The House of Four Read online

  Copyright © 2017 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 in Great Britain in 2017

  by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  First published as an ebook in Great Britain in 2017

  by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  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.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 3466 7

  Cover images: house © Vehbi Koca/Alamy Stock Photo; sky © STILLFX/Shutterstock; texture © Alex Staroseltsev/Shutterstock

  Cover by craigfraserdesign.com

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Barbara Nadel

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Cast List

  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

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  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 visitor to Turkey for over twenty years. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel DEADLY WEB, and the Swedish Flintax Prize for historical crime fiction for her first Francis Hancock novel, LAST RIGHTS.

  To find out more, follow Barbara on Twitter @BarbaraNadel

  Praise for Barbara Nadel’s novels:

  ‘Inspector Çetin İkmen is one of detective fiction’s most likeable investigators, despite his grumpy and unsociable character. Or perhaps because of it – we seem to like our detectives a little grouchy: think of him as the Morse of Istanbul’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Intelligent and captivating’ The Sunday Times

  ‘Fascinating . . . Inter-gang drug war and racial prejudice are only two of the ingredients stirred into the incendiary mix’ Good Book Guide

  ‘Nadel’s evocation of the shady underbelly of modern Turkey is one of the perennial joys of crime fiction’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘Impeccable mystery plotting, exotic and atmospheric’ Guardian

  By Barbara Nadel

  The Inspector İkmen Series

  Belshazzar’s Daughter

  A Chemical Prison

  Arabesk

  Deep Waters

  Harem

  Petrified

  Deadly Web

  Dance with Death

  A Passion for Killing

  Pretty Dead Things

  River of the Dead

  Death by Design

  A Noble Killing

  Dead of Night

  Deadline

  Body Count

  Land of the Blind

  On the Bone

  The House of Four

  The Hancock Series

  Last Rights

  After the Mourning

  Ashes to Ashes

  Sure and Certain Death

  The Hakim and Arnold Series

  A Private Business

  An Act of Kindness

  Poisoned Ground

  Enough Rope

  About the Book

  Everyone in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Moda knows the Devil’s House. A crumbling Ottoman mansion, and once the home of a princess, it is a place associated with ill fortune.

  The princess’s four children, now in old age, still live in separate apartments on different floors and are rumoured never to speak to each other. Then one of them is found dead, stabbed through the heart, and it is discovered that the other three siblings have met an identical fate. There is no sign of forced entry or burglary, and all evidence must be gained from letters and diaries, but as Inspector İkmen digs into their past it becomes clear they have been harbouring a secret . . .

  Meanwhile a young couple are arrested for a series of seemingly random killings on the streets of Istanbul. They claim to have been squatting in the Devil’s House. But this fiendish mystery is far from over and it will take Inspector İkmen to the darkest and most devilish depths of this ancient city.

  This book is dedicated to the memory

  of Professor Josef Vanek (1818–1889).

  Physicist, revolutionary and magician

  to Sultan Abdülmecid I of Turkey.

  Cast List

  Police:

  Inspector Cetin İkmen – middle-aged Istanbul detective

  Inspector Mehmet Süleyman – Istanbul detective and İkmen’s protege

  Commissioner Hürrem Teker – İkmen and Süleyman’s boss

  Sergeant Kerim Gürsel – İkmen’s sergeant

  Sergeant Ömer Mungun – Süleyman’s sergeant

  Dr Arto Sarkissian – police pathologist – an ethnic Armenian

  Constable Barçın Demirtaş – traffic officer also linguist

  Inspector Ahmet Cıngı – organised crime detective

  Sergeant Deniz Akgunduz – organised crime officer

  Turgut Zana – technical officer

  Others:

  Fatma İkmen – Cetin’s wife

  Gonca Şekeroğlu – Süleyman’s mistress – a gypsy

  Selin İnce – a cleaner at the Devil’s House

  Bilal İnce – Selin’s husband

  Ali Baykal – works in the Grand Bazaar

  Barış Şekeroğlu – Gonca’s cousin

  Saira Öymen – tram passenger

  Elif Büyük – homeless heroin addict

  Ali Erbil – Elif’s boyfriend, also a homeless addict

  Yiannis Apion – an Istanbul Greek

  Father Anatoli Ralli – a Greek priest

  Marina Ralli – his wife

  Sami Nasi – a stage magician

  Rüya – Sami’s assistant

  Hasan Dum – a gypsy gangster

  Dr Aksu – a psychiatrist

  Rauf Karadeniz – a retired lawyer

  Erdal Bey – practising lawyer

  Aslan Gerontas – mentally ill street boy

  Gila Saban – witness

  Richard Oates – British witness

  Fatima, Yücel, Kanat and Kemal Rudolfoğlu – the four residents of the Devil’s House

  Another day, another torment. The old woman was going mad and had lately taken to following her around the house talking nonsense at her. Cleaning the toilets was bad enough without havin
g her raving on about voices in the walls. But a job was a job, and as Bilal always said, maybe Fatima Hanım would leave her something when she died. She’d told him he was living in a fantasy if he thought that. The old witch was mean as well as wicked.

  Selin opened the apartment door and went inside. Most of her employer’s possessions made her shudder anyway. Who would want massive faded sofas stuffed with ancient horsehair? She actually hoped they weren’t going to come her way when Fatima Hanım died. Although she did like the old woman’s dressing table, which was made entirely of gilded glass. She had a notion it was French, although it was more likely German because that was where Fatima Hanım’s father had been born.

  Mercifully the apartment was quiet, which meant that Fatima Hanım was probably still asleep. Selin went straight to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. As usual, every surface was covered with the detritus the old woman left in her wake whenever she tried to cater for herself. Cheese, uncovered by the sink, a half-sliced onion, broken biscuits scattered on the floor and round the waste bin. What she really needed was live-in help, but that wasn’t going to happen. No one in their right mind would actually want to sleep in that awful rotting building. It was bad enough visiting almost every day.

  Waiting for the kettle to boil, Selin had a cigarette. Bilal had forbidden smoking ever since he’d become a member of the AK Party, and so she had to get her cigarettes in where she could. The old woman didn’t mind. In fact she sometimes smoked too. It felt good to have a quiet smoke after a whole weekend of abstinence. Bilal had made them all go to a party rally, even the kids, and Selin had been required to be on her best behaviour. Surrounded by pious, covered women, she’d felt completely out of her depth. Bilal reckoned it was because she wasn’t covered. She knew he wanted her to cover, but she wasn’t going to do it. She hated covering.

  There was still no movement from the old woman’s room. Selin made the tea, and while she waited for it to brew, she had another cigarette. The smoke helped to keep at bay the smell of old person, which was strong on this occasion. But then it always was when Fatima Hanım had been alone all weekend.

  A fucking mosquito! Ali Baykal winced. With a pile of folded kilims on his head, he couldn’t very well stop and scratch where the bastard had bitten him. And it hurt! If only he’d worn that awful jacket his mother had tried to get him into, maybe he wouldn’t have been bitten. The tiniest vest in the world just didn’t do the job when it came to determined insects. But it was as hot as a kettle in the Grand Bazaar in July, and also, girls didn’t like boys who wore their fathers’ jackets. Especially when their father had been dead for ten years.

  People were looking at him now. Was he pulling a face as he tried to deal with the pain? It was getting worse! What kind of mosquito had attacked him? It was agony!

  Ali put his bundle down. He’d have to take a look. A man came over to him and said, ‘What’s happened?’

  He put a hand on Ali’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ve been bitten,’ he replied.

  ‘Bitten?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ali looked down, and it was then that he saw blood. Pumping out of his side, running down his vest and into his sweat pants. Suddenly he felt very weak . . .

  Chapter 1

  The cleaner’s name was Selin İnce. A plain, uncovered woman in her forties, she kept saying that she hadn’t done anything wrong, and Çetin İkmen tended to believe her.

  ‘Bilal is always saying that bad things will happen unless I cover,’ she said as she visibly trembled. Only the cigarette between her fingers was holding her up.

  Inspector Çetin İkmen of the İstanbul police led her towards a dusty sofa and made her sit down.

  ‘I don’t think your employer’s death has anything to do with your choice of clothes,’ he said.

  Away in the largest bedroom of what was a vast nineteenth-century apartment, the department’s pathologist, Dr Arto Sarkissian, was already at work on the corpse of a very old woman. But it was only a formality. The blood-soaked hole in her chest left little doubt as to the cause of death of Miss Fatima Rudolfoğlu.

  İkmen sat down opposite Selin İnce. From there he could also watch his officers as they began to search for the bladed instrument that had killed the old woman.

  ‘Have you seen anyone hanging around the building in the last few days?’

  ‘No. People don’t come here any more. Haven’t done for years. Only me and Mr Yücel’s man, Osman.’

  İkmen frowned. ‘Mr Yücel’s man? Who’s Mr Yücel?’

  ‘He’s Fatima Hanım’s brother. He lives on the ground floor. Osman does odd jobs for him. Shopping and things.’

  İkmen had been having a wonderful breakfast of heavily sweetened Turkish coffee and three cigarettes at his desk when he’d got the call to an address on the Asian side of the city. All he knew about the district of Moda was that it was fashionable and expensive. Although close to the old disused Moda ferry stage, which he had visited as a child, fifty years ago, the huge Ottoman house that contained Fatima Hanım’s apartment was unknown to him.

  ‘So does this brother know . . .’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘They don’t . . . they didn’t speak. None of them do.’

  Finding the unnamed alleyway between a coffee shop and a fashion house that led to number 130 Moda Caddesi had been a mission in itself. Unearthing the mansion behind its protective curtain of bindweed, ivy and rotting garden furniture had challenged İkmen and his officers still further. The pathologist, Dr Sarkissian, who had been obliged to park his car down near the ferry stage, had arrived exhausted. And now there was not only a dead woman, but an uncommunicative brother too. And what had the cleaner meant when she’d talked about ‘none of them’?

  ‘None of who?’

  She put one cigarette out and lit another. İkmen saw little hope for Selin İnce as a modest, covered woman.

  ‘Mr Yücel, Mr Kanat and Mr Kemal,’ she said. ‘They don’t speak, any of them.’

  ‘And Mr Yücel is Fatima Hanım’s brother?’

  ‘And Mr Kanat and Mr Kemal,’ she said. ‘There are four siblings. They all live in this building, in different apartments. But they’ve not spoken to each other in my lifetime. Probably not in yours either.’

  İkmen had been born and brought up on the Asian side of the city, in the working-class district of Üsküdar. Now that he lived in the European part, he, in common with most ‘Europe dwellers’, rarely ventured to this side of the Bosphorus. It was a whole other world, and this one in particular was clearly out of the ordinary.

  Selin İnce began to cry again. ‘You won’t put me in prison, will you?’ she said.

  İkmen’s sergeant, Kerim Gürsel, waved at him from the kitchen. İkmen stood.

  ‘I doubt it very much, Mrs İnce,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being called . . .’

  Kerim Gürsel was a good-looking man in early middle age. He was also, to İkmen’s delight, a person of great initiative.

  ‘I bought some cappuccinos from that café on the corner,’ he said. He pointed to a box containing cardboard cups on top of the cooker. ‘I talked to the owner.’

  ‘He must’ve seen us fighting to get in,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Let’s say he was intrigued. Wanted to know why we were here. I told him we’d had a call.’

  ‘Everything and nothing.’

  ‘Yes. But what he told me was interesting,’ Kerim said. ‘Did you know that this house is called the Teufel Haus?’

  ‘The Devil’s House?’

  ‘In German, yes,’ Kerim said.

  ‘Mmm.’ The dead woman had a part-Turkish, part-Germanic surname. But why call your house the Devil’s House? Was it some sort of joke?

  ‘Anyway, there’s coffee if you want it, sir.’

  İkmen patted him on the shoulder. ‘Thank you. Stay with the cleaner, I’m going to talk to Dr Sarkissian.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The old woman’s bedroom was pure French-inspired Ot
toman: ornate, stuffy and, in this case, filthy. Either Selin İnce was forbidden from cleaning it, or the task was too big for her.

  The pathologist, an overweight, slightly owlish Armenian, looked up. ‘Ah, Çetin.’

  ‘Arto.’

  Çetin İkmen and Arto Sarkissian had been friends since childhood, and so they very rarely used formal titles even in front of others.

  ‘So, a stabbing,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Yes, straight through the heart,’ the doctor replied. ‘One blow. No sign of a struggle. With any luck the victim was asleep when it happened. She’d certainly taken enough drugs to make that possible.’

  İkmen had seen a tray with numerous bottles of pills beside the bed when he’d first looked at the crime scene.

  ‘What sort of drugs?’

  ‘I’ve not made a full inventory yet,’ the doctor said. ‘But so far I’ve spotted warfarin, various blood-pressure medications, sleeping tablets, an antidepressant, tranquillisers . . .’

  ‘The diseases of old age,’ İkmen said. ‘We have this to come.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Arto said. ‘Some of us are already there.’

  Both men were of a certain age, İkmen coming up for sixty and the doctor one year older.

  ‘Could her meds have killed her before she was stabbed?’

  ‘Oh no, there’s far too much blood. No, she was alive when she was attacked, heart pumping away . . .’

  İkmen walked over to the old woman’s bed and looked at her. Tall and thin, Fatima Rudolfoğlu, even in death, had a strong jawline for a woman the cleaner reckoned had to be in her nineties. She also had a thick head of steel-grey hair.

  ‘Well, I suppose I should go and break the bad news to her brothers,’ he said.

  ‘Where do they live?’

  ‘In the three apartments below this one,’ İkmen replied. ‘Apparently they never spoke.’

  Arto frowned.

  Only the oldest traders in the İç Bedesten, at the very centre of the Grand Bazaar, were calm about the closure. Mainly antique dealers, they’d seen it all before and knew that to rail against policemen like Sergeant Ömer Mungun was pointless.

  ‘He’s only doing his job,’ a white-haired Armenian said to the Muslim owner of the shop next to his.