Ikmen 16 - Body Count (17 page)

‘Do you know what, Han
ı
m?’

‘No, but my gypsy friend who is also yours might,’ she said. ‘For a consideration.’

Like a lot of poor areas, Tarlaba
ş
ı
worked on several different levels that didn’t always divide or join at the junctures one would logically expect. Sugar was a Kurd and yet here she was blagging cash for a gypsy.

‘Oh, Sugar Han
ı
m, my pockets are getting emptier by the day,’ Süleyman said.

‘What a shame.’

‘What a shame indeed. However, I think I may be able to find the odd few kuru
ş
if I look hard enough,’ he said.

‘I know that you can, Mehmet Bey.’

He smiled. She’d get her cut once the gypsy had been paid and had lied to her about how much Süleyman had given him.

‘Tell Necati to come to me at the usual place; assure him that I will have money,’ he said.

He heard her smile. ‘You know he doesn’t like to ask himself …’

‘Mr Hallaç is such a sensitive soul.’

‘And
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu’s eyes and ears are everywhere,’ she said, and put the phone down.

Süleyman replaced his receiver and looked across the room at Ömer Mungan. ‘Don’t know if you caught all that,’ he said. ‘Necati Hallaç could have just called me himself, but he probably owes Sugar something and so she agreed to call me for a price that he can feel honourable about. It’s not a debt, it’s a payment. Do you see?’

‘Well, yes, sort of …’

‘In addition, if
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu ever suspects that Necati is informing us about his movements, and beats him up to find out what he knows, Necati can lie to him with a clear conscience. Such is life amongst the poor and disenfranchised of
İ
stanbul. Everyone must make a living.’

‘So the gypsy has information for us.’

‘About why the prostitute
Ş
eftali has, it is said, taken a beating from
Ş
ukru
Ş
erkero
ğ
lu, yes.’

‘Which is?’

‘Blackmail,’ he said. ‘The subtext being that
Ş
ukru is concealing something from us.’

‘Which we know already.’

‘Yes.’ He thought for a moment and then said, ‘Let’s save some money. Let’s bring
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu in.’

‘Before you’ve spoken to your gypsy, sir?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Süleyman said. He stood up, put his jacket on and began to walk towards his office door. ‘To hell with convention. Let’s do it now.’

The professor’s office at Bo
ğ
aziçi University was the kind of room that Çetin
İ
kmen liked. Lined with books and full of strange and sometimes unfathomable artefacts, it was testimony to a mind that was wide-ranging in its pursuit of knowledge.

Cem Atay, who was almost as distinguished in the flesh as he was on television, sat behind a vast scarred desk covered with books and papers, in no easily discernible order, looking very comfortable. ‘No historical phenomenon, be it the Ottoman Empire or early Anatolian civilisations, existed in a vacuum, and so one must sometimes refer to, and compare and contrast with, contemporary groups.’

‘So your studies take you to other countries?’
İ
kmen said.

‘And continents, Inspector,’ he said. ‘For my series about Ottoman minorities, I went to Israel, Syria and Greece. I even visited gypsy communities in Macedonia and Bosnia. For the last few years I have been doing research for a book I have been commissioned to write about the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Spanish Empire. We engaged the Spaniards in a lot of sea battles in the Mediterranean and beyond, as I’m sure you know, in large part to try and get our hands on their prolific amounts of South American gold.’ He smiled. ‘But then we also relieved them of a lot of their unwanted Jewish citizens, as I am certain you also know.’

‘That worked out rather better for us than it did for them,’
İ
kmen said.

‘It was an excellent PR exercise which also gave us some very clever scientists, mathematicians and doctors, yes. But I’m sure you didn’t come here to talk about my work, Inspector.’

‘No, sir.’
İ
kmen took a sip of the excellent coffee the professor had given him and said, ‘I’m afraid it is about your late sister, Professor Atay. Or rather it’s about her husband.’ He’d had to follow up on the interview he’d had with Suzy Greenwood. Cem Atay was Hande Genç’s brother; he was involved.

He frowned. ‘Faruk?’ And then, seeming to remember something, he said, ‘Oh, about his, er, other woman, the one who … er …’

‘Leyla Ablak,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Professor Atay, we’re trying to find out who might have known about that affair before Mrs Ablak died. Did you know about it?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But – and here you may find me controversial, Inspector – had I known, I would have completely understood.’

‘Understood?’

‘Faruk is my brother-in-law. My sister was a very sick woman and had been for a couple of years,’ he said. ‘Her illness made her irascible and – if one can say this about a terminally ill person without sounding a beast – her self-pity, justifiable as it was, was constant and difficult to bear. Faruk was Hande’s nurse, her uncomplaining companion; he funded her completely and he was also often her whipping boy too. She couldn’t help it. I’m not saying she could. But if Faruk found any sort of happiness during those dark days, then I can only be glad for him. That it ended as it did is almost beyond imagining, and I feel sorry for him.’

Sympathy for Faruk Genç was not something
İ
kmen had been expecting from Professor Atay, but he could see his point of view.

‘Did any other member of your family know about the affair?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Not that I know of,’ he said. ‘Had my mother or my other sister found out, I’m sure Faruk would have been made very aware of it.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes, my mother is a vocal woman, to say the least. She has a very strong sense of what is right and what is not.’

‘Infidelity is always wrong.’

‘According to my mother, yes. When she did find out, when we all found out, she was furious.’

İ
kmen said, ‘I understand, sir, that you attended Mr Genç’s spa, where you had homeopathic treatment.’

‘From Miss Greenwood, yes.’

‘Did she ever say anything to you about Leyla Ablak and your brother-in-law?’

Cem Atay fingered the edge of a large brown book on his desk. ‘I didn’t even know that Leyla Ablak went to the spa, Inspector, much less that she was having an affair with Faruk. And anyway, why would Miss Greenwood have told me about her? As a non-Turkish-speaker, I’m pretty sure the whole Ergenekon aura that surrounded General Ablak would have passed her by.’

İ
kmen toyed with the idea of telling the professor that in his opinion, the Greenwood woman had been at least a little in love with Faruk Genç. He decided against it. ‘Where were you on the night that Leyla Ablak died, Professor Atay?’

‘Am I under suspicion, Inspector
İ
kmen?’

‘Inasmuch as everyone connected to a murder victim is, however tenuously.’

The professor opened the brown book, which was apparently his diary, and said, ‘Well, that night I had dinner with a friend, a lady.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘I can give you her name, Inspector, if I must, but if I might ask you to be discreet …’

‘Of course.’ Now maybe the professor’s take on Faruk Genç’s situation became more understandable.

Cem Atay wrote a name and a phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to
İ
kmen. ‘This is her personal mobile number and I was with her all night.’

İ
kmen put the piece of paper into his pocket. He would be discreet. He had already decided to send Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu to interview this lady rather than go himself. He said, ‘Can you tell me why you consulted Miss Greenwood, Professor Atay?’

He smiled. ‘Stage fright,’ he said.

Suzy Greenwood had been right about that.

‘Odd, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘A colossal show-off like me. I’ve tried everything over the years: hypnotherapy, diazepam, meditation.’

‘And did the homeopathy help you?’
İ
kmen asked.

He said, ‘Oh, sympathetic magic does work, Inspector; anyone who doubts that is, in my opinion, a fool.’

And
İ
kmen, son of a witch with more than the odd bit of magic in his soul himself, said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Even though he did not, personally, include homeopathy in his own definition of sympathetic magic. But then he felt that the professor had just been touching the very tip of a large iceberg of examples he could have used, but had chosen not to.

‘So you didn’t tell us earlier about the fact that Hamid had seen the body of Levent Devrim because you wanted to protect the boy,’ Süleyman said to the cowed figure of
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu in the chair in front of him.

The gypsy looked him straight in the eyes. It hadn’t taken a lot, oddly, to make him come clean. ‘Yeah.’

‘And then when it came out that the boy might have seen something he shouldn’t, you got him out of Tarlaba
ş
ı
and sent him to one of your friends.’

‘I sent him to no one,’
Ş
ukru said. ‘I just got him out.’

‘Because you didn’t want us to find out that you had been withholding information from us.’

‘I didn’t want the kid involved.’

Süleyman leaned back in his chair. ‘Even if he had killed Levent Devrim?’

Ş
ukru batted the suggestion away with a dirty hand. ‘That kid couldn’t kill a kitten!’ he said. ‘I was trying to protect him from an interrogation like this!’

‘By concealing the truth and then compounding the problem by attempting to prevent us from finding out,’ Süleyman said.

Ş
ukru said, ‘But it was all nonsense! Monsters and feathers and—’

‘Maybe our murderer was in disguise,’ Süleyman said. ‘Maybe he, she or it really was a monster. Mr
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu, your own Roma culture is rich in myth and legend …’

‘Oh, so because I’m Roma, I’m fucking stupid!’
Ş
ukru stood up. He was a good deal taller than Süleyman and towered over Ömer Mungan, who also got to his feet.

Süleyman looked up casually at the gypsy and said, ‘Oh do sit down, Mr
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu.’

But the gypsy remained on his feet, as did Ömer Mungan.

‘You don’t understand our life, Inspector Süleyman, however much you might think you do,’
Ş
ukru said, alluding, albeit obliquely, to the time Süleyman had spent with his sister. ‘There are things we believe in that you don’t, just like there are things you believe to be true that we ignore. But monsters ain’t a thing we tend to come across.’

Süleyman didn’t ask him to sit again. For a moment he just stared at him with steady eyes, and then he said, ‘All right, if we’re playing the ethnic card, you can tell me all about your beliefs, Mr
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu. And you can start by explaining what, if anything, the number twenty-one means to you.’

He came awake fighting, as he so often did these days, for breath. But this was nothing to do with his heart or his asthma. Somebody had him by the throat; somebody was on top of him, holding him down. Rafik Efendi tried to shout, but he couldn’t. All he could feel was fear and a rage he didn’t even begin to understand. He was an old man and if somebody was killing him then they were probably doing him a favour. What did he do except sleep, try to get an erection and piss himself? Why shouldn’t some kind soul put him out of his misery?

But this wasn’t a mercy killing; it was far too painful to be that. Rafik looked up to see what his attacker looked like and found himself regarding a blankness filled with tiny silver stars. The oxygen to his brain was being cut off. He heard himself, an infantalised gurgling in his throat, and he was disgusted. Was this how it would end? With a sound like a baby newborn and choking for air?

It intensified. A pain in his chest that defied all description. Was this what a heart attack was like? he wondered. Like having his chest sliced open, and a smell of metal that reminded him of all those times he’d taken a boy who did it for money and then hurt him. Blood.

Blood bubbling up in his mouth where his teeth used to be and pouring out of his mouth on to his chin. Like a baby bringing up milk.

Çetin
İ
kmen lay beside his sleeping wife and wondered what the city was doing. He thought about John Regan, Leyla Ablak and Levent Devrim, and he went through, again, those areas of their lives that seemed to intersect. They were few and slight and his heart began to pound as he considered the possibility that maybe their deaths were completely unconnected. Only the dates of their deaths provided any real consistency, and it was that that really kept him awake. It was the twenty-first again.

He’d heard of killers copying one another, or rather he was aware of it in crime fiction. Could such things happen in fact? Nothing beyond the most basic details of the victims’ deaths had been released to the press, so how could a copycat know what to emulate?

He turned and looked at Fatma, who was just faintly smiling. The weather had improved considerably in the last week and there had been no need to light the soba for the past three days. In the scheme of things it was no great triumph, but then small victories pleased her and it made him envy her. She took joy where she found it, in what he arrogantly called the mundane. He knew there was nothing wrong with that, but he also knew that the mundane didn’t please him. How was he going to deal with retirement without the necessary resources to take pleasure in an afternoon spent in a coffee house or a game of tavla with other ‘old’ men? He wasn’t. The last time he’d gone to a coffee house just for pleasure was when his father had taken him as a young man, just before he’d married Fatma. Every subsequent visit to such places had been on business of one sort or another, and now that one wasn’t allowed to smoke in public areas any more, that was as much of a chore as everything else had become.