Harem

by Barbara Nadel

  Sılay, who saw where he was looking, smiled.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said, ‘in Egypt. I was eighteen and, as you can see, I was criminally handsome. That was taken on the set of my first movie.’

  ‘So it’s your acting career that fascinates the girls?’ Tepe said.

  ‘My career?’ Sılay tipped his head backwards to indicate his dissent. ‘No. The fact that I’ve worked with the greatest director of all time didn’t impress them. That I once worked with a man who went to Hollywood did.’

  ‘And who was that?’ In spite of his need to stick to the point with what was in reality a suspect, Tepe found himself drawn to ask further questions about this man’s previous life. If all of the movie posters and various cinematic trinkets that adorned his home were anything to go by, he’d had a very interesting life.

  ‘Hikmet Sivas, or Ali Bey the Sultan as he came to be known in Hollywood,’ Sılay replied. ‘I met him first in Egypt when we both appeared in a V O Bengü monstrosity. He took that photograph of me. We got on and even returned to this country together.’ He shrugged. ‘But then Hikmet went off to Hollywood and I stayed here and worked with the greatest director of all time.’

  Tepe frowned. Neither Steven Spielberg nor Ridley Scott were to his knowledge Turkish.

  Sılay, seeing his confusion, elaborated. ‘I mean Yılmaz Güney,’ he said, citing arguably Turkey’s greatest and most controversial film director. ‘An artist of genius as well as a true hero of the people.’

  There was an element of challenge in Sılay’s gaze now. But, Tepe reasoned, if he had indeed worked for Güney then he probably shared at least some of the late director’s views about politics and society. The way he spoke seemed to bear this out. But then Tepe reminded himself firmly that he hadn’t come to speak to Sılay about either Sivas or the frequently imprisoned Güney.

  ‘So you didn’t ask either of the girls, Hatice İpek and Hulya İkmen, to accompany you back here to see your collection of film things?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Why would I? While I’m out I’m old and interesting. Why disturb that illusion by bringing them back to this place where they can see me for what I am?’

  Apart from the film ephemera, the only other notable items in the house were the hundreds of empty rakı bottles that stood in silent groups in every room. Sılay, the alcoholic, had a point.

  ‘And last night you spoke to the girls . . .’

  ‘As I always do.’ Sılay frowned. ‘Has something happened to Hatice or Hulya?’

  ‘Just answer my questions please, Mr Sılay,’ Tepe said, verbally stepping back into the officiousness of his law enforcement role.

  Sılay, who had in all probability, given his past associations, come across this sort of attitude before, just took another swig from his bottle and let his shoulders slump.

  ‘What time did you leave the pastane?’ Tepe asked.

  ‘At about ten.’

  ‘Shortly before it closed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you go after that?’

  ‘I went out to Bebek.’

  To Tepe, Sılay, actor or no actor, didn’t exactly look like the sort of person who would go out to a smart suburb like Bebek. Ice cream, for which Bebek is famed, didn’t seem to be his sort of thing even on the warmest of evenings.

  Sılay knew what the policeman was thinking. He responded with a good deal of actorly arrogance.

  ‘My father, who lives in Bebek, will substantiate my story,’ he said. ‘I went to visit him. He’s very old now and although, as I’m sure you can see, I am a great disappointment to him, I am still his son and I keep in contact.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And in answer to your next question, officer, yes, I went to get money from him too.’ Sılay smiled, but not with any warmth. ‘I haven’t acted since nineteen eighty-three and I can’t do anything else. Someone has to keep a roof over my head and my father is very rich.’

  Not the sort of person Tepe could imagine having a lot of sympathy with either the background or the politics of Yılmaz Güney. It must have been extremely galling for Sılay senior to have his no doubt beautifully educated son mixed up with communists and jailbirds. But then perhaps the old man just paid Ahmet to go away – go away and get drunk in a ‘bad’ part of town, well out of sight.

  ‘I took no little girls back with me,’ Sılay continued as he lit a thin cigar and then sucked appreciatively on it. ‘I just collected my money, slept in my father’s house for one night – you can ask his nurse if you want an independent witness – and then I came home here in the morning.’

  ‘So as far as Hatice and Hulya are concerned . . .’

  ‘The girls told me they wanted to become actresses and I amused them with my stories. Nothing happened. I never invited them here nor met them anywhere outside the pastane.’

  Tepe felt fairly certain that he was telling the truth. Once a rebellious and socially conscious young rich boy, Sılay had never achieved the fame that he craved and so he took to drink, dining out on boasts about a man he had worked with only briefly. He was a sad, broken character whose love for and knowledge of cinema was all that he retained of the handsome youngster in the baggy suit.

  Tepe lit up a cigarette of his own. ‘So if you didn’t have an inappropriate relationship with either of these girls, do you know of anyone who might have done? Men who might have attempted to entice the girls back with them, using their ambitions to tempt them?’

  Ahmet Sılay sighed. ‘Hulya’s father, I know, is big in the police. Everyone knew, it annoyed her. Men, young and old, kept their distance.’

  ‘And Hatice?’

  He took a swig from his glass and again wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘Well that, I think, might have been another matter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Tepe asked.

  ‘I mean that if you want to know about Hatice and men you might begin by asking Hassan Bey.’

  ‘The proprietor of the pastane?’

  ‘Yes. Unlike his father, who is a man of both learning and principle, Hassan Bey believes I am only a harmless old drunk wedded to stories of my youth. But I have eyes in my head and I know what it looks like when a man squeezes a girl’s breast and she likes it.’

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  Although it was obvious that the girl had been sexually assaulted in both her vagina and her anus, and had lost blood from both, that was not what had killed her. She had lacerations to the pubic area and some deep bruising but the cause of Hatice İpek’s death was elusive.

  Not that pathologist Arto Sarkissian was giving up. There was still far more information that could be gleaned via further observation of the corpse as well as tests to be performed on tissue samples. But it was late now and he was tired. He would return to Hatice again in the morning. She wasn’t, after all, going anywhere. The Armenian’s large features broke into a smile as he thought about this grim little joke – the sort of dark observation that he and his friend Çetin İkmen frequently exchanged. Çetin was probably right at this moment still trying to comfort his daughter whose friend Arto’s charge had once been.

  Poor little girl. Whoever the man or men were who had assaulted her, they had been brutal. Surprisingly Hatice had not been a virgin before the attack, a detail upon which Arto passed no judgement even though many, he knew, would condemn the girl for that. As far as he was concerned, it was hardly relevant. Hatice had been subjected to sexual violence, the perpetrators of which were obviously both dangerous and without conscience. It was something that Çetin needed to know so that he could act upon it – and soon. Sex crimes did not, fortunately, happen every day, but when they did the assailants had to be caught quickly. With nearly thirty years’ experience behind him as well as, rather more recently, close contact with Mehmet Süleyman’s wife, the psychiatrist Zelfa Halman, Arto knew that sexual brutality tended to escalate. And if what he had seen of Hatice’s injuries was anything to go by, this man or men were already well down that par
ticular road. Whether or not they had killed her, they had abused her body in almost every orifice. Next time who knew where their depraved appetites would lead them.

  Arto considered ringing İkmen to give him the news but then thought better of it and decided to go and tell him in person. This was not, after all, just any body he had here, it was the body of Hulya’s best friend. Çetin would have to think very carefully about how to tell his daughter what the post mortem had so far found, so it was probably best to discuss it fully with him first. He would, of course, have to take him away from the apartment in order to be able to speak freely – probably, knowing Çetin, to one of his favourite bars.

  Arto scrubbed his hands and arms until they were red, put his jacket on and made his way out towards the car park. It was already gone six o’clock when he finally emerged from the confines of the mortuary. The sun was still strong, however, so he took his jacket off before he got into his car. As he fired up the engine, he flicked the switch to turn on the air conditioning – a luxury that Arto, with his palace on the northern shore of the Bosphorus and his elegant, wealthy wife, took for granted. His friend Çetin İkmen lived an entirely other kind of life and so Arto would need the air conditioning to cool him down before he toiled up the many stairs to the policeman’s stuffy, chaotic Sultanahmet apartment.

  As he walked from the kitchen into the hall, İkmen looked down at Hulya where she sat on the floor with the telephone in her lap, talking to her mother. Her little face, which now looked folded in on itself with grief, was still wet with tears. Earlier when Canan, Hatice’s sister, had returned from staying over with one of her aunts, Hulya had rushed over to the İpek apartment to comfort her. Both girls had hugged, crying with misery and disbelief. Behind them, in the dark depths of the apartment, İkmen had just glimpsed Hürrem İpek’s devastated face, now still and lifeless as if the core of her being had dried to stone. That he would have to formally interview both his neighbour and his daughter about the events surrounding Hatice’s death was not something that he looked forward to. In the meantime, however, he would let Hulya talk alone to her mother.

  ‘But, I mean, we can’t really know where people go to when they die, can we?’ he heard his daughter ask his wife. He watched as Hulya’s face briefly resolved into a frown as she listened to Fatma’s response. Just in case one or other of them should decide to draw him into the conversation, İkmen made a quick getaway into the living room and then out onto the balcony. OK, so like his late mother he might have the odd premonition, experience the occasional ghost, but the afterlife and particularly traditional Islamic concepts of it were not his province. That was Fatma’s area; she, after all, almost alone in the vast İkmen household, believed.

  Bülent was already out on the balcony when İkmen arrived. His sweet young face was tinged with gold as he turned his features up to the still fierce setting sun. His father sat down beside him and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Your mother’s helping your sister to come to some sort of peace with what has happened,’ he said as he exhaled smoke out across Divanyolu Caddesi with its teeming pavements and packed trams. ‘I’m glad it’s her. I couldn’t have done it.’

  Bülent shrugged. ‘But you see death all the time,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t mean that I’m inured to it,’ İkmen responded. ‘Even when it happens to people I don’t know, I’m still shocked. But when it’s someone close . . .’ He sighed. ‘You don’t get over it, you just get used to it. There are times when I think about your grandfather and the pain is so intense it feels like I’ve been punched in the stomach.’

  Bülent sipped some water from his bottle and then leaned back and closed his eyes. At eighteen he still wasn’t mature enough to be comfortable around emotions like the ones his father was expressing. And so the two of them sat in silence until İkmen’s mobile phone began to ring.

  Hassan Şeker, dressed in an elegantly cut suit and emanating expensive cologne, looked totally incongruous as he sat behind the old stained table in Interview Room 2. The poor light from the one inadequate bulb overhead made his immaculate appearance seem even more bizarre. Orhan Tepe knew that Şeker was in a different league from him. He is in the same category as Mehmet Süleyman, Tepe thought sourly. Back in Ottoman times, when Süleyman’s family had been aristocrats, Şeker’s had been the culinary artists who served such people. Patronised and flattered by their exalted customers, many confectioners, jewellers and other artisans had as a result become admired and wealthy themselves. Despite the passing of time and the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923, such people retained their wealth and reputations.

  Tepe looked across at the confectioner again and scowled. Very like Süleyman, in fact, he thought – handsome, loved by women and rich . . . in comparison to him. His scowl deepened – which was not lost upon Hassan Şeker.

  ‘Is something bothering you, officer?’ he asked, his head held high with imperious indignation.

  Tepe slid his glance across to the young constable who stood guarding the door. People were not generally so confident and up front in this type of setting and the constable looked uncomfortable.

  ‘I was just hoping that Inspector İkmen gets here soon, sir,’ Tepe replied. ‘It would be good if we could get this over with.’

  ‘I can only agree with that,’ Şeker said and he looked Tepe up and down with very obvious disdain.

  And then the room became silent again until there was a knock at the door. The constable opened it immediately and İkmen entered. Hassan Şeker rose to his feet.

  ‘Ah, Inspector,’ he said. ‘It will be a trouble, I know, but if you could just put this stupid man right with regard to the grave error he has committed, I would be grateful.’

  İkmen looked at Tepe before, smiling at Şeker, he sat down.

  ‘If you mean that Sergeant Tepe has made a mistake in bringing you here, sir, then I must take issue with that.’ İkmen lit up a cigarette. ‘Had you answered his questions—’

  ‘He and his underlings just marched into my place of business asking insulting questions!’

  ‘Sir, we have reason to believe that you may have been having a relationship with a girl we found dead earlier today.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He ran one hand through his hair, his head bowed. ‘He told me about Hatice and I am very sorry. It is most distressing. But as to my having a relationship with her—’

  ‘Oh, I agree,’ İkmen said, ‘that I may have overstated your connection with Hatice. From the information we have received it would seem that it stopped at just sex. If indeed it got that far. But you were seen touching her breasts, and she appeared to be comfortable with that.’

  Şeker raised his head a little, his eyes furious. ‘And who says this?’

  ‘Sir, you must know that I cannot—’

  ‘Oh, but of course, I told your men the whereabouts of Ahmet Sılay, didn’t I?’ He laughed without mirth. ‘And you believe the word of a politically dubious alcoholic. Such observations are pure fantasy, the product of a mind obsessed with celluloid.’

  ‘Mr Sılay apart, there is a witness who can substantiate this notion who is not given to strong drink.’

  ‘Who?’ Şeker’s voice as well as his eyes were challenging, imperious. ‘Well?’

  ‘Mr Şeker, I am not at liberty to—’

  ‘But if I am to counter this accusation then I have to know who I am up against! This is a lie! I am fully aware that some of the people who work for me do not necessarily like me.’

  In the face of İkmen’s stoic silence, Şeker sat down. As he did so, a thought appeared to occur to him. It was perhaps prompted by the gravity that was etched on İkmen’s features. ‘Unless, of course, it was your daughter,’ he said. ‘In which case I may as well, I suppose, confess to this whether I did it or not.’

  İkmen sighed. This was not a place he had wanted to go to with this interview. But when Tepe had telephoned him about Şeker, he had had to ask Hulya about her employer and Hatice.

 
; ‘Sir, telling the truth might help,’ İkmen said. ‘Touching a girl’s breast or having consenting relations with her is not a crime. We are not accusing you of harming her, we simply need to know who her contacts were. And because you must have been one of the last people to see her alive—’

  ‘When she finished her work she left with your daughter.’

  ‘And you didn’t see her again that night?’

  ‘No. I went home to my wife as I always do. I have never done anything with or to that girl. If some people mistake my natural friendliness for something else then that is their problem, not mine.’ And then he sank back into his chair as if temporarily deflated.

  İkmen put his cigarette out and lit another. ‘Well, you may be right,’ he said. ‘It is possible some misunderstanding . . .’

  ‘Thank you!’

  ‘However, I stand by my officers’ actions. We were, sir, bound to follow up such an accusation.’

  ‘Well, of course.’ Şeker’s features had softened considerably now. Although not exactly smiling, he appeared more relaxed. It was at this point that İkmen pleasantly called a halt to the proceedings and allowed Hassan Şeker to go.

  As soon as they heard the confectioner’s footsteps disappear down the corridor outside, Tepe turned to his superior and said, ‘Do you believe him, sir?’

  ‘No.’ İkmen frowned. ‘It’s his word against Ahmet Sılay’s and Hulya’s. I know that my daughter, at least, doesn’t lie. She’s seen that man with his hands all over Hatice. And besides, even if I didn’t know that I would still call Hassan Şeker a liar.’

  ‘Why?’

  İkmen smiled. ‘Oh, just because, Tepe. Feelings that I have about people. Call it something supernatural, for want of a more appropriate term.’ He stood up and made ready to leave the room.