On the Bone Read online

  But he had another question. ‘Do they know you’re a police officer?’

  ‘Aysel does, but no one she works with, no. Whenever I go to meet Aysel, it’s to go out to a club, so I’m always dressed up. No one knows anything about me.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  If the women were such good friends, wouldn’t Aysel talk about what the constable did?

  ‘I’m certain.’

  ‘And so am I,’ Teker said. ‘Now, Inspector, if you would brief Constable Can, she is due to start at the restaurant tonight.’

  It was a fait accompli. It was quite a benign one, as it meant he didn’t have to try and find another way in to the Imperial Oriental himself. But it still didn’t feel exactly right.

  ‘If you would leave us for now, Constable, I’d like to speak to Inspector İkmen alone.’

  ‘Madam.’

  She left.

  Teker opened her office window and offered İkmen a cigarette.

  When they’d both lit up, she said, ‘I expect you feel a little overridden. I know I would, but Constable Can had this contact and I would have been negligent had I ignored her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  But how had she known? He didn’t want to ask her, but curiosity simply took him over. ‘Madam, Constable Can—’

  ‘Inspector, I have given my life to policing,’ she said. ‘I’ve made little impact. But …’ She raised a hand to silence his protest. ‘But if I manage to achieve anything in this current role, I want it to be for the benefit of my officers, particularly the women. Now I know that you and I think alike in lots of ways, İkmen. You are a republican, you drink, you smoke, you make up your own mind … But what we can’t share is our gender.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If women are to progress, we need to help each other. One of the things I do is actively look for female officers with what I perceive to be the ability to lead. Constable Can was brought to my notice by Sergeant Bayrak. Do you know her?’

  Hatice Bayrak was a hard-as-nails multiple linguist who worked for the tourism police. İkmen had a lot of time for her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Sergeant Bayrak encouraged Constable Can to join the service,’ Teker said. ‘I’ve known the sergeant for many years.’

  ‘Me too.’

  She smiled. ‘I told Constable Can everything.’

  ‘About the cannibalism?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You think I made a mistake?’

  He knew she’d be expecting him to say something like that’s not for me to say, but instead he said, ‘In view of who is involved in protecting Mr Myskow, I am surprised …’

  ‘And yet I imagine even you have to accept that under these circumstances it is difficult to know who to trust,’ she said. ‘I would even extend that to ourselves, Cetin Bey.’

  She wasn’t wrong. The security services had a way of recruiting the most unexpected people. That was why they were who they were. And of course money helped.

  ‘I believe that Constable Can will be an honest and accurate informant. I hope her friend Aysel can be trusted,’ Teker said. ‘And Boris Myskow is all you’ve managed to come up with so far. That said, he is Jewish.’

  İkmen raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Dr Sarkissian has told me that the cannibalised body could be Jewish,’ she said. ‘Why would Myskow prepare one of his own for the table?’

  ‘Why would Myskow cook wild boar?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘He’s nervous, in spite of his protectors,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Yes.’

  She told him to go. As he walked along the corridor back to his office, İkmen wondered whether the old rumours about single woman Hatice Bayrak were true, and whether Constable Can suffered from the same speculation. Then he wondered about Teker.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  Kerim knew her surname was Baydar. She was the sister of a missing man called Volkan Doğan. He’d just asked her, tactfully he thought, whether any of her antecedents had been Jewish.

  ‘My husband served his country in the military for all his working life,’ she said. ‘Not that such a thing means anything to people any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’

  ‘Do I look Jewish to you?’

  Did Jews have a particular look? Kerim remembered going to school with the Nabarro sisters, who, it was said, had been Jewish. But they had just looked like all the other little girls at his school. Except they’d been twins.

  Defne Baydar looked into his eyes. She was a small woman in late middle age, thin and severe. She wore no make-up and had met him at the door to her apartment in a pair of rubber boots. ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know, hanım,’ Kerim said. ‘I’ve simply been asked—’

  ‘My brother has been missing for three months,’ she said. ‘And after the first flurry of interest from your department, we have heard nothing. Why this sudden interest in a man with learning difficulties, eh? The policeman who came here when Volkan went missing behaved almost as if he thought my brother’s disappearance was some sort of blessing.’

  A lowly constable had turned up in the first instance. Defne Hanım clearly thought she was ‘someone’, and had been offended.

  ‘I’m very sorry, hanım.’

  ‘And now you come and ask me about some sort of Jewish connection.’ She shook her head. ‘Another attempt to taint our name?’

  ‘Hanım, I assure you …’

  ‘My husband has been to prison,’ she said. ‘He has served time for who knows what, some non-existent felony. And now this.’

  She sat down on a vast red sofa.

  ‘I don’t know what this Jewish business is about, and quite frankly, I am not interested. My only question is whether or not you have found my brother.’ She looked up at him. ‘So have you?’

  Once again, Kerim didn’t know what to say.

  Chapter 11

  Mehmet Süleyman had employed a zenne at his first wedding, to his cousin Zuleika. But that had been a long time ago. Back then, the zennes had not been as glamorous as they appeared to be if Zenne Gül was anything to go by.

  ‘I’ll tell Uğur Bey you’re here to see him,’ the young dancer said as he led him into the communal room that Süleyman had been to the first time he’d visited the squat.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And sorry to meet you like this,’ he smiled. ‘I’m just about to go to work and it’s only two streets away.’

  His outfit was purple. A tiny bolero above a shimmering sequin-encrusted skirt. There was a big pink rhinestone in his navel.

  ‘It’s no problem.’

  Süleyman sat down. He could hear people in other rooms. Maybe they were getting ready for evenings out in bars and clubs. He picked up a listings magazine that had been flung on a cushion and began to look at what was on in Istanbul. It was only seconds later that he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Someone was watching him. He was sure of it. He lowered the magazine and looked around the room. But nobody was there. It took him a few moments to realise that his watcher was outside the building.

  A face at the window, small and dirty, with dark, terrified eyes. As he looked into them, their owner appeared to take fright. He – Süleyman was sure it was a boy – disappeared.

  ‘Inspector Süleyman.’

  Uğur İnan walked into the room and Süleyman stood. The two men shook hands.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, I thought I could do something for you, but maybe I can’t,’ Süleyman said.

  ‘Oh?’ He gestured for Süleyman to sit. ‘Please …’

  ‘I came to tell you that I hope you may be given some respite at least from the boys from Fatih. I have spent some time in the district talking to parents of apparently perfect children …’

  Uğur İnan, smiling, sat down.

  ‘I have even made contact with one of the local imams. So I was going to say that I hoped you were n
ot going to experience any more incidents. However, I’ve just seen a rather dirty little face at your window.’

  ‘Just one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, one we can deal with, I think,’ Uğur İnan said. ‘Thank you for doing that, Inspector. I can imagine it wasn’t easy.’

  ‘It is trite to describe what divides certain parts of this city as a clash of cultures, but we all experience people and situations that are alien to us in what has become a truly vast conurbation in recent years.’

  ‘True. When I was a boy, there weren’t even two million people in Istanbul.’

  ‘And now we are fourteen million,’ Süleyman said. ‘We all have to adapt, and that is the line I took up in Fatih. We don’t even know for sure whether the kids came from there. Although it is a fair assumption.’

  ‘It’s a poor district. I think religion is only part of their problem with us.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I think they believe we have money and the technology they crave. Money we do have, a little, but technology is something we actively eschew. The surveillance society is not for us. Some of us have even actively come offline. But thank you anyway.’

  ‘No problem. And next time, call us,’ Süleyman said. ‘We are here to serve everyone.’

  The artist smiled. ‘I heard that Ümit Kavaş was buried today.’

  ‘I believe so.’

  It had been reported that his father’s military friends had attended in force.

  ‘So your investigation into his death is over?’

  ‘It never really began,’ Süleyman said. ‘Mr Kavaş died of natural causes; all we wanted to do was find out whether any external factors had contributed to it.’

  ‘But you found none.’

  ‘No,’ Süleyman said. ‘We didn’t.’

  ‘When service starts, you are going to have to be quick like the wind, canım,’ Aysel said.

  She’d helped Halide Can find her locker and put on her apron. Now they were in the kitchen, with service set to start in less than an hour.

  ‘Chef Romero will let it be known if he’s not happy with your work,’ Aysel said.

  ‘Is he a bit of a monster? I know you’ve said—’

  ‘Oh, Chef Romero doesn’t do anything except create dishes and tell Chef Tandoğan when he’s upset about what’s going on in his kitchen. He doesn’t speak Turkish, canım. He tells Chef Tandoğan what he wants in Spanish and then Tandoğan yells at us.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  Aysel shook her head. ‘You deal with worse, much worse than him on the streets.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘Well, you know! Tandoğan is nothing compared to drug dealers and—’

  ‘Shut UP, Aysel!’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’m nothing to do with the police, all right?’

  Aysel shook her head. ‘No.’ She was a pretty, plump girl with dimpled cheeks. But now she looked serious. For a moment. Then she smiled. ‘But it IS exciting—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  This time Halide put a hand over her friend’s mouth.

  ‘I’m not taking my hand away until you stop behaving like a school kid,’ she said.

  She felt ragged, excited breathing underneath her hand and waited until it slowed.

  ‘OK?’

  Aysel nodded and Halide removed her hand.

  ‘Yes.’ Aysel took another calming breath. ‘OK, so Chef Tandoğan does shout but he’s only Chef Romero’s servant really. He can dismiss you on the spot, though, and so you have to keep your wits about you. Chef Myskow will hardly ever come, but when he does, you mustn’t look at him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He doesn’t like it,’ Aysel said. ‘If you do look at him, he might dismiss you.’

  Halide muttered under her breath, ‘This is a minefield.’

  Aysel gave her a packet of plastic gloves. ‘It can be,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go out the back for a quick cigarette. We’ve got time.’

  They went through the staffroom and out through a door that led on to a terrace. Outside, the air was choked with petrol fumes but the view was amazing. The Bosphorus and the Golden Horn illuminated by the lights of a million homes and hovels. Out on the water, ferries sailed from Europe to Asia and back again. Halide was a born-and-bred İstanbullu, often infuriated by the dirt, the smell and the size of her city. But she never tired of the views.

  Both girls lit cigarettes.

  ‘What about the other people in the kitchen?’ Halide asked.

  ‘Well, you know Muammer and Serra. They wait at table. Then there’s Zerrin, who is also a cleaner. She’s a bit slow in the head, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘If she’s slow, why hasn’t Chef Tandoğan got rid of her?’ Halide said.

  ‘Because she’s the mother of a friend of Mr Myskow,’ Aysel said. ‘Don’t worry about her, she doesn’t speak. All the sous-chefs and the waiting staff are fine apart from Ali Buyuk, who’s the front-of-house manager. He’s a prick, but you won’t have to get involved with him. Except for Chef Romero and Chef Tandoğan, the only people you have to worry about are Mr Myskow’s friends. Or rather his guests. I don’t know.’

  ‘Who are they?’ This was the first time Halide had heard anything about Myskow actually entertaining personal guests. ‘What are they like?’

  ‘They vary,’ Aysel said. ‘Some of them are celebrities, but you don’t have to worry about them because they rarely notice us. Some are rough, look like gangsters to me, but I don’t know that they are. They don’t bother us really, except some of the younger girls don’t like the way they look at them. The smartly dressed men who sometimes come are really creepy, though. Muammer said he thinks they might be businessmen. But they don’t often come to the kitchen. They may walk through occasionally, but Mr Myskow always entertains them in a private room up in the conference suite, so there’s a limit to how much time you have to spend being disgusted by them.’

  ‘Ugh. But you have to cook for them.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Aysel said. ‘Mr Myskow always cooks when that lot come.’

  Was that perhaps where the wild boar was cooked? Or something worse? Halide felt her heart begin to race. Were these parties for friends significant?

  ‘How does that work?’

  ‘There’s another kitchen on the first floor,’ Aysel said. ‘It’s a service kitchen for the conference rooms. You can cook there, but it’s just a bit of a pain because it has no freezers. You’re up and down the back stairs all the time. But when Mr Myskow cooks for these people, he makes sure that everything he needs is already in place.’

  Halide smoked and thought. Aysel knew that Celal Vural, a waiter she was acquainted with vaguely, was missing. She didn’t know what Mr Myskow had in at least one of his freezers, and who was making sure he was able to keep it a secret.

  Cetin İkmen knew that he should probably be more adventurous when it came to places to drink, but the Mozaik Bar was close to home, and if he went there, people always knew where to find him. This evening those people were Ömer Mungun and his sister Peri, who had just taken a new job at the Armenian Hospital in Yedikule.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to work with elderly mentally ill people,’ Peri said.

  ‘You’re brave,’ İkmen said. His own father had suffered from dementia at the end of his life, and he’d found living with him very hard.

  Peri looked at her brother. ‘Our grandfather developed Alzheimer’s disease,’ she said. ‘It was very tough for our mother. Whatever can be done to make life easier for their families has to be a good thing. And the Surp Pirgiç Hospital takes people from all communities.’

  ‘The staff used to be mainly Armenian, though,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Oh yes, many still are,’ Peri said.

  Ömer looked up. ‘The grandfather Peri speaks of was Armenian,’ he said. ‘Mardin has always been a mixed city.’

  ‘Yes. Inspector Süleyman worked down there for a few months some years ago,’ İkmen said. ‘There are so
me ancient and very diverse sects in that area.’

  Neither of the Munguns said anything. Had he hit on a raw nerve? ISIS fighters were just across the border from Mardin in Syria.

  İkmen raised his glass. ‘Well here’s to your new job, Peri. Şerefe!’

  ‘Şerefe.’

  Their glasses met and everyone smiled. Ömer’s phone rang and he excused himself from the table.

  Alone with Peri, İkmen said, ‘Ömer tells me that you now have cats.’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, two Vans.’

  ‘Ah, the swimming cats.’

  ‘Yes, but Zeytin and Aslan don’t really get the chance to do that.’ She lit a cigarette. She was a striking young woman with her slanted green eyes and long, slim legs. A lot of men also seated outside the Mozaik looked at her.

  ‘My cat’s wandering around here somewhere,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Oh? What’s its name?’

  ‘Marlboro,’ İkmen said. ‘A huge ragged male.’

  Peri laughed.

  ‘He’s just a street cat. My wife can’t stand him, although she should be used to him by now.’

  ‘Have you had Marlboro long, Inspector?’

  ‘This one, about five years,’ he said. ‘We’ve had, I think, six or seven Marlboros over the years. All street cats, all loud, all oddly devoted to me.’

  ‘Well if you feed them …’

  Ömer returned and sat down. He looked at his sister. ‘Excuse me, Peri, I need to talk about work.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ She snuggled into her gin and tonic and watched the world go by. She was used to her brother’s work breaking into their lives.

  ‘Sir, that was Celal Vural’s wife,’ Ömer said.

  ‘Didn’t you go to see her this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When apparently, so she says now, she lied to me.’

  İkmen frowned.

  ‘I asked Mrs Vural whether her husband had any Jewish ancestors,’ Ömer said. ‘She became quite flustered …’

  ‘Yes, that question does cause some people trouble,’ İkmen said. ‘Kerim was virtually thrown out of one property for asking it. But what else can we do?’

  Ömer shrugged. ‘Anyway, Mrs Vural told me that no, her husband had no Jewish antecedents. Now, however, she phones up telling me that she lied.’