Ikmen 16 - Body Count (10 page)

‘Maybe he killed her and then killed himself,’ she said. The look on his face was so horror-struck that she was inclined to go even further, which she did. ‘Or maybe I had her killed, with General Ablak’s blessing.’

Before he knew what was happening, he found himself on top of her with his hands around her throat. ‘You tell me the truth, you fucking bitch! Stop playing with me and tell me the truth!’

Horrified by his own violence, he threw himself off her and stood looking down as she coughed and heaved her way back to normality. Once she was herself again, Hande Genç pointed at her husband, and then she laughed at him.

He was sure that one of those little shits who hung about around the entrance to Tünel had taken his wallet. There were often small groups of Roma kids waiting at the end of
İ
stiklal Caddesi for tourists to get off at the top of
İ
stanbul’s historic funicular railway. Then they’d nick their wallets or bags or anything they could get their hands on.

But how could he prove it? He hadn’t noticed his wallet had gone until he’d got back to his apartment in Karaköy. And anyway, it sounded just so politically incorrect, and John Regan was nothing if not politically correct. Luckily he’d left his credit cards at home, and so the kid had only got away with about two hundred lira in cash. That was about eighty-five pounds. Spitefully John hoped that the stolen money only brought the thief pain in some way. Maybe he’d buy dodgy drugs with it that would land him in hospital. But then he let it go. He had stuff to do.

The computer he used to write his book on was in the bay window overlooking his street, Büyük Hendek Caddesi. Across the road was one of the city’s many Sephardic Jewish synagogues, while at the end of Büyük Hendek was the famous Genoese-built Galata Tower. In the past, Karaköy, or Galata as it was known in Ottoman times, had been a very cosmopolitan area. But the Latins and most of the Jews had left decades, if not hundreds of years ago. Now John, an Englishman from a very English town in East Anglia, was the most exotic creature that Karaköy had to offer.

He sat down in front of the machine and, after a brief look at his emails, brought up the document that he hoped one day was going to change his life. He had only started actually writing his semi-fictional romance – set in Y
ı
ld
ı
z Palace at the time of Sultan Abdülhamid II – a few weeks before, but already he felt that he had something. When he’d tried to work on the book back in the UK, it just hadn’t gelled. Although he could visualise Y
ı
ld
ı
z Palace, which he had visited as a tourist many times over the years, he couldn’t find the context in which the sultan’s real-life lover, the Belgian glove-seller Flora Cordier, had lived. Her shop had been on
İ
stiklal Caddesi back when it had been called the Grand Rue de Pera, and at first sight he couldn’t place her in such a youthful, twenty-first-century milieu. However, living in the area had opened his eyes, and he’d begun to find all the little nineteenth-century streets that Flora would have known, all the tucked-away churches she could have walked past every day. As the historian he had trained to be, John was delighted that now it was just his literary skills that were open to question. But how would he know whether he was any good unless he tried? He read through what he had written and then looked out of the window into the street.

Was it just his imagination, or was the man standing outside the synagogue looking up at him? Thirty-something, young – and good-looking. No. Or if he was, it was just because John was a new boy on the block, as it were. Since coming to
İ
stanbul to live, John, whose Turkish-language skills were minimal at best, had made friends with a couple of English-speaking local people, including S
ı
rma, a publicist who lived just up the hill in Cihangir. When he had told her he reckoned that people were staring at him in his local area, she’d said, ‘Oh John, Turks always stare. When someone new moves into a neighbourhood, they stare. Eventually they’ll get used to you and then you’ll complain that they’re ignoring you.’ But he’d been in town since 3 January and it was now almost March. How much more time did they, and he, need?

One of the women wouldn’t stop talking, while the other one just cried.

‘Leyla Ablak was a dear friend and she will be very badly missed,’ said the one who talked all the time. ‘Of course nobody here believed the rumours about her husband the general, although now he’s dead too, it does make you think. Suicide, wasn’t it?’

A week had passed since General Ablak’s death, and everyone now knew that he had taken his own life.
İ
kmen, who had been waiting for these friends of Leyla Ablak to return to
İ
stanbul from their winter golfing breaks abroad with their husbands, tried to get a word in edgeways but failed. Had Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu been with him, she might, as a fellow woman, have had more luck, but she was back at the station doing the ever-increasing paperwork the state demanded. The stuff
İ
kmen always shunned. For a moment he felt both guilty and stupid.

‘As for Leyla, who would want to hurt her? And at a spa? At a spa you relax, you don’t get your head bashed in or whatever it was that happened to her. Although Latife Han
ı
m told me that she was at the spa at night. Seems strange. What was she doing there at night? Do you know?’

Although Leyla Ablak’s infidelity had not been reported,
İ
kmen got the distinct impression that this woman, Verda Kavaf, already knew about it. She just wanted him to say it.

‘Mrs Ablak had gone to the spa to meet someone,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Verda Kavaf said. For a moment, the other woman, Latife Özen, stopped crying. ‘Who was she meeting, Inspector?’

İ
kmen smiled. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say,’ he said. Latife Özen began crying again.

İ
kmen had been up to the club these women belonged to, the Kemer Golf and Country Club, two days after Leyla Ablak’s death. Contrary to his expectations the staff and management had been very helpful. They’d told him that Mrs Ablak had been a good golfer, an adequate horse-rider and a very frequent user of the fitness facilities. She also, together with Latife Özen and Verda Kavaf, belonged to a monthly book-reading circle. Other members who came and went included the wife of a judge and a female airline pilot. According to Verda Han
ı
m, Leyla Ablak had favoured erotic books, usually by foreign authors. When she’d told him that,
İ
kmen had noticed a slightly sour look creep on to her face. He remembered what General Ablak had told him about Leyla’s friends. But then, from the little that he knew about it, didn’t competition always exist between rich and powerful women? Did anything mark these women out as particularly toxic?

‘Do you think Mrs Ablak had had too much cosmetic surgery?’
İ
kmen asked.

There was a stunned silence.

‘You see, our pathologist found a lot of small, neat scarring on Mrs Ablak’s face and body,’ he said. ‘I wondered what you thought about that?’

Latife Özen stopped crying.

Verda Kavaf said, ‘Oh, well clearly if it made Leyla Han
ı
m happy … I have never resorted to it myself …’ She had;
İ
kmen could see the scars on her face even through her make-up. ‘But then she had her reasons …’

She looked at
İ
kmen as if she was expecting him to ask her about those reasons. He didn’t disappoint her. ‘What reasons?’

‘Oh, well …’ She was trying to look grave, but
İ
kmen could see the small smile that lay beneath her assumed expression.

Latife Özen sniffled. ‘Oh, Verda Han
ı
m, you cannot …’

‘Cannot what?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘You cannot …’ Latife Özen shut her mouth. Where Verda Kavaf was pin-thin and elegant, Latife, who was clearly her acolyte on some level, was a small, round bundle of nerves and lack of style.

‘Leyla liked men, Inspector,’ Verda Kavaf said. ‘She enjoyed male attention and she went out of her way to make sure that she got it.’ She laughed, but without warmth. ‘When Leyla walked into a room, nobody else could get a look-in, nobody else was allowed to.’

‘What did her husband think about that?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Verda Kavaf said. ‘He appeared not to notice. He always smiled when she made eyes at other men, pouted her lips and generally put herself at the centre of everything.’

‘He didn’t want to see what she was,’ Latife Özen interjected.

‘Which was?’

There was a pause, and then Verda Kavaf said, ‘She was very taken with a foreign book she found online.
Fifty Shades of Grey
– have you heard of it?’

‘No,’
İ
kmen said.

‘It’s an erotic story about a young girl who allows herself to be sexually dominated by a rich and powerful man. Leyla was besotted by it. She said she wanted to find a man who would dominate her.’

‘And did she?’
İ
kmen asked.

The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then Verda Kavaf said, ‘I don’t know whether she found her Christian Grey – that’s the character she was so taken with in the book – but she did meet somebody, that I do know.’

‘How do you know?’
İ
kmen asked.

A look of sourness settled on her features. ‘Because she was happy again,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’ve known Leyla most of my life, and I know that she is only ever happy when she’s in the throes of romantic love, and I know she didn’t have that with the general.’

‘She was having good sex,’ Latife Özen added. And then, realising what she’d just said, and to whom, she put a hand up to her mouth and her face went red.

Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu was the type of man who had always played his cards close to his chest. Even amongst what remained of the Sulukule gypsy community, he was an enigma. Nobody, not even his ex-neighbour Necati Hallaç, knew exactly how many children he had or by how many women. But then the
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu family had always been a law unto themselves, and that was why Necati hated them. They had money, through
Ş
ukru’s artist sister; they had fame; and years ago, and most significantly,
Ş
ukru had smashed Necati’s nose across his face in a fight over a woman. After that Necati had left Sulukule, only coming across
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu again when they both found themselves living in Tarlaba
ş
ı
.

Ş
ukru, for his part, had welcomed his old adversary as a long-lost friend and Necati had pretended to respond in kind. But he hadn’t either forgotten or forgiven
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu for the beating he had given him thirty-five years ago. Since leaving Sulukule, Necati had supplemented his income as a shoe-shine man with the occasional selling of information to that policeman who had once loved
Ş
ukru’s sister, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman. However, what he was doing now was providing more than just information, and it was much better paid. This time he had to watch
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu and find out where he went, what he did and who he met. He had to keep an eye out for a kid, too – the eldest son of the whore with the birthmark on her face. Usually the boy was everywhere, but Necati hadn’t seen him for well over a week.

It was well known that
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu had multiple business interests. Not that he gave the appearance of being a busy man. He only appeared on the street before midday if he was collecting fuel, which he did infrequently, and most of his time after that would be spent in his favourite coffee house. Later he would go to the bar owned by his father. But he’d be doing business all day long, and Necati knew that one of the people he’d been talking to at the coffee house lately was a Roma from Bulgaria who ran a pocket-diving ring up in Beyo
ğ
lu. What the arrangement with the Bulgarian was, Necati didn’t know, but he told Süleyman, ‘In the past, once he couldn’t wrestle or dance his bears any more,
Ş
ukru would go into the city with his kids and dive pockets and bags. Then Gonca got rich and the family became respectable. But times are hard again now, even for the
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu, so maybe
Ş
ukru has gone into business with this man.’

Süleyman had asked, ‘In what way?’

‘Well, maybe he supplies the Bulgarian with kids,’ Necati had said. ‘They speak the language and they know their way around.’

Faruk Genç didn’t look like the sort of man who knew his way around a whip.
İ
kmen, sitting opposite him, clarified what he had just said. ‘I’m not asking whether you beat Mrs Ablak up because you lost your temper; I’m asking whether she ordered you to act in a violent and dominant way towards her,’ he said.

‘No! Why do you want to know these things?’

İ
kmen leaned on the table that stood between them. Faruk Genç had never been inside a police station before and he clearly wasn’t enjoying the experience.

‘Because, Mr Genç,’
İ
kmen said, ‘I’ve reason to believe that Mrs Ablak may have harboured a desire to be dominated, and people who like that kind of thing are generally masochistic.’

‘Well she wasn’t,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t have smacked her or whatever those people do even if she’d asked me.’

Apart from the bruising on her neck, Leyla Ablak hadn’t sustained any sort of injury to other parts of her body that Dr Sarkissian had been able to see. But in light of what her ‘friends’ had told him about her preferences,
İ
kmen had been obliged to check it out.