Ikmen 16 - Body Count (6 page)

‘Murder,’ the Armenian said. He looked up into Çetin
İ
kmen’s eyes. ‘Possibly. I may be wrong, but she’s got heavy bruising on the back of her neck which I think may well have happened as a result of her head being smashed down forcefully on a hard surface.’

‘Like tiles.’

‘Like tiles, yes,’ he said. He stood up slowly. ‘No guarantees until I get her on the table, but I don’t think your journey has been wasted this morning, Inspector.’

Sometimes
İ
kmen’s fluency in the English language could work against him. This was one of those times. Suzy Greenwood, the hotel’s resident homeopath and aromatherapist, didn’t speak much Turkish, and so it was only sensible that he should interview her. However, although he wanted to hear her evidence, if she had any, he didn’t want to hear about her job, which he regarded, along with religion, as nonsense. He therefore went into his interview with her somewhat tentatively.

It was quickly established that Suzy, a woman in her mid forties, hadn’t been at work for a week because she’d been on holiday.

‘I went to Greece,’ she said. ‘You can check my passport.’

He did. She wasn’t lying.

‘I went to a homeopathy conference in Kavala,’ she said. She looked
İ
kmen up and down. ‘I smell you are a smoker, Inspector; you know that I could help you with that.’

‘Could you.’ In retrospect, he should just have cut her off there, but Suzy Greenwood took his response as an invitation to climb aboard her hobby horse and ride it for all it was worth. A deluge of ‘facts’ followed – to
İ
kmen entirely lacking in any sort of scientific veracity that he could recognise. Apparently the key to his smoking cessation lay in the idea that water, somehow, had a ‘memory’. He’d never viewed water as a sentient being before and he wasn’t sure that he did so now. Sadly for Suzy, her words just served to enhance the prejudices
İ
kmen already had against homeopathy.

‘Inspector!’

Mercifully, Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu had come into the small conference room the hotel had given him to interview staff.

‘Excuse me, Miss Greenwood,’
İ
kmen said with a smile. ‘Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu?’

‘Sir, I think you need to hear something,’ she said.

‘OK.’ He looked at the Englishwoman and extended his hand. ‘Well, thank you very much for your assistance, Miss Greenwood,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we will need to speak to you again, but of course I will contact you if anything changes.’

She smiled. ‘Of course.’ And then as he began to leave with Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu she added, ‘And don’t forget I’m always here if you need a consultation.’

‘Thank you.’

Ay
ş
e led
İ
kmen along a corridor back towards the spa. He said, ‘Why are “alternative” people such damned hard work? That woman was like some sort of religious fanatic. And it was all rubbish.’ His phone rang and he stopped and answered it. ‘
İ
kmen.’

He listened to the caller for a few moments while Ay
ş
e stood in front of a door and watched him. When he finally ended the call he said, ‘That was Dr Sarkissian. Our victim was murdered. He has confirmed it. He reckons her head was smashed against the bottom of the plunge pool.’

‘It couldn’t have been an accident?’

‘No. Her neck was held and constricted while her forehead was forced down on to the pool floor.’

‘So we’re in business.’

‘So it would seem.’

Ay
ş
e opened the door of the spa manager’s office, where
İ
kmen saw a man of about forty sitting behind a very ‘designed’ glass desk.

‘Sir, this is Faruk Genç.’

İ
kmen tipped his head. ‘Mr Genç.’

‘This is my superior, Inspector
İ
kmen,’ Ay
ş
e said to the spa manager.

After over forty years in the
İ
stanbul police force,
İ
kmen knew a worried expression when he saw one, and Faruk Genç had one all over his face.

‘Please, do sit down, Inspector,’ he said.

İ
kmen sat.

‘Could you tell Inspector
İ
kmen what you told me?’ Ay
ş
e said.

Genç sighed. ‘I know the dead woman. I wondered what had happened when I saw that her car was still here this morning.’

‘What’s her name?’
İ
kmen asked.

‘She’s called Leyla Ablak,’ he said. ‘You’ll find her clothes and ID card, car keys, handbag in one of our lockers. I have a master key.’ He looked down at his blank glass desktop.

‘How did you know Leyla Ablak?’
İ
kmen asked. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ay
ş
e raise an eyebrow.

Faruk Genç did not look up. ‘She was a client and, er, we’d been having an affair for almost a year,’ he said. ‘She’s, er, Leyla was married, and so am I.’

To say that
İ
kmen was shocked by Genç’s candour would have been an overstatement. But he was surprised. Men who were unfaithful to their wives didn’t usually own up to their infidelity so readily. But then death had become involved here, and Mr Genç, sensibly, probably wanted to get his story out before anyone else did.

‘Were you here with her last night?’
İ
kmen asked. There was little point in minutely investigating their relationship until he had established where Genç had been when Ablak died.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The spa closes at seven. We met at midnight. I gave her a massage, she liked that.’

‘Did you also make love?’

He looked up. ‘Of course.’

‘So how did she end up dead in your plunge pool, Mr Genç?’

‘I don’t know.’ He put his head down again. ‘When I left her, she was alive.’

‘In the plunge pool?’

‘No, in the shower.’

‘You left before her?’

‘Well we couldn’t leave together. We might have been seen. We always met late as it was, in the hope that most people would be in bed around here, especially at this time of year.’

Those bars and nightclubs that did exist in Sultanahmet were quiet during the winter months and tended to close early.

‘But you manage this spa, Mr Genç,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Why did you leave Mrs Ablak here alone?’

He sighed again. ‘She had a key. I gave it to her. Sometimes she would be able to get away before me. The key enabled her to let herself in and wait for me. Last night I had to get home. I left Leyla to have her shower and then jump in the plunge pool. That was her routine. She did it to close her pores. We were … I cared for her, you know. I would never have done anything to hurt her.’

‘Mmm.’
İ
kmen put his chin in his hand. Genç didn’t really give the impression that he was particularly heartbroken by Leyla Ablak’s death. There were no tears in his eyes. ‘You say you had to get home, Mr Genç. Why was that?’

‘My wife called. She has cancer, Inspector. I know it sounds bad.’

The small office became silent for a moment, and then
İ
kmen said, ‘So tell me, Mr Genç, how did you manage to get away from your very sick wife to come here and have sex with Mrs Ablak?’

He loosened his tie. ‘Well, er, Hande, that’s my wife, she … we sleep separately now and she goes to bed early. She, um, she takes a lot of pain medication. If she wakes and she needs more in the night, she calls my mobile phone and I go and give it to her. We keep our phones by our beds.’

‘Yes, but you weren’t at home, were you, you were—’

‘Hande knows that I have friends and she is aware that I have to see them sometimes. I … I told her I was out. She knew I’d be a little time.’

‘In pain,’
İ
kmen said. ‘She knew you’d be a little time while she was in pain.’ Again the small office became silent around
İ
kmen’s anger, and then he said. ‘Well, Mr Genç, I will need the clothes that you were wearing when you came here last night, plus a sample of saliva for DNA testing. As you had sex with Mrs Ablak, I will also want semen. There may be some residual seminal fluid inside her body we can compare it to. I will also need to speak to your wife.’

‘My wife?’

‘In order to discover when she called you and what time you subsequently arrived home.’

Faruk Genç jumped up from his chair and began to walk backwards and forwards very quickly behind his desk. ‘Can’t I just bring you her phone?’ he said. ‘She’s very sick.’

‘No, her phone won’t do,’
İ
kmen said. ‘It may tell us when she called you, but it won’t tell us when you got home.’

‘Yes, but I can work that—’

‘No, sir, we need to be precise,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Our doctor will determine a time of death for Mrs Ablak, and in order to eliminate you from our investigation, we will need some proof that you left here before that time. We will have to speak to your wife.’

Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu regarded the expression on
İ
kmen’s face and detected in it something she could only describe as satisfaction. A weak man, who might or might not be a murderer, had done a bad thing and been caught out in it. And now
İ
kmen was making him pay.

It was midday by the time the news broke about the death of Leyla Ablak. And although the dead woman’s name was not released to the press, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman’s mother, Nur, knew exactly who the victim was.

‘She is your Great-Uncle Hüseyin’s granddaughter!’ she said as she told her son all the details with breathless excitement. ‘Leyla
İ
pek, that was her name before she married Osman Ablak. You know the elderly man she married after she divorced that American. Of course General Osman Bey is very wealthy – in property, her mother told me. She wasn’t pleased about it, though, because Osman Bey is no one. And now with this scandal …’

Süleyman had just come out of one of the few places that the late Levent Devrim had definitely frequented socially, the Ada bistro and bookstore on
İ
stiklal Caddesi, when his mother had called him. According to staff at the Ada, the mysterious mathematician had spent most of his time reading, usually books about what they described as New Age subjects. This covered topics as diverse as yoga, homeopathy, spiritualism and conspiracy theories. He’d talked to other people, but only really when they spoke to him. No one had actually
known
Levent Devrim.

‘I remember Hüseyin’s brother, Great-Uncle Raf
ı
k,’ Süleyman replied as he walked back down
İ
stiklal towards the side street where he’d parked his car.

‘A true prince, yes. He never worked.’

‘He was creepy.

‘Mehmet! He was not!’

‘But Leyla
İ
pek—’

‘Oh, Mehmet!’ His mother clicked her tongue in aggravation. ‘Leyla
İ
pek! Hüseyin Efendi’s last bayram, 1970, you remember! Leyla was quite the young lady then …’

‘Yes, and I was a child,’ Mehmet said. ‘I remember an old man who looked like my grandfather, a younger man who gave me the creeps, and I remember sweets.’

‘Well anyway, you must do something about it,’ Nur Süleyman said.

‘Do something about what?’

‘About Leyla
İ
pek. She’s family, she’s been found dead and you are a police officer.’

‘Mother, I am not working on that case.’

‘Well then you must tell your superiors that it has to be assigned to you.’

‘It doesn’t work like that.’

Infuriated, she put the phone down on him. Now that his father, Muhammed, had drifted away into the further reaches of dementia, his mother spent all her time discussing her husband’s imperial background with anyone who would listen. Mehmet’s brother Murad had even found her doing it at Sirkeci railway station, accosting complete strangers at the Orient Restaurant. Now that a distant family member had died in mysterious circumstances, she was going to be abuzz. But Mehmet was still working the Devrim case and Çetin
İ
kmen had already been assigned to this new incident.

Mehmet Süleyman turned left off
İ
stiklal and on to Hamalba
ş
ı
Caddesi, where he’d left his car. Down the hill in front of him and across Tarlaba
ş
ı
Bulvar
ı
was the district of the same name, where Levent Devrim had once chosen to live. Why anyone who wasn’t an immigrant, transsexual, Syriani or Roma would choose to settle in such a place, he couldn’t imagine. As far as he could deduce, Devrim had had no sexual kinks that would have set him apart from the mainstream and he had been well educated and well brought up. But then he had been odd – eccentric, as his parents had apparently put it; more likely he had been mentally ill.

Faruk Genç’s wife, Hande, had guessed that her husband had been seeing other women, even though she said she hadn’t known who. When
İ
kmen had asked her to corroborate her husband’s story, she had done so. She’d never told Faruk about her suspicions, but then as she said to
İ
kmen, ‘He was happy thinking that he was saving my feelings, and I am a pragmatist. What can be wrong with that?’ There had however been a light in her eyes that
İ
kmen recognised as malice, and he wondered whether she had known more than she was letting on.

İ
kmen and Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu’s meeting with Leyla Ablak’s husband Osman did not go so smoothly. In his eighties, Osman Bey, a military man, was a veteran of the Korean War and of the 1974 Turco-Greek war over Cyprus. He was not a man easily persuaded that what he believed could in any way be wrong. And Osman Ablak, soldier and latterly successful businessman, did not believe that his wife would have been unfaithful to him.

‘The truth, Inspector,’ he told
İ
kmen as he motioned for him to sit down opposite him, ‘is that my wife had an arrangement with that spa. She could use it any time she liked and sometimes she liked to do so at night.’