Ikmen 16 - Body Count (36 page)

Panic set in and he began to feel as if he couldn’t breathe. He’d come at her request, to talk about their relationship. What had happened between that request and whenever it was he had found her? And then there was the smell. So much blood gave the air a ferrous tang. Selçuk attempted to breathe normally, but with his heart banging around in his chest like a beach ball, that was impossible. Was she still alive? He put a hand on one of her shoulders and pushed it. Her head flopped backwards, exposing still more of her vast, liverish wound.

Horrified, he ran from her and blundered his way back to the front door, covered in her blood; some of it had even found its way on to his tongue. He opened the door and said weakly, ‘Help me!’

Someone’s hand took his and a voice said, ‘What has happened, Selçuk Bey?’

Süleyman looked up as
İ
kmen entered his office. ‘Finished?’ he asked.

The older man had been interviewing the girl Suzan Arslan for several hours and he looked exhausted.

‘I left her with Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Then I went for a very protracted smoke.’

Süleyman smiled.

‘I may need you to come back and terrorise that child for me,’
İ
kmen continued as he sat down at Ömer Mungan’s desk. ‘I feel quite weak. What have you been doing?’

‘Well, I have called Gonca,’ he said.

‘And?’

‘She was prepared. She cried, of course, but she quickly calmed herself and she’s with her father now.’

‘Good.’

‘Then I called that film company, Hittite, to ask for a copy of the documentary
Ş
ukru appeared in some years ago. I don’t know what kind of difficulty Gonca had with them, but they agreed to make a DVD for me and get it over here tomorrow.’

İ
kmen smiled. ‘Ah, the power of authority,’ he said.

‘And what of Suzan Arslan? And her money?’

‘What of them?’
İ
kmen said. ‘She worked for Abdurrahman
Ş
afak for eighteen months; there is no way she could have managed to save five thousand lira out of her wages in that time. By her own admission she was sending money home to the back of beyond via Western Union every week and the old man made her buy her own food!’ He shook his head. ‘And yet she insists that the money constitutes her savings.’

‘The notes are new and sequential; we can check them with the banks.’

‘Ultimately. But I want her to tell me first,’
İ
kmen said. ‘That girl knows something she shouldn’t and I think it’s about her master’s death.’

‘You don’t think she killed him, do you?’

‘No. But I think she may know who did.’ Then he said, ‘I need more cigarettes.’

Süleyman took his packet out of his pocket and put it on his desk.

İ
kmen rose to his feet. ‘All this ridiculous al fresco nonsense …’

‘Passive smoking, Çetin,’ Süleyman said. ‘It’s a worry.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Well, clearly. But you know what a chain-smoker my ex wife Zelfa was? Well, she doesn’t smoke in her house any more and certainly not around our son under any circumstances. The world’s changing.’

But
İ
kmen wasn’t really listening. Looking over Süleyman’s shoulder, he saw what the younger man had been looking at before he came in. He said to him, ‘Checking your family tree – again?’

Süleyman stood up. ‘Ah, you’ve caught me – again. Yes, those genealogies Professor Atay gave you proved just too intriguing.’

‘Really? I didn’t think you were interested in your Ottoman past,’
İ
kmen said acidly. ‘I thought it bored you.’

Süleyman smiled. ‘That’s what we tell people, yes. But if you are, albeit indirectly, related to a family like the Osmano
ğ
lu, then you are almost compelled to give in to a certain level of curiosity. And especially now …’

‘Because you’re related to Leyla Ablak?’

‘Absolutely. I’ve also discovered too that …’ He shuffled the large sheets of paper in front of him. ‘Just a minute …’

But then his phone rang and he answered it. ‘Süleyman.’

Çetin
İ
kmen, a cigarette already between his lips, watched as his colleague, in response to what he was being told on the phone, allowed his usually very proper mouth to drop open like a fish’s.

Selçuk Devrim sat on the floor of his hall with a blanket around his shoulders. His face, his hands and his clothes were all smeared in his wife’s blood. Above him, leaning against the wall, was the man who had called the police, Professor Cem Atay. When Süleyman and Dr Sarkissian first saw the professor, he had been crying. Now, however, he was quiet and the doctor had gone to attend to the body of the woman who had been his lover.

Süleyman looked down at the husband, who just gazed ahead without blinking. He was clearly in shock and a medic was on the way to attend to him. The inspector turned his attention to Cem Atay.

‘Sir, I will have to interview you formally later …’

‘Of course.’

‘But can you tell me, in brief, what happened when you arrived at this house?’

He shook his head, then said, ‘I arrived, parked outside and then Selçuk Bey opened the door looking like … covered in blood.’ He shook his head again. ‘He said “Help me” and at first I thought he was hurt, so I asked him if he was OK and then he showed me … her …’

‘Mrs Devrim.’

‘He took me into the kitchen and he showed her to me.’ His eyes filled with tears. He looked up at Süleyman. ‘We were all meeting to discuss something. Hatice, Selçuk Bey and me.’

‘To discuss what?’ Süleyman asked.

He put his head down and lowered his voice. ‘Hatice, Mrs Devrim, and myself, we had been having an affair for some years. Selçuk knew.’ He glanced at the man on the floor.

‘For how long?’ Süleyman asked.

‘How long?’

‘How long had Mr Devrim known about your affair with his wife?’

‘I don’t know. Some time. But Hatice and I didn’t know he knew until recently.’

A small man carrying a large black bag appeared in the doorway and said, ‘Inspector Süleyman?’

Süleyman excused himself to Professor Atay and approached the man, who put his hand out for Süleyman to shake. But the latter had plastic gloves on and so he just said, ‘You are?’

‘Dr Emre. I’m told there’s someone here in need of medical attention.’

‘Yes.’ Süleyman indicated the man on the floor. The doctor put his bag down and got on to his haunches to talk to Selçuk Devrim. Süleyman meanwhile escorted Cem Atay into the Devrims’ living room.

‘How did you find out that Mr Devrim knew about your affair?’ he asked.

‘May I sit down?’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ Süleyman said. ‘You must be feeling …’

‘Yes,’ the older man said. When they were both seated on yellow leather lounging chairs, the professor said, ‘Hatice told me that a couple of your officers came to this house, about Selçuk Bey’s brother who was murdered …’

‘Levent Devrim, yes. That was my Sergeant Mungan and a Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu.’

‘Yes, it was the woman …’

‘Farsako
ğ
lu.’

‘Whatever her name was, she was talking to Hatice and she knew that she’d met her before because I had given the police Hatice’s contact details after the Ablak woman was found dead at my brother-in-law Faruk’s spa in Sultanahmet. Well, Selçuk overheard their conversation and confronted Hatice about it after the police had gone. Apparently he said that hearing her tell someone else about it upset him enormously.’

‘Did he say anything else to her?’

‘Not that I know of,’ the professor said. ‘But from that moment, things got bad. Selçuk didn’t want a divorce and he wanted our affair to stop.’

‘And you weren’t …’

‘Hatice and I were in love,’ he said. ‘It was nightmarish. Hatice didn’t want to hurt either of us. She asked us both to come and meet with her today so that we could maybe sort out what we were going to do like adults. I didn’t for a moment believe that she’d do something like this …’

‘You think Mrs Devrim killed herself?’

‘Well I can’t believe that her husband would have killed her, and he was the only other person here when I arrived.’

‘Mr Devrim definitely arrived before you?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Inspector Süleyman, may I have a moment, please?’ The voice that came from the doorway belonged to Arto Sarkissian.

Once again Süleyman excused himself to the professor and went to join the doctor in the kitchen. The body of Hatice Devrim, sitting on its chair, existed between them like a sin.

Süleyman looked at it and said, ‘Doctor?’

‘Well, I can tell you that she didn’t kill herself,’ the Armenian said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because the pressure on the weapon that killed her was the same at the end of the cut as it was at the beginning. Had she slit her own throat she would have lost purchase after she started to bleed out. Look at this.’ He took Süleyman behind the body and pointed to the back of the neck. ‘The cut starts almost behind the left ear and carries on until it reaches the lobe of the right ear. That’s massive. Whoever killed her was standing behind her; he or she was right-handed and I imagine that he probably held the victim to the chair with his left hand just prior to cutting. That’s how I would have done it.’

‘But he or she would have to have been strong.’

‘Oh undoubtedly, yes.’

‘Do we have a weapon, Doctor?’

‘As a matter of fact we do,’ he said. He took Süleyman to the kitchen sink. A sheet of blue plastic had been laid over the draining board. On it was a small knife with an ornate mother-of-pearl handle.

‘If I were to make a guess, I’d say Ottoman,’ Arto Sarkissian said.

Süleyman frowned. ‘And I’d concur.’ He looked up into the doctor’s wide face. ‘I think I might even know what it is.’

‘What is it?’

‘My father has one,’ he said. ‘It belonged to his aunt Gözde. She lived in Ni
ş
anta
ş
ı
, in a terrible old mansion that eventually burnt down. She was a princess.’

‘And she had a knife like this?’

‘They all had knives like that,’ Süleyman said. ‘All the princesses.’

Arto, smiling in spite of his colleague’s solemnity, said, ‘Odd thing for a lady of quality to carry, wasn’t it?’

Süleyman sighed. ‘It was so that they could kill their husbands if they stepped out of line,’ he said. ‘The sultan himself would present the knives to the princesses when they got married. They were a constant reminder to their consorts about what royal blood really meant. For this to be used on a woman is bizarre to say the least; well, it is to me.’

‘Ah, but not many people have your background …’

‘True. Well either our killer knows exactly what this knife means, or he or she just grabbed something suitable for the job. But it’s an odd thing to just grab …’

‘The husband was first on the scene, wasn’t he?’ the doctor asked.

Süleyman looked through the kitchen door to where Selçuk Devrim sat on the hall floor being attended by Dr Emre. He said, ‘Yes. And he was a cuckold.’

‘Was he?’

‘Courtesy of the other man, Professor Cem Atay,’ Süleyman said.

‘Who arrived afterwards?’

‘So he says.’ Süleyman lowered his voice. ‘You know, Doctor, it was Hatice Devrim, or Öz as she preferred to refer to herself back then, who provided an alibi for Professor Atay for the night when the spa murder victim, Leyla Ablak, was killed. Leyla Ablak, you may or may not recall, was the lover of Faruk Genç, Professor Atay’s brother-in-law.’

‘Yes, his sister’s husband.’

‘His dying sister’s husband, yes,’ he said.

‘What are you thinking, Inspector?’ the doctor asked.

Süleyman paused for a moment and then said, ‘I’m thinking that Selçuk Devrim had a very obvious reason to kill his wife. I’m also thinking that under certain circumstances so did Professor Atay.’

Arto Sarkissian frowned. ‘Depends whether Mrs Devrim’s alibi was sound, and if it wasn’t, whether she was using that fact to her advantage,’ he said. ‘No doubt in the fullness of time we will see.’

The girl had to crack in the end.
İ
kmen knew she wouldn’t sleep in that cell and so he stayed close at hand. At ten o’clock a neighbour’s boy arrived with the bread his wife had got for him and the chicken she had cooked for him. He was, as ever, grateful but he only really picked at the food. With instructions to the custody officers to call him if the girl so much as sneezed, he sequestered himself out in the car park so that he could smoke. Looking out over a city that boasted far more light than had been seen in the whole country when he’d been a child,
İ
kmen wondered how he’d manage to survive in an increasingly expensive megacity on a pension. Of course if necessary he could sell his Sultanahmet apartment to some rich media type who would no doubt give him a laughable amount of money for it. But if he didn’t live there, then where could he live? And anyway, he didn’t want to live anywhere else.

It didn’t help that he knew Mehmet Süleyman was up too. Or more to the point, it didn’t help that he knew
why
his colleague was still up. Another murder had occurred and he’d been interrogating Professor Cem Atay, who had been found at the house of the brother of Levent Devrim, their first twenty-first of the month victim. Apparently the professor had discovered Selçuk Devrim with the body of the latter’s wife, Hatice, who had had her throat cut. And it wasn’t even close to the twenty-first of any month.

İ
kmen knew little more than just the bald details of the events that had taken place in Bebek. He hadn’t had a chance to talk to Süleyman or Arto Sarkissian, who had also attended the scene. But then the girl Suzan was still preoccupying him. Had it really been just her excessive mourning for her master that had alerted him to the idea that she might have done something wrong? Or had he picked up something else from her? And was his position on that even tenable? He’d given the banks the serial numbers of the notes the girl had had on her and was waiting to hear from them. What if they had come from the old man’s own account? What if he had given her the money for some reason? But if that was the case, why hadn’t the girl just told him? Unless she’d taken money from him in exchange for something shameful, like sex. This was not the first time Çetin
İ
kmen had asked himself these questions, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.