Ikmen 16 - Body Count

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘You’re charged with the murder of one police officer and the imprisonment and assault of another,’ Commissioner Ardıç said.

  He didn’t often get his hands dirty by interviewing suspects, but this one was a TV star, and Çetin İkmen, who would normally have performed this function, had been sent home. His sergeant was dead and he was in shock. Had he come in with the offender, he would either have had nothing to say to him or he would have beaten him up. The former would have been useless, while the latter, in view of the massed ranks of the press who had suddenly appeared outside the station, would have been unwise to say the least.

  Ardıç looked at the young eastern boy who had taken over from İzzet Melik. He was a good officer and had handled the entire crime scene most efficiently.

  ‘So tell me, Sergeant …’

  ‘Mungan,’ he cut in quickly.

  ‘Apart from those facts we are sure about – the death of Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu at this man’s hands – what else do we know about our professor? I don’t mean age, education and all that rubbish.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  The subject of their conversation, Cem Atay, sat in front of them, silently, with his lawyer.

  ‘I want to know why a man such as you, Professor Atay, would kill one of my officers and wound a second,’ Ardıç said. ‘You have everything a man could want – money, fame, the respect of your peers.’ He leaned, with some difficulty, towards the professor, denting his large stomach uncomfortably as he did so. ‘How did we get here, Professor Atay? Eh?’

  Still the famous man didn’t speak.

  Ömer Mungan cleared his throat. ‘Sir, when Inspector İkmen and myself were trying to apprehend Professor Atay, the inspector put it to him that his behaviour had something to do with an incident that had happened a long time ago.’

  ‘What incident?’

  Ömer looked down at the few notes he had made prior to joining Ardıç in the interview room. ‘Inspector İkmen had learned from murder victim Leyla Ablak’s mother, Sezen İpek, that Professor Atay and Leyla had had a relationship back in the 1970s when they were both students. Leyla İpek, as she was then, became pregnant and her family organised an abortion. However, the father, Professor Atay, was humiliated by the İpeks and was never allowed to see Leyla again.’

  The professor’s face coloured.

  ‘This incident, and I think the professor’s political views too, developed in him a hatred not just for Leyla İpek’s family but for all members of the former Imperial Ottoman family, of which they were one small part.’

  ‘And given that we’ve had so many unnatural deaths in that family this year …’

  ‘Professor Atay volunteered what he hoped we would find to be useful information about our increasing caseload,’ Ömer said. ‘By pointing us in the direction of something called the Mayan Long Count calendar.’

  Ardıç, who was accustomed after so many years to be unsurprised by every esoteric lead that Çetin İkmen and those around him chose to follow, said, ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s South American …’

  ‘It’s all mixed up with the end of the world; yes, I know, Sergeant,’ Ardıç said. ‘Contrary to appearances, I do keep up.’

  Ömer looked down, to smother a smile – Ardıç was a wry bastard – then said, ‘We believe it’s very possible that the deaths of Leyla Ablak, John Regan, Rafik İpek Efendi and Abdurrahman Şafak Efendi were committed not as some sort of blood sacrifice to a South American god but as an act of vengeance. You see, sir, Professor Atay has connections to all those victims, albeit loosely in some cases. He remains the only suspect who does.’

  ‘And the first victim? In Tarlabaşı?’

  ‘Levent Devrim. He was the brother-in-law of the professor’s now deceased mistress, Hatice Devrim.’

  ‘Royal?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Ömer said. ‘But Inspector Süleyman thought it possible that he knew the professor was having an affair with his sister-in-law. And for the record, sir, Levent Devrim was a believer in the Mayan Long Count calendar. It’s my personal belief that Professor Atay could just as easily have come up with the idea of pinning these killings on some mythical crazy conspiracy theorist by observing Levent Devrim as he could have done by studying the Maya on a trip to Mexico in 2011.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Ardıç looked down at a sheaf of papers in front of him on the table and took a few moments to read something. ‘Says here that Hatice Devrim’s husband has confessed to her murder.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So not the professor?’

  ‘A connection also exists between the professor and a gypsy called Şukru Şekeroğlu, whose burned body, you will recall, sir, was found on some waste ground …’

  ‘Know him too, did he? Mmm,’ Ardıç said. He looked at Cem Atay. ‘Well you can sit there in silence beside your very expensive legal adviser, but eventually you will have to answer questions relating to yourself and these unfortunate members of the Osmanoğlu family, plus the madman and the gypsy too, lest we forget. Silence can be interpreted as guilt, especially if we ally it to forensic evidence. Do you see?’

  For a moment Cem Atay didn’t speak. Then he said, ‘I’ll talk to İkmen, and only İkmen.’

  He was cold, and he feared that Fatma would use the unseasonal weather to talk about the soba and the central heating again. But she didn’t, and when he looked at her properly, he could see that she was actually quite warm.

  ‘Get into bed and I’ll bring you some tea,’ she said as she helped him into his pyjamas and pulled the bedclothes up to his chin.

  Still confused by the temperature, he said, ‘But don’t you want me to light the soba?’

  ‘The soba? It’s …’ She gave him an ashtray and then she briefly hugged him. ‘It’s not cold, Çetin, you’re just very upset,’ she said. ‘And it’s not surprising.’ Her eyes filled up. ‘That poor girl!’

  He kissed her on the cheek and let her go.

  ‘I’ll make tea and then I might cook some börek,’ she said as she walked towards the bedroom door.

  It had to be past one o’clock in the morning, but İkmen didn’t say anything. When times were hard, or she was upset, Fatma cooked. It was her therapy, and if cooking all night meant that she kept her sanity, then it was time and ingredients well spent. She’d always liked Ayşe Farsakoğlu. As a religious woman, she hadn’t always approved of the sergeant’s lifestyle, but she’d never told her that. Ayşe had been welcomed into the İkmen household time and time again, and had she lived, she always would have been.

  İkmen pulled the covers around his body so that they warmed his sides. He was like a man caught in the snow, shaking with chills and aching from head to foot. Did Mehmet Süleyman know about Ayşe? Was he even awake? Last time İkmen had spoken to Ömer Mungan, the sergeant had only known that Süleyman had been given an overdose of benzodiazepine and that the hospital were going to administer an antidote. Had that drug come from the same bottle as the stuff that had been given to Şukru Şekeroğlu? Serial murderers were rare, very rare, especially in Turkey. But had they suddenly found one? In plain sight? On their televisions?

  People could become fixated on anything. In the past İkmen had been obliged to arrest obsessed people. It might be money they got hooked on, or sex, or all sorts of oddities including the dead, the occult, power and religion. And although he had met people who found the ex-Imperial family fascinating, and had even known those who resented them, he’d never before come across someone who wanted to kill them. There were vast numbers of them and so it was a fool’s errand anyway, and also they were so benign. All the calls that various politicians and other interested parties made to bring back the monarchy in truth fell on deaf ears. The Osmanoğlus would never run the country again, not even as constitutional monarchs. It was absurd. But maybe because he’d been rejected by them as a youth, though possibly for other, more complicated reasons yet to be discovered, Cem Atay, a brilliant man with absolutely everything, had decided to kill th
em. Or so it seemed.

  He had certainly killed Ayşe. She had bled out into every centimetre of İkmen’s clothes, which Fatma had taken away from him as soon as she could and put into a plastic bag like a good policeman’s wife. Then she had washed him in the shower, his skinny body trembling with cold and with the sobs that had only just left him, exhausted and alone in his bed. Ayşe had been his successor, and now that she was gone, there was no one. Ardıç would say that they’d find someone from another force to take over after he left, but that wasn’t good enough. İstanbul had to be policed, where it could be, by İstanbullus. Officers like Ömer Mungan were good, but it took them years just to understand the city: its byways, its quirks and its intense frustrations. There had been no one else; there was no one else.

  He wanted to sleep, but he knew that he wouldn’t, and so he lit a cigarette and stared at the ceiling. A few minutes later, Fatma, smelling of flour and butter, came in with his tea.

  ‘What will you do?’ she asked.

  He sipped the hot liquid. ‘About what?’

  ‘About when Ayşe’s funeral is over and you are alone in that office.’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We have to get through tomorrow, today or whatever it is first.’

  She frowned. ‘This won’t affect what you’re going to do, will it?’

  She meant his retirement. Çetin İkmen didn’t answer.

  Chapter 34

  ‘You know,’ Çetin İkmen said as he looked at the man in front of him through sore red eyes, ‘I have other things I could be doing. Later on today I have to go to a funeral for a friend and colleague you killed in front of my eyes.’ He leaned forward on to the table in front of him. ‘Now my boss, Commissioner Ardıç, told me that you won’t speak to anyone but me, so if that is the case, then speak. Stop fucking me around and confess or whatever it is you want to do. Just get it over with.’

  The smart, very young lawyer who sat at Cem Atay’s side whispered something in his ear.

  İkmen, irritated by this, said, ‘Don’t you tell him to carry on the silent act, for fuck’s sake!’

  Ömer Mungan, who was conducting the interrogation alongside İkmen, had never heard him swear quite so much before and was a little taken aback.

  ‘If he stays silent it won’t do him any fucking good and you know it,’ İkmen said to the lawyer. He looked at Cem Atay again. ‘Well? We know you killed my sergeant, you wounded Inspector Süleyman. You’ll be happy, maybe, to know that he is still alive, is now better than he was and is talking.’ He looked at Ömer Mungan, who had not long returned from Süleyman’s bedside. ‘What did he tell you, Sergeant Mungan?’

  ‘We know that the inspector was drugged, with a benzodiazepine. He thinks it was, initially, in the tea that you served him. You didn’t drink it, Professor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, he speaks!’ İkmen said.

  Ömer continued. ‘After a visit to your bathroom, Inspector Süleyman went into your study and in there, in a cupboard, he found a cloak, a feathered headdress and a mask that could be described as frightening, especially by a child. He thought, as you must have realised, that it looked very like the description we were given of the creature that murdered Levent Devrim in Tarlabaşı back in January. Because if you didn’t think he thought that, then why did you try to kill Inspector Süleyman?’

  Even when Ömer spoke directly to him, Professor Atay only ever addressed his answers to İkmen. ‘I didn’t know until later that anyone except Şukru Şekeroğlu had seen me that morning,’ he said. ‘Much less a child. I wouldn’t have planned for a child to see such a thing. As for Süleyman, I knew he’d seen it and so I had to think quickly. Yes, I put diazepam in his tea. I needed him quiet while I thought what to do next.’

  ‘Why did you kill Levent Devrim?’ İkmen asked. ‘Was it just because he knew about your affair with his sister-in-law?’

  The young lawyer put a hand on his client’s arm and said, ‘You don’t have—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Cem Atay said. He smiled at İkmen. ‘It’s all publicity, isn’t it?’

  That a man who had been a serious academic could have been so seduced by fame that even talking about how he had killed people was making him smile caused Çetin İkmen to shudder.

  ‘Şukru Şekeroğlu had seen Hatice and myself together. He recognised her as Levent’s sister-in-law and so he let him know. Maybe he thought there was some money to be made out of it. Şukru was all about money. Levent told Hatice that she had to tell her husband the truth about us,’ he said. ‘He didn’t want money, it wasn’t blackmail; he just thought it was the right thing to do. But Hatice wouldn’t tell Selçuk and so Levent said that he would.’

  ‘So you killed him on the twenty-first of January 2012.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘To silence him.’

  ‘I didn’t want Selçuk to know about us either.’

  İkmen narrowed his eyes. ‘Because you didn’t want your lover to get ideas about leaving her husband?’

  ‘To be honest, yes. Hatice was a lovely woman who adored me and would do anything I asked, but that can be tiresome sometimes, you know? I also wanted to see what I could do, whether I could kill. It was by way of a dry run.’

  ‘Did you tell Hatice?’

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘I think you also killed Levent Devrim to confound us,’ İkmen said. ‘Is that true?’

  The professor smiled. ‘It did, didn’t it?’

  ‘Four victims with Imperial blood, one without: yes, it did. For a while. One way or another, you were and always had been the common denominator, Professor Atay,’ İkmen said. ‘Did Şukru Şekeroğlu help you to kill Levent Devrim? I know that you knew each other.’

  ‘He was in one of my documentaries. I liked him. But he didn’t help me, no.’

  ‘Did he know that it was you behind the ridiculous “Mayan” costume?’

  He laughed. ‘I knew I had to get into and out of Tarlabaşı without being seen, and knowing how superstitious gypsies and Kurds are …’

  ‘That’s something of a generalisation.’

  ‘The Maya gave me the headdress as a gift and I purchased the mask, in Mexico City, because it appealed to me,’ he said. ‘The snow and the ruinous nature of Tarlabaşı gave me excellent cover, or so I thought, but the theatrics meant that I could feel more secure than I would have done just creeping about as myself. I had planned to break into Levent’s apartment and kill him there, but when I arrived, he was out. I was going to give up and leave when I saw him sharing some rakı with a man who I later learned had come to meet Şukru Şekeroğlu: a Bulgarian gypsy he often did business with that could not be done in the light of day.’

  ‘Stolen bags or drugs?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Once Levent had parted from the foreigner, he started collecting wood for his fire. I followed him, let him collect fuel for a while and then I killed him.’

  ‘Did you think that anyone had seen you?’

  ‘I obviously knew that Şukru had seen my “character”, for want of a better word,’ the professor said. ‘But I didn’t think he had realised it was me, and when I hissed at him, he left, which implied that maybe I had frightened his superstitious gypsy soul. However, like most gypsies, Şukru was a very observant man. That was how he came to blackmail me. He recognised me from my hands.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ömer asked.

  Cem Atay held up his left hand, and they all saw that he had six fingers. None of them had noticed it before with the unwitting exception of Süleyman who had bitten it when he’d tried to escape from the academic. ‘There you are, deformity as well as poverty. Can you imagine what Sezen İpek said when she saw that? When she realised that the child Leyla was carrying might inherit it?’

  ‘So, just to be clear, when you killed Levent Devrim, did you have your subsequent Osmanoğlu killing spree in mind?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And what about your lover, Hatice Devrim
? Did she know what you had lined up for members of her own family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Think carefully before you implicate a dead person who cannot defend herself,’ İkmen said.

  The professor leaned across the table so that he was closer to the policeman. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘in order to understand what Hatice did, you have to know about the nature of our relationship.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then tell me about it,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Hatice Öz was one of my students in the late 1990s. She was very pretty, very left-wing, and she enjoyed my classes because she liked to learn more about what I eventually discovered was her ancestry, mainly so that she could debunk all the romance that existed around it. We were attracted to each other and she offered herself to me. She’d never been with a man before and that was significant. You never really get over your first love, especially women.

  ‘She knew I was married to Merve then and that it was not advisable career-wise for a senior academic to be mired in any sort of sexual controversy, especially where students were concerned. Hatice knew there was no future in it but she couldn’t stop herself loving me. When she left Boğaziçi she got on with her life and I got on with mine; media work came in for me and Hatice made a career for herself and married Selçuk Devrim.

  ‘It was when Merve disappeared – and before you start to speculate that maybe I killed my wife too, I didn’t. I didn’t know where she went then and I don’t know now. When Merve disappeared, Hatice got in contact again. She loved her husband but there was no passion in her life, and she was a woman who needed passion. We started seeing each other, but although she was in love with me, I wasn’t in love with her. I never have been. I don’t believe I’ve ever been in love with anyone – except my Leyla, of course. It was sex. She was good at it.

  ‘I became famous, and if anything, that was what really engaged me, if I’m honest. But then in 2009, the then head of the Osmanoğlu family, Prince Osman Ertuğrul, died, and because I am an Ottoman historian, I chose to go and watch his funeral. Hatice came with me. We were horrified. Tens of thousands were there, weeping and calling for the family to come back. It shook me to my core. I’d had no idea so many Turks felt like that! Then I started to notice a trend towards recognition in the newspapers and on television. People began to talk about a new Ottoman age, and I realised that what I’d been doing for years on end was not just informing people about their history; inadvertently I’d been promoting that anachronistic form of government, those useless people and their pointless lives. For months I was in a state of despair. In 2010 I made a documentary about the Ottoman occupation of Bosnia and I nearly had a breakdown. The İpeks, my first love’s family, had been high and mighty on their golden Ottoman past, and Hatice told me that there were relatives in her family too who were like that. Awful old autocrats and perverts who believed that the world owed them a living. It was also at this time that Hatice started to tell me stories about her brother-in-law Levent and his obsession with the end of the world, 2012 and the Mayans.