A Chemical Prison Read online

  ‘Arto! At last!’

  Both Arto and Çetin turned in response to this rather strident cry and found themselves looking at a tall, extremely attractive man in, Çetin quickly reckoned, his late thirties.

  ‘Avram!’

  Quickly, but with much affection, Arto hugged and kissed this man and then, smiling, introduced him to his old friend.

  ‘Çetin, this is Dr Avram Avedykian, a most avid and enthusiastic supporter of my brother’s project. Avram, this is my oldest and best friend, Inspector Çetin İkmen.’

  The two men shook hands.

  ‘Inspector İkmen as in police, isn’t it?’ the doctor said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Çetin replied in his best speaking-to-those-outside-my-usual-sphere-of-influence voice, ‘we have, as you can imagine a vested interest in—’

  ‘You don’t have to call anybody here sir, Çetin,’ Arto put in before his friend’s awkwardness became a problem. ‘We are all here for the same reason, all trying to help.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Yes.’

  Chastised, Çetin then looked down at the floor. It was a movement that even he found childish. Had it not been for the appearance of another man at Dr Avedykian’s side the moment could have been embarrassing, but this man, possibly just slightly older than the doctor, was so arrestingly handsome that even a red-blooded heterosexual like Arto was quite lost in admiration.

  Moving forward to greet this newcomer, he said, ‘And you are?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dr Avedykian, suddenly also aware of this man’s presence, ‘this is my best friend actually, Arto.’ He moved the man forward to include him in the group and made his introductions. ‘Dr Arto Sarkissian, this is Mr Muhammed Ersoy.’

  The name was familiar to Arto. ‘Oh, yes, Avram talks of you frequently, Mr Ersoy, and my brother Krikor has, of course, mentioned your name to me. You’re very interested in his work, I believe?’

  ‘Yes.’ Muhammed Ersoy shook hands with his host in a casual, almost off-hand manner and then turned almost immediately to Çetin. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing that you are a member of our fine body of police officers.’

  It was said in such a way as to imply a mockery of that force. Luckily, Çetin, who was accustomed to this sort of reception, rose only mildly to the bait. ‘Yes, I am,’ he said, ‘but like yourself, Mr Ersoy, I am here tonight to support Krikor’s initiative rather than talk about what I do.’

  ‘Quite.’

  A rather frosty silence followed which was only brought to a close by a change of topic on Arto’s part. ‘So,’ he said, addressing the two newcomers, ‘I hope that you gentlemen are going to be generous after my brother’s speech tonight.’

  ‘You can count on us,’ confirmed Dr Avedykian lightly.

  ‘Quite,’ said his companion, still, for some reason, looking at Çetin.

  It was at this point that an annoying beeping sound was heard. In response to this the two doctors and Mr Ersoy checked their jacket pockets and removed a varied selection of mobile telephones. As a man they all checked their machines muttering short phrases such as ‘Not me’, ‘Not mine’, and ‘No’. Then they all looked around to see who might be in receipt of a message – until Arto, with a heavy I-am-so-accustomed-to-this sigh, reached inside Çetin’s jacket pocket and removed the offending article for him.

  As he pressed the ‘receive’ button and then handed the instrument back to his friend, he said, ‘I do wish you’d get to grips with this thing, Çetin. It’s not that difficult.’

  The look of smug amusement that this elicited from Arto’s other companions was not lost on Çetin. He made a mental note of their reactions for a later date as he turned away and spoke into the machine: ‘İkmen.’

  Leaving his friend to get on with whatever conversation he was having on the telephone, Arto motioned one of the waiters over in order to offer his companions more drinks.

  ‘Çetin does unfortunately get calls at odd times,’ he explained, ‘as do I and probably yourselves too.’

  ‘We are all busy men these days,’ agreed Dr Avram, ‘which, in our case, is odd when you consider that we probably have more doctors than ever before.’

  Muhammed Ersoy took a champagne flute from the waiter’s tray and smiled. ‘Ah yes, my dear Avram, but don’t you also have oh so many more patients too?’

  ‘Oh, well …’

  ‘Now that those we have always considered to be the traditional “poor” can have things like televisions, mobile telephones and other instruments of information and communication they are far more aware of what doctors can and cannot offer them. Whereas in the past some nebulous ache would be ignored, now they repair to the doctor just in case that ache may be cancer or heart trouble or of the other ills they have seen mentioned on the television.’

  Arto viewed his new acquaintance keenly. ‘Do I detect that you feel there is something wrong with that, Mr Ersoy?’

  ‘Indeed I do.’ It was said with an arrogance which seemed to embarrass his best friend, who turned away and busied himself looking at some of the other guests. ‘Had we, or rather people like us, not planted such ideas in their heads then they would hardly have formulated them for themselves and—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Arto, I’ve got to go.’

  It took a few moments for Çetin’s words to register with his friend. ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Arto,’ Çetin reiterated, ‘right now.’

  ‘Oh, is it, er …?’

  ‘Yes.’ With some difficulty Çetin folded his mobile phone away and replaced it in his pocket. ‘In fact I could actually do with you.’

  ‘Right.’ Arto sighed and then squared his shoulders. ‘Right, yes, of course. I’m sure Krikor can manage without me. I’ll just … er …’ He pointed in the direction of his brother and made off towards him.

  ‘Something come up?’ Muhammed Ersoy asked as he and Çetin stood alone, the latter rather tensely shuffling his feet against the pile of the carpet.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Çetin replied absent-mindedly.

  ‘Might I ask …?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid you can’t. We have our rules as I am sure do you in your work.’

  Muhammed Ersoy shrugged. ‘Ah, but I don’t work, Inspector.’

  ‘Then perhaps we should leave it at that then, sir?’ Çetin observed. He saw that Arto was threading his way back towards him and he moved forward to join his friend.

  Chapter 2

  While the doctor attended to his part of the investigation, namely the corpse upon the bed, Inspector İkmen and Sergeant Farsakoǧlu looked around at the living quarters of the deceased. A cursory examination seemed to confirm the sergeant’s earlier contention that this part of the house was a separate apartment. The main room contained the bed, a chair, various cupboards and bureaux plus a television; two smaller rooms led off from it. These were a rather opulent bathroom and a small, almost cupboard-like place that contained a refrigerator, a small sink and a work surface bearing an electric kettle.

  As was his custom, İkmen made straight for the fridge, one of his great fascinations at moments like this being with what his victim liked to eat. But as he went to pull the handle towards him, Sergeant Farsakoǧlu pre-empted his curiosity.

  ‘It’s quite empty, sir, I’ve looked,’ she said. ‘Like the kitchen downstairs. Not a crumb in there.’

  İkmen raised one eyebrow. ‘And yet someone obviously lived here.’

  ‘Yes,’ the sergeant replied. ‘An Armenian gentleman, according to the grocers opposite. Although from the description we’ve had it seems unlikely that he is our corpse.’

  İkmen moved out of the kitchen and back into the main bedroom area again. ‘No?’

  ‘No. The man the old grocer described was middle-aged and very smart. You could not,’ – she moved her head in the direction of the bed – ‘describe what lies there as either of those things.’

  ‘You could, however,’ the doctor put in from the side of the bed, ‘describe our friend here as a user of hard drugs.’ r />
  ‘Really?’

  Holding up a limp arm so that his colleagues could see it, Arto Sarkissian pointed to a number of small scars and sores on the inside of the forearm. ‘These marks are scars left by repeated injections with a hypodermic syringe. They are typical of the damage habitual drug users inflict upon themselves. Untrained or desperate for their fix, they shove needles into any vein they can find. Needles, furthermore, that are not always clean, hence the sores.’

  Farsakoǧlu let her eyes drift slowly around what, with its expensive chandelier and very clean, tasteful furniture, was an extremely nice apartment. ‘Users don’t generally live in places like this, do they?’

  İkmen frowned. ‘Don’t be so sure. Addicts, like anybody else, can surprise you. Just because a man shoves heroin in his arm on a regular basis doesn’t mean to say he necessarily lives in a slum. And besides, we don’t yet know that this man did live here, do we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps when Cohen gets back from questioning the hotelier next door we’ll know a bit more.’

  While the doctor silently continued his investigations, İkmen walked over to the chest of drawers nearest to the door. He’d noticed its incongruity as soon as he came in. Although he had only really passed through the rooms lower down in the building, he had taken note of Farsakoǧlu’s observation that the house was almost totally without character. She had said that it ‘lacked personal touches’, a rather more typically ‘womanly’ observation from her than he was accustomed to, but he trusted her instinct nevertheless. And that was why the items on top of the chest of drawers appeared so startlingly strange: little crystal figures, about fifty of them, all arranged in neat rows across the top of the chest; animals, domestic items, little people, tiny houses, palaces, mosques. Each in its own way a dazzling work of art and, making up a collection of such magnitude, probably worth quite a lot of money too. A little evidence, so İkmen mused, in support of the idea that the victim had not actually resided in this house. Small, portable and expensive things like these crystal figures rarely survived around the heavy and committed drug user. But then …

  ‘Until I’ve done some tests I won’t know for sure what killed him,’ Arto Sarkissian said, thoughtlessly wiping his hands on the lapel of his dinner jacket, ‘but I’d say it’s pretty certain that it wasn’t the drugs.’

  İkmen strode over to the side of the bed. ‘No?’ he questioned, looking into the face of what had once been a really quite nice-looking young man.

  Gently but firmly, the doctor pushed the young man’s head to one side, revealing to İkmen’s gaze a dark purple and red line around the base of the throat. ‘I would say that he was strangled, possibly by ligature,’ he said, ‘which, if I am right, opens the door quite neatly to some very foul play indeed.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Get the place dusted, Çetin,’ the doctor continued. ‘I think that Farsakoǧlu was quite right to have you called out here tonight.’

  ‘I had a bad feeling,’ the sergeant put in, looking over the shoulders of the two men at the sad little body on the bed. ‘Not very old, is he?’

  ‘Probably about twenty, I should think.’

  İkmen looked across at his friend and sighed. ‘But he’d been a user for some time, hadn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Some of those marks on his arms are old and, if I’m right, he’s probably got some more on his legs and maybe in his groin too. The longer they’ve been using, the more their veins start to collapse, which means that they have to go in search of sites in all sorts of improbable places. Very squalid.’

  ‘And just the sort of information your brother would like to make a little more public.’

  ‘Yes, on the basis that if those who are contemplating the habit knew about its more disgusting aspects, it might make them think twice. After all, who wants to die like this? Murdered probably for a couple of grams of heroin and left reeking in your own shit?’

  İkmen allowed himself a grim little smile. ‘Perhaps we should have brought some of your brother’s prospective sponsors out here to have a look?’

  Arto Sarkissian pulled a comically shocked face. ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Inspector!’

  ‘Bit too real, you think?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  The door to the apartment opened to admit Constable Cohen. İkmen greeted him with a nod of the head. ‘Anything?’

  Cohen shrugged. ‘Not a lot. Mr Draz, the hotel owner next door, knew even less than the grocer about the man who lives here. He described him as middle-aged and quiet. Keeps himself to himself. Didn’t know how long he’s been here but Mr Draz has owned the hotel for five years and our man was here when he came. Didn’t know whether he was Armenian or not though.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘If a man has an expensive suit everybody usually assumes that he’s either Armenian or Jewish, isn’t that right, Cohen?’

  ‘Some do, yes, Doctor. Except, that is, in my case.’

  İkmen, unable to join what was essentially a closed conversation, changed the subject. ‘So what we’ve got,’ he said slowly, as if fixing the information firmly in his mind, ‘is a victim who is young, a drug user and who may have been strangled. This house, or rather this part of the house, may or may not have been his home. As far as we know the place is owned or rented by an older man who may or may not be Armenian and who we really do need to find now.’

  ‘And the windows have been nailed shut.’

  They all turned to look at Sergeant Farsakoǧlu who had been minutely examining the casement.

  ‘What?’

  ‘These windows are all nailed shut, sir,’ she said, ‘and they’ve been painted over too. Some time ago by the look of it.’

  ‘Have they indeed?’ İkmen replied. ‘Well, quite a conundrum for my sergeant to get his teeth into when he returns to us tomorrow.’

  The doctor put his gloves and stethoscope back into his bag and sighed. ‘And another late night for me, I think.’

  ‘Yes,’ said İkmen, ‘we need to get going on this one fast.’

  For those residents of İshak Paşa Caddesi for whom high drama was a particular passion, the events of the rest of that night proved most absorbing. As well as the arrival of various ordinary police squad cars there was the added thrill of witnessing the entrances and exits of other people to and from the house. These included police photographers, forensic investigators and, just after midnight, a group of sombre individuals bearing a stretcher and body-bag. As this latter group and its grim cargo passed by the now considerable crowd of onlookers, those in that company of a more religious persuasion were heard to mutter ‘Allah!’ and turn away from this all-too-real manifestation of mortality.

  Opinions varied regarding what may or may not have occurred in ‘that house’. The police officers, as ever, were not in the least forthcoming about what was occurring and so theories abounded within the crowd. Mrs Yalçin, the grocer’s wife, was particularly free with her ideas.

  ‘I always knew that it wasn’t quite natural for a man of his age to be living there all by himself.’

  ‘Well, he is Armenian,’ offered another elderly, heavily veiled woman. ‘And you know that with Christians—’

  ‘With Christians, what?’ The voice was deep and, had it not been so thoroughly smoke-scarred, would have been almost operatic in quality.

  The two women turned to face the source of the voice and found themselves looking at a short, thin man wearing a dinner jacket that was several sizes too big for him.

  ‘With Christians, what?’ Çetin İkmen repeated, shrugging his arms wide in a questioning gesture.

  ‘Well,’ said the veiled woman, ‘you know, they’re sort of …’

  ‘They’re different to us, aren’t they?’ said Mrs Yalçin. ‘They don’t make their men go through sünnet.’

  ‘So not very clean.’

  ‘Yes, and also they don’t eat right which makes their women hot in the blood.’

  ‘Which all means that they are f
ar more likely than true believers to have lots of policemen turn up at their door?’ İkmen finished.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed the veiled woman. ‘My thoughts exactly.’

  ‘And you know for a fact that the man who lives in this house is a Christian, do you?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘From his clothes and his general look …’

  ‘So he didn’t tell you that he was a Christian, but you assumed so?’

  ‘Well, er … No, I mean we rarely spoke. But he had a ring and … er …’

  İkmen’s face resolved into a bitter scowl. The old them and us thing rearing its ugly head again. He’d seen it so many times, but it never ceased to anger him: the notion that ‘we’ couldn’t possibly commit a crime and so ‘they’, whoever they happened to be at the time, had to have done it. Ignorant and dangerous assumptions. He turned a stern face upon the two old ladies and then proceeded to give them a small but to him familiar lecture.

  ‘Keeping your opinions to yourselves may be rather a safer course of action at this time, don’t you think, ladies? Making assumptions about people can be very dangerous, particularly when they pertain to a person’s race or religion, and especially in view of the fact that you don’t know what may or may not have happened in that house.’

  A somewhat aggressive looking middle-aged man who had been listening in on the conversation quickly came to the ladies’ defence. ‘And what do you know?’ he asked İkmen, ‘Who are you to tell people what to say?’

  İkmen smiled. He really rather enjoyed situations like this. ‘I’m the officer in charge of this investigation, sir.’

  ‘Oh.’ The man moved, just slightly, away from where he had been standing.

  The two ladies however, became if anything, more animated.

  ‘So, what has happened then, Officer?’ asked the grocer’s wife.

  ‘Is he dead, that Ar— the man who lives in that house?’ put in her companion.

  ‘That is not something I am at liberty to tell you, ladies,’ İkmen replied, ‘but if you would like to assist us in this matter I would suggest that the best thing you could do right now is return to your homes.’