Ikmen 16 - Body Count (8 page)

‘Your daughter had a lot of cosmetic surgery,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Which I assume the general paid for …’

‘Of course he did! Where else would she have obtained the money for surgery! Why not from one of the people who took it all away from her family?’ Now she began to cry. ‘The only consolation I had was that she was taking his money while he was alive, so he could see it going.’

‘Maybe making your daughter look nice made him happy?’
İ
kmen said.

‘No! No, it didn’t make him happy, because she was unfaithful to him!’

‘Maybe he didn’t know that she was being unfaithful.’

‘He did know!’ she said. ‘He did!’

‘And how do you know that, Sezen Han
ı
m?’
İ
kmen said. ‘Was it because, in spite of your almost-but-not-quite denial earlier, you really did tell him?’

She leaned towards him. ‘So what if I did?’

‘You may very well have put your daughter’s life in danger,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Did you think of that?’

‘I wanted him to hurt!’ she shouted.

İ
kmen stood up and leaned down to shout right back at her. ‘Well you may have hurt him so much that he killed her! Or not!’ he added. ‘But whatever he did or didn’t do, you acted for reasons that make me want to be sick!’

When they eventually left the
İ
pek family’s yal
ı
,
İ
kmen said to Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu, ‘You know, Sezen Han
ı
m is the sort of person who makes me even more grateful to Atatürk for bringing the Ottoman Empire to an end. What an absolute—’

‘Sir, I saw Inspector Süleyman’s mother,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘I suppose … maybe they’re related to the
İ
peks …’

‘Oh, probably!’
İ
kmen lit up a cigarette and got into his car. ‘They’re all related to each other; it’s like one big miserable club for overprivileged malcontents who choose to live in a psychic museum of their own creation.’

Ay
ş
e got in beside him. She couldn’t think about Mehmet Süleyman, not now. Last time they’d been together he’d made her cry. ‘So do you think her husband did know about Leyla’s affair with Faruk Genç?’

İ
kmen shrugged. ‘I think if he did, he behaved rather stupidly when he didn’t tell us the truth,’ he said. ‘Knowing that we’d have to come and see the mother-in-law from hell.’

‘What’s he done this time?’ In spite of the disfiguring birthmark on her face, which was enormous,
Ş
eftali the gypsy was a good-looking woman. About thirty-five, she was tall, slender and had the kind of curly red hair that an art historian would no doubt have described as ‘Titian’.

Ömer Mungan had taken two constables with him to visit the three cramped rooms where the gypsy and her family lived just behind Tarlaba
ş
ı
Bulvar
ı
. Sugar’s tip-off about Hamid, whether it came to anything or not, had been too tempting to pass up.

‘We’ve had a complaint about pickpocketing,’ Ömer said.

‘What? Hamid?’ She shrugged. There was a heap of ragged clothes lurking in a bowl of water at her feet.
Ş
eftali crouched down to agitate them. As she rolled her sleeves up, Ömer saw the track marks up her arms and at her wrists. She’d been using for a long time. ‘Who says he’s been pocket-dipping?’

‘Is he here?’

He wasn’t. The two constables had already searched the place, such as it was. There was only one child present, a tiny girl standing in a corner looking at them with suspicious eyes.

‘No, he isn’t,’
Ş
eftali said.

‘Do you know where he is?’

She looked up at him. One of her eyes was completely surrounded by a dark bruise. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would I?’

‘You’re his mother.’

She shrugged.

‘He should be in school.’

Ş
eftali went back to her washing. ‘He’s Roma, why do you care?’

‘Because it’s the law.’

‘It used to be lawful for us to live in Sulukule.’
Ş
eftali stood up in one smooth movement. ‘But then suddenly it wasn’t lawful for us to be there any more and so we moved to this shithole. Now you’re knocking this down and soon it won’t be lawful for us to be here either. You Turks make it up as you go along! Don’t talk to me about what I can and can’t do with my kids. And anyway,’ she added, ‘what are you doing interesting yourself in some pocket diving? You’re one of them who’s been trying to find the killer of the old man with the camera. Still haven’t found him, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Well then I suggest you stop going after my son and do that,’ she said. ‘You may think we’re all scum round here, but we don’t deserve to live in a place where people get their heads chopped off, do we?’

‘No.’

‘No. So do something about it, then.’

When he left, Ömer Mungan felt chastened by what
Ş
eftali had said. The Roma did get a poor deal in the city, and what had he expected but hostility? Sugar Bar
ı
ş
ı
k’s information about the boy Hamid had only been hearsay.

But what Ömer didn’t know as he and his constables left
Ş
eftali’s tiny flat was that she was already on the phone to her son, telling him not to come home.

There were days when fate – or whatever one believed in – was clearly against one. General Ablak put his telephone back in its cradle, slowly. The call he’d just received had not come as any sort of surprise. Leyla’s death, if not her infidelity, had been the biggest shock of the day. This, however, was not something that he could just ignore. He had Murad to consider, and the possible besmirching of his only son’s good name. That could not be allowed to happen. Murad’s mother had died thirty years before, and now that Leyla was dead too, there was only the boy, if a man of fifty-seven could be called a boy …

The call had come from someone who didn’t identify himself, but then that was standard practice. All he’d said was ‘They’re coming for you,’ because that was all he had needed to say. Who
they
were was something that the general knew anyway. As to
when
they were coming, it could be any minute, or the next day; maybe even the following week, although that was doubtful. If they were coming, they were coming soon. The general walked over to his office door and locked it. His phone rang again, but this time he left it unanswered. When it stopped, he very calmly reviewed his options. If he went to court and was convicted – which he would be, because that was what happened in cases like his – then Murad would be dishonoured. His father would be a known traitor and his own career, not to mention his family, could suffer. Before that, though, there would be prison to contend with, and the general knew that for all his tough military training, he couldn’t deal with that. Better men than he had succumbed to prison violence, heart disease or just despair in those places. General Ablak, proud follower of Atatürk, believer in modernity and the beauty of rational thought, sat back down at his desk and worked through in his mind what might be left for him to do.

His son had known what was going on right from the start and the general had said everything he had wanted to say to him. Murad knew that his father loved him. He believed and would continue to believe in his innocence. And now that there was no trophy wife left, there was no one else. A thought came to the general and he took a sheet of paper out of his desk drawer and picked up his Montblanc pen. It only took him five minutes to say everything he needed to say. He put the note into an envelope and addressed it, then laid it beside his telephone.

The general took a few moments to remove his mobile phone, his keys and his loose change from his pockets. He arranged them all neatly on his desk. Then he put his hand into his desk drawer again, took out his old service revolver and shot himself through the head.

‘I thought the kid was just messing around,’
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu said to
Ş
eftali the prostitute. They were both in the small yard at the back of his house with her son, Hamid. Even though he was nearly sixty years old,
Ş
ukru wouldn’t allow his aged father to see him with a woman like
Ş
eftali. ‘I assumed he was shaking because he was cold. If I’d known he’d seen someone when he came across Levent Bey’s body, I would’ve had him speak to the police.’

Ş
eftali held her son by his collar. ‘He didn’t see someone, he saw some
thing
,’ she said. ‘Like a … a … What was it?’ She shook the boy. ‘What?’

‘A monster,’ the boy mumbled.

‘A monster! Yes! It was a monster that he saw, and so of course he’s going to be too frightened to tell the police or you. I had to beat it out of him. Crying at night like a baby because he thought the monster might come for him. I couldn’t have it when I was trying to work.’ The boy squirmed to try and get away from her and
Ş
eftali smacked him on the head. ‘And now today the police come round asking for him. They say they want him for pocket-dipping. But the copper who come was one of them working on Levent Bey’s murder. So they know he knows something.’

‘How do they know?’
Ş
ukru asked.

‘I don’t know! Maybe he’s been telling people!’ She agitated the boy hard again.

Ş
ukru said, ‘You’re making assumptions.’

‘So what if I am? He can’t tell them he knows something after all this time; they’d beat him to death! You know how they are!’

Ş
ukru got down on one knee and looked into the boy’s face. ‘Hamid,’ he said, ‘did you really see who killed Levent Bey?’

The boy looked at him for a moment with steady eyes, and then he said, ‘Yeah.’

‘And was what you saw a monster? Really?’

Ş
ukru knew that some people in his community believed in all sorts of supernatural beings up to and including monsters. But he didn’t. He only believed in what he could see. ‘Hamid?’

The boy broke his gaze and said, ‘There were feathers, like a bird.’

Ş
ukru felt cold. ‘Where?’

‘On its head, down its back.’

‘What else?’
Ş
ukru asked. Suddenly he felt colder.

The boy shrugged.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

Ş
ukru said, ‘Well it must’ve had a face, this monster of yours. And what size was it? Was it big, small …?’

‘It was big … like, like tall big, but it never had a face,’ Hamid said.

‘It didn’t have a face?’

‘It was a monster, just like he said,’
Ş
eftali said. ‘You told my boy to leave Levent Bey’s body and run away before the police come, but now he’s in trouble because of it.’

‘I didn’t know that he had seen anyone, much less a “monster”,’
Ş
ukru said. He stood up. ‘The kid told me nothing. How do you know he didn’t just make it all up,
Ş
eftali Han
ı
m? Eh?’

‘Because the police come for him!’

‘For picking pockets, which you and I both know he does,’
Ş
ukru said.

But
Ş
eftali shook her head, her breath coming short and hard in the frigid February air. ‘No, no,
Ş
ukru Bey, they know something, I know they do!’

‘But if only you know …’

‘Well, and the boy and … I might have told F
ı
nd
ı
k about it … His crying at night and …’ She looked up into
Ş
ukru’s face.
Ş
eftali’s best friend, F
ı
nd
ı
k, was a notorious drunk and gossip. Anyone in Tarlaba
ş
ı
could know about the boy and his ‘monster’. That wasn’t good.
Ş
ukru suppressed an urge to hit her.

Instead he shook his head and then shrugged. ‘So …’

‘So you’ll have to look after the boy until the police go away,’
Ş
eftali said. ‘You encouraged him to just get up and leave Levent Bey’s body before the police came.’

‘I didn’t know about his “monster”, did I?’

‘No, but …’

‘I can’t look after your son; I’ve got kids of my own and I don’t need the aggravation,’
Ş
ukru said.

‘I’ll pay you. You know, in …’

He curled his lip. ‘No.’

‘Oh, so what do you suggest we do, then,
Ş
ukru Bey?’
Ş
eftali said, her hands on her hips. ‘You told the boy to hop it, and now—’

‘He hopped it without saying a word about what he might have seen!’
Ş
ukru said. ‘I’d suggest you take him to the police yourself,
Ş
eftali Han
ı
m. Explain that the boy is having nightmares …’

‘And what do I say about you,
Ş
ukru Bey?’ she said. ‘Do I tell them that you knew that my boy found Levent Bey’s body before you did? That’s withholding information, isn’t it?’

Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu looked at her beautiful ruined face and wondered what he should do with
Ş
eftali the prostitute. Although illiterate and uncultured, she was in many ways like his artist sister, Gonca. Lovely and yet sly,
Ş
eftali always had her eye on the main chance, just like Gonca. And in common with his sister, she knew how to manipulate men. Much as he loved her body from time to time, he hated her for that sly mind. But he also knew that her silence was essential to him.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘How much to buy a small revision of history, then,
Ş
eftali Han
ı
m? I didn’t see the boy; he came and went before I arrived.’

He watched her turn it over in her mind, and he resolved then and there that when all of this was over, he would first fuck her and then beat her until she couldn’t stand, as a punishment.