The House of Four

by Barbara Nadel

  There was a flap in the cell door through which, every so often, pairs of eyes would appear. He didn’t know who they belonged to, but they weren’t the Devil. He was out in the city, causing chaos.

  He’d known for months that the Devil would come. He’d appeared in his room a couple of times, which was why in the end he’d had to buy tinfoil and black paint to put over his windows. But then Belkis Hanım had thrown him out. She’d taken his rent first, though, the old hag. Then she’d taken down the tinfoil and let the Devil in. She’d learn. She had learned. Only two days later, when she was out shopping, the Devil had burned her house to the ground. Then he’d skipped away to better things. Killing.

  Even though he hadn’t seen the attack in the Grand Bazaar, he knew it had to have been the work of the Devil. Now that he was in the city, anything was possible. But who had called him? Someone had to summon the Devil. He only came if he was invited. Who had been so reckless as to think that such an act would end well?

  ‘I’m not saying I don’t believe the boy. I actually do,’ Mehmet Süleyman said. ‘What I am saying is that I’ve seen offenders try to convince us they are mad when they’re not. I have to be careful.’

  ‘You think this boy is mad because he tells you that the Devil has come to town?’

  Gonca was brushing her hair in front of her dressing table mirror, looking at his reflection, naked on her bed.

  ‘If I say yes, you will accuse me of being small-minded.’

  ‘You can be,’ she said. ‘When it comes to belief, magic . . . Çetin İkmen—’

  ‘I am not Çetin İkmen,’ he said. ‘Teker wants him to see the boy. But I don’t know what good that will do.’

  She smiled. ‘You’re much better-looking than Çetin Bey.’

  She saw him rake his fingers through his hair.

  ‘Come to bed,’ he said. His tone was desperate, almost whining. It annoyed her.

  She put her hairbrush down and turned. ‘Don’t order me around, Mehmet Bey.’

  She saw him lower his gaze, but he said nothing.

  ‘It’s not my fault that your only suspect is a boy you think is either mad or playing at madness. Much of your confusion comes from the fact that you can’t accept that evil may be personified,’ she said. ‘But the Devil is real, Mehmet. Trust me.’

  ‘Why?’

  She discarded her dressing gown and climbed naked on to the bed.

  ‘Because I love you,’ she said. ‘And because I have seen the Devil.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  He kissed her breasts. She could have stopped the conversation there. Men were such single-minded idiots when it came to sex. But he’d started it and she was determined to give him her opinion.

  She held him away from her with one hand while she massaged his penis with the other – to reassure his ego.

  ‘I’ve seen the Devil in the faces of politicians many times,’ she said. ‘I see him in the eyes of the property developers who demolish people’s homes, and outside the windows of jewellers’ shops in all his lurid glory.’

  ‘Gonca—’

  ‘He exists, Mehmet,’ she said. ‘He uses the souls of the greedy, the power-crazed and the vengeful. If that boy you have in your cells really has seen the Devil, then he is just the same as me, and am I, your lover, a madwoman?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said as he straddled her. ‘All I do know is that I need you.’

  She laughed. ‘Well come on then, my prince. We can’t have you coming too soon like a frustrated teenager.’

  Had he really heard what she had said before he gave himself over to making love to her? Gonca hoped so. But what she hadn’t told him was what she had heard from her father and some of the other old gypsies that she knew. The pulse of evil in the city had quickened of late, so they said. Only the Devil himself could make that happen. The old people interpreted this as the Prince of Darkness coming to claim his own.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Letters? Only very rarely saw her write any.’

  Selin İnce was a pleasant enough woman, but Çetin İkmen seriously doubted her abilities as a domestic. Fatima Rudolfoğlu’s apartment, though cleaner than those of her brothers, had been far from spotless.

  ‘So you were unaware of the fact that Fatima Hanım and her brothers wrote to each other?’ he asked.

  ‘News to me,’ she said. ‘As far as I knew, they never spoke and so they didn’t communicate.’

  ‘You went to the bank for your employer, and the post office?’

  ‘Which is why I know she only ever sent a few letters,’ Selin said. ‘Through the post, that is. She must’ve slipped any letters she wrote to the old men under their doors. But I never saw her do it. To be honest, Inspector, I never saw her leave her apartment at all. I did her shopping, such as it was, and no one else visited, not for ten years at the very least. That Osman who did for Mr Yücel might know something.’

  ‘He claims he doesn’t.’

  ‘Oh, well then . . .’

  ‘Mr Osman Babacan, like you, knew nothing of any letters between the siblings, and yet there were a considerable number. All four of them wrote to each other on a regular basis. We’ve found drawers full of them in all the apartments. Are you sure you’ve never seen anyone apart from Mr Babacan come to the house?’

  ‘Certain,’ she said. ‘Why would they? That house is a terrible place these days, full of mould and rot and rats. And it’s not as if Fatima Hanım, at least, had anything of value. A few bits of jewellery was all.’

  ‘How did you come to work for Fatima Hanım, Selin Hanım? If the Devil’s House is so forgotten, how did you know about it?’

  ‘Oh, I’m Moda born and bred,’ she said. ‘My grandmother worked in the house for Perihan Hanım – that’s Fatima Hanım’s mother. She was only a girl when she started there, my grandmother, but she loved Perihan Hanım, and so when my mother was old enough, she had her work in the house too. But by that time Perihan Hanım was dead and so Mum only worked for Fatima Hanım. She rarely saw the gentlemen. I took over ten years ago.’

  ‘Did your mother or your grandmother ever say why the house was divided up into apartments?’ İkmen said.

  ‘No. Fatima Hanım and her brothers no longer spoke, but Mum and Granny never told me why. Don’t know if they knew. But even if they had, they wouldn’t have said. Very private about their employers, they were.’ She shook her head. ‘As for me, I never spoke to anyone about what I did, except to my husband. It was sad. I don’t know what was going on with the old men, but in the last few weeks of her life, Fatima Hanım began to go demented. I told her to call Dr Tanis, but she wouldn’t. Said he was a crook.’

  ‘In what way was Dr Tanis a crook?’

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t know. He always did her pills up for her correctly.’

  ‘You say she was beginning to dement,’ İkmen said. ‘Why did you think that?’

  ‘Because of the ghosts,’ she said.

  ‘Ghosts?’

  ‘Yes. She said she could hear them in the walls. Of course, I couldn’t. There’s no such thing as ghosts, although my husband would disagree. Said she heard them talking.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘She never said. But it upset her. One time she took to her bed and pulled the covers over her head. That wasn’t like her. In spite of her age, she was always fearless. Sometimes when I used to leave her to go home, I’d ask her whether she was frightened to stay in that great big apartment all on her own. But she wasn’t. She always said she wasn’t frightened of anyone. In fact she used to say that people should be frightened of her.’

  At first she thought they were men. Then, as they got closer, she noticed that the shorter of the two figures moved more like a girl. They were mucking about, pushing each other and laughing. They looked a bit scruffy, and as Gila passed them, she clutched her bag a little closer to her side. The city was full of pickpockets and all sorts of undesirables, especially now there were so many re
fugees from Syria on the streets. Just briefly she saw a pair of very pale eyes underneath a dark hood, but then she looked away.

  The Galata Bridge was always busy, day and night, especially in the summer, when the city was full of tourists. Then there were the fishermen who hung their lines into the waters of the Bosphorus on one side and the Golden Horn on the other, all hoping to catch something tasty for their lunch or supper. Gila lived in trendy Cihangir, amid the ornate nineteenth-century buildings of the late Ottoman period, but she worked across the bridge in the Old City for a small publishing house whose office windows looked out over the Grand Bazaar. Usually she took the tram to work, from Karaköy to Beyazıt. But this morning she hadn’t been able to face it. Every tram had arrived packed and so she’d decided to walk. It was a beautiful day, so why not?

  She had almost reached the end of the bridge when she heard a commotion behind her. Some people were shouting, and someone was on the ground. She walked back, and as she got closer, she realised that the people were speaking English. A woman was screaming for help, and one of the fishermen was trying to get the person on the ground, a man with grey hair, up on his feet. Another man was shouting at the fisherman to leave him where he was.

  ‘Can I help?’ Gila said.

  The man who had pushed the fisherman away looked up. Gila saw that he had blood on his shirt.

  ‘He’s been stabbed,’ he said.

  ‘Your friend?’

  ‘Yes. Get an ambulance or something, will you!’

  Gila took her phone out of her handbag and dialled 112.

  Selin İnce’s husband Bilal had the look of a man who had probably been a bit of a villain in his youth. Short and powerfully muscled, he reminded İkmen of a bouncer outside a low-rent brothel where the punters were all drunk. Mr İnce, however, was a born-again Muslim, a fact that he was very keen to impress upon Çetin İkmen. Not that İkmen was about to discount him as a suspect in the deaths of the Rudolfoğlu siblings just because of that. The policeman would reserve judgement until forensic reports were in and he’d managed to check out Mr İnce’s account of his movements over the previous weekend.

  Once the interview was over, İkmen went outside to the car park for a smoke, where he was approached by that very unnerving technical officer, Sergeant Turgut Zana. İkmen was only really on nodding acquaintance with Zana, and so he was surprised when the Kurd walked up to him and said, ‘You need someone who can read Ottoman script. I know such a person.’

  İkmen hadn’t exactly broadcast the existence of the Ottoman letters to the whole department, but somehow Zana had found out. Maybe it was because people often had conversations around him without actually noticing he was in the room.

  İkmen lit his cigarette. ‘And who is that, Sergeant?’

  ‘She’s in the traffic department.’

  ‘A woman.’

  ‘Constable Demirtaş,’ Zana said.

  ‘Do you know how well Constable Demirtaş can read Ottoman script? She’d need to be fluent.’

  ‘She studied it at university.’

  If she did, she was wasted in the traffic division. But İkmen knew it had to be true. Sergeant Zana wouldn’t make it up, because he couldn’t. Lies were not precise, and he didn’t do anything that wasn’t a hundred per cent accurate.

  ‘Well then, with the permission of her superiors, she’d better come and see me,’ İkmen said.

  ‘She’s already had that conversation,’ Zana said.

  ‘Really?’

  Again, he wouldn’t lie, but how had Zana managed to tell this constable about İkmen’s case and persuade her to speak to her superiors in such a short space of time? If İkmen hadn’t known that wasting words on pointless details like that would only irritate the Kurd, he would have asked him. Instead, he said, ‘I’d better meet her.’

  ‘She finishes her shift at six p.m. May I instruct her to come and see you then?’

  İkmen had planned, barring accidents and emergencies, to be ensconced in the Mosaik Bar with a glass of cognac at 6 p.m. He scowled. Then he had a thought. Everyone knew how he led his life, even, probably, this Constable Demirtaş.

  ‘You may,’ he said. ‘Tell her to meet me at the Mosaik Bar in Sultanahmet at six.’

  Unlike some of İkmen’s colleagues, Turgut Zana didn’t look at all surprised.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, then turned and walked away.

  The local woman who had accompanied the British couple, their two sons and a friend to the hospital was called Gila Saban. She was clearly very shaken up, but not nearly as traumatised as the family of Mr Simon Oates. He had been dead by the time the ambulance arrived at the Cerrahpaşa Hospital. While the family mourned, Süleyman interviewed Miss Saban.

  A pale single woman in her early forties, Gila Saban was well-spoken and, in spite of the ordeal she had just been through, keen to help in any way she could.

  ‘Mrs Oates told me that her husband just dropped to the ground,’ she said. Süleyman had bought her a coffee from a stall outside the hospital, which she clung on to with white knuckles. ‘I saw the blood. I called the ambulance.’

  Süleyman had learned of the attack when the ambulance service called police headquarters to request an escort for their vehicle. Could another sudden stabbing mean that the incarcerated boy in the black tracksuit was innocent? Or was this maybe a copycat offence?

  ‘Did you see anyone near the family?’ he asked.

  ‘I had been in front of them, so no,’ she said.

  ‘I imagine you know that the Galata Bridge has a reputation these days.’

  ‘For pickpockets, yes,’ she said. ‘I always make sure the clasp of my handbag is facing inwards when I walk across. But I don’t think Mr Oates was robbed. My understanding is that they were all looking at the views when he was just, well, stabbed.’

  ‘Did you see anyone running away from the scene, towards Eminönü or Karaköy?’

  ‘Not that I remember, no,’ she said. ‘One of the fishermen on the bridge came over to help, but he was doing all the wrong things. Then some other fishermen came and tried to keep Mr Oates warm with their jackets. He was still speaking then.’

  ‘Did you hear what he said?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘My English is good, but in a situation like that it was as much as I could do to call the ambulance and try to comfort Mrs Oates.’ She frowned. ‘What I did see, although this probably reflects my own prejudices more than reality, was a couple of young people clowning around.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘They were coming towards me, from Eminönü. They were laughing and jumping around. They made me feel a bit . . . uncomfortable for some reason. But they didn’t say anything to me, and once they’d gone—’

  ‘Towards the Oates family.’

  ‘I guess. Once they’d gone, I thought no more about them.’

  ‘Can you describe these young people?’

  ‘A bit. One was wearing jeans. The other was dressed in a black tracksuit or one of those all-in-one things, I think. With a hood.’

  ‘With a hood? Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yes. They both wore hoods. Until they got closer, I thought that both of them were male. Then I saw that the shorter of the two, the one in the tracksuit, moved like a woman. Oh, and as they passed me, I saw that one’s eyes.’

  ‘The woman?’

  ‘The one I believe is a woman, yes,’ she said. ‘They were very strange. So pale. Grey, I imagine. But in the sunlight they looked almost silver. Like two drops of mercury.’

  Physically Fatima Rudolfoğlu hadn’t been in bad shape for such an old lady. There was some evidence of arthritis, her liver was fatty and her kidneys were not in a good condition. But in spite of her untreated diabetes, there was nothing immediately life-threatening. According to her cleaner, the old woman had started to dement, but then at her age that was to be expected. Had she not been stabbed through the chest, Arto Sarkissian was convinced she would still be alive. Ditto, amazingly, her brother Y�
�cel, who had been one hundred years old.

  However, even before he began to work on them, the pathologist knew that the bodies of Kanat and Kemal Rudolfoğlu were going to be different. Kanat, who had lived in an apartment so filthy it stank, presented with multiple pressure sores and a jaundiced complexion that indicated liver failure. The corpse was emaciated, and Arto wondered when he had last eaten, and what. His brother Kemal was also stick thin, but his corpse was free of sores and only a very pale shade of yellow. He, however, had a large mass sticking out of his right thigh. A tumour, although whether it was malignant or not was yet to be deduced.

  Toxicology on all four bodies had come back from the laboratory. All except Kemal had taken various medications for things like arthritis and constipation. But there had been no substances in excess in any of their systems – and that included alcohol. They had all died in exactly the same way, which was via a single stab wound to the heart. Given their advanced age, whoever had killed them had not had to be physically strong. Mental strength was another matter. Stabbing one person through the heart required a high degree of resolve. Doing it four times indicated a determination and conviction that was unusual and frightening.

  The thought made Arto Sarkissian shudder.

  Whoever this offender was had killed four times, almost certainly while his victims slept. What else was he capable of?

  ‘Inspector Süleyman?’

  He looked up from his phone. He was standing outside the hospital, trying to get a signal and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to reach your department, then I was told that you were here.’

  The man was wearing a white coat, so he was probably a member of the hospital staff.

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Şahin Uslu,’ he said. ‘I’m lead pathologist here.’

  ‘Ah.’

  The two men shook hands, rather awkwardly on Süleyman’s part as he attempted to juggle both his cigarette and his phone.

  ‘I know you are busy,’ Dr Uslu said. ‘I’ve heard about that unfortunate incident on the Galata Bridge . . .’

  ‘The victim will not come into your hands but will be sent to our own pathologist, as we believe this is part of an ongoing series of attacks.’