Ikmen 16 - Body Count (46 page)

‘You must go home and rest,’ Arto said.

Suddenly everything he had to know and do came crashing in upon him. ‘Yes, but we must find Süleyman,’ he began, as adrenalin burst out of his glands and flooded his bloodstream.

‘He’s been found,’ Arto said. Recognising the signs of mounting panic, he added, ‘He’s fine.’

‘You’re not lying to me, are you? You’re not …’

‘I’m telling you the truth, as I always have,’ Arto said. He put a hand in his pocket and took out a small bottle of pills. He shook one out into his palm. ‘Now I want you to take this.’

İ
kmen looked at the pill as if it were a live hand grenade. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a mild tranquilliser.’

‘What? Diazepam?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t want that! What do I want that for?’ He pulled away from his friend, stuck a hand in his jacket pocket, took out his cigarettes and lit up. His legs buckled and he fell to the ground.

Arto helped him to his feet again. ‘A sudden rush of nicotine, oddly, isn’t always a panacea for all your ills, Çetin,’ he said. Then he pushed the tablet between
İ
kmen’s lips and made him swallow. ‘And no spitting it out.’

İ
kmen did as he was told. ‘But what about the man who lives in this house?’ he said. ‘Professor Atay?’

‘Your colleagues have taken him to the station,’ Arto said.

‘I’ll have to interview him!’

Arto put one of his arms through
İ
kmen’s and led him into the professor’s house. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you have to go home and rest,’ the doctor said.

They passed into the marble hall with the silent Greek fountain. In front of them, the wreckage of the academic’s door lay splintered across the threshold.

‘But who will interview Professor Atay?’
İ
kmen said. ‘Who?’

When Gonca arrived at the hospital, she found Nur Süleyman beside her son’s bed talking to a doctor.

‘We’ve given your son a drug called flumazenil, which is the antidote to a benzodiazepine overdose,’ he was saying. ‘If his respiratory function had been better we could have just left him to wake up. But there is an outside risk of coma in some of these cases, which I now think we’ve averted.’

‘He will live, won’t he?’ the old woman asked.

Gonca looked at the long, pale figure of her lover and began to cry.

‘Benzodiazepine overdose is rarely fatal,’ she heard the doctor say. Then she saw him look at her. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

She looked a mess. She’d been trying to get some sleep, more for her father’s sake than for her own, when the constable had called. Sergeant Mungan had sent him; such a nice boy, that boy from the east. He’d told her that Mehmet Bey was in the Taksim. So she’d come.

‘Madam?’ The doctor looked at her as if he had a bad smell under his nose. But then she was dishevelled. Her hair was uncombed and knotted and she wore a dirty shift, with no bra, over which she had just flung a skirt that wasn’t even hers. On her feet she wore her father’s slippers. Who was she going to say she was? What relation could she possibly be to a high-ranking police officer?

But then an old, cultured voice said, ‘Oh, Doctor, this is a friend of my son’s.’

And although Nur Süleyman wasn’t exactly smiling at her, Gonca did not get the impression that she wanted to bite her.

Nur urged her forward. ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘The doctor has said that he can be sat with.’

Gonca, tentatively at first, moved past the doctor and joined the old woman at the bedside. At first she stood, but then Nur told her to go and get a chair. She found one in a corridor and returned to see what she hoped was a little more colour in her lover’s cheeks. It turned out to be just a smudge of blood from his nose, which was swollen and pushed to one side.

After what seemed like an eternity of silence, the old woman said, ‘You know, I hate my son doing this job. Again a madman tries to kill him. You must hate it too.’

Gonca, taken aback by this tacit acknowledgement of her position in Mehmet’s life, took a few moments to gather her thoughts. ‘It’s what he does,’ she said.

‘You are very accepting.’

‘As you know, Han
ı
m, I am a gypsy. We have no choice but to accept.’

The old woman – who had once, Gonca could see, been very beautiful – said, ‘And yet you are a very successful artist. I don’t think you always have to accept what fate hands out to you.’

‘My father lives in Tarlaba
ş
ı
and today they began to pull it down around him,’ Gonca said. ‘That I have to accept. And my brother
Ş
ukru, some terrible person murdered him and then burnt his body. What remains of him we have to bury in the morning. These are things I can do nothing about, Han
ı
m.’

‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Nur Süleyman said, following up with the more traditional exhortation to the bereaved to ‘live long’.

‘Thank you.’

‘As for Tarlaba
ş
ı
…’ The old woman shook her head. ‘You know, my husband’s Armenian wet nurse came from there. It makes me sad to see it disappear. Some people talk in terms of what they call “new Ottoman” projects. But what connection that has to my husband’s family is anybody’s guess. The old Ottomans want things to be left as they are. Who these new Ottomans are I do not know.’

Gonca said nothing. She didn’t really care who was tearing down Tarlaba
ş
ı
or why, she just wanted it to stop. ‘They moved us on from Sulukule,’ she said. ‘Where I was born and my brother and all of us.’

‘And that too was a disgrace,’ Nur said. ‘Our city is famous for many things, and one of those is the fact that we used to have one of the most colourful and happy gypsy communities in Europe.’

‘A thousand years.’

‘As you say, a thousand years of living side by side in peace.’ She turned to look at Gonca. ‘You know, Han
ı
m, I will not pretend to be happy about my son being with a woman like you. You do not conform to the norms of life as my family understand them and you are far too old for him, but I will never try to dissuade him from you again. On that you have my word. I can see that you love him, and that is worth something. There has been too much interference with love in the past.’

It was hard to know how to respond to what was hardly a compliment; more a declaration of peace. But Gonca was gracious and she was truthful. She said, ‘I expect nothing, Han
ı
m, except the right to love your son. Loving him is something I cannot help and I will not apologise for it.’

‘You’re charged with the murder of one police officer and the imprisonment and assault of another,’ Commissioner Ard
ı
ç said.

He didn’t often get his hands dirty by interviewing suspects, but this one was a TV star, and Çetin
İ
kmen, who would normally have performed this function, had been sent home. His sergeant was dead and he was in shock. Had he come in with the offender, he would either have had nothing to say to him or he would have beaten him up. The former would have been useless, while the latter, in view of the massed ranks of the press who had suddenly appeared outside the station, would have been unwise to say the least.

Ard
ı
ç looked at the young eastern boy who had taken over from
İ
zzet Melik. He was a good officer and had handled the entire crime scene most efficiently.

‘So tell me, Sergeant …’

‘Mungan,’ he cut in quickly.

‘Apart from those facts we are sure about – the death of Sergeant Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu at this man’s hands – what else do we know about our professor? I don’t mean age, education and all that rubbish.’

‘No, sir.’

The subject of their conversation, Cem Atay, sat in front of them, silently, with his lawyer.

‘I want to know why a man such as you, Professor Atay, would kill one of my officers and wound a second,’ Ard
ı
ç said. ‘You have everything a man could want – money, fame, the respect of your peers.’ He leaned, with some difficulty, towards the professor, denting his large stomach uncomfortably as he did so. ‘How did we get here, Professor Atay? Eh?’

Still the famous man didn’t speak.

Ömer Mungan cleared his throat. ‘Sir, when Inspector
İ
kmen and myself were trying to apprehend Professor Atay, the inspector put it to him that his behaviour had something to do with an incident that had happened a long time ago.’

‘What incident?’

Ömer looked down at the few notes he had made prior to joining Ard
ı
ç in the interview room. ‘Inspector
İ
kmen had learned from murder victim Leyla Ablak’s mother, Sezen
İ
pek, that Professor Atay and Leyla had had a relationship back in the 1970s when they were both students. Leyla
İ
pek, as she was then, became pregnant and her family organised an abortion. However, the father, Professor Atay, was humiliated by the
İ
peks and was never allowed to see Leyla again.’

The professor’s face coloured.

‘This incident, and I think the professor’s political views too, developed in him a hatred not just for Leyla
İ
pek’s family but for all members of the former Imperial Ottoman family, of which they were one small part.’

‘And given that we’ve had so many unnatural deaths in that family this year …’

‘Professor Atay volunteered what he hoped we would find to be useful information about our increasing caseload,’ Ömer said. ‘By pointing us in the direction of something called the Mayan Long Count calendar.’

Ard
ı
ç, who was accustomed after so many years to be unsurprised by every esoteric lead that Çetin
İ
kmen and those around him chose to follow, said, ‘I see.’

‘It’s South American …’

‘It’s all mixed up with the end of the world; yes, I know, Sergeant,’ Ard
ı
ç said. ‘Contrary to appearances, I do keep up.’

Ömer looked down, to smother a smile – Ard
ı
ç was a wry bastard – then said, ‘We believe it’s very possible that the deaths of Leyla Ablak, John Regan, Rafik
İ
pek Efendi and Abdurrahman
Ş
afak Efendi were committed not as some sort of blood sacrifice to a South American god but as an act of vengeance. You see, sir, Professor Atay has connections to all those victims, albeit loosely in some cases. He remains the only suspect who does.’

‘And the first victim? In Tarlaba
ş
ı
?’

‘Levent Devrim. He was the brother-in-law of the professor’s now deceased mistress, Hatice Devrim.’

‘Royal?’

‘Not at all,’ Ömer said. ‘But Inspector Süleyman thought it possible that he knew the professor was having an affair with his sister-in-law. And for the record, sir, Levent Devrim was a believer in the Mayan Long Count calendar. It’s my personal belief that Professor Atay could just as easily have come up with the idea of pinning these killings on some mythical crazy conspiracy theorist by observing Levent Devrim as he could have done by studying the Maya on a trip to Mexico in 2011.’

‘Mmm.’ Ard
ı
ç looked down at a sheaf of papers in front of him on the table and took a few moments to read something. ‘Says here that Hatice Devrim’s husband has confessed to her murder.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So not the professor?’

‘A connection also exists between the professor and a gypsy called
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu, whose burned body, you will recall, sir, was found on some waste ground …’

‘Know him too, did he? Mmm,’ Ard
ı
ç said. He looked at Cem Atay. ‘Well you can sit there in silence beside your very expensive legal adviser, but eventually you will have to answer questions relating to yourself and these unfortunate members of the Osmano
ğ
lu family, plus the madman and the gypsy too, lest we forget. Silence can be interpreted as guilt, especially if we ally it to forensic evidence. Do you see?’

For a moment Cem Atay didn’t speak. Then he said, ‘I’ll talk to
İ
kmen, and only
İ
kmen.’

He was cold, and he feared that Fatma would use the unseasonal weather to talk about the soba and the central heating again. But she didn’t, and when he looked at her properly, he could see that she was actually quite warm.

‘Get into bed and I’ll bring you some tea,’ she said as she helped him into his pyjamas and pulled the bedclothes up to his chin.

Still confused by the temperature, he said, ‘But don’t you want me to light the soba?’

‘The soba? It’s …’ She gave him an ashtray and then she briefly hugged him. ‘It’s not cold, Çetin, you’re just very upset,’ she said. ‘And it’s not surprising.’ Her eyes filled up. ‘That poor girl!’

He kissed her on the cheek and let her go.

‘I’ll make tea and then I might cook some börek,’ she said as she walked towards the bedroom door.

It had to be past one o’clock in the morning, but
İ
kmen didn’t say anything. When times were hard, or she was upset, Fatma cooked. It was her therapy, and if cooking all night meant that she kept her sanity, then it was time and ingredients well spent. She’d always liked Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu. As a religious woman, she hadn’t always approved of the sergeant’s lifestyle, but she’d never told her that. Ay
ş
e had been welcomed into the
İ
kmen household time and time again, and had she lived, she always would have been.

İ
kmen pulled the covers around his body so that they warmed his sides. He was like a man caught in the snow, shaking with chills and aching from head to foot. Did Mehmet Süleyman know about Ay
ş
e? Was he even awake? Last time
İ
kmen had spoken to Ömer Mungan, the sergeant had only known that Süleyman had been given an overdose of benzodiazepine and that the hospital were going to administer an antidote. Had that drug come from the same bottle as the stuff that had been given to
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu? Serial murderers were rare, very rare, especially in Turkey. But had they suddenly found one? In plain sight? On their televisions?