Ikmen 16 - Body Count (45 page)

The professor looked down at his burden and then up again. ‘I said, you’ll need a warrant.’

‘But if I have reason to believe that you could have illegal drugs in that bag …’

‘Don’t be absurd!’

‘Which I do,’
İ
kmen said.

All three men looked at each other. Çetin
İ
kmen didn’t usually make things up to get his way, but both he and Ömer Mungan wanted very badly to see what the professor had in his heavy sack.

‘It won’t take a moment,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Just let Sergeant Mungan—’

‘No. No, you’ve no right,’ the academic said. ‘I’ve never been convicted of drug offences in my life; you have no reason to search me or my property. Go and get a warrant. Go away.’

He was standing his ground, which
İ
kmen had expected. He said, ‘Sir, for all I know my colleague Inspector Süleyman may never have left this house after his appointment with you this afternoon …’

‘He did.’

‘I need to verify that.’

‘Then get a warrant. Go away, get a warrant and then come back and I will gladly show you my home.’

He was trying to get them to leave. But if they went, they would be giving him time to do who knew what both inside the house and with the sack that Ömer Mungan was gradually moving closer to.

‘And I mean all of you,’ the professor said. ‘If you think I’ll tolerate people staking out my home …’

‘Who we leave on the public highway is up to us,’
İ
kmen said. ‘The grounds of the church are not your property …’

‘You have no reason to watch me! You’ve no reason to follow me!’

‘Follow you? Who said anything about following you?’
İ
kmen said. Ömer was almost in a position where he might be able to see inside the sack. ‘Are you planning to go somewhere, Professor?’

‘Well, clearly, because I am preparing my car.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘That’s none of your business!’ he said. In his anger he shook his head, and it was then that he saw what Ömer was trying to do. ‘Get away from that!’ he screeched.

‘If you’ll just let me look inside …’ Ömer reached down.

‘No!’ In a movement that was both very rapid and amazingly smooth, Cem Atay took a gun out of his jacket pocket and fired it.

They all heard the shot. It sounded as if it had come from behind the property. Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu, outside the professor’s front door, told the uniformed constables to kick it in. It was one of those ornate, heavy Greek doors and so it took some doing, but eventually it gave.

Ay
ş
e went in first and ran through the marble front hall and into the kitchen. By a light that seemed to come from somewhere underneath the house she could see three figures standing by a car.
İ
kmen was instantly recognisable, and she thought the taller man could be Ömer Mungan. What she could see easily, however, was that the other figure had a gun. She said to the constable at her back, ‘No one down as far as I can see.’

‘That’s good.’

‘But I’m going to get closer.’

‘Ma’am, don’t you want us to—’

‘No.’ She held up a hand to stop the men behind her. Then she moved from the back of the kitchen to the front and tucked herself down behind what she could now see was the partially open back door. In that position she could hear what was going on outside.

İ
kmen said, ‘You have to see that you were always too close. And that in part was your own fault. You came to us and told us about the connection to the Mayan Long Count calendar.’

‘I came to you in response to a request for ideas and information you made in the press,’ Atay said.

‘You still put yourself on our radar,’
İ
kmen continued. ‘Both Inspector Süleyman and myself had doubts about you, but it wasn’t until I managed to speak to Leyla
İ
pek’s mother this afternoon that the possibility of a deeply personal motive emerged.’

Ay
ş
e opened the door a little wider so that she could see the garden more easily.

‘The
İ
peks humiliated you when you were little more than a child,’ she heard
İ
kmen say. ‘You and the girl had sex, she got pregnant and you were treated like a peasant. I understand. And now, in recent years, the parasites appear to be moving back into public life …’

‘And you know what, exactly? Nothing!’ Cem Atay’s body appeared to stiffen. ‘I’ve studied these people all my life. They’re still the same morally redundant, greedy, stupid, vicious family they have always been. And people want them back?’

‘Some people.’

‘Some people in the government, yes! I’ve spent my life studying and teaching the history of empire as a catalogue of failure and inequality that we have grown out of!’ His voice became shriller and shriller as his agitation increased. ‘But then in 2009 we, this country, gave one of them what amounted to a state funeral! One of those people who kept the rest of us enslaved for centuries in the mistaken belief that they were divinely appointed by a God whose every commandment they abused!’

‘We can talk about this,’
İ
kmen said. ‘We can talk about all this, just—’

‘This gun is all I have,’ Atay said. ‘I’m not putting it down and you are going to let me get into my car or I will kill you.’

‘You can’t kill both of us.’

‘You know, I really don’t care.’

‘Where is Inspector Süleyman?’

Ay
ş
e felt her heart jolt in her chest.

‘What do you care where another one of them is or isn’t?’

‘He’s my friend.’

‘He’s one of them! Do you have no consciousness of your own class at all?’ He waved his gun. ‘Now move to the back of the garden and let me get in my car and go.’

There was a pause. No one moved, then
İ
kmen said, ‘No.’

Another pause followed, after which Cem Atay said, ‘I have your weapons. You’re unarmed. What are you going to do?’

He must have taken their guns. Ay
ş
e began to sweat. She looked at the men lined up behind her and then back into the garden again. What she needed to do was to deploy them around the property, effectively cutting off all escape routes.

‘If you’re not with me, you’re against me,’ Cem Atay said.
İ
kmen moved towards him and the professor clicked the safety catch off.

‘Give me the gun,’
İ
kmen said.

Ay
ş
e knew that this was her moment, the one where she unequivocally proved her worth and
İ
kmen’s job became hers by right. As she got to her feet, she saw
İ
kmen push Ömer Mungan away from him, and then she was outside the kitchen door with her own weapon raised.

‘Put the gun down now, Professor,’ she said.

They all looked at her, and for just a moment Ay
ş
e felt a glow of triumph. With her gun trained on the professor’s head, she’d brought this stand-off to a close.
İ
kmen and Ömer Mungan behaved as if they believed that too, because they both took one step towards Cem Atay. But what none of them had noticed was that even when the others had stopped looking at Ay
ş
e, the professor hadn’t.

He shot her in the stomach, and she fell to the ground before the men at her back could reach her.

Ömer kicked the weapon out of the professor’s hand and pulled him into a headlock while he took his own and
İ
kmen’s guns out of Atay’s trouser waistband.

Completely oblivious to anything else,
İ
kmen ran to where Ay
ş
e lay on the ground in the arms of a uniformed constable. Another cop was calling an ambulance and a third officer had gone back into the house to secure the front door. He heard the snap of handcuffs as Ömer disabled the professor. Before he even squatted down beside her,
İ
kmen knew that Ay
ş
e was dead. Not just because shots to the stomach were difficult to survive but because she looked at peace. There was no fight for survival, no struggle to take breath or attempt last, significant words.

The constable holding her said, ‘She’s gone.’

And although he knew that was a fact,
İ
kmen took one of her wrists between his fingers and felt for a pulse that was never going to be there. Only then did he say, ‘Yes.’

He heard Ömer call for backup and he felt entirely impotent to either help or advise the young man.

The constable holding Ay
ş
e said, ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’

İ
kmen put his arms out. ‘Give her to me.’

The constable moved out of the way and a gentle exchange of the dead body of Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu took place. As soon as he had her,
İ
kmen smiled and held her to his chest as he would have done one of his own children. Because in many ways she was one of his daughters, and he had loved her.

‘Sir?’

Ömer had put the professor into the custody of the constable who had called the ambulance. Its siren could just now be heard in the far distance, towards the centre of the city.

‘Sir?’

İ
kmen looked up. ‘She’s dead.’

Ömer sank to his knees and looked at her with eyes imbued not so much with horror as with the light of having seen some sort of miracle. Because she was still smiling. ‘She saved us,’ he said. He went to touch her hand, but
İ
kmen gathered her still closer to himself. He put his head in her hair and he curled himself into her terrible blood-soaked wound, and Ömer Mungan knew that for the moment there was only him, and so he took charge. He had liked Ay
ş
e Han
ı
m a lot, but to
İ
kmen she was almost family. Now it was his time: Ömer Mungan, the boy from the back of beyond who still had to find his boss, the man who’d chosen him above all the slick city boys in
İ
stanbul to be his deputy. Now he had to prove whether he was prepared to fight to stay in
İ
stanbul or not.

Once again he checked the sack the professor had been dragging towards his car. Just like the first time he’d looked in it, it contained only a very old mattress and some bedding.

He went over to the academic, who was now sitting on the ground in a stress position with the constable looming over him. Ömer knelt down beside him and said, ‘What have you done with Inspector Süleyman?’

There was no answer. Whether he was in shock or just noncompliant Ömer didn’t know. He took Atay’s chin between his fingers. ‘Listen to me. Where I come from, revenge is a way of life. Tell me where Süleyman is and it will go easier for you. Don’t, and I will reach inside your cell and I will increase your torment.’

Still Cem Atay said nothing. Ömer Mungan toyed with the idea of kicking him in the head as he rose to his feet, but then decided that he had better things to do. As
İ
kmen continued to cradle Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu in his arms, Ömer ordered the other constables into the house and told them to search every corner of it. He had been so convinced that Süleyman was in that sack, he couldn’t imagine where else his boss might be.

When he did eventually find Süleyman, on the cellar floor, covered in a thin grey blanket, he was sure that he too was dead. But although his breathing was so shallow as to make it almost invisible, it was there, and when the ambulance arrived it was Süleyman who was loaded into it and taken to hospital.

Ömer tried to tell
İ
kmen the good news, but he didn’t appear to be able to hear anything.

Proximity to the death of a loved one put those who experienced it under a sort of a spell. Çetin
İ
kmen had seen it a hundred times in his work and had experienced it himself when his father and his son had died. It involved an increasing appreciation of the irrelevance of time, a conviction that one was dying from the pain one was experiencing, as well as a terrible fear about where and what the dead person was about to be subjected to next. Even when Forensics arrived to investigate the scene, still he wouldn’t give Ay
ş
e up. They were a team. In the real world she was meant to be his successor when he retired, and until she left him, how could he leave her?

For a good hour nobody came near them. He told her how much he appreciated everything she did for him and what a brilliant career she had ahead of her as he desperately tried to cling on to the real world that had existed just that morning, just that afternoon. But far away inside the depths of his mind, he knew it couldn’t last. He just didn’t know how to end it. Because if he left her then he’d know she was dead and she was never coming back.

‘Çetin?’

The voice was soft and familiar and it washed against his strained nerves like water, because it was a sound that came right from the roots of his childhood. He looked up into Arto Sarkissian’s face.

‘You need to give Ay
ş
e to me now, Çetin,’ the doctor said. ‘You know I will take good care of her.’

It was true. Arto always took care of the dead; it was what he did. And impervious to the spell they cast, he could find out exactly why and how they had died, which sometimes helped to bring them justice.

Arto put an arm between the body and his friend. ‘It’s OK to let go now, Çetin,’ he said.

And it was. Arto took her, and together with two of his orderlies he put her on a stretcher, then he covered her face and her body with a sheet.

İ
kmen looked down at himself for the first time since he’d taken Ay
ş
e in his arms and suddenly her blood disgusted him. It wasn’t where it was meant to be. While the orderlies took the body away, Arto helped him to rise to his feet. As Ay
ş
e receded into the distance, everything about her faded: the smell of her perfume, the feel of her skin, the spell that she had put on him. Did he imagine it as a mist that followed her corpse into the plain green transport that would carry her to the Armenian’s laboratory, or was there really a mist that had come up from the Bosphorus, giving the pretty Arnavutköy garden an eerie feel?