Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that the publisher who expressed an interest in my son’s book when he sent them a synopsis is far more relevant than either of us.’

  For a moment Abdurrahman didn’t seem to understand.

  Arthur clarified. ‘John had a UK publisher,’ he said. ‘I’ll need to talk to them about whether they want to give the project to another writer. Personally I’d like to see my son’s work finished.’

  He watched, without any compassion, as Abdurrahman’s breath shortened. ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘It brings dishonour to my family.’

  ‘By telling the truth about a particularly notorious relative of yours who had a child with a non-Muslim woman? What about all the Turks Abdülhamid killed because he feared they were plotting against him? Not worried about those?’

  ‘He had a … he was not a well man …’ Arthur knew that Abdülhamid II was widely acknowledged to have been suffering from extreme paranoia for much of his life, but that didn’t excuse his actions in the eyes of those who came after him.

  But there was something else that John’s book alleged about Abdülhamid. It was contained in just a few lines at the end of his synopsis, but they were lines Arthur knew would upset his brother-in-law, and they were the reason he had come.

  ‘My son was keen to prove that Abdülhamid fathered a child on Flora Cordier,’ he said. ‘And although I haven’t been through all his research material yet, I think that John came up with some evidence to prove his thesis.’ He could see that the other man was speechless with fury, but he carried on regardless. ‘The tragic climax to the book is where Abdülhamid had Flora’s daughter tied into a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. Taught her a lesson for seducing his son, didn’t he?’ It felt so good, so refreshingly spiteful to say it!

  Abdurrahman shook. ‘Your son had no evidence for any of that!’

  Arthur shrugged. ‘Even if he didn’t, what does it matter?’ he said. ‘Abdurrahman, the book is a romance, a fiction.’

  ‘It is defamatory!’

  ‘Is it? So was that why you had my son killed?’ He said it without thought, not even knowing whether he believed it on any level himself.

  Abdurrahman made a noise in his throat.

  ‘Because I don’t believe you didn’t know that John was in town,’ Arthur continued. Now that he had started the cruelty, he had to finish. ‘You soon tracked me down via your contacts here, there and everywhere. And anyway, who else would have killed him, eh? My son was the best of men, he was …’ He broke down and sobbed, while Abdurrahman watched him.

  When Arthur’s tears finally subsided enough for conversation to be possible, Abdurrahman said, ‘I didn’t kill your son. I didn’t know he was here. Ask the maid, she will tell you how often I leave this place. It is never.’

  Arthur shook his head as he wiped his eyes.

  ‘Only since the police came do I know of this terrible book,’ Abdurrahman said. ‘But even if I had known, what would I have been able to do about it?’

  ‘You? Nothing. But you could have paid someone.’

  Abdurrahman waved a hand in front of his face. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I didn’t kill your son! I invite you to come here and be honest about this book your son was writing, and you—’

  ‘Yes, I came here to confront you and humiliate you,’ Arthur said. ‘Frightening you is a bonus.’

  ‘You don’t frighten me!’

  ‘And you didn’t frighten me when I came to this apartment the first time,’ Arthur said. ‘Standing next to your father, trying to look both regal and hard at the same time! I wasn’t frightened then and I’m not frightened now. Betül chose me, remember. Whatever you do or say, however many lies you tell, you can’t change that.’ He looked down at the tea the little maid had brought him and said, ‘I don’t fancy this tea any more.’

  Abdurrahman glared at him through yellowing eyes.

  Arthur rose to his feet. ‘You can keep that manuscript,’ he said. ‘I’ve got copies, John’s publisher has copies, everyone has copies.’

  The Turk continued to stare at him.

  ‘I only came to piss you off and I’ve done that now and so I’m going,’ Arthur said. ‘Just a pity your father isn’t still alive so I could have pissed him off too.’ He began to walk towards the door, then stopped and turned. ‘You know, I could have forgiven you lot much, but when none of you came when she died, I knew I’d never get over my hatred for you.’

  Watching as he went, Abdurrahman was seized by a coughing fit. Once he’d managed to recover, he shouted out, ‘Publish that book anywhere in the world and I will kill you!’

  But Arthur just kept on walking. As he reached the front door, his eyes briefly met those of Abdurrahman’s little maid, who with a shaking hand let him out. He muttered his thanks to her and left.

  Çetin İkmen didn’t usually make house calls on demand, but on this occasion, for Sezen İpek, he made an exception. Driving along the coast road out to Ortaköy, he saw a group of brightly dressed gypsies practising their Hıdırellez songs and dances, and he fancied he saw a bear amongst their number. But he must have been mistaken. Bears hadn’t danced in İstanbul since the late 1990s, when people like Şukru Şekeroğlu had been finally forced to give up tormenting the poor creatures for money. İkmen had approved. As a child he’d always found the sight of the dancing bears almost unsupportably sad. But he also knew that the demise of the bears had in turn heralded the later crackdown on traditional gypsy lifestyles in places like Sulukule. And that he couldn’t condone. Gypsies settled for hundreds of years in communities that worked were now scattered all over the city in groups that he knew found life at times almost impossible. One of the excuses given for the breaking up of the gypsy clans had been to reduce crime. Many of the old families had made their living from alcohol and prostitution and the government had wanted to curtail those practices. But closing the brothels and trying to move the clans out of the city to ‘nice’ new tower blocks had largely failed. Unable to make a living outside the city, the gypsies had moved back in to neighbourhoods like Tarlabaşı, where they had either gone back to their old ways of making money or had found new and often even less savoury methods of putting food in their children’s mouths. And sore though he was at Gonca Şekeroğlu for bewitching his Mehmet yet again, İkmen hoped that the gypsies had a good Hıdırellez and made lots of money for the summer to come.

  He pulled up outside Sezen İpek’s listing wooden house and found her waiting in her doorway for him. When he got close, he could see that she had been crying. But then her phone call had been hysterical.

  When Ayşe Farsakoğlu had interviewed her, a process that had been interrupted by one of her neighbours, Elif Ceylan, it had become very apparent that Sezen Hanım had things to hide. Elif had said she’d seen a man in the garden earlier in the evening, and Sezen had tried to silence her. But Elif had just carried on anyway, revealing to boot that old Rafik Efendi had been homosexual and rather fond of the visits young men made to his home when his niece was away. Later Sezen Hanım had confessed all to her relative, Mehmet Süleyman. In addition to having a liking for men, Rafık Efendi had also been a predatory and sometimes violent paedophile. But İkmen didn’t want to talk to her about that until he knew exactly why she was so keen to speak to him now.

  She ushered him into her salon. The first time he’d been there it had been full of her relatives and she had behaved like some sort of thwarted empress. Now it was just her, and she was frightened. She offered him a seat and he sat down.

  ‘You told me on the phone that you’re being threatened, Mrs İpek,’ İkmen said. She’d asked for Süleyman but he hadn’t been available.

  ‘Yes.’ She shook her head and then ran a hand through her hair. ‘Blackmailed.’

  She handed him a piece of paper on which were stuck words and letters cut from newspapers. He took a moment to read what he recognised as pretty standard extortion fare. When he’d finished, he looked up at her
and said, ‘If it’s any consolation, Sezen Hanım, murder victims’ families are sometimes targeted by mischief-makers. And this is a very amateurish attempt …’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ Her other hand flew up to her head as she massaged her temples. ‘No, Inspector, what this person alleges … it’s true,’ she said.

  ‘About Rafik Efendi. Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. Inspector Süleyman told me.’

  ‘If it had all been lies then I would just have thrown it away,’ she said. She picked up another piece of paper from the chair beside her and handed it to him. ‘And this.’

  İkmen began to read the second letter.

  ‘That one has dates, places, including this house, and there is a suggestion that the blackmailer and my uncle were not alone.’

  İkmen read a catalogue of buggery and other sex acts carried out on the old man’s bed as well as in other parts of the house. The letter didn’t just go on to ask for a large sum of money; it also accused Sezen of knowing all about her uncle’s proclivities – which was entirely true.

  He said, as a statement of fact, ‘You knew what your uncle did and in his later years you helped him do it.’

  She sat in silence for a moment and then she said, ‘I never brought him children.’

  He looked down at the letters again. ‘It’s alleged that Rafik Efendi abused this man, whoever he is, when he was a child.’

  She looked away and said, ‘I don’t know about that. I told you I never brought him children.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I don’t have the kind of money this man is asking for and I don’t want my family’s name blackened,’ she said. ‘What am I to do, Inspector?’

  What indeed. If she had no money, then she couldn’t possibly give the blackmailer the 500,000 Turkish lira that he demanded. As İkmen knew, a proportion of blackmail plots didn’t ever actually come to anything. But where such an obviously jealously guarded reputation was concerned, there was far more at stake than just money. Well, there was for her. İkmen silently wondered whether the blackmailer knew that most of Sezen’s Hanım’s family were already aware of what the old man had been.

  ‘You probably think I’m a terrible woman for not handing my uncle over to the police for his crimes, but what could I do?’ she said. ‘When I was young, my family was despised. If my uncle’s proclivities had become known in the 1970s, who knows where we would have ended up. In jail?’ She shook her head. ‘And now? Now the people and the government are learning to love us again. How can I disappoint them? How can I ruin their dreams?’

  And your own, İkmen thought.

  She wrung her hands. ‘Leyla told me I should have gone to the police years ago!’

  ‘Your daughter was right,’ İkmen said. ‘Some things, Sezen Hanım, are just wrong, and what your uncle did was one of them.’

  Her face flushed. ‘You think I’m a terrible person, don’t you? Well you live my life. Come from where I came from, suffer the ignominy of your daughter first ruining herself and then marrying a traitor. I don’t know how much more I can stand!’

  İkmen had a limit for absorption of self-pity and he’d reached it, but he controlled himself. ‘We don’t know whether General Ablak, your son-in-law, was a traitor or not,’ he said. ‘But by your own admission, Sezen Hanım, your uncle was a predatory paedophile who you knew about – for years.’

  She gazed at him through glassy, tear-washed eyes, but this time she didn’t speak.

  He looked at her, and for a while he was silent too. Then he said, ‘Whatever happens now must be practical. I can’t do anything about what your uncle did or what you didn’t do. Not right now. But blackmail is a crime, and in addition, until we catch this man, we can’t be sure that he isn’t also your uncle’s murderer.’ He doubted this but he didn’t tell her that. This blackmail just looked opportunistic to İkmen.

  ‘So what do we do?’ she asked.

  İkmen looked down at the second letter again and said, ‘Well, Sezen Hanım, you keep this appointment with this man in the gardens of Yıldız Palace this afternoon at four.’

  Her eyes bulged in horror. ‘But I told you I don’t have any—’

  ‘You won’t need any money,’ İkmen said. ‘All you will need is a bag that looks as if it is full of money, and a strong nerve. I assure you, Sezen Hanım, we will do the rest.’

  Şukru Şekeroğlu had come into İstanbul with a group of Edirne gypsies. Given the fact that he didn’t want to attract too much attention, particularly from the police, he felt more secure in the company of others. They’d taken a ferry across the Bosphorus from Kadıköy to Karaköy and then he’d joined them, dancing and begging, as they made their way along the coastal road to the village of Ortaköy. There, they’d danced through streets lined with coffee shops and chichi restaurants, playing the whole Hıdırellez thing for the rich people who found such activities authentic enough to give money to.

  Ortaköy wasn’t Şukru’s usual stomping ground, but it was near to where he needed to be in order to do a bit of business he should have done some time ago. In spite of everything, Tarlabaşı wasn’t going to last long and soon they’d have to be on the move again. And despite his various business interests that had over the years made him quite a bit of money, Şukru knew that he could always do with more. The business with the kid Hamid had caused him a lot of grief, and that needed to be recompensed. Şukru took off the hot bear costume he’d put on in Edirne and which had so entranced the people of Ortaköy, and put on the suit he’d folded up into his rucksack. Looking at himself in the window of an art shop near the old synagogue, he was pleased with what he saw. Being in Edirne with three doting aunts had given him a chance to clean himself up. He almost looked respectable, which, given where he was going, was a good thing.

  He put the fedora one of the other dancers had given him on his head and rang his sister from his mobile phone.

  ‘I’m coming home and then I’m moving the family on,’ he told her. ‘Soon as I can.’

  ‘Moving on? Where to?’ Gonca asked. ‘Some smart Bosphorus village?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere,’ he said.

  ‘How? They want everyone to go outside the city.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll have money,’ he said.

  He heard her gasp. He knew what she was thinking. ‘Oh Şukru, nothing dangerous!’

  ‘You think I’d put myself at risk while you’re fucking a policeman? No,’ he said. ‘Not dangerous, Gonca.’

  He said nothing about illegal – she knew that was a given – or immoral, but then he was aware that that wasn’t the way her mind would move. Like him, Gonca’s morality was a thing that shifted with the time, the place and the person.

  ‘Well come and see me before you take my father who knows where,’ she said.

  ‘And your policeman?’ he said.

  She snorted. ‘Oh Şukru, don’t you know me? I will tell Süleyman you’ve been to see me when you’ve gone.’

  He smiled. ‘OK. But I have some business to attend to first.’ He finished the call and began to make his way north out of Ortaköy towards the village of Arnavutköy.

  There was a time when Çetin İkmen would have joined his colleagues secreted in the trees and flower beds around the Malta Kiosk. But the afternoon was overly warm and he found that as long as he could see Sezen Hanım from his vantage point in the lee of the baroque kiosk, that was good enough for him. Unless whoever she was meeting knew him somehow, he, or she, wouldn’t give a slightly scruffy man in sunglasses, smoking furiously, a second look. But then how likely was that anyway? In his heart of hearts, İkmen knew that no one was coming.

  Someone clearly knew about Sezen İpek’s uncle’s crimes and was trying to frighten her, but İkmen didn’t think that he or she was about to make good on those threats. For a start, the location for the ‘drop’ didn’t make sense. The Malta Kiosk, which was a very smart café in the centre of the Ottoman palace of Yıldız, was a very public place. It had CCTV cameras and, while busy,
was not busy enough to provide cover for any nefarious activities that might be taking place on its premises.

  But from İkmen’s point of view it was a pleasant enough place to be. Sitting at the back of the palace’s outside terrace, he had a fine view of the Bosphorus and he was drinking very nice coffee, which was on expenses. The woman he was watching was tense, as were the officers who had positioned themselves around the kiosk, but İkmen himself, although a little hot, was perfectly calm. In the scheme of what he’d had to face over the past few months, a little blackmail was a very small crime. And anyway, the real ‘victim’, if the odious Rafık Efendi could be called such a thing, was already dead.

  İkmen concentrated on the back of Sezen İpek’s neck. Although he didn’t like her, he had to admit that she was an attractive woman. She had that air about her that a lot of the old nobility had. It led to good posture and a certain attitude towards grooming that was very far in advance of his own. The Osmanoğlu clan had a sheen. And yet it was something their most prominent representatives in the past had not always had. Sultan Abdülhamid II, whose palace Yıldız had been, had looked like a thwarted crow in the ill-fitting greatcoat he had always seemed to wear when he’d been photographed. His predecessor, his brother Murad V, had looked like the lush he had been, and their father, Abdülmecid II, had been a tiny sliver of a man who had lived his life in the shadow of tuberculosis. İkmen wondered what John Regan’s creation Tirimujgan had looked like. If, as he had contested, her mother had been a blonde Belgian, had the girl been a blonde too? Her imperial father had been very dark indeed, so dark in fact that rumours had circulated about the possibility of his mother having been from an Armenian family. Had the girl had that sheen İkmen always saw in the modern Osmanoğlus?

  A young man passed in front of Sezen Hanım’s table, looked at her briefly and then moved on. It was four fifteen already and so the blackmailer was late. Had he or she worked out that some of the people on the pathways and in the arbours around the kiosk were police officers? It was unlikely, as the team had assembled only slowly across the course of the day, with İkmen appearing last, at three thirty. There was no way of knowing until and unless he or she contacted the press with the story Sezen İpek did not want told. But İkmen, for his part, found it impossible to be worried about that eventuality. However back in vogue the old Imperial family might be, they, just like the republican generals who had followed them, couldn’t escape their past. The old generals had mounted coups designed to consolidate their power in the 1960s and the 1980s, for which soldiers like General Ablak had been rightly brought to book, even if his involvement in the alleged modern version, Ergenekon, was open to question. But the Osmanoğlu still had cases to answer, not least of which was the terrible sense of entitlement that people like Rafık Efendi still believed they had. However, even that did not give whoever had taken Rafık’s heart from his chest the right to behave with such barbarity.