Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  Süleyman frowned. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, aromatherapy, chakras, homeopathy – she did a lot of that.’

  ‘Really. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Ah, the appeal of the weird,’ İkmen said as he lit one cigarette from another.

  ‘Well that’s very interesting, Çetin.’

  İkmen laughed. ‘What, pseudo-science? The outer limits of human credulity? I mean, I know I say this as the son of a woman who was a witch …’

  ‘Yes, but you believed in your mother, didn’t you?’

  ‘My mother clearly had something, even if I can’t really say what that was.’

  ‘It’s interesting because my victim, Levent Devrim, was into alternative therapies too,’ Süleyman said. ‘Apparently he read copiously on all sorts of “weird” topics – aliens, stone circles, the Mayan 2012 prophecies – at his favourite bookshop, the Ada on İstiklal.’

  ‘Can’t imagine your cousin consorting with the great unwashed at the Ada,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Maybe not, and maybe the fact that Devrim and Leyla were both into these therapies doesn’t mean anything,’ Süleyman said. ‘But I tell you, Çetin, I am struggling to find a motive for Levent Devrim’s death. As far as I can tell he was a quiet eccentric obsessed with numbers. Although what numbers meant to him, and why, I have no idea. The calculations we found scrawled all over his apartment were meaningless. Then today Ömer was told by Levent Devrim’s old paramour Sugar Barışık that Şukru Şekeroğlu didn’t in fact find his body. A gypsy kid found it. But of course the child, Hamid, was nowhere to be found.’

  ‘Did Ömer speak to Şukru Şekeroğlu?’ İkmen knew the gypsy brother of Süleyman’s great love, as well as the rest of the Şekeroğlu family, rather well, and had always been aware of the fact that back in his native Sulukule, Şukru had been a local celebrity for decades. He wondered how he was dealing with the comedown that Tarlabaşı had to be for him.

  ‘No,’ Süleyman said. ‘We’re going after the boy Hamid on the pretext that he picked Sugar Barışık’s pocket. Once we get hold of him, we can also question Şekeroğlu again. In the meantime, I’m going to have Şukru watched.’

  İkmen raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Yes, I know Tarlabaşı is a tough place to stake out, but I’ve got a few old Sulukule contacts over there, and I’ve got the budget for it.’

  ‘Sulukule contacts who will tell you the truth about Şukru Şekeroğlu?’

  ‘Ah, well that could be moot,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Friends or enemies?’

  ‘Oh, enemies.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to be careful.’

  ‘Of course. But what can I do? A strange face in that quarter would be headline news in all the coffee houses and brothels within minutes. One of the many things that really puzzles me about this case is how the murderer managed to get in and out without being noticed.’

  ‘Unless he was local.’

  ‘Unless he was local, which is a terrible thought, because if that’s the case then I’ll never catch him.’

  ‘Unless he upsets one of the local drug dealers, or his neighbours.’

  Süleyman lit another cigarette. ‘Absolutely. But I don’t think he is local.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Tarlabaşı is agitated. Since Devrim’s murder, people are afraid. Admittedly half of them think it’s a conspiracy on the part of the government to get them to move out of the area more quickly and with less bother …’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘While of course some more “progressive” types outside the quarter believe it was an inside job to frighten away the developers.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard that,’ İkmen said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think Levent Devrim was murdered by someone and I think we have too many conspiracies in this country.’

  İkmen smiled. ‘Poor Mehmet.’

  ‘At least with Leyla Ablak there is, or could be, a cogent motive,’ Süleyman said.

  İkmen looked up into the foggy February air and coughed. Then he said, ‘Yes, possibly. Her late husband hinted at jealousies amongst his wife’s friends. Don’t you think it’s amazing how so often it is highly privileged women who harbour truly vicious feelings about each other?’

  ‘They have little else to think about,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘The only people my wife is jealous of are folk who have central heating.’

  Süleyman didn’t answer. Apparently, once he had retired, İkmen was going to have central heating fitted in his apartment. Why he hadn’t had it put in before was a bit of a mystery.

  ‘So I must make the acquaintance of the Kemer Golf and Country Club,’ İkmen said. He lit another cigarette, then looked up at Süleyman. ‘What do you think they’ll make of me, Mehmet?’

  With his frayed trouser turn-ups and very unfashionable haircut, not to mention the general grey ashiness of his demeanour, there was very little about İkmen that Süleyman thought the good people at the Kemer Golf and Country Club could allow themselves to like. But then, he thought, that was really their problem.

  Hande Genç watched and listened in silence as her husband grovelled around her like a penitent.

  ‘Hande,’ he said, ‘do you want me to leave the television on or do you want to read?’

  The news had already started and it was full of depressing stories. Did he imagine they were upsetting her? She said, ‘Leave the TV. I’m dying and you’ve been unfaithful to me; how much worse can things get?’

  He didn’t say anything. She saw him very obviously busy himself making room on her night stand. She wanted to hurt him but she knew she didn’t have the strength to do that physically. That didn’t matter. Instead, she said, ‘I told the police a lie.’

  His face drained of blood. ‘What about?’

  ‘I knew you were having an affair with Leyla Ablak.’

  ‘No you didn’t. How could you?’

  ‘Younger women with old husbands can’t resist boasting about any toy boys they might pick up,’ she said.

  On the TV, the news from Syria was bloody and grave, as usual.

  Faruk Genç put the book Hande had been reading underneath the tray that contained all her medications. ‘You didn’t know Mrs Ablak,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t, no,’ she said. And watched his face as he went through a mental list of people who visited her who might have known Leyla Ablak.

  In the end he said, ‘Who do you mean?’

  But she just shrugged. He moved towards her, his hands outstretched, ‘Hande, who do you—’

  ‘Don’t you touch me, you son of a pig!’ She cringed away from him. She looked elsewhere, her eyes eventually coming to rest on the television screen. On it she saw a face she recognised.

  ‘Hande—’ her husband began.

  ‘Shut up!’ she snapped. Then she pointed at the television. ‘Look.’

  The picture of General Osman Ablak was no longer on the screen, but the newscaster was obviously talking about him. ‘… veteran of the war in Cyprus, currently under investigation in connection with his role in the 1980 coup d’état and subsequent alleged actions prejudicial to the democratic process. General Ablak was found dead at his home in İstanbul last night. A police spokesman said that the death was not suspicious.’

  Hande looked at her husband and said, ‘That means he probably killed himself.’

  Still looking at the TV screen, Faruk Genç said, ‘They didn’t say that and you don’t know it. He was old.’

  ‘So then the shock of finding out that his wife was slagging around stopped his heart,’ she said. ‘Either way, you and your lover killed him.’

  ‘No we didn’t. He was involved in Ergenekon.’ Even though he had once loved her, and she was dying, he couldn’t look at her without feeling true loathing. How had she known about Leyla? Why wouldn’t she tell him? Was it just a lie with which to taunt him?

  ‘Maybe he killed her and then killed himself,’ she said. The look on his face wa
s so horror-struck that she was inclined to go even further, which she did. ‘Or maybe I had her killed, with General Ablak’s blessing.’

  Before he knew what was happening, he found himself on top of her with his hands around her throat. ‘You tell me the truth, you fucking bitch! Stop playing with me and tell me the truth!’

  Horrified by his own violence, he threw himself off her and stood looking down as she coughed and heaved her way back to normality. Once she was herself again, Hande Genç pointed at her husband, and then she laughed at him.

  Chapter 7

  He was sure that one of those little shits who hung about around the entrance to Tünel had taken his wallet. There were often small groups of Roma kids waiting at the end of İstiklal Caddesi for tourists to get off at the top of İstanbul’s historic funicular railway. Then they’d nick their wallets or bags or anything they could get their hands on.

  But how could he prove it? He hadn’t noticed his wallet had gone until he’d got back to his apartment in Karaköy. And anyway, it sounded just so politically incorrect, and John Regan was nothing if not politically correct. Luckily he’d left his credit cards at home, and so the kid had only got away with about two hundred lira in cash. That was about eighty-five pounds. Spitefully John hoped that the stolen money only brought the thief pain in some way. Maybe he’d buy dodgy drugs with it that would land him in hospital. But then he let it go. He had stuff to do.

  The computer he used to write his book on was in the bay window overlooking his street, Büyük Hendek Caddesi. Across the road was one of the city’s many Sephardic Jewish synagogues, while at the end of Büyük Hendek was the famous Genoese-built Galata Tower. In the past, Karaköy, or Galata as it was known in Ottoman times, had been a very cosmopolitan area. But the Latins and most of the Jews had left decades, if not hundreds of years ago. Now John, an Englishman from a very English town in East Anglia, was the most exotic creature that Karaköy had to offer.

  He sat down in front of the machine and, after a brief look at his emails, brought up the document that he hoped one day was going to change his life. He had only started actually writing his semi-fictional romance – set in Yıldız Palace at the time of Sultan Abdülhamid II – a few weeks before, but already he felt that he had something. When he’d tried to work on the book back in the UK, it just hadn’t gelled. Although he could visualise Yıldız Palace, which he had visited as a tourist many times over the years, he couldn’t find the context in which the sultan’s real-life lover, the Belgian glove-seller Flora Cordier, had lived. Her shop had been on İstiklal Caddesi back when it had been called the Grand Rue de Pera, and at first sight he couldn’t place her in such a youthful, twenty-first-century milieu. However, living in the area had opened his eyes, and he’d begun to find all the little nineteenth-century streets that Flora would have known, all the tucked-away churches she could have walked past every day. As the historian he had trained to be, John was delighted that now it was just his literary skills that were open to question. But how would he know whether he was any good unless he tried? He read through what he had written and then looked out of the window into the street.

  Was it just his imagination, or was the man standing outside the synagogue looking up at him? Thirty-something, young – and good-looking. No. Or if he was, it was just because John was a new boy on the block, as it were. Since coming to İstanbul to live, John, whose Turkish-language skills were minimal at best, had made friends with a couple of English-speaking local people, including Sırma, a publicist who lived just up the hill in Cihangir. When he had told her he reckoned that people were staring at him in his local area, she’d said, ‘Oh John, Turks always stare. When someone new moves into a neighbourhood, they stare. Eventually they’ll get used to you and then you’ll complain that they’re ignoring you.’ But he’d been in town since 3 January and it was now almost March. How much more time did they, and he, need?

  One of the women wouldn’t stop talking, while the other one just cried.

  ‘Leyla Ablak was a dear friend and she will be very badly missed,’ said the one who talked all the time. ‘Of course nobody here believed the rumours about her husband the general, although now he’s dead too, it does make you think. Suicide, wasn’t it?’

  A week had passed since General Ablak’s death, and everyone now knew that he had taken his own life. İkmen, who had been waiting for these friends of Leyla Ablak to return to İstanbul from their winter golfing breaks abroad with their husbands, tried to get a word in edgeways but failed. Had Ayşe Farsakoğlu been with him, she might, as a fellow woman, have had more luck, but she was back at the station doing the ever-increasing paperwork the state demanded. The stuff İkmen always shunned. For a moment he felt both guilty and stupid.

  ‘As for Leyla, who would want to hurt her? And at a spa? At a spa you relax, you don’t get your head bashed in or whatever it was that happened to her. Although Latife Hanım told me that she was at the spa at night. Seems strange. What was she doing there at night? Do you know?’

  Although Leyla Ablak’s infidelity had not been reported, İkmen got the distinct impression that this woman, Verda Kavaf, already knew about it. She just wanted him to say it.

  ‘Mrs Ablak had gone to the spa to meet someone,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ Verda Kavaf said. For a moment, the other woman, Latife Özen, stopped crying. ‘Who was she meeting, Inspector?’

  İkmen smiled. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say,’ he said. Latife Özen began crying again.

  İkmen had been up to the club these women belonged to, the Kemer Golf and Country Club, two days after Leyla Ablak’s death. Contrary to his expectations the staff and management had been very helpful. They’d told him that Mrs Ablak had been a good golfer, an adequate horse-rider and a very frequent user of the fitness facilities. She also, together with Latife Özen and Verda Kavaf, belonged to a monthly book-reading circle. Other members who came and went included the wife of a judge and a female airline pilot. According to Verda Hanım, Leyla Ablak had favoured erotic books, usually by foreign authors. When she’d told him that, İkmen had noticed a slightly sour look creep on to her face. He remembered what General Ablak had told him about Leyla’s friends. But then, from the little that he knew about it, didn’t competition always exist between rich and powerful women? Did anything mark these women out as particularly toxic?

  ‘Do you think Mrs Ablak had had too much cosmetic surgery?’ İkmen asked.

  There was a stunned silence.

  ‘You see, our pathologist found a lot of small, neat scarring on Mrs Ablak’s face and body,’ he said. ‘I wondered what you thought about that?’

  Latife Özen stopped crying.

  Verda Kavaf said, ‘Oh, well clearly if it made Leyla Hanım happy … I have never resorted to it myself …’ She had; İkmen could see the scars on her face even through her make-up. ‘But then she had her reasons …’

  She looked at İkmen as if she was expecting him to ask her about those reasons. He didn’t disappoint her. ‘What reasons?’

  ‘Oh, well …’ She was trying to look grave, but İkmen could see the small smile that lay beneath her assumed expression.

  Latife Özen sniffled. ‘Oh, Verda Hanım, you cannot …’

  ‘Cannot what?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘You cannot …’ Latife Özen shut her mouth. Where Verda Kavaf was pin-thin and elegant, Latife, who was clearly her acolyte on some level, was a small, round bundle of nerves and lack of style.

  ‘Leyla liked men, Inspector,’ Verda Kavaf said. ‘She enjoyed male attention and she went out of her way to make sure that she got it.’ She laughed, but without warmth. ‘When Leyla walked into a room, nobody else could get a look-in, nobody else was allowed to.’

  ‘What did her husband think about that?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Verda Kavaf said. ‘He appeared not to notice. He always smiled when she made eyes at other men, pouted her lips and generally put herself at the centre of everything.’
r />   ‘He didn’t want to see what she was,’ Latife Özen interjected.

  ‘Which was?’

  There was a pause, and then Verda Kavaf said, ‘She was very taken with a foreign book she found online. Fifty Shades of Grey – have you heard of it?’

  ‘No,’ İkmen said.

  ‘It’s an erotic story about a young girl who allows herself to be sexually dominated by a rich and powerful man. Leyla was besotted by it. She said she wanted to find a man who would dominate her.’

  ‘And did she?’ İkmen asked.

  The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then Verda Kavaf said, ‘I don’t know whether she found her Christian Grey – that’s the character she was so taken with in the book – but she did meet somebody, that I do know.’

  ‘How do you know?’ İkmen asked.

  A look of sourness settled on her features. ‘Because she was happy again,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’ve known Leyla most of my life, and I know that she is only ever happy when she’s in the throes of romantic love, and I know she didn’t have that with the general.’

  ‘She was having good sex,’ Latife Özen added. And then, realising what she’d just said, and to whom, she put a hand up to her mouth and her face went red.

  Şukru Şekeroğlu was the type of man who had always played his cards close to his chest. Even amongst what remained of the Sulukule gypsy community, he was an enigma. Nobody, not even his ex-neighbour Necati Hallaç, knew exactly how many children he had or by how many women. But then the Şekeroğlu family had always been a law unto themselves, and that was why Necati hated them. They had money, through Şukru’s artist sister; they had fame; and years ago, and most significantly, Şukru had smashed Necati’s nose across his face in a fight over a woman. After that Necati had left Sulukule, only coming across Şukru Şekeroğlu again when they both found themselves living in Tarlabaşı.

  Şukru, for his part, had welcomed his old adversary as a long-lost friend and Necati had pretended to respond in kind. But he hadn’t either forgotten or forgiven Şukru Şekeroğlu for the beating he had given him thirty-five years ago. Since leaving Sulukule, Necati had supplemented his income as a shoe-shine man with the occasional selling of information to that policeman who had once loved Şukru’s sister, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman. However, what he was doing now was providing more than just information, and it was much better paid. This time he had to watch Şukru Şekeroğlu and find out where he went, what he did and who he met. He had to keep an eye out for a kid, too – the eldest son of the whore with the birthmark on her face. Usually the boy was everywhere, but Necati hadn’t seen him for well over a week.