Petrified Read online

  Copyright © 2004 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 7856 2

  HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Prologue

  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

  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.

  To all those wonderfully helpful people who prefer not to see their names in print. You know who you are and thank you.

  Also to Ersin and Erdoḡan for another classic Istanbul experience. I’d also like to thank my editor at Headline, Martin Fletcher, and, as ever, my long suffering family.

  PROLOGUE

  ‘Sir?’

  The man sitting in the chair continued to look out of the window as if he hadn’t heard. Could it be that whatever was happening in the streets of Kuloǧlu was of more importance than the woman lying dead in the next room?

  His pistol drawn, Sergeant İsak Çöktin turned briefly to look at the small squad of uniformed policemen behind him. But, from the expressions on their faces, they were just as clueless as he was about what to do in a situation like this. He returned his gaze to the motionless figure before him.

  ‘Sir, I don’t know what has happened here, but if you would just indicate that you have heard . . .’

  The perfect poise of the figure robbed him of further speech. How could anyone be so still, so utterly statuesque? Çöktin had seen shock before but never this – catatonia.

  Perhaps if Çöktin touched him, he might rouse him from his fugue. The man’s hands were in plain sight, one to each side of his body, braced against the seat of the chair. In theory the man might dive one hand underneath that military blazer he wore and pull out a weapon, but was that really likely? Or even really possible from a position of such utter immobility?

  With one light movement, Çöktin allowed his hand not holding a weapon to take that risk. The man pitched forward into a foetal heap on the floor.

  All of the officers moved to join Çöktin.

  ‘Has he fainted?’

  ‘Get him up!’ Çöktin ordered.

  One of the younger men, Constable Hikmet Yıldız, moved around the figure and took one of its wrists between his hands. It was perfectly, completely cold. Yıldız looked up into the piercing blue eyes of Çöktin and said, ‘Sir, I think he’s dead.’

  Çöktin squatted down beside Yıldız and gently moved the chin of the man on the floor towards him. İstanbul was stewing in the humid, forty-degree heat of a midsummer afternoon but the man’s skin felt as if it had just been removed from a refrigerator. Çöktin quickly took his hand away before easing himself down to look into the second dead face he’d seen that day.

  However, unlike the first corpse, this one had its eyes wide open. They were violet, beautiful and startling. Çöktin found himself lost in admiration until he realised that they were not made of aqueous and vitreous humours but of coloured glass.

  CHAPTER 1

  Çetin İkmen wiped one hand across his heavily sweating brow and sighed. He could fully understand why the elderly, fabric-swathed woman in front of him was weeping. In her position he would have come to exactly the same conclusion. But what she feared wasn’t true, or rather proved – yet – whatever misgivings she or those around her might have.

  ‘It is,’ İkmen said, as he lit the latest in what had been, was always, a long series of cigarettes, ‘my intention to return your grandchildren to your family alive. As yet we have no reason to believe that they—’

  ‘But you are a homicide detective!’ the woman wailed through her brightly coloured scarves. ‘You bring justice only to the dead! Everyone in the city knows you and what you do! You are a great man Çetin Bey, you see things . . .’

  ‘Yes, but I act for the living too, Mirimar Hanım,’ İkmen replied gently, ‘and on this occasion I have been assigned to search for your grandchildren because of my knowledge of this city and because of my many years of experience in the police force. We are taking their disappearance very seriously.’

  ‘My daughter is like something already dead, Çetin Bey! Neither eating nor sleeping, drifting about her business . . . And Melih – he’s no good to her, still working like one possessed . . .’ Overcome, she put her head down into the folds of her clothes and wept once again.

  The eight-year-old Akdeniz twins, Yaşar and Nuray, had been missing for thirty-six hours. The children had left their home in Balat on Saturday morning to go and play out in the gentle early morning sunshine, had never since returned and no one had seen them since. The children had, seemingly, vaporised out of the steep Balat streets as if by magic.

  It was now fifty-five and a half years since Çetin had been born to university lecturer Timür İkmen and his Albanian wife, Ayşe, the famous witch of Üsküdar. And although this thin, smoke-dried man had worked for the İstanbul police department for all of his adult life, there was a lot of his mother’s magic underlying his well-honed veneer of pragmatism. The woman before him should be given only facts – even if those facts were things she’d heard before. Mirimar Hanım was both of the age and social class to nurture a deep, almost religious, respect for Ayşe İkmen and her ‘magical’ policeman son. In İkmen’s experience, such people expected solutions to their problems that were both out of this world and rapid.

  ‘My officers are continuing to make enquiries in Balat as well as in the surrounding districts,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Yes, but what if they have been taken away from Balat?’

  ‘To where?’ İkmen shrugged his arms out to his sides in a questioning motion. ‘We haven’t even finished checking all the children’s contacts in the district yet. I don’t, Mirimar Hanım, have any evidence that your grandchildren have moved out of the Balat area. I have no leads or sightings outside of the district, and in a city of ten million . . .’

  ‘Yaşar did tell me that Melih was taking them over to Sarıyer.’

  ‘Yes, but clearly he didn’t, did he, Mirimar Hanım?’ İkmen stubbed his cigarette out in his ashtray and then lit up another.
‘Both your daughter and your son-in-law were in bed when the children disappeared. Once he’d established that the children weren’t with any of their friends, Melih called us, from Balat, late on Saturday morning.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mirimar Hanım shook her head helplessly, ‘I know. I know. They are most likely close by. Even my daughter says that, and Eren is not one to entertain false hope.’

  That the woman’s son-in-law’s name was not added to that of her daughter didn’t surprise İkmen. No one, beyond Eren Akdeniz, that he had encountered so far had any great love for the children’s father. But then that was often the way with famous people, doubly so if, like Melih Akdeniz, that fame was also allied to controversy.

  A Balat boy by birth and still staunchly resident within the district, Melih Akdeniz was Turkey’s wealthiest and most experimental visual artist. Though poorly educated in the conventional sense, Akdeniz had begun shocking art lovers both domestic and foreign in the late nineteen seventies. His work, which was expressed through a variety of media, took modern, controversial themes and presented them in a traditional Turkish context. His most famous work, a series of carpets depicting stylised renditions of internal sexual organs, had been woven using human hair. This ‘indictment of the myth of Turkish chastity’ had, in places as diverse as New York and Ankara, earned him the soubriquet of ‘genius’ – which Melih Akdeniz believed with every fibre of his being. But in spite of his arrogance he was no doubt experiencing a great deal of pain since the disappearance of his children. Melih, in his own frenetic and work-obsessed way, had to be suffering just as much as Mirimar Hanım and her ghost-like daughter.

  But then if the boy, Yaşar, had told his grandmother that he and his sister were due to accompany their father over to the Bosphorus village of Sarıyer, it was just possible that the children could have attempted to get there on their own. It wasn’t the first time that İkmen had thought along these lines. He had indeed made enquiries to that effect, but no one in or around Sarıyer had any knowledge of the Akdeniz children. There was, of course, something further that he could do.

  ‘Look, I’ll send some of my officers over to Sarıyer,’ he said, ‘just to check it out.’

  ‘Oh, thank you so much!’ Mirimar Hanım replied. ‘So, so—’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ İkmen said, cutting across her effusive and now tear-stained thanks, ‘you know why the children and Melih Bey were going out to Sarıyer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh well, I will have to ask your son-in-law. He will know.’ İkmen smiled.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’ He smiled even more broadly. ‘Mirimar Hanım . . .’

  ‘You want me to leave?’ She lowered her eyes as she once again fastened the ends of her scarf around the back of her head. ‘But of course. I know I have been a trouble to you.’

  ‘Not at all. Not at all.’

  As soon as she stood, so did İkmen, who then moved quickly to position himself beside his office door. Mirimar Hanım picked her large tomato- and bread-filled shopping bag up from the floor and walked wearily towards him.

  ‘İnşallah, the little ones will return,’ she said as she passed through the now-open door and into the corridor beyond.

  ‘İnşallah,’ İkmen repeated. ‘We are all in the gentle hands of the Almighty, Mirimar Hanım.’

  ‘Indeed, Çetin Bey, so very true.’

  And then with other religiously inspired mutterings for company, Mirimar Hanım left.

  İkmen, still leaning against the doorpost, raised his head upwards.

  ‘Look, I know that You and I have our differences regarding religion, ethics, Your very existence,’ he said wearily, ‘but You know, these children are very young and even though we’re doing everything we can, I would appreciate a little help . . .’

  There had been a time when the idea of artists living in the district of Balat had been laughable. Run down, if hardworking, the district had always been a haven for refugees and those who were a little different. But not for artists.

  Jews, as Nilufer Cemal knew only too well, had settled in Balat after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Welcomed into the Ottoman Empire by Sultan Beyazıt II, the Jews had prospered in Balat – some, alongside more recent refugees from Kosovo, still remained. Living in great houses, their doorsteps littered with tiny gypsy children, were the old Jews – people with names like Levi, Baruh, Leon and Palombo. Nilufer’s paternal grandmother had been a Palombo and when, back in the seventies, the old woman had died, Nilufer had inherited her deep brown wooden house, with its twisted, arabesque window grilles. What an excitingly eccentric location the house had provided for Nilufer’s first studio! Her father had fretted. After all, who would want to go to filthy old Balat to buy or even look at an artist’s work? However talented the artist, that surely was quite out of the question.

  But Nilufer had faith. She bought her materials and set up her kiln in the small courtyard garden at the back of the house. She slowly and lovingly created the most exquisite ceramics, and at the same time made, rather more rapidly, artefacts the tourists would like to buy. Deals struck with various tourist outlets in the Grand Bazaar kept Nilufer in clothes, food and materials while her ‘real’ work – modern renditions of traditional Turkish ceramics – started to gain some attention from the artistic élite. One of her friends from university, another aspiring artist, moved, briefly, into the district afterwards and for a while Nilufer nurtured fantasies about an artists’ colony in Balat.

  When Melih Akdeniz first exploded on to the international art scene in 1979, Nilufer was ecstatic. The most famous artist in Turkey was living, had in fact always lived, in Balat. Her dreams of a colony buzzing excitedly around in her head, Nilufer went to see this so-called phenomenon in his great ochre house opposite the Greek Boys’ School. And although his work was not to her taste, she appreciated it for its innovation and felt that as a statement it was extremely exciting. She never thought that Melih would really appreciate her work, but perhaps, like her reaction to his art, it would interest him in an academic sense. So Nilufer took one of her ceramics with her on her long, breathless climb towards the great ochre house and its almost unrivalled views of the Golden Horn.

  When Nilufer arrived, Turkey’s greatest artist was in the midst of one of what later became his legendary heroin binges. Drunk as well as delusional, he wasn’t amused by the appearance of this sober, middle-class young woman carrying something he sneeringly derided as ‘some tourist junk’.

  But Nilufer wanted him to like her, wanted him to help her build up a colony, regenerate the area, bring Balat into the mainstream. And so she gave him her beautiful green and blue tile with its abstract images of Seljuk representational forms and he smashed it at her feet.

  ‘This is shit!’ he cried. ‘Fucking gutless, Turkish virgin’s shit!’

  Both he and the two prostitutes he’d paid for that day laughed as Nilufer, tears streaming from her eyes, ran back down the hill to the safety of her own studio.

  Not once during the twenty-three years since that event had Nilufer even so much as looked at the great ochre house at the top of the hill. Until very recently no other artists had come to join either herself or Melih in their respective artistic isolation. Though always working, Nilufer had not lived up to her potential, and had achieved little recognition in the intervening years, certainly nowhere near as much as Melih. It was, however, Nilufer, as opposed to Melih, who knew the few but significant artists who had started to colonise Balat since the beginning of the new millennium. The English writer who had inherited his neat rose-coloured house from his native grandparents; the couple who specialised in portraiture; and Gonca, the big gypsy woman whose collages made of equestrian and fortune-telling artefacts had been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in Ankara. The colony, or so it seemed, was finally happening, and without any intervention from Melih Akdeniz, who, although now married and a father, had not, it was said, moderated his lifestyle in any significant way. Drugs and
alcohol still influenced both his work and his behaviour to which Nilufer now, for the first time in twenty-three years, was exposed once again.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about your children,’ she shouted up to the shaggy-headed figure eyeing her suspiciously from one of the second-floor windows of the great ochre house. ‘I hope they are found quickly, for their sake.’

  ‘Who are you?’ he responded sharply. Thinner and more unkempt than Nilufer had remembered him, Melih Akdeniz looked bad. ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘My name is Nilufer Cemal, a Turkish virgin,’ she said with an ironic smile. ‘You destroyed a ceramic of mine back in 1979. And I’m sorry not for you but for your wife and the children themselves. Little ones like that shouldn’t be separated from their parents, whoever those parents might be.’

  Melih sniffed loudly – had he now perhaps taken to cocaine too? ‘Keep your pity for your own lack of talent and leave me to continue my work.’

  ‘As you wish, Melih Bey,’ Nilufer replied evenly, ‘but even your talent isn’t going to bring the little ones back, is it? Not even you can do that, can you?’

  For just a moment he stared, his long, slit-like eyes burning into her mildly amused and strangely immobile face.

  ‘Bitch!’ he spat as he yanked the window closed and disappeared somewhere deep inside his eyrie.

  As soon as he had gone, Nilufer turned and made her way back down the steep cobbled hill. Her face impassive now, she didn’t respond to the requests for money or offers of domestic services from any of the local children who clustered around her smartly dressed figure. Looking over their heads, she surveyed the shifting, watery vista before her, the Golden Horn and, beyond that, the Bosphorus. Massive and glimmering in the late afternoon heat, these waterways could be seen and perhaps in moments of delusion, commanded from Melih Akdeniz’s vaunting house topped by its fantastic glass studio. She pictured him sitting there, up high, his drug-addled brain seething with new and even more shocking ways to express his genius. She had envisioned him like this many times before – an arrogant sultan just ripe for a fall, like a soft, wrinkling plum. Nilufer smiled. Well, now that fall had come and there was nothing Melih could do about it. The children, his creations, had gone and, just like Nilufer had been when Melih had smashed her lovingly created ceramic, he was completely powerless to do anything about it.