She breathed in deeply to control her tears, then she said, ‘The child was called Rouvin. It’s Greek. Mum told me that it means “behold, a son”.’
Chapter 21
Elif Büyük had tried to kill herself. According to the custody officers, she’d become agitated when no one would answer her questions about whether her name had appeared in the press. Met with a wall of silence, she had smashed her head against her cell wall until she became unconscious. That no one had stopped her made Süleyman mad. The lazy bastards had probably been looking at ridiculous websites of cats wearing hats. Now Elif was in a rather different hospital to the one that had been expecting her.
On the up side, forensic results on the Yeniköy murder scene had arrived showing that the site was covered in DNA from both Elif and Ali Erbil. The British victim’s family had been due to come in and see whether they could identify the pair. Now they’d be taken to see just Ali. It was disappointing. Elif was by far the more recognisable of the two.
Walking down the corridor towards his office, Süleyman saw that Constable Demirtaş was already at her desk. Although her door was open, he knocked.
She looked up. ‘Oh.’
‘Good morning, Constable,’ he said. ‘You’re very early.’
‘Yes,’ she said. She smiled. ‘I don’t know if you’ve spoken to Inspector İkmen yet, but we had a breakthrough yesterday. We think there might actually be something to this idea that Fatima Rudolfoğlu had a son.’
‘Really? So the Oriental Club could have a rival for all that money?’
He walked in and sat on the edge of her desk.
‘Potentially,’ she said.
‘Interesting.’
He was making her uncomfortable, he could see it in her nervous smile. Did it mean anything? He knew she was attracted to him; it was so very obvious.
‘Ah, Mehmet Bey . . .’
He turned around and saw İkmen at the door.
‘Çetin Bey.’
‘Good morning, Constable Demirtaş,’ İkmen said. ‘Excellent work yesterday. I went to see Selin İnce last night and we have a name for this son. I want you to look for any references to a boy or a man called Rouvin.’
‘Strange name,’ she said.
‘Greek,’ Süleyman said.
‘Indeed. If you have time, Mehmet Bey, I can tell you all about it,’ İkmen said. ‘But I understand you’ve had some problems this morning.’
‘Yes.’ He jumped off the desk and walked towards the older man. ‘Aslan Gerontas is still awaiting transfer and Elif Büyük tried to kill herself last night. She’s in hospital.’
İkmen shook his head. ‘Weren’t you supposed to be trying to get an ID on Elif and Ali from the British victim’s family?’
‘Richard and Paul Oates, the victim’s sons, are due here in half an hour. They’ll have to make do with Ali for the time being. They’ve seen photographs, which neither of them was sure about. I was hoping that seeing the couple in the flesh would help.’
‘It often does,’ İkmen said. ‘Well, come and see me when you’ve finished, Mehmet Bey. I think you may find my latest discoveries interesting.’
He carried on towards his office.
Süleyman looked round to see what Constable Demirtaş was doing, and found that she was completely absorbed in transliterating a document.
‘The cause of Father Anatoli’s suicide could be completely unconnected to the Rudolfoğlus,’ İkmen said. ‘Maybe their secrets were just some amongst many that he had to carry around with him. His wife told me as much.’
‘Yes, but why now?’ Kerim Gürsel said.
‘Oh, I agree,’ İkmen said. ‘That we must discover. And indeed the same may be said for the deaths of the Rudolfoğlus. Why now? We may consider different scenarios, including maybe one in which whoever killed them has only recently found out about what they did in 1931.’
‘How?’
‘From Father Anatoli? Perhaps, tired of being alone with that awful secret, he shared it with someone who thought they might exact revenge on behalf of the murdered baby.’
‘Apion.’
‘Indeed, although Apion says he learned the story from his father four years ago. He subsequently told Father Anatoli what he knew.’
‘Anatoli wasn’t alone with that secret, then.’
‘No.’
‘So something else happened,’ Kerim said.
İkmen sighed. ‘OK, back to the beginning. The day before his suicide, Father Anatoli met Yiannis Apion at the ayazma of St Katherine. They talked about the future of the spring, they prayed and then they parted. Apion went to get the ferry back to Beşiktaş from Kadıköy, and Father Anatoli either went somewhere to do something or met someone.’ He shrugged. ‘Yiannis said that the priest was in good spirits when he saw him. So something changed that. Something that happened after Yiannis had gone and before Father Anatoli arrived back home later on that evening.’
‘Accepting that Apion isn’t lying,’ Kerim said.
‘I accept he could be.’
İkmen opened his office window and lit a cigarette.
‘Kerim,’ he said. ‘When I called you last night, you were at the Koço in Moda.’
‘I’d been at the Teufel Ev all day. The Koço is a nice place, which is just up the road.’
‘It’s also where you met that old man, the one who first told us about the ayazma and its connection to the Rudolfoğlu family. Have you seen him again?’
‘Not to speak to.’
‘But he’s a regular at the Koço?’
‘I don’t know about regular . . .’
İkmen wondered whether it was his imagination that made him think Kerim was holding something back.
‘He’s local and so he knows a few local stories,’ Kerim said.
‘Like what?’
‘Apart from what he said about the ayazma?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just stuff about local characters: artists, drag queens . . .’
İkmen let it go.
‘What we need is a connection,’ he said. ‘We have a lot of information from many different sources, but it won’t hang together. Not yet. Not in any sort of definitive way that means we can make an arrest. We know that the murderer had to know about the Rudolfoğlus’ past misdemeanours. For someone to kill them in the way they did, mirroring what happened to the child, is too much of a coincidence.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’m aware we’ve not really explored Perihan Hanım’s family. I’m not thinking direct family, but brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. All these old offshoots of the royal family are coming out into the daylight now our Ottoman past is glorious again. I wonder if one of them was righting old wrongs?’
‘More likely to be an attempt to get at the property,’ Kerim said. ‘The baby Fatima and her brothers killed was the daughter of a Greek servant.’
‘True.’ He put his cigarette out and crossed his arms. ‘According to Selin İnce, the only people who knew about the murder, apart from later on the local Greek priest, was Konstantinos Apion, the servant Muazzaz and the doctor Kevork Sarkissian. Now Kevork, we know, had worked at Yıldız Palace, which is probably where Perihan Hanım lived at some point. As you know, I asked our Dr Sarkissian if he would search through his grandfather’s effects to try and find his old medical records. But apparently his grandfather’s papers are jumbled up, they’re written in Ottoman script and there are, according to the doctor, millions of them. We can’t take that on. But what we – or rather you – can do is contact the Yıldız Palace archive and find out if they can trace Perihan.’
‘OK. Hopefully some of that will be online,’ Kerim said. ‘What about Rudolf Paşa?’
‘What about him?’ İkmen said. ‘He was dead. Anyway, he was German.’
‘Yes, but sir, aren’t there shares in Mercedes Benz involved in this legacy?’
İkmen smacked his forehead. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Thank you, Kerim. God, I must be losing my mind! Stupid old man! I’ll get back
in touch with Erdal Bey and find out if he knows anything. Rudolf Paşa must have had a surname. If we have that, we may have access to his family in Germany. Might not help us, but it’s worth a try. You know, I sometimes forget how much money is at stake here.’
Although only half constructed, the new building next door to the Peacock Yalı was already restricting the light. When Maryam returned from Chicago, she’d go crazy.
Unknown to Çetin İkmen, Arto Sarkissian had been trying to find anything he could about his grandfather Kevork’s later career as a doctor in post-Ottoman İstanbul. He’d had a few brief conversations with İkmen in the past few days, including one very late the previous evening, and what seemed to be coming to light about the Rudolfoğlu case was far more sinister than either of them had imagined. What disturbed the Armenian personally was his grandfather’s involvement. Had he really helped to cover up a horrific crime by declaring that Perihan’s baby was stillborn? Arto’s uncle, Mesrob, had been convinced that the source of his father’s sorrow had been the fact that he’d been unable to save the baby, followed by the death of its mother. But what if his misery had stemmed from guilt? If what İkmen was saying was true, Kevork had helped to cover up a murder. But how could Arto reconcile that with the gentle old man he had known when he was a child?
He’d found no documents to help him. Amid ever-increasing noise from the site next door, he’d looked at page after page of notes, letters and records, most of them in a script he couldn’t understand, and had found nothing. Intellectually he knew precisely why Atatürk had Latinised the Turkish alphabet in 1929. The Latin characters reflected Turkish letters far more precisely. But the abandonment of the Ottoman script had also cut most people off from their past.
He’d spoken to Mesrob again at three o’clock that morning – which was why he was so very tired this morning – and told him everything he knew. Oddly, Mesrob had not been as disturbed by the fact that his father might have colluded in covering up a murder as Arto had thought he would be.
‘What else was he supposed to do?’ he’d said. ‘At that time, as an Armenian he was part of the enemy within.’
‘Yes, but who would have threatened him? The child’s father was Greek. It wouldn’t have been him. The Turkish servant?’
Mesrob had responded emphatically. ‘No! Perihan Hanım.’
‘Perihan Hanım never wanted her children near her again!’
‘No, but she equally didn’t want them to go to jail,’ Mesrob had said. ‘However fucking twisted they were, she was still their mom.’
However fucking twisted . . . Arto and Maryam Sarkissian had never been able to have children. In a way, Çetin İkmen’s brood were substitutes. Arto’s brother Krikor was also childless. Sometimes the pathologist wondered whether his family was actually meant to die out. Natural selection in action. He couldn’t see how Perihan Hanım, ill and alone, had threatened his grandfather into silence. But then he wasn’t a parent, and so how could he understand? All he knew was that whenever he had done bad things as a child, his father had always forgiven him in the end.
‘The family name was Bauer,’ Erdal Bey said.
Kenter and Kenter provided excellent coffee for its guests. Çetin İkmen was no exception. Drinking what he had been told was a superior Colombian blend while Erdal Bey consulted a sheaf of yellowing papers, he actually felt a certain sense of well-being, misplaced though it might be.
‘From Munich,’ the lawyer continued. ‘My father put me through the agony of German classes when I was a child, which means I can read documents in that language. Rudolf Paşa’s birth certificate gives his name as Rudolf Ignatius Maria Bauer, son of Maximilian Tomas Maria Bauer and his wife Zelinda. The family lived on Leopoldstrasse. Unfortunately for anyone wishing to trace descendants of Rudolf Paşa, Bauer is a common German name, although if the family lived on Leopoldstrasse then they had money, which is always helpful.’
‘The poor leave fewer footprints,’ İkmen said.
‘Sadly. But what I can also tell you, Çetin Bey, is that we haven’t received any enquires from anyone in Germany about the Rudolfoğlu estate. I will willingly give you this address in Munich, as well as that of a property I believe Rudolf Paşa still owned when he came to Turkey. But that is all I have.’
‘Thank you,’ İkmen said. He drank his coffee. Then a thought came to him. ‘Erdal Bey,’ he said, ‘do you know whether there is any reference to someone called Dimitri Paşa in your documents?’
‘It doesn’t sound familiar,’ he said. ‘But if you give me some time, I’ll see what I can find. Of course, you must understand that all the older documents pertaining to Rudolf Paşa and his family are in the Ottoman script, so unless we employ a transcriber, they are closed to us.’
‘Well, I have a transcriber working for me at the moment,’ İkmen said.
‘On the letters?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I can arrange for him—’
‘Her.’
‘Her,’ he smiled, ‘to examine the documents if you wish.’
‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’
İkmen finished his coffee. ‘I’ll contact the German consulate and run the name Bauer by them. They must have records of their nationals who came here to “help us out” at the beginning of the twentieth century.’
Erdal Bey sighed. ‘If only they’d stayed at home.’
‘Oh I expect we would have been drawn into the First World War anyway, without the Germans’ help,’ İkmen said. ‘It was a time of empires, and we were an empire.’
‘The world was run by madmen,’ Erdal Bey said. ‘As usual.’
The Oates brothers couldn’t definitively identify Ali Erbil. According to their statements, neither of them had really seen him.
When the Englishmen had gone, Süleyman and Ömer Mungun followed Erbil back to his cell. Süleyman had taken the decision to keep Elif Büyük’s attempted suicide from him. Such acts in a prison situation could, in his experience, spread. And Ali and Elif were lovers . . .
‘I’m going to ask Dr Aksu, the psychiatrist, to come back and reassess that young man,’ Süleyman said as the two men walked away from Ali Erbil’s cell. ‘He knows precisely what he’s doing. I don’t want him to go to hospital when he should be in prison.’
‘No.’
Ömer Mungun was subdued. It was uncharacteristic but not unknown. Maybe his father back in Mardin was ill again.
‘And I still believe he knows more than he’s saying,’ Süleyman said.
‘About what?’
‘I don’t know. But it wasn’t easy getting what he knew about Father Anatoli and his meeting with Mr Apion out of him. What else is in that clever brain, I wonder?’
‘If he’s a junkie, he’s not clever,’ Ömer said.
He was distinctly moody. In fact he was on the verge of hostility.
Süleyman frowned. ‘Everything all right, Sergeant?’
‘Yes.’
‘You seem a little tense.’
Ömer shrugged. ‘I’m sorry sir. I didn’t sleep well.’
‘Oh. Well . . . it’s very hot at the moment. Not conducive to restful sleep . . .’
But the way Ömer looked at him made the inspector absolutely certain that he was lying. It irked him. And what was the resentment in his voice about?
‘Call Dr Aksu, will you?’ Süleyman said. ‘Ask him to come and see Ali Erbil.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Maybe it was the way he said ‘sir’ that made Süleyman think it was personal. Or maybe it was the memory of Ömer and Barçın Demirtaş leaving together . . .
We are siblings, and siblings stay together . . .
It was just a fragment, written in what Barçın recognised as Kemal Rudolfoğlu’s handwriting. It had come from one of the boxes on Miss Fatima’s dressing table. She put it down. She couldn’t concentrate on it. She couldn’t concentrate on anything.
The problem with Şeymus had always been the sex. Had Barçın
remained a good girl, a virgin, she would never have discovered this obsession. And it was an obsession. Under control after she finally managed to get rid of Şeymus, her desires had been reawakened by Ömer Mungun. The sex had been frantic, just the way she liked it. But Ömer himself wouldn’t do. He was already beginning to exhibit more than just a tendency to cling, and she feared where a relationship with him might lead.
And so that morning, when they were alone, she’d told him it was over. He’d taken it badly; he’d actually asked her whether she’d thrown him over for his boss. Barçın had scoffed at this even though she knew that she’d give herself to Mehmet Süleyman in a heartbeat. But that wasn’t happening. He had the formidable Gonca Hanım, who probably did everything he wanted and more in terms of sex. Even if she was old.
Ömer had sloped off after that and no mirra had been forthcoming that morning. She heard him return to Süleyman’s office and felt a sudden rush of panic that manifested as heat. She opened her window, fanned her face and unbuttoned her shirt down to her cleavage. She looked at the fragment again and tried to concentrate. But then her door opened and she cringed.
He was getting used to the methadone. He knew this because his head felt clearer than it had done for a while. Neither of those English boys had identified him. Even if he hadn’t been able to speak their language, he would have known by the expressions on their faces. Blank.
The police had his DNA from the shop in Yeniköy, but they couldn’t prove he’d killed those men, because he hadn’t. Elif had moved so quickly and so violently, the gangster and his henchman had been taken completely by surprise. She’d attacked them in the same way he’d seen big cats attack their prey in TV documentaries about Africa.
Even through the junk haze, why hadn’t he moved to stop her? Had he been so desensitised by what she’d already done? The simple answer was that he loved her. But was that even true? Wasn’t it much more to do with the fact that she’d had sex with him? Not ordinary sex; dirty sex, sex he’d seen on the Internet. But even that was a long time ago now. He’d not been able to do it for months.
The House of Four Page 23
