Ikmen 16 - Body Count (47 page)

People could become fixated on anything. In the past
İ
kmen had been obliged to arrest obsessed people. It might be money they got hooked on, or sex, or all sorts of oddities including the dead, the occult, power and religion. And although he had met people who found the ex-Imperial family fascinating, and had even known those who resented them, he’d never before come across someone who wanted to kill them. There were vast numbers of them and so it was a fool’s errand anyway, and also they were so benign. All the calls that various politicians and other interested parties made to bring back the monarchy in truth fell on deaf ears. The Osmano
ğ
lus would never run the country again, not even as constitutional monarchs. It was absurd. But maybe because he’d been rejected by them as a youth, though possibly for other, more complicated reasons yet to be discovered, Cem Atay, a brilliant man with absolutely everything, had decided to kill them. Or so it seemed.

He had certainly killed Ay
ş
e. She had bled out into every centimetre of
İ
kmen’s clothes, which Fatma had taken away from him as soon as she could and put into a plastic bag like a good policeman’s wife. Then she had washed him in the shower, his skinny body trembling with cold and with the sobs that had only just left him, exhausted and alone in his bed. Ay
ş
e had been his successor, and now that she was gone, there was no one. Ard
ı
ç would say that they’d find someone from another force to take over after he left, but that wasn’t good enough.
İ
stanbul had to be policed, where it could be, by
İ
stanbullus. Officers like Ömer Mungan were good, but it took them years just to understand the city: its byways, its quirks and its intense frustrations. There had been no one else; there was no one else.

He wanted to sleep, but he knew that he wouldn’t, and so he lit a cigarette and stared at the ceiling. A few minutes later, Fatma, smelling of flour and butter, came in with his tea.

‘What will you do?’ she asked.

He sipped the hot liquid. ‘About what?’

‘About when Ay
ş
e’s funeral is over and you are alone in that office.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We have to get through tomorrow, today or whatever it is first.’

She frowned. ‘This won’t affect what you’re going to do, will it?’

She meant his retirement. Çetin
İ
kmen didn’t answer.

‘You know,’ Çetin
İ
kmen said as he looked at the man in front of him through sore red eyes, ‘I have other things I could be doing. Later on today I have to go to a funeral for a friend and colleague you killed in front of my eyes.’ He leaned forward on to the table in front of him. ‘Now my boss, Commissioner Ard
ı
ç, told me that you won’t speak to anyone but me, so if that is the case, then speak. Stop fucking me around and confess or whatever it is you want to do. Just get it over with.’

The smart, very young lawyer who sat at Cem Atay’s side whispered something in his ear.

İ
kmen, irritated by this, said, ‘Don’t you tell him to carry on the silent act, for fuck’s sake!’

Ömer Mungan, who was conducting the interrogation alongside
İ
kmen, had never heard him swear quite so much before and was a little taken aback.

‘If he stays silent it won’t do him any fucking good and you know it,’
İ
kmen said to the lawyer. He looked at Cem Atay again. ‘Well? We know you killed my sergeant, you wounded Inspector Süleyman. You’ll be happy, maybe, to know that he is still alive, is now better than he was and is talking.’ He looked at Ömer Mungan, who had not long returned from Süleyman’s bedside. ‘What did he tell you, Sergeant Mungan?’

‘We know that the inspector was drugged, with a benzodiazepine. He thinks it was, initially, in the tea that you served him. You didn’t drink it, Professor?’

‘No.’

‘Ah, he speaks!’
İ
kmen said.

Ömer continued. ‘After a visit to your bathroom, Inspector Süleyman went into your study and in there, in a cupboard, he found a cloak, a feathered headdress and a mask that could be described as frightening, especially by a child. He thought, as you must have realised, that it looked very like the description we were given of the creature that murdered Levent Devrim in Tarlaba
ş
ı
back in January. Because if you didn’t think he thought that, then why did you try to kill Inspector Süleyman?’

Even when Ömer spoke directly to him, Professor Atay only ever addressed his answers to
İ
kmen. ‘I didn’t know until later that anyone except
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu had seen me that morning,’ he said. ‘Much less a child. I wouldn’t have planned for a child to see such a thing. As for Süleyman, I knew he’d seen it and so I had to think quickly. Yes, I put diazepam in his tea. I needed him quiet while I thought what to do next.’

‘Why did you kill Levent Devrim?’
İ
kmen asked. ‘Was it just because he knew about your affair with his sister-in-law?’

The young lawyer put a hand on his client’s arm and said, ‘You don’t have—’

‘It’s all right,’ Cem Atay said. He smiled at
İ
kmen. ‘It’s all publicity, isn’t it?’

That a man who had been a serious academic could have been so seduced by fame that even talking about how he had killed people was making him smile caused Çetin
İ
kmen to shudder.

‘
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu had seen Hatice and myself together. He recognised her as Levent’s sister-in-law and so he let him know. Maybe he thought there was some money to be made out of it.
Ş
ukru was all about money. Levent told Hatice that she had to tell her husband the truth about us,’ he said. ‘He didn’t want money, it wasn’t blackmail; he just thought it was the right thing to do. But Hatice wouldn’t tell Selçuk and so Levent said that
he
would.’

‘So you killed him on the twenty-first of January 2012.’

‘I did.’

‘To silence him.’

‘I didn’t want Selçuk to know about us either.’

İ
kmen narrowed his eyes. ‘Because you didn’t want your lover to get ideas about leaving her husband?’

‘To be honest, yes. Hatice was a lovely woman who adored me and would do anything I asked, but that can be tiresome sometimes, you know? I also wanted to see what I could do, whether I could kill. It was by way of a dry run.’

‘Did you tell Hatice?’

‘Eventually.’

‘I think you also killed Levent Devrim to confound us,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Is that true?’

The professor smiled. ‘It did, didn’t it?’

‘Four victims with Imperial blood, one without: yes, it did. For a while. One way or another, you were and always had been the common denominator, Professor Atay,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Did
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu help you to kill Levent Devrim? I know that you knew each other.’

‘He was in one of my documentaries. I liked him. But he didn’t help me, no.’

‘Did he know that it was you behind the ridiculous “Mayan” costume?’

He laughed. ‘I knew I had to get into and out of Tarlaba
ş
ı
without being seen, and knowing how superstitious gypsies and Kurds are …’

‘That’s something of a generalisation.’

‘The Maya gave me the headdress as a gift and I purchased the mask, in Mexico City, because it appealed to me,’ he said. ‘The snow and the ruinous nature of Tarlaba
ş
ı
gave me excellent cover, or so I thought, but the theatrics meant that I could feel more secure than I would have done just creeping about as myself. I had planned to break into Levent’s apartment and kill him there, but when I arrived, he was out. I was going to give up and leave when I saw him sharing some rak
ı
with a man who I later learned had come to meet
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu: a Bulgarian gypsy he often did business with that could not be done in the light of day.’

‘Stolen bags or drugs?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Once Levent had parted from the foreigner, he started collecting wood for his fire. I followed him, let him collect fuel for a while and then I killed him.’

‘Did you think that anyone had seen you?’

‘I obviously knew that
Ş
ukru had seen my “character”, for want of a better word,’ the professor said. ‘But I didn’t think he had realised it was me, and when I hissed at him, he left, which implied that maybe I had frightened his superstitious gypsy soul. However, like most gypsies,
Ş
ukru was a very observant man. That was how he came to blackmail me. He recognised me from my hands.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ömer asked.

Cem Atay held up his left hand, and they all saw that he had six fingers. None of them had noticed it before with the unwitting exception of Süleyman who had bitten it when he’d tried to escape from the academic. ‘There you are, deformity as well as poverty. Can you imagine what Sezen
İ
pek said when she saw that? When she realised that the child Leyla was carrying might inherit it?’

‘So, just to be clear, when you killed Levent Devrim, did you have your subsequent Osmano
ğ
lu killing spree in mind?’

‘Of course.’

‘And what about your lover, Hatice Devrim? Did she know what you had lined up for members of her own family?’

‘Yes.’

‘Think carefully before you implicate a dead person who cannot defend herself,’
İ
kmen said.

The professor leaned across the table so that he was closer to the policeman. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘in order to understand what Hatice did, you have to know about the nature of our relationship.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then tell me about it,’
İ
kmen said.

‘Hatice Öz was one of my students in the late 1990s. She was very pretty, very left-wing, and she enjoyed my classes because she liked to learn more about what I eventually discovered was her ancestry, mainly so that she could debunk all the romance that existed around it. We were attracted to each other and she offered herself to me. She’d never been with a man before and that was significant. You never really get over your first love, especially women.

‘She knew I was married to Merve then and that it was not advisable career-wise for a senior academic to be mired in any sort of sexual controversy, especially where students were concerned. Hatice knew there was no future in it but she couldn’t stop herself loving me. When she left Bo
ğ
aziçi she got on with her life and I got on with mine; media work came in for me and Hatice made a career for herself and married Selçuk Devrim.

‘It was when Merve disappeared – and before you start to speculate that maybe I killed my wife too, I didn’t. I didn’t know where she went then and I don’t know now. When Merve disappeared, Hatice got in contact again. She loved her husband but there was no passion in her life, and she was a woman who needed passion. We started seeing each other, but although she was in love with me, I wasn’t in love with her. I never have been. I don’t believe I’ve ever been in love with anyone – except my Leyla, of course. It was sex. She was good at it.

‘I became famous, and if anything, that was what really engaged me, if I’m honest. But then in 2009, the then head of the Osmano
ğ
lu family, Prince Osman Ertu
ğ
rul, died, and because I am an Ottoman historian, I chose to go and watch his funeral. Hatice came with me. We were horrified. Tens of thousands were there, weeping and calling for the family to come back. It shook me to my core. I’d had no idea so many Turks felt like that! Then I started to notice a trend towards recognition in the newspapers and on television. People began to talk about a new Ottoman age, and I realised that what I’d been doing for years on end was not just informing people about their history; inadvertently I’d been promoting that anachronistic form of government, those useless people and their pointless lives. For months I was in a state of despair. In 2010 I made a documentary about the Ottoman occupation of Bosnia and I nearly had a breakdown. The
İ
peks, my first love’s family, had been high and mighty on their golden Ottoman past, and Hatice told me that there were relatives in her family too who were like that. Awful old autocrats and perverts who believed that the world owed them a living. It was also at this time that Hatice started to tell me stories about her brother-in-law Levent and his obsession with the end of the world, 2012 and the Mayans.

‘Last year I went to Mexico. I spent time with what remains of the Mayan people on the Yucatan peninsula. I liked them. They told me stories about their ancestors: how the Spaniards had forcibly converted them to Christianity, how they’d tortured and brutalised them and stolen everything they had, including their gold. I told them how our Ottoman masters had fought the Spaniards for the Mayan gold and used it to oppress their own people and build an unjust empire that enslaved millions. As I’ve said, the Maya made me the headdress I wore when I killed Levent Devrim. To be honest, part of me hoped that the sight of me would give him a heart attack; he was always complaining of chest pains. But it didn’t, and so I had to cut his throat, with him squirming to get away from me. I didn’t want to do it like that – he wasn’t a bad man – but if I was going to use a mythical Mayan conspiracy theorist as my supposed murderer, I had to kill in the way of the Maya. If I hadn’t, any connections I could build between the Long Count calendar and the killings would take too long to lose their obscurity. Your request for information about Levent Devrim’s calculations just speeded things up.’

‘So you were on a mission to justify your career, were you?’
İ
kmen said. He shook his head. ‘But it was also deeply personal, wasn’t it? Let’s talk about the
İ
peks. About Leyla.’