Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  It was well known that Şukru Şekeroğlu had multiple business interests. Not that he gave the appearance of being a busy man. He only appeared on the street before midday if he was collecting fuel, which he did infrequently, and most of his time after that would be spent in his favourite coffee house. Later he would go to the bar owned by his father. But he’d be doing business all day long, and Necati knew that one of the people he’d been talking to at the coffee house lately was a Roma from Bulgaria who ran a pocket-diving ring up in Beyoğlu. What the arrangement with the Bulgarian was, Necati didn’t know, but he told Süleyman, ‘In the past, once he couldn’t wrestle or dance his bears any more, Şukru would go into the city with his kids and dive pockets and bags. Then Gonca got rich and the family became respectable. But times are hard again now, even for the Şekeroğlu, so maybe Şukru has gone into business with this man.’

  Süleyman had asked, ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, maybe he supplies the Bulgarian with kids,’ Necati had said. ‘They speak the language and they know their way around.’

  Faruk Genç didn’t look like the sort of man who knew his way around a whip. İkmen, sitting opposite him, clarified what he had just said. ‘I’m not asking whether you beat Mrs Ablak up because you lost your temper; I’m asking whether she ordered you to act in a violent and dominant way towards her,’ he said.

  ‘No! Why do you want to know these things?’

  İkmen leaned on the table that stood between them. Faruk Genç had never been inside a police station before and he clearly wasn’t enjoying the experience.

  ‘Because, Mr Genç,’ İkmen said, ‘I’ve reason to believe that Mrs Ablak may have harboured a desire to be dominated, and people who like that kind of thing are generally masochistic.’

  ‘Well she wasn’t,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t have smacked her or whatever those people do even if she’d asked me.’

  Apart from the bruising on her neck, Leyla Ablak hadn’t sustained any sort of injury to other parts of her body that Dr Sarkissian had been able to see. But in light of what her ‘friends’ had told him about her preferences, İkmen had been obliged to check it out.

  ‘Do you know anything about Mrs Ablak’s fixation on a book called Fifty Shades of Grey?’ he asked.

  ‘That!’ Faruk Genç snorted. ‘What woman isn’t fantasising about Christian Grey?’

  İkmen felt it doubtful whether his wife was. In spite of an improvement in the weather, she was still firmly focused on the hated soba.

  ‘So she—’

  ‘Oh, she talked to me about it, but we never did any of those things,’ he said. ‘Leyla wanted good sex, not violence.’ He looked down. ‘I gave her good sex.’

  According to Verda Kavaf, Leyla Ablak had been happy, which Latife Özen had put down to her having good sex. It all made sense, and İkmen had never seriously thought that Leyla had died during the course of a masochistic sex game. Also, albeit reluctantly, Genç’s wife Hande had supported the alibi he had given, which was that when Leyla had died, he had been on his way home. There was no forensic evidence to implicate him either. But what if Leyla Ablak had found herself another, more adventurous lover? What if she’d stayed at the spa that night in order to meet him?

  ‘Do you know whether, apart from her husband, there was anyone else in Leyla Ablak’s life, Mr Genç?’ İkmen asked.

  He looked back down at the floor again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He looked up, angry now. ‘Well of course I can’t be certain! We didn’t live in each other’s pockets! We were having a very private affair! For all I know she could have been sleeping with half the city. But I don’t think she was.’

  ‘I’m sorry I have to ask you these—’

  ‘Oh, are you?’ Faruk Genç said. ‘Are you really?’

  İkmen didn’t say anything. He had been harsh in his judgement of Faruk Genç as soon as he’d admitted his affair with Leyla Ablak, because he had never approved of infidelity. As a man without religion, people often assumed that his values were impossibly liberal, but they never had been and never would be. However, Genç had shown courage in coming out with information that had naturally aroused suspicion immediately.

  ‘Mr Genç,’ İkmen said, ‘my only concern is to find who killed Mrs Ablak and then lock him up for as long as the law allows. From the start you have been most accommodating and I thank you for that. I am truly sorry that your wife had to hear about your affair in the way she did, but I really had no choice.’

  Faruk Genç didn’t say anything.

  ‘I was also most distressed to learn of General Ablak’s death,’ İkmen said. ‘Although of course, that is quite separate from his wife’s murder …’

  ‘You know my wife thinks the general killed himself because of my affair with Leyla.’

  İkmen shook his head. ‘I think that’s most unlikely, Mr Genç. General Ablak was involved in an investigation into … well …’

  ‘Ergenekon,’ Genç said.

  ‘Into the kind of political issues that I am very glad do not concern me or my officers,’ İkmen said.

  They both sat in silence for a few moments, individually wondering at the seismic political shift that had taken place in Turkey that allowed once revered military men to be vilified as traitors.

  Then Faruk Genç said, ‘So where do we go from here, Inspector?’

  İkmen smiled. ‘I expect you will go back to work, and so will I, sir.’ He stood up and put his hand out to Faruk Genç who took it but then seemed to have a moment where he appeared to be wondering what to do next.

  İkmen said, ‘Mr Genç? Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘Well, er …’ Then he seemed to pull himself together, and smiled. ‘Oh no, no, Inspector, nothing is wrong, everything’s fine.’

  John had decided to call the daughter many authorities believed Flora Cordier had borne the sultan Tirimujgan. It was the name of Abdülhamid II’s Circassian mother, who had died when he was a child; like Flora’s little girl, the sultan’s mother had been blonde. ‘Tirimujgan 2’, as he was referring to the child, had lived in the imperial harem at Yıldız Palace long after her mother had somehow faded out of history. It was unlikely that Flora had adapted well to harem life, and she had probably gone back to Belgium. But she’d had to leave her daughter behind, and the child had eventually become a woman. What was more, she was the sultan’s favourite and was allowed to do just about anything she wanted – within reason. And that had been her problem.

  John looked up from his computer screen and glanced out of the window. It was dusk – he’d been working all day – and Büyük Hendek Caddesi was completely deserted. He suddenly felt a twinge of homesickness. Back in the small Cambridgeshire village he’d lived in ever since he’d left university, people he’d known for years would be settling in for the evening with dinner and the TV. If he happened to see David, the vicar, walking his dog, he’d pop in for a brandy and a chat and it would all be very safe and warm and civilised. In İstanbul, he had failed to get the hang of the coal-fired thing called a soba that was supposed to keep the apartment warm. He’d asked the barely conscious kapıcı, the building concierge, several times how one was supposed to first light the thing and then keep it going, but the man had just shrugged and muttered something in Turkish that John could not understand. To keep warm, he wore all his outdoor clothes, including a hat and fingerless gloves. Then there was the rattling, humming plumbing and the electrical wires that hung out of the walls like architectural spaghetti. He turned away from the window and regarded his shelf of books all about learning Turkish. If anything, the language seemed more alien to him now than when he’d first arrived back in early January. Yet he had been out and had spoken to people, albeit usually reluctantly, and he had made friends. But it wasn’t home and it was never going to be.

  Cooking something for his dinner was a task John knew he should tackle. He’d managed to master the gas-bottle-powered oven
and he had some lamb chops in the fridge. But he just didn’t feel like it. Maybe it had something to do with how the girl, Tirimujgan, had died – or rather how it was said she had died: tied up in a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. The story went that she had fallen in love with her half-brother, Prince Selim, and had been found with him in flagrante by the palace staff. The sultan, of course, could not put up with that and the girl had been killed, while Prince Selim had been exiled to some backwater of the Empire to think on his misdeeds. It was a really sad little story, this tale that he was going to inflate into a grand, doomed romance, and John suddenly wondered whether he should be doing it. But then that was a ridiculous idea and he dismissed it immediately. This project had been years in the planning, against all the odds he had a publisher, and he’d taken a sabbatical from his very comfortable fellowship at Cambridge to do it. Anyway, it was personal.

  A ring on the doorbell brought him back to full consciousness, and he jumped up from his chair, left the apartment and ran down the stairs to the front door of the block. There were no intercoms in the building, and so every time he had a visitor, he had to run all the way downstairs to open the door. Often he got there, as on this occasion, to find that it was no one, probably some passing kid mucking about with doorbells.

  He returned to his apartment and his front window, with the intention of pulling the blinds. Out on the street the figure of a man caught his eye. Just like the time before, he was young and attractive, and he was standing outside the synagogue. Although John couldn’t see him properly through the early evening fog, he thought he could possibly be the same man he’d seen out there before. Had he rung the bell and then drifted into the grey background of Büyük Hendek Caddesi? At that moment the man looked up and stared straight into John’s eyes. John backed away from the window and scuttled to the far side of his living room. Then he sat down on his sofa and stayed there in the darkness until he got the courage together to go back to the window and pull the blinds, without looking down into the street.

  Chapter 8

  ‘I know a man,’ Çetin İkmen said to Mehmet Süleyman, ‘who is not going to be happy.’

  What felt like an eternity of false leads, irritating paperwork and the usual petty station-based in-fighting had passed, and now – this.

  It was difficult to know where to stand in that room. It was like an abattoir. Ömer Mungan had gone outside to be sick.

  ‘I don’t think Dr John Regan is exactly ecstatic,’ Süleyman said. ‘Ardıç is something of a side issue.’

  ‘With three murders, all unsolved, on the city’s books, I’d hardly describe our commissioner as a “side issue”,’ İkmen replied. ‘And this victim’s a foreigner. You know how he hates a non-Turkish death.’

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu, though rather more robust than Ömer Mungan, stood over by the open window that overlooked Büyük Hendek Caddesi and breathed in deeply. She was accustomed to her superiors’ banter, if not the foul surroundings she was in. One of her old colleagues, Balthazar Cohen, had used to live on Büyük Hendek until al-Qaeda terrorists had blown his apartment to pieces and nearly killed his son. Berekiah Cohen, the son, was married to one of Çetin İkmen’s daughters and the whole clan now lived across the Golden Horn in Balat, which had also once been a Jewish quarter. What Cohen would make of this latest outrage Ayşe couldn’t imagine. He was old and sick and in all probability it would make him cry.

  The victim, who wasn’t easy to spot in amongst the blood that stained and dripped from every piece of furniture that was still intact, was, the kapıcı had said, an Englishman. He was called Dr John Regan and he was, or had been, a middle-aged writer. The kapıcı hadn’t been able to get access to Regan’s apartment. He’d wanted to deliver the Englishman’s bottled water, but when he couldn’t rouse him, he’d used his duplicate key to let himself inside. What he’d found, just in the hall, had been enough to send him screaming into the street. A local uniform had responded to the incident, but then İkmen had been called. He had in turn called Süleyman. Now they were both waiting for the pathologist to arrive.

  As usual, Arto Sarkissian was not long in coming. As he entered the room, he said, ‘Good God.’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said. ‘Like you, Arto, I thought I’d seen it all. Good morning.’

  The Armenian blinked as if he was trying to wash something out of his eye. ‘I don’t know about “good”,’ he said. ‘So where’s my victim?’

  İkmen pointed to a blood-soaked bundle that lay on the floor in front of a small sofa.

  The Armenian shook his head. ‘You know what this reminds me of?’

  ‘It reminds you of something?’

  The doctor put his medical case down on the sofa and said, ‘I read a book, years ago, about the Jack the Ripper murders in London back in the nineteenth century. Jack was never caught, but his last victim looked like this. There was a photograph in the book. It was unrecognisable as a human being.’

  They all looked at the thing on the floor, and Arto Sarkissian wondered where he was going to start.

  Hande Genç was dead. Her mother and her sister were in her bedroom, washing her body. Her husband, Faruk, sat tense and alone in their living room, looking out of the window at the small and distant view his apartment had of the Bosphorus.

  As stubborn as ever, Hande had endured her pain until the early hours of the morning, when, finally, she’d allowed her husband to call out her doctor. He had recommended immediate transfer to hospital, but Hande had always been determined to die at home. She’d asked him to give her more diamorphine, which, much to Faruk’s dismay, he had.

  Faruk had known she was in the final hours of her life before the doctor arrived, and so he had begged her to tell him the truth about whether she had been involved in Leyla Ablak’s death. Not a day had gone by since Leyla’s murder without Hande taunting him about it. One day she and Leyla’s late husband had planned her death together; another time it had been Hande alone; and on other days still she denied even knowing that Faruk had been having an affair with Leyla. She was punishing him for being unfaithful to her, but as time had gone on and she had moved ever closer to death, Faruk had begun to panic. What if she died taking the truth with her? He needed to know whether his actions had, directly or indirectly, led to Leyla’s death. If they had, he didn’t know how he could ever atone. But he was desperate to find out so that he could at least try. Maybe Hande or the general or both of them had hired someone else to kill Leyla, and if that were the case, Faruk needed to find that out too. All he could do for Leyla now was help to discover her killer, and if Hande could give him a name, he could pass that on to the police.

  The previous night had been one of horror for Faruk. First Hande had vomited blood, and although he’d pleaded with her to let him call the doctor at that point, she’d just rasped at him to clear it up and then whispered her bile about Leyla. Faruk had done as she’d asked, trying to ignore her vicious taunting, but eventually it had got underneath his skin and he had hit her. He’d regretted it immediately, especially when she’d drawn him close and said, ‘I will never tell you, Faruk. I will go to my grave and you will remain here, in hell.’ He’d run around the apartment, crying and banging his head against the walls in frustration. But then the doctor had arrived. Just before he gave Hande her first injection of diamorphine, he had asked her whether she wanted to say anything in private to her husband. All three of them knew what this could mean. But Hande didn’t even look at Faruk with her bloodshot, jaundiced eyes. She just said, ‘No,’ and then the needle went into one of the exhausted veins in her arms and she became a living corpse. Later she began to fit. It had only taken one more dose of pain control and then she was dead.

  Now, alone with a body that would never tell him its secrets, and her family, who despised him, Faruk wondered how he was going to be able to get through her funeral.

  ‘May Allah give you patience.’

  The unexpected voice made Faruk jump. But it was only Cem, Hande’s broth
er. When Faruk had called his mother-in-law to tell her that Hande was dead, Cem had driven her and Hande’s spinster sister, Nilüfer, over to the apartment. Faruk attempted a smile. Unlike the women, Cem wasn’t his enemy. Maybe it was because he was a man and therefore understood infidelity. More men than women did it. Or maybe it was just because he was a rational academic who did not believe in religion – his appeal for Allah to give Faruk patience was a standard response spoken to the bereaved – or in monogamy and other outmoded or oppressive forms of human relationship.

  ‘Hande’s pain is at an end,’ Cem said.

  Cem Atay was a lot older than his sisters. In his mid fifties, he was an historian who had fronted several popular television series about Anatolian civilisations and the Ottoman Empire. These days he was single, but Faruk didn’t doubt for a moment that he had lovers.

  ‘Yes.’ Faruk’s answer was tardy and he was barely conscious of giving it. Now that Hande’s mother and sister were washing her body, the funeral was only hours away. In line with Muslim custom, they would want to have her buried before sundown if possible. As women, they wouldn’t go to the graveside, as Faruk would be expected to. They also wouldn’t have to respond to the discharge, which was when the imam asked all those present whether the deceased had been a good person and, more crucially, whether those still living forgave the dead person for his or her past misdemeanours. Just thinking about it made Faruk sweat. He wasn’t a religious man, but there was something about lying to Allah that did not sit well with him. But then what else could he do? Could he actually say that he didn’t forgive his wife for taking to her grave what might be her involvement in a murder?