Ikmen 16 - Body Count Read online

  ‘She is your Great-Uncle Hüseyin’s granddaughter!’ she said as she told her son all the details with breathless excitement. ‘Leyla İpek, that was her name before she married Osman Ablak. You know the elderly man she married after she divorced that American. Of course General Osman Bey is very wealthy – in property, her mother told me. She wasn’t pleased about it, though, because Osman Bey is no one. And now with this scandal …’

  Süleyman had just come out of one of the few places that the late Levent Devrim had definitely frequented socially, the Ada bistro and bookstore on İstiklal Caddesi, when his mother had called him. According to staff at the Ada, the mysterious mathematician had spent most of his time reading, usually books about what they described as New Age subjects. This covered topics as diverse as yoga, homeopathy, spiritualism and conspiracy theories. He’d talked to other people, but only really when they spoke to him. No one had actually known Levent Devrim.

  ‘I remember Hüseyin’s brother, Great-Uncle Rafık,’ Süleyman replied as he walked back down İstiklal towards the side street where he’d parked his car.

  ‘A true prince, yes. He never worked.’

  ‘He was creepy.

  ‘Mehmet! He was not!’

  ‘But Leyla İpek—’

  ‘Oh, Mehmet!’ His mother clicked her tongue in aggravation. ‘Leyla İpek! Hüseyin Efendi’s last bayram, 1970, you remember! Leyla was quite the young lady then …’

  ‘Yes, and I was a child,’ Mehmet said. ‘I remember an old man who looked like my grandfather, a younger man who gave me the creeps, and I remember sweets.’

  ‘Well anyway, you must do something about it,’ Nur Süleyman said.

  ‘Do something about what?’

  ‘About Leyla İpek. She’s family, she’s been found dead and you are a police officer.’

  ‘Mother, I am not working on that case.’

  ‘Well then you must tell your superiors that it has to be assigned to you.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  Infuriated, she put the phone down on him. Now that his father, Muhammed, had drifted away into the further reaches of dementia, his mother spent all her time discussing her husband’s imperial background with anyone who would listen. Mehmet’s brother Murad had even found her doing it at Sirkeci railway station, accosting complete strangers at the Orient Restaurant. Now that a distant family member had died in mysterious circumstances, she was going to be abuzz. But Mehmet was still working the Devrim case and Çetin İkmen had already been assigned to this new incident.

  Mehmet Süleyman turned left off İstiklal and on to Hamalbaşı Caddesi, where he’d left his car. Down the hill in front of him and across Tarlabaşı Bulvarı was the district of the same name, where Levent Devrim had once chosen to live. Why anyone who wasn’t an immigrant, transsexual, Syriani or Roma would choose to settle in such a place, he couldn’t imagine. As far as he could deduce, Devrim had had no sexual kinks that would have set him apart from the mainstream and he had been well educated and well brought up. But then he had been odd – eccentric, as his parents had apparently put it; more likely he had been mentally ill.

  Faruk Genç’s wife, Hande, had guessed that her husband had been seeing other women, even though she said she hadn’t known who. When İkmen had asked her to corroborate her husband’s story, she had done so. She’d never told Faruk about her suspicions, but then as she said to İkmen, ‘He was happy thinking that he was saving my feelings, and I am a pragmatist. What can be wrong with that?’ There had however been a light in her eyes that İkmen recognised as malice, and he wondered whether she had known more than she was letting on.

  İkmen and Ayşe Farsakoğlu’s meeting with Leyla Ablak’s husband Osman did not go so smoothly. In his eighties, Osman Bey, a military man, was a veteran of the Korean War and of the 1974 Turco-Greek war over Cyprus. He was not a man easily persuaded that what he believed could in any way be wrong. And Osman Ablak, soldier and latterly successful businessman, did not believe that his wife would have been unfaithful to him.

  ‘The truth, Inspector,’ he told İkmen as he motioned for him to sit down opposite him, ‘is that my wife had an arrangement with that spa. She could use it any time she liked and sometimes she liked to do so at night.’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘General.’

  ‘General, I know this is very difficult for you, but … Look, General, a man at the spa has admitted—’

  ‘They’re all queer in those places.’ Osman Ablak waved away with one large hand the notion of straight men in spas. ‘My wife was a woman of taste and refinement; she wouldn’t have been attracted to some fruit.’ He lit a cigarette but without offering one to either İkmen or Ayşe Farsakoğlu, to whom he hadn’t even proffered a seat. ‘Did you know that my wife was a member of the Imperial family?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘Yes, her grandfather was a prince. Now whatever you may think of them, that family did not rule this country and its empire for five hundred years without knowing a bit about human nature. Corrupt and appalling they may have been, but they were no fools. My wife would never have gone with a queer.’ He looked at İkmen sitting and Ayşe standing with a challenging expression on his face. However, like Faruk Genç, General Ablak didn’t cry over Leyla’s death. Maybe, İkmen thought, Leyla Ablak wasn’t a woman that anyone would cry over. He also wondered what, if any, relative she might have been to that other son of the Ottomans, Mehmet Süleyman.

  ‘As I say, a member of staff at the spa has made a statement to the effect that he was sleeping with your wife—’

  ‘Preposterous!’

  ‘General,’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu cut in, ‘our pathologist is performing tests on your wife’s body now. Once he has finished, whether your wife was having an affair or not will be proven. In the meantime, we have a man under investigation who tells us that he was having a relationship with her. What do you expect us to do? Ignore him?’

  A bitterness and an anger that İkmen knew wasn’t entirely the fault of this opinionated old general told him that Ayşe was tired and probably agitated too. She thought he didn’t know about the resumption of her affair with Mehmet Süleyman and how deeply hurt she was by the way the Ottoman simply used her. But İkmen had known both of them for many years and had learned to read the signs a long time ago.

  It took the general a few moments to gather his thoughts after her onslaught, time during which İkmen said, ‘General, what my sergeant is saying is that we cannot afford to ignore any evidence, be it physical, word of mouth or whatever, in our hunt for your wife’s killer. This is a dangerous person. He or she held your wife’s neck with one hand whilst smashing her head against the bottom of the hotel’s plunge pool. That’s a very violent act. We need to catch this person before they do something like this again.’

  General Ablak didn’t move or make any sort of comment. For the first time since the officers had arrived he looked a little sad. Eventually he said, ‘Well what about this, er, this man at the spa who says he … with her … Couldn’t he have …’

  ‘Killed her? We’re in the process of investigating his story,’ İkmen said. ‘That gentleman is of course most definitely of interest to us. However, we also need to know about anyone who may have disliked or had some sort of grudge against your wife. Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm or even kill Mrs Ablak?’

  The general looked İkmen straight in the eyes. ‘Women can be very jealous of one another, Inspector, and my wife was a very wealthy, beautiful and fortunate woman.’

  İkmen, who had been expecting him to elaborate on those words, waited in vain for clarification. Eventually he said, ‘Do you have any particular woman in mind, General?’

  Ablak waved a hand dismissively again. ‘Leyla had a lot of friends who were not really friends. She played golf; there’s a lot of rivalry in that game.’

  ‘Do you play golf yourself, General?’

  ‘No! Hateful game! No, we both belonged to the Ke
mer Golf and Country Club, which was where my wife played and where we would both sometimes go to meet friends for drinks. As you will have noticed, Inspector, there was a considerable age gap between myself and my wife, over twenty years, and so Leyla did a lot of things on her own. She also visited her family on her own.’ He looked down.

  İkmen said, ‘Why was that? Didn’t you get on with her family, General?’

  For a moment he remained silent, and then he said, ‘Her father was fine. Until he died last year I had a good relationship with him. But her mother and the rest of them?’ He shook his head, then looked up again. ‘I was never good enough, not for Princess Sezen.’

  ‘That’s her …’

  ‘Mother. Good enough for her daughter to take my money but not good enough to be a member of that family. What can I say? If my wife was having the affair you claim she was, then why did either of us go through the hell that bunch of Imperial bastards put us through, eh?’ He looked at Ayşe and said, ‘I suppose you think I killed her, don’t you?’

  Caught off guard, Ayşe said, ‘General, I can—’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry … Sergeant,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I’d suspect me too. After all, I could have been lying when I told you that I didn’t know my wife was having an affair, couldn’t I? And in view of my pending arrest …’ He looked them both in the eyes; İkmen did not lower his gaze. Now at least that particular elephant in the room had been acknowledged: the fact of General Ablak’s alleged involvement in Ergenekon, the plot to overthrow the government. İkmen should have raised it himself, but then it was probably irrelevant.

  ‘General,’ he said, ‘your involvement, or not, in a possible plot to overthrow our current government is not something I have any interest in. All I want to know about is who killed your wife.’

  In terms of door-to-door inquiries, searches and forensic investigation, the police had done Tarlabaşı to death. And yet Ömer Mungan still believed that there was more he could do. However because he felt comfortable in the area, where so many people spoke Aramaic, he was all too aware that he could just be deluding himself. Unlike his sister, Peri, he was homesick. This wasn’t helped by the fact that his boss, Inspector Süleyman, appeared to want to keep him very much at arm’s length. He didn’t know why this was, although the gossip back at the station was that the inspector had become too close to previous sergeants, who, it was said, he believed had always let him down. Whether this was true or not Ömer didn’t know, but as he sauntered past a small sex shop up by the Syriani church of St Mary the Virgin, his mind was not on his job but rather on how he might be able to get posted back to Mardin. In spite of wanting desperately to keep his parents in their old home, he knew that his father at least would be mortified if he knew how unhappy his son was.

  ‘Hey, you!’

  For a moment he didn’t think the voice was anything to do with him. But then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘You!’

  He turned and found himself looking into a fat face he recognised as that of the old prostitute Sugar Barışık.

  ‘Where’s your boss?’ she asked. She was wearing clothes that were hardly adequate for a cold February day, and her legs were bare.

  ‘Inspector Süleyman?’

  ‘Yeah. Where is he? Has he forgotten about Levent now that some woman’s been killed?’

  Ömer had heard that a woman’s body had been found at a posh spa in Sultanahmet and that she had been murdered. But he didn’t know anything else – except that Süleyman wasn’t involved in that case.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re all still working really hard to find his killer. But so far …’ He shrugged. ‘No one saw or heard anything.’

  She leaned in towards him. ‘You need to threaten these bastards round here. Don’t ask a gypsy nicely; he’ll just laugh in your face, which is what they are doing. Come with me.’

  She pulled him into her shop, which, Ömer noticed, smelt strongly of cats. She sat him down in a chair between her soba and an inflated rubber sex doll. Then she locked the shop door and lowered herself into her own chair, which was almost as large, battered and hairy as she was.

  ‘Now look, son …’

  ‘Sergeant Mungan.’

  ‘Sergeant whatever,’ she said with a wave of her hand. ‘Listen, something’s come to my ears lately and so I’m passing it on provided you never say to anyone that it came from me. OK?’

  Ömer didn’t like making promises that he probably couldn’t keep, but what else did he have? Levent Devrim had been dead for over a month, and no information had been discovered that shed any light on who might have killed him. ‘OK,’ he said.

  Even though the shop door was locked, Sugar looked around warily. Then she said, ‘There’s a family of gypsies live up by the Bulvarı. I don’t know what their family name is, but the mother is called Şeftali, she’s a prostitute. You can’t miss her: she has a purple birthmark on her face the size of a shoe. She’s got a little girl looks fleabitten all the time, but it’s her eldest you need to talk to, a boy called Hamid.’

  ‘Why?’

  For a little while Ömer didn’t think that she had heard him. He was just about to repeat his question when she said, ‘Well let us say that maybe Şukru Şekeroğlu didn’t find Levent’s body first.’

  ‘This kid did?’

  Sugar Barışık held up her hands. ‘Oh, I know nothing! But the child is a thief and a thug and he pimps his own mother – so it is said.’

  ‘I can’t bring him in for being a kid from a rough area, Sugar Hanım …’

  ‘Ah, but you can bring him in for picking my pocket,’ Sugar said.

  ‘Picking your pocket? When?’

  ‘About half an hour ago,’ she said. ‘In the market.’

  ‘How do you know it was this Hamid?’

  ‘Because I was in the market, he was there and then my purse was gone,’ Sugar said. Then she leaned across her vast stomach and whispered, ‘Look, kid, work with me here, will you? I saw the boy in the market. I’m giving you an excuse straight from heaven.’

  Chapter 5

  Leyla Ablak’s mother, Sezen İpek, didn’t cry, even though a group of family members who sat with her wailed incessantly. One of them İkmen recognised as Süleyman’s mother, Nur Hanım.

  ‘If it is any consolation, our pathologist is of the opinion that your daughter died instantly and without pain,’ İkmen said. What he didn’t say was that Leyla Ablak had struggled prior to her death and so must have had some notion about what was about to happen to her.

  ‘What was she doing at the spa in the middle of the night?’ Sezen İpek asked, more of herself than of İkmen. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, Sezen Hanım, if we could possibly talk alone …’

  ‘Without my family? Impossible,’ she said.

  There were a lot of her family. In İkmen’s experience, Ottoman dynasties related to the Imperial family were even more numerous than peasant clans out in the east. The large, shabby drawing room in the İpeks’ crumbling Ortaköy yalı was crowded with people. All but one – a man who looked old enough to have remembered the last sultan – were women.

  ‘Sezen Hanım, I have to insist,’ İkmen said. ‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu and myself …’ He briefly caught sight of Nur Süleyman looking in his direction when he mentioned Farsakoğlu’s name. Then he saw her look at his sergeant with pure hatred. He was well aware of the fact that she knew about Ayşe and her son, and that she didn’t approve. ‘… really need to speak to you in private.’

  For a moment Sezen İpek looked outraged, and İkmen feared that she might just throw them both out of her house. Then she turned to a tiny woman sitting beside her and said, ‘Get these people out of here, will you please, my dear sister. I appreciate their concern, but I have a headache coming on.’

  The tiny woman didn’t speak, but simply ushered the women and the ancient man one by one out of the room. As they left, they all carried on crying, and even when the door was closed behind them İkme
n could still hear their wails coming from other parts of the house. When they’d gone, Sezen İpek looked at İkmen and said, ‘Well?’

  She was, İkmen reckoned, about seventy-five years old. Of medium height, she was slim and upright and she had a face that could frighten God. If Leyla Ablak had been brought up by this woman, then she had been either a frightened, shivering leaf of a woman or an Amazon. From what he knew of her so far, she had probably been the latter, which meant that Leyla and this woman must have had some terrible scenes. He got straight to the point. ‘Sezen Hanım, did you know that your daughter was having an affair with the manager of the spa she attended at the Great Palace Hotel?’

  Her face didn’t change at all. ‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘I did.’

  ‘Do you know the gentleman?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘No, but I knew that Leyla was seeing a man rather younger than her husband.’

  ‘And did you approve?’

  ‘What could I do?’

  ‘Did you tell her husband?’

  She shrugged.

  There was a silence, and then she laughed.

  ‘Sezen Hanım?’

  ‘That dry old stick! Ha! Do you know who Osman Ablak is, Inspector İkmen? He is the son of one of those people who sold our empire out and made this country into the rudderless mess it is today.’

  The general’s people had been republicans, followers of Atatürk.

  ‘My daughter married him for his money. Even for that reason, I disapproved. But she was an adult, so what could I do?’ She shook her head and for the first time looked as if she might be about to cry, but then she pulled herself together. ‘Anyway, she spent his money on ridiculous things: t’ai chi retreats, spas, acupuncture – anything crazy, New Age and quackish that she could find. I know the general didn’t approve of such things any more than I did, and he must have known that she was being unfaithful to him. At his age! My daughter was beautiful …’ Her eyes brimmed.

  ‘Your daughter had a lot of cosmetic surgery,’ İkmen said. ‘Which I assume the general paid for …’

  ‘Of course he did! Where else would she have obtained the money for surgery! Why not from one of the people who took it all away from her family?’ Now she began to cry. ‘The only consolation I had was that she was taking his money while he was alive, so he could see it going.’