A Passion for Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Ssh! Ssh!’ Poor Mehmet sounded as if he was in the midst of a crisis. His voice was full of tears. ‘Come on, Mehmet, I will meet you. Just tell me where. I will wait. I promise.’

  ‘Oh, er, at, at . . . Meet me at Uç Horan, you know, the Armenian church in the Balık Pazar. Dr Sarkissian’s friend is custodian there . . .’

  ‘Garbis Bey, yes, I know him,’ İkmen said. And then, shrugging helplessly at his son, he added, ‘I’ll go there right away.’

  Bülent waved his hands in the air and mouthed the word ‘no’ most emphatically.

  ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be, Çetin,’ Süleyman continued. ‘Something has happened that I have to deal with first, I . . .’

  ‘I will be with Garbis Bey in under an hour,’ İkmen said.

  When he put the phone down, İkmen lit a cigarette before he looked up into his son’s face.

  Bülent, shaking his head sadly from side to side said, ‘Dad, you are dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen responded gloomily. ‘I know.’

  Permçemli Sokak was cordoned off by the time Süleyman arrived. Uniform had been very quick and efficient. Mürsel, who was leaning over a body that appeared to be in the middle of the little street, had called straight through to Ardıç. As Süleyman approached, Mürsel straightened up and smiled.

  ‘Haydar,’ he said as he tipped his head, seemingly dispassionately, in the direction of the ground. ‘I shall miss him.’

  Süleyman, shocked, took him to one side, away from the uniformed officers. ‘How did it happen?’

  Mürsel lowered his voice. ‘I ordered Haydar to get in behind our man, but he was too quick for us. He cut Haydar’s throat. He’s very good.’

  ‘But still, apparently, without a name,’ Süleyman said exhibiting impatience with the apparently endless subterfuge.

  ‘You have no need of a name, Inspector,’ Mürsel said as he moved towards Süleyman with his smile still fixed upon his face. ‘You will never catch him.’

  ‘Which will put me on an almost equal footing with you,’ Süleyman responded sharply. ‘Those who assist me are still alive. What were you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘There’s a girl,’ Mürsel said as he gestured towards the synagogue. ‘Some functionary at the museum. He killed her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The peeper, he killed a girl in the synagogue,’ Mürsel elaborated. ‘What . . .’

  ‘How did you know?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What made you come here in the first place?’

  At the end of the small street the heavy traffic on Yüzbaşi Sabahattin Evren Caddesi thundered past in glorious oblivion. Out on the Bosphorus, night-time ferries sounded their horns to announce their arrival at Eminönü, Kabataş and Üsküdar.

  Mürsel Bey’s eyes glittered. ‘Intelligence,’ he said.

  ‘What intelligence?’

  He smiled again. ‘If you remember, Mehmet Bey,’ he said, ‘when this business began and my agency and yours started to co-operate, it was understood that intelligence would only proceed in one direction. I don’t have to tell you anything.’

  Some of the uniformed officers around the scene began to look at the two men with some curiosity. Feeling rather vulnerable without İzzet Melik, Süleyman went through the archway to the courtyard in front of the synagogue without another word.

  The Zulfaris Synagogue, now the İstanbul Jewish Museum, was a nineteenth-century building and one of the very many, particularly Sephardic, synagogues that were built in the Karaköy area of the city. The main body of the synagogue, with the women’s gallery looking down from above, was exactly as it would have been when the place was built. Now, however, display cases and large bodies of text have replaced worshippers and down beneath the main hall there is a small ethnographic display. It was to the lower level that Mehmet Süleyman was directed by the uniformed officers stationed at the main entrance. Dr Sarkissian and another man Süleyman didn’t know were with the body.

  As Süleyman approached, the Armenian turned towards him and said, ‘Her name is Leyla Saban. She was twenty-nine and a member of the local Sephardi community.’

  Süleyman wondered whether his old friend the Sephardi Balthazar Cohen had known her. Or, given Leyla’s age, whether his son Berekiah had. Not pretty like Berekiah’s wife, İkmen’s daughter Hulya, Leyla Saban was nevertheless a handsome-looking woman. And if it hadn’t been for the huge bloodstain across her chest she might have looked as if she were just sleeping. Her features were at rest and seemingly untroubled.

  The other man, whom Süleyman did not know, spoke next. His eyes full of tears, he said, ‘She was a great scholar of her people’s history. Leyla helped to run this place. She was a good girl!’

  Süleyman looked at Arto Sarkissian who said, ‘This gentleman lives across the road.’

  ‘I am a Muslim scholar, Leyla was a Jewish scholar,’ the man, who had to be at least eighty, continued. ‘We were friends. We spoke of and enjoyed the differences between us. It is the Turkish way.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘My grandfather, he was an Armenian,’ the old man said. Though still tearful, he was nevertheless in his stride. ‘I don’t care who knows it! Leyla knew it. You know what she was doing in here so late into the night on her own? She was going through archives taking notes for a book she wanted to write – a book about all the Turks who saved Jews from the concentration camps in the Second World War. If this is the work of people who call themselves religious . . .’

  ‘This is not the work of fundamentalists of any kind, sir,’ Süleyman said. ‘Of that you can be certain.’

  Arto Sarkissian looked up at Süleyman again and frowned. ‘You sound very sure, Inspector.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well, she was stabbed,’ the Armenian said. ‘One thrust to the heart. Left-handed assailant.’

  Just like the peeper.

  ‘Doctor, who actually found the body? Was it . . .’

  ‘No, it wasn’t this gentleman,’ Arto Sarkissian said as he smiled gently at the distressed old man. ‘He just came over when he heard the commotion.’

  ‘I knew that Leyla was in here on her own,’ the man said. ‘I have given the name of her father to your officers. He lives out in Şişli. There are many Jews in those districts to the north these days.’

  ‘So who actually found the body?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘Oh, it was that officer from out of town,’ the doctor said as he turned his attention back to the corpse. ‘You must have seen him on your way in. A Mürsel Bey.’

  ‘Was it.’ Süleyman felt cold. Mürsel. How had he known that the peeper, if indeed it was him, had struck inside the museum? Intelligence? What did that mean, exactly? And what, he wondered, could the peeper have had against poor Leyla Saban? How had she transgressed his seemingly evermore stringent and deranged moral standards?

  ‘Yes, his sergeant was killed trying to apprehend Miss Saban’s killer, so it would seem,’ the Armenian said. ‘I will attend to him in due course. By the way, Inspector Süleyman, where is your sergeant tonight?’

  ‘Hakkari.’ İzzet Melik and Süleyman did not always see eye to eye but he missed his sergeant’s blunt, but honest loyalty now.

  ‘What is he doing there?’ the doctor asked. ‘God, but that’s the end of the earth almost!’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Süleyman said and then he turned to the elderly erstwhile friend of the murdered woman. ‘Sir, if you wouldn’t mind coming outside and telling me exactly what happened from your point of view . . .’

  ‘You will find him, won’t you? Leyla’s killer . . .’

  At that moment Mürsel came into the room and just before he turned aside to look at a display cabinet given over to nineteenth-century wedding dresses, he smiled at Süleyman who fixed him with his eyes and said, ‘Oh, yes, sir, we will find Leyla’s killer, you have my word on that account.’

  His English friend was very drunk, but then if Wim Klaassen had just lost the equivalent of approximat
ely two hundred thousand euros, he would probably be drinking heavily too.

  ‘How could he do it?’ Peter Melly said as Doris poured him yet another large gin and tonic. ‘What a shit!’

  Doris gave her husband a meaningful look and then made off into the kitchen to make some coffee. It was very late and she, for one, wanted to go to bed.

  ‘It was his uncle who stole the carpet, not Yaşar,’ Wim said. ‘And to be fair, Peter, I don’t think that it was in Yaşar’s plan to die before he completed his deal with you.’

  But Peter Melly was in no mood to listen to facts. ‘Yaşar lied! And now the fucking police are actively looking for the family of bloody Lawrence’s batman, Roberts. Fucking Yaşar’s uncle stole the carpet from them, so they think, and so legally it belongs to them. And where does that leave me?’ He drained his glass and leaned in shakily towards his host. ‘Fucked is where it leaves me! What am I going to tell Matilda?’

  ‘Just what Inspector İkmen told you to tell her,’ Wim replied calmly. ‘The truth.’

  ‘The truth? The truth! The truth is, Wim, old mate, that my wife and I were mortgage-free, I’d paid the fucker off until Yaşar came into my life. The house I bought in good old Henley-on-Thames just before I got married for a hundred and fifty grand has now doubled in value. That’s three hundred grand to go home to – except that it isn’t. Now it’s one hundred and eighty. It’s less if I go ahead with the loan I’d arranged with the bank to pay Yaşar the rest of his money. That leaves me with about fifty grand. Do you know what kind of hovel you can expect to get in Oxfordshire for that sort of money these days? For our three hundred thousand we were going to buy a flat on the river when we went home. Matilda has her heart set on it. That the house was never hers is immaterial. She’s been married to me for ever so she expects things. What will I be able to give her now? A fucking bedsit in Reading! Men get divorced, taken to the cleaners, for less! I haven’t lived alone since I was at Oxford, for God’s sake!’ He began to cry.

  Wim passed him a box of tissues and then excused himself to go into the kitchen. As he entered, Doris was pouring water into the coffee percolator, shaking her head.

  ‘I want Peter to go home,’ she said forcefully to Wim. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him!’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’ll have to drive him home yourself if necessary, Wim,’ she continued.

  ‘He won’t be easy to shift. He doesn’t want to go home and have to face Matilda.’

  ‘Well, he’ll have to sometime.’

  ‘I know, but . . .’

  ‘By turns he deceives that woman and then treats her as if she were some kind of saint,’ Doris said as she angrily wiped down an already clean work surface. ‘Matilda Melly has flaws just like the rest of us. More than some of us!’

  Wim looked hard at his wife and frowned. ‘Matilda is very quiet, very meek. But of course she’ll be angry when she finds out about their house . . .’

  ‘Oh, you men are so slow! Sometimes, Wim, appearances can be deceptive,’ Doris said. She regretted it instantly.

  ‘Doris?’ Wim moved in close to her and said, ‘Do you know something about Matilda that I don’t?’

  She looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Doris?’ He knew that she was concealing something. Women could be very hard to read, in his experience, but Doris was in general easier than most.

  She turned away from him. ‘Wim, I don’t know anything about Matilda. I just find it difficult to believe that she is really so perfect.’ She looked back at him again. ‘Maybe I’m just a bitch.’

  He smiled. Doris was about as far from being a bitch as a woman could get. But he let whatever it was that was buzzing about in her head go and said, ‘I must go back to Peter. Perhaps some coffee . . .’

  ‘Absolutely. Any minute.’ She watched him go with a smile on her face. But then her features dropped as she turned back to the percolator and her own thoughts. Yes, Matilda did annoy her with her good works and her knitting and her soft, soft voice. But what really annoyed Doris was the fact that the domesticity and devotion were only part of the picture that was Matilda Melly. If Peter had financial secrets from Matilda, she had a few secrets from him that were of an entirely different nature. But that was not, Doris reminded herself firmly, any of her business. Unlike her husband, Matilda had never come to either herself or Wim in order to pour out her heart. No, what Doris knew about her had been stumbled upon on a flying shopping trip one afternoon late on in the previous year. Matilda had not even known that Doris was there.

  It was half past two in the morning by the time Mehmet Süleyman reached the old door, which was slightly ajar, leading to the Armenian church of Uç Horan. The figure that sat, red-eyed, in the little wooden hut just in front of the church grounds said, ‘You know that when my son Sınan was little he used to call this place “The Church in the Cupboard”. We all came to Arto’s cousin Sylvie’s wedding here. Sınan must have been about four and from then on it was “The Church in the Cupboard”. He still calls it that.’ İkmen smiled softly at this, his own fond memory, and repeated, ‘The Church in the Cupboard.’

  It was easy to see why. The main entrance to Uç Horan and the courtyard around it is accessed via a small, ancient door in the right-hand wall of the Balik Pazar. Back in the fishy crowdedness of the Balik Pazar, it is difficult to imagine that anything larger than a wardrobe can possibly be behind such a door, much less a church built for, at one time, a very large Christian minority. Now, however, in the depths of the night, all was quiet, almost reverential.

  ‘Where is Garbis Bey?’ Süleyman asked as he watched İkmen lock the outer door behind them with a very rusty-looking key.

  ‘I had Bülent take him home,’ İkmen said. ‘He’s too old to stay up all night.’

  Süleyman looked around rather nervously. ‘Is Bülent here?’

  ‘No. I told him to take Garbis Bey home and then go back to Sultanahmet. He wasn’t exactly overjoyed, but then who would be at the prospect of an interrogation about me and my movements from my wife?’

  Süleyman frowned.

  ‘I haven’t been home for more than an hour in almost three days. My life is full of dead carpet dealers, filthy, mythical rugs and news that our case against the acid killer has been postponed. Poor Ayşe, after all that preparation . . . Now I’ve promised to be here until eight when I’ll let Garbis in to do his job.’ He shrugged. ‘Fatma is not happy and who can blame her?’

  The two men embraced.

  As he pulled gently away from his friend, Süleyman said, ‘The peeper has struck again. A young Jewish woman in Karaköy.’

  İkmen shook his head sadly. ‘Do you have any . . .’

  ‘Çetin, can we go into the church?’ Süleyman asked, looking around at the empty courtyard with a considerable amount of nervousness.

  ‘You told me that you wanted to talk,’ İkmen replied. ‘So we will. I’m quite happy to go into the church if that is what you want. I’ll just go and put the lights on.’

  ‘No!’ Süleyman nervously placed a hand on İkmen’s arm. ‘Can’t we light a few candles or something. I don’t want too much light – it might attract attention.’ İkmen shrugged. His friend was obviously very nervous. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you want, Mehmet.’

  A box of candles was by the front door and as Süleyman followed İkmen into the church they lit two apiece and both watched the enormous, incense-scented space flicker in the pale yellow candle-light Süleyman whispered, ‘Çetin, I want to tell you something, but I’ve been told that if I do, you and I will be killed.’

  İkmen looked up at his much taller friend and then, holding his candles aloft, at the enormous crystal chandeliers that hung from the vaulted ceiling of the church, he asked, ‘Who said that, Mehmet?’

  From outside there came a noise that might have been a footfall. Süleyman paled and ran quickly outside the church to find out what it was. But there was nothing to see out there an
d so he returned, sweating, re-lighting the candles that had snuffed out when he ran.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Süleyman said as he made an effort to calm down. ‘Ardıç says it would be foolish to use names like MIT . . .’

  ‘Oh, spies!’ İkmen smiled. ‘Ardıç is involved?’

  ‘Not with the threats of death, but yes, he knows about these people. Like me he is obliged to work with them. It’s to do with the peeper . . .’

  ‘And no doubt the fact that the bodies of his victims frequently go to places Dr Sarkissian thinks they shouldn’t.’ İkmen took his friend’s elbow and led him to a pew at the back of the church. They both placed the candles in the sand box positioned in the niche in the church wall. ‘Arto asked me to talk to you about this, Mehmet,’ he said.

  ‘But Çetin . . .’

  ‘And if MIT or whoever want to threaten me personally, they can come and see me themselves,’ İkmen said as he sat down. ‘So come on, what’s this all about?’

  Although his voice quavered as he spoke, Süleyman told İkmen everything about Mürsel and Haydar, about who the peeper might be and what his motives were perceived to consist of. He was scared but he was also relieved, in a way that he hadn’t been when he had told İzzet Melik only part of the truth in the patisserie. When İkmen asked him why he had chosen this moment to break his silence, and had chosen to talk to him and not to Ardıç, he said, ‘As I told you, Mürsel’s bosses speak to Ardıç. Mürsel and his superiors have the bodies of the peeper’s victims examined and keep the results to themselves. Dr Sarkissian is quite correct to be concerned. But it seems that Ardıç trusts these people and, by extension, Mürsel. But I don’t. The bosses I don’t know about, but I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Mürsel Bey is not all that he seems. Even if he doesn’t appear at a murder scene he seems to know where the peeper has just been and what he has just done for a lot of the time. Earlier tonight the peeper apparently killed Mürsel’s sidekick, Haydar. Mürsel says that the man we know as the peeper is a highly trained agent who is expert at avoiding detection and capture. The police have no hope of apprehending him. But so far Mürsel, himself one of these “people”, is not having any more success than ourselves. The body count of peeper victims is mounting. He must be stopped!’