Deep Waters, page 25
part #4 of Inspector Ikmen Series
The colour had left Mehti’s face. He opened his mouth to speak but seemed incapable of forming the words.
‘Well then,’ Suleyman said and turned to face his red-headed colleague. ‘Just possession of cannabis and assault on Mr Bajraktar then, Sergeant Çöktin.’
‘But . . .’
‘Hardly worth a tape for just that, sir,’ Çöktin said as he pressed the eject button on the tape recorder.
‘No,’ Suleyman said and then rose to his feet and without another word left the room.
Çöktin, smiling, looked down at the man who was now a very low-grade prisoner.
‘You see, Mehti,’ he said as he shoved the tape into one of his pockets, ‘we didn’t dig too deeply into your confession until Aryan came to see us. But after that, the little details that had simply niggled before turned into very big issues indeed.’ Shrugging theatrically he added, ‘Families, eh? You try your best to impress them and they just go and piss on you!’
When he reached the floor, Berekiah Cohen looked up to where he’d seen the strange woman and the boy. They were still there, pressed against the side of the guard rail. Too far away now to be able to see the expression on the woman’s face, he was nevertheless uneasy about her. For some reason she had shrieked in panic and, for just a second, he thought he had seen real fear on her face. No one else had responded to the cry, but then Professor Apa and his colleagues were always so absorbed in what they were doing. Even when he’d handed over the gold leaf the professor had done little more than mutter his thanks. Berekiah understood why. It was so fabulous up there inside the dome, suspended as it were with the angels. Indeed the mosaics upon which the team were currently engaged depicted Michael and Gabriel, their faces unearthly and serene, their wings spread against the great expanse of gold that enveloped their figures. It was, he thought as he made his way towards the guard who stood by the exit, a privilege just to be able to deliver gold to such a place. It was something he wanted to do more of, whatever his stupid father might think. History was interesting and as Professor Apa had told him when they’d first met, it was alive too. A great empire like that of Byzantium didn’t just disappear, it echoed relentlessly down the centuries, in the faces of modern İstanbulis, in the city’s architecture, in the almost live quality of these pictures of faith, these mosaics. Berekiah felt invigorated just being in the building.
He turned his thoughts back to the woman. She hadn’t made a sound since that first shriek but he still wasn’t entirely happy about what might be taking place in the gallery.
‘There’s a boy and a woman up in the gallery,’ he said to the cold-looking guard by the open door. ‘I think they might be having an argument.’
The guard, a thickset man with a bored expression, shrugged. ‘So?’
‘I think the woman might be in trouble!’ Berekiah said with some passion.
The guard first suppressed a yawn and then shuffled his no doubt cold feet. ‘Which part of the gallery are they in?’ he said. ‘It’s a big place.’
‘Just above us, actually.’ Berekiah pointed towards the roof of the narthex. ‘In the Gynekoion.’
‘The women’s gallery, typical,’ the guard said and moved slowly towards the cobbled ramp. ‘I expect this woman’s just nagged the poor boy half to death. Wanting to see everything, asking stupid questions all the time, not listening. I see it every day – foreigners, our own people. Always the same.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Berekiah asked, watching the man’s slow progress forwards.
‘No, you stay here,’ he said with a sigh of resignation. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll sort it out. I always do.’ And with yet another sigh, he mounted the step up to the ramp and began his no doubt slow ascent to the upper gallery.
Berekiah, now alone save for the thin smattering of tourists entering the narthex, leaned back against one of the porphyry-dressed walls and closed his eyes. Porphyry, he knew, came from Egypt. Mr Lazar, his tiny fox-faced employer, had once remarked that the stone had in all probability been hewn by the ancient Israelites, erstwhile slaves of the great Egyptian dynasties. With a laugh, Lazar had then said that by rights the Jews should have at least some of this now very valuable material and that perhaps Berekiah might like to try and lift some off with a knife one day when no one was looking. Mr Lazar said that the dark purple stone would look stunning in a white gold or even platinum setting. Berekiah smiled. Lazar might be old but at least he was still amusingly anarchic, not unlike the old communist antique dealer he knew in Beyoǧlu. Still wearing that ‘uniform’ of the 1950s, a beret and black jumper, Mr Orga even had a painting of himself in full Che Guevara kit over the entrance to his tiny, dusty empire. It had been there even during the Cold War years. He was tenacious, funny and challenging, just as Berekiah’s father had once been – before the earthquake, before Berekiah’s brother Yusuf’s mind splintered into fragments in a place very far from home. A place Berekiah didn’t want to remember.
He opened his eyes just as the guard, now in rather more of a hurry than he had been, emerged at the bottom of the ramp.
‘So was it all right?’ Berekiah asked him.
‘We’re going to have to clear the building,’ the guard said in a voice that was not a great deal above a whisper. ‘But now I must call the police.’
Berekiah’s face creased with concern. ‘Why? What’s going on? Is the lady hurt?’
The guard turned. ‘You’ll have to go back up the scaffolding and tell the professor and the team to come down,’ he said and then shaking his head in disbelief he added, ‘We can’t take the risk of anyone doing anything to upset that boy up there.’ And then he hurried forward again, muttering, ‘I’ll have to get the police . . .’
Berekiah laid a hand on the guard’s retreating shoulder. ‘What’s wrong? Please tell me.’
The guard turned again, his wide eyes expressing what he felt about what he had just seen. ‘The kid has a knife’, he mouthed. ‘OK?’
‘Right.’ Berekiah took a deep breath and quickly made his way back into the nave and up the scaffolding.
He made a point as he climbed not to look at the Gynekoion. By the prickling on the back of his neck, he knew with every step precisely where the women’s gallery and its occupants were.
İkmen had to bend down and turn his head to see İlhan Evren’s face. Twisted to one side, the art dealer’s head lay on a small stack of his personal stationery on top of his desk. Slackened by death, his jowls spread limply across paper and pens, all of which were covered with his blood.
İkmen straightened and looked once more at the scissors that stuck out of Evren’s back. They would, he imagined, have to be long in order to have killed someone of Evren’s bulk. But unless Arto Sarkissian found another more subtle cause of death, it was the scissors that had killed İlhan Evren – or rather, more precisely, the person wielding the scissors.
‘I don’t suppose the chauffeur has any idea where this Dimitri character may have gone,’ İkmen said to Tepe who was, for some reason, regarding his own profile in what remained of the smashed mirror over the fireplace.
‘No. Apparently he just cleaned his hands on a towel and left.’
‘Do we have the towel?’
‘Yes.’ Tepe turned away from his image and looked at İkmen. ‘And I’ve taken quite a good description from Hassan. The Russian did regular business with Evren so there could be correspondence or financial details pertaining to him.’ And then frowning he said, ‘I wonder why only the mirror is damaged. Nothing else is broken.’
‘Apart from Evren.’
The sound of a car drawing up outside momentarily distracted the men’s attention. Only İkmen went to look. The vehicle was a large black Mercedes.
‘Dr Sarkissian has arrived,’ he told his colleague. ‘I’d better let him in. You go back to the kitchen. I’ll join you when I’ve finished here.’
Hassan the chauffeur had drunk more of his employer’s whisky since the last time Tepe had seen him. Not that he was inebriated; in Tepe’s experience, people in shock could often drink a lot without getting drunk. Perhaps the extra adrenaline they produced ate up the excess alcohol – or something.
‘Did Mr Ali give you any idea when he and his sister might be back?’ the policeman asked as he sat down at the table opposite the chauffeur.
Hassan shrugged. ‘No.’
‘And you’ve no idea where they might have gone?’
‘Somewhere in Sultan Ahmet. I don’t know. That boy likes to wander around the monuments sometimes. So does Miss Flick. Or at least she did occasionally when she was friendly with the Albanian.’
Tepe leaned back in his chair and reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. ‘So what did you make of Rifat Berisha the Albanian then, Hassan? Did you like him?’
‘I liked it that he helped Miss Flick.’ Hassan poured himself another glass of whisky. ‘He was nice with her.’
‘But?’
‘But I knew he didn’t fancy her. I mean, who could? She, of course, wanted him to want her.’
Tepe offered the chauffeur one of his cigarettes, which he took. ‘So did there ever come a point when Rifat made that apparent to Miss Evren? Do you know?’
‘No.’ Hassan lit up and then offered his lighter to Tepe. ‘But then it would have been very difficult for him to do that, wouldn’t it? What with her giving him that car and anything else he wanted. And anyway, she has this strange attitude that makes telling her things like that very difficult.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, she sort of talks about herself like she’s beautiful. I mean, at first I thought she was just making a joke,’ his eyes widened at the memory of it, ‘but Allah in his mercy made sure I kept my mouth shut which is why I still have this job – if I still do.’
‘Presumably keeping your job was the reason why you didn’t tell Constable Roditi anything about these matters when he spoke to you.’
Hassan lowered his head. ‘Mr Evren was still alive then.’
‘Right.’ Tepe frowned. ‘So do you think that Miss Evren is suffering from actual delusions about her looks?’
‘I don’t know.’ Hassan took a good long swig from his glass and then banged it back down onto the table. ‘She’s a weird woman. Her and that boy—’
‘Her brother?’
‘Yes. They talk all the time when they’re together. Always in English, which I don’t understand very well.’ He leaned forward across the table conspiratorially. ‘If Mr Evren were still alive, I wouldn’t be saying this, but I’ve always thought there might be something unnatural going on between those two. Something about the tone of their conversations . . . Not that the boy seemed unhappy about whatever it was.’
‘But if Miss Evren wanted Rifat . . .’
‘Oh, I don’t mean that Miss Flick and Mr Ali were fucking! Well, I don’t know, maybe . . .’ Hassan, his eyes now glazed with drink, laughed. ‘No, it’s more like there’s some sort of control thing going on. Sometimes it’s him, sometimes it’s her. I don’t know. Like today I think she would have liked him to have gone to school, but he said no. He refused. And she just went along with it.’
Tepe sucked thoughtfully on his cigarette. ‘You don’t know why he didn’t want to go to school, do you?’
‘Perhaps because he’s not been well. Not that I’ve ever known him really fit.’
‘But if Ali is ill, surely he would want to stay at home?’
‘If I’d taken them up into Taksim I’d have said he was going to see his doctor.’
‘His doctor?’
Hassan tapped the side of his head with one of his fingers. ‘Doctor for the brain,’ he said darkly. ‘Crazy doctor.’
‘You mean a psychiatrist?’
‘Yes. Some other English woman or something.’
No, Irish actually, Tepe thought as he recalled hearing about İkmen and Suleyman’s meeting with Dr Halman on this very doorstep. They had wondered at the time who the psychiatrist had come to see. Now they knew.
‘So did you see Mr Evren this morning when you came to pick his children up?’ Tepe asked, changing the subject back to one that was more relevant to current events.
‘No, they just came out of the house when they saw me arrive.’
‘Is that usual?’
‘I generally manage a glass of tea between getting out of my car and starting up the Rolls.’
‘But not this morning?’
‘No.’
‘Mmm.’ Tepe put his hands up to his lips and frowned. According to Hassan, Dimitri the Russian said he’d knocked on the door to no avail before Hassan arrived in the car, so Evren could already have been dead by then. Maybe he was dead even before his children left the house. In fact, he could have been dead since the previous night.
‘Hassan,’ he asked at the end of these musings, ‘you don’t know whether the door to Mr Evren’s office was open when you came in with Dimitri, do you?’
After thinking this over for a few seconds, Hassan said, ‘I don’t know is the honest answer. That Russian pushed in front of me and so I came straight down here. Mind you, even if it had been open, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything because Mr Evren’s desk is round the corner from the door.’
‘So his children wouldn’t have been able to see that their father was dead unless they actually went into his office?’
‘No.’
If they hadn’t needed to speak to their father about anything they could have left the house with no idea he was dead. It was, Tepe felt, an eerie thought and one that the Evren children, once tracked down, would probably find shocking. If, that is, Evren had indeed been dead when they left. After all, there was still the issue of the now absent Russian.
As it turned out, Tepe didn’t have to wait very long for these issues to be addressed. İkmen put his head round the kitchen door and called him into the hall.
‘What is it, sir?’ the younger man asked as he observed the grave expression on İkmen’s face.
‘The doctor thinks that Evren died some time ago,’ İkmen said, ‘possibly in the early hours of this morning or even late last night. We need to know whether or not he had visitors and we need to find those children of his fast.’
‘Hassan says Ali Evren didn’t go to school today,’ Tepe said. ‘He took Felicity and Ali out to Sultan Ahmet this morning, he doesn’t know why or what for. He did tell me, however, that Ali is one of Dr Halman’s patients. So I suppose he could be a bit, well, you know what they can be like.’
İkmen did. ‘Well, it might be worth giving her office a call,’ he said. ‘It’s just possible Zelfa might have some idea where they might go.’
‘Yes.’
İkmen gave Zelfa Halman’s office phone number to Tepe who punched it into his mobile telephone. Then, as it started ringing, the two men waited in silence for someone to answer.
The thickness of the snowfall had, if anything, increased since he’d last looked outside. Moving back from the window, Mehmet Suleyman placed Mehti Vlora’s latest statement on his desk and smiled as he recalled what Çöktin had told him about the green Fiat. In reality it had been dumped just round the corner from the Vloras’ own apartment. Having driven around aimlessly in it all night Mehti had abandoned it when it had run out of petrol. How very incompetent and thoughtless. How very Mehti.
Suleyman looked at his watch and then walked across his office to where his overcoat hung on the back of the door. He’d only left himself twenty minutes to get down to Eminönü and Pandeli’s. He didn’t want to keep Zelfa waiting, not in this weather. He’d have to hurry.
Pausing only to light a cigarette, he closed the door of his office behind him and then made his way towards the stairs. Although rushed, he was looking forward to this meal. He hadn’t had an easy morning with Mehti Vlora and although it now seemed that they had finally arrived at some sort of truth about his involvement, or lack of involvement, in Rifat Berisha’s death, they still did not know who had committed the crime. It was troubling. The murderer was still at large and could, conceivably, kill again. It was a frightening thought and one that he knew his usually less than sympathetic superiors would share. Burglaries and car crime were one thing, but unsolved murders were quite another. They made the public nervous, got into the newspapers, sat on your service record like tombstones . . .
Lost in thought, he didn’t really register that Çöktin had come alongside him, much less notice that the Kurd was panting.
‘Sir, we’ve got a hostage situation,’ he puffed.
‘What?’ Suleyman turned towards him, his eyes still clouded by his earlier thoughts.
‘You’ve got to come. We’ve got a woman taken hostage!’
Suleyman’s heart began to pump faster and he felt the familiar sensation of adrenaline release clear his mind.
‘Where?’
‘In the Aya Sofya,’ Çöktin said. ‘The guards have cleared the museum.’
‘Right.’
Perfectly in step now, the two men ran into the squad room and called out three of the constables who were lounging in there.
‘Do we know who the victim or the perpetrator are?’ Suleyman asked as he took his phone out of his pocket and punched a well-used number into the keypad.
‘No,’ Çöktin replied.
‘OK.’
As a body the five men moved towards the door out of the squad room, Suleyman with his ear pressed to his telephone.
‘Zelfa?’ he said. ‘Look, I’ve got to go to something. There’s been an incident at the Aya Sofya. Sorry.’
Running now, the small squad of men pushed through the crowd of sad-eyed peasants, weeping women and disgusted businessmen who clustered around the front desk. For some reason, extremes in the weather, of whatever sort, seemed to lead to increases in reported crime.
Not that any of this registered on Suleyman who was now frowning fiercely into his mobile. ‘No, I don’t know who is involved!’ he said as he pushed his way through the crowd after his colleagues. ‘Yes, it could be . . . Well, yes, Zelfa, if Çetin says the Evrens were taken to Sultan Ahmet . . . Yes, I will bear it in mind . . . Well, I think that’s all rather psychological . . .’
