Deep Waters (12 page)

He pushed a pile of as yet unattended paperwork to one side and pulled his telephone towards him. Just to talk to Murad wouldn’t do any harm – he talked to him a lot, always had. Besides, he had promised his father he would and as a man of his word he would just have to do it. His fingers got as far as the receiver before he heard the knock on his door.

‘Come in,’ he said, his hands retreating from the phone.

The door opened to reveal a middle-aged man in uniform.

‘Hello, Roditi,’ Suleyman said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘A patrol over in Ortaköy has found an abandoned Mercedes underneath the Boǧaziçi Bridge.’

‘Oh?’ Suleyman prepared to return to his telephone. ‘And this concerns me how?’

‘The inside is drenched in blood, sir,’ Roditi said, his voice betraying his discomfort with this image.

Suleyman frowned. ‘And whose blood is it?’

‘Oh, the car is empty, sir,’ Roditi said. ‘The men are searching the area for either a body or somebody who might be wounded.’

‘I’d better get out there.’ Suleyman slipped his jacket from the back of his chair and put it on.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Roditi said as he watched his superior check his pockets for keys, cigarettes and the like. ‘I mean, it might not be a murder, but from the description we’ve been given of the car’s interior, I can’t see how death in some form can’t be involved.’

‘Well, you’d better get ready to come with me then,’ Suleyman said, moving across determinedly towards his colleague.

Roditi took a deep, hopefully calming breath before he spoke.

‘Right, sir,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll go and get my overcoat.’

‘Oh well now, what a turn of events, eh, Mother?’ İkmen said as he hunkered down in front of the small marble slab that was his mother’s gravestone. ‘I’m cold, it’s dark, I’m not supposed to be here and it’s foggy. I feel like I’m about to star in some sort of horror movie.’ Shivering violently he added, ‘But then after the things that ghastly old woman said to me, I just felt I had to come. Seeking inspiration I suppose. Closeness to you.’

Trying to keep his coat off the damp grass beneath him, İkmen leaned forward to touch the chilly tablet that announced that his mother, Ayşe İkmen, had died on 3 May 1957. A long time ago now – a time when the Turks lived without television and young men still spoke about their heroic deeds on the battlefields of Korea. Try as he might, İkmen had never been able to recall seeing his father’s face on the day of his mother’s death. All he could remember was how Timür İkmen had held on tightly to both his and Halil’s hands at the funeral, standing grimly over this spot, his hair touched with hints of grey. Some people claimed that the grey hairs had arrived overnight, but perhaps his father had been going grey for some time before that. After all, what notice at that age, did the young Çetin take of his father? The man was usually out working and anyway it was Ayşe that he adored with all his soul, her that he really
knew
, or thought that he did.

‘Mother, if someone killed you, I will need to find out who that was.’ İkmen fought to choke back tears that had started to rise at the back of his eyes. ‘I didn’t see you on the day you died and so what that old bitch Angeliki said could be true for all I know. But then if it were, surely Timür or Halil would have told me about it? I mean why keep such a thing a secret after over forty years . . .’

Unbidden, tears of grief and frustration ran down his thin face.

‘If only I could reach you, Mother,’ he said, ‘sometimes I know that I can but . . . I’m so lost. I just need an idea, somewhere to start . . . I don’t care if this
gjakmaria
nonsense is part of your culture, it’s wrong. If you died in blood then I need to know that. I need to understand and come to terms with that.’

Then standing up he called out to the cold winter wind. ‘A young boy lies dead. Possibly killed just because of his name. And his people,
your
people, Mother,’ he said as he looked down at the gravestone, ‘are messing with my head. And because of what they know about you, and because I love you, they’re succeeding!’

Away on the distant Bosphorus, a ferry sounded its fog-horn. As he looked across the top of his mother’s stone, the faint smudge of numerous other tombstones made İkmen feel that he was at the end of the recognised world. Now, in some poisoned anteroom of death, he felt desolate in almost every respect: as a bereaved son, as a man wrestling with professional difficulties, as one possessed of enough knowledge to realise that one day either the earthquakes or the growling pain he felt now in his stomach from his ulcers would put him into this same rancid earth. As if bowing to the inevitable, he lowered his head to the harsh wind.

‘It was Halil who found you,’ he said to the gravestone, ‘so I should, I suppose, go and talk to him. Not that he’ll like it. We’ve always avoided talking about that day. It’s too painful. But,’ he shrugged, ‘it would appear I have no choice. If he reiterates the tale we have always believed, I’ll feel relief, as well as anger towards that Vlora woman. But if I do discover that Halil has been lying to me, well, I don’t know what I’ll do.’

Turning away from the gravestone, away from the wind, he pulled his cigarettes and lighter out of his coat pocket and lit up. It was, he felt, time to move on from this ugly, toxic place. His mother was dead. Only her bones remained, rotting now beneath the feet of her younger son. And, as he started to walk back towards the entrance to the cemetery, İkmen wondered why he’d even attempted this vast trek over to the Asian side of the city.

However, halfway down the hill, İkmen suddenly stopped. Whether the thought that came to him had, as he felt, been suddenly inserted into his mind or whether his fevered cogitations had just simply sifted the idea out from what was already there, he didn’t know. But wherever it came from the thought was both helpful and logical.

Vahan Sarkissian. Of course! Like his sons, Arto and Krikor, Vahan Sarkissian had been a doctor. Indeed he had been the doctor who had come out to the İkmen house in response to Halil’s request for help. Vahan it had been who, all those many years before, had declared Ayşe’s life extinct. So logically Vahan would have been obliged to keep records of that incident – if, of course, such things still existed after all this time. Vahan had died only a few months after Ayşe İkmen. Who could know what may have become of his possessions after so many years? İkmen suddenly felt deflated. Well, either Arto or Krikor could have his things . . . But it was worth a try, rather than contacting Halil immediately. And so, thanking whatever power had allowed him to uncover this thought, he continued to stride through the dampness towards the cemetery entrance.

It was unusual for Arto Sarkissian to be up after 11 p.m. when he wasn’t working. But his wife, Maryam, had watched a video of the film
Gladiator
earlier in the day, which, she had declared, had been very good. And so, as soon as Maryam had retired to bed, Arto had slipped the tape into the machine and then settled down on one of his enormous sofas with a glass of tea and a big bowl of aşure. The deranged son of the Caesar Marcus Aurelius was just descending into thoughts of incestuous perversion when the phone at Arto’s elbow rang.

Pausing the tape, Arto picked it up. ‘Sarkissian,’ he said. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello, doctor,’ the familiar voice of Mehmet Suleyman replied. ‘I do apologise for disturbing you so late into the night.’

‘It’s not a problem, Inspector. I assume you require my assistance.’

‘Not, happily, in person, no,’ the younger man said and the doctor heaved a sigh of relief. ‘I’m in Ortaköy at the moment standing beside an empty car, the interior of which is drenched in blood.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. There’s no body, but I’m having it moved after forensic have taken samples for analysis. What I need from you, doctor, is a sample of Rifat Berisha’s blood. Could you send it over to the Institute in the morning?’

‘You think he may have died in your car of blood?’

Suleyman sighed. ‘I think it’s possible. We must, after all, explore every eventuality.’

‘Well, I will certainly do as you ask,’ Arto said and jotted a note to himself on the pad beside the telephone. ‘Do you want me to contact you in the morning?’

‘Please.’

‘Well,’ Arto said with a smile, ‘you’d better get out of this dreadful fog and back to your home then. These conditions give doctors far too much work, in my opinion.’

‘Thank you, doctor, I will bear that in mind,’ Suleyman said. ‘Goodnight to you.’

‘Goodnight, Inspector,’ Arto replied and replaced the receiver.

So Suleyman wanted some of Berisha’s blood for comparison, did he? Although he was holding the video remote control, Arto didn’t press the ‘play’ button – not yet. Professional interest swinging in whether he wanted it to or not was a common occurrence in his life. A man with one kidney struggling for life in a car full of blood was a disturbing image – if indeed that was what had happened. If so, there would have to be glass, if in small quantities, present too. Now that he’d had a chance to examine the small shards properly, he’d noticed how very thin and brightly coloured they were. Almost pretty really, and definitely not the sort of material a murderer would jam into a dying man’s face. Unless, of course, the glass constituted a message of some kind. Like the message the Italian Mafia sent to the families of informants when they stuffed their dead mouths full of banknotes. It was interesting and also vaguely morbid to speculate on these issues – not unlike, Arto felt, creating aspects of a character for a novel. However, he was not destined to muse for long. The ringing of his doorbell, plus the knowledge that the housekeeper had gone to bed many hours before, forced Arto from his seat and out of the living room.

Cringing against the sound of his own slippers slapping against the marble floor of the hall, Arto moved in a leisurely manner befitting a man of wide stature. Now that he was on this side of his enormous mansion, he could hear that the weather outside had taken a turn for the worse. Fog had apparently given way to driving rain. He switched the outside light on before unlocking and opening the door. For a moment he thought that the small, drenched Turk who stood on his doorstep was a rather alarming-looking beggar. That was until he saw first the smouldering cigarette in his right hand and then the familiar manic expression around the eyes.

‘What in the name of God are you doing here, Çetin?’ Arto asked as he pulled his friend into his house.

‘It’s a long story, Arto,’ the Turk replied. ‘It may well take me all night.’

Orhan Tepe was engaged in sorting through the considerable possessions of the late Rifat Berisha when he noticed a familiar pale face pass by the window in his office door. Using this as an excuse to do something other than marvel at the convoluted picture he was building up of the Albanian’s world – old railway tickets, expensive trainers, cheap aftershave, foreign artefacts – he left his desk and ran out into the corridor.

‘Çöktin!’ he called to the back of the other man’s drooping red head. ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were ill!’

Turning, a thin smile on his pale lips, İsak Çöktin walked slowly back towards Tepe, stopping occasionally along the way in order to cough.

‘I’ve returned,’ he said gasping somewhat over his words, ‘as much to visit the pharmacy and get some proper medicine as anything else.’

‘Haven’t you been taking aspirin?’

‘No, but I have been given a variety of drink and food designed many hundreds of years ago to alleviate symptoms such as these.’

‘Your mother,’ Tepe said with a knowing smile.

‘Yes,’ Çöktin replied, ‘wishing only a speedy recovery for her son.’

‘She makes you eat and drink Turkey’s past.’

Çöktin’s smile encouraged Tepe to usher him into İkmen’s office. Had Tepe known that what Çöktin’s mother had given him was not a Turkish but a native – to the Çöktin family – Yezidi remedy, he might not have behaved in quite such a friendly fashion. Although ethnically Kurds, the Yezidis are not Muslims, they worship a version of a redeemed and restored Satan they call the Peacock Angel. In common parlance they are called the Devil Worshippers and Tepe, unlike his rather more enlightened superiors İkmen and Suleyman, would have been very disturbed to know that Çöktin was one of their number. Not that Çöktin ever spoke of his faith himself, even to İkmen and Suleyman. It was a known but unspoken fact that existed only between the three of them in a sort of silent agreement to maintain yet further silence.

‘Do you have a fever?’ Tepe asked as he rummaged in the top drawer of his desk.

‘Yes,’ Çöktin replied, dragging forward a chair and sitting in front of Tepe’s desk. His eye caught on some of Rifat Berisha’s possessions scattered there. ‘What’s all this?’

‘I’ve got aspirin, which will bring your temperature down,’ a still very medically minded, Tepe said, ‘or there’s some stuff in sachets which is supposed to be specially for influenza. Tell me which you would prefer.’ Holding the medication aloft, he assumed a grave expression as he offered it to the other man.

‘Just some aspirin will be fine for now,’ Çöktin said with a smile. ‘So what is all of this stuff on your desk?’

Tepe poured some water out of one of his drinking bottles into a glass and handed it and the tablets to Çöktin before replying.

‘It belongs to an Albanian we found dead in the road down in Eminönü,’ he said. ‘Twenty-five years old, name of Rifat Berisha. Whoever killed him cut his throat literally from ear to ear.’

After swallowing the water and the tablets, Çöktin thanked Tepe before advancing the idea that perhaps Rifat had died a gangster’s death.

Now sitting down opposite his colleague, Tepe said, ‘It’s possible, yes, and in fact we have discovered that Rifat’s family are currently feuding with another family of Albanians. However, there are complications.’