Ikmen 16 - Body Count (19 page)

‘At the Swissotel, yes.’ She sniffed.

He nodded his head and just very briefly smiled. ‘How nice.’ He knew how to play the exquisitely mannered Ottoman game.

‘So there was a man in your garden this evening around the time we believe your uncle was murdered,’ he continued. ‘My colleague tells me further that your neighbour asserts that young men were often to be seen coming and going from this house while you were out.’

‘She’s lying.’

‘Your neighbour?’

She looked up at him. ‘You know how they are, Mehmet Bey, the people …’

He looked into her eyes, afraid he might display how tired he was with all the Ottoman snobbery that dinosaurs like Sezen Han
ı
m, like his own mother, enjoyed displaying. But he kept his gaze pleasant. In order to get out of her what he half knew had to be in her mind, he had to remain civil for a while.

‘It’s all jealousy with them,’ she continued.

‘The people?’

‘Yes! They’re not born to be anything special and so they crave proximity to greatness. I’m sure you know what I mean.’

He looked around what she no doubt called her ‘salon’ and wondered whether her common neighbour had mouse droppings on her soft furnishings, whether her Tiffany lampshades were cracked and filthy. He could so easily have been in his parents’ home. He said, ‘I accept that your neighbour may be … intrusive and maybe jealous too. I’m afraid I don’t know her and so I cannot tell, but Sezen Han
ı
m, I cannot see why she would make up a story about many clearly young men entering this house in your absence.’

‘Well, they came to see Rafik Efendi, of course,’ she said. All tears had now gone and suddenly she was smiling, if nervously. ‘Young people are so interested in the Ottoman past these days; it’s really rather heartening, don’t you think?’

‘So they were students? And all men?’

‘It would hardly have been seemly for Rafik Efendi to see women or girls on his own, Mehmet Bey.’

‘Oh come now, Sezen Han
ı
m,’ he said. ‘A man of Rafik Efendi’s age? I think a young lady would have been quite safe with him, don’t you?’

She turned her head away.

Süleyman had only ever met Rafik Efendi twice in his life, once as a child and once as a young man in his twenties. On both occasions his father had told him not to get too close to the old prince. He hadn’t explained why, but Mehmet had understood. That was exactly why he had told his mother, when she’d asked about the
İ
peks in the wake of Leyla’s death, that Rafik Efendi had given him the creeps.

‘Because actually your uncle preferred the company of men, didn’t he?’ Süleyman said.

Her fury was instant. ‘How dare you!’

‘Oh come on, Sezen Han
ı
m, it’s common knowledge in the family,’ he said. ‘I admit I never imagined he was still active at his age. What did he do? Pay them?’

‘Mehmet Bey, I thought that as a member of this family—’

‘Who I am is irrelevant. The fact that your uncle has been murdered is,’ he said. ‘Now tell me what type of men came into this house, and why.’

She began to cry again. He lost patience. ‘And please do not weep! Speak to me and tell me the truth! I can and will take you in for questioning if you attempt to lie to me.’

Oddly she did stop crying, which shocked him. Had he done such a thing to his own mother, she would probably have clawed his face in her fury. But then his mother was a peasant.

Sezen
İ
pek pulled her spine rod-straight and looked down her nose, if not at Süleyman, then near him. She said, ‘My uncle had a weakness for young men. He’d had it all his adult life. The men who came to this house in order to service Rafik Efendi were professional purveyors of sex. I know nothing about them except their profession.’

‘And how old were—’

‘They were adults,’ she said. ‘That I do know.’

‘And when he was a younger man?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What then?’

‘In what respect, Mehmet Bey?’

‘In respect of the ages of the men, or boys, Rafik Efendi chose to love,’ he said. ‘Because I know that he liked young boys, Sezen Han
ı
m. When I was eleven, my father told me to keep away from him.’ He leaned forward in his chair so he could be closer to her. ‘I remember how he looked at me.’

Their eyes met. She hadn’t wanted them to but now she was caught by him. She said, ‘Then I don’t have to go into detail about what went on here, do I, Mehmet Bey.’ Only then did she cry again. ‘Oh Allah,’ she said, ‘what horrors are going to come out of the woodwork to pick over his poor corpse in a very public fashion now?’

Mehmet Süleyman said, ‘Just those seeking justice, madam.’

The Internet was, even Çetin
İ
kmen had to admit, a marvellous thing to use when searching for a lot of facts about something very quickly. Even if some of the information online did represent the ramblings of lunatics.

It wasn’t the first time he’d searched for facts related to the number twenty-one – in the past few months he’d discovered, amongst other things, that the twenty-first tarot card was the World, which represented the end of one life cycle and the beginning of a new one. But this was the first time he’d searched for significant twenty-ones in Turkish history. He looked at his computer screen and said, ‘Did you know that the exact date upon which all Turks were obliged by law to have surnames was the twenty-first of June 1934?’

‘I didn’t.’
İ
kmen could see that Mehmet Süleyman was looking down at his own fingers. This wasn’t a good sign. Years before, when Süleyman’s father Muhammed Efendi had been in charge of his own mind, he’d told
İ
kmen that as a child his son had always bitten his nails when he was nervous. Now his teeth were only centimetres from his fingertips.

‘On the twenty-first of November 1938,’
İ
kmen continued, ‘Atatürk’s body was transferred to the Ethnographic Museum in Ankara prior to its interment in his mausoleum at An
ı
tkabir.’

‘And why would either of those things make someone want to kill?’ Süleyman said. ‘Çetin, Raf
ı
k Efendi, my revolting paedophile uncle, paid for rent boys who visited him at his home. The Englishman was gay, too …’

‘But Leyla Ablak wasn’t gay and neither was Levent Devrim.’

‘No, but then maybe we’re connecting all these victims who are not in fact conjoined,’ Süleyman said. ‘After all, only John Regan and Raf
ı
k Efendi were killed in the same way.’

‘The heart …’

‘Levent Devrim was almost decapitated, while Leyla Ablak had her head smashed against the bottom of a therapy pool.’

‘And yet each was murdered on the twenty-first of successive months,’
İ
kmen said. ‘And Mehmet, you know, I was thinking that in one way or another they were all outsiders, weren’t they? Devrim was a sort of hippy/genius/lunatic, Leyla Ablak was an adulteress, John Regan, homosexual, and old Raf
ı
k Efendi …’

‘I never knew that he was a paedophile before Sezen Han
ı
m told me,’ Süleyman cut in bitterly. ‘He was my grandfather’s youngest brother – creepy to me as a child, admittedly, and my father always told me to be wary of him – but in reality I hardly knew him at all.’

There was a pause, and then
İ
kmen said, ‘Do you feel—’

‘Bad about it? Of course.’ He bit the nail of his forefinger. Then he looked up. ‘I know that all families have their secrets, but when you come from a family like mine, it’s all bound up with what is deemed honourable, too. My family kept his paedophilia a secret. A crime as horrific as that! Imagine! Imagine how many boys might have been damaged by him!’

İ
kmen shook his head.

‘And of course this Ottoman thing is made worse by these mad people who want my family to come back and rule them again. Rule what? The Empire is long dead and there’s no place for monarchs in a republic. What are we supposed to do? Mount a
coup d’état
? And do any of these people realise just how many of us there are? How twisted and awful some of us have become?’

Çetin
İ
kmen nodded. The House of Osmano
ğ
lu, the Ottoman royal family, was, and always had been, vast. In a system where the oldest male inherited and where sultans could have multiple wives and sometimes hundreds of children, those directly descended from a sultan were numerous.

‘Oh, you can nod your head in sympathy,’ Süleyman said, ‘but such characters encourage people like my mother in their delusions of grandeur, and as for all the Islamists who’d like to see a modern caliphate, don’t even get me started. Don’t these people realise that my ancestors were some of the worst drinkers and fornicators in history?’

Contact with Sezen Han
ı
m had clearly pressed all of Süleyman’s anti-Ottoman buttons.
İ
kmen had wanted to talk about the recent murders they had so far unsuccessfully investigated but was finding that his colleague was wanting to be far more specific. He gave up on his computer screen and said, ‘So, Sezen Han
ı
m …’ In the end she’d refused to speak to anyone but Süleyman. ‘Tell me everything.’

‘She doesn’t know who any of Raf
ı
k Efendi’s rent boys were, only that they were adults,’ he said. ‘Or so she claims.’

‘How did the old man meet them?’

‘He got telephone numbers from the Internet,’ Süleyman said.

‘The Internet? How?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Apparently Sezen Han
ı
m went online and got them for him. Ömer is with her now so that she can talk him through all those she contacted. If she can remember, and if they’re still online. But she says she hadn’t done that for some weeks.’

‘Maybe the old man had started to make arrangements without her supervision. Asking boys to come back without booking,’
İ
kmen said.

‘Maybe. Maybe the ones he got for himself were children.’ Süleyman frowned. ‘If, for a moment, we assume that these four murders are connected, do you think that the perpetrator is punishing these people for immoral acts? Not that Rafik didn’t deserve it.’

‘You mean fundamentalists? Jihadis posing as rent boys? Putting on weird costumes? Going to spas? I don’t know,’
İ
kmen said. ‘What does the number twenty-one mean in Islam?’

‘I don’t know.’

He sighed. ‘Then maybe we ought to find out. The one person who doesn’t fit in with the obvious sinner profile is John Regan.’

‘But he was …’

‘Gay, yes, but not actively so, not here,’
İ
kmen said. ‘As far as I know, that is. I got old Pomegranate to put the word out and he drew a blank. If John Regan was after some boy action in this city, he was being very discreet about it.’ He shook his head. ‘None of the connections we have so far extend across all four victims. We have two homosexuals, two members of your family; Levent Devrim and Leyla Ablak were both interested in alternative therapies, John Regan was an historian and a foreigner, and Raf
ı
k Efendi, well, what shall we say …’

‘He liked little boys,’ Süleyman said. ‘After decades of turning a blind eye, now Sezen Han
ı
m is having nightmares about it. She fears that old victims, upon hearing about his death, will come forward to, and I quote, “pick over his poor corpse in a very public fashion”. It’s truly difficult for me to count the ways in which I don’t care, but I also fear the effect any fallout, should it come, will have upon my relatives, however much I may resent their previous inertia.’

‘Of course.’
İ
kmen leaned back in his chair. Then he said, ‘I’m going outside. Thinking without a cigarette just isn’t natural.’

They left his office and walked down to the station car park. It was packed with men and women smoking as if their lives depended upon it, and Ömer Mungan, who, oddly, didn’t seem to need nicotine. He walked over to them.

‘
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu the gypsy has left Tarlaba
ş
ı
,’ he said. Ömer had been spending a lot of time in that district ever since Levent Devrim’s death. As well as being able to speak several of the languages he heard on the streets, he also felt at home there.

‘Do we know why?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No, sir. Word is he’s travelling.’

‘Gypsies often say that.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you think he’s got out of town before H
ı
d
ı
rellez?’ Süleyman asked.

‘What, the spring festival? Why?’
İ
kmen said. ‘Gypsies love all that jumping over fires and dancing in the streets and they make a lot of money from telling fortunes. Why would
Ş
ukru go?’ He shook his head. ‘From what you’ve told me about his involvement with the boy Hamid when Levent Devrim died, I’m left with a distinct feeling of unease, I must say.’

‘You think
Ş
ukru might be implicated in some way?’

‘No,’
İ
kmen said. ‘But I think he might know more then he has told us even now. You’ve said that yourself, Mehmet Bey.’

He sighed.

‘You should have continued the surveillance. With
Ş
ukru out of town, you only have his family to go to, and only one of them, as you know, will even entertain talking to you.’

He looked up at Süleyman, who knew exactly what
İ
kmen wanted him to do. With his family up in arms about his dead uncle, the last thing he needed was an ex-lover he still had feelings for.

There had been another killing. It had happened on the twenty-first, just like John’s, but exactly one month after. Sitting alone in the Ada bookshop, Arthur Regan felt desolate. It didn’t matter that the victim had been some ancient man with multiple health problems; he had been a human being and now he was just a corpse because of someone else. Some animal. It wasn’t easy staying on in the city now that John’s body had been taken back to the UK. He’d returned with it briefly for the funeral, but he’d said he’d stay in
İ
stanbul until the police found his son’s killer, and he was going to stick to it. Not that the police appeared to be making too much progress.