Land of the Blind Read online

  Süleyman sat down.

  Hürrem got straight to the point. Süleyman might not be entirely trustworthy, but he didn’t deserve the rebuke she was about to deliver. So he fucked some gypsy women? So what. That wasn’t her business. But there were some, both inferior and superior to Hürrem, who felt that it was very much their concern. A few were people she couldn’t ignore. ‘I’ve called you in because I’ve had complaints,’ she said.

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Yes. Although I should hasten to add these complaints are not about your work. They concern the company you keep, namely a gypsy woman you visit in Balat.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked crushed.

  Hürrem hated herself. What this man did in bed was his affair. Except that in some people’s eyes – those she called the ‘Morality Police’ – his life was not his own, but needed to be lived according to their standards. And there were a lot of people like them.

  ‘Be discreet,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to lecture you about your personal life, especially in view of the tragedy that befell this department only a few months ago.’

  İkmen’s sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, had been shot and killed in the line of duty and many of her colleagues still felt her loss keenly. Principal amongst those who suffered was Çetin İkmen, who had been her immediate superior, and Mehmet Süleyman, who at one time had been her lover.

  ‘Personally I don’t care who you associate with provided they don’t have a criminal record,’ Hürrem continued. ‘But you know as well as I just how influential those of a highly moralistic tenor are in our society right now, and I don’t want you to get caught out by them. The bottom line is that I don’t want to lose a good officer. I don’t think I have to tell you that such people can affect careers and lives, and there’s not a lot someone like me can do about it.’

  The current government and some of their allies were religiously inspired in their opinions. Their resultant moral standards, particularly when it came to sex, were high. More and more of them had entered the police in recent years.

  ‘I see.’ Now he looked defiant – and arrogant, and very attractive.

  Hürrem cleared her throat. ‘I’m not going to say you must stop seeing this woman, Gonca Şekeroğlu,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying that you should marry her. Who knows what those of a moralistic nature would make of a gypsy as a policeman’s wife. But leave your car somewhere other than outside her house. I know where she lives is up a monstrous hill that I wouldn’t want to climb. You smoke, I smoke; I know the problem. But your last medical showed you to be fit. Walk there.’

  Now he put his head down. ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘And when you arrive it would be better if this woman’s vast tribe of children and grandchildren didn’t spill out on to the streets to see what sweets you’ve brought for them.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Süleyman, truly . . .’

  ‘I know these words are not yours, madam,’ he said.

  ‘In instances like this I have to act on the words of others,’ she said. ‘And I’m sorry.’ Then she smiled. ‘Discreet. Yes?’

  After a moment he smiled too. ‘Discreet. Absolutely.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  After he left she berated herself for giving in to pressure and telling Süleyman he had to be more careful, but also congratulated herself on a job well done. She hadn’t forbidden him from seeing Turkey’s most famous gypsy artist, Gonca Şekeroğlu, which was what she was supposed to have done. Hopefully she’d made him behave as if he was being watched by an enemy, which he was.

  Everything about the ‘Morality Police’ stuck in Hürrem’s craw. Her father and grandfather had been professional soldiers who passionately believed in Ataturk’s secular republic. They would have been horrified at her interference in Süleyman’s personal life. Admittedly, they would also have been horrified by the amount of power the military had taken for themselves prior to the coming of the Islamically based AKP government. The army’s rigidity and cruelty had helped to bring the AKP into power just as surely as the party’s promise to break the military’s iron grip on the country. But even in her wildest imaginings, Hürrem had never considered the kind of moral bullying she and many others were being subjected to.

  She opened her office window, stuck her head out into the torrid İstanbul air and lit a cigarette. In a moment of rebellion, she hoped that some ‘morality policeman’ in the street below saw her. After all, she could get away with the cigarette by arguing that her head was outside the building. What she would be able to say should either of her two latest lovers be identified, she really didn’t know.

  If Kerim Gürsel had been a young man, İkmen would have expected him to bound across open ground like a gazelle. But he was in his early forties, which made his rapid gambol look a little awkward.

  ‘Don’t know where the fire is, Sergeant Gürsel,’ İkmen said as his deputy approached.

  Gürsel, whose face was slim and dark and forever mildly amused, said, ‘We’ve got a murder, sir. Can’t afford to waste time.’

  ‘No, but I’m not sure that Professor Bozdağ will share your enthusiasm. When he gets here,’ İkmen said.

  He’d been sitting outside Dr Sarkissian’s pathology laboratory for over an hour. For the past ten minutes he’d been waiting for this Professor Bozdağ. When he’d first stepped out of the Armenian’s lab he’d done so to smoke and also to get away from the inevitable smell of blood and preserving fluid that pervaded the building. He’d found out what he needed to know, which was that the woman from the Hippodrome had been killed by a blow to the back of the head. She had possibly fallen, although some of the indentations in her skull seemed to suggest that she could also have been hit with an instrument of some sort. Then he’d got a call from the station about this Professor Bozdağ.

  ‘If he’s an archaeologist a dead body won’t upset him,’ Kerim Gürsel said. ‘They deal with them all the time.’

  ‘When they’re thousands of years old, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘I doubt very much whether Professor Bozdağ has seen many fresh corpses.’

  ‘He offered to come.’

  ‘Because one of his colleagues has gone missing,’ İkmen said.

  Kerim continued to smile, which was annoying. He did a few things that wound İkmen up. He made puerile jokes sometimes, did far too much running and didn’t smoke. But he was a good soul who talked about his wife, whom he seemed to adore, and he liked animals, which was a plus in İkmen’s book. His main fault was that he wasn’t Ayşe Farsakoğlu. He, poor man, had been given the impossible task of replacing a dead officer most people had liked and everyone had trusted. Luckily he was an İstanbullu, which was a plus in most people’s eyes, but he still wasn’t Ayşe and he never would be.

  A yellow taxi with a pair of Türkcell bug antennae on the roof stopped in front of the laboratory and an elderly, grey-haired man got out.

  ‘Inspector İkmen?’

  İkmen threw his latest cigarette butt to one side and stood up.

  ‘Yes.’

  The man paid the driver and then walked up the steps towards the police officers. ‘God but it’s hot!’ He put a hand out. ‘Ramazan Bozdağ,’ he said.

  İkmen shook his hand and then introduced Sergeant Gürsel.

  ‘I’m really hoping that this visit is going to be a waste of time, from my point of view,’ the professor said. ‘When our Dr Savva didn’t arrive for work this morning, I thought she might just be late. But then when Meltem Hanım came to me and said she’d not seen Dr Savva return to her apartment last night I became concerned. I tried to ring her but she didn’t pick up. And then of course I heard the news about the woman inside the sphendone.’

  ‘The back of the Hippodrome.’

  ‘Yes. Dr Savva is a specialist in Byzantine art, she has a key to the structure.’

  İkmen looked meaningfully at Gürsel. Then he said, ‘Let me take you through, Professor Bozdağ.’

  The older man wiped his brow. ‘I imagine it will at least be coo
l in there . . .’

  When Arto Sarkissian exposed the dead woman’s face, the professor didn’t look shocked or horrified, just sad.

  ‘Oh God, what has happened here?’ he said.

  İkmen could see that Kerim Gürsel was champing at the bit to know whether the body was the professor’s colleague or not, so he put a calming hand on his shoulder. Moments that felt like minutes passed.

  Professor Bozdağ took in a deep breath. ‘It’s her, gentlemen. My colleague, Dr Ariadne Savva. She was a Greek national, so you’ll have to inform the consulate.’ Then he leaned forwards to get closer to her. ‘Oh Ariadne, what on earth has happened to you?’

  They let him have a few moments with her and then Arto Sarkissian said, ‘Professor, when we found Dr Savva she had just given birth to a child.’

  The archaeologist straightened up. ‘A child? In the sphendone?’

  ‘Did you not know she was pregnant?’

  All the colour disappeared from his face. İkmen, afraid that the professor might be about to faint, got him a chair. As he sat down Bozdağ said, ‘No.’

  A lot of men, especially older ones, could be notoriously unobservant when it came to what women looked like and what they wore. İkmen always relied on his daughters to tell him when his wife had a new dress or a manicure.

  ‘Was she married?’ İkmen asked. ‘Or did she have a partner?’

  ‘No,’ the professor said, ‘to both. Ariadne was married to her job. She had friends, at the museum, and she was involved in some sort of voluntary social work . . .’

  ‘Do you know what?’

  Arto Sarkissian covered the body’s face and wheeled it out of the viewing room.

  ‘No,’ Bozdağ said. ‘But I believe she got some of her colleagues at the museum involved. I assume you’ll want to interview everyone . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was silence for a while. The professor began to shiver, and when Arto Sarkissian returned he got him a blanket which he draped around his shoulders.

  The archaeologist thanked him and then said, ‘What about Ariadne’s child? What is it? A boy or a girl?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘When we found her the baby had gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘We don’t know. We’ve been searching the immediate vicinity ever since we found the body of the mother. Now we know who she was we’ll search her apartment. Commissioner Teker is giving a press conference this afternoon where she’ll appeal for information.’

  ‘What was Dr Savva doing having a child in the sphendone?’ He looked up at İkmen. ‘It’s filthy in there. And dark. Did she have a light with her?’

  ‘No. No handbag, no light, just the key to the monument.’ İkmen kept the other detail, the porphyry stone, to himself. Holding back certain pieces of information about a crime scene often proved useful when suspects began to emerge.

  ‘The museum will do whatever we can to assist your investigation, Inspector İkmen,’ the professor said. ‘Especially with a baby out there somewhere. Do you think that maybe its father took it?’

  ‘It’s possible. But if he did,’ İkmen said, ‘he also, possibly, killed Dr Savva first. Because it’s very possible she was murdered, Professor Bozdağ. I think she gave birth and then either she fell, was pushed or someone smashed her skull in. And that someone could have her baby.’

  The old archaeologist closed his eyes and shook his head.

  Chapter 2

  He finished for the day at one and headed straight for Gonca’s house, but he left his car right down by the Golden Horn. Then it was hill climbing and crumbling staircases all the way up to where she lived, which was behind the Greek School. Technically Gonca and her vast family lived in the old Greek quarter of Fener but it was on the border with Balat, which was its postal address.

  The climb in the fierce afternoon heat was tough. But Mehmet Süleyman was determined to do what he wanted in spite of what unnamed moralisers in the department might think. Ever since Ayşe had been killed he’d found he needed Gonca even more. Not just for sex, although that was part of it, but because he could talk to her about how he felt. Gonca was way too old and way too wise to be threatened by the spectre of a dead woman.

  When he arrived all the kids were out and she was alone, painting in her studio. When she saw him sweating and panting in her doorway she smiled. ‘You’re eager,’ she said.

  ‘Yes – and no,’ he said. He sat down and told her what Commissioner Teker had spoken to him about. He also pointed to his car, which was a tiny white dot beside the water. She got him a large glass of water.

  When he’d finished she said, ‘Bastards! What business is it of theirs who you have sex with? Or give presents to?’

  He shook his head. ‘The children will have to wait in the house for their sweets. It’s a reality we have to deal with now.’

  ‘We don’t have to like it!’

  She looked even more magnificent when she was angry. Tall and curvaceous, Gonca had to be at least sixty even if she didn’t look it. And she loved sex.

  ‘Nobody’s going to tell me I can’t have you!’ she said. ‘I don’t care how religious they might think they are!’

  He smiled. Now he’d caught his breath he was aroused. She was only wearing a skirt and a bra which barely covered her breasts. He stood up, cupped her breasts with his hands and then kissed them. It was as if he’d set her on fire.

  She undressed herself and him where they stood. Then she sank to her knees and took him in her mouth. He put his fingers in her hair and closed his eyes. The studio window was open but he didn’t care. Later when she was on top of him he said, ‘I’ll never give you up, Gonca, never!’

  He buried his head in her breasts.

  ‘Try to leave me and I’ll kill you,’ she said. And he knew that she meant it.

  ‘Our overriding concern is for the safety of the child. The woman gave birth before she died and we have no reason to believe that it wasn’t a live birth.’

  Commissioner Hürrem Teker, on a raised platform above the press pack below, was flanked by the İstanbul Police Department’s Press Officer as well as by the investigating officer, Çetin İkmen.

  Camera flashes went off and newsmen and women jostled for position, shouting out questions.

  ‘Was the woman a prostitute?’

  Teker shook her head. She knew the querent, from a right-wing anti-feminist rag.

  ‘No, she wasn’t,’ she said. ‘As if it matters. The İstanbul Police Force is tasked with protecting the people of this city. All the people. If you can’t ask sensible questions, don’t ask any. The fact is, we need to find this child as soon as possible. Without its mother it may not survive. We also need to catch whoever may have killed and abandoned the woman.’

  The Greek consul had only just been informed of the tragedy and wanted to contact the Savva family in Thessaloniki before any public statement was released.

  ‘Inspector Çetin İkmen is in charge of the investigation,’ she gestured towards him. ‘Anyone with any information should contact him or a member of his team here at police headquarters. At the end of this briefing we will be announcing a dedicated telephone number just for this incident. And if people want to remain anonymous then that’s up to them. We just need to find this child. That is our number one priority.’

  Hands flew up in the air again and Teker pointed to a female left-wing reporter.

  ‘Hürrem Hanım,’ she said, ‘what do you think about what İstanbul police officers are doing right now in Gezi Park? I don’t see burning tents down and using tear gas against a peaceful protest by environmentalists as the act of a caring organisation, do you?’

  Hürrem should have expected it. Environmentalists had been camping out in Gezi Park for some time. Angry at the government’s decision to build on the last green space in the central Taksim area of the city, those opposed to the plan had been making their feelings apparent for some time. The encampment had taken the protest one stage
further and now that the police were involved the situation was escalating. Hürrem knew that Gezi could potentially be a catalyst for unrest related to other issues people had with the government. Like the restrictions on the sale of alcohol, the government’s opposition to a proposed extension to gay, lesbian and transgender rights and the naming of the proposed new Bosphorus Bridge after a sultan, Selim 1, who had massacred thousands of the country’s Alevi citizens back in the sixteenth century.

  ‘All the protesters want is to preserve a green space,’ the reporter said. ‘They’re not hurting anyone. But they’re being hurt, women as well as men, Hürrem Hanım. And all because they don’t want yet another shopping mall in what is fast becoming a city of shopping malls.’

  Hürrem hesitated. She’d sent officers to Taksim in full riot gear on orders that had come directly from the Chief of Police. She knew at least one woman had been sprayed with water by police and everyone was aware that tents had been burned. She hated it. Like she hated the people who had busied themselves in Mehmet Süleyman’s private life. But for the moment they represented the state she had sworn to protect, even if some of her officers’ zeal for the Gezi job had sickened her.

  She smiled at the reporter. ‘Sabıha Hanım, this briefing is intended to inform the media about the dead woman who was discovered last night in the Hippodrome and to put out a call to find her baby. Any other matters are beyond the remit of this briefing.’

  ‘Hürrem Hanım, with respect—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she held up a hand. ‘That is all I have to say for the time being. Let us all find this child as quickly as we can.’

  As she left, the pack followed her, and by the time Hürrem got back to her office she felt as if she’d been in a riot of her own. She had her head out of the window, smoking a cigarette, when there was a knock at her door.

  She knew there were other ‘sinners’ in the department and she’d only just lit up so she said, ‘Who is it?’