The House of Four

by Barbara Nadel

‘Is she?’ Selin shook her head. ‘The old men feared for her. They believed the city to be full of madmen. They were right.’

  ‘No.’ He looked down. ‘Did you kill them, hanım?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Before God, did you?’

  ‘No, but I should have.’

  They looked into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Did it cause trouble between them?’ he asked. ‘That the old men wanted Sofia to come home?’

  ‘Letters flew between them like snow,’ she said.

  ‘They never spoke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My father told me that Kemal went to the ayazma to dig Sofia up and destroy her body because it was an abomination and a stain on the honour of his family. Why the change of heart? Was it just the sentimentality of an old man?’

  Selin didn’t speak for a while, but when she did, she held his arm. Had anyone seen them, they would have thought that maybe they were a middle-aged married couple trying to recapture some of their youthful romance.

  ‘Had your father listened to Kemal rather than just beaten him, he would have known that his intention was never to desecrate the shrine or destroy your sister’s body,’ she said. She looked into his eyes again. ‘He wanted to bring her home. Even then, all he ever wanted to do was bring her home.’

  ‘You want the truth? I’ll tell you the truth.’

  ‘Take me to her,’ Ali said.

  He was bruised and his lip was split. Süleyman looked at the custody officers with naked contempt.

  ‘Dr Aksu says you have something to tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me and I’ll take you to her.’

  Ali Erbil laughed. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘A who’s got the biggest prick competition? I’m a junkie and you’re wearing a Rolex watch. I haven’t had an erection this month. You win. Happy? Take me to her.’

  ‘And have you change your mind once you’ve got what you want? As you said, you’re a junkie. I know how you operate.’

  ‘Well then you’ll get nothing.’ He wiped a hand across his bloodied mouth.

  Süleyman sat down. ‘All right then. You get the truth. But I won’t take you to her until you tell me what you have been concealing from us.’

  Ali Erbil said nothing.

  ‘Elif tried to kill herself by smashing her head against the wall of her cell,’ Süleyman said. ‘It should never have happened and I will be investigating why she was not monitored more closely. She is alive, but there has been a measure of brain damage.’

  Ali looked up.

  ‘Whether that is permanent or not, we won’t know for some weeks.’

  Tears gathered at the corners of the young man’s eyes. ‘You let her hurt herself.’

  ‘I did not, but it happened,’ Süleyman said. ‘I am telling you the truth.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’

  ‘Because we didn’t know whether she would live,’ Süleyman said. ‘I feared for your life and so I took the decision to conceal her actions from you until we knew more about her condition.’

  ‘You didn’t want me to kill myself.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How very thoughtful of you.’

  ‘No. You’re an intelligent man. It was pragmatism.’

  ‘Yeah, and it’s pragmatism that makes me stick to my guns,’ Ali said. ‘I know something you don’t. I can recognise who I saw in the house where all those old people died. You want to know who that is . . .’

  Süleyman leaned forward.‘A name.’

  ‘Oh you’re not getting that,’ Ali said. ‘You can beat me until I turn purple. You can stick a baton up my arse. I don’t care. Take me to her.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘You see, your prick may work properly, but ultimately, mine is bigger.’

  Chapter 23

  ‘Begin.’

  They’d had to wait for a representative from the Greek Orthodox patriarchate to attend before they could even start to lift the floor of the ayazma.

  Commissioner Teker stood beside Father Manuel Phokas outside the shrine as they both watched her officers enter the premises.

  ‘We will try to cause as little damage as possible, Father,’ she assured him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  But he looked tense.

  Teker felt compelled to add, ‘We have to try and verify this story we have been told. If there is a body under the ayazma . . .’

  ‘It will be given a Christian burial,’ the priest said.

  ‘If our intelligence is correct, then the child’s mother was Turkish.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  They lapsed into silence.

  Inside, men grunted as they attempted to lift stones last removed by Konstantinos Apion almost a century before.

  He should have known. People with head injuries could die suddenly even if they were being treated in hospital. Elif Büyük had died. Just over an hour after Süleyman had left Ali Erbil in his cell to think about his options, the love of Ali’s life had suffered a cardiac arrest from which she had not recovered.

  He’d told himself he’d left his office to go and get some rest. But that was a lie. He’d looked up Barçın Demirtaş’s mobile number on the computer system and called her. They’d met in the street behind her building. Apparently the kapıcı of her block was ever vigilant, and she didn’t want him to see a man go into her apartment.

  He drove her to his small apartment in Cihangir in silence. As soon as they were through the door, she kissed him, hard, and grabbed his penis. He told himself it was just sex, but there was addiction too. Hers or his or both – it didn’t matter. It wasn’t right and he knew it. But he fucked her anyway. Losing himself in the hard, almost masculine demands of her body, he only just managed to answer his phone on time. And that was when he heard about Elif.

  He was a gentleman and so he took Barçın back to her apartment. As she got out of the car she said, ‘Call me.’ He didn’t answer, even though he knew that he’d phone her as soon as he was free.

  Teker had been just about to go out to Moda when he knocked on her office door.

  ‘Ah, they found you,’ she said.

  ‘Madam.’

  ‘Well, go down and break the news. While I don’t blame you for going home and trying to get some more sleep, I’d rather you’d stayed given the circumstances.’

  ‘I was giving Erbil time to think.’

  ‘You didn’t need to go home to do that,’ she said. ‘You could have caught up on your sleep later. Why am I telling you this? You know I’m right.’ She shrugged. ‘And anyway, your sleep has done you no good at all. You look like shit.’

  Did she know? She probably thought she did. She probably thought he’d been home making love to Gonca. The memory of where he had been and what he’d really done made him feel temporarily dizzy. Or maybe it was the blood loss. She’d stuck her nails so hard into the flesh on his back and buttocks, she’d drawn blood. And she’d bitten him.

  Çetin İkmen didn’t often go in for fancy coffees. Traditional Turkish, very sweet, was his tried and tested favourite. But on this bright and already hot morning, he tried a cappuccino and was pleasantly surprised. To the chagrin of the owners, Koço had been taken over by the police for the duration of the excavation work on the floor of the ayazma. And while Commissioner Teker had taken charge of the operation, Çetin İkmen and Kerim Gürsel had set up a temporary incident room in the garden of the restaurant.

  In spite of the gravity of the task, İkmen couldn’t help but feel elated. Here he was, working, while drinking coffee and smoking – and all without fear of being discovered by those he called the ‘morality squad’.

  Kerim brought him back down to earth. ‘I’ve heard there are plans to ban smoking in public gardens,’ he said.

  ‘Fucking hell!’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  İkmen refreshed his laptop screen. ‘I honestly don’t understand why sinners aren’t being allowed to destroy themselves in whatever way they please. “Nice” people don’t like us
; we’re a fucking nuisance to them. They should be paying me to smoke and then thanking me for being so public-spirited.’

  Kerim smiled.

  ‘I suppose I’d better make the most of it, then,’ İkmen said as he lit one cigarette from the butt of another.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Kerim frowned. ‘Sir, what if we don’t find anything in the ayazma?’

  İkmen sat back in his chair. ‘Doesn’t mean that what we’ve been told didn’t happen.’

  ‘We won’t be able to prove it, though.’

  ‘No. But we still have four dead bodies and no murderer. This dead child will remain where it is at the moment, a motive in the abstract.’

  ‘We seem to have a lot of those.’

  ‘One always does,’ İkmen said. ‘Unless one has actually seen the murder take place before one’s eyes.’

  His computer buzzed as a gaggle of emails came in. He ignored it.

  ‘Logic tells me that because the method used to kill the child was also employed to murder the offending adults, there has to be a connection.’

  ‘Yes. Unless someone did that deliberately to implicate another.’

  ‘Of course,’ İkmen said. ‘But whichever way we go with this, that person knew at least some of the Rudolfoğlus’ secrets. I fear, Kerim, that we may only be at the beginning of our journey into the monstrous history of this family.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘There’s so much sexual transgression here. And you and I both know what chaos that can cause. What do you think?’

  Kerim shrugged.

  ‘When sex becomes something dirty as opposed to something natural, bad things happen,’ İkmen said. ‘That’s when men make devils out of the frailest human flesh.’ He looked at his computer screen. ‘Ah, something from the German consulate . . .’

  Ali Erbil didn’t cry.

  ‘Everyone used and abused her,’ he said when Süleyman told him of Elif’s death. ‘Me too.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘When I still could, I screwed her. The first time we met, I paid her for sex. Then I fell in love with her.’

  ‘And let her kill,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘It made a light come into her eyes. When we left Moda, it was as if she died. Then she took control . . .’

  ‘By killing.’

  ‘When you kill, you’re God, aren’t you?’ Ali said. ‘Power of life and death . . . the ultimate celebrity. She’d grown up with all that shit on the TV she watched in that terrible place I found her. Full of men in filthy vests smelling of spunk. That psychiatrist spoke about folie à deux. But it wasn’t that. I didn’t join in with Elif. I just didn’t stop her. I didn’t dare. I couldn’t lose her love.’

  ‘But now you have, and you are still holding something back,’ Süleyman said. ‘There is no need any more. You must understand that. Help us now and you can make things easier for yourself. We know you stayed in the Devil’s House, we know you saw a man . . .’

  ‘I saw him again,’ Ali said.

  ‘When? Where?’

  This time he did cry.

  ‘Ali . . .’

  ‘When you took me to Moda,’ he said. ‘In that restaurant. He was speaking to a priest . . .’

  İkmen said, ‘Tell me about him.’

  Kerim leaned back in his chair. ‘Old, smartly dressed, walks with a stick.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I think he came on to me,’ he said. ‘I felt he knew, you know, about me. I avoided him.’

  İkmen looked at his screen again.

  ‘Rauf Karadeniz of Moda has visited the German graveyard at Tarabya three times in the last year. His stated reason for these visits was to place flowers on the grave of Rudolf Bauer.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘How did he know him?’

  ‘The Germans don’t interrogate those who visit their graveyards, Kerim. We don’t know. But we do know that when you spoke to him, Rauf Karadeniz knew a lot about the Rudolfoğlus.’

  ‘He did. He was our starting point.’ Kerim frowned. ‘But if Rauf Bey is involved, why reveal himself to me? I didn’t start our conversation about the family.’

  ‘We need to see him,’ İkmen said. ‘You have his number?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Call him. Say you need to speak to him. If you’re right about his proclivities, he will agree. This may all be a coincidence, but he’s too close to this investigation for us to just discount him.’

  Kerim looked around the empty restaurant. ‘Normally he’d be here,’ he said.

  ‘Mmm.’

  They both listened to the sound of stones scraping against each other as they were moved in the cave down below.

  İkmen said, ‘I wonder what St Katherine makes of all this . . .’

  ‘Koço is closed today,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Inspector İkmen has evidence to suggest that a body is buried underneath the shrine. We’re lifting the floor.’

  ‘Whose body?’ Ali asked.

  Now calmed by his latest dose of methadone, he had stopped crying and was slowly putting on his jacket.

  ‘Not your concern,’ Süleyman said. ‘But if we can get you out there, maybe the staff will be able to recognise this man from your description.’

  ‘When I saw him in the house, he seemed to be looking for something,’ Ali said. ‘I thought it was only a question of time before he found us.’

  ‘Why? Could he not also have been a homeless person passing through? Maybe a burglar?’

  ‘He wore good clothes.’

  ‘Sometimes burglars wear good clothes.’

  He shook his head. ‘I know. But he was old. What was he doing burgling a house at his age?’

  ‘You’ll be cuffed to me,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘I know. I don’t care. When she was alive, I had a goal. I wanted to protect her. Even in the madhouse, I knew I could do that. I’m a junkie, I’ll die and that’s OK. Do you know what it’s like to be so much in love, Inspector?’

  Süleyman said nothing. But he did know. If only, unlike Ali Erbil, he was able to completely immerse himself in that other person! Maybe it was true that Gonca had bewitched him into loving her. But what she’d never managed to do was tame him. He knew he would give anything to go back in time and not respond to the very obvious advances Barçın Demirtaş had made towards him in her office that first time they had sex. A moment’s desire on his part had caused him to put a hand on a breast that was almost naked. The rest was history.

  Rauf Bey was out. Or so he said. Wherever he was sounded very quiet.

  ‘I’m at my doctor’s office,’ he said. ‘May I know what you want to see me about?’

  Kerim looked at İkmen, who shook his head.

  ‘About the Rudolfoğlus,’ Kerim said.

  ‘I told you all I know,’ the old man said.

  ‘Just a couple more questions if you don’t mind, sir. You probably don’t know any more, but we have to check.’

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘So when . . .’

  ‘I’ll be home in an hour,’ he said. ‘But I will need to eat. On top of the arthritis, I am also diabetic and so I must eat regularly. Another cross I have to bear.’

  ‘I’ll see you in an hour then,’ Kerim said.

  When he finished the call, he said to İkmen, ‘How many Muslims do you know who talk about having a cross to bear?’

  Barçın looked different. If he’d been asked to say how, Ömer would have been unable to do so. All he could describe it as was ‘looser’. The way she walked, the way she wore her clothes was more confident somehow. She wore more make-up. And when he saw her talking in the corridor with Süleyman, he knew.

  The boss had stolen a woman from his predecessor, İzzet Melik, who had then been transferred back to his native İzmir. The woman, Sergeant Farsakoğlu, whom Ömer had known briefly before she died in an incident in Arnavautköy, had then been rejected in favour of Gonca Hanım. What was i
t about Süleyman? Yes, he was good-looking and confident, but he was no longer young. He had to be spectacular in bed in some way. But how?

  Ömer wanted to ask her, but he didn’t. He wasn’t in love with her, but they’d had a good time. Or so he’d thought.

  Süleyman came out of the cell accompanied by the prisoner, who was cuffed to his wrist, and two constables.

  ‘Inspector İkmen is with Commissioner Teker at the Koço,’ he said to Ömer. ‘Call him and tell him I will want to speak to the staff.’

  ‘Am I not coming too?’

  ‘No. I’d like you to get an update for me from Bakırköy on the condition of Aslan Gerontas. I want to know whether he’s still being pursued by the Devil. And whether he has settled.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Gerontas had only been transferred that morning. He had clearly been insane. What did Süleyman hope to achieve by checking up on him? Now he was finally in hospital, surely his part in İstanbul’s recent dramas was over.

  ‘You wouldn’t question my request if it had come from Inspector İkmen,’ Süleyman said.

  Was it Ömer’s imagination, or was Süleyman being uncharacteristically harsh? People said he’d turned on İzzet Melik when he’d taken Ayşe Farsakoğlu away from him. But was that true? Or was it just gossip?

  ‘The boy in Tarlabaşı saw the Devil everywhere,’ Ali Erbil said. ‘Everywhere.’

  Süleyman and the two constables began walking towards the door that led out to the car park.

  Without turning, he said to Ömer, ‘Oh, and please phone the Forensic Institute. They owe us some results.’

  Ömer didn’t answer. Arrogant prick! A woman they both fancied arrived and Süleyman pulled rank. Of course any sane woman would choose a higher-status man over a nobody from Mardin. But it hurt, and also Süleyman already had a woman. Did Gonca Hanım know he was messing around with Barçın? Ömer doubted it.

  He wondered whether he should tell her.

  By the time he’d climbed the stairs back to Süleyman’s office, however, he’d decided that he wouldn’t. He had no actual proof, and if he was wrong, it would only hurt Gonca Hanım, who had always been kind to him. He meant her no harm. Her man, however, was another matter.

  Four enormous stone slabs had been lifted before they found anything. Under the fifth was a fragment of cloth, finely woven and delicately hemmed. Commissioner Teker called for all activity to cease while Father Phokas investigated.