‘Infidelity is always wrong.’
‘According to my mother, yes. When she did find out, when we all found out, she was furious.’
İkmen said, ‘I understand, sir, that you attended Mr Genç’s spa, where you had homeopathic treatment.’
‘From Miss Greenwood, yes.’
‘Did she ever say anything to you about Leyla Ablak and your brother-in-law?’
Cem Atay fingered the edge of a large brown book on his desk. ‘I didn’t even know that Leyla Ablak went to the spa, Inspector, much less that she was having an affair with Faruk. And anyway, why would Miss Greenwood have told me about her? As a non-Turkish-speaker, I’m pretty sure the whole Ergenekon aura that surrounded General Ablak would have passed her by.’
İkmen toyed with the idea of telling the professor that in his opinion, the Greenwood woman had been at least a little in love with Faruk Genç. He decided against it. ‘Where were you on the night that Leyla Ablak died, Professor Atay?’
‘Am I under suspicion, Inspector İkmen?’
‘Inasmuch as everyone connected to a murder victim is, however tenuously.’
The professor opened the brown book, which was apparently his diary, and said, ‘Well, that night I had dinner with a friend, a lady.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘I can give you her name, Inspector, if I must, but if I might ask you to be discreet …’
‘Of course.’ Now maybe the professor’s take on Faruk Genç’s situation became more understandable.
Cem Atay wrote a name and a phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to İkmen. ‘This is her personal mobile number and I was with her all night.’
İkmen put the piece of paper into his pocket. He would be discreet. He had already decided to send Ayşe Farsakoğlu to interview this lady rather than go himself. He said, ‘Can you tell me why you consulted Miss Greenwood, Professor Atay?’
He smiled. ‘Stage fright,’ he said.
Suzy Greenwood had been right about that.
‘Odd, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘A colossal show-off like me. I’ve tried everything over the years: hypnotherapy, diazepam, meditation.’
‘And did the homeopathy help you?’ İkmen asked.
He said, ‘Oh, sympathetic magic does work, Inspector; anyone who doubts that is, in my opinion, a fool.’
And İkmen, son of a witch with more than the odd bit of magic in his soul himself, said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Even though he did not, personally, include homeopathy in his own definition of sympathetic magic. But then he felt that the professor had just been touching the very tip of a large iceberg of examples he could have used, but had chosen not to.
‘So you didn’t tell us earlier about the fact that Hamid had seen the body of Levent Devrim because you wanted to protect the boy,’ Süleyman said to the cowed figure of Şukru Şekeroğlu in the chair in front of him.
The gypsy looked him straight in the eyes. It hadn’t taken a lot, oddly, to make him come clean. ‘Yeah.’
‘And then when it came out that the boy might have seen something he shouldn’t, you got him out of Tarlabaşı and sent him to one of your friends.’
‘I sent him to no one,’ Şukru said. ‘I just got him out.’
‘Because you didn’t want us to find out that you had been withholding information from us.’
‘I didn’t want the kid involved.’
Süleyman leaned back in his chair. ‘Even if he had killed Levent Devrim?’
Şukru batted the suggestion away with a dirty hand. ‘That kid couldn’t kill a kitten!’ he said. ‘I was trying to protect him from an interrogation like this!’
‘By concealing the truth and then compounding the problem by attempting to prevent us from finding out,’ Süleyman said.
Şukru said, ‘But it was all nonsense! Monsters and feathers and—’
‘Maybe our murderer was in disguise,’ Süleyman said. ‘Maybe he, she or it really was a monster. Mr Şekeroğlu, your own Roma culture is rich in myth and legend …’
‘Oh, so because I’m Roma, I’m fucking stupid!’ Şukru stood up. He was a good deal taller than Süleyman and towered over Ömer Mungan, who also got to his feet.
Süleyman looked up casually at the gypsy and said, ‘Oh do sit down, Mr Şekeroğlu.’
But the gypsy remained on his feet, as did Ömer Mungan.
‘You don’t understand our life, Inspector Süleyman, however much you might think you do,’ Şukru said, alluding, albeit obliquely, to the time Süleyman had spent with his sister. ‘There are things we believe in that you don’t, just like there are things you believe to be true that we ignore. But monsters ain’t a thing we tend to come across.’
Süleyman didn’t ask him to sit again. For a moment he just stared at him with steady eyes, and then he said, ‘All right, if we’re playing the ethnic card, you can tell me all about your beliefs, Mr Şekeroğlu. And you can start by explaining what, if anything, the number twenty-one means to you.’
Chapter 12
He came awake fighting, as he so often did these days, for breath. But this was nothing to do with his heart or his asthma. Somebody had him by the throat; somebody was on top of him, holding him down. Rafik Efendi tried to shout, but he couldn’t. All he could feel was fear and a rage he didn’t even begin to understand. He was an old man and if somebody was killing him then they were probably doing him a favour. What did he do except sleep, try to get an erection and piss himself? Why shouldn’t some kind soul put him out of his misery?
But this wasn’t a mercy killing; it was far too painful to be that. Rafik looked up to see what his attacker looked like and found himself regarding a blankness filled with tiny silver stars. The oxygen to his brain was being cut off. He heard himself, an infantalised gurgling in his throat, and he was disgusted. Was this how it would end? With a sound like a baby newborn and choking for air?
It intensified. A pain in his chest that defied all description. Was this what a heart attack was like? he wondered. Like having his chest sliced open, and a smell of metal that reminded him of all those times he’d taken a boy who did it for money and then hurt him. Blood.
Blood bubbling up in his mouth where his teeth used to be and pouring out of his mouth on to his chin. Like a baby bringing up milk.
Çetin İkmen lay beside his sleeping wife and wondered what the city was doing. He thought about John Regan, Leyla Ablak and Levent Devrim, and he went through, again, those areas of their lives that seemed to intersect. They were few and slight and his heart began to pound as he considered the possibility that maybe their deaths were completely unconnected. Only the dates of their deaths provided any real consistency, and it was that that really kept him awake. It was the twenty-first again.
He’d heard of killers copying one another, or rather he was aware of it in crime fiction. Could such things happen in fact? Nothing beyond the most basic details of the victims’ deaths had been released to the press, so how could a copycat know what to emulate?
He turned and looked at Fatma, who was just faintly smiling. The weather had improved considerably in the last week and there had been no need to light the soba for the past three days. In the scheme of things it was no great triumph, but then small victories pleased her and it made him envy her. She took joy where she found it, in what he arrogantly called the mundane. He knew there was nothing wrong with that, but he also knew that the mundane didn’t please him. How was he going to deal with retirement without the necessary resources to take pleasure in an afternoon spent in a coffee house or a game of tavla with other ‘old’ men? He wasn’t. The last time he’d gone to a coffee house just for pleasure was when his father had taken him as a young man, just before he’d married Fatma. Every subsequent visit to such places had been on business of one sort or another, and now that one wasn’t allowed to smoke in public areas any more, that was as much of a chore as everything else had become.
İkmen wondered how it would be if he retracted his request for retirement. The soba aside, Fatma would probab
ly welcome it if he continued on at work. At home he was going to get under her feet and irritate her, and with just the two of them in the apartment most of the time, they would certainly row. On the other hand, he was tired. His body felt like a particularly troublesome appendage most of the time and his last medical had thrown up a whole load of age-related irritations, some of which he had been given tablets for. Not that he took them. He didn’t want to end up like Arto Sarkissian, taking tablets to counteract the side effects of other tablets. He just wanted to work and feel the way he had felt in the past. He wanted to get that tingle on the back of his neck and in the pit of his stomach as he closed in on his prey and knew that just his existence was making him or her sweat.
But then was that happening now? Was there someone in the city who was sweating as he lay there just at the thought of him? Was that real, a fantasy, or was he just too old and too cynical to see it? Çetin İkmen looked at the clock beside his bed and watched as midnight clicked over into the following day.
Going out was not something that Sezen Hanım often did. Since she’d been widowed, and particularly since her daughter’s death at the beginning of the year, it had not felt right. But her friend Melek had really badgered her to go to what had turned out to be a very pleasant evening at the Swissotel in nearby Beşiktaş. So close it was almost walking distance from the house, she’d felt happy to leave her uncle for just a short time to have a couple of glasses of champagne with Melek.
She had also managed to convince herself that her time out had been improving. Melek worked as a curator at the Pera Museum, and the Swissotel event had featured a selection of the museum’s new ‘Contrasting Civilisations’ exhibition. Through the prism of a carefully selected group of artefacts, Melek and her colleagues had presented a snapshot of the Ottoman Empire’s relationships with other significant countries when it was at the height of its power in the 1520s. Süleyman the Lawgiver, or the Magnificent as he was known in the West, had been sultan then, and in 1529 he had extended the Empire to the gates of Vienna. Relationships with foreign powers had therefore been conducted from a position of strength, and people like the British and even the mighty Spanish Empire had quaked before Süleyman and his terrifying corps of Janissaries. After that high point, it had been downhill all the way until the early twentieth century, when the Empire had imploded.
Sezen walked up the creaking staircase that led to the upper storey of the house, trying not to make too much noise in case she woke her uncle. It was after midnight, and Rafik Efendi was brittle and easily woken now. The smallest sound could rouse him, and then it was always a fight to get him to go back to sleep again. But Sezen would check on him, even if it did wake him up. Having a very old person in the house was a bit like having a baby again: one was always looking and listening to make sure that they were still breathing.
She stepped on to the landing, the wooden house creaking and sighing around her. Light from the open door that led to her bedroom showed her that her uncle’s door was open. This was unusual but fortuitous, because it meant that when she went in to see him, Sezen probably wouldn’t disturb him.
She first realised that something was wrong when she noticed that the smell coming from Rafik’s room was different. He’d been incontinent for some time and so she was accustomed to the sharp smell of ammonia, the occasional sick odour of faeces. But this was different; this was something she didn’t know. Sezen peered through the darkness and for a moment she couldn’t really tell what she was looking at. But then, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she realised that her uncle wasn’t in his bed at all; he was lying on the floor. Alarmed that he might have fallen out of bed and hit his head, she flicked on the light switch by the door and made as if to walk over to his bed. Then she stopped, frozen in horror, finding it hard to believe what she was seeing.
‘You know, just for a few hours I clung on to the hope that we weren’t going to have to leave our beds this time,’ Çetin İkmen said as he smoked over the old man’s washstand.
Commissioner Ardıç didn’t even look at him. ‘Put the cigarette out, İkmen,’ he said.
The other officers in the room, including Süleyman, became still and silent. They were all in the presence of something unprecedentedly terrible, and Ardıç was telling İkmen to put his smoke out. They all waited for his reply. When it came, it was undramatic. ‘No.’
Ardıç’s response was muted too, to say the least. He just shrugged. Other people began to breathe again. Arto Sarkissian, who was the only person in the room who had been oblivious to what had just happened, stood up and looked down at the body he had just been examining. ‘The heart is missing,’ he said.
Ardıç switched his gaze from İkmen to the Armenian. ‘You’re sure?’
‘The chest was cut open, again with a large-bladed knife, then the ribs were spread and the heart was removed with a smaller blade,’ he said. ‘A better job this time.’
‘Than?’
‘The Englishman,’ the doctor said. ‘That was a mess. This is not. He’s obviously learning.’
Everyone in that room looked down at what remained of Rafik Efendi. A bloodied shell, its legs akimbo, it was not the image of the prince dignified in death that the woman whose crying they could all hear from downstairs had wanted for the old man. İkmen looked over at Süleyman, whose distant relative the old man had been, and wondered what he was thinking. But his face was impassive.
‘So the heart could be …’
‘Having removed it, which must have taken some effort,’ İkmen said, ‘I doubt he’d just throw it away. He took it for a reason.’
‘A trophy,’ Süleyman said.
‘A talisman.’ İkmen shrugged. ‘How can we even guess at what it might mean when we don’t know his, or her, motives?’
Arto shook his head. ‘From my point of view I’d say that the murderer was probably a man. To remove a heart from even an old chest is difficult …’
‘Female surgeons,’ İkmen offered.
‘True, Inspector, but their patients are anaesthetised when they operate. This man was alive.’
İkmen saw Süleyman’s face crease in disgust.
‘Old as he was, he clung to life beyond the opening of his chest cavity,’ Arto said. ‘A terrible death; he must have been in agony.’
Again silence rolled in across the room until Ardıç looked across at İkmen, who had put out one cigarette and lit another. ‘Why can’t we catch this character?’
‘Or characters,’ İkmen replied. ‘Not sure it’s one person, sir.’
‘But it could be?’
‘Yes.’
Ardıç looked at his phone. ‘And this date thing. Here we are again, the twenty-first. What about that?’
İkmen shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. I mean, clearly it means something to the killer or killers, but it doesn’t have any meaning that we have discovered so far …’
‘Then you’re obviously looking in the wrong places,’ Ardıç said. His brows knitted above his dark eyes. ‘Look again. Look again at every victim, every crime scene and every bloodied corpse this city has suffered since the beginning of the year. When this story hits the media, yet another killing on the twenty-first, we are going to have to answer some questions, quite rightly, about what the hell we think we’ve been doing for the last four months. This is now a serial killer, or so the media will say, and I for one won’t have one of those fucking bastards in my city. Do I make myself clear?’
She didn’t want to be with this woman, she wanted to be with Mehmet Bey. She’d seen him come in, go up to that terrible bedroom she would close up for ever as soon as she could, but he hadn’t come down to see her.
Not for the first time, the policewoman, a Sergeant Farsakoğlu, said to her, ‘Sezen Hanım, is there anyone I can call for you?’
Again she’d said, ‘No.’
Of course there were people she could have called, a lot of them, but she wanted no one, except perhaps Mehme
t Bey. With Rafık Efendi’s death, her entire connection to her Ottoman past had dissolved and Sezen had never felt so exposed, mainly because she knew, deep as it was buried, what Rafık had done. What would she do, what would the family do, if damaged middle-aged men stepped out of the past with stories about anal rape and sex for money? When someone died like this, the papers and the TV stations were full of it; there was no way she could hide a death as violent as Rafik’s. Maybe if she told Mehmet Bey the whole truth, she could persuade him to keep the details the police gave to the media to a minimum. But then Nur Süleyman, Mehmet’s mother, was forever telling everyone how honest he was. Could an appeal to his blood persuade him to be economical with the truth should anything bad emerge about her uncle?
The doorbell rang, which made Sezen immediately rise to her feet. But the policewoman told her to sit down. One of the constables upstairs would deal with it. Big male feet thundered down the stairs. The policewoman looked at her and said, ‘Would you like some tea?’
‘No.’
The front door opened with a creak – the police had told her, disapprovingly, that the back door had been unlocked; it always was. Sezen closed her eyes. Why had she done that? She’d done it because her uncle had told her to. How else could the boys he still occasionally rented come and go without anybody seeing them?
Then she heard a voice. ‘I’m a neighbour. What has happened? Can I see Sezen Hanım?’
It was that interfering Elif Ceylan. She was one of those who thought that just living near those of standing invested her and her family with quality too. Sezen knew it did not.
The officer said something to the silly woman, then Elif Ceylan said, ‘Oh, because when I saw the police cars, I wondered whether it had anything to do with the man who was in the garden.’
She’d seen something, or she’d claimed to! In the garden. With the ever-open back door. She’d never said anything before! Sezen, terrified, called out to her, ‘Elif dear, I’m in here! Do come in.’ She looked at Sergeant Farsakoğlu, who was frowning. ‘She is my friend, I need to speak to her,’ she said.
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