Deep Waters (32 page)

‘Apart from Evren.’

The sound of a car drawing up outside momentarily distracted the men’s attention. Only İkmen went to look. The vehicle was a large black Mercedes.

‘Dr Sarkissian has arrived,’ he told his colleague. ‘I’d better let him in. You go back to the kitchen. I’ll join you when I’ve finished here.’

Hassan the chauffeur had drunk more of his employer’s whisky since the last time Tepe had seen him. Not that he was inebriated; in Tepe’s experience, people in shock could often drink a lot without getting drunk. Perhaps the extra adrenaline they produced ate up the excess alcohol – or something.

‘Did Mr Ali give you any idea when he and his sister might be back?’ the policeman asked as he sat down at the table opposite the chauffeur.

Hassan shrugged. ‘No.’

‘And you’ve no idea where they might have gone?’

‘Somewhere in Sultan Ahmet. I don’t know. That boy likes to wander around the monuments sometimes. So does Miss Flick. Or at least she did occasionally when she was friendly with the Albanian.’

Tepe leaned back in his chair and reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. ‘So what did you make of Rifat Berisha the Albanian then, Hassan? Did you like him?’

‘I liked it that he helped Miss Flick.’ Hassan poured himself another glass of whisky. ‘He was nice with her.’

‘But?’

‘But I knew he didn’t fancy her. I mean, who could? She, of course, wanted him to want her.’

Tepe offered the chauffeur one of his cigarettes, which he took. ‘So did there ever come a point when Rifat made that apparent to Miss Evren? Do you know?’

‘No.’ Hassan lit up and then offered his lighter to Tepe. ‘But then it would have been very difficult for him to do that, wouldn’t it? What with her giving him that car and anything else he wanted. And anyway, she has this strange attitude that makes telling her things like that very difficult.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, she sort of talks about herself like she’s beautiful. I mean, at first I thought she was just making a joke,’ his eyes widened at the memory of it, ‘but Allah in his mercy made sure I kept my mouth shut which is why I still have this job – if I still do.’

‘Presumably keeping your job was the reason why you didn’t tell Constable Roditi anything about these matters when he spoke to you.’

Hassan lowered his head. ‘Mr Evren was still alive then.’

‘Right.’ Tepe frowned. ‘So do you think that Miss Evren is suffering from actual delusions about her looks?’

‘I don’t know.’ Hassan took a good long swig from his glass and then banged it back down onto the table. ‘She’s a weird woman. Her and that boy—’

‘Her brother?’

‘Yes. They talk all the time when they’re together. Always in English, which I don’t understand very well.’ He leaned forward across the table conspiratorially. ‘If Mr Evren were still alive, I wouldn’t be saying this, but I’ve always thought there might be something unnatural going on between those two. Something about the tone of their conversations . . . Not that the boy seemed unhappy about whatever it was.’

‘But if Miss Evren wanted Rifat . . .’

‘Oh, I don’t mean that Miss Flick and Mr Ali were fucking! Well, I don’t know, maybe . . .’ Hassan, his eyes now glazed with drink, laughed. ‘No, it’s more like there’s some sort of control thing going on. Sometimes it’s him, sometimes it’s her. I don’t know. Like today I think she would have liked him to have gone to school, but he said no. He refused. And she just went along with it.’

Tepe sucked thoughtfully on his cigarette. ‘You don’t know why he didn’t want to go to school, do you?’

‘Perhaps because he’s not been well. Not that I’ve ever known him really fit.’

‘But if Ali is ill, surely he would want to stay at home?’

‘If I’d taken them up into Taksim I’d have said he was going to see his doctor.’

‘His doctor?’

Hassan tapped the side of his head with one of his fingers. ‘Doctor for the brain,’ he said darkly. ‘Crazy doctor.’

‘You mean a psychiatrist?’

‘Yes. Some other English woman or something.’

No, Irish actually, Tepe thought as he recalled hearing about İkmen and Suleyman’s meeting with Dr Halman on this very doorstep. They had wondered at the time who the psychiatrist had come to see. Now they knew.

‘So did you see Mr Evren this morning when you came to pick his children up?’ Tepe asked, changing the subject back to one that was more relevant to current events.

‘No, they just came out of the house when they saw me arrive.’

‘Is that usual?’

‘I generally manage a glass of tea between getting out of my car and starting up the Rolls.’

‘But not this morning?’

‘No.’

‘Mmm.’ Tepe put his hands up to his lips and frowned. According to Hassan, Dimitri the Russian said he’d knocked on the door to no avail before Hassan arrived in the car, so Evren could already have been dead by then. Maybe he was dead even before his children left the house. In fact, he could have been dead since the previous night.

‘Hassan,’ he asked at the end of these musings, ‘you don’t know whether the door to Mr Evren’s office was open when you came in with Dimitri, do you?’

After thinking this over for a few seconds, Hassan said, ‘I don’t know is the honest answer. That Russian pushed in front of me and so I came straight down here. Mind you, even if it had been open, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything because Mr Evren’s desk is round the corner from the door.’

‘So his children wouldn’t have been able to see that their father was dead unless they actually went into his office?’

‘No.’

If they hadn’t needed to speak to their father about anything they could have left the house with no idea he was dead. It was, Tepe felt, an eerie thought and one that the Evren children, once tracked down, would probably find shocking. If, that is, Evren had indeed been dead when they left. After all, there was still the issue of the now absent Russian.

As it turned out, Tepe didn’t have to wait very long for these issues to be addressed. İkmen put his head round the kitchen door and called him into the hall.

‘What is it, sir?’ the younger man asked as he observed the grave expression on İkmen’s face.

‘The doctor thinks that Evren died some time ago,’ İkmen said, ‘possibly in the early hours of this morning or even late last night. We need to know whether or not he had visitors and we need to find those children of his fast.’

‘Hassan says Ali Evren didn’t go to school today,’ Tepe said. ‘He took Felicity and Ali out to Sultan Ahmet this morning, he doesn’t know why or what for. He did tell me, however, that Ali is one of Dr Halman’s patients. So I suppose he could be a bit, well, you know what they can be like.’

İkmen did. ‘Well, it might be worth giving her office a call,’ he said. ‘It’s just possible Zelfa might have some idea where they might go.’

‘Yes.’

İkmen gave Zelfa Halman’s office phone number to Tepe who punched it into his mobile telephone. Then, as it started ringing, the two men waited in silence for someone to answer.

The thickness of the snowfall had, if anything, increased since he’d last looked outside. Moving back from the window, Mehmet Suleyman placed Mehti Vlora’s latest statement on his desk and smiled as he recalled what Çöktin had told him about the green Fiat. In reality it had been dumped just round the corner from the Vloras’ own apartment. Having driven around aimlessly in it all night Mehti had abandoned it when it had run out of petrol. How very incompetent and thoughtless. How very Mehti.

Suleyman looked at his watch and then walked across his office to where his overcoat hung on the back of the door. He’d only left himself twenty minutes to get down to Eminönü and Pandeli’s. He didn’t want to keep Zelfa waiting, not in this weather. He’d have to hurry.

Pausing only to light a cigarette, he closed the door of his office behind him and then made his way towards the stairs. Although rushed, he was looking forward to this meal. He hadn’t had an easy morning with Mehti Vlora and although it now seemed that they had finally arrived at some sort of truth about his involvement, or lack of involvement, in Rifat Berisha’s death, they still did not know who had committed the crime. It was troubling. The murderer was still at large and could, conceivably, kill again. It was a frightening thought and one that he knew his usually less than sympathetic superiors would share. Burglaries and car crime were one thing, but unsolved murders were quite another. They made the public nervous, got into the newspapers, sat on your service record like tombstones . . .

Lost in thought, he didn’t really register that Çöktin had come alongside him, much less notice that the Kurd was panting.

‘Sir, we’ve got a hostage situation,’ he puffed.

‘What?’ Suleyman turned towards him, his eyes still clouded by his earlier thoughts.

‘You’ve got to come. We’ve got a woman taken hostage!’

Suleyman’s heart began to pump faster and he felt the familiar sensation of adrenaline release clear his mind.

‘Where?’

‘In the Aya Sofya,’ Çöktin said. ‘The guards have cleared the museum.’

‘Right.’

Perfectly in step now, the two men ran into the squad room and called out three of the constables who were lounging in there.

‘Do we know who the victim or the perpetrator are?’ Suleyman asked as he took his phone out of his pocket and punched a well-used number into the keypad.

‘No,’ Çöktin replied.

‘OK.’

As a body the five men moved towards the door out of the squad room, Suleyman with his ear pressed to his telephone.

‘Zelfa?’ he said. ‘Look, I’ve got to go to something. There’s been an incident at the Aya Sofya. Sorry.’

Running now, the small squad of men pushed through the crowd of sad-eyed peasants, weeping women and disgusted businessmen who clustered around the front desk. For some reason, extremes in the weather, of whatever sort, seemed to lead to increases in reported crime.

Not that any of this registered on Suleyman who was now frowning fiercely into his mobile. ‘No, I don’t know who is involved!’ he said as he pushed his way through the crowd after his colleagues. ‘Yes, it could be . . . Well, yes, Zelfa, if Çetin says the Evrens were taken to Sultan Ahmet . . . Yes, I will bear it in mind . . . Well, I think that’s all rather psychological . . .’

As the door to the station opened, a sharp blast of icy air hit the hurrying officers, including Suleyman. Faced with the choice of either continuing to talk to Zelfa who seemed to be convinced that the couple in the museum were Felicity and Ali Evren, or pulling his coat more closely round his body, Suleyman chose the latter option.

‘Just let me deal with it, will you, Zelfa!’ he said and then clicked the end button with a determined finger.

The guards hadn’t made any attempt to try to control what was happening up in the gallery. It had taken all their powers of persuasion to get the visitors and the restorers to leave quietly. As one of the men said to Suleyman as he escorted the squad of policeman up the cobbled ramp, nothing like this had ever happened before and they had no idea what they should do. This guard in particular, looked rattled and, once the officers had arrived at the top of the ramp, he quickly made himself scarce.

Even assuming that the assailant had seen the policemen enter the building, Suleyman didn’t want to walk straight up to the couple without surveying the scene first. The Gynekoion is a wide and very light part of the upper gallery which is covered by a patterned cradle vault. Light comes in via arches set into the outer walls of the building, which correspond with similar structures across a wide corridor. These allow views into the nave below. There was only one way up to the gallery but it would still be possible to position men on both sides of the archway in which the couple were standing. Preventing the boy with the knife from tipping them both down into the nave would not be easy, however. After a few moments’ thought, Suleyman decided to position Hikmet Yıldız in the northern part of the gallery opposite where the couple were standing. He could report on anything happening from that clearer vantage point and his presence, armed as he was, might be a deterrent – depending of course on the state of mind of the assailant.

Suleyman had just sent the young man about his business when he caught his first sight of the couple’s faces. They had moved slightly away from the guard rail and their profiles were visible. Her strange, misshapen face was unmistakable. Suleyman did not recognise the boy but he was speaking English, which was enough to identify him.

Suleyman ushered his team back behind the door of the ramp and said, ‘I know these people. Felicity and Ali Evren. They’re brother and sister.’

‘Sergeant Tepe and Inspector İkmen went out to the house of someone called Evren this morning,’ Constable Avcı said. He was the sort of man who made it his business to know everything about everything other people were involved in.

‘Do you know why?’ Çöktin asked.

Avcı shrugged. ‘I’m only a constable,’ he said a trifle moodily. ‘Why should they tell me?’

Suleyman turned towards Çöktin and said, ‘I think Ali Evren is one of Dr Halman’s patients. She had an idea they might be here.’

‘Ah.’ Çöktin offered no further comment.

‘I’d better call her. Any background she can give us might be useful,’ and then to Avcı Suleyman added, ‘Get downstairs and tell the guards to expect the doctor, will you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Oh, and you might prepare them for the arrival of Inspector İkmen too,’ he said as he keyed Zelfa’s number into his mobile. ‘He spoke to Dr Halman earlier about the Evrens.’

‘Do you want me to call him, sir?’ Çöktin said as he watched Avcı move quickly back down the ramp.

‘Yes,’ Suleyman replied as he listened to Zelfa’s phone ring, ‘but keep your voice down.’