River of The Dead

by Barbara Nadel

  Erdur had spent some time talking to Inspector Çetin İkmen from İstanbul before he’d been to the Kaplans’ house. One of the people the inspector was seeking in connection with drug offences was his own son. Not that Bekir İkmen had turned up yet, to Captain Erdur’s knowledge. In fact everything at Bulbul Kaplan’s house had been just perfect. The lady herself had been modestly dressed, busy and cheerful. The house was clean and quiet and even old Mr Kaplan, always a problem apparently with his somewhat erratic sleep patterns, had not so much as stirred when they had looked round the house. But then that was the issue really, that was the reason, in part at least, why Captain Erdur could not feel content. Gazi Kaplan, though rarely seen by anyone in recent years, was a mad old man who shouted, appealed to Allah for help and sometimes screamed as well. The story was that he’d contracted an eye disease many years before and had ever since endured a lot of pain and had needed some surgery. He was, famously, very easily agitated. Not, however, it would seem, by a troop of heavy-footed young jandarmes.

  And so Captain Erdur drove back to the Kaplan house later on that afternoon. He told Private Yüksel exactly where he was going and why. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until very much later, when inspectors Süleyman and Taner, a couple of constables and some bizarre-looking civilian arrived from Mardin that anyone thought to try to contact the captain. Inspector Taner called his mobile phone but it was, apparently, switched off.

  ‘Why, Edibe, do you think that a person like my father fears and despises the Kaya family so very much?’ Gabriel Saatçi said as he walked out of the Jandarmerie towards Inspector Taner’s car.

  They had gone to the hospital so that Taner could bid the monk goodbye before they set off for Birecik. But then he had insisted upon accompanying them. When he’d first seen them together, Süleyman had been convinced that Edibe Taner was in love with Gabriel Saatçi, but he had not been entirely sure that her feelings had been reciprocated. Now it seemed, from the looks that he gave her and the words that he spoke, that the monk loved the police officer in return. He also had information, it transpired.

  ‘Your father has never liked the Kayas,’ Edibe Taner replied as she unlocked her car door and then got in. ‘No decent people do. My father was horrified when my uncle let Zeynep marry Yusuf Kaya. But then my uncle isn’t a very nice man.’

  Süleyman, who was going to travel with Taner and Brother Gabriel, signalled to the small group of jandarmes who were going to follow them to the Kaplan house that they were about to move off. As he stood by the car, the monk repeated what he’d said back in the Jandarmerie.

  ‘Yusuf Kaya’s father could not bring himself to tell another Muslim the fearful violence he had done to Gazi Kaplan. He told only someone who was a very young monk at the time: Brother Seraphim.’ Then he looked at Süleyman. ‘Inspector, you must think badly of us. That Brother Seraphim only shared his certain knowledge with his brothers for such a long time must seem strange to you.’

  ‘It would seem to me, Brother Gabriel,’ Süleyman said as he got into the car, ‘that a lot of people had their suspicions anyway.’

  The monk climbed into the front passenger seat and said, ‘Indeed. But no proof. Had there been proof that the story was true the truce between the Kayas and the Kaplans would have been worthless. More blood would have been spilled.’ He turned round in his seat to look Süleyman in the face. ‘That was the deal, you see, the one that no one at St Sobo’s could speak about.’

  ‘What deal?’

  ‘That the Kaplans pay for the dishonouring of Bulbul Kaya with Gazi’s eyes.’

  Edibe Taner fired up the engine while Süleyman sat and struggled with feelings of shock and revulsion. The Kayas and the Kaplans had actually traded a young girl’s body for a young man’s sight! It was so monstrous that he began to feel his head pound with rage. Allah, but what could that young man and that young woman have felt about their vile relatives? What could Bulbul Kaplan have felt about Yusuf Kaya?

  ‘Inspector, we’ll go off with Private Yüksel and the others now,’ Constable Selahattin said, bending down to talk to Taner through the window.

  ‘All right,’ Taner said. ‘You’re looking for strangers, remember? Any strangers, but particularly any young men resembling the man Bekir İkmen, also known as Aslan. He may or may not be travelling with another young man called İsak Mardin. We don’t have a photograph of him but just be aware that this İkmen or Aslan may not be alone.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector.’

  He left to join his other colleague and a group of jandarmes around a jeep which then sped off towards the centre of Birecik. Edibe Taner waved to the other jeep behind her car to let privates Güzer and Bilge know that they were heading along the banks of the Euphrates river towards the house of Bulbul and Gazi Kaplan.

  Just before she put her foot down on the accelerator, she turned to Gabriel Saatçi and said, ‘When we get there, you stay in the car, understand?’

  The monk did not so much as turn in her direction. He just looked up into the now rapidly darkening sky and frowned.

  ‘Fatma?’

  She was standing at the window, looking across towards Sultanahmet Square and the darkening bulk of the famous Blue Mosque. It was dusk but she hadn’t as yet put any of the apartment lights on. No one apart from his wife was, seemingly, at home. It was preternaturally quiet and it made Çetin İkmen shudder.

  ‘Fatma, are you all right?’ he asked as he walked over to her and put a hand on her heavily cardiganed shoulder. He felt her flinch beneath his touch and he shook his head and sighed. ‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘Even you must see that.’

  ‘They will kill our son, your colleagues!’ she responded bitterly.

  ‘Bekir is involved in a drug supply operation that is probably the biggest this country has ever seen,’ İkmen said. He sat down on the arm of the chair that stood beside his wife and lit a cigarette. ‘People have been murdered because of it.’

  ‘Our son hasn’t—’

  ‘Fatma, I don’t know whether Bekir has killed anybody or not.’ The words almost choked him but they were nothing but the truth. Bekir might very well have killed someone on his road into or within the Wormwood Route plot. The prospect of billions of dollars did that to people. ‘Mehmet Süleyman is out there and he has gone to the town the corrupt doctor told me Bekir was heading for,’ he continued. ‘Fatma, Mehmet will protect him if he can. That’s all we can do.’

  ‘You ordered his arrest.’ She said it in a frighteningly quiet voice. ‘You.’

  İkmen puffed on his cigarette, his back to his wife, the Blue Mosque, the ancient Byzantine Hippodrome. ‘I had no choice,’ he said.

  ‘Because of your job?’

  ‘Because what our son has done is wrong,’ he said. ‘As well as being whatever he is in this plot he also gave Kemal cocaine, he got that girl pregnant and then just left her . . .’

  ‘He is our son.’

  ‘He was stealing from his brothers and sisters when he was a teenager!’ İkmen turned to look at his wife with anger in his eyes. ‘For years we put up with his drug-taking, his lying, the violence he perpetrated wherever he went! He was a nightmare and I will be honest with you, Fatma, I was glad when that boy left this family all those years ago! I was glad!’

  They looked at each other, her eyes wide with the fury his words and even the look on his face was making her feel. Then she drew one hand back slowly and deliberately and smacked him full on across the mouth. For several seconds neither of them so much as breathed. İkmen, his face sore from the great slap she had dealt him, simply sat as his eyes watered with the pain. It wasn’t the first time she’d hit him. It had happened when Bekir had originally left the family home. Then, as now, she was completely unrepentant.

  ‘Bekir needed you and you let him down.’ Fatma turned to look back at the Blue Mosque once again. ‘Always at work. Always spending what time you did have with the children who pleased you. Sınan and Orhan with their medical studies, Çiçek learning languag
es to travel the world.’

  ‘You are as proud of our children as I am!’ İkmen growled, now for the first time touching a hand gently to his aching mouth.

  ‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘But Bekir was different. He needed . . . he needed . . .’

  ‘He needed what, Fatma?’ İkmen looked up at her face in profile. She was still very beautiful to him. ‘Needed what?’ He sighed. ‘Go on and say it, woman, because it’s what is in your head.’

  His words made her angry again, but then that had been the intention. Making Fatma angry got to the root of her worries, made her say the things he did and did not want to hear. ‘He needed moral guidance!’ she said.

  ‘Religion.’

  ‘Absolutely religion!’ she shouted. ‘Islam would have saved that boy! I begged you, Çetin İkmen, to give our children the choice about religion, to at least take the lead with them, guide them! But you wouldn’t have it!’

  ‘You wanted me to take them to the mosque and I said no,’ he said, struggling to control himself now. This if anything was the fault line in their long, long marriage. It had always been, and remained, the only real point of disagreement between them. ‘You took them from time to time. I was not averse to your brothers’ taking the boys . . .’

  ‘But whenever we came back you ridiculed us!’ Fatma said, beginning to weep with the sorrow of it all. ‘You looked at the girls with their heads covered and it angered you!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, it did.’ He stood up, calm again now for some reason he couldn’t even begin to fathom, and began to move back to the living-room door.

  ‘Religion is a wonderful thing, Çetin. Faith is—’

  ‘Faith would have done nothing for Bekir.’ İkmen cut her off cruelly and then said, ‘I have asked Mehmet Süleyman to do what he can for our boy, I can do no more. You pray if it makes you feel better. I don’t believe it. You knew that when you married me.’

  He made to leave the room and, suddenly panicked by his unusually cold demeanour, she said, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to work,’ he said with a small, tired shrug. ‘Back to work.’

  And then he left. Fatma İkmen, alone again, tried to pray with all her heart, but found that she could only cry.

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  ‘What do Gazi and Bulbul Kaplan do for a living?’ Süleyman asked the Jandarma officer Private Bilge. They were looking round what was turning out to be a very empty and silent house.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the young man replied. He took a piece of paper off the kitchen table, looked at it and then put it back again. ‘The actual Kaplan family are rich,’ he said. ‘They all live off each other, and . . .’

  Edibe Taner came into the kitchen and both men looked towards her.

  ‘There’s no one here,’ she said, running her hands agitatedly through her hair. ‘Where can they have gone? The old man is blind, and—’

  ‘I’d just like to find the captain,’ Private Bilge cut in darkly. ‘It’s not like him to be out of contact. Can’t see his jeep anywhere.’

  ‘Maybe, Private, he’s gone on somewhere else.’

  The house did not, to Süleyman’s way of thinking, have any sort of ominous atmosphere. Maybe it was because it was so modern. But there was a smell. It wasn’t, he knew, the vaguely sweet and metallic smell of blood, but it was faintly disturbing. He didn’t know why.

  ‘Where’s Private Güzer?’ Taner asked.

  ‘Outside,’ his colleague replied.

  ‘Let’s go and join him,’ Taner said. ‘There’s no point being in here; there’s nothing.’

  They went outside to where Brother Gabriel stood beside Taner’s car looking up at the stars. He wasn’t supposed to have left the vehicle and Edibe Taner was very quick to hustle him back inside. Süleyman meanwhile took his small pencil torch out of his pocket and switched it on. The earth was poor, dusty and rutted, and as he made his way towards the back of the property he was very aware of the fact that his shoes were really quite unsuitable for the countryside.

  Private Güzer, a figure also shining a torch down towards the ground, was over by an outbuilding of some sort, a garage or a barn.

  ‘Anything?’ Süleyman asked as he walked over to where the young man was standing.

  ‘Not in that shed, sir, no,’ the jandarme replied. Then he frowned. ‘But if you look on the ground there are some fragments.’ Cloth by the look of them, torn pieces that looked as if they had been dragged into or embedded in the dust. Some of them were quite bright, like fabric women might favour.

  ‘Have you looked behind the shed yet, Private?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘No, sir. Not yet. I’ve only just got here.’

  ‘Let’s do that now, shall we?’

  They walked together round the side of the shed, past what Süleyman imagined was a very old piece of agricultural machinery – a large rusted metal thing. The smell he’d noticed earlier was getting stronger.

  ‘Nothing inside, sir?’ the young private asked as they rounded a corner of the shed.

  ‘No,’ Süleyman replied. ‘No one in. Do you have any idea about where Mr and Mrs Kaplan may have gone, Private?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Güzer said. ‘People out here in the country generally don’t go far. Especially not the old folk. Not at night.’

  Süleyman scanned what he could see of the flat area around the house and its outbuildings. His small torch was useless here and so he just squinted unaided into the darkness. The banks of the Euphrates were less than half a kilometre away and he began to wonder whether indeed this was where Yusuf Kaya had met his death. At the hands of his aunt? Could that possibly be the case? Could the old lady have done it on her own, or—

  ‘Sir, the earth’s been turned.’

  ‘What?’ He’d seen something, just very faintly against the almost black horizon, something sticking up above the olive trees in the field behind the house.

  ‘Sir, the earth has been turned here,’ Private Güzer said.

  Because he couldn’t make out what the object in the field might be, Süleyman looked down to where the jandarme was shining his torch. At his feet was a large area of churned and scuffed-up earth.

  ‘Do you want me to get a shovel?’

  But Süleyman just pushed at it with his foot. The smell he’d noticed earlier became much stronger. It didn’t need any more force than a foot because in less than thirty seconds a very dead and dusty human hand had come to light. It was attached to an equally dead and dusty arm.

  Mrs Bulbul Kaplan wasn’t alone in what was in fact a very hastily dug and shallow grave. Captain Erdur lay beside her, his throat cut, his still open eyes filled with surprise. Private Güzer put a hand up to his head and then breathed deeply through his mouth. The captain had been his superior, and he had respected him.

  Süleyman took his mobile phone out of his pocket and said, ‘We’ll need the services of the police in Şanlıurfa. This is a crime scene; we need forensic support. I hadn’t been expecting this. I don’t think any of us had.’

  He had just started to work through the directory of numbers in his mobile and had heard what he thought was Güzer shuffling his feet next to him when the phone was suddenly and violently wrenched out of his hand.

  ‘Güzer!’

  But Private Güzer hadn’t touched Süleyman. In fact Private Güzer was unlikely to touch anything again. Before he could even look to see where his phone had gone, Süleyman gazed on horrified as Private Güzer slumped slowly to the ground. Blood poured out of his mouth and also out of the great gaping stab wound in his back. The person standing behind him holding what had certainly killed the jandarme was a man he had never seen before. Probably in his early thirties, he held, as well as the knife, a small pistol which was pointed at Süleyman’s head. He said nothing. Even when Süleyman wheeled round to try to locate his other colleagues the man just stayed where he was, smiling.

  ‘What?’

  And then lights! The thing he
had vaguely seen on the horizon in the darkened field behind the house lit up. Its engine roaring into life as its lights came on, a truck of some considerable size lumbered through the trees and over towards what was a very rickety back fence. The person who had knocked Süleyman’s phone out of his hands, the person standing behind him now, rammed the barrel of a gun hard into his temple and then ripped his own gun out of its holster underneath his jacket.

  ‘Who . . .’

  ‘Get them all over here; we’ll finish the lot of them together!’ a male voice behind his head called. Süleyman tried to speak but as he watched the truck heading towards the fence he found that he was completely dumb. What were these people going to do, run them all over? And where were the others anyway? Where were Inspector Taner and her beloved monk? Where was Private Bilge? The person behind him pushed Süleyman in the direction of the smirking man who had killed Private Güzer. Stumbling over the bodies of Bulbul Kaplan and Captain Erdur, he almost fell on to the outstretched knife, but he recovered himself in time. However, as he stumbled, he did look behind again and saw that Taner, Private Bilge and Brother Gabriel were being herded by the man who had grabbed him plus someone else too. It was a woman.

  ‘You can’t get any more in that pit, for God’s sake!’ Elizabeth Smith said to her two men. ‘In fact let’s just finish them and leave them where they fall. We’re leaving. What does it matter?’

  The truck had stopped moving now and someone had got out. As the figure moved towards the rickety garden fence, Süleyman saw that it was İbrahim Keser.

  Her face a splash of white horror in the darkness, Edibe Taner looked down at the body of Bulbul Kaplan and said, ‘Did you kill her? What—’

  ‘She’d done her bit,’ Elizabeth Smith said simply. Then, leaning in to place her gun against Taner’s head, she said, ‘That’s how this operation works, Inspector. Haven’t you worked that out yet?’ She smiled. ‘Yusuf did his bit when he set the whole thing up. All sorts of people did their bit when he got out of prison and then escaped from the hospital. Now . . .’