Ikmen 16 - Body Count (33 page)

‘Does anyone know about your affair?’ Ay
ş
e said.

‘We’re very discreet.’

‘You’ve not answered my question,’ Ay
ş
e said.

Hatice Öz looked at her. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

Ay
ş
e thought for a few moments. ‘Not maybe your brother-in-law, Levent …’

‘Levent?’

‘Yes, Levent who died in Tarlaba
ş
ı
. Levent Devrim.’

‘I hardly knew him,’ she said. ‘Selçuk wouldn’t let me near that terrible flat he had. He came here once, just after we got married, but … While he was alive, after my in-laws died, Selçuk paid him an allowance, but we never went to see him.’

‘And the allowance …’

‘Oh, that was up to my husband,’ she said. ‘But he got no opposition from me. Ask him! The poor man was mad and he had a heart condition; who wouldn’t want to help him?’

She hadn’t been expecting him. When he’d arrived, she had just finished on the phone to the production company who had made the documentary that her brother had been in. They hadn’t been helpful and she’d been furious, but she’d put that aside to make love to him. Now he was fucking her and all she could think about was how hot he felt inside her. Just the thought of him made her grind her hips still harder against his. In spite of
Ş
ukru, in spite of everything, when Mehmet Süleyman wanted her, Gonca gave herself to him without a thought. Only afterwards, as he lay half asleep beside her, did her thoughts go back to
Ş
ukru once again.

The TV production company who had made the Ottoman minorities documentary had been called Hittite, as in the ancient Anatolian civilisation. The man she’d finally managed to speak to there had been arrogant and terse, and when she’d told him who she was, he’d become even worse.

‘Oh that was years ago,’ he’d told her. ‘If we have got it, it’ll only be on old videotape.’

‘But they’ve played bits of it on the news,’ she’d said.

He’d gone away to apparently find out about that, but when he’d returned, he’d just said, ‘That was a clip from an old videotape.’

‘Oh, so can I have a copy?’

‘Of videotape? What will you play it on?’ he’d said. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t the whole programme; it was just a tape of clips that we had.’

‘Where can I get a copy if you don’t have one?’ she’d asked.

He’d said he didn’t know, and so she’d told him to fuck off, put the phone down and then cursed him and his wretched company. Afterwards she’d thought that maybe she should have been a bit nicer, because perhaps he would, given time, have agreed to give her the clip. But then she could record that off the television herself. No. What her father wanted was the whole programme. Not just for
Ş
ukru, but for all the shots of Sulukule that were in it too.

She looked over at Mehmet Süleyman. He’d be on his way soon, back to his work and the life that he had without her. There had been no news about the DNA test, and as soon as he’d told her that, she’d taken him to her bedroom. Now he was catching some rest after his exertions and it made Gonca smile. But only for a moment. Recalling her conversation with her father, she wondered whether she should tell Süleyman about the old man’s suspicions regarding
Ş
ukru. After all, if the body that the police had found burning in Aksaray
was
Ş
ukru, then whoever had done that had to be punished. Not that her father would want the police to do it. But if the police could find the bastard for them, the community could think of a way to deal with him. Anyway, Gonca had a question for her lover.

She tapped Süleyman on the shoulder.

‘What?’ He raised his head. His hair was, Gonca noticed, uncharacteristically awry.

She rolled over and put an arm on his naked side. ‘I went to see my father,’ she said. ‘He thinks
Ş
ukru was blackmailing someone.’

‘Blackmailing who?’ He lit two cigarettes and gave her one. She put an ashtray on the bed between them.

‘He doesn’t know. But he has a theory.’

‘What?’

‘Baba thinks that
Ş
ukru saw whoever killed that crazy man in Tarlaba
ş
ı
back in January. Before he left to go to Edirne,
Ş
ukru told him that he was going to move the family out to a Bosphorus village when H
ı
d
ı
rellez was over. That takes money.’

‘Do you think that he may just have been boasting?’ Süleyman asked.

Gonca stroked his face. ‘Gypsy men don’t boast unless they can follow through, darling,’ she said. ‘We are not like you. We don’t boast about our big penises unless we can show them.’

‘I’ve never—’ he began.

‘You have to prove nothing,’ she said. ‘But Mehmet, what if my
Ş
ukru went to see someone to blackmail him that day when he returned to
İ
stanbul?’

‘But who? Does your father have any idea?’

‘No. My father doesn’t leave the house. What does he know?’ She puffed on her cigarette. ‘
Ş
ukru was in Ortaköy with the Edirne gypsies when he called me just before H
ı
d
ı
rellez,’ she said. ‘And his body was found in Aksaray.’

‘H
ı
d
ı
rellez is the sixth of May, and
Ş
ukru’s body – if it is
Ş
ukru’s body – was found on the twenty-first,’ Süleyman said. ‘Dr Sarkissian is of the opinion that the Aksaray man was killed some days before he was cremated.’

‘But if
Ş
ukru disappeared on H
ı
d
ı
rellez, which he did,’ she said, ‘then whoever had him must have kept him prisoner.’ She frowned. ‘But who could keep a man like
Ş
ukru as a prisoner? He wouldn’t allow it. And why Aksaray?’

‘There were no security cameras where the body was found,’ Süleyman said.

She changed the subject. ‘Mehmet,’ she said, ‘many years ago my brother took part in a documentary about Sulukule. My father wants a copy, so I spoke to the production company who made it to try and find one. But they didn’t have one. They were offhand with me and I lost my temper with them.’

‘Gonca …’

‘I know! I know I should be a better woman! But look, Mehmet, do you remember that documentary?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’

‘It was made when all the trouble first started with the council threatening to demolish Sulukule,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really pay attention at the time, and the piece they showed on the news programmes just shows
Ş
ukru being a loudmouth. But I want it, for my father. Will you ask people you know about it? If I knew who the director was …’

‘So ask the production company,’ he said.

She said nothing and lowered her eyes.

‘You really abused them, didn’t you, Gonca?’ He shook his head. ‘I will ask everyone I think might know.’

Çetin
İ
kmen motioned for Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu to sit down in front of his desk while he finished his telephone call. Once the call had ended, he wrote some notes on one of the scrap pieces of paper that littered his desk and then he said, ‘Ay
ş
e?’

She told him what she’d found out at Selçuk Devrim’s house and how his wife had turned out to be someone she had met before. ‘Hatice Öz provided an alibi for her lover Professor Atay for the night that Leyla Ablak was murdered,’ she said. ‘In addition, because Miss Öz is Levent Devrim’s sister-in-law, that creates a link between those two crimes.’

‘Did Miss Öz know Leyla Ablak?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘She says not, sir.’

‘What about the spa, any connection there?’

‘Again she says not, but I have yet to check that out.’

‘OK.’

‘What she did tell me was that Professor Atay was at the centre of a missing person case some years ago,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘His wife, Merve Atay, apparently walked out of their house in Arnavutköy in 2002 and never returned. I don’t remember it myself.’

‘Nor I,’
İ
kmen said. ‘But I’ll look it up. The woman’s still missing, you say?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Mmm.’ He shook his head. ‘Professor Atay has been helpful to us with regard to sharing his knowledge of the vast Osmano
ğ
lu family. I don’t know whether the Mayan connection really has any validity, but …’ He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Have you ever watched his television programmes?’

‘I saw one he did about Süleyman the Lawgiver,’ she said. ‘That was good, if a bit depressing. I mean, he really explored the whole notion of the Ottoman Empire going into decline from then on.’

‘It did,’
İ
kmen said.

‘At the end of the narrative it sort of went into the inevitability of Kemalism and the Republic,’ she said. ‘But that has to be over ten years ago now, before all this re-evaluation of the Ottoman period came into vogue. I think Professor Atay has made a lot of documentaries since then.’

‘Oh yes.’
İ
kmen put his hand in his desk drawer and pulled out a large sheaf of paper. ‘Told me he’s just written a book about the relationship and rivalry between the Ottoman and the Spanish Empires. Hence some fascinating trips to South America and his interest in the Mayans. That will I believe become a documentary at some point too. But then the professor is a very personable man with a rather lovely speaking voice.’ He smiled again. ‘Sexy academics. Very in demand. Have you seen that British physicist? Professor something or other from Manchester University? My daughters make very strange noises when he comes on the television. I don’t think they understand a word he says. I know I don’t.’ He frowned. ‘I presume that Levent Devrim’s brother doesn’t know that his wife is having an affair with … Did you say that Hatice Öz had been a student of Professor Atay?’

‘Years ago, yes,’ she said. ‘And no, according to his wife, Selçuk Devrim does not know.’

İ
kmen put the sheaf of paper he’d taken out of his drawer on his desk. ‘The Osmano
ğ
lu family trees given to me by Professor Atay,’ he said. ‘I’ve read and read them. They’re just names …’ He looked up. ‘If Selçuk Devrim doesn’t know about his wife’s affair, that doesn’t mean that other people are as clueless as he is – if he
is
clueless. And if other people know and maybe take advantage of that knowledge in some way … But how does any of this relate to the death of either Levent Devrim or Leyla Ablak?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘At least it doesn’t given what we know about these people at the moment. Hatice Öz hardly knew her brother-in-law Levent. The money his brother gave him every month was clearly not stretching the couple financially and she seemed to have actually had a sneaking affection for the man. Whether Professor Atay knew Leyla Ablak from the spa is open to question, but he has an alibi for the night she died …’

‘From Hatice Öz.’

‘And what would have been his motive for killing Leyla anyway?’

‘Because she was having an affair with his brother-in-law, Faruk Genç, the husband of his dying sister?’

‘And yet you said that Professor Atay exhibited some understanding of Faruk Genç’s situation.’

He shrugged. ‘Yes. But you’ve raised an interesting connection, Ay
ş
e,’ he said, ‘and it does mean that the professor’s alibi for Leyla Ablak’s death may be unsafe. Not because he has a mistress – we knew that – but because he concealed, as did she, her connection to a previous crime. Why do that? We could have cleared them both with little trouble had we known the truth. But they didn’t tell us the truth.’ He rubbed his eyes, which were bloodshot. ‘I’ll look into his missing wife; we have to have historical data on that, especially if the woman is still officially alive.’

They sat in silence for a few moments as they both absorbed what had just been discussed. Then
İ
kmen said, ‘When you came in, I was on the phone to the father of victim number three.’

‘John Regan.’

‘Arthur Regan had been to see the maid, Suzan, at Abdurrahman Efendi’s apartment in
Ş
i
ş
li. Not at my request, I should say.’

Ay
ş
e knew that
İ
kmen was having the little maid watched, although she couldn’t really understand why. It came down, as far as she knew, to a feeling
İ
kmen had about how the young girl had cried too much when the old man had died. One of his hunches, apparently, but it was also backed up by her own and Arthur Regan’s observation that the old man had treated the girl badly. If that was the case, why was she so cut up about his death?

‘Did Mr Regan find anything out?’ Ay
ş
e asked.

‘Only that Suzan intends to go back to her home village at the end of the week,’ he said. ‘Oh, and she has very little faith in our ever finding her master’s killer.’

‘That’s not unusual, sir,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘The public—’

‘Understand neither our problems nor our methods,’ he said. ‘But you know, the girl was very calm with Mr Regan. And how she can stay in that apartment, given that she is choking with sobs every time I see her, I don’t know. She says she knows nobody in the city …’

‘Then that explains it,’ Ay
ş
e said.

‘Yes, but we could have moved her into a hostel,’
İ
kmen said. ‘I asked Inspector Süleyman if he’d offered her alternative accommodation, and he said that he had but she turned it down.’

‘Do you think she wants to maybe take something from the apartment before she goes?’ Ay
ş
e asked.

‘I believe an inventory has been produced; it would be stupid of her. But maybe,’ he added. ‘She’s a little country girl; she may be that … what do you call it, unworldly?’

She smiled. ‘You’ll find out. You’re having her watched.’

‘Yes, I am, Ay
ş
e,’ he said. ‘At the moment I’m having a lot of people watched. In that sense, if in no other, I do feel Ottoman.’ Then, realising that she didn’t know what he meant, he added, ‘In the latter stages of the Empire, from the nineteenth century, successive sultans continually increased their spy network until, under Abdülhamid II, it was reckoned that half the country was spying on the other half.’