Ikmen 16 - Body Count (16 page)

Süleyman looked at the boy again and said, ‘All right, so if we accept that there was a “monster”, tell me what it looked like and what it was doing, specifically, to Levent Devrim.’

The boy did look scared, that was beyond doubt. He said, ‘It had arms and legs like a man but on its head and down its back it was like a bird.’

‘It had feathers?’

‘Yes.’

‘And its face?’

‘Oh, that was like it was melted or something,’ he said. ‘A nose that was falling down its face and a mouth that hung like a … I don’t know … I didn’t see its eyes.’

‘It didn’t see you?’

‘No.’

‘So you didn’t see it from the front?’

‘No. From the side.’

‘What was it doing to Levent Devrim when you saw it, Hamid?’

‘Nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘Standing over him.’

‘So you didn’t see this thing kill Levent Devrim?’

‘No.’

‘How long did you watch it for?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Seconds? Minutes?’

The boy shrugged again. ‘A bit.’

‘A bit. So then what did you do? What did it do?’

‘It went away,’ Hamid said.

‘Just like—’

‘It walked past Levent Bey and then it went off into the wrecked house next door and then it disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘I couldn’t see it no more.’

‘OK, so what did you do then, Hamid?’

‘I went to look at Levent Bey. I saw that his head was hanging off. I poked him with one of me sticks to see if he was still alive, but he weren’t.’

To Süleyman and Ömer Mungan it seemed that a man who had been effectively decapitated had to be dead, but then neither of them was a young gypsy boy raised on myth and magical thinking.

‘Then what did you do?’ Süleyman asked.

‘I legged it,’ the boy said.

‘You went home?’

‘Yeah. But I never told me mum nothing. I never told no one nothing till I told
Ş
ukru Bey today. He brought me here because it was the right thing to do.’

As well as hearing the rehearsal in the boy’s voice, Süleyman knew what Sugar Bar
ı
ş
ı
k had told Ömer Mungan before the boy disappeared: namely that he’d been telling people that it had been him and not
Ş
ukru who’d found the body. He looked up at
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu. Still with his eyes on the man he said, ‘So what were you doing up at Tünel yesterday, hanging out with a load of foreign boys?’

‘Oh, I wasn’t hanging out with them boys. They was just there.’

‘Pocket-diving.’

‘We all was, but I was on me own,’ Hamid said. ‘I run away from home after I saw the monster.’

‘Why?’ Süleyman asked.

For a moment the boy looked confused, and then he said, ‘Because I thought it might get me.’

‘It didn’t see you. How could it get you?’

The boy said nothing.

Later, when he let
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu and the boy go, Süleyman asked Ömer Mungan, ‘What did you make of the monster story?’

Ömer thought for a moment and then he said, ‘You know, sir, that was one of the few things the child said that I did believe.’

And Süleyman smiled, because that was exactly how he felt about Hamid’s story too.

‘All right, I didn’t like her,’ Suzy Greenwood said to
İ
kmen. ‘Is that what you wanted to hear?’

‘I want to hear the truth,’
İ
kmen said, ‘and if that is the truth …’

‘Leyla Ablak was seducing Mr Genç away from where he should have been, which was at his dying wife’s side,’ she said.

İ
kmen looked across at Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu. He wanted to see her reaction to this – her English was up to it – but she just yawned. He’d seen Süleyman in the car park earlier, for a couple of cigarettes, and he’d been yawning also. A busy night for both of them, then.
İ
kmen only just managed to stop himself from scowling. Ay
ş
e should have forgotten about Süleyman years ago; he was no good for her.

‘And what was Mr Genç’s dying wife to you?’
İ
kmen asked. ‘Did you treat her with your homeopathic medicine?’

‘No. I didn’t know her.’

‘Then why were you so concerned about what her husband was doing with Mrs Ablak?’

Suzy Greenwood sat up straighter. ‘Because I thought it was wrong,’ she said.

‘How did you know about their affair?’
İ
kmen asked. ‘Did somebody tell you?’

She thought for a few moments, and then she said, ‘No. No, I just … I know Mr Genç quite well, and so I notice things about him.’

‘You are in love with him.’

‘No!’ She looked up at him and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

‘What made you think that Faruk Genç and Leyla Ablak were having an affair, Miss Greenwood?’

She shook her head. ‘Oh, it was … Well, they flirted,’ she said. ‘Whenever Mrs Ablak came to the spa, she seemed to seek him out, she pursued him – or rather, that was what I felt. But I didn’t know that they met at the spa after hours and I didn’t kill her. Why would I?’

‘Why indeed?’
İ
kmen looked down at a piece of paper on his desk and said, ‘When Mrs Ablak was murdered, you were at a conference in Kavala, Greece. Is that correct?’

‘Yes. I told you when you first asked me where I was.’

There was no doubt that she had left the country before Leyla Ablak died and returned after she was dead. But she could still have ordered her murder. Her and Hande Genç, maybe General Ablak … But it was an outside chance and
İ
kmen knew it. There was no record of Suzy Greenwood ever having met or even telephoned Hande Genç. The only reason she was at the station at all was because Faruk Genç had always, he said, had the feeling that she had the hots for him. In that he was probably right, but it still put Suzy a long way away from killing his lover.

‘So what did you know about Mrs Ablak?’
İ
kmen looked down at his notes again. ‘I believe that you were treating her, or whatever you call it, for depression.’

Incensed by what she saw as a slight on her profession, Suzy Greenwood said, ‘Homeopathy is treated with respect in my country, I’ll have you know! The royal family swear by it!’

İ
kmen smiled. ‘With respect, Miss Greenwood, am I supposed to be impressed by the beliefs of a dysfunctional German family?’

For a moment she was speechless. She’d only come in because, when he’d called her, she’d thought that it meant
İ
kmen was getting her two hundred lira back for her. She said, ‘Mrs Ablak was depressed because her husband was under investigation and also because of some childhood issues.’

‘What childhood issues?’

‘That is confidential between the therapist, myself, and the patient …’

‘She’s dead, Miss Greenwood, and you are a suspect. Tell me what her issues were; I don’t have time for this.’

Her face drained. Maybe it was actually hearing the word ‘suspect’ in relation to herself. She said, ‘She talked a lot about her mother. Her mother is a member of your former royal family, and apparently she overwhelmed Mrs Ablak with her past when she was a child.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, slavish following of outmoded etiquette; her insistence that no man was ever good enough for her daughter. Mrs Ablak had a history of broken relationships, which she put down to the fact that her mother refused to let her marry the first man she ever loved, years ago. And her father, who wasn’t royal, was weak. She felt that her mother had ruined her life.’

‘Is that it?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘Yes.’

‘But then what are spas but places for the worried rich to come and pay someone to talk to them?’ He shook his head. Fatma had nagged him about the soba all the while he had been trying to drink his morning tea, and it had put him in a foul mood. It wasn’t even cold any more, and besides, every time she talked about the soba, he had to think about the fact that he was retiring at the end of the year. And he really didn’t want to.

‘To be honest, she wasn’t a bad woman so much as a selfish one. She was always civil to me. I just couldn’t abide her behaviour around Mr Genç.’

İ
kmen, who had made an inventory of Suzy Greenwood’s clients the previous evening, said, ‘You told me earlier, Miss Greenwood, that you had never met the late Mrs Genç.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And yet you treated her brother, didn’t you?’

‘Her brother?’

‘Cem Atay,’
İ
kmen said.

‘Professor Atay? He’s a friend of Mr Genç.’

‘He’s also Mrs Genç’s brother,’
İ
kmen said. ‘What does he come to see you about, Miss Greenwood?’

This time she didn’t even bother to try and protect her client’s confidentiality. ‘Professor Atay is in the public eye. Sometimes he suffers from camera fright.’

‘And homeopathy helps him with that, does it?’

‘He says it does, yes,’ she said.

İ
kmen smiled. ‘So we have to thank you, I imagine, Miss Greenwood, for Professor Atay’s latest excellent documentary about eastern Anatolian myths and legends.’

But Suzy Greenwood didn’t smile. She just said, ‘I guess you do, Inspector, yes.’

And then his smile dropped. ‘You didn’t tell Professor Atay anything about Mrs Ablak, did you?’

‘Of course I didn’t.’ She sounded exhausted, because she was. She’d had to get out of bed at the crack of dawn to come and have questions barked out aggressively at her. ‘Why would I?’

Sezen Han
ı
m laid a rug over the old man’s knees and then went back to her embroidery. She had a frame in front of the soba at which she sat creating a silk representation of the Sultanahmet mosque. She looked back at the old man again. Her uncle, Rafik Efendi, whose house she shared, was the last member of her immediate family who could remember the Ottoman Empire. And even he only had the vaguest of recollections.

Rafik had been born in 1918, just before the end of the Great War, and had been little more than a toddler when the Republic had come into being in 1923. He wasn’t really an Ottoman at all, but he was the nearest thing that Sezen had, and she loved him. It was just a shame that Uncle Rafik had always preferred men. None of his marriages had lasted, he’d never had any children, and keeping his homosexuality quiet had sometimes placed a strain on the whole family. He’d been priapic in his youth, and in later years, when people interested in the life of one of Turkey’s last princes had come to visit him, it had been impossible to trust him with male guests. Even at his advanced age he still ‘entertained’ occasionally, much to Sezen’s disgust.

Sezen sewed and thought about Leyla. The police still didn’t know who had killed her, but then they were probably not that worried about it. Republicans – or, even worse, Islamists – to a man, what did they care about a woman who should have been a princess? Had they really cared, they would have allowed Mehmet Süleyman Efendi to investigate Leyla’s murder. One of their own. But they hadn’t. Instead there was that awful little man
İ
kmen, who was now also involved in an investigation into the murder of a foreigner. News reports said that the father of the foreigner, an Englishman, was staying on in the city until his son’s murderer was caught. So of course
İ
kmen would give that his full attention. Leyla would just be sidelined.

She began to feel tears invade her eyes and pulled herself together. Sezen Han
ı
m didn’t cry; she had too much dignity. But for all the waywardness of Leyla’s early years, and the resentment that had characterised their later relationship, she missed her daughter bitterly. The final year of Leyla’s life had probably been the worst: her husband coming under suspicion in the Ergenekon investigation, and then the unhappy little affair she’d had with that married man at her spa. The spa where she had died. Although she didn’t know him, Sezen Han
ı
m didn’t trust that spa manager, and she wondered why the police hadn’t arrested him. He’d had sex with Leyla after hours and then, after hours, she was murdered. How hard could it be to work out what had happened there?

But then her thoughts were distracted when she accidentally speared her thumb with her embroidery needle. ‘Ow!’

As she looked down at her hand, blood began to ooze from the wound. In the corner, the old prince stirred briefly and then went back to sleep again.

‘It’s Miss Bar
ı
ş
ı
k,’ Ömer Mungan said as he handed the telephone over to Mehmet Süleyman.

The older man took the call. ‘Yes?’

‘Hello, Inspector,’ the old woman said. ‘I hear you’ve had the boy Hamid and
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu in your no doubt loving embrace.’

He smiled. ‘You know I can’t comment on that, Sugar,’ he said. ‘But I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you that you’re mistaken.’

‘You are as gracious as you are handsome, Mehmet Bey,’ she said. ‘It warms an old woman’s heart and I thank you for it.’

‘You’re welcome. Now what can I do for you, Sugar Han
ı
m? If it’s in my gift to help you, I will.’

‘Well actually it’s more what I can do for you,’ Sugar said.

‘Oh?’

‘A little snippet for you, Mehmet Bey, about
Ş
eftali the whore, Hamid’s mother.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s doing her shopping with two black eyes and a lot fewer teeth,’ she said.

Süleyman leaned back in his chair. ‘Is she?’

‘Word is that it was
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu who gave her her new face decoration.’

‘Oh? Why would he do that, Sugar?’

There was a very slight pause, and then she said, ‘Well, a gypsy I know who you know too is of the opinion that
Ş
eftali was trying to blackmail
Ş
ukru over something to do with her son.’