Body Count Read online

  Copyright © 2014 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.

  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.

  First published in Great Britain as an Ebook by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP in 2014

  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 0 7553 8895 0

  Cover photographs © Peeter Viisimaa (streetscape) and Roy Bishop/Arcangel images (figure)

  Cover design by Craig Fraser

  Author photograph © Angus Muir

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  About the Author

  By Barbara Nadel

  Praise

  Dedication

  Cast List

  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

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgements

  About the Book

  Any bloody death will lead Inspectors Çetin İkmen and Mehmet Süleyman out onto the dark streets of Istanbul. On 21 January, a half-decapitated corpse in the poor multicultural district of Tarlabaşı poses a particularly frustrating and gruesome mystery. But as the months pass and the violence increases, it turns into a hunt for that rare phenomenon in the golden city on the Bosphorus: a serial killer.

  Desperate to uncover the killer’s twisted logic as the body count rises, İkmen and Süleyman find only more questions. How are the victims connected? What is the significance of the number 21? And how many Istanbullus must die before they find the answers?

  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 RITES.

  To find out more, follow Barbara on Twitter @BarbaraNadel

  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

  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

  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

  ‘Impeccable mystery plotting, exotic and atmospheric’ Guardian

  To Elsie and Lütfü who took me to Mexico. And to the Maya, without whom this book would not have been written.

  Cast List

  The Police

  Inspector Çetin İkmen – middle-aged İstanbul detective

  Inspector Mehmet Süleyman – İstanbul detective and İkmen’s protégé

  Commissioner Ardıç – İkmen and Süleyman’s boss

  Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu – İkmen’s sergeant

  Sergeant Ömer Mungan – Süleyman’s sergeant

  Dr Arto Sarkissian – police pathologist

  Other Characters

  Fatma İkmen – Çetin’s wife

  Nur Süleyman – Mehmet’s wife

  Muhammed Süleyman – Mehmet’s father

  Peri Mungan – Ömer Mungan’s sister

  Gonca Şekeroğlu – a gypsy and Süleyman’s ex-mistress

  Şukru Şekeroğlu – Gonca’s brother

  Hadı Şekeroğlu – Gonca and Şukru’s father

  Tansu ‘Sugar’ Barışık – an aging prostitute

  Selçuk Devrim – a telecoms engineer

  Hatice Devrim – Selçuk’s wife

  Faruk Genç – a health spa manager

  Hande Genç – Faruk’s wife

  Professor Cem Atay – Hande’s brother

  Leyla Ablak – a wealthy socialite

  General Osman Ablak – Leyla’s husband

  Sezen İpek – Leyla’s mother

  Rafik Efendi – Sezen’s Uncle

  Abdurrahman Şafak – an elderly aristocrat

  Suzan Arslan – Abdurrahman’s maid

  John Regan – a British academic

  Arthur Regan – John’s father

  Hamid – a gypsy boy

  Şeftali – Hamid’s mother

  When Şukru saw him, the kid was poking a stick in the man’s wound. It made the body’s head move almost as if it were still alive. For a few moments Şukru just watched, mesmerised by the child’s apparent lack of either fear or empathy for the dead man. Ever since İstanbul’s Roma gypsies had been evicted from their traditional quarter of Sulukule three years before, life had been tough and it was the kids who had suffered the most. This kid, like Şukru, was Roma. Şukru knew him – he knew the whole family. His mother, once madam of a good-sized brothel back in the old quarter, now sometimes sold her body to poor immigrants on Taksim Square. The mother had little pride and so she beat the child, taking it out on the son, who in his turn poked a corpse with a stick.

  The child – he was twelve at the most; no one including the kid himself knew his age for sure – didn’t see the middle-aged man approach. It was still dark and the ground was covered in a thick wadding of newly fallen snow – powdery, pure white and silent. As Şukru moved closer, he saw that the child was shaking. Was he cold, or frightened, or both? The government were moving the Roma on from this district, Tarlabaşı, now too. Houses were being demolished to make way for ‘better’ homes for people who were not Roma and everyone was scared all the time. Just as they had been back in Sulukule. As a child with no father and a whore for a mother, this kid was shunned and Şukru felt sorry for him. The boy poked the man’s wound again, but this time with his finger. Şukru cleared his throat. The kid, alarmed, looked up at Şukru Şekeroğlu, one-time grease wrestler, one-time king of the gypsy dancing-bear men. Trembling still harder now, he raised a hand in greeting. ‘Şukru Bey!’

  Şukru Şekeroğlu tried not to show on his face how much he pitied the boy. He put his phone to his ear and waited for an answer.

  ‘Who you calling, Şukru Bey?’ The child, still apparently oblivious to how macabre his situation was, spoke with a frozen frown on his face.

  ‘You’d best get away from here now,’ Şukru said.

  ‘Why?’

  No one was answering the phone, but Şukru persisted. ‘Well, do you want the police to think that you killed Levent Bey?’ he asked.

  The child frowned. ‘I didn’t. I’ve killed no one.’ He put his head to one side and regarded Şukru closely. ‘You calling the coppers now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because sometimes that is all that is left to do,’ Şukru said. And then as someone finally answered his call he said to the boy, ‘And Levent Bey was not one of our own; he was one of theirs. Now they have taken him back.’

  Chapter 1

  Police sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu knew that all she had with and of the man who was making love to her was sex. No words of affection passed Mehmet Süleyman’s lips as he took her up against the
wall of her shower room. When he came, it was Ayşe who panted with spent lust – he simply grunted and then immediately washed himself without looking at her. She, however, looked at him. Although middle-aged now – Ayşe had first met Inspector Mehmet Süleyman when he was twenty-nine – he was still slim, handsome and very aware of his power over women. The scion of an old Ottoman family related to the sultans, Süleyman was as mercurial as he was beautiful and Ayşe had been besotted by him for over a decade. Less than a year ago she’d passed up what might have been her last opportunity to marry a man who had really loved her for Süleyman. She was forty, and although she was still beautiful, her face was lined. Her eyes, for just a moment, became sad. But he didn’t notice. Married unsuccessfully twice and with a trail of failed affairs and one-night stands behind him, Mehmet Süleyman was unreliable, promiscuous, obsessed with his job and a thoroughly bad prospect. She loved him.

  As he stepped out of her shower room, his phone began to ring. It had to be the station. No one else called before six in the morning. Ayşe walked back into her bedroom naked, hoping that maybe the sight of her tall, slim, slightly bronzed body would arouse his passions once again, knowing that if she had to compete with his work she was on a hiding to nothing. And she did have to compete with his work. She heard him say, ‘OK, I’ll be there’ – he looked briefly down at his watch, which was lying on her bed – ‘in ten minutes at the most.’ He didn’t tell whoever was on the other end where he was coming from and she didn’t know where he was going. Leaning against the door frame of her bedroom, Ayşe watched him dress quickly and tried to remember how many times she’d seen him do that in the past. Eventually she said, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘A partially decapitated body in Tarlabaşı,’ he said.

  She said nothing. He continued dressing with care, making sure that his shirt was crease-free, his tie just so. He used cologne on his face and through his hair and he even ran a finger across his teeth to make sure that they were perfectly clean. How could such self-absorption be attractive? And how could Ayşe concentrate on such irrelevances when apparently someone had been killed over in the poor district of Tarlabaşı?

  She sat on her bed. ‘Who called?’ she asked.

  ‘Sergeant Mungan.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I have to go.’

  He didn’t bend down to kiss her goodbye and it wasn’t just because he was in a hurry. He rarely kissed her. Since their on/off affair had resumed in December 2011 when Ayşe had given up İzzet Melik, the man who had loved her so much, there had been sex but no passion. Even when he was inside her, he was as cold as winter. She watched him leave the room and then stood by her bedroom window so she could see him get into his car in the snowy street below.

  Mehmet Süleyman didn’t like Tarlabaşı any more. From a professional point of view it had been trouble for years. Anywhere that was poor had problems. But the district’s poverty notwithstanding, and including its great brotherhood of drug dealers, was not why he disliked it. He objected to how it was being changed, which was against the will of the majority of its people.

  Those who wanted to redevelop the area – construction companies approved by the government – had tried to put a positive spin on the demolition of an established nineteenth-century central İstanbul neighbourhood. But they’d failed. The locals – mainly Kurds, foreign immigrants, Roma, transsexuals and prostitutes – were not easily convinced. They knew that the brand-new flats they were being offered as compensation were in tower blocks thirty kilometres outside the city, because that was exactly what the deal had been when the Roma had been evicted from Sulukule. And that was why so many of them had subsequently moved out of those new flats and into the urban stew that was Tarlabaşı. In spite of the presence of the very obvious wrecking balls and earth-movers, Süleyman didn’t blame them. He’d heard stories about those tower blocks; about how people cried when they moved into them because they missed their communities. And what was it all for anyway?

  He pulled off Tarlabaşı Bulvari on to some nameless street he knew would take him where he needed to be and briefly looked over his shoulder towards the back of İstiklal Caddesi, the very heart of the vibrant part of İstanbul known as the ‘New City’. Land there was worth a fortune. Land there was what Tarlabaşı, once it was remodelled for the new urban middle classes, was going to become. His car bumped down what quickly turned into an unmade track, past a shop selling nothing but plugs, which was next to a derelict house that had clearly been decorated by Tarlabaşı’s only recent new tribe of residents, street artists. What once had been a kitchen was now spray-painted with images of government ministers dressed as Nazis. Süleyman shook his head. Not so many years ago the only people ever portrayed as Nazis were the military. Now contained and curtailed by the Islamically inspired government of the AK Party, the army were not the bogeymen any more. In fact, an ongoing investigation into Ergenekon, a plot that had allegedly been devised by the generals to undermine the AK government, had made those who had once ruled into those who were now hunted. The military coups that had happened in the past in defence of Atatürk’s secular state were now no longer possible. But what had taken their place was, it seemed to Süleyman, gradually turning sour also. That was certainly the view from somewhere like Tarlabaşı, as well as, he imagined, from the prison cells of the generals who had already been locked up pending trial for treason.

  He got out of his car and walked over to where a group of people – police officers and civilians – stood and squatted in the snow.

  ‘This man found the body.’

  Ömer Mungan was new to the department as well as to the city, and he was eager to please. He had a tendency to pull Süleyman towards whatever it was he wanted him to see, whoever he needed him to meet. It didn’t help to endear him to his new boss.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Sergeant,’ Süleyman said as he extricated himself from Ömer’s nervous grasp. He walked alone towards the very tall, grizzled man, whom he knew, if not well, then well enough. Şukru Şekeroğlu had always had something of the look of his sister Gonca. Coming upon him and that look suddenly made Süleyman’s heart squeeze. Gonca the gypsy artist had once – and in reality, still – possessed his soul.

  ‘Hello, Mr Şekeroğlu,’ he said. But he didn’t extend his hand in greeting.

  Şukru looked up at him from underneath tangled eyebrows. ‘Inspector Süleyman,’ he said.

  ‘You found the body.’

  ‘Half an hour ago.’

  ‘Where were you going?’

  ‘You know how cold it’s been.’ As if to illustrate this point, he stamped his feet on the snow to warm them. ‘This place is a building site now; I was out collecting anything I could burn to keep my kids and my father warm. Then I saw this …’ He waved a hand towards what was now a small white tent. ‘Him.’

  Süleyman rubbed his gloved hands together and looked up into the lightening grey morning sky. ‘My sergeant says you knew the dead man,’ he said.

  ‘I knew of him,’ Şukru corrected. ‘Everyone round here did.’

  ‘So he was a local …’

  ‘He was a nutter.’

  Süleyman lowered his gaze and looked into Şukru Şekeroğlu’s eyes. They were just as hostile as he remembered. Back when Süleyman had loved Şukru’s artist sister, Gonca, Şukru had used those eyes as a weapon in his armoury to try and terrify the policeman away. He’d never succeeded. When their affair had finished it had been because Gonca, finally bowing to family pressure, had ended it. Even in the bone-freezing cold of a January morning, with a dead body awaiting his attention, Süleyman knew that in spite of everything, he’d still smile if he saw his old gypsy lover turn the corner. He looked back at her brother. ‘Mad.’

  Şukru shrugged. ‘He made films. Not with a video camera, with an old film camera.’

  Süleyman took out his notebook. ‘Films of what?’

  ‘Of Tarlabaşı. The streets, the people, I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know his name?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘Levent Devrim. Did you know him?’

  Süleyman frowned. ‘No. Why should I?’

  Şukru shrugged again. ‘He was like you.’

  In view of the fact that Şukru had recently described the dead man as ‘a nutter’, this was hardly complimentary.

  ‘Posh,’ Şukru said.