by Jane Bastin
Chapter Two
The trees are whispering, your bare arms will be cold.
Inspector Sinan Kaya stood over the body. Only the top half was clothed. Peering down, he felt a knot in his stomach. He knew that the same engraving would be there before he saw it. It was too much of a coincidence. In the space of two weeks, the bodies of two middle-aged men, semi-clothed, propped up against the wall of a side alley off the Flower Passage with the word ‘Barbaros’ engraved in Ottoman lettering on their genitals. Flicking the elastic on his plastic glove, he eased the dead man’s right leg away from his left and looked carefully. He was rarely wrong.
“Mehmet. Get forensics to examine the tattoos of this gentleman and the one last week. Any links – ink, letter formation, needle…”
Sergeant Mehmet beckoned to the team.
“Okay. Let’s meet tomorrow at eight to discuss the findings. In the meantime, we don’t want any of this getting out to the media. No need to panic the locals about a possible serial killer. They have enough to worry about with the bombings.”
“Of course, sir.” Mehmet felt for the comfort of his gun pressed into his waist and smiled over the dead body.
“And give the gentleman some dignity now. Cover him up. He’s not just an exhibit in a murder enquiry. Got identification on him?”
“Yes…”
“Don’t tell me. He works for one of the ministries?”
“Correct.”
“Lives in Ankara? In one of the complexes for high ranking civil servants?”
“Correct.”
“Married with one child?”
“Almost, married but no children.”
Sinan pressed his heel into the hard tarmac.
“Okay, age about 53?”
“Spot on.”
Sinan bent his knee to ease the pressure of his body.
“Okay. Speak tomorrow morning.”
“Date, sir?”
“Mehmet. Don’t get too familiar!”
Sinan swiped his hand over the top of Sergeant Mehmet’s head and laughed.
“Yes. Zeynep, the new police officer in the fraud section.”
Sinan Kaya rubbed his hand over his mouth. The stench of death never failed to upset his stomach. He walked quickly past the forensics team as they combed through the debris that lined the walls. Emerging out of the alleyway, another world appeared. One where living people walked, some hurriedly, some nonchalantly, some dreamily. Cars seared past, leaving the streak of headlights and exhaust fumes floating in the air. It was early evening and the light was thinning and although it was spring, schoolchildren shuffled past, cloaked in layers of jumpers, scarves and thick padded jackets so that only the blink of their eyes could be seen. Men in ill-fitting suits lined the bars at the edge of the Flower Passage clinking glasses of raki and singing along to the gypsy violinists who swayed from table to table. A group of women cloaked in swathes of black cotton moved like a flock of ravens, tutting loudly at the lithe women who had begun to prowl among the raki drinkers. Sinan tucked his hands into his jacket pockets as the cold began to bite and walked towards the police station in Taksim Square.
He would only pop in to check on a few details about the murder last week, he thought casually. He knew that his colleagues taunted him for doing nothing other than live the job. He clenched his hands. Hadn’t he invited the new police officer in the fraud department out for a drink this evening? Okay, she had invited him, he conceded, but still, he had accepted and he had not accepted anything for over a year not since Ani had… His thoughts, the internal dialogue that boiled within him, stopped suddenly. Ani, beautiful Ani. How could he have been blinded? Stepping too quickly off the kerb, Sinan toppled slightly to one side. Brushing his jacket flat against his body, he looked around to check whether anyone had seen him almost fall. A small child on the other side of the road, bundled in fabric pointed and laughed while his mother tugged on his arm. A car swerved past almost clipping Sinan’s outstretched arm and, just as he reached for his phone to photograph the offending vehicle, it rang.
“Inspector Kaya, where are you?”
Sinan’s grip tightened at the sound of the Chief Superintendent’s gravelly voice.
“Just north of the Flower Passage on my way back to the station, sir. If it’s about the links between…”
Sinan heard the Chief Superintendent draw on his cigar before coughing.
“No, not interested in that. Get over to the Pera Palas Hotel now. The Prime Minister’s dead.”
“What?”
But Sinan’s question was unanswered. The connection cut out.
“For God’s sake, you’d think you’d be able to make a call in a city.”
A young woman, a blur of greyness in a long coat and headscarf, stared past Sinan as he ranted into the air.
Sinan was the first officer to arrive at the Pera Palas Hotel. Confused and unsure if he had heard the Chief Superintendent correctly, he wandered through the large glass-fronted doors and showed his badge to the receptionist. Without saying a word, she removed her black wired glasses, wiped away tears and pointed to the hotel manager who was gesticulating to a group of waiters.
“Sir, Inspector Sinan Kaya.”
The manager grabbed Sinan’s hands and held them to his chest, releasing a mournful sigh.
“Dead. In my hotel. How could this happen? Today of all days. How am I going to explain this to my boss? The Prime Minister, dead. Dead, dead, dead.”
Sinan slipped his hands free.
“Sir, I believe some of our people are here already. Is that correct?”
“No. Nobody came. You are the first.”
“Can we go somewhere a little quieter?”
As Sinan spoke to the manager, his eyes focused on the archway to the ballroom entrance at a woman in a long black dress with hair the colour of copper. For a split moment, he thought he was looking at a ghost of Ani but then she moved.
The manager’s office could better be described as a broom cupboard with barely room for the battered metal table and two wobbly vinyl-backed chairs. A picture of Ataturk stared defiantly across the room at a picture of the last sultan to have stayed at the hotel. A pair of cufflinks engraved with the Turkish flag, a pack of tissues and a small gilt-framed photograph of the manager hand in hand with another small man were carefully positioned on the table. Tightening his bow tie, the manager looked across at Sinan and sighed mournfully again. The pain in Sinan’s right ankle flared as he stretched it beneath the narrow table. A knock on the door and the weeping receptionist entered with a tray of tea glasses and a bowl of sugar cubes. Without registering her presence, the manager continued.
“Our beloved Prime Minister visits us every Friday afternoon and now we repay him with this!”
Sinan pushed the pack of tissues across the table. Melodrama irritated him.
“Every Friday afternoon?” Sinan tapped his ankle against the table leg.
The manager looked away, rubbing his eyes.
“Every Friday afternoon?” Sinan repeated.
“Okay, you police are always difficult. You ask too many questions, do you know that?”
Sinan held the hot tea glass to his lips, blew softly and waited.
“Yes, the Prime Minister has human needs as well, you know.” The manager stared softly at the photograph on the table.
“Such as?”
“Ladies. Every Friday afternoon, he brings a lady… well… not sure they are all ladies, if you see what I mean!”
The manager laughed awkwardly, a sort of frog-like croak but Sinan simply sipped his tea and leant back trying to fit his long legs beneath the table.
“Often the same lady. I heard him call her Sultana but I don’t know if that is her real name. We never asked. We offer our more distinguished clientele a certain service which is discreet and pertinent to their particular needs. Why, we even have a customer who brings his entourage of poodles to our king suite so that they have a view of the Golden Horn!”
&n
bsp; “And security?”
“Yes, lots of security. They usually have the room next door and we have to serve limitless supplies of tea and cake to them.”
“So tell me what happened.”
Sinan flicked open his phone to record the conversation. The manager pursed his lips together.
“I’m not sure I want to be recorded, Inspector.”
Sinan ignored him.
“When and how did you find the body?”
The manager pushed his small round glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, puffed his pigeon like chest and threw words out as though they were choking him.
“The security men phoned down to say that the Prime Minister and the girl, Sultana, had not emerged. Can you believe it?”
Sinan stared at the manager. He cleared his throat and continued.
“They told me to call the police… I forgot to do that straightaway…”
Sinan waved his hand in the air and the manager continued.
“The Prime Minister was not breathing. They performed CPR but he didn’t come round. Oh my God! What will the press say about my hotel now? Oh, and I have an international writers’ congress staying as well. Oh God! The girl is dead as well, of course.”
Sinan put his hand in front of the manager’s face.
“Sir, stop. Take a deep breath… Did you call an ambulance?”
“No, they… the security wouldn’t let us. Too much to get out, they said, so I called the police.”
“Too much?”
“The girl… woman… you know. Married, elderly Prime Minister, Islamic party, not good for anyone. Although it was good for him…”
The manager stopped laughing when he saw Sinan staring at him.
“Was anyone able to get into the room other than the woman or security?”
“No, nobody. It was completely sealed. The only way into the room is through another empty room. You pass through what looks like a wardrobe and you enter the room. Nobody could have got in from outside, it is too high up. It’s the girl, I tell you. Her eyes were too close together. Shifty. She murdered him then killed herself.”
The loud hum of the writers’ congress echoed as Sinan and the manager moved from the ground floor in the birdcage lift. Looking down through the lift’s glass window, Sinan caught sight of the woman in the long black dress. Juddering to a sudden halt, the manager pushed open the metal grating before opening the lift door for Sinan. Four well-built secret service men blocked the doorway. Flicking open his badge one of the four squinted before nodding to the others. He blocked the manager with one hand and ushered Sinan through with the other.
Sinan knew how the city’s beauty could be glimpsed between the brashness of skyscrapers and the crumbling 1960s apartment blocks but it still caught him in the gut. Light sparkled in the cut of the mirrors that lined the walls. Crimson and purple carpet softened the sound of their shoes so that only the muffled chatter of the writers’ congress down below could be heard. Stylised calligraphy snaked along the top of the walls in and out of lines of geometrically exact shapes. Sinan stopped suddenly. The same tugra. The signature of Sultan Suleyman the Great that had dogged his every step of the investigation with Ani. How had he not been able to see? Squeezing his eyes closed, he saw the outline of Ani’s face.
“Inspector, be careful…”
Sinan’s foot collided with a large Ming vase that stood inches from the entrance to the main bedroom. Rubbing his ankle furiously, Sinan glared at the security guard. Why did he have to look like a second-rate copy of a CIA operative? he thought, as pain shot along his ankle to his shin. Dark sunglasses when there was barely enough light to see, black suit with a shirt so white that it had probably never been worn before and hair razed to a stubble. Sinan pushed through the entrance as the security guard fanned his arms out to block any imaginary others.
“Has anyone moved the bodies?”
“Which bodies?”
Sinan looked incredulously at the security guard.
“The one on top of my head! Which bodies? The Prime Minister’s body. The one that is draped like a sacrificial goat over the bed. Legs dangling like a prostrate monkey and mouth open wide as though in the throes of a passion that he, poor man, never got to consummate. And not to forget the poor girl. Understood?”
The security guard held his sunglasses in one hand and rubbed his eyes with the other. Without the glasses, his look of innocence threw Sinan momentarily. The Asiatic slant to his eyes made the CIA outfit look all the more incongruous.
“What’s your name?”
The security guard looked behind him thinking that Sinan must have been addressing someone else.
“You. Name?”
“Hamit Ozbek”
“Family from Ozbekistan?”
Sinan walked around the bed while the security guard grappled with the right words to respond.
“Tajikstan, Ozbekistan border actually, sir. Not far from the Chinese border but I have never been there. My parents came in the fifties when there was no food and…”
Sinan was not listening. He had beaten the team of forensics. They were more than likely going to be the same team as the one he had left at the Flower Passage. A five-minute walk meant that they would certainly be called and he knew that evidence fatigue would have set in. He had worked too closely with Yasemin Hanim and her team for too long to know that this inevitably occurred. He thought back to the multi-storey car park murders the year before when Yasemin Hanim’s team missed the critical mobile phone that broke the chain of what appeared to be unlinked events. It was Sinan who had found it, lodged inside the back of a ticket machine. He knew never to leave everything to the experts. Like a sheepdog, Sinan’s vision slowed everything down. The pace of ordinary life bypassed him. The breathing of the security guard was heightened as though each breath drawn was his last. The flapping of the thick, velvet curtain in the draft made by the sudden opening of the door looked as though it was done in slow motion. Hunter-like, Sinan circled the body. Nothing that would not be expected in the bedroom of a man about to make love to a young woman, he thought. A cigarette packet lay half open, two cigarettes missing. A cheap brand. A brand not often marketed by Prime Ministers. A smudge of purple lipstick on the corner of the top pillow case beneath the Prime Minister’s right ear. Two strands of dark brown hair lay over the Prime Minister’s bushy, grey eyebrow. Lying on his left side facing the view over the Golden Horn, the Prime Minister’s eye bulged like a fish eye staring out of a cabinet in a Bosphorus restaurant. His naked body, burnished brown by years of sun, looked frail and vulnerable against the white cotton sheet rucked beneath him. So much power vested in this frail body, thought Sinan, as he took photographs of the evidence. In death, the girl looked… simply like a girl. Her make-up washed and faded on her upturned face. Her body lay foetal.
“Who’s the girl?”
“Girl?”
The four security guards sipped their tea nervously as though they had synchronised their hand movements. The Ozbek security guard who had accompanied Sinan into the bedroom appeared to be the sole mouthpiece.
“The reason the Prime Minister was here in the first place. I take it he didn’t come here to play a game of bridge?!”
One of the security guards broke the synchronicity and guffawed loudly. Another jabbed him sharply in the rib and the Ozbek guard rubbed his eyes.
“Yes. Urm… classified, I’m afraid, sir.”
“Classified? There has been a murder here of the Prime Minister and I am a police officer. There is no ‘classified’, understood?”
The Ozbek guard shifted uncomfortably in the plastic chair.
“Okay.” He looked at the others who continued sipping their tea loudly.
“Her name is Gaye Kan. We have a copy of her details on file. She had to have security clearance, you see.”
“Show me the file.”
The Ozbek guard stared into his tea glass.
“Now.” The rise of Sinan’s voice made the
others shift. The muffled sound of chair legs scraping along the thick carpet made Sinan wince. The Ozbek guard pulled a thin electronic tablet from an inner pocket, tapped in a code before scrolling his thick forefinger up and down the screen.
“Gaye Kan. Address: 66 Mescit Sokak, Levent. Age 19. Employed by Madame Popov at the same address. We have all of her work details; she became an employee of the state once she started sleeping with our Prime Minister, you see. She gets all of the pension rights and social security privileges of a normal civil servant. Incredible but true.”
“Picture.”
Sinan stretched his hand out. He was getting tired. Evening had set a few hours ago and he had not eaten since morning. His stomach contracted and, involuntarily, he slapped his hand over his shirt. The Ozbek guard held out the electronic tablet but when Sinan tried to take it, he withdrew it suddenly.
“Sorry, sir, but I would prefer it if you looked without holding.”
Sinan felt the ebb of an argument rise within him and recede as tiredness flooded back. Tilting forward, he saw the outline of a young girl, her features distorted in size as the Ozbek guard enlarged the screen with his fat forefinger. Long, dark brown hair draped across her bare shoulders. Her lips puckered suggestively, smeared with purple lipstick and her eyes matted with mascara seemed to look beyond the camera. Despite the make-up, she looked very young.
“When did she arrive?”
“She waited in the reception of the hotel for the Prime Minister to arrive like she has done for the past six months. Every Friday, she waits at the reception and we arrive about half an hour later. She was chosen by the Prime Minister from Madame Popov’s catalogue.”
“Madame Popov?”
“Russian, she runs the girls. Sad women but they make good money. Better than us.”
The Ozbek guard leant forward and winked. Sinan glared. His stomach rumbled. The sound of voices got louder and when Sinan looked along the corridor, he saw Yasemin Hanim striding purposefully with her forensics team trailing behind
“Inspector Sinan.”
Yasemin Hanim was younger than Sinan and felt the pressure of status. Hair scraped back into a precariously styled bun at the back of her head, her face looked pinched as though every sinew was tightened. She stood over Sinan demanding access to the room.
