Ikmen 16 - Body Count (13 page)

Ay
ş
e smiled. This was
İ
kmen’s code for the belief he and many other secular Turks now had that their views were becoming subordinate to the new Islamic elite. Ever since the religiously rooted AKP Party had come to power in 2002, Çetin
İ
kmen had felt what he interpreted as the cold hand of the pious on his shoulder. And even though he knew that he was probably overreacting, he was also aware of a change in the tenor of his country that did not entirely favour people like him. Some of the new elite even expressed admiration for the long-gone Ottoman Empire, and that included the much-maligned last autocratic sultan, Abdülhamid II.

‘Abdülhamid killed a lot of people mainly because he was obsessed with his own security,’
İ
kmen said. ‘He was clearly as mad as so many of his ancestors had been, but that doesn’t excuse the thousands he had put to death. Well, not in my eyes. I don’t know what Dr John Regan’s thesis was with regard to Abdülhamid, but I can’t see how, as an academic, he can have avoided criticism.’

‘There’s some sort of partial manuscript on his computer, but until the—’

‘Unfortunates.’

‘The technical people …’ She looked up at him and smiled. He always called the police department’s team of technical experts ‘the unfortunates’, on the basis that they supposedly had poor social skills. ‘… have had a chance to examine it, then we won’t really know.’

‘Well, it’ll keep them safely away from women,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Or rather women will be safe from their inept—’

His phone rang. ‘
İ
kmen.’

While he took the call, Ay
ş
e went back to looking at some of John Regan’s research material. As far as she could tell, he’d been more interested in the sultan’s personal life than in his actual reign. There were notes about his mother, his brothers and also about his harem and his children. Mehmet Süleyman was a descendant of the man secular Turks of a certain age, like Çetin
İ
kmen, still called Abdul the Damned. He’d been sent into exile for his crimes against his own people and had been replaced by first one brother and then another, both puppets of the post-Ottoman regime known as the Young Turks. They’d not been much better than the Empire, but then had come Atatürk, and although Ay
ş
e didn’t hold with the idea that he was the be all and end all of Turkish political life, he had undoubtedly transformed the country for the better. Or rather, that was what she believed. Not everyone held to that view; the Ottoman Empire was back in favour with some people. Politicised religion Ay
ş
e could at least understand, although she didn’t agree with it, but to want a creaking and corrupt and – more to the point – dead empire back seemed like madness.

İ
kmen put his phone down slowly and said, ‘Hande Genç, wife of Faruk Genç, is dead and in her grave.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor woman, she suffered.’

‘Then maybe, sir, she was glad to go.’

‘Oh, I’ve no doubt of it,’ he said. ‘When one is riddled with cancer and has been betrayed by one’s partner, life must be bleak to say the least. But now her husband wants to come in and speak to us again. Apparently he has something he wishes to tell me.’

‘What do you think it’s about?’

İ
kmen put an unlit cigarette into his mouth and leaned back in his chair. ‘I don’t know. When he was first speaking to me I wondered whether he was perhaps planning to confess to the murder of Leyla Ablak, but I don’t think it’s that.’

‘You think that maybe he’s going to implicate his dead wife?’

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘But he’ll be here in an hour. We’ll just have to wait until then to find out what he has to say for himself. The way things have been going in the city since the beginning of this year, I’m not prepared to speculate on anything.’

‘Three murders in three months.’

‘Yes,’
İ
kmen said, ‘and do you know what I noticed about that when I first got in this morning, Ay
ş
e? They all took place on the twenty-first of the month. Levent Devrim was killed on the twenty-first of January, Leyla Ablak on the twenty-first of February and Dr John Regan on the twenty-first of this month.’

Ay
ş
e raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you told the Commissioner, sir?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

‘What did he say?’

‘Well you know Ard
ı
ç; at first he berated me for not having seen this pattern earlier and then he said that we really must not fall into the trap of ascribing occult meanings to what could be mere coincidence. I said that as far as I could tell there was nothing occult at work here, but then he said that with serial killers it was always, and I quote, “some sort of religious or magical mania”.’

As Ay
ş
e knew only too well, Commissioner Ard
ı
ç, for all his good qualities, was a man given to generalisation.
İ
kmen had said of him before that his knowledge of a lot of serious crime came from the television and films.

‘Anyway, at the moment, the connection to a specific date is just one element in a very complicated picture,’
İ
kmen said. ‘I can accept, on Dr Sarkissian’s evidence so far, that there could be a connection between the deaths of Levent Devrim and Dr John Regan. But Leyla Ablak’s case has an entirely different profile. That death, to me, is more personal. But maybe Mr Genç will tell us more when he arrives.’

The tears just wouldn’t stop. He tried to control them but he couldn’t. Eventually, given the obvious embarrassment he was causing to the man sitting next to him, Arthur Regan asked the cabin crew if he could please move to a seat where he could be on his own. Luckily the flight was half empty and so this was easy. Arthur cried on in peace, although somewhere over the Alps the crew did ask him whether he wanted chicken or pasta for his meal. He said he wanted nothing, just a large glass of whisky, which they brought to him immediately. Had it only been the previous afternoon that the British Consul in
İ
stanbul had called to tell him that John was dead? Had it really been less than a day?

Usually a bad flier, this time Arthur didn’t give a toss about all the bangs and jerks that were always a part of any flying experience. His son was dead at the age of forty-six, taking with him the last familial relationship that Arthur still possessed. He wished that he too could die, right there in that seat, in that aeroplane, but he knew he wasn’t going to. The consul had told him that the
İ
stanbul police believed John had been murdered. Until he found out who had done this, and why, Arthur knew he had to keep on living. Who would kill a gentle academic man going about the business of writing a work of romantic fiction? But then had John just been doing that, or had he availed himself of what was now a very vibrant nightlife scene in
İ
stanbul? Back in Arthur’s day, the 1960s, the only nightlife available outside the big hotels and traditional meyhanes was confined to the brothels of Karaköy and the beer houses in the gypsy quarter of Sulukule. That was, he’d been told, all very different now. Now the city had hundreds of clubs and bars catering to almost every taste in music, dance and sexual orientation one could imagine.
İ
stanbul had a big gay scene, and Arthur wondered whether John’s loneliness had driven him to bring someone unsuitable back to his flat. All the consul had told him about his son’s death was that he had been killed in his own apartment, opposite the Neve
Ş
alom synagogue.

Arthur recalled the streets of Karaköy that John had come to know well. Back in the 1960s, when he’d been working for a tiny English school in Beyo
ğ
lu, he’d explored the area around the Galata Tower extensively. It had actually been outside the Tower that he’d first met Betül. She’d been drinking coffee at a tiny café where a small group of self-identified bohemians met. As classic romantic fiction would have had it, their eyes met and the rest was history. It still hurt Arthur that he’d had so little time with her. They’d married in 1965, John had been born, in England, in 1966, and then in 1967 Betül had died. No preamble, no terrible illness; she’d simply dropped dead in the bathroom. Her heart, according to her doctor, had just stopped. Afterwards, Arthur had never wanted to go back to Turkey, although John had been on several occasions and had always been fascinated by his mother’s country. So much so that he’d decided to live there and write a book about it.

Arthur looked at his diary to remind himself of the name of the person who was going to meet him at the airport. Inspector Mehmet Süleyman. He knew that surname. Even though it was over forty years ago now, he remembered the day Betül had pointed to a large empty piece of land in the now chic suburb of Ni
ş
anta
ş
ı
and said, ‘Oh, Arthur, that is where the house of the sad Princess Gözde Süleyman used to be. All her life she mourned the death of her fiancée, then when she died, her house burnt down. It’s one of the saddest love stories in the whole of Turkish history.’

A Bulgarian gypsy was featuring large in Ömer Mungan’s life, even though he didn’t know his name. Not only had old Deniz Ribeiro told him about a gypsy – local gossip had it that he was Bulgarian – hanging about outside the Neve
Ş
alom synagogue, but apparently
Ş
ukru
Ş
erkero
ğ
lu had some sort of business deal going on with a Bulgarian gypsy called Marko.

A lot of kids, some gypsies and some not, dived pockets and bags in and around
İ
stiklal Caddesi. They rarely worked alone and were usually organised by adult gang masters. It had been going on for years. Very rarely were any of the adults arrested, and the kids who were nabbed red-handed never snitched on their handlers; it was more than their miserable lives were worth. Ömer thought how strange it was that parts of
İ
stanbul had grown so rich while other parts remained back in the nineteenth century. He looked at a group of young boys hanging about around the entrance to Tünel and wondered whether one of them was the elusive Hamid, son of
Ş
eftali, the birthmarked prostitute. He moved in close to them and tried to listen to what they said, but they weren’t talkative types, and when they did utter one or two words, he couldn’t understand what they meant. Ömer moved away again, but not far.

Inspector
İ
kmen’s Tarlaba
ş
ı
informant had told him that
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu could very well have spirited the boy Hamid out of the quarter and given him into the care of his Bulgarian friend. But even if that had happened, it didn’t bring them any closer to the kid or to a Bulgarian man whose description, according to Ribeiro, was so ‘typical’. All they knew, again through Süleyman’s informant, was that a particularly favoured beat for Bulgarian gypsy pickpockets was outside Tünel funicular railway station at the bottom end of
İ
stiklal Caddesi.

The Bulgarians and the Turks had had a difficult relationship over the centuries they had been involved with each other. Ömer had seen a TV programme about it once, by some eminent professor. The Bulgarians had been ruled by the Ottoman Empire until 1878, but when the country had become part of the Warsaw Pact bloc after World War II, relations between the two countries had all but ceased. In more recent years, a lot of Bulgarians had migrated to Turkey, particularly
İ
stanbul, where they had a reputation as hardened criminals. This of course was a generalisation, but a lot of
İ
stanbullus stood by it, and Ömer Mungan, as a new resident, was in no position to argue with them.

He looked at the children again and wondered what they were thinking. Unlike the pocket-divers of the past, these kids were fairly clean and tidy; only their eyes, Ömer thought, were in any way suspect. The way they looked everywhere all the time, checking their world out for opportunities in the shape of tourists, the vulnerable and the unwary. They hung around in groups of three at the most. More often than not, however, they were in pairs. Only one kid stood on his own, and he was the only one who didn’t look shifty. Maybe he wasn’t with the others. But if that were the case, why had he been standing alone outside Tünel for over an hour? Beyond the music shop opposite the station, there wasn’t much to interest a kid of eleven or twelve.

Whoever ran these kids almost certainly wouldn’t put in an appearance. And when the boys finally finished their shift, there’d be little point in trying to follow them, because they’d all split up. Or rather that was what Inspector Süleyman had told him they would do. It was all quite sophisticated. Back in Mardin, the pocket-diving kids just went home to their parents and got arrested there.

Although he tried not to, in case the kid noticed him, Ömer found himself focusing on the boy who was on his own. From his vantage point at a café just inside the Parisian-style Tünel Pasaj, he watched him through one of the wrought-iron gates that closed the tiny alleyway off at night. Although some of the other kids spoke and sometimes shouted unintelligible things to each other from time to time, the lone boy remained silent and even, possibly, a little wary of the others. Occasionally shifting from foot to foot, he didn’t, as far as Ömer could tell, even try to take a tourist’s watch or a cripple’s wallet. The others were successful, on and off, but, as per his instructions from Süleyman, Ömer just watched and waited either for a man to turn up to move the kids on, which was unlikely; or to follow at least one of them if and when they did move on.

He drank his coffee and carried on watching.

‘I think Hande might have been taunting me, but I can’t be sure,’ Faruk Genç said.

İ
kmen looked across his desk at him. Genç was pathetic and the inspector was sorry for him, but he was also angry. ‘Mr Genç,’ he said, ‘if your wife told you that she, together with General Ablak, killed your mistress, then you should have told me immediately.’