Selim Bey came out from behind his counter and then reached behind a large sack of rice. Neşe Hanım’s eyes lit up as she looked at the shiny new shovel in his hands.
‘Well, it looks strong,’ she said.
‘It is.’ Selim Bey replied as he banged it down onto the floor and then passed it across to her. Grave-faced, she nodded her approval and then turned her long, wiry frame towards the shop door.
‘May it come easy,’ Selim Bey said as he watched Neşe step out into the sun-baked street beyond. From the near by Sea of Marmara the sound of a ship’s hooter echoed plaintively through the narrow streets of the battered Kumkapı district.
The pastane was only a short way from where İkmen usually parked his car. And having received little beyond sulky denials from Hulya with regard to the movements of Hatice İpek, it made sense just to see whether the girls’ employer, whom he knew, could shed any light on the situation. Besides, averse though he normally was to food, İkmen possessed something of a passion for all things chocolate.
As he entered via the elegant art nouveau doorway, İkmen cast his eyes across the creamy and sugary delights that filled the glass confectionery cabinet to his left. Numerous rich gateaux, profiteroles and croissants oozing with liquid chocolate vied for supremacy with local sweets. Syrup-drenched baklava, thick rice puddings and aşure, a sticky fruit and nut dessert packed with fat and calories. But İkmen’s thin frame could do with some extra bulk. And so in lieu of breakfast and because his wife was hundreds of kilometres away, İkmen ordered a cappuccino and a plate of profiteroles. Then he sat down, lit a cigarette and waited for his food and drink to arrive. Out in the street, curly-headed Ali, one of the local waiters, also known as ‘Maradona’ because of the facial resemblance, nodded a cheerful greeting.
The coffee and profiteroles were eventually brought over to İkmen by Hassan, the proprietor of the pastane. A tall, slim man in his early thirties, Hassan had taken over the shop from his father, the formidable confectioner Kemal Bey, early the previous year. Hassan placed the pastries down with a small bow and then offered his hand to İkmen, inquiring after his health as he did so. İkmen gestured for Hassan to join him.
‘We don’t often have the pleasure of your company, Inspector,’ the younger man said as he called across to the woman at the counter to bring him a cup of Nescafé.
‘No,’ İkmen shrugged, ‘but my wife is away visiting her brother in Antalya. And seeing as a man must eat . . .’
‘Ah.’ Hassan smiled.
‘Not of course that being here isn’t a pleasure,’ İkmen added as he forked a large lump of profiterole into his mouth. ‘You and your father have always been the Picassos of chocolate and pastry, Hassan. It is an art that is as important as painting and sculpture, in my opinion.’
‘You’re very kind, Inspector.’
‘It’s nothing.’
The policeman continued to eat in silence, his eyes at times half closed in appreciation. Shortly after Hassan’s Nescafé arrived, İkmen came to the point of his visit.
‘So is my daughter behaving herself?’ he asked. ‘And her friend Hatice?’
‘But of course.’ Hassan cleared his throat with a strange, almost feminine giggle. ‘The girls are very nice. The customers like them.’
‘Any particular customers?’ İkmen inquired.
The confectioner’s face assumed a sudden grave expression. ‘You mean young men, Inspector?’
‘Amongst others.’
Hassan leaned back in his chair, bathing his face in the strengthening morning sun. ‘Well, the girls are young and pretty,’ he said, ‘and so naturally the men do try to engage them in conversation from time to time. But nothing serious takes place, I can assure you, Inspector. I take care of my staff, particularly the women.’
‘But of course.’
‘And besides, as far as I am aware the only male those two ever show any interest in is old Ahmet Sılay.’
İkmen raised his eyebrows. ‘Wasn’t there an actor of that name? Long ago?’
‘Yes, the very same.’ Hassan sipped his coffee before continuing. ‘He’s a regular but he has to be sixty at the very least. He’s a contemporary of Hikmet Sivas who, to be candid, he talks about at some length. As regards Hulya and Hatice, I don’t think there’s anything you need to be concerned about beyond a bit of filmstar worship.’ He smiled. ‘Not for Ahmet, you understand, but for Sivas.’
‘Our Turkish brother in Hollywood,’ İkmen observed.
‘Our only Turkish brother in Hollywood,’ Hassan corrected. ‘Although he is rather past his prime now, don’t you think?’
İkmen shrugged. Films didn’t really interest him. He was aware that Hikmet Sivas had appeared in a lot of Hollywood films in the 1960s but beyond that he knew very little about the man.
‘So was Sılay in here last night?’ İkmen asked.
‘Yes.’ Hassan frowned. ‘Why?’
At this stage, with the possibility of Hatice İpek turning up at any moment, İkmen didn’t want to sound any alarm bells.
‘Oh, it’s just that Hulya keeps going on about wanting to be an actress,’ he said. It was, after all, the truth.
Hassan smiled. ‘Oh well, yes, she would have probably got that idea from Ahmet,’ he said. ‘His stories about theatrical tours of Turkey and other countries he went to in the fifties are quite exotic, plus of course his association with Sivas.’
‘So Sılay is still friendly with Sivas?’
‘He has apparently visited him in Los Angeles in the past,’ Hassan replied. ‘I’ve no reason to disbelieve him.’
‘No.’
‘But if you want me to speak to him about putting ideas in the girls’ heads, I will,’ Hassan offered as he stood up and made ready to go back to his work. ‘I don’t want to lose Hulya and Hatice to the dubious business of entertainment, do I?’
İkmen smiled. ‘No, but I’m sure that Sılay is, from what you say, quite harmless. And if the girls are just amusing themselves, there’s no harm in that.’
‘Well, it’s up to you, Inspector,’ the younger man said and then with a small bow he departed.
İkmen finished his profiteroles and then looked out of the window again. Of course nothing ever sprang from nothing and it was interesting to know the source of Hulya’s theatrical ambitions. And if, as Hassan seemed to think, both girls were currently bent upon careers in the entertainment industry then maybe Hatice had gone off to try and see some of the film and theatrical agents up in Beyoǧlu. Perhaps that was why Hulya had seemed so reluctant to talk about her friend. But surely Hatice wouldn’t have gone to see agents in the middle of the night?
Chapter 2
* * *
Inspector Mehmet Süleyman was just leaving for work when he heard the scream rip through the upper storey of his house. Zelfa! He dropped the sheaf of papers he had been carrying and raced upstairs to his bedroom. As he entered, Patrick, his wife’s fifteen-year-old cat, bounded nimbly past him heading, presumably, for somewhere where Zelfa wasn’t.
His wife, whom he had left apparently sleeping only half an hour before, was sitting up in their bed, her face red and contorted with pain.
‘What is it? Has it started?’ he said as he ran over to her side and placed an arm round her trembling shoulders.
By way of reply, Zelfa pushed the duvet down towards her feet and then stared, panting at what she had revealed. The underside of the duvet as well as the sheet were drenched with pink, blood-stained water.
‘Seems like it’s time to get to hospital,’ her husband said. He turned away from her and walked over to her wardrobe. He took a suitcase and a winter coat from inside it.
Zelfa, panting still as she watched what her husband was doing, frowned. ‘I can’t wear that,’ she said in her gruff, Irish-accented English. ‘I’ll die of heatstroke.’
Mehmet draped the coat loosely round her shoulders.
‘You can’t go out in just a nightdress,’ he said. ‘I’ll put the air condition
ing on in the car. It’ll be fine.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
Mehmet helped Zelfa swing her swollen legs down onto the floor and then pulled her slowly to her feet.
For a woman like Zelfa – a professional woman, a psychiatrist, who had grown up in Ireland – to be quite so large seemed wrong and even puzzling. But then Zelfa had both craved and eaten an enormous amount of chocolate during her pregnancy, which had seemed preferable to her usual cigarettes.
‘I’m like one of those toys,’ she said as she lumbered, with her husband’s help, towards the bedroom door. ‘One of those fat clowns that won’t fall over, keeps on bouncing back.’
‘When our son is born you will feel better,’ Mehmet said. Inside his heart beat fast and his flesh trembled inside his skin. His son! At last he would be born, bringing an intense feeling of joy but also of great apprehension. Even now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a proportion of babies still died at birth. And Zelfa was, after all, nearly forty-eight and this little boy was her first and probably her last child.
As they descended the stairs Mehment hugged both his wife and his child tightly to his body.
‘The doctor says that they belonged to a girl who was not yet fully developed,’ Orhan Tepe said as he placed the photograph of pelvic and femur bones in front of his superior, Çetin İkmen.
‘OK, so you’ll need to check out the lists of missing earthquake victims in that sector,’ İkmen replied. It wasn’t the first time they’d had to try to marry up discrete body parts with names of those whose bodies had never been recovered in the wake of the 1999 catastrophe. Nearly two years on, traumatised survivors were still being shocked by the bones and flesh of the dead that their gardens and car parks kept on revealing to them. There was also the possibility that these fragments held more sinister secrets. After all, where better to hide a murder victim than in those parts of the city that were effectively graveyards? This was why İkmen and his colleagues became involved in these matters. Unlawful death was his speciality and the fight to bring those who had committed such acts to justice had been his professional mission for almost all of his working life.
At fifty-four years old, Çetin İkmen was undernourished (due to pain from his numerous stomach ulcers), underpaid and smoke-dried. In spite of these drawbacks he was passionate about his work, possessed a loving and supportive wife and nine healthy, if at times problematic, children. Over the years his formidable detective skills and keen intellect had afforded him considerable success within the İstanbul police department. This combined with the incorruptible honesty he demanded of both himself and his officers had provided him with the kind of legendary status that occasionally allowed certain breaches of procedure to be performed without comment from those above. In short, İkmen was a phenomenon and as such he was admired and even courted by others. This was not always easy for those around İkmen. His current junior, Sergeant Orhan Tepe, frequently felt that rather more was expected of him than was reasonable. It was not an attitude that had afflicted İkmen’s previous sergeant, Mehmet Süleyman, now promoted to inspector. But then as Tepe frequently observed to himself, İkmen and Süleyman were two of a kind. He was different. It was not something that made him happy. Nothing much did nowadays.
As the list of missing persons for the Ataköy area flashed up on Tepe’s computer screen, he put such personal thoughts aside and concentrated on his work. On the other side of the small, cluttered office, İkmen frowned at a pile of papers until he was interrupted by the ringing of his telephone.
He picked up the receiver. ‘İkmen.’
‘Dad?’
It was Hulya, and from the tremor in her voice, she was nervous about something.
İkmen lit a cigarette. ‘Hello, Hulya, what can I do for you?’
‘Dad, I’ve just seen Mrs İpek and she says that Hatice still isn’t home.’
‘Oh?’ Could it be that his daughter was finally going to tell him exactly what had happened when she and her friend had parted the previous evening? İkmen suspected that she was. Although whether this would be a major confession as opposed to just some juvenile nonsense he couldn’t yet tell.
‘So,’ he prompted, ‘do you have anything more to tell me about how you parted from Hatice last night, or are you just calling to keep me up to date?’
In the short silence that followed İkmen watched Tepe look up briefly from his computer screen to eye the shapely figure of Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoǧlu who was passing by the window of their office. So evident was the younger, and married, man’s lust for their colleague that İkmen turned his chair round to face the wall.
‘Well, Hulya, I’m waiting.’
‘Dad . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I didn’t actually see Hatice go back to her apartment last night.’
This was hardly a surprise, though Hulya obviously felt that it should be.
‘Where did she go then, Hulya?’ he said. ‘After work when you left her . . .’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh?’
He heard her swallow. ‘No, honestly, Dad, I don’t.’
‘So if you don’t know where she went, do you know what she might have been doing?’
‘But Dad, I promised I wouldn’t tell.’
İkmen swung himself back round to face the front of his office again, his features stern. Mercifully Tepe was back at his work. Not that İkmen took much notice, he was far too irritated by his daughter to be bothered by his sergeant’s peccadilloes. As İkmen knew from bitter experience, promises between teenagers could be very dangerous things.
‘Hulya, you’re going to tell me otherwise you wouldn’t have telephoned and so I would just get on and do it,’ he said.
‘Oh, Dad, but you’re going to be so angry.’
‘Seeing as I’m already furious, you have nothing to lose, do you!’
‘Dad . . .’
‘So if it has anything to do with Mr Ahmet Sılay or any other theatrical type you girls have talked to about your ambitions . . .’
‘How did you know?’ She sounded outraged and truly shocked. ‘Have you spoken to Mr Sılay?’
‘No,’ İkmen replied sharply, ‘but I think I’m about to.’
‘But this has got nothing to do with him, Dad!’
İkmen puffed heavily on his cigarette. ‘What does it have to do with then, Hulya?’ he said.
He heard his daughter sigh and then with an almost visible shrug in her voice she gave in, as was her wont with her father.
‘Hatice had another job after work last night. It was a great entertainment opportunity. Lots of money.’
İkmen, who had heard such stories many, many times before from girls even younger and more innocent than Hulya, put his head in his hands.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said wearily. ‘Some nice men wanted her to dance for them.’
‘Yes, and act too,’ Hulya replied simply. ‘How did you know? Have you met . . .’
‘I think you ought to come down here now, Hulya,’ İkmen said as he stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.
‘What? To the police station?’ She sounded appalled.
‘Yes,’ her father replied through his teeth. ‘It’s where I work, Hulya. I’m a policeman. You have information about someone who might be missing and in danger. Please get yourself over here. Now!’
Tepe, startled by his superior’s sudden, enraged bellow, accidentally printed the list on his screen.
Although Turgut Fahrı possessed a voracious intellectual appetite, his enthusiasm for physical pursuits was rather more muted. OK, so his mother was no longer young, but why was it that he always had to carry all the tools when they went on their expeditions into the underworld? He was the brains of the family. Both his mother and his sister told everyone so and, when he was alive, his father had agreed with that analysis also. It was, after all, Turgut who had put the whole cistern idea into Adnan’s head in the first place, although his mother always referred to these f
orays as attempts to fulfil her husband’s dreams.
The cisterns which riddle the foundations of the old city were built by the Byzantine emperors. Fed with water from the Belgrade Forest by aqueducts, these enormous spaces ensured that despite drought or siege, the city of Constantine never went thirsty. It was a very successful system – for a time. During the Ottoman period, however, the cisterns fell into disrepair and were only ‘rediscovered’ by a sixteenth-century French traveller, who was amazed by stories of locals fishing underground. It was not until the twentieth century that any of them were extensively explored. And even then it was only one, the Yerebatan Saray, which since the 1980s had hosted daily sound-and-light entertainments for tourists. It wasn’t therefore to the Yerebatan Saray that Turgut and Neşe Fahrı and their tools were headed. No. If Turgut’s theory was correct and Greek treasure of unimaginable value was hidden in the cisterns, it was not going to be in the one that had already been comprehensively excavated. It was going to be in one of the others which lay undisturbed beneath bazaars and cafés, houses and apartment blocks, gently rotting into its own thick dark silt. A cistern just like, in fact, the one that Turgut was entering now.
Via a combination of amateur detective work and bribery, Turgut and Neşe had identified this particular cistern some months before. Rumours of a small cistern just north of the great Binbirdirek Cistern – which was currently under excavation – had been circulating for a while. It had only been a matter of time before the intrepid Fahrıs tracked it down. Situated in the garden of an old house on Türbedar Sokak, the entrance to the cistern was a hole in the ground which, until recently, had been covered by a rough wooden lid. Now helpfully removed by the elderly woman who owned the house, access to the entrance was currently costing the Fahrıs almost half of Turgut’s weekly wages. Age had not, apparently, dimmed the owner Mrs Oncü’s desire for the cheap jewellery this little enterprise allowed her to purchase.
‘May it come easy,’ Mrs Oncü said as she passed the shovel down into the cistern to Neşe.
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