On the Bone Page 17

  Aylin Hanım knew where he was going and the old man knew that she hadn’t approved. Not that she’d said so. She wouldn’t.

  ‘There are ISIS safe houses in Gaziantep,’ the boy said.

  ‘Oh, and what use are they to us? We want to take one of their fighters from them.’

  ‘I know that,’ Radwan said. ‘You must speak to the Kurds. But if we can go to where the safe houses are, we may hear things.’

  ‘How do you know about ISIS safe houses? I thought all your information was made up.’

  ‘It was,’ he said. ‘But Mustafa, Burak and me saw things online, at Internet cafés.’

  ‘Safe houses?’

  ‘No. But a hospital for mujahaddin. It was in Gaziantep.’

  ‘This was on a jihadi site?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In an Internet café?’ The old man rolled his eyes. ‘And did it look like the brightest, cleanest, most wonderful hospital you have ever seen?’

  ‘It did.’

  He put a hand on the boy’s arm. ‘Radwan, child, these things are used to draw people in. I don’t think there is any such place.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Oh my God, why am I here with you?’ the imam said. ‘What am I doing? This is madness.’ He began to cry.

  Radwan, who didn’t know what the old man had just said, watched him. For a long while he said nothing. When he did finally break his silence, it was to ask for some biscuits from a buffet kiosk. The old man gave him some money, and when he came back, he said, ‘Radwan, I need to tell you something about Mustafa and Burak.’

  Kerim Gürsel didn’t dare phone Zenne Gül. Now that Gül was working for the department, his every breath would be monitored. But how had İkmen found him – in his capacity as a hacker? Gül had given that up when he’d been barely out of his teens. Or so Pembe always said.

  Gül would know not to talk about Kerim. He lived in that squat they’d been investigating in connection with the cannibal incident and still the two men hadn’t even seen each other. Gül was no fool, he’d keep quiet, and anyway, İkmen, Gürsel’s immediate superior, knew about his unconventional personal life. It had never got in the way before. He just had to trust.

  He rang a familiar doorbell and waited for a familiar person to let him in. Most police officers knew Madame Mimi. She’d had her business on Zürafa Sokak for almost fifty years. She’d even known the great Mathild Manukyan, Istanbul’s greatest, wealthiest brothel-keeper. Mimi, sadly, was of a different stamp.

  ‘Come in,’ she said through a haze of cigarette smoke.

  Dressed in a tattered kimono, Mimi looked every day of her almost seventy years – and a few more. Unlike her aristocratic mentor, Mathild, she was as much a coalface worker as the rest of her girls. A combination of harassment from the authorities and competition from unlicensed Eastern European streetwalkers had made Istanbul prostitution more competitive than it had ever been. Kerim was aware that Mimi might have called the department just to earn good behaviour points with the police.

  ‘You want a drink?’ she asked.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Mind if I do?’

  ‘No.’

  She took a bottle of rum out from under the battered table that passed for a reception desk and slugged a shot down straight. When she’d finished, she said, ‘One of the girls told me that Volkan Doğan hadn’t been for a while. I wish I could say that I’d noticed, but I hadn’t. We were throwing old newspapers out when we found the bit about him being missing.’

  ‘Three months ago.’

  ‘You’d be amazed at how useful newspaper can be as insulation round the windows in the winter,’ Mimi said.

  ‘So why were you throwing it out?’

  ‘You can have too much of a good thing sometimes,’ she said. ‘It was beginning to make the place look untidy.’

  Kerim sat down.

  ‘So what can you tell me, Mimi?’

  ‘Me? Not a lot. Didn’t see Volkan last time he came in.’

  ‘He was a regular?’

  ‘Once a month, at least,’ she said. ‘People think that men like him don’t have sex lives, but they do. He liked Raquel.’

  ‘Raquel?’

  ‘She’s from Antakya originally. Parents were Arabs or something.’

  And her name wasn’t Raquel. All Mimi’s girls took exotic names when they came to the brothel. If he remembered correctly, Mimi’s real name was Ayşe.

  ‘Volkan, bless him, isn’t young, and neither is Raquel, which is part of the attraction,’ she said. ‘Raquel takes care of him.’

  ‘Why’d you call us?’

  ‘The paper said he was missing. Is he still?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t.’

  ‘It said he was last seen on the twelfth of April, which was the day before he came here,’ she said.

  ‘So you’re saying that Raquel …’

  ‘Could’ve been the last person to see him, yes. And there’s something else, too. He told Raquel he wasn’t going home.’

  ‘He lives with his sister.’

  ‘Yeah. Married to some army officer who’s been in prison.’

  ‘Deniz Baydar.’

  ‘Yes. Well Volkan told Raquel that he wasn’t going back there. His sister and her old man were pissing him off. He said he was going to rent an apartment of his own. He was picking up the keys the next morning. Said he’d invite Raquel round. But he didn’t. Never seen him since.’

  ‘Did he say where this apartment was?’

  ‘Etiler, he reckoned,’ she said. ‘Which made it all so sad and stupid. Can you imagine someone simple like him living in a big glass and steel mansion in the sky in Etiler? Someone like Volkan wouldn’t even be allowed to make deliveries to those places. And anyway, he had no money. When he comes here, he pays mostly in coins. I don’t know where he gets those from. He doesn’t work. I suppose his sister keeps him.’

  Kerim said nothing. The sister, Defne Baydar, would have to be told all this, which wouldn’t be easy. She was an aggressive woman who would probably be angry at any suggestion that her brother used prostitutes.

  ‘Can I speak to Raquel?’ he said.

  Mimi looked at her watch. ‘In ten minutes,’ she said. ‘She’s with a regular.’

  Speaking to Selma Vural about her husband, her children clustered on and around her lap, was like kicking a puppy.

  ‘Celal never said that he was dissatisfied with me,’ she said, crying. ‘Life is hard but we carry on. Why would he say such a thing to a stranger?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘Do you know this chef, Bülent, Selma Hanım?’

  ‘I don’t know anyone Celal works with,’ she said. ‘I don’t go out. I am a good woman, Cetin Bey.’

  ‘I’m sure you are. But if we are to find your husband, we have to know as much about him as we can.’

  ‘Sergeant Mungun took a hairbrush when he was here,’ she said. ‘What else can I do?’

  ‘Tell me the truth.’

  ‘I am.’

  He believed her. DNA tests on hair from Vural’s brush were far from complete. Could it be that, rather than being dead, this woman’s husband was fit and healthy and off with another woman?

  ‘As I say, life is hard,’ she said. ‘Look at this place.’

  The family were so cramped inside their small apartment, it looked as if it could have been burgled. There was no storage, and on walls where shelves could have been put up, the damp was so bad the plaster had rotted. This area was one of the few working-class districts left in Kağıthane, which was slated to become a transportation hub for Istanbul’s new third airport once it was built.

  ‘It’s all we can afford.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And now the landlord is getting upset about the rent,’ she said. ‘Which I understand. I can’t pay it and we have no savings. This whole block is going to be demolished in the next few years anyway. As people are evicted or leave, the landlord doesn’t replace t
hem. He’ll make money. That’s what Celal always said.’

  İkmen sat on a rickety chair that just about held what there was of his weight.

  ‘Do you have family you can go to, Selma Hanım?’

  ‘In İzmit,’ she said. ‘But what do I tell them?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘My parents never liked Celal,’ she said. ‘I married him in spite of them. I have dishonoured my family.’

  İkmen had seen this scenario more times than he cared to remember. A woman married a man in spite of her parents, he went bad, and she, and sometimes her children too, ended up homeless.

  ‘Have you explained the situation to your landlord, Selma Hanım?’

  ‘Yes. But he’s unwilling to help. He wants us out.’

  ‘Even though when people move out he doesn’t replace them?’

  She said nothing. She didn’t want to discuss what was a source of shame any further. But he could find out the landlord’s name and address easily. He’d have a quiet word.

  ‘My husband loves me and I love him,’ Selma said. ‘He would never leave me and the children defenceless. He is a man of honour.’

  Radwan and the imam hadn’t been able to sit together on the bus. The imam sat next to a young man who would later snore all night, while the boy was squashed against the window by the fattest man in the world. In common with most cheap long-distance buses, this one was overheated, and the driver had arabesk, hip hop and even some rap blaring out of his antiquated tape recorder. In his youth, Imam Ayan had read Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now he wondered which circle of hell he was in.

  Behind him, he heard the boy squeak.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ the boy said. He squeaked again.

  The imam looked round. The boy was squirming in his seat. The fattest man in the world looked at them both with disgust. He thought they were Arabs.

  The imam said to him, ‘Don’t look like that!’

  The fattest man in the world looked away.

  ‘Radwan, what is the matter, boy?’ the old man said.

  Then he saw a hand snake out between the seats that Radwan and the fat man sat on and dig itself into the boy’s groin. He stood up and walked up the aisle until he drew level with the culprit. Sitting next to a covered woman, who was probably his wife, the small, weaselly man with his hand on Radwan’s penis looked up at the imam and then, untroubled, looked away.

  ‘Shame on you, son of a donkey!’

  The man looked up again, and this time he reddened.

  ‘Leave the child alone or I will have the driver throw you off!’ the old man said.

  The wife didn’t react, but other passengers muttered. The man said nothing, just sat back and stared out of the window.

  As he returned to his seat, the imam said to Radwan, ‘If he touches you again, tell me and I will give him a thrashing he will never forget.’

  The boy thanked him, then said, ‘You’re very kind.’

  His words made the old man sad. He hadn’t been acting out of kindness so much as decency. The boy had experienced little of that in recent years.

  The music blared and the heat increased. Imam Ayan looked at his watch. Still another eighteen hours to go.

  Chapter 18

  Zenne Gül knew bullshit when he saw it, and this was bullshit. A supposed meet-up site for cannibals was actually a dating site for the desperate. People past their prime, the lonely, the unlovables who had finally hit the bottom of the kink barrel and were offering themselves as food to people just like them. It was difficult to find anyone who actually wanted to eat. What was interesting about this site and the other one he’d tracked down was the advertisements.

  Human meat both fresh and frozen was offered for sale. No prices, no details, no names. Just a contact e-mail address, which Gül knew from experience didn’t lead directly to its owner. Did these people, any more than their Western counterparts, really have human flesh to sell? How many people wanted to do that? Gastronomy had become a huge business in recent years, with people eating things they wouldn’t have dreamed of consuming ten years ago. But even so, human flesh was way beyond any of that. How had someone as kind and caring as Ümit Kavaş stepped over that line?

  In spite of all his worries about his father, Ümit had always seemed cheerful. He drank and smoked too much at times, and Gül had known him to be depressed, but he had always managed to stay basically positive. Maybe he hadn’t known what he was eating. Inspector İkmen had said he thought that was possible. But how had Ümit got into a situation where he ate human meat? And where had he done it?

  Ümit had usually hung around Karaköy when he wasn’t working. But on the day he ate the meat, when he died, he’d been up on İstiklal Caddesi. Had he got it somewhere up there? Gül knew there was a small Goth scene around İstiklal, but Ümit had been a bit old for all that. Most of the Goths were kids who wore black, got tattoos and talked about becoming vampires. A lot of them enjoyed zombie fiction, but he doubted whether any of them ate human flesh.

  One of Pembe Hanım’s friends, an old trans woman who called herself Madame Edith, had spoken once about snuff movies. Back in the 1970s and 80s there had been, so Edith said, horror films where people actually died. Most of these movies came from America, although Edith did say that she was once asked to be in a Turkish version. The money had been good but she’d turned it down because she feared that she, as well as the unwitting victim, would be killed.

  Being back in the world of the Dark Web didn’t fill Gül with any sense of achievement or joy. He was doing this because it was the right thing to do, not because he wanted to be inside people’s weird fantasies. Swapping hacking for dancing had been the best move he’d ever made. There was nothing healthy about grubbing around in the far reaches of the Internet.

  Whenever he’d done research for Father Bacchus, he’d always ended up feeling faintly nauseous. Where did these so-called cannibals get their victims? Did they all volunteer online, like these lost and lonely souls, or were they homeless people picked up at random? As fiction it was entertaining, but in reality …

  It was almost eleven o’clock and nearly everyone in the house had either left for work or gone shopping. Only Ziya stayed behind, throwing what still remained of the old bathhouse into a skip. Usually he was with the other biker boy, Bülent, but on this occasion he was alone. When Gül went down to the kitchen to get himself some tea, he asked Ziya if he’d like a drink too.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be good, thanks,’ Ziya said.

  When Gül had made the tea, he took it out to the biker.

  ‘Where’s Bülent today?’ he asked.

  ‘Gone to get some fertiliser,’ Ziya said. ‘We’ll grow tulips here. And roses.’

  Aylin Hanım had seen that man before. He was a policeman. What was Ramazan doing talking to him?

  She called her son over, but he didn’t move. He looked at her, as did the officer, but neither of them came over. She had taken the decision to cover herself completely many years ago. It made her invisible, which was what she had wanted. But sometimes it worked against her. The policeman, all smart suit and shiny shoes, didn’t know how to approach her.

  Aylin Hanım walked over to them.

  Ramazan said, ‘Inspector Süleyman was asking after Imam Ayan, Mother.’

  ‘He’s gone away,’ she said. ‘My son is feeding his cats.’

  ‘Yes, he said.’ The officer smiled. ‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

  ‘No.’

  People weren’t supposed to go to Syria any more. She remembered when the imam’s wife had come from that country, and how shocked everyone was by her strange clothes. Some malicious types had wondered whether she was a gypsy. But no one had ever asked the imam.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your son told me that Imam Ayan took a boy with him, a Syrian.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Ramazan said. ‘Radwan.’

  Stupid child!
Aylin didn’t know whether the imam had wanted people to know he had the boy with him or not, because he hadn’t said, but she suspected that he didn’t.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you—’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘Hanım, if you know where Imam Ayan and the boy have gone, you have to tell me,’ the policeman said. ‘We are currently investigating the disappearance of the imam’s sons, and we need to speak to him.’

  If she said the word ‘Syria’, Aylin Hanım feared that all hell would break loose. The policeman would shout at her for not telling the authorities. She couldn’t say that. But she did know where Imam Ayan had taken the bus to, which was known to be a stopping-off point for Syria.

  Eventually she said, ‘Gaziantep.’

  He wrote it down.

  ‘To do what?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know who he’s staying with?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have a mobile phone number for Imam Ayan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So if his cats get sick, what do you do?’

  She was lying, which was a sin, albeit in a good cause. But she couldn’t continue. Of course she had his mobile number! She gave it to the policeman, who thanked her. Then he said, ‘You know, Hanım, that if the imam and the boy are going to Syria, they are putting themselves in grave danger.’

  ‘Mustafa and Burak are in Syria,’ Ramazan said. That boy had always talked too much!

  ‘They may be,’ the policeman appeared to correct him. ‘But the imam still shouldn’t go. If that’s his aim, I will have him intercepted, for his own safety. When did he and the boy leave?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ she said. ‘They went from Esenler.’

  İkmen put his phone down and looked over at Kerim Gürsel.

  ‘Call Gaziantep for me, will you, Kerim?’ he said. ‘See if you can track down an Inspector Ali Ata. I haven’t seen him for at least twenty years. He could be dead for all I know. He came up here for training and we got on. He’s an old bastard, like me.’