Dance with Death Read online

  Copyright © 2006 Barbara Nadel

  The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 7858 6

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise for Barbara Nadel

  Dedication

  List of Characters

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Afterword

  Glossary

  Turkish Alphabet

  Footnotes

  About the Author

  Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time and has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel Deadly Web in 2005. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Francis Hancock series set during World War Two.

  Praise for Barbara Nadel:

  ‘Nadel moves into the elite ranks of Michael Dibden, Donna Leon and Magdalen Nabb when it comes to blending foreign exoticism and impeccable mystery plotting. Exotic and atmospheric, this is superior police procedural sleuthing in which the locale is etched with precision and the city of Istanbul becomes an indispensable character and adjunct to the action’

  Guardian

  ‘Really refreshing to encounter something as idiosyncratic and evocative among debut novels as Barbara Nadel’s Istanbul-set thriller’

  The Times

  ‘The delight of the Nadel book is the sense of being taken beneath the surface of an ancient city which most visitors see for a few days at most. We look into the alleyways and curious dark quarters of Istanbul, full of complex characters and louche atmosphere’

  Independent

  ‘Part of its appeal is the exotic settings and characters, especially the colourful little cameos which remain in the memory’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘One of the most intriguing detectives in contemporary crime fiction . . . The backdrop of Istanbul makes for a fantastic setting’

  Mail On Sunday

  ‘My reader rates this author higher than Donna Leon’

  The Bookseller

  ‘The dark, Byzantine plot springs organically from the tensions of race and class in Turkish society, which is treated with a depth and detail unusual in a crime novel’

  Evening Standard

  ‘As dark and multi-plotted as Ian Rankin’s tales of Edinburgh . . . Istanbul is the perfect city for Byzantine intrigue and Harem makes full use of this’

  Country Life

  ‘Few can capture the magic mystery of Istanbul like Nadel as she delves once more into its darkened heart with a faithful friend in İkmen as our guide’

  Western Mail

  ‘Superbly written’

  Glasgow Evening Times

  ‘Intriguing, exotic . . . exciting, accomplished and original’

  Literary Review

  ‘A bewitching style . . . a story that carries the reader forward willingly along until the well-sprung denouement’

  Scotsman

  ‘Barbara Nadel continues to go from strength to strength with her atmospheric and idiosyncratic Istanbul-set thrillers . . . one of the most original crime series currently in progress’

  Crime Time

  ‘As before Nadel presents a gallery of richly created characters along with the superb scene-setting we have come to expect from her’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Intelligent and captivating mystery’

  Sunday Times

  This book is dedicated to everyone who so generously shared

  their iftar meals with me during Ramazan 2003.

  This book would never have been written without the help and inspiration provided by the people of Cappadocia. Both locals and incomers were endlessly generous and kind to me and for that I remain most grateful.

  I am particularly indebted to Ruth, Faruk, Jeyda, and Hüseyin from Tribal Collections for their wealth of local knowledge and wonderful company. Thanks also to Ruth for taking the time to proof-read Dance with Death for me. Other heroic figures include Dawn and family at the Köse Pansiyan and Ali from the Kelebek, my neighbours during my stay in the land of the fairy chimneys.

  Very big thanks also go to Pat who, like Ruth, proof-read Dance with Death and always made helpful suggestions. Big gratitude goes in addition to Pat for letting me stay in her beautiful house with Baris, Zeytin, Aslan, the ‘one I called Arthur’ and, at times, the mysterious Kismet too.

  I had great fun with the lovely Caroline, experienced the grace and charm of Faruk’s wonderful family on several enjoyable occasions and had a marvellous balloon flight courtesy of Kapadokya Balloons. Thanks to Lars and Kaili for making that flight so special for me, and by extension, for Çetin İkmen too.

  List of Characters

  Çetin İkmen – middle-aged İstanbul police inspector

  Mehmet Süleyman – İstanbul police inspector, İkmen’s protégé

  Commissioner Ardiç – İkmen and Süleyman’s boss

  Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu – İkmen’s deputy

  Sergeant İzzet Melik – Süleyman’s deputy

  Dr Arto Sarkissian – İstanbul police pathologist

  İstanbul

  Fatma İkmen – Çetin’s wife

  Hulya İkmen Cohen – Çetin and Fatma’s daughter

  Berekiah Cohen – Hulya’s husband

  Balthazar and Estelle Cohen – Berekiah’s parents

  Zelfa Halman Süleyman – Mehmet Süleyman’s wife

  Abdullah Aydın – injured victim of the criminal known as the ‘peeper’

  Mürsel Bey – louche habitué of the Saray Hamam

  Cappadocia

  Mensure Tokatlı – Çetin İkmen’s cousin, hotelier

  Captain Altay Salman – police riding school instructor

  Ferhat Salman – Altay’s nephew, a jandarma

  Inspector Erten – police officer from Nevşehir

  Haldun Alkaya – victim Aysu Alkaya’s father

  Kemalettin Senar – Aysu Alkaya’s old sweetheart

  Turgut Senar – a guide, Kemalettin’s brother

  Nalan Senar – Kemalettin and Turgut’s mother

  Nazlı Kahraman – daughter of the businessman Ziya Kahraman who had been married to Aysu Alkaya

  Baha Ermis – Nazlı Kahra
man’s foreman

  Dolores Lavell – American tourist

  Tom Chambers – young English tourist

  Rachelle Jones – Australian resident of Muratpaşa

  ‘I’m not sure that I should be here with him,’ the prettier of the two girls whispered nervously.

  Her friend, accustomed to these – to her – fussy little strictures, said, ‘It’s only Ferhat.’

  They both turned to look at a young man in uniform shining a pencil torch up at the ceiling.

  ‘Mum wouldn’t have let me come out here without him,’ the second girl said. ‘Anyone could be lurking out in a place like this.’

  ‘Yes, but Hande, he’s also a jandarma. My mum would go mad . . .’

  ‘Ferhat is my cousin, Türkân,’ Hande said firmly. ‘He wouldn’t do anything to either of us. He is an honourable boy.’

  Türkân hung her brightly headscarved head just a little and murmured, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ her uncovered friend replied, kindly. ‘I’m not trying to make you do anything against Islam, Türkân, honestly. But if we want to come out here, we do have to be safe, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hey, come over and look at this,’ Ferhat said as he shone his torch down into what looked like a deep, black hole.

  The two girls walked across the uneven surface of the floor and joined him.

  ‘What is it?’ Hande asked, placing, just lightly, one hand on her cousin’s arm.

  ‘I think it might be a fresco,’ Ferhat said. ‘Even now people are still discovering new ones in these things.’

  ‘How busy those old Christians must have been!’ Hande said.

  Ferhat laughed, ‘Busy Christians!’ he said. ‘Just like Mr Dimitri. Do you remember him, Hande? The old Greek who ran the flower shop at the end of my road? Working day and night, all hours.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Hande said, her eyes lighting with excitement as she did so. ‘He always had the most beautiful blooms, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Always such pretty flowers in İstanbul.’

  And then for a moment they both became quiet, seemingly lost in their thoughts and memories. Hande and her family had moved from İstanbul to the small Cappadocian village of Muratpaşa just over a year before. Her father, who was an equestrian trainer for the police, had been sent to the area to take charge of a new facility just outside the regional capital of Nevşehir. He was very happy with all his new horses, his eager, if raw, recruits, and his man’s world of flying gallops, football talk and rakı. Hande and her mother were, however, another matter. Unaccustomed to the restrictions of village life they both missed the glittering shops of İstanbul, the music in the streets and the easy access the city affords to entertainment. Until Ferhat had, quite coincidentally, been posted to the local gendarmerie, both Hande and her mother had felt more at home with the tourists who came to the area to see the weird, lunar landscape that Cappadocia is famous for than they did with the ‘locals’. Türkân was a good friend and the only girl Hande could really relate to at High School, but she was very, very different to herself, as this current trip out was demonstrating. Türkân, though interested in the frescos that Ferhat was pointing out, was neither comfortable with him nor with the ancient Christian paintings he was looking at.

  ‘I think I’ll go outside and see if it’s raining,’ Türkân said.

  ‘If you want to,’ Hande replied. ‘But do be careful, won’t you? You don’t want to fall over and hurt yourself all the way out here.’

  Türkân smiled. How nervous Hande was of the countryside! ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I know the chimneys and they know me.’

  And then she walked out through the rough-hewn doorway and made her way outside. This left Hande and Ferhat alone in a natural geological structure known locally as a Fairy Chimney. Made of a volcanic substance called tufa, the chimneys were conical structures that over the thousands of years of their existence had provided shelter and places of work and worship for the local inhabitants. There were, as Hande and Ferhat had discovered since they had moved into the area, tens of thousands of these things, many of which were decorated with frescos and carvings.

  After they’d stared at the fresco, which featured indistinct figures weathered by time, Ferhat and Hande decided to go a little deeper into this cluster of chimneys through a small tunnel off to the left.

  ‘Don’t you think we should tell Türkân what we’re doing?’ Hande said as she nevertheless allowed her cousin to pull her along after him.

  ‘We’ll only be a minute,’ Ferhat said. ‘She can wait that long, can’t she?’

  He wasn’t really taken with any of the locals, male or female. A lot of them were religious, which Ferhat wasn’t, and those that weren’t seemed to him to be interested in little beyond making quick money. Some of them were decidedly odd, too, something his friend and fellow jandarma, Abdulhamid, said was due to ‘inbreeding’. ‘You get that in villages,’ Abdulhamid, who was from İzmir, had said. ‘Family relationships that are far too close, if you know what I mean. And here with all of these penises around . . .’ All of the young jandarma had laughed at that. The locals may well call them ‘Fairy Chimneys’, but everyone knew what they REALLY looked like, including young high school girls like Hande and Türkân.

  Once through the tunnel, what Ferhat and Hande found themselves in wasn’t actually another chimney, but a cave in the side of the escarpment behind the cluster of chimneys. It was very dark and smelt rather more earthy than the volcanic tufa had done. Ferhat switched on his torch once again and quickly flashed its beam around what appeared to be a considerable space.

  ‘I expect these caves go on for kilometres,’ he said. ‘You know, back into the escarpment.’

  ‘It doesn’t smell very nice in here,’ Hande said as she wrinkled up her nose at the rich smell of damp and rot. ‘I think that we should go back for Türkân now.’

  ‘I thought we were meant to be exploring,’ Ferhat said. ‘Just because she thinks I’m going to touch her or something . . .’

  ‘Ferhat!’

  ‘Well,’ he said as he hunkered down and then shone the torch into yet another, even smaller, tunnel into the ground, ‘I’m sorry, Hande, but this place does make me tired. Everyone looks at us as if we’re some kind of threat. Even the tourists give us a wide berth! The gendarmerie is here for their benefit as much as anyone else’s.’ And then, almost folding himself in half, Ferhat slipped into the tunnel and disappeared.

  ‘Ferhat!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she heard him say through the almost total darkness. ‘I’ll just be one minute.’

  ‘But it’s dark!’ Hande cried. ‘Don’t leave me!’

  ‘I’ll be just one minute!’ she heard his disgruntled and muffled voice pour through the rock. ‘It won’t kill you just to wait for a minute.’

  Hande thought about trying to find somewhere to sit down but then thought better of it. This cave stank and who knew what ‘things’ or creatures it might have within its walls? Local people and even some of the jandarma told stories about bats and wolves living in the far-flung valleys of chimneys, like this one. Then, of course, there were supernatural stories, too – about malignant peris and djinn waiting in dark places to rob men and women of their souls. It was all rubbish of course, but as ‘a minute’ turned into several minutes, Hande began to feel an irrational panic settling on to her chest.

  ‘Ferhat?’ she said, quietly at first, and then, when he didn’t answer, with more force, ‘Ferhat!’

  But neither sound nor light came from the small tunnel that Hande could no longer actually see. What was going on? She hadn’t heard any noise from where Ferhat had gone and so she couldn’t imagine that he had fallen over or anything like that. Had he, perhaps, gone off somewhere else? He’d said that he wouldn’t do that, but maybe if he’d found something, another tunnel, maybe that really interested him . . .

  ‘Ferhat!’ She was getting a little angry
now and it showed in her voice. ‘Ferhat, I’m all alone here, in the dark!’

  But when that didn’t appear to elicit any response, Hande wondered whether she should try to find the way they’d come into this cave and go outside to join Türkân. But she could no more find that tunnel than the one that Ferhat had slithered down and so, more out of frustration than anything else, Hande began to cry. She was, after all, only thirteen years old, little more than a child, really – even though the city-bred Hande would rather have died than admit it. If Ferhat did ever turn up again and he told anyone about it, she would just deny that she’d cried at all. İstanbul girls did not, after all, do such things.

  ‘Hande!’

  The torch caught the tears on her cheeks before she could even think of wiping them away. Not that it mattered much because Ferhat was back now and, suddenly, that was all that she cared about.

  ‘Hande,’ he said breathlessly, ‘we have to get back to the gendarmerie.’

  There was something different about her cousin that went beyond the sudden paleness of his skin.

  ‘Ferhat?’

  He grabbed her wrist and pulled her after him with what seemed to Hande to be tremendous urgency.

  ‘Ferhat, what is it? What . . .’

  But he didn’t speak again except, when they got outside, to tell Türkân to come with them. It was raining a little bit now and so it would have seemed more sensible, to the girls at least, to shelter amongst the chimneys until the weather cleared up. But Ferhat wanted them all to go back to the jeep and quickly.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ he said to the girls as they struggled to keep up with him. Rocky, uneven ground like the terrain around the chimneys isn’t kind to ordinary, non-military shoes and so Hande and Türkân were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to following Ferhat.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Türkân asked as she and Hande watched Ferhat race down a slope towards his waiting jeep.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hande said. ‘It’s almost as if something in that cave frightened him.’

  By the time the girls reached the jeep, Ferhat was already on the radio.

  ‘Captain Göktaş?’ he was saying and then he followed this with, ‘Yes, sir . . . I’ve found a dead body, sir . . .’