A Passion for Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  İkmen smiled. Programmed almost from birth, like most Turks, to treat everything a carpet man or woman said with extreme caution, this profession of honesty and expertise by Raşit Bey rather made his skin crawl.

  ‘But then, of course,’ the old man continued, ‘one can only do so much, however well-intentioned one might be. Ultimately, Çetin Bey, the carpet chooses the person, not the other way around.’

  Still smiling, İkmen said, ‘Magic carpets.’

  ‘If you wish,’ Raşit Bey said. ‘Not that I have to explain magic to someone like you, Çetin Bey.’

  At this allusion to his late mother, Ayşe the Albanian witch of Üsküdar, İkmen put his head down a little in a small bow of recognition. He had loved his mother very much, but her old profession was not something he often wanted to discuss with people.

  İkmen changed the subject. ‘Do the boys all go with the carpets in the truck when they go out to one of these shows?’

  ‘Yes.’ Raşit Bey’s grandson Adnan came in at that point and sat down beside the front door of the shop. ‘Hüseyin drives as I said before, and Yaşar sits next to him. Adnan, you usually lie on the carpets at the back, don’t you?’

  The boy turned to look at his grandfather with a serious expression on his face which, İkmen saw, was sadly damaged. The poor lad had quite a pronounced hare-lip that made him appear as if he were continually sneering at everyone.

  ‘Usually, yes,’ he said. ‘It’s dusty and makes me cough. But I am the smallest and so I have to do it. Although I didn’t do it last time.’

  The old man frowned. ‘No?’

  ‘No, I sat up with Hüseyin last time, on Monday. Yaşar followed in his car.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘I don’t know, showing it off, I expect. You know how he is with it, Grandfather, it’s like his son or something.’

  The famous Jeep that İkmen knew was not in the garage of Uzun’s apartment building.

  ‘I assume then that Yaşar also left the show in his own car at the end of the evening?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Adnan replied. ‘He stayed on a bit to talk to the people at the show while Hüseyin and I packed up the carpets and made our way home. It was already one o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Now tell me, where was this show held?’ İkmen said.

  But before either the grandfather or the grandson could answer, the policeman’s mobile phone began to ring insistently in his jacket pocket. With a muttered apology he turned aside in order to answer it. It was Mehmet Süleyman and he was calling from the station. He took up all of İkmen’s time and attention for the next ten minutes. When finally he did finish the call, İkmen turned back to look at the old carpet dealer with a grim expression on his face.

  ‘Raşit Bey,’ he said, ‘did the carpet show on Monday take place in the vicinity of the village of Peri out in the Belgrad Forest?’

  ‘It took place in Peri,’ the old man said, ‘at the house of a very enthusiastic collector, a Dutchman. Why?’

  İkmen lit a cigarette before replying. He hated this part of the job, and always had. ‘Raşit Bey,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Yaşar Uzun’s Jeep and a dead body, which would appear to be that of your assistant, have been found in a deep gorge by the side of the road out of Peri.’

  The old carpet dealer put one hand up to his chest. ‘Allah!’

  His grandson, equally shocked by this news, said, ‘Did he have an accident or . . .’

  ‘It would seem so, yes,’ İkmen replied. ‘I can’t tell you very much yet except that the Jeep and the body were discovered in the early hours of this morning by a man walking his dog.’

  ‘So you mean that poor Yaşar has lain there undiscovered since Monday night?’ Raşit Bey said as the full horror of what had just happened began to sink into his mind.

  ‘Unless he went back to Peri after the show for some reason, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘I am very, very sorry, Raşit Bey.’

  The old man took the mouthpiece of the nargile between his teeth once again and then shook his head as he smoked heavily upon it.

  Although the traffic officer who had responded to the Canadian’s call for assistance when he’d found the Jeep suggested that the driver of the vehicle had just simply had an accident, police officers were dispatched to investigate. Inspector Metin İskender, one of İkmen and Süleyman’s colleagues, had already left for the forest. Mehmet Süleyman, now that he had informed İkmen about Yaşar Uzun, was also out and about his professional business. Today he was out in the fashionable Bosphorus village of Yeniköy to interview Cabbar Soylu’s widow, Emine. On his way back he planned to briefly stop off at his parents’ house in order to tell his father the news about Raşit Bey’s unfortunate assistant. But before that could happen he had to talk to Emine Soylu. After all, whatever Mürsel might believe about Soylu’s murder and his contention that it was definitely the work of the peeper, it was incumbent upon the police, in the shape of Mehmet Süleyman, to explore all and any other possibilities that might exist.

  The woman who greeted him at the door of what was a small nineteenth-century palace was of indeterminate age. It was rumoured that Emine was considerably older than her husband, by as much as ten years, some said. But, unlike Süleyman’s own wife who was twelve years his senior, one couldn’t even guess as to the age of Emine Soylu. Nothing on her face had been left untouched by the knife of a plastic surgeon – not mouth, nose, eyes, cheeks or chin. That aside, however, it was obvious that she had been crying and plastic surgery or no plastic surgery, her face was pale with tiredness and shock.

  ‘I loved my husband more than life itself,’ she said without preamble as she led Mehmet Süleyman into a large room that contained a lot of very ornate lamps and several overstuffed red sofas. Pointing to one of these she said, ‘Please do take a seat, Inspector.’

  He sat down, took his notebook out, and apologised for intruding upon her grief.

  Emine Soylu smoothed her short dark dress down towards her knees and said, ‘We are burying Cabbar this afternoon. But you have your job to do, Inspector, I know that.’

  According to the pathologist, Dr Sarkissian, there hadn’t been any significant forensic evidence on the body. In fact, there hadn’t been anything at all. Soylu had died from a single stab wound to the heart, but that was all the doctor could tell from his investigation. As he had told Süleyman in a very frank exchange between the two men the previous evening, he wasn’t at all happy about releasing Soylu’s body for burial. It was Muslim custom for the deceased to be buried within twenty-four hours of death – Turks in particular believe that the soul of the departed suffers terrible torment until burial is effected. Victims of crime, however, could not always be given an early burial for legal reasons and this was one of those occasions. Or rather it would have been had not the hand of Commissioner Ardıç on instruction no doubt from Mürsel, intervened. Dr Sarkissian had told Süleyman, in no uncertain terms, that he opposed releasing Soylu’s body. He had also intimated that he felt something was distinctly awry with this case and that Süleyman himself knew or suspected what that might be. How right the pathologist was! And yet Süleyman couldn’t say anything to him or anyone else about Mürsel, the peeper and the involvement of organisations beyond either his understanding or control. In a few hours’ time Cabbar Soylu was going to be buried and that would be that.

  Süleyman cleared his throat before speaking. ‘Mrs Soylu,’ he said, ‘if we are to have any success in tracking down your husband’s killer, we need to know something about his life and his contacts.’

  She sighed. Cabbar Soylu had been a well-known and very prosperous villain and both Emine and Süleyman knew it. ‘I know you know exactly what Cabbar was,’ she said as she looked up into the policeman’s face with a small smile on her lips. ‘And I know you want to know who his enemies were.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sighed again before offering Süleyman a cigarette from her packe
t and then taking one for herself. ‘But I can’t help you with that,’ she said. ‘Cabbar, I know, was not always a nice man to those outside his immediate circle. He was after all a businessman and I accept that they can be ruthless. But with Rahmi and me, he was perfect.’ Her eyes began to fill with tears once again. ‘He kept us away from all that. He took care of us, always.’

  Süleyman had met gangsters’ wives and women in the past and, although Emine Soylu did look very similar to many of them, her character so far appeared to be radically at odds with those hardbitten females. There was, in fact, something of the simple rural Anatolian woman about her. It made him pursue a different, if not less relevant, line of inquiry.

  ‘So tell me about yourself and your husband,’ he said. ‘Rahmi is, I take it, your son?’

  ‘No.’ She lowered her head slightly, hunching over her burning cigarette. ‘Rahmi is Cabbar’s son by his first wife. She died when Rahmi was born.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Where we come from, Inspector, women die in childbirth.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ He knew it would be somewhere out in the east, somewhere hot in the summer, cold in the winter, miserable all year round. And he wasn’t wrong.

  ‘Hakkari,’ she replied naming a troubled far eastern town close to the Iraqi border. Ringed by the impressive Cilo Mountains, Hakkari would be an outdoor sports enthusiast’s paradise were it not for the still raw memories of the battles waged by the Turkish army against the Kurdish separatist movement, the PKK, in the 1980s and 1990s. Even in the twenty-first century Hakkari was, Süleyman knew, still dirt-poor. What it must have been like when Cabbar and Emine lived there he couldn’t imagine.

  ‘So you married Mr Soylu . . .’

  ‘We met just over a year after his first wife died. We’d seen each other before of course, but . . . I, too, had a son at that time . . .’

  ‘You were married before?’

  ‘No.’ She looked him straight in the eye with an honesty that was so straightforward it was intoxicating. After all, even in the twenty-first century sophisticated city women rarely admitted to a pregnancy outside of wedlock. For a woman from a place like Hakkari to do so, it was quite something. ‘The father of my son, Deniz, deserted me as soon as he had got what he wanted. When Cabbar rescued me I was a destitute woman with a sick child. He brought me to İstanbul twenty years ago. We married here and I brought Rahmi up as my own.’

  Süleyman put his cigarette out in one of the many ashtrays scattered around that luxurious room. ‘And Deniz?’

  ‘My son is dead, Inspector. He was a very sick young man.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She shook her head and smiled weakly. ‘As I said, my son was sick. He died in hospital, back home.’

  ‘Mum . . .’ It was eerie, in view of what she had just said, to hear a young male voice call out to her like that.

  Emine Soylu looked towards the door and said, ‘Rahmi.’

  Unlike his late father, Rahmi Soylu was a slim, attractive young man, in what Süleyman presumed had to be his early twenties. The only intimation that he was anything like his father was a slight steely glint to his slanted, green eyes. He walked into the room while his stepmother spoke. ‘Rahmi, this is Inspector Süleyman from the police. He is trying to find out who killed your father.’

  The young man looked at Süleyman with ill-disguised disdain. ‘Why?’

  Süleyman rose in order to shake Rahmi Soylu’s hand, but the latter kept his wrists clasped firmly behind his back in what was a very ill-mannered snub.

  ‘It’s my job,’ Süleyman replied. ‘The State pays me to do so.’

  Rahmi shrugged his narrow shoulders. ‘But this is the Soylu family you are talking to,’ he said. ‘It is a family I now head. We take care of our own affairs.’

  His stepmother, obviously appalled at Rahmi’s lack of manners, reddened and then turned away.

  ‘It is your affair, yes,’ Süleyman said, ‘but a murder has been committed which also means that it is a police matter.’

  ‘My father and the police were not exactly close,’ Rahmi Soylu snapped back bitterly, leading Süleyman to the conclusion that perhaps Emine Soylu had been lying when she told him that her husband kept herself and her stepson away from his business. Rahmi Soylu, after all, seemed very keen to assume the mantle of a big, police-taunting man of power.

  ‘I know what your father did and what he was, Rahmi,’ Süleyman said as he leaned down just a little bit in order to speak to the younger, shorter man. ‘This does not debar him or your family from access to justice.’

  The young man snorted unpleasantly.

  Emine Soylu went over to her stepson and said, ‘Rahmi, Inspector Süleyman wants to help.’

  ‘We can handle our own affairs.’

  ‘Rahmi,’ she put one of her hands on his shoulder. ‘Some people your father may have been involved with . . .’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about things you don’t understand!’ He shook her hand off roughly and began to walk back towards the door. ‘You’re not my mother. You’re nothing! All you could ever give birth to was a demon!’

  And then without another word he left. Once he was out of earshot the tear-stained Emine Soylu said to Süleyman, ‘You mustn’t mind Rahmi, he doesn’t mean what he says. It’s his grief talking, that’s all.’

  But Süleyman wasn’t so sure. There was both a hardness and an inappropriately childish petulance about Rahmi Soylu he really didn’t like. Grief or no grief, to be so cruel to his stepmother was inexcusable. And what was that about Emine having given birth to a demon?

  ‘What are you doing here?’ İkmen said as he walked over to and then embraced his friend the pathologist, Arto Sarkissian.

  There were five vehicles parked somewhat precariously by the side of the road, perched, as it were, on the lip of the steep gorge below. There was Inspector Metin İskender’s Audi, a standard police squad car, an ambulance, İkmen’s beaten up old Mercedes and a much newer and sleeker model of the same make that belonged to the Armenian.

  Arto leaned in towards İkmen and said, ‘Both Inspector İskender and the attending medic reckon that the victim was shot at some point during his recent “adventures”. I’m here to cast my eye over the body. Although, looking down there . . .’ He pointed into the deep darkness of the gorge and was not, in tandem with İkmen, comforted by the sight of İskender, his sergeant, and a white-coated medic coming up through the trees towards them.

  ‘It’s a long way down, isn’t it?’ İkmen said as he lit up a Maltepe cigarette. ‘I wonder if it’s slippery down there, or . . .’

  ‘If I fall over, at my weight, I will break something,’ the Armenian said with some passion in his voice. ‘Either the rest of you will have to hold me as I walk down or we will have to get a crane in from somewhere!’

  İkmen rolled his eyes up towards the bright blue spring sky. ‘Arto, I don’t think that industrial machinery will be required,’ he said. ‘I think that’s just a little over-dramatic.’

  ‘Do you! Do you!’ His large face was white with fear, his small dark eyes staring out wildly from behind the thick lenses of his spectacles.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Fifteen minutes later, however, having struggled alongside his colleagues to get the terrified Arto Sarkissian down into the gorge unharmed, İkmen was no longer as sure as he had been about the amount of dramatic potential inherent in a crane. In retrospect it seemed to be almost a missed necessity. Sweating heavily after his long slide down the gorge, İkmen, along with Metin İskender, surveyed the overturned Jeep while the doctor got to work with the body on the forest floor.

  ‘What makes you think that Yaşar Uzun has been shot?’ İkmen asked as he offered his colleague a cigarette.

  İskender took the proffered Maltepe with a grunt and then said, ‘The large hole between his shoulder blades was a bit of a clue.’

  A dapper and attractive man in his early thirties, Metin İskender had the reputation for being a somewhat spiky individual
. Not that he was as bad as he had been when he’d first joined the force. Although the majority of Turkish police officers originate from working-class families and districts, the tough Istanbul neighbourhood of Ümraniye, which was where Metin was born and brought up, had a fearful reputation for poverty and ignorance. Pulling oneself out of such a place, as he had done, was an act of great willpower and courage and did not allow one to tolerate either prejudice or criticism.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I also noticed something odd about the tyre tracks,’ İskender continued.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘They only appear to start halfway down the gorge. The ones near the road have been brushed over – literally – with an actual broom, by the looks of it.’

  İkmen sucked on his cigarette and then said, ‘So someone didn’t want Mr Uzun and his lovely car to be discovered.’

  ‘It would seem so,’ İskender replied. ‘The “mob” strikes again if I am not much mistaken, Inspector İkmen.’

  The latter sighed and then said, ‘Yes. Or so it would appear.’

  As well as being very beautiful and healthy, the Forest of Belgrad had for some time had a more sinister reputation as graveyard for the various poor souls who had had the misfortune to cross one or other of the city’s brutal Mafia bosses. Gorges like it provided excellent natural dumping grounds.

  ‘The last whereabouts of Mr Uzun are back in the village,’ İkmen said as he looked up the gorge to the road above. ‘Monday night.’

  ‘Any idea what he might have been doing?’ İskender enquired.

  ‘Selling carpets to foreigners,’ İkmen replied.

  ‘Oh. I see.’ The words were spoken with a slight curl of the lip as if Metin İskender had a bad smell under his nose.

  İkmen laughed softly. ‘Not keen on carpet dealers, Metin?’