Ikmen 16 - Body Count (41 page)

‘And we only know what we know, Mehmet Bey,’ Sugar said. ‘And that includes the boy. I know you want to solve this, but you, like us, have only what you have.’

Süleyman left Sugar’s apartment with Gonca and Ömer and went briefly to pay his respects to the
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu family. Gonca’s father greeted him with bemusement but also with some gratitude, but neither of the policemen stayed. When they left the
Ş
ekero
ğ
lus’, they walked through the dust-choked streets of Tarlaba
ş
ı
, watched, Süleyman knew, by at least three separate drug dealers.

Süleyman looked at his text messages. ‘Ömer, can you please go and visit Dr Sarkissian for me? He wants to talk about his autopsy on Hatice Devrim’s body.’

‘Yes, sir, of course,’ Ömer said. ‘But you usually go.’

Süleyman sighed. ‘In spite of Mr Devrim’s insistence that he must, albeit without remembering it, have killed his wife, I feel I need to speak to Professor Atay again. He was the only other person who was there, and maybe he can recall something that will back Devrim’s story up.’

‘I thought you had suspicions about the professor, sir?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘And in part I also want to see just how far, if at all, Atay will push his story in order to implicate Devrim. No one saw him at his home in Arnavutköy that afternoon; maybe he went back to Bebek. From where he lives he could have walked and still been back in time to pick his car up at ten to six. You go off to the lab now and I’ll get an appointment to see the professor. I’ll meet you back at the station in a few hours.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Ömer walked to his car and drove off.

Süleyman called the professor’s office at Bo
ğ
aziçi University but was told that it was his day off. So he called him on his mobile phone. The professor was at home in Arnavutköy and said that of course Inspector Süleyman could come and see him in his lovely garden. It was, after all, a very beautiful day.

It was only a theory and in truth he was thinking and fretting about several things. It wasn’t even a theory that could really be tested scientifically, because he had no other murder weapon to compare with the small Ottoman knife. But Arto Sarkissian had been of the opinion ever since Leyla Ablak’s death that more than one blade had been used on the twenty-first of the month victims. Now he wondered whether the Ottoman knife used to kill Hatice Devrim was that second, smaller blade.

Forensics had produced a series of photographs across four of the victims, including Hatice Devrim, of throat and chest wounds. In the victims prior to Hatice Devrim, the smaller knife appeared to have been used within the chest cavity in order to remove or attempt to remove the heart. And of course that made sense, because a large-bladed weapon would not have been suitable for the finer work of cutting veins and arteries within the restrictions of a chest cavity.

Arto Sarkissian shook his head. And then there had been Çetin.

Apparently trying to get some sleep at home after a sleepless night at the station, the inspector was nevertheless fretting about Abdurrahman
Ş
afak’s servant girl, Suzan. Arto was glad to hear that his friend had discovered that Hatice Devrim was implicated in the old man’s death. She herself was dead, but it was still a lead. Although all Çetin seemed able to do was go on about how Suzan had needed the money that had been found on her for her mother’s operation, and what were they going to do about it? An almost classic sob story to Arto’s way of thinking; he’d told Çetin that they didn’t have to do anything about it, which had not gone down well. But he’d heard it all before, from everyone from shoe-shine boys to deeply indebted colleagues at smart dinner parties. He didn’t care what Çetin said: he just couldn’t believe it.

But of course
İ
kmen’s need to help Suzan Arslan was not just about her or her situation. This was Çetin attempting, in some small way, to impose control over a situation that was running out of control. Including Hatice Devrim and
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu,
İ
kmen and Süleyman had been confronted with six unsolved murders since the beginning of the year, and so far there had been no breakthrough. It was a beautiful
İ
stanbul May and
İ
kmen was due to retire at the end of the year. Arto knew that he would hate to leave on what he would consider a failure.

A knock on the laboratory door roused the pathologist from his gloom and he said, ‘Come in.’

The professor’s home was on the other side of the Greek Orthodox church of the Taksiyarhis from where Süleyman’s parents lived. So he knew the area well, even if the smart as well as stunning facade of the academic’s house was not one he recalled having taken notice of before. Unlike his parents’ home, this wooden building was freshly painted and its delicate fretwork had either been well preserved or very expertly restored.

When he’d found out where Atay lived, he’d parked his car in the bay that he usually used outside his parents’ house and walked the two short streets to his destination. In spite of its almost semi-rural atmosphere, Arnavutköy was fashionable and popular and so parking was always difficult. He pulled on an old-fashioned bell cord and waited in the hot afternoon sun, sweating. After what seemed like a long time, but was only seconds, the professor opened the door.

‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘come in.’

The hall was cool with marble and there was a small, silent Greek fountain in one corner. And although Süleyman instantly felt cooler once he was inside, he did also feel compelled to ask his host whether he could freshen up a bit before he followed him out into his garden.

‘Of course,’ Atay said. ‘My bathroom is up on the second floor, first door on the right.’

‘Thank you.’

Old Ottoman summer houses like this one had few rooms on each floor, and Süleyman noticed that there was only a hall and a kitchen on the ground floor. As he ascended, he passed a very pleasant living room, plus a shut door that concealed either another living room or a bedroom. On the second floor he found the bathroom. Opposite that was a room he could see was lined with books.

‘I’ve made a small meze,’ the professor called up from the kitchen below. ‘I do hope you’ll join me.’

Süleyman didn’t really feel like eating; he hadn’t been to sleep for well over twenty-four hours and couldn’t really contemplate anything beyond tea and cigarettes, but he said, ‘Thank you, that would be nice.’ Then he went into the bathroom.

His sleepless image in the mirror was even more horrible than his imagined notion of it. Not only were his eyes shadowed with skin that was almost purple, but his face was both white and blotched with red patches. Once he’d been to the toilet, he splashed his face with cold water and then washed his hands with the fine pistachio soap the professor had laid out on the sink. He finished off by dragging some lemon cologne that he always kept in his jacket pocket through his hair. He looked at himself again, decided that he didn’t look quite as bad as he had, and left the room.

For a moment he stood quite still on the landing, looking into what was clearly a study and listening to the sound of the academic moving around in his garden. However suspicious or otherwise of this man he might be, he knew that he had no right to enter the study without his permission, but that was what he did.

As well as books and what looked like the sprawling first draft of a manuscript, complete with red-penned edits, on a large wooden desk, the main thing he noticed about the room was the preponderance of statues and pictures it contained. And while the statues were mainly classical or what he imagined were probably Mesoamerican in character, the pictures were almost exclusively late Ottoman oil paintings of the Bosphorus and the Old City. One of them he thought represented the nineteenth-century waterfront at Arnavutköy when it had been a mainly Greek village. He was advancing to look more closely at it when his jacket caught the edge of the door to a full-length cupboard or wardrobe that stood next to the painting. Embarrassed by his own clumsiness, Süleyman stopped to close the door, but he couldn’t help but have a look inside.

Adrenalin spiked up from his gut to his head in a jagged, hot rush. He touched the cloak and the ghastly mask that sat on top of it with shaking hands. It was monstrous. And when he felt the feathers framing the face that looked so much like the idols of the Americas that sat on every surface around the room, he began to feel sick.

‘Inspector, can I help you?’

The cupboard door wasn’t quite shut and his hand had moved out of it, he thought, just in time when the professor’s voice interrupted him. He looked round and felt his face drain.

‘I was just looking at this picture,’ he said.

‘Ah, Arnavutköy in 1900,’ the professor said with a smile. ‘Yes, its style is after the Ottoman court painter Fausto Zonaro, as I am sure you recognise.’ He stood to one side so that Süleyman could pass out of the study and into the hall. ‘Shall we take tea? Then I shall gladly answer your questions.’

It was late afternoon when Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu knocked on Mehmet Süleyman’s office door.
İ
kmen was at home resting and she wanted to see whether, in his absence, Süleyman would check the notes she had taken pertaining to the transfer of Suzan Arslan to prison where she would await trial. But it was Ömer Mungan who answered the door.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘is …’

‘Still out,’ Ömer said. ‘Can I help you, Ay
ş
e Han
ı
m?’

‘No, not really, but … Why aren’t you with him?’

He let her into the office. ‘Oh, it’s this Hatice Devrim thing. I don’t have to tell you, it’s stretching us all to the limit. The inspector is out interviewing and I went over to see Dr Sarkissian. Sit down.’

He motioned towards Süleyman’s chair.

‘What, in …’

‘He’s not here, is he?’ Ömer said.

Ay
ş
e sat down. ‘So what did the doctor have to say?’ she asked.

‘He’s got a theory, which he can’t as yet prove or disprove, that the knife that killed Hatice Devrim may also have been used on some of our twenty-first of the month victims. Don’t get me wrong, Ay
ş
e Han
ı
m, I can see his point, but when he was showing me photograph after photograph of cuts to neck veins and internal organs, I didn’t really know what I was looking at.’

She smiled. Dr Sarkissian was a very clever man, but sometimes his absorption in the minutiae of forensic work did leave others at a loss as to just what he was seeing that they were not.

‘He’s as desperate to make sense of all this as we are,’ she said. ‘If somehow all these deaths are connected to or were perpetrated by Hatice Devrim …’

‘But Dr Sarkissian is certain she couldn’t have killed herself.’

Ay
ş
e, distracted slightly by a disc on Süleyman’s desk, said, ‘Maybe whoever killed her wanted to put a stop to her activities.’

‘The old
Ş
afak man was her relative.’

‘Yes, but …’ She picked the disc up. ‘What’s this?’

‘That? Oh, it’s a film of the gypsy
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu,’ Ömer said. ‘I don’t know how he features in it. The inspector tracked it down for the family.’

He had been very careful not to say Gonca’s name and Ay
ş
e was grateful for that.

‘We saw the family earlier on and the inspector was annoyed with himself because he forgot to take it with him,’ Ömer continued. ‘Those poor people.’

‘The family …’

‘The gypsies in general,’ he said. His face suddenly became red. ‘Nobody should be marginalised like that. Nobody!’

Taken aback by Ömer’s sudden flight into passion, Ay
ş
e looked down at the disc again and said, ‘Have you watched it? The film?’

He took a moment to calm himself. ‘No.’

She shrugged. ‘You can play it on your laptop, can’t you? Why don’t we have a look at it?’

‘Well, because the inspector—’

‘He isn’t here.’

‘No.’ But he still paused for a moment before he took the disc from her. ‘Well I suppose if it was on TRT …’ he said.

Although he could drink, eating was impossible. There was too much adrenalin in his system. If the man he was with was what that costume in his office seemed to indicate, then he was highly dangerous. And if he knew that Süleyman had seen it …

‘I do accept, Inspector,’ Cem Atay said, ‘that physically I could have left this house and gone back to Bebek and killed Hatice. Arnavutköy is quite an isolating place these days, what with all the new rich incomers, not to mention the foreigners, so I don’t know my neighbours and they don’t know me. But why would I do that? I loved Hatice; her death has left me shattered.’ Noticing that Süleyman’s glass was empty he said, ‘Would you like more tea?’

It was a little bit stewed, but since he hadn’t been able to eat anything, Süleyman felt obliged to say, ‘Yes.’

The professor poured tea from the pot on top of the samovar for the policeman while Süleyman said, ‘Professor, I am not saying that I believe you killed Hatice Devrim, but I do have to cover every eventuality.’

‘Well I can’t add anything else to what I’ve already said. I found Selçuk with the body as I described it to you, Inspector. I’m not prepared to make any sort of judgement about him based on that.’

‘No …’ Oddly the feeling of raw fear that had overcome him in the study had left him now. In its place was a slightly disconcerting calm.

‘It has to be possible that someone else entered the premises before Selçuk and killed Hatice. But that person wasn’t me.’

He was rather matter-of-fact about his lover’s death now that the initial shock had passed. But then if he had killed her …

‘Who could it have been?’ Süleyman asked. ‘You knew Mrs Devrim. Did she have any enemies?’

She’d killed or been instrumental in arranging the murder of Abdurrahman
Ş
afak, and so she had clearly had an issue with him. Had those around him, albeit distant relatives, had an issue with her? Süleyman wondered why he was even thinking about such things. This was the man he had reason to fear, this academic he was sitting with now. But his mind didn’t seem to be processing anything as quickly as it normally did. He thought,
I must be sick.
And that thought made him anxious.