‘Last year I went to Mexico. I spent time with what remains of the Mayan people on the Yucatan peninsula. I liked them. They told me stories about their ancestors: how the Spaniards had forcibly converted them to Christianity, how they’d tortured and brutalised them and stolen everything they had, including their gold. I told them how our Ottoman masters had fought the Spaniards for the Mayan gold and used it to oppress their own people and build an unjust empire that enslaved millions. As I’ve said, the Maya made me the headdress I wore when I killed Levent Devrim. To be honest, part of me hoped that the sight of me would give him a heart attack; he was always complaining of chest pains. But it didn’t, and so I had to cut his throat, with him squirming to get away from me. I didn’t want to do it like that – he wasn’t a bad man – but if I was going to use a mythical Mayan conspiracy theorist as my supposed murderer, I had to kill in the way of the Maya. If I hadn’t, any connections I could build between the Long Count calendar and the killings would take too long to lose their obscurity. Your request for information about Levent Devrim’s calculations just speeded things up.’
‘So you were on a mission to justify your career, were you?’ İkmen said. He shook his head. ‘But it was also deeply personal, wasn’t it? Let’s talk about the İpeks. About Leyla.’
He shrugged. ‘Why not start with her? The first time I saw her at the Great Palace spa it was a terrible shock. I went home and, I’ll be honest, I threw up. Leyla didn’t see me, though, I made sure of it. I wasn’t ready for that. But in spite of the fact that her appearance was a shock, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know about her and Faruk. I saw her sitting on his knee in his office. It made me furious to see her with him. I watched her and then I confronted her one night in the hotel garden after one of their lovemaking sessions. I said I knew she was having an affair and I needed to speak to her. They always met on a Saturday night and a Tuesday if they could, and the next Saturday was the twenty-first, which was perfect for me. I told her to get Faruk to leave the spa first, which she did. Then she let me in. And even after all that time, she still wanted me. I could see it in her eyes. You know, when her family made her have an abortion, I still loved her; I even put flowers on her doorstep for her birthday. Why? Was I a fool? She was such a slut!’ For a moment his face fell. ‘A beautiful, beloved slut.’
‘You killed her in the plunge pool.’
‘The Mayans called them cenotes, the water holes into which they would hurl their sacrifices.’
‘Yes, you or one of your Mesoamerican experts told me,’ İkmen said. ‘In amongst royal blood and heart-ripping … But if you respected and had sympathy for the Maya, why did you emulate the very worst elements of their culture? You liked them …’
‘They were convenient,’ he said. Even his lawyer looked taken aback.
‘And you were full of rage and vengeance, weren’t you?’ İkmen said. ‘Rage at Leyla’s family, who had rejected and humiliated you.’
His face went red. ‘They’re a danger to all of us. Doesn’t matter whether we love or like them, that’s irrelevant. Don’t you see?’
İkmen ignored him and looked down at his notes. ‘And John Regan. A nephew of Abdurrahman Şafak, who was also related to Hatice Öz …’
It took a moment for the professor’s anger to blow itself out, and then he said, ‘Hatice saw the old man from time to time, her mother’s cousin. He was furious because he got a letter from John Regan asking if they could meet and talking about a romantic book he wanted to write about Sultan Abdülhamid II. Regan thought the old man could help him. It was nauseating. Abdurrahman didn’t reply. But then he got another letter from Regan, this time from a Karaköy address. Hatice had already told me that the old man had made his servant girl pregnant, and had got her to take the kid to the abortion clinic, and so we wanted to make room for him in our scheme. But then there was this silly Englishman.’
‘Mr Regan fought you,’ Ömer said.
‘Yes. I did almost exactly the same thing as I did when I killed Abdurrahman Efendi.’
‘Which was?’
‘I got into the building hours before I needed to be there. In the case of John Regan, he was out when I got in. The kapıcı at that building is always drunk. He was in the street laughing with some other drunk. I asked to go in; he didn’t even look at me, just waved me inside. I waited in an empty apartment. Then, when Regan came home, I knocked on his door and said I was one of his neighbours. He just let me in.’
Ömer frowned. ‘Did you work with anybody?’ he said. ‘We had reports of a gypsy outside the synagogue opposite.’
The professor gave one of his eerie smiles. ‘Oh, he was one of Şukru Şekeroğlu’s. Şukru was having me followed and watched.’
‘And you knew?’
‘By that time, yes. We’d spoken. He’d told me he knew that I’d killed Levent Devrim.’
‘He didn’t try and stop you?’
‘He needed money. He’d seen me kill once, and he suspected I’d killed more than once, so he wanted to see what I’d do next. He wanted to get as much as he could out of the situation. Those watching me didn’t know why they were doing so. That’s what Şukru told me. And subsequent events have not proved him wrong. So far no other gypsies have beaten a path to my door.’
‘He blackmailed you?’
‘He knew that all he had to do was point a finger at me and, true or not, his accusations would ruin my career. So yes, he began to blackmail me.’
‘Until you drugged him and then killed him. Then you burned his body on some waste ground in Aksaray.’
‘It’s a shithole. Nobody cares. I waited until the next twenty-first of the month. It amused me.’
‘Be that as it may. Where did you get the intravenous benzodiazepine our doctor says you must have used on Şukru and later on Inspector Süleyman? I doubt it was prescribed to you.’
‘No. I have tablets. The liquid and the needles came from Hatice. She used to be a nurse. She still knows people.’
‘You mean she knew people …’
‘If you will.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Almost everyone I have killed has been either a particularly ghastly member of that parasitical family or corrupt.’
‘John Regan was neither.’
‘No, but if his book had become popular, it would have been more exposure for that family. John Regan was stupid.’
‘If that were a crime, Professor, then half the world would be slated for death,’ İkmen said.
He shrugged. ‘But Şukru came in useful. Made you think you’d had your twenty-first of the month murder and then along came another one.’
İkmen sat back in his chair. He was desperate for a cigarette, and toyed with the idea of going outside for a while, but he also wanted this over with and the professor was being candid, to say the least. ‘So let me get this right,’ he said. ‘You can now live with yourself because you’ve killed all these people?’
‘In the past, unwittingly, I promoted them. Now I’m not.’
‘Yes, but your career, the fame you love so much is over now.’
‘My career, yes, my fame …’ He laughed. ‘Well that, I think you will find, will live on.’
‘So you can be a legend in your own mind while you clean up shit and piss and get buggered in Silivri Prison,’ İkmen said.
‘I killed a madman, an adulteress, a fool, an old man who raped a young girl and an ancient paedophile. Another man tried to blackmail me and so I killed him. What was I supposed to do?’
‘You also killed my sergeant, and you killed Hatice Devrim too, didn’t you? Selçuk Devrim didn’t kill her; he couldn’t have.’
This time he didn’t answer straight away. In fact he looked anywhere but at İkmen’s face before he spoke, and when he did, it was in an entirely different tone.
‘The problem was,’ he said, ‘that Hatice only ever did what she did to please me. She hadn’t necessarily wanted her brother-in-law to die, but when she found out I’d murdered him, if anything s
he loved me even more than she had before, because she thought I’d done it for her. She happily bribed the servant girl to leave Abdurrahman Efendi’s front door unlocked for me the afternoon he died. Her politics were always left-wing, but I don’t know whether she actually hated her family as much as she claimed to do. She wanted to please me …’
‘She did what you asked her and still you killed her.’
‘When she found out that Selçuk had known about our affair for some time, Hatice hoped he’d ask her for a divorce. But he didn’t. He didn’t want one, she did, and what was more, she wanted to be with me all the time. I didn’t want that. I could also see that she was starting to lose her nerve, becoming a weak link.’
‘You couldn’t have that.’
He smiled. ‘I couldn’t live with one of that family, not really, not for ever, not after what they’d done to me.’
‘You’d have lived with that family for Leyla İpek. Professor, a lot of men make girls pregnant and then get thrashed by their families,’ İkmen said. ‘A lot of men are never allowed to see those girls ever again. Leyla İpek suffered just as much, in fact more than you did, because she had the abortion.’
‘Leyla was not humiliated. Her Uncle Beyazıt Süleyman beat me with a whip as if I were some sort of lackey!’ He flung his hands in the air as if suddenly impatient with everything. ‘Hatice wanted me all the time and I didn’t want that! I couldn’t have done that! But then that is what the Ottomans do, isn’t it? They can’t help themselves. They take and take and drink you dry like vampires! That’s what they did to this country for centuries!’
İkmen felt a long, thick shudder run down his back. ‘Civilised people do not solve their problems by killing,’ he said.
‘They did, the Ottomans. That was always how they solved their differences! How could we live with that in this country again, eh? We should have killed them when we deposed them, like the Russians did with their tsar.’
İkmen said nothing. Since the end of communism in Russia, the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family had been canonised.
‘Yes, I killed them all,’ the professor said. ‘I waited behind the lift on the ground floor for Abdurrahman Şafak’s English guest to go and for the maid to leave the door unlocked, and then I went in and I butchered him. I walked through the back door in the steps of his rent boys to kill Rafik İpek, and if I had been able to do so, I would have killed his nephew Mehmet Süleyman too. I’m being honest with you and I’m not ashamed or sorry. I expect you think that’s really “disordered” and “mad” of me, don’t you? I expect you’ll have every bloody psychiatrist in the country poking about in my brain. Well, won’t you?’
Çetin İkmen didn’t answer. Ömer showed him his watch, and after a moment, he nodded. He spoke to the academic and his lawyer. ‘I am going to be seeking prosecution on eight counts of murder, including that of Sergeant Farsakoğlu, and one of the attempted murder of Inspector Mehmet Süleyman. You, sir, are never going to get out of jail. And yes, you’re right, I am going to request psychiatric assessments.’
Cem Atay, smiling again now, shook his head sadly. ‘Are you?’
‘Yes.’ İkmen stood up and leaned across the table. ‘Sadly, and this is just my opinion, you, Professor, have probably increased public sympathy for the Osmanoğlu family more effectively than any of your documentaries ever would have done. I wouldn’t be surprised if they really are invited back to run the country after this. I’d call your project a failure. Now Sergeant Mungan and I have a funeral to go to.’
Chapter 35
Mehmet Süleyman hadn’t been obliged to drive Arthur Regan to the airport for his flight back to London, but he’d wanted to. He parked up and then walked with him to the smoking area outside International Departures. The whole airline security madness began as soon as one walked through the doors, and anyway the policeman wanted to have a cigarette.
‘I can’t thank you enough for what you did for me and for John,’ the old man said as he put his suitcase down on the pavement.
‘I wish we could have protected him,’ Süleyman said. ‘I wish we could have stopped his death.’
‘But you found his killer.’
Süleyman shook his head. ‘I cannot decide whether Professor Atay is crazy or evil. He is certainly deluded.’
‘You don’t think your family will ever rule this country again?’
Süleyman smiled. It hurt a bit because his nose was still a little swollen from first being broken by the professor and then rebroken by the surgeon, who had made it look like his ‘old’ nose again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Our time has passed. Some people might like to call themselves new Ottomans and dream about a Turkish empire, but it will not happen. You know, when I looked through the professor’s genealogies, I found that I am related, if distantly, by blood to the Şafak family.’
‘And so to John!’
‘And so to your son, yes,’ he said. ‘I wish I could have known him.’
‘I wish you could have known him too. He was a nice man.’ Arthur went quiet for a moment, and then he said, ‘So you’re quite recovered now?’
‘I am very well, thank you,’ Süleyman said. ‘Although sad.’
‘You lost a colleague,’ Arthur Regan said. ‘A nice lady as I recall her. A terrible waste.’
‘I had known Sergeant Farsakoğlu for a very long time,’ Süleyman said. ‘And I was not always as kind as I should have been to her.’ His eyes misted, and Arthur Regan put a hand on his shoulder.
‘I am sure that if you were unkind it was not intentional,’ the Englishman said. ‘We all do things we are not proud of. I go over the last conversation I had with John sometimes, endlessly wondering what I could have said that would have been kinder or more loving. Our last moments with people are what they are. You are a good man.’
Süleyman smiled. ‘Only sometimes.’
‘That is about the best that any of us can hope for,’ Arthur Regan said. He offered his hand to Süleyman. ‘I must go home and put my life back together.’
Süleyman took the old man’s hand and shook it. ‘And I must stay and make sure that Inspector İkmen doesn’t work himself to death.’
‘He’s sticking to his decision not to retire, then?’
‘Oh yes,’ Süleyman said. ‘They are getting him a new sergeant soon and he says he will work on until he feels that he can leave.’
‘Which will be never.’
‘I imagine so.’ He smiled again, and then, just briefly, the two men embraced.
As Arthur Regan passed through the glass door and into the terminal he said, ‘When I come back next time, I will buy you a drink and we will toast my son. Maybe make a toast to your family, even!’ Then he said, ‘You do drink?’
Süleyman laughed. ‘I am an Ottoman, Mr Regan, I do as I please.’
The house opposite the Şekeroğlus’ place, the one that used to double as a drinking den, came down in minutes. The wrecking ball, a mindless sphere of concentrated force, flattened it and then smashed it into its own cellar. Gonca, a cigarette in her hand, watched it come down. Her father, sitting in the living room at the back of his property, was, she knew, watching that film of Şukru again. He had no interest in anything but images of his dead son.
Neither Gonca nor anyone else had told the old man the whole truth about Şukru. A couple of the men he’d used to follow Professor Atay around had turned up at the house asking for money not to talk to the press. But when she’d told them that her lover was a policeman, they’d quickly melted away. After all, even if they were entirely innocent of any crime, they all knew that if they ended up in a police station, almost anything could happen. Not that she’d seen much of her policeman lover in recent weeks. But she could understand that and she was fine with it. Ayşe Farsakoğlu had been a big part of his life both personally and professionally, and it was going to take time for the emotional wounds he had suffered after her death to heal.
She knew that he felt guilty. Had he been conscious, mayb
e he might have been able to save her. But he’d been entirely helpless. Gonca was just happy that he was alive and that finally, the person who had killed poor mad Levent Bey had been brought to justice. She’d heard that since the professor had been arrested, Hamid had stopped having nightmares. If only she could say likewise. Tarlabaşı haunted her.
With the houses opposite down, it wouldn’t be long before the developers came for her father’s house. He’d been offered money, which he wouldn’t take, and a flat in some new development, which he also wouldn’t accept. And she agreed with him. But where, when Tarlabaşı did eventually gentrify from its ragged head to its bare toes, would or could they go? The question was of course rhetorical.
In Balat there was an artist’s studio and a great big house in a garden filled with terracotta pots and olive oil cans full of flowers. Although she shared her home with two teenage sons, a daughter and a grandson, Gonca did have space for a life of her own. And when Mehmet visited, it was always as if it was just the two of them. But she had a lot of family in this house in Tarlabaşı. There was her father, her two older, widowed sisters and now Şukru’s widow and her children, all nine of them. She couldn’t see them out on the street, none of them.
Ikmen 16 - Body Count Page 36
