‘Do you know where they got it from?’ İkmen asked.
‘I’m coming to that!’ Bülbül Uzun said tetchily. ‘Allah! You are an impatient man! Kemal, my brother-in-law, he spoke very good English.’
‘He is deceased?’
‘Along with my husband, his brother, yes,’ she said. ‘Kemal carried the luggage on board for the old man and his son. One of the things that he noticed was a very ornate sandalwood box. He asked what it was and the younger man began to tell him something about it being an heirloom, when the older man told him to be quiet. Kemal was, of course, as you would be, very intrigued.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Well, one night when nearly all of the guests were up on deck, Kemal heard the younger man in conversation with another Englishman. They were both drunk and the one told the other that he had a box with a carpet inside that once belonged to the Englishman Lawrence of Arabia. He said that many years before, his father had been given the carpet by Lawrence’s own hands. But he, the father, had then given it to someone else. By chance it turned up in İstanbul where the old man first recognised the box and then bought both that and the rug inside from a dealer who, he said, had no idea what it really was. He boasted, this son, about what the carpet might be worth. He said that it was stained with the blood of young Turks that Lawrence had killed in the desert. He blew up our troop trains, this Lawrence, and he stole this carpet from one that he destroyed outside a place called Ma’an. It is, I think, in Arabia. Kemal wrote that name down on a piece of paper.’
İkmen stubbed out one cigarette and then lit another. ‘The sandalwood box you spoke of was destroyed when your son’s car crashed into the trees of the Belgrad forest,’ he said. ‘So . . .’
‘It is not my place to speak ill of the dead,’ Bülbül Uzun continued, ‘but my brother-in-law Kemal was not an honest man. When the gulet stopped at Kaş the following day, when all the passengers got off, he stole the sandalwood box from the cabin of the old man. He hid it in the house of a loose woman he had been seeing in Kaş for a few months so that when the police came, which he knew they would, they would find no box or carpet in his possession. When the cruise was over he came home to Antalya with the box and the carpet and he told my husband, Orhan, all about it.’
‘What did your husband say, Mrs Uzun?’
‘He said he thought that his brother should get rid of it quickly. There are men, you know, who . . .’
‘Men who buy stolen goods.’ İkmen smiled. ‘Yes, I know of them.’
‘But then Kemal died.’
‘Died?’
‘He was in an accident in a car,’ she said. ‘So, because he was unmarried, my husband inherited his goods, including the carpet. He put it and everything else of Kemal’s away for many years. It was a very upsetting time.’
İkmen wondered what the real owners of the Kerman, whom he imagined were probably Roberts and his son, were going through at this time, but there was no way of knowing.
Seemingly lost in a dream of the past, Bülbül Uzun stared into space.
‘And then?’ İkmen prompted.
She sighed. ‘And then one day, Orhan took the Kerman out. It was filthy and stained and Yaşar, who was with his father at the time, tried to take it and its box to throw them away. It was then that Orhan told him what his uncle Kemal had thought it to be. Later that week, Orhan went into Antalya – we live just outside – got into a fight and was killed. I told Yaşar to get rid of the Kerman then. I said it was bewitched. But he wouldn’t. He was just getting involved in the carpet trade himself then and he was fascinated by it. In recent years, or so he said, he has grown to hate carpets. Maybe the Kerman and the greed and fear that it provokes turned him against them. Who knows? But during that time he read every book he could find on Lawrence of Arabia, and he watched the film – looking, always looking, for the Kerman in a picture or a description. But he found nothing. He went to work for Cengiz Bey, Raşit Bey’s brother, and then he came to İstanbul, bringing the Kerman with him. It was then that things changed.’
‘How?’
‘He found a picture of Lawrence with the Kerman on the Internet,’ she said. ‘He sent me a copy in the post and it was certainly the carpet Kemal had taken all those years ago. I could see that. Yaşar told me that now he had the proof the Kerman was what it was supposed to be, he was going to sell it and make us all rich. He said that Raşit Bey had many wealthy customers, passionate collectors of carpets who would not be averse to being taken aside and shown the Kerman in confidence. Yaşar said that it was going to make him his fortune. I begged and begged him not to sell it. It is cursed. It belonged to an enemy of our people who stained it with the blood of martyrs. Kemal stole it, only making the bad fortune worse. He died, Orhan died. I told Yaşar to throw it away. But . . .’
‘Your son decided to make some money out of it instead.’
‘And it has killed him, as you see,’ Bülbül Uzun said as she looked down at the floor and then burst into tears. ‘First it murdered his true love of carpets and then it murdered him!’
İkmen took his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialled a number. When the person at the other end answered he said, ‘Ah, Ayşe. Can you send an e-mail to Inspector Lloyd at Scotland Yard in London for me please? His address is in my desk diary for last year which is in my top drawer.’
Bülbül Uzun, through her tears, looked up at him questioningly.
‘I want you to e-mail Inspector Lloyd a copy of that photograph of the Kerman rug with Lawrence of Arabia and the soldier Victor Roberts. We need to trace Roberts, or his descendants, I should say, I expect he is dead by this time. You will need to attach the photograph to an e-mail asking Lloyd, in English, to look for this family Roberts. He will probably be able to use the uniform of Roberts in the photograph as a starting point.’ He then looked straight at Bülbül Uzun as he said, ‘It would seem that we have something that belongs to the Roberts family here in İstanbul. Something that was stolen from them in the 1980s.’
He clicked his mobile shut and returned it to his pocket. He sighed. ‘Bülbül Hanım,’ he said, ‘I am very sorry for your loss, but as you have admitted yourself, this carpet is not yours.’
She looked down at it with ill-disguised loathing. ‘You think I want this?’ she said. ‘After what it has done to my family?’
‘We have to keep it until someone can definitely prove ownership anyway,’ İkmen said as he began to roll the Kerman up.
‘Burn it if you want. I don’t care.’
If, as Raşit Bey was fond of saying, carpets chose people as opposed to the other way around, then the Lawrence Kerman seemed to have had a somewhat mischievous, not to say malignant, nature with regard to the Uzun family. İkmen found himself handling the carpet with some trepidation.
A ripple of voices outside in the shop made them both look towards the only partly curtained-off entrance to the office. Ara was nowhere to be seen, but Raşit Bey was bending down to kiss the hand of an elderly man well known to Çetin İkmen.
‘Who is that?’ Bülbül Uzun said as she regarded this obviously favoured customer with a frown.
‘That’s a man whose family used to rule this country,’ İkmen said as he smiled and bowed very slightly towards the stately form of Muhammed Süleyman Efendi.
Like most of his fellows, Abdullah Ergin hadn’t wanted to hand his Beretta in to the ballistics laboratory. But he’d done it anyway and now, off duty, he was wandering aimlessly along İstiklal Caddesi when he came upon Handan’s erstwhile teacher, the Canadian woman, coming out of the Markiz patisserie. She wasn’t alone. There was another woman with her whom he vaguely remembered from either one of his very short visits to Handan’s class – one to get her started, the other to stop her going.
‘Er, madam . . .’ He touched the Canadian woman on the elbow to attract her attention.
Smiling, she turned and then, seeing who it was, her expression changed to one of studied neutrality. ‘Mr Ergin,’ she said, ‘what can I do for you?’
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‘It is Handan, she . . .’
‘Mr Ergin, I have told you that I haven’t seen your wife for at least two months,’ Kim Monroe said firmly. ‘I will be telling the police who, I understand, you’ve put on to me, the same thing.’
‘But Mrs, er, Handan was still going out at class time. My neighbour saw her.’
‘Well she wasn’t coming to my classes, Mr Ergin,’ the Canadian said again very firmly.
He turned to the other woman with her and said, ‘You, Mrs, er, you took classes with Handan too . . .’
‘Mrs Melly stopped teaching way before you made Handan leave,’ Kim Monroe said with an edge to her voice. ‘She wasn’t there to witness the scene you made.’
Abdullah Ergin put his head down just a little. ‘I am sorry.’
‘No, you’re not,’ the Canadian responded calmly. And then before she and Matilda Melly went about their business she added, ‘But I am truly sorry that Handan has gone missing, Mr Ergin. Goodbye.’
Arm in arm the two of them made their way up İstiklal Caddesi towards the Vakko department store. Kim looked around once and saw the beleaguered figure of Abdullah Ergin still standing outside Markiz, but then she dismissed him from her mind and said, ‘So Matilda, how’s Peter about that rug he wanted to buy from that carpet dealer guy?’
‘As far as I know the police still haven’t found it,’ the English woman replied.
‘Yes, neither of us were at poor old Yaşar’s last show, were we?’ Kim said. ‘How did Peter get on with the police this morning? Has he called you?’
‘He’s OK.’ She smiled. ‘What about Mark?’
‘Oh Mark left Doris’s such a long time before Yaşar it was hardly worth them having him in. Anyway, all they seemed to want to do was to talk about that poor Handan Ergin.’
‘Mark doesn’t know anything about her, does he?’ Matilda said as she glanced at the window of an antique bookshop.
‘No, the inspector guy wants to talk to me, apparently,’ Kim replied. ‘I don’t know what to tell him! Handan would sometimes turn up to class with bruises . . .’
‘Did she?’
‘Yeah, don’t you remember? Oh, well, whatever. And then Ergin made her leave. Said we were corrupting her mind.’
‘Turkish men,’ Matilda Melly said by way of explanation.
‘Some Turkish men, yes,’ Kim replied.
Matilda looked at her friend coldly before she pointed to a shop front just up ahead and said, ‘Look! Lace!’
When darkness came to the golden city on the Bosphorus that night neither Çetin İkmen or Mehmet Süleyman had managed to reach their respective homes. Someone else was out and about still too, someone neither of the police officers had any knowledge of.
‘Have you ever seen a film called Nosferatu, Haydar?’ Mürsel asked as he and his henchman watched what looked like a black cloak or part of a coat slither across the surface of the alleyway.
‘No, Mürsel Bey,’ Haydar whispered in return. ‘That thing,’ he tipped his head towards the alley, ‘is that him?’
‘I believe so,’ Mürsel whispered back. ‘I feel we’re too late. He’s already killed. But if we can get him now . . .’
‘Mürsel . . .’
‘Get behind him. Block his exit back on to Sabahattin Evren Caddesi.’
‘He will see me!’ Haydar hissed.
They were both squatting down in the doorway of the small information centre and bookshop to be found just before the Jewish Museum at the end of Permçemli Sokak. Like a lot of the streets in the district of Karaköy, Permçemli Sokak was, in reality, little more than an alleyway. It was dark even in daylight, and sometimes it was hard to believe that it was almost opposite the northern end of the wildly busy Galata Bridge. Now at night with the museum, the ex-Zulfaris Synagogue, and the hardware shop on the left-hand side, closed, only those who lived in one of the flats in the old darkened buildings came deliberately into this alleyway. And they were few. He, Mürsel and Haydar’s frightening prey, had slithered out of the synagogue-museum several minutes earlier. As yet neither of the men could say whether or not there had been anyone else in there with him. But if there had been, the chances were that he or she was now dead.
Haydar reluctantly did as he was told and began to creep along past the shuttered hardware store in order to cut off the escape of the person still, apparently, motionless on the ground. Although he had seen a lot in his ten years with the service, Haydar had to admit that the one the police called the peeper was very good. If you didn’t know where to look, he could make himself completely invisible. It was a good thing that Mürsel Bey did know where to look. What was not so fortunate for Haydar was that the peeper could move very much faster than most people and that included his boss, Mürsel Bey. Haydar’s death was so quick and so efficient, he didn’t even have time for a last thought.
Chapter 8
* * *
İkmen put the telephone receiver down with a heavy hand and then looked out of his office window at the very black night sky outside. His conversation with Peter Melly had not been easy. But then he never imagined that it would be. Even for a well-paid diplomat, one hundred and twenty thousand pounds sterling was a lot of money, particularly if one had nothing to show for it. As sympathetically as he could, he had had to explain to Mr Melly that although the Kerman had now been found, Yaşar Uzun had never been the rightful owner of it. The carpet dealer’s story about having bought it from an antique dealer in Antalya had been a total fabrication. Whether a member of the existing supposed true owners, the Roberts family, could prove that he or she had a proper claim on the carpet was another matter. But Yaşar Uzun did not and never had. What was more, his mother wanted nothing to do with the carpet. If Melly could prove, as he asserted, that he had in fact given Uzun the one hundred and twenty thousand pounds, some of that money could possibly be recouped from the dead man’s estate. But that would take time and as Melly himself had freely admitted, time was not on his side. He’d raised the cash, he said, on a house he owned in England, but he hadn’t shared this knowledge with his wife – she was not apparently co-owner with him. However, in spite of that, İkmen’s advice to him had been that perhaps now was the time to tell Mrs Melly and get the inevitable out in the open. After all, if she was married to him, she had an interest in his property because it was also, apparently, their home. But Melly had just shouted and raved and in the end İkmen had put the phone down on him. Not that he was incapable of understanding what Peter Melly was feeling.
İkmen knew about wives, at least about his own dear Fatma. He adored her. But he’d only been home for one hour in the last forty-eight and she had called him five times since then to ask about estimated times of arrival, food preferences, his state of health, etc. Each time she called her voice was a little bit more elevated. But he had promised Arto Sarkissian that he would speak to Mehmet Süleyman soon and so he dialled his home number and waited for him to answer. But Mehmet, just like Çetin, was not at home.
‘He called about ten minutes ago to say he was on his way,’ Mehmet’s wife Zelfa said in that lovely Eire-accented English of hers. Although her father was Turkish, Zelfa’s mother had been Irish and she had spent most of her formative years in Dublin.
‘Oh, I’ll try him tomorrow,’ İkmen said wearily. ‘It’s not urgent. We just don’t seem to get the time we once did to talk these days. There is always so much to do! I miss him.’
‘And he misses you, I know,’ Zelfa replied. ‘Brave new world of international crime and implementing EU standards, eh, İkmen?’
He smiled. Zelfa was a bright woman who understood her husband’s world very well. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You know, Zelfa, I remember when the worst young boys ever got up to was stealing chocolate from their local bakkal. When did they start sniffing gas lighters and stealing cars?’
‘Probably about the same time as boys in Ireland decided that breaking into the priest’s house and smashing him over the head with a cosh was a lot more fun
than laughing at him behind your hand on the street,’ Zelfa said. ‘But we mustn’t carry on like this, İkmen, it makes us sound old.’
‘I am old.’
She laughed and then said, ‘I’ll tell Mehmet that you called.’
He’d just put the receiver down when there was a knock at his door followed by the appearance of a thin young man in front of his desk. He carried a small paper bag, which he placed, rather ceremoniously, on top of İkmen’s ink blotter.
İkmen looked at the bag, which appeared to be gently steaming and said, ‘I take it this is my final warning?’
‘Yes,’ the young man said. ‘Sigara börek. Mum just made it. Eat it first, then please come home, Dad. She’s driving everyone mad.’
İkmen sighed, indicated that his son should sit down opposite him, and then opened up the bag. A great waft of steam came floating out at him. He looked up at his son and said, ‘You know, Bülent, that if I plunge my fingers in there I’ll be scarred for life. You must have run like the wind to get here with these!’
‘Mum is very angry with you,’ Bülent replied. ‘So the oven was hot and my escape route was very short and rapid. What have you been working on, Dad?’
‘Oh . . .’
His office telephone began to ring.
Bülent said, ‘Oh please don’t answer that, Dad!’
The phone continued to ring.
‘I have to,’ İkmen said as he went to pick up the receiver. ‘If I’m in the building I have to answer my phone.’
‘Dad!’
İkmen spoke into the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘Çetin, it’s Mehmet,’ the familiar voice of his friend Mehmet Süleyman said. ‘I need to speak to you. I must!’
He sounded both breathless and rattled. İkmen said, ‘When and where?’
‘I don’t know when. Oh, Allah, Allah!’
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