Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  Cem, seeing his pain, tightened his grip on his shoulders and said, ‘You won’t get over Hande’s death, Faruk, but you will get used to it. Trust me on this. When my father died, I was just as shell-shocked as you are.’

  Arto Sarkissian washed up as best he could in a tiny bathroom at the back of the apartment and then went to join Ayşe Farsakoğlu and the group of senior police officers, which now also included the commissioner, Ardıç, in the kitchen. When he walked in, they all looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Well, Dr Regan didn’t die a natural death …’

  ‘I think that even we could see that, Doctor,’ Ardıç growled. Overweight, tired and distinctly grey around the cheeks, Ardıç was due to retire just after İkmen. Like the inspector, he didn’t really want to, but that was not because he loved his job so much as that he feared the man who would replace him. The rumour mill had it that the man his superiors had in mind was of a very pious nature. And although Ardıç was not averse to religion, he found that when it entered public life, its influence sometimes led to favouritism along sectarian lines. This sat badly with Ardic and his personal philosophy regarding his department. His own religion was and always had been a private matter.

  ‘To give him credit, the Englishman fought,’ Arto said. ‘That’s why there’s blood in the living room and in the hall. I’d say that the attacker came in through the front door.’

  ‘He let him in?’ İkmen asked. The kapıcı had said that when he tried to deliver Regan’s water, the door had been locked.

  ‘That will be for Forensics to decide,’ the doctor said. ‘But it’s very possible.’

  ‘So he could have known him?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Çetin, did the kapıcı see anyone come to visit Dr Regan last night?’ Süleyman asked.

  İkmen shook his head. ‘He was out. Drinking.’

  ‘Until when?’ Ayşe said.

  ‘He doesn’t remember.’

  ‘Time of death?’ Ardıç asked the doctor.

  ‘Anywhere between about ten last night and two o’clock this morning.’

  ‘Cause?’

  ‘Ah well, that’s where you’re going to have to be a little bit patient with me,’ the doctor said. ‘The victim has sustained so many wounds, administered I would say by a very sharp, long-bladed knife …’

  ‘A machete?’

  ‘Not really, but something like that. However, that was only at the beginning. Later on I think he used a smaller knife. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Basically he has multiple wounds and it’s going to take me some time to work out exactly which one, if any of them, was responsible for his death.’

  Süleyman looked confused. ‘If any?’

  ‘He could have died from simple blood loss,’ the doctor said. ‘However, what I can tell you is that if my observations are correct, whoever attacked him tried, and failed, to cut his heart out.’

  There was a stunned silence. Then Çetin İkmen said, ‘Cut his heart out? Are you sure?’

  ‘His chest cavity has been cut open, probably with the large knife, his ribs broken and separated and the vessels around the heart hacked at and in some cases severed,’ the Armenian said.

  ‘But the heart is still in the chest?’

  ‘Such as it is, yes. Where it’s been cut about, there isn’t actually that much of it left.’

  Süleyman said, ‘If the murderer wanted to cut out Dr Regan’s heart, why did he stop?’

  ‘He could have been interrupted,’ İkmen said. ‘By a noise that made him fear he was about to be discovered, or maybe even by a person entering the apartment. We’ve got officers going door to door—’

  ‘Or,’ the doctor interrupted, ‘what I think is the most likely reason.’

  Ardıç frowned. ‘Which is?’

  ‘Well, from a medico-butchery point of view, I’d say that our murderer had very little knowledge of anatomy. For some reason he wanted this man’s heart, but when it came to the reality of obtaining the organ, he was up to neither the job nor the sight of what was revealed when he opened up the chest. I think he just stopped because he couldn’t go any further.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Ardıç nodded his head up and down. ‘Doctor, I recall you said something similar about the Tarlabaşı semi-decapitation.’

  ‘Yes, that was a possibility in that case too.’

  ‘So we could be looking at the same offender in both this case and the Tarlabaşı murder?’

  ‘Possibly, yes.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Very different victims, however,’ Süleyman said. ‘A crazy, drug-addled fantasist in Tarlabaşı, a foreign writer with a doctorate here.’

  ‘Yes, although the Tarlabaşı man was well educated, as I recall,’ Ardıç said. He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, his voice had a much harder tone. ‘But whether one person is doing these things, or twelve, the fact remains that they’re happening and they shouldn’t be.’ He looked across at İkmen. ‘Movement on General Ablak’s wife?’

  İkmen shrugged. ‘We’ve ruled out the lover. The husband?’ He shrugged again. ‘I’ve been back to see the lover’s wife a few times, but she’s terminally ill and so I’ve had to tread carefully.’

  ‘Well then maybe now it’s time to tread heavily,’ Ardıç said. ‘You say the woman is terminally ill, but that wouldn’t stop her arranging the death of her rival even if she didn’t do it herself. Put your boots on, İkmen, go back to her and squeeze her – hard.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And in the meantime, Doctor, I assume you’ve arranged transport for the body to your laboratory …’

  ‘Once I have permission from Forensics and the photographer, yes.’

  ‘And then I suppose I’ll have the delightful task of telling the British Consul that one of his nationals has been murdered,’ Ardıç said. ‘I hate it when we lose a foreigner.’

  The old man, who gave his name as Deniz Ribeiro, was one of the very few Jews still resident in Karaköy. He was also, apparently, one of the most observant. ‘There’s not much I miss around here,’ he told Ömer Mungan. ‘And so when I tell you that there was a gypsy hanging about around the synagogue, I expect you to believe me. For weeks, on and off, same man or similar, hanging around. Until Selim Bey – he owns the bakkal on İlk Belediye Caddesi – told me that the place was infested with Bulgarian gypsies, I thought it was some jihadi type. But then I heard him speak into his mobile phone. I can speak Arabic and five other languages, but I didn’t know that one.’

  ‘If you thought the man might be plotting something against the synagogue, why didn’t you call us?’ Ömer asked.

  The old man didn’t answer. But Ömer knew that the subtext to his silence was his probable belief that because the synagogue was a place of worship for Jews, the police didn’t care. Ömer said, ‘So this gypsy, what do you think he was doing hanging around the synagogue?’

  ‘Nothing. Looking at the buildings opposite.’

  One of which was where John Regan had lived.

  ‘How long did he do this for?’ Ömer asked.

  Deniz Ribeiro shrugged. ‘A couple of weeks. But on and off, not every day.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone about this, Mr Ribeiro?’

  He laughed. ‘For what it was worth, I told Hasan Bey – he’s the kapıcı of the building opposite the synagogue entrance.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘What does he ever say! “Leave it to me! I’ll take care of it!” He does nothing, takes care of nothing. Two of his tenants were robbed in their own apartments last year and what did he do? Nothing. He’s a drunk, but who else is there to tell, eh?’

  Hasan Bey had said nothing to İkmen about any lurking gypsies, as far as Ömer knew. But that didn’t mean that Deniz Ribeiro was making it up. Hasan Bey was a drunk, which was precisely why he’d been out of the building when John Regan had died. But then apparently so had all of the other tenants, apart from the old Syrian lady who lived in the basement.

  ‘Did
you see the gypsy outside the synagogue yesterday evening?’

  ‘For a bit, yes,’ Deniz Ribeiro said. ‘But when I looked out of my window at about eight, he’d gone.’ Ribeiro lived next door to the synagogue, which gave him a very good view of John Regan’s building.

  ‘Did you see anyone go into Hasan Bey’s building?’ Ömer asked.

  ‘What, you mean the murderer? Is it true that the Englishman’s head was chopped off? You know, like that man in Tarlabaşı?’

  ‘Can we please stick to the facts, Mr Ribeiro? Did you see anyone going into the building?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I saw people leave. That drunk who goes out with Hasan Bey sometimes, who lives on the ground floor. He wobbled out at about seven. The couple who live next door to the Englishman went out much earlier, at about five. The Syrian woman in the basement never goes anywhere. Apart from the Englishman’s place and Hasan Bey’s apartment, the rest of the building is empty this time of year.’

  Much of the building was used for short-term holiday lets for people visiting the city for a week or two in the summer.

  ‘So the gypsy was outside the synagogue when the other tenants left?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes. Although Hasan Bey went out later, but then he always does. You can set your clock by his addiction to the rakı bottle.’

  ‘Can you describe this gypsy to me, Mr Ribeiro?’

  ‘I can, although he’s so typical you’ll think I’m making it up.’

  ‘Try me,’ Ömer said.

  ‘Well, medium height, dark, hawkish sort of features, scar on his left cheek, leather jacket, mobile phone stuck to the side of his face all the time. A gypsy on the make? Yes, like a fucking cartoon character, I swear to God!’

  Marko was good to him, but he did make him work. Every day he was taken all over the city, everywhere that tourists went, and every day he had to make at least a thousand lira. If he didn’t, then Marko would tell Şukru Bey, who would tell his mum that he wasn’t pulling his weight. Şukru Bey had got him out of Tarlabaşı and so his mum was now in his debt. He had to keep on being good both for his own sake and for his mum. But then Hamid was a brilliant pocket-diver. He’d got used to snatching bags, but that wasn’t quite so easy. Even so, provided there were enough tourists around and the other boys didn’t beat him to it, he always met his target.

  But Hamid was homesick. Going back to the apartment in Fener with Marko and the other kids wasn’t much fun. Marko spoke some Turkish but none of the boys did. This, as well as the fact that the Bulgarians were Christians and he was a Muslim, excluded Hamid from their play. He missed his mother and his sister, even though they’d irritated him. And all for what? Because he’d seen a monster standing over the body of mad old Levent Bey. But then it wasn’t just because of that, and Şukru Bey, if no one else, knew it too. Just thinking about Şukru Bey made Hamid shudder, and so he stopped doing it. He was doing well now, and that was all that mattered. Marko seemed to be unusually happy this morning, so clearly no one, including Hamid, was doing too badly.

  Chapter 9

  ‘A biography of Sultan Abdülhamid II could be contentious,’ Çetin İkmen said as he leaned back into his office chair. ‘But would a person kill somebody for writing it?’

  Ayşe Farsakoğlu, whose grasp of English was not nearly so good as İkmen’s, put one of the bloodstained pieces of paper from John Regan’s apartment down on her desk and said, ‘I don’t know, sir. Maybe. People get offended by all sorts of things, don’t they?’

  İkmen shook his head. ‘Don’t they indeed. Hah! I get offended by people who moan continually about smoking, but somehow nobody cares what I think. The wonderful world of selective offence.’

  Ayşe smiled. This was İkmen’s code for the belief he and many other secular Turks now had that their views were becoming subordinate to the new Islamic elite. Ever since the religiously rooted AKP Party had come to power in 2002, Çetin İkmen had felt what he interpreted as the cold hand of the pious on his shoulder. And even though he knew that he was probably overreacting, he was also aware of a change in the tenor of his country that did not entirely favour people like him. Some of the new elite even expressed admiration for the long-gone Ottoman Empire, and that included the much-maligned last autocratic sultan, Abdülhamid II.

  ‘Abdülhamid killed a lot of people mainly because he was obsessed with his own security,’ İkmen said. ‘He was clearly as mad as so many of his ancestors had been, but that doesn’t excuse the thousands he had put to death. Well, not in my eyes. I don’t know what Dr John Regan’s thesis was with regard to Abdülhamid, but I can’t see how, as an academic, he can have avoided criticism.’

  ‘There’s some sort of partial manuscript on his computer, but until the—’

  ‘Unfortunates.’

  ‘The technical people …’ She looked up at him and smiled. He always called the police department’s team of technical experts ‘the unfortunates’, on the basis that they supposedly had poor social skills. ‘… have had a chance to examine it, then we won’t really know.’

  ‘Well, it’ll keep them safely away from women,’ İkmen said. ‘Or rather women will be safe from their inept—’

  His phone rang. ‘İkmen.’

  While he took the call, Ayşe went back to looking at some of John Regan’s research material. As far as she could tell, he’d been more interested in the sultan’s personal life than in his actual reign. There were notes about his mother, his brothers and also about his harem and his children. Mehmet Süleyman was a descendant of the man secular Turks of a certain age, like Çetin İkmen, still called Abdul the Damned. He’d been sent into exile for his crimes against his own people and had been replaced by first one brother and then another, both puppets of the post-Ottoman regime known as the Young Turks. They’d not been much better than the Empire, but then had come Atatürk, and although Ayşe didn’t hold with the idea that he was the be all and end all of Turkish political life, he had undoubtedly transformed the country for the better. Or rather, that was what she believed. Not everyone held to that view; the Ottoman Empire was back in favour with some people. Politicised religion Ayşe could at least understand, although she didn’t agree with it, but to want a creaking and corrupt and – more to the point – dead empire back seemed like madness.

  İkmen put his phone down slowly and said, ‘Hande Genç, wife of Faruk Genç, is dead and in her grave.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor woman, she suffered.’

  ‘Then maybe, sir, she was glad to go.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve no doubt of it,’ he said. ‘When one is riddled with cancer and has been betrayed by one’s partner, life must be bleak to say the least. But now her husband wants to come in and speak to us again. Apparently he has something he wishes to tell me.’

  ‘What do you think it’s about?’

  İkmen put an unlit cigarette into his mouth and leaned back in his chair. ‘I don’t know. When he was first speaking to me I wondered whether he was perhaps planning to confess to the murder of Leyla Ablak, but I don’t think it’s that.’

  ‘You think that maybe he’s going to implicate his dead wife?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘But he’ll be here in an hour. We’ll just have to wait until then to find out what he has to say for himself. The way things have been going in the city since the beginning of this year, I’m not prepared to speculate on anything.’

  ‘Three murders in three months.’

  ‘Yes,’ İkmen said, ‘and do you know what I noticed about that when I first got in this morning, Ayşe? They all took place on the twenty-first of the month. Levent Devrim was killed on the twenty-first of January, Leyla Ablak on the twenty-first of February and Dr John Regan on the twenty-first of this month.’

  Ayşe raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you told the Commissioner, sir?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Well you know Ardıç; at first he berated me for not having seen this pattern earlier and t
hen he said that we really must not fall into the trap of ascribing occult meanings to what could be mere coincidence. I said that as far as I could tell there was nothing occult at work here, but then he said that with serial killers it was always, and I quote, “some sort of religious or magical mania”.’

  As Ayşe knew only too well, Commissioner Ardıç, for all his good qualities, was a man given to generalisation. İkmen had said of him before that his knowledge of a lot of serious crime came from the television and films.

  ‘Anyway, at the moment, the connection to a specific date is just one element in a very complicated picture,’ İkmen said. ‘I can accept, on Dr Sarkissian’s evidence so far, that there could be a connection between the deaths of Levent Devrim and Dr John Regan. But Leyla Ablak’s case has an entirely different profile. That death, to me, is more personal. But maybe Mr Genç will tell us more when he arrives.’

  The tears just wouldn’t stop. He tried to control them but he couldn’t. Eventually, given the obvious embarrassment he was causing to the man sitting next to him, Arthur Regan asked the cabin crew if he could please move to a seat where he could be on his own. Luckily the flight was half empty and so this was easy. Arthur cried on in peace, although somewhere over the Alps the crew did ask him whether he wanted chicken or pasta for his meal. He said he wanted nothing, just a large glass of whisky, which they brought to him immediately. Had it only been the previous afternoon that the British Consul in İstanbul had called to tell him that John was dead? Had it really been less than a day?

  Usually a bad flier, this time Arthur didn’t give a toss about all the bangs and jerks that were always a part of any flying experience. His son was dead at the age of forty-six, taking with him the last familial relationship that Arthur still possessed. He wished that he too could die, right there in that seat, in that aeroplane, but he knew he wasn’t going to. The consul had told him that the İstanbul police believed John had been murdered. Until he found out who had done this, and why, Arthur knew he had to keep on living. Who would kill a gentle academic man going about the business of writing a work of romantic fiction? But then had John just been doing that, or had he availed himself of what was now a very vibrant nightlife scene in İstanbul? Back in Arthur’s day, the 1960s, the only nightlife available outside the big hotels and traditional meyhanes was confined to the brothels of Karaköy and the beer houses in the gypsy quarter of Sulukule. That was, he’d been told, all very different now. Now the city had hundreds of clubs and bars catering to almost every taste in music, dance and sexual orientation one could imagine. İstanbul had a big gay scene, and Arthur wondered whether John’s loneliness had driven him to bring someone unsuitable back to his flat. All the consul had told him about his son’s death was that he had been killed in his own apartment, opposite the Neve Şalom synagogue.