Ikmen 16 - Body Count (18 page)

İ
kmen wondered how it would be if he retracted his request for retirement. The soba aside, Fatma would probably welcome it if he continued on at work. At home he was going to get under her feet and irritate her, and with just the two of them in the apartment most of the time, they would certainly row. On the other hand, he was tired. His body felt like a particularly troublesome appendage most of the time and his last medical had thrown up a whole load of age-related irritations, some of which he had been given tablets for. Not that he took them. He didn’t want to end up like Arto Sarkissian, taking tablets to counteract the side effects of other tablets. He just wanted to work and feel the way he had felt in the past. He wanted to get that tingle on the back of his neck and in the pit of his stomach as he closed in on his prey and knew that just his existence was making him or her sweat.

But then was that happening now? Was there someone in the city who was sweating as he lay there just at the thought of him? Was that real, a fantasy, or was he just too old and too cynical to see it? Çetin
İ
kmen looked at the clock beside his bed and watched as midnight clicked over into the following day.

Going out was not something that Sezen Han
ı
m often did. Since she’d been widowed, and particularly since her daughter’s death at the beginning of the year, it had not felt right. But her friend Melek had really badgered her to go to what had turned out to be a very pleasant evening at the Swissotel in nearby Be
ş
ikta
ş
. So close it was almost walking distance from the house, she’d felt happy to leave her uncle for just a short time to have a couple of glasses of champagne with Melek.

She had also managed to convince herself that her time out had been improving. Melek worked as a curator at the Pera Museum, and the Swissotel event had featured a selection of the museum’s new ‘Contrasting Civilisations’ exhibition. Through the prism of a carefully selected group of artefacts, Melek and her colleagues had presented a snapshot of the Ottoman Empire’s relationships with other significant countries when it was at the height of its power in the 1520s. Süleyman the Lawgiver, or the Magnificent as he was known in the West, had been sultan then, and in 1529 he had extended the Empire to the gates of Vienna. Relationships with foreign powers had therefore been conducted from a position of strength, and people like the British and even the mighty Spanish Empire had quaked before Süleyman and his terrifying corps of Janissaries. After that high point, it had been downhill all the way until the early twentieth century, when the Empire had imploded.

Sezen walked up the creaking staircase that led to the upper storey of the house, trying not to make too much noise in case she woke her uncle. It was after midnight, and Rafik Efendi was brittle and easily woken now. The smallest sound could rouse him, and then it was always a fight to get him to go back to sleep again. But Sezen would check on him, even if it did wake him up. Having a very old person in the house was a bit like having a baby again: one was always looking and listening to make sure that they were still breathing.

She stepped on to the landing, the wooden house creaking and sighing around her. Light from the open door that led to her bedroom showed her that her uncle’s door was open. This was unusual but fortuitous, because it meant that when she went in to see him, Sezen probably wouldn’t disturb him.

She first realised that something was wrong when she noticed that the smell coming from Rafik’s room was different. He’d been incontinent for some time and so she was accustomed to the sharp smell of ammonia, the occasional sick odour of faeces. But this was different; this was something she didn’t know. Sezen peered through the darkness and for a moment she couldn’t really tell what she was looking at. But then, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she realised that her uncle wasn’t in his bed at all; he was lying on the floor. Alarmed that he might have fallen out of bed and hit his head, she flicked on the light switch by the door and made as if to walk over to his bed. Then she stopped, frozen in horror, finding it hard to believe what she was seeing.

‘You know, just for a few hours I clung on to the hope that we weren’t going to have to leave our beds this time,’ Çetin
İ
kmen said as he smoked over the old man’s washstand.

Commissioner Ard
ı
ç didn’t even look at him. ‘Put the cigarette out,
İ
kmen,’ he said.

The other officers in the room, including Süleyman, became still and silent. They were all in the presence of something unprecedentedly terrible, and Ard
ı
ç was telling
İ
kmen to put his smoke out. They all waited for his reply. When it came, it was undramatic. ‘No.’

Ard
ı
ç’s response was muted too, to say the least. He just shrugged. Other people began to breathe again. Arto Sarkissian, who was the only person in the room who had been oblivious to what had just happened, stood up and looked down at the body he had just been examining. ‘The heart is missing,’ he said.

Ard
ı
ç switched his gaze from
İ
kmen to the Armenian. ‘You’re sure?’

‘The chest was cut open, again with a large-bladed knife, then the ribs were spread and the heart was removed with a smaller blade,’ he said. ‘A better job this time.’

‘Than?’

‘The Englishman,’ the doctor said. ‘That was a mess. This is not. He’s obviously learning.’

Everyone in that room looked down at what remained of Rafik Efendi. A bloodied shell, its legs akimbo, it was not the image of the prince dignified in death that the woman whose crying they could all hear from downstairs had wanted for the old man.
İ
kmen looked over at Süleyman, whose distant relative the old man had been, and wondered what he was thinking. But his face was impassive.

‘So the heart could be …’

‘Having removed it, which must have taken some effort,’
İ
kmen said, ‘I doubt he’d just throw it away. He took it for a reason.’

‘A trophy,’ Süleyman said.

‘A talisman.’
İ
kmen shrugged. ‘How can we even guess at what it might mean when we don’t know his, or her, motives?’

Arto shook his head. ‘From my point of view I’d say that the murderer was probably a man. To remove a heart from even an old chest is difficult …’

‘Female surgeons,’
İ
kmen offered.

‘True, Inspector, but their patients are anaesthetised when they operate. This man was alive.’

İ
kmen saw Süleyman’s face crease in disgust.

‘Old as he was, he clung to life beyond the opening of his chest cavity,’ Arto said. ‘A terrible death; he must have been in agony.’

Again silence rolled in across the room until Ard
ı
ç looked across at
İ
kmen, who had put out one cigarette and lit another. ‘Why can’t we catch this character?’

‘Or characters,’
İ
kmen replied. ‘Not sure it’s one person, sir.’

‘But it could be?’

‘Yes.’

Ard
ı
ç looked at his phone. ‘And this date thing. Here we are again, the twenty-first. What about that?’

İ
kmen shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. I mean, clearly it means something to the killer or killers, but it doesn’t have any meaning that we have discovered so far …’

‘Then you’re obviously looking in the wrong places,’ Ard
ı
ç said. His brows knitted above his dark eyes. ‘Look again. Look again at every victim, every crime scene and every bloodied corpse this city has suffered since the beginning of the year. When this story hits the media, yet another killing on the twenty-first, we are going to have to answer some questions, quite rightly, about what the hell we think we’ve been doing for the last four months. This is now a serial killer, or so the media will say, and I for one won’t have one of those fucking bastards in my city. Do I make myself clear?’

She didn’t want to be with this woman, she wanted to be with Mehmet Bey. She’d seen him come in, go up to that terrible bedroom she would close up for ever as soon as she could, but he hadn’t come down to see her.

Not for the first time, the policewoman, a Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu, said to her, ‘Sezen Han
ı
m, is there anyone I can call for you?’

Again she’d said, ‘No.’

Of course there were people she could have called, a lot of them, but she wanted no one, except perhaps Mehmet Bey. With Raf
ı
k Efendi’s death, her entire connection to her Ottoman past had dissolved and Sezen had never felt so exposed, mainly because she knew, deep as it was buried, what Raf
ı
k had done. What would she do, what would the family do, if damaged middle-aged men stepped out of the past with stories about anal rape and sex for money? When someone died like this, the papers and the TV stations were full of it; there was no way she could hide a death as violent as Rafik’s. Maybe if she told Mehmet Bey the whole truth, she could persuade him to keep the details the police gave to the media to a minimum. But then Nur Süleyman, Mehmet’s mother, was forever telling everyone how honest he was. Could an appeal to his blood persuade him to be economical with the truth should anything bad emerge about her uncle?

The doorbell rang, which made Sezen immediately rise to her feet. But the policewoman told her to sit down. One of the constables upstairs would deal with it. Big male feet thundered down the stairs. The policewoman looked at her and said, ‘Would you like some tea?’

‘No.’

The front door opened with a creak – the police had told her, disapprovingly, that the back door had been unlocked; it always was. Sezen closed her eyes. Why had she done that? She’d done it because her uncle had told her to. How else could the boys he still occasionally rented come and go without anybody seeing them?

Then she heard a voice. ‘I’m a neighbour. What has happened? Can I see Sezen Han
ı
m?’

It was that interfering Elif Ceylan. She was one of those who thought that just living near those of standing invested her and her family with quality too. Sezen knew it did not.

The officer said something to the silly woman, then Elif Ceylan said, ‘Oh, because when I saw the police cars, I wondered whether it had anything to do with the man who was in the garden.’

She’d seen something, or she’d claimed to! In the garden. With the ever-open back door. She’d never said anything before! Sezen, terrified, called out to her, ‘Elif dear, I’m in here! Do come in.’ She looked at Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu, who was frowning. ‘She is my friend, I need to speak to her,’ she said.

Elif Ceylan was a small, round, peasanty woman who dressed in clothes that had been designed in Milan. One did that when one’s husband was rich. Because she was short and gossiped, Sezen was in the habit of giving her unpleasant nicknames, like ‘poison dwarf’ and ‘short on style’. Now, however, she wanted to see her more urgently than anyone else she could imagine. Elif lumbered in. Sezen said to the policewoman, ‘Can I have a moment alone with my friend, please?’

Farsako
ğ
lu frowned. ‘I heard the lady say that she saw someone in the garden …’

‘Yes, a man,’ Elif Ceylan said. Before Sezen could stop her, she was standing next to the policewoman. ‘I was looking out of my bedroom window; I was just getting ready for bed. I always take one last look outside before I retire, because one never knows, does one, and Sezen Han
ı
m’s garden is so lovely. I can’t imagine having a better image in one’s head if one is about to die suddenly and in an untimely fashion in one’s sleep. But—’

‘Can I talk to Elif Han
ı
m—’

‘What did he look like, the man in the garden, and what time did you see him?’ The wretched policewoman cut across her words and now put herself between the two women as well. As Elif opened her mouth, Sezen Han
ı
m began to feel herself breaking out into a sweat.

‘Oh, he was tall,’ the neighbour said. ‘Although beyond seeing that it was a man I couldn’t make out any details. I suppose it had to be about two hours ago …’

‘And you didn’t think to call us or alert Sezen Han
ı
m to the fact that a man was in her garden?’ the policewoman said.

And then, oddly Sezen thought at first, Elif smiled. ‘Oh, there are often men in the garden,’ she said. ‘I think they must have come to see the old prince. Young people are so interested in the Ottoman Empire these days, don’t you think? It’s nice. They often come when Sezen Han
ı
m is out.’ Sezen Han
ı
m closed her eyes; she must have been watching the house for years. The bitch. ‘Partial to young men, I always thought, old Raf
ı
k Efendi, but then I don’t judge, and anyway, they’re like that, aren’t they, aristocrats? Eccentric.’

The policewoman looked at Sezen as if to say
Did you know about this?
But instead she said, ‘You will need to talk to one of the inspectors, Sezen Han
ı
m.’

Elif Ceylan took one of Sezen’s hands in hers and said, ‘I don’t know what’s happened here, dear, but judging by the police cars, I can only imagine that one of Raf
ı
k Efendi’s liaisons must have ended in tears. Is that right?’

Mehmet Süleyman sat down in the chair opposite the crying woman. Although a distant relative, he hardly knew Sezen
İ
pek. But the interview that Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu had tried to conduct with her after her neighbour left had just disintegrated into hysteria. It had also become unintelligible. Süleyman had been called, and as soon as she had realised that a relative was on his way, Sezen Han
ı
m had calmed down. Now she just wept, gently.

‘Sezen Han
ı
m, I know that you have suffered a terrible shock and an almost unimaginable loss,’ he said. ‘And in truth there is nothing I can say that can make that any better for you. However, my colleague tells me that one of your neighbours claims to have seen a man in your garden this evening. I believe you were out.’