Ikmen 16 - Body Count (31 page)

‘When did all this happen?’ Süleyman asked.

‘I went to see the old man as soon as I got back from Abdurrahman
Ş
afak’s apartment in
Ş
i
ş
li this afternoon,’
İ
kmen said. ‘All the time I was in that place something was niggling away at me that I just couldn’t place. Then I realised it was the old prince’s maid, Suzan.’

‘What about her?’

‘All that sobbing.’ He shrugged. ‘And yes, I know that she will lose her job now, but the old man treated her like dirt. He didn’t even know her name, and by the girl’s own admission he had her sleep not in a bed but in a wooden box outside the kitchen.’

‘Painful though it is to admit it, I can remember my grandfather’s servants sleeping in his stables,’ Süleyman said.

‘Back in the old days, yes,’
İ
kmen replied. ‘But now? These days, Mehmet, even little country girls can vote with their feet. No, he had something on that kid that kept her there and I want to know what it was. I also want to know where that girl goes, who she sees and who she calls on the telephone from now on.’

‘You think this child killed her own employer?’

‘No,’
İ
kmen said. ‘I don’t think she’s up to cutting out a heart. But I do think she might know someone who is.’ He smiled. ‘You know, with all these extra officers under our command, Mehmet, you and I are rather like Ottoman pashas ourselves.’

‘Then we had better not let it go to our heads, Çetin,’ Süleyman said. ‘I know I don’t have to tell you how dangerous proximity to princes and princely things can be.’

‘Sulukule is the oldest Roma settlement in all of Europe,’
Ş
ukru said. ‘We belong here! Not people always in the mosque praying, not businessmen doing deals with Russians or Americans. Us! So we’re Roma? So we drink and dance and we live with our bears and with our horses? These are our traditions. What are you going to do to us, eh? Kill us?’

Gonca put her fingers up to the television screen and touched his face just before it faded out and some smart anchorwoman appealed for information. She knew that she was wasting her time, and she cried.

Even though she hadn’t been in it herself, she remembered that documentary well.
Ş
ukru had really thought it would save the district and he had been the principal mover in getting the producers of the film to come to Sulukule. Of course greater interests than just the opinions of one loud-mouthed gypsy had had to be in place before the production company had even agreed to look at the place. But once they’d got their celebrity presenter, as well as the selection of eccentrics and cuddly oddities that
Ş
ukru had chosen for them to interview, the whole lot of them had been born-again believers.

Not that the documentary, or anything else for that matter, had or could have saved Sulukule, just like nothing was going to save Tarlaba
ş
ı
. Gonca switched off the television and sat down to wait for her lover to return to her.

Now that the efendi was dead, his apartment was going to pass into the hands of some cousin. She didn’t know who he was. All she knew was that she had a week to leave and that the cousin would pay her up until the end of the month. Not that it mattered.

The intercom buzzed and Suzan answered. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Suzan?’ The voice was slow and the accent foreign. ‘It’s Arthur Regan. You know, Efendi’s brother-in-law?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She felt her nerve go a little, but she said, ‘Do you want to come up, Arthur Bey?’

‘I’d like to see how you are, Suzan, yes,’ he said. ‘Do you feel up to visitors?’

‘Yes.’ He had been a nice man, nicer than Abdurrahman Efendi, but then the old prince had upset Arthur Regan too and threatened him – right up to the end. As she walked towards the front door of the apartment, she remembered the story about how her employer had disowned his own sister because she’d married this foreigner, and how cold he had been towards the Englishman when his son had been found killed. Somehow that made her feel better. She opened the door and smiled at the elderly man as he got out of the lift.

‘I am sorry my Turkish is slow and not so good,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You are welcome.’

She made him apple tea, fresh, not out of a packet, and he gave her a large box of biscuits he told her were called shortbread.

‘They come from Scotland, where it’s very cold, and so they’re full of butter to keep you warm,’ he said as he opened the box and offered her a biscuit. ‘Unfortunately they make you fat too, not that that is a problem for you, Suzan Han
ı
m.’

Embarrassed at what amounted to a compliment from a man, Suzan pulled her headscarf down a little on her forehead and smiled.

‘What will you do now, Suzan? Will you look for another job or will Efendi’s family look after you?’

She told him about the cousin, who he didn’t know, and then she said, ‘At the end of the week I will go home for a while.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘We, that is my father, works on a farm in a village.’

The Englishman drank his tea. ‘And will you stay there?’ he said. ‘Permanently?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’ve had enough of
İ
stanbul?’

She laughed. ‘Oh, it’s such a wonderful place, Arthur Bey, what can I say?’ But then she let her features drop. ‘But a bad place too. Look at what happened to Abdurrahman Efendi.’

‘People are not murdered every day or even every week here.’

‘No, but the police don’t seem to be able to find who is doing these things, do they? I mean, your poor son …’

‘John is why I stay,’ he said. ‘You may find it strange, Suzan, but I have faith that the police will find out who killed my son and the other people who have been murdered too, including your master.’

‘But they haven’t made any arrests,’ she said. ‘Everybody in the street thinks they are many, many kilometres away from a solution.’

Arthur Regan frowned. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time around Inspector
İ
kmen, Inspector Süleyman and their team, and I must say that the impression I have is that they’re getting close.’

In spite of the fact that she knew that what Arthur Bey had been told by the police was absurd, Suzan felt her heart beat a little faster. ‘I think the police tell lies to foreigners sometimes to make them feel better,’ she said. ‘You know, Arthur Bey, that Turkish police are not like English police. Sometimes they are not good people.’

But he just smiled, and so she changed the subject and they talked of other things until he left about half an hour later. When they parted, at the apartment front door, they shook hands and he wished her luck for the future. ‘And remember, the police, whatever you may think about them, will catch Efendi’s murderer in the end,’ he said, and she felt her face change colour from pink to white. She wondered, as she eventually closed the door on the Englishman, whether he had noticed it. But then she heard him get into the lift and she made a decision to forget about what Arthur Bey had said and just get on with her packing. One thing that was for sure was that Arthur Bey had not seen her on the day that Abdurrahman Efendi had died, and that was a good thing. By the end of the week she would be back home to a very grateful and happy family.

The ‘Incident’, as the series of five murders that had occurred in
İ
stanbul since the beginning of the year was now known, was dominating the station to an unprecedented degree. Technical officers looking at how frequently, if at all, the victims used social media sites worked alongside Security Sciences postgraduate officers who were searching for similar patterns in the daily lives and activities of the deceased.
İ
kmen, out of his office and so instantly available to them, responded to every query and request for attention that came his way.

He knew what some people thought: that his intense dedication to this case was because it was not only his biggest but also, probably, his last. But he didn’t care, and anyway, in part at least, they were right. He wanted to solve this one, not just because whoever was committing these crimes had to be locked up for the safety of the public, but also because of course he wanted to go out on a high. If necessary he’d sleep at the station – he hadn’t been home the previous night as it was, and he’d even told Fatma to get a quotation for central heating to keep her quiet and stop her moaning about being lonely without him. Because it was all about the case now, and those officers who were not working on it in the station were out and about their business with the friends, relatives and neighbours of the victims.

Eventually he went outside for a cigarette. It was a pain to have to go into the car park every time he wanted to smoke, but it was unavoidable. As soon as he got out and lit up, he saw that his sergeant, Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu, was smoking over the other side of the compound too.

‘Ay
ş
e!’ he called.

It took her a few seconds to locate him, but when she did, she came over.

‘Sir.’

He smiled at her. ‘Come out to get away from all that intensity?’ he asked.

‘Some of those graduates …’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a terrifying intelligence combined with a lack of street knowledge that may or may not be useful to us.’

‘They are the future, sir,’ she said.

İ
kmen chose not to respond. As far as he had always been concerned, it wasn’t possible for people to have too much academic learning, but then the same could also be said of street smarts. Not that he could always understand what the young graduates said to him or to each other. But then a lot of it was ‘Internet speak’, which was a whole other matter and which seemed to afflict everyone, however bright or dim, under the age of thirty. Against the pressure from a cringe he felt start in the pit of his stomach and reach the top of his head he said to Ay
ş
e, ‘John Regan and Leyla Ablak had Facebook pages, you know.’

She looked at him as if he was a little bit mad, although in a way she probably expected, and said, ‘Most people do have them, sir.’

‘Levent Devrim didn’t, nor did Rafik Efendi or Abdurrahman Efendi.’

‘With respect, sir, the two efendis were old men, and Levent Devrim, well, he was I think too taken up with his numbers.’

‘He would have found out a lot more about his Mayans if he’d gone “online”, as they say,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Not that I do it myself, but I have children who seem to live there almost exclusively now.’ He took a final drag on his cigarette and threw it to the ground. Then he lit up another one. ‘But it does have its uses in terms of space-saving,’ he continued.

‘Mmm?’

‘Yes, when I went to see Professor Atay, the historian, he had all the Osmano
ğ
lu family trees on paper and so he had to get a student to scan them into the computer before he could email them to me. It was very time-consuming and means we’re now drowning in printouts.’

‘Yes, sir, I remember,’ she said.

He saw a small glint of humour in her eyes and realised that he was behaving like a terrible old man who thought that the entire modern world was magic. He changed the subject. ‘So are you going somewhere, or …’

‘Levent Devrim’s brother Selçuk has just returned from a short trip abroad,’ she said. ‘Sergeant Mungan called him because he’s now got all of his brother’s effects, the ones that we don’t have, over at his house in Bebek. There are a lot of items and so I said I’d go with Sergeant Mungan to help him. I know I should have cleared it with you …’

‘But you’ll be doing my job in less than a year’s time,’
İ
kmen said.

‘Oh, sir, I …’ She felt her cheeks go red.

He ignored the colour change. ‘I’m serious, Ay
ş
e,’ he said. ‘Go for promotion. I will recommend you with all my heart. You can do this job.’ He wanted to say
Concentrate on your career and forget about Süleyman!
But he didn’t, and then his phone rang, and when he answered it, the caller had some very interesting information for him which made him forget about Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu almost entirely.

Gonca knelt down beside the old man and took one of his hands in hers. ‘Baba,’ she said.

He kissed her. ‘You have come to tell me that my oldest child, my
Ş
ukru, is dead.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

Had
ı
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu looked at her through ancient, bloodshot eyes that, in spite of the topic of their conversation, did not weep. He said, ‘Their scientific tests …’

‘I don’t care about their tests,’ Gonca said. ‘
Ş
ukru is dead, Baba. Every coffee ground looks like a skull, every card is Death, every glass is empty.’

The old man sat in silence.

‘Baba, do you know exactly what
Ş
ukru was going to do when he came back from Edirne?’

He shrugged. ‘He said that we could move.’

‘I know.’

He looked around at the scarred and battered walls of his house and said, ‘What is here for us? There is nothing except misery and filth. They take us from Sulukule and put us somewhere we can’t work, and so we move and we end up here.’ He shook his head. His eyes were fixed on the floor now; he looked as if he was staring into a nightmare.

‘Baba, where was
Ş
ukru going to take you?’ Gonca asked.

‘He said we would move to one of the villages on the Bosphorus.’

‘Yes, I know, but which one?’

‘I don’t know.’

Gonca had thought about this. ‘It’s not possible,’ she said. ‘
Ş
ukru must have been having a joke. How could he get enough money to live in such a place?’

‘I don’t know.’ The old man looked up. ‘But he wasn’t joking, Gonca, he was serious. I know when your brother was joking and when he wasn’t, and this was too serious for him to make fun of. We had to go, he had to go.’