. ‘So we’re looking for anyone who may have had contact with them, recently or in the past.’

  ‘That house of theirs has to be worth a fortune, or rather the land beneath it is,’ Rauf Bey said.

  ‘We are looking for any potential beneficiaries,’ Kerim said. ‘But as far as we know, the Rudolfoğlus all died without issue.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine they did.’ He shook his head. Then he smiled. ‘Unless, of course, Fatima Hanım had the Devil’s child.’

  In spite of being a shithole full of thieves and con men, İstanbul was a good place to be if you were on the streets and needed somewhere to sleep. While half the city was being torn down, the other half was under construction, which meant that the homeless could usually find somewhere to bed down. This time it was an old shop in the upmarket Bosphorus village of Yeniköy.