River of The Dead Read online

  He was right. Neither İkmen nor Süleyman had known either of the men who had been killed by Yusuf Kaya’s people.

  ‘Didn’t know them myself,’ Ardıç continued. ‘But what I do know is that the only thing those officers were doing that night was their duty. They were called upon to provide escort to a prisoner, which they did, and they died for their pains.’ He pulled himself up very straight in his chair then and said, ‘Know them or not, Mete and Kanlı were İstanbul police officers. If Kaya is out east, I want him brought back here. I don’t want some eastern types getting hold of him.’

  ‘Sir, Kaya was, as you say, imprisoned in İstanbul,’ İkmen said. ‘Surely, if he is caught, we—’

  ‘Mardin have issues with Kaya,’ Ardıç said contemptuously. ‘His crime empire here in the city apparently helped to fund still more illegal activities amongst his relatives in the east. They want him and so do we.’ He looked across at Süleyman and frowned. ‘Make sure you get hold of Kaya, not this Inspector Taner. We want him serving time in İstanbul. He will serve time in İstanbul.’

  Süleyman sighed. ‘So it’s a competition, then, between myself and Taner. İstanbul versus Mardin.’

  ‘If you wish.’ Ardıç cleared his throat. ‘It is one that we will win.’

  ‘Sir, Mardin is a very small city with limited resources and a lot of problems,’ İkmen began. ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘You, İkmen, will continue the investigation here,’ Ardıç said. ‘Your own sergeant as well as Süleyman’s deputy Sergeant Melik will assist you. Now, I understand some male nurses have gone missing from the Cerrahpaşa.’

  İkmen told Ardıç about the three men he was currently pursuing, while Süleyman descended into silence. In spite of being a professional woman herself, his wife Zelfa wouldn’t like the idea of his going away for an uncertain length of time. For a woman who was half western, and had indeed been brought up in her mother’s country of Ireland, she was intensely possessive. But then Mehmet, much as he adored his intelligent and considerably older wife, hadn’t always been faithful to her. That said, going to Gaziantep and then maybe on to Mardin was not like going to Paris. Antep was famously dull and ugly and, at only fifty-eight kilometres from the Syrian border, Mardin was the back of beyond. As far as Süleyman was concerned it was not a city famed for its alluring women. In summer Mardin was infested with snakes that, without even visualising a serpent, made Süleyman shudder. Not that the snakes were what really bothered him. Mardin had other associations too – with terrorism and with the internal war Turkish troops had been fighting against the separatist Kurdish organisation, the PKK, for decades. The conflict was bitter and vicious and loss of life on both sides was heavy. In addition, now there were other dimensions too. Hezbollah were known to be operating in the area and there were rumours of al-Qaeda cells also. Anyone, even out of uniform, who represented the Turkish state was at risk. Snakes were nothing compared to that.

  Murat Lole lived in a small second-floor apartment on Büyük Hendek Street in Karaköy. It was a location that was sadly familiar to İkmen because it was close to the Neve Şalom synagogue which had been attacked by al-Qaeda-inspired suicide bombers back in 2003. His son-in-law, Berekiah Cohen, who had lived opposite the synagogue had been badly injured in the explosion. The union of İkmen’s daughter Hulya, a Muslim, and his old friend Balthazar’s son, a Jew, had seemed like an example of tolerance and hope for the future when the two youngsters first got married. But now that Berekiah could no longer work and Hulya by contrast had to work all the time, cracks were beginning to show. The apartment where the Cohens had once lived was now repaired and repainted, which pleased İkmen, even if it did only serve to underline how easily buildings could be fixed compared to people.

  When he and Ayşe Farsakoğlu arrived they found the orthopaedic nurse indeed in thrall to a very bad cold. About thirty, slight, with a pleasant face and ready smile, Murat Lole showed the two officers into a poorly furnished but tidy living room, which smelt strongly of coffee. It put İkmen in mind of the coffee houses of his youth, back in the fifties when even enlightened men like his father went to all-male cafés to play backgammon, talk about football and drink the thickest, darkest Turkish coffee imaginable.

  ‘You don’t expect to get a really bad cold at this time of year,’ Murat Lole said as he ushered them towards a rather battered sofa under the window. ‘But then I don’t work with well people, do I?’

  ‘Orthopaedics,’ İkmen said. ‘Bones not infections.’

  ‘They often come in with infections,’ Murat Lole said as he sat down on a small hard chair and blew his nose loudly. ‘After all, if you have a cold and then break your leg, it can’t just be left until the cold has gone, can it?’

  ‘Mr Lole,’ Ayşe said, ‘we’ve come to talk to you about the escape of a prisoner, sent for treatment to the Cerrahpaşa.’

  ‘That was the last day I was at work,’ Lole said. ‘I wasn’t really well then, but . . . That prisoner was being taken to cardiology. I didn’t see him, but I heard about it, of course.’

  ‘You have a colleague,’ İkmen said. ‘Faruk Öz.’

  ‘Faruk and I were on shift together that night,’ Lole said.

  ‘All night?’

  ‘We came on at eight the previous evening and I at least finished at eight the following morning. I don’t remember seeing Faruk. But then we’re not that close and I was feeling very bad by then and wasn’t noticing much, to be truthful.’

  ‘During the course of an average shift, do members of staff come and go from the ward very much?’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Lole said, ‘a lot. We go to get drugs, check new patients in, take existing patients to the lavatory . . .’

  ‘Do you know if you were on the ward at four a.m.? Was Faruk with you?’

  Murat Lole shrugged. ‘I remember I was on the ward when all the commotion reached us,’ he said. ‘I was actually in the toilet trying to clean up my nose and splash some water on my face to wake myself up. I heard someone scream about people being stabbed. I don’t know where Faruk was. Obviously, I was alone at the time.’

  ‘Can you remember seeing Faruk Öz in the hour or so before the incident?’ İkmen asked.

  For a few seconds Lole was silent, and then he said, ‘No. No, I can’t. He may very well have been on the ward, but I was not personally with him. As I said, this cold wiped me out. I shouldn’t even have been at work.’

  ‘Mr Lole,’ Ayşe said, ‘do you have any idea where Faruk Öz might be now?’

  ‘If he’s not either at his apartment or at work, then no.’

  ‘You don’t know where his family live, where he’s from?’

  ‘No.’ Lole shrugged again. ‘Faruk and I are only work colleagues. Although . . .’ He paused, thinking, and then said, ‘I think his parents might live in Ankara. I don’t know whereabouts.’

  Faruk Öz’s apartment in Gaziosmanpaşa had been searched by constables Yıldız and Orğa while İkmen was with Commissioner Ardıç. He hadn’t been there, even though, unlike İsak Mardin’s, many of his possessions appeared to be still in situ. Significantly, however, no one in Öz’s block had seen him since the night of Yusuf Kaya’s escape. He too had disappeared.

  Ayşe asked Murat Lole whether he knew anyone by the name of İsak Mardin. He said that he didn’t.

  ‘İsak Mardin is also a nurse at the Cerrahpaşa,’ İkmen said.

  ‘It’s a big place, Inspector.’

  ‘Mr Mardin worked on the cardiac care ward,’ İkmen continued. ‘He too has been missing since the incident with Yusuf Kaya. Mr Lole, do you know whether Faruk Öz knew İsak Mardin?’

  ‘No. Inspector, I’ve never heard of İsak Mardin before. As I said, the hospital is a very big place.’

  The interview continued until finally, taking pity upon Lole and his obviously fragile state, İkmen thanked him for his time and prepared to leave. As he rose from his seat, he said, ‘Mr Lole, I’m sorry, but I must ask. The smell of
coffee . . .’

  ‘Oh.’ The nurse frowned, then smiled again almost immediately. ‘Sorry, I can’t smell anything at the moment. But I know what you mean. That isn’t me, Inspector. Next door there’s a couple from the east. You know how strong they like their coffee out there.’

  Although İkmen himself had barely been east of Ankara in the whole of his life, he knew what Murat Lole meant. Once, years before, he’d had to pick up a prisoner from Nusaybin on the Syrian border. In many ways Nusaybin is far more an Arab than a Turkish town, and the coffee there had been so thick that İkmen had almost been able to stand a spoon in it. As he recalled, Nusaybin was quite close to Mardin, from whose airport he remembered having travelled. He had never seen the city itself, however. As he and Ayşe walked out into the street and back to his car, İkmen identified some feelings of envy for Süleyman. Mardin had always been one of those semi-legendary places, almost an Anatolian Shangri-la. In Mardin, it was said, Christians, Muslims and Jews all lived in harmony in big, beautiful, honey-coloured mansions. The place was infested with snakes but there was some sort of snake goddess who the locals swore protected them from potentially fatal bites. Süleyman, if he did indeed get there, would tell İkmen all about it upon his return. If he returned. Like most İstanbullus, İkmen automatically feared for those going out east. Out east, fabled cities notwithstanding, terrorists and armed clan chiefs were most certainly amongst one’s neighbours.

  Of course, Ardıç had chosen Süleyman to go after Kaya because he had made the original arrest. That was the reason, because Ardıç had said so. But that İkmen was seventeen years older than Süleyman did cross the older man’s mind. Dodging bullets required a certain turn of speed. Unless they already lived out east, it wasn’t somewhere the ‘old’ went. But then, with Bekir back in his life once again, would İkmen really have wanted to be anywhere else? There were things he had to say to his son: details about his past that needed clarification, for instance. And as he looked around at the very ordinary little street in Karaköy where his car was parked, the one with the Neve Şalom synagogue, he was reminded that there was his sad daughter Hulya to support too. With little time for friends and not wishing to bother the already over-burdened Fatma, İkmen’s daughter was turning more and more to her father for advice and comfort these days.

  As he got into his car beside Ayşe, İkmen looked up and saw Murat Lole looking at him fixedly through the window. He was drinking from a very tiny coffee cup.

  Mehmet Süleyman made a point of reading his little boy, Yusuf, his bedtime story that night. Of course, he’d see him in the morning, before the child left to go to the brand new nursery that had just started up in Ortaköy. Zelfa Süleyman had been delighted that somewhere so apparently professional and child-centred had opened up virtually on their doorstep. But then Ortaköy, once a quaint Bosphorus village, had become in recent years a very chic İstanbul suburb. So chic, in fact, that the couple often had difficulty parking their own cars for all the Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Aston Martins that, in the summer months particularly, lined their once very countrified street of wooden cottages. That otherwise very modern young people wanted to be associated with somewhere as quaint and historical as Ortaköy was something that Zelfa, a psychiatrist, had various theories about. Not least amongst these theories was one concerning the fact that very few of the nouveaux riches youngsters who hung around the clubs and bars of Ortaköy came from native İstanbul families. Most of them came originally from dirt-poor villages in the east. By inhabiting a place like Ortaköy, so Zelfa claimed, they were in effect buying a piece of history, or rather buying into a past that was completely alien to them. They thought, she said, it gave them a cachet, legitimised maybe their excessive cars, houses and clothes. Zelfa’s husband, like her father, was a genuine İstanbullu as well as being from an Ottoman dynasty related to the now deposed imperial family. There were still people in the city who insisted upon calling Mehmet’s father Prince Muhammed Süleyman, even though the old man had been born well after the Ottoman Empire had crumbled to dust. But that was İstanbul.

  ‘You know Gaziantep has got a fantastic museum,’ Zelfa said to her husband as he came into the living room and sat down.

  ‘Yusuf isn’t very pleased about this trip of mine,’ Mehmet said as he lit up a cigarette and then let the smoke out of his nose on a frown. ‘He wanted to know when I was going to come home and I just couldn’t tell him. When I find, if I find, Yusuf Kaya.’

  Zelfa moved away from the television set she’d been watching and sat down next to her husband. Snuggling in close to his side, she changed to English, the language with which she was really more comfortable than Turkish. Her voice, which was husky, was also imbued with a strong southern Irish accent. ‘I’m not mad about your going off myself,’ she said. ‘I suppose Ardıç wouldn’t send İkmen out there because of his age.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with that,’ Mehmet said. ‘And anyway, Çetin is hardly an old man, is he?’ he added loyally. İkmen, as well as being a legend in policing circles, was also his friend, and as such İkmen could never truly be old. ‘No, I have to go because it was me that arrested Kaya originally.’

  ‘You have an insight into the way his mind works.’

  Mehmet frowned. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘But I am going to Gaziantep and maybe Mardin too and I cannot do anything about it.’

  Zelfa sat up and looked at him. ‘Well, if you must go to Gaziantep, you can at least try to stimulate your mind by going to the museum. They’ve got the Zeugma mosaics there – you know, from that ancient site they flooded to build a dam? They’re supposed to be the most marvellous examples of mosaic art in the world.’

  She was insatiable when it came to cultural things like art. She was also, he knew, trying very hard not to mention or even perhaps think about all the dangers that being out east could involve. ‘You’d like a brochure of some sort, Zelfa?’ he said.

  ‘I’d like a big book full of beautiful colour pictures of the mosaics,’ she replied forcefully. ‘God Almighty, Mehmet, if I can’t go myself and I’m forced to be without you, I have a right to expect something.’

  ‘So Gaziantep baklava . . .’

  ‘Oh, I’ll have some of that too,’ she cut in playfully. ‘And you can get some for your son as well.’

  They both laughed. But then there was a serious silence, a moment during which he saw the fear of what could happen ‘out there’ reflected in her eyes. He was about to lean over and kiss her when his mobile phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and answered it.

  Zelfa, cuddling into his side, said, ‘If that is Ardıç . . .’

  Mehmet said, ‘It’s Çetin.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Mehmet, I’m so sorry I didn’t get very much time with you today,’ İkmen said. ‘You’re off to Antep tomorrow and so I won’t see you.’

  ‘No.’

  Zelfa, suddenly agitated as she was wont to become at anxious times, got up and walked back towards the television.

  ‘I just wanted to say that I will continue to find out what I can here and I’ll contact you every day,’ İkmen said.

  ‘I will also pass anything that I find on to you,’ his friend replied. ‘How did you get on with that nurse in Karaköy this afternoon?’

  İkmen told him about his meeting with Murat Lole. He added that although the man’s story about what he had been doing at the hospital when Kaya escaped checked out in every available way, he still didn’t trust him. Mehmet asked him why.

  ‘It’s a stupid thing really,’ İkmen said. ‘Basically, all the time Ayşe and I were with him, I could smell very strong coffee, like the real hard Turks in the old days used to drink. I asked him about it, because you don’t find many people these days who drink that stuff, and he told me that the couple next door, people from the east, were making it. Then after we left I looked up at his apartment and saw him at the window drinking from a tiny coffee cup. Of course he could have been given the
coffee by his neighbours, but I don’t really think so. I think that he lied to me. A senseless, silly lie that makes me distrust him. Why would he do such a thing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mehmet said. ‘But if you have a bad feeling about this man, Çetin, then we should watch him. I never knew your mother but I trust absolutely the intuition of the Witch of Üsküdar’s son.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mehmet heard his friend sigh. When he spoke again, the younger man noticed that İkmen’s voice was lowered. ‘I just wish I didn’t have similar – as in bad – feelings about my own son.’

  ‘Bekir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mehmet Süleyman had never met Bekir İkmen and would probably not do so until he returned from the east. But İkmen had told him a few things over the years: how Bekir had stolen from his brothers from the age of twelve, how he had lied about his drug-taking, and the terrifying stand-up fight he’d had with his father just before he ran away from home.

  ‘We still don’t know anything approaching the truth about where he’s been, what he’s done and what he’s now doing,’ İkmen said. ‘I don’t know what it means, but . . .’ He raised his voice once again and seemed to cheer up. ‘But I just wanted to wish you a good journey, Mehmet.’

  ‘Thank you, Çetin. I’ll do my best to acquit myself with honour and dignity in the face of eastern hostility – as well as eastern food, of course.’

  They both laughed. The previous year, Süleyman’s deputy İzzet Melik had been sent to the shores of Lake Van, also in the east, in the course of an investigation and had lost several kilos in weight. He had enjoyed the spicy eastern food very much, but sadly it had not suited his constitution.

  ‘Be safe, my friend. Go soon, come back quickly,’ İkmen said, and cut the connection. Süleyman put his phone back in his pocket. Suddenly tearful, he turned away quickly lest his wife see his weakness. Çetin was like a very loving older brother, always there, always watching his back. He too knew what the realities of working out east could be. İkmen, like everyone else, read the papers, watched the news from what some called the front. Süleyman was going to miss him very much.