A Chemical Prison, page 9
İkmen ground his cigarette out in his ashtray and went back to looking at the miniature. But then, finding that his tired brain would just not think in any coherent fashion, he too got up and walked slowly towards his bed.
Although quite fearless when it came to dealing with people, Dorotka Taşkiran had always treated motor cars with the respect that, in all probability, they deserved. She had, in other words, never learned nor even wanted to learn to drive. Living where she did, however, over in the distant suburb of Polonezköy, this did mean that in order to get into the city she had to take first a taxi, then a ferry and then, depending upon her final destination, usually a bus or a dolmuş too. Her appointment this morning at nine with Dr Sarkissian at the mortuary had meant leaving her home before the sun had even vacated its bed. It had been a wet and windy dawn which had not, sadly, discouraged Dorotka from standing outside on the ferry – she loved to look at the numerous palaces and gardens that lined the shores of the Bosphorus – it had done little for the state of her hair. Strange hat notwithstanding, when she approached Arto Sarkissian and powerfully shook his hand, she looked not unlike a woman with her head inside a huge, grey storm.
As was her custom, she asked to be taken to see her ‘sitter’ – as she liked to term anybody, living or dead, whom she was sketching – right away and so Arto led her down the long central corridor towards the small room where the body of the dead boy lay. As she strode along beside him, Arto periodically stole small but embarrassed glances at her. She was, he always felt, someone who irresistibly invited second looks.
Dorotka Taşkiran was not really an ‘official’ police artist. There were several of those but, whenever Çetin İkmen needed work of this sort done, he always employed this strange old woman as opposed to any of the others. This sprang from the high opinion he held of her work. She alone, so İkmen said, could capture the ‘soul’ of a subject, although quite what he meant by that, the decidedly unaesthetic Arto Sarkissian could not imagine. All he knew was that she liked to talk to her sitters in a way that he found particularly disturbing and that on this occasion she had what appeared to be a dead bird attached to the brim of her hat.
When they arrived at the designated room, Arto put on all the lights and uncovered the face of the corpse while Mrs Taşkiran removed a large selection of pencils, brushes, paints and sketch pads from the small suitcase she carried for this purpose. Arto, who had, as promised, given his assistant the day off, asked whether the artist would mind if he stayed in the room in order to sort through and replace recently cleaned instruments. She gave her permission with a regal wave of one hand and then, drawing a stool up to the side of the trolley on which the corpse lay, she bent low over it and peered into its face.
‘Well, you’re a soft little thing and no mistake!’ she said, skittering but not touching her fingers across the top of his features. ‘You’ve a very fine nose there and a pretty rather girlish mouth.’ She turned away quickly to address Arto Sarkissian who was cringing over by the sinks. ‘He was strangled you say, Doctor?’
‘Yes, although there are signs of drug abuse on the arms. The samples are still at the lab, but I suspect that the narcotic involved was heroin.’
She tutted and shook her head. ‘Shame.’ Then with one swift movement of the wrist she grabbed hold of the edge of the sheet and whipped it right off the body and on to the floor.
‘What are you doing!’ Arto cried, running over to the trolley and picking the sheet up off the floor. ‘You’re only supposed to be drawing the face!’
Ignoring him completely, the old woman took one of the body’s hands in hers and held it up closely to her eyes. ‘My goodness, but you’ve got soft hands, boy!’ she said and then, pushing roughly past the outraged doctor she performed exactly the same procedure with one of the feet. ‘And these are like little babies’ hooves too!’ she exclaimed.
‘Mrs Taşkiran, I insist that you—’
‘Oh, come, come, Doctor,’ she said, almost with humour in her voice, ‘neither of us is a Muslim and so their dictates regarding opposite sexes attending to bodies don’t apply to us.’
‘That’s not the point!’ he said, hastily shuffling the sheet over the top of the torso. ‘You have been asked to draw the face and only the face and that is what you must do!’
She shrugged. ‘If you wish,’ she said in a way that showed that she was totally unabashed. ‘If you will be rigid on these matters.’
She then opened one of her sketch books and, as she bent low in order to look closely into her ‘sitter’s’ face, Arto Sarkissian took a few deep, hopefully composing breaths. It was all very well for Çetin İkmen to send this crazy person over to the morgue but he didn’t have to either talk to her or supervise her work. Not that, probably, her antics would have worried the inspector; he could, at times, be quite as strange himself. To inflict such oddity on others, however, was not really on and the doctor determined to speak to his friend about it when next they met.
‘Your skin is quite flawless, dear,’ said a voice that looked, from where Arto was standing, to be emanating from the creature that adorned her hat.
This, followed by the sound of graphite moving across paper, told him that, speaking or not, she had at least started the work that she had been contracted to perform.
Partly reassured that she wasn’t going to do anything else that was too peculiar for a while, Arto returned to the bench and the pile of instruments arranged around the sinks. He did from time to time keep half an eye upon what the woman was doing, just in case. Not that he could really criticise her unless she did something absolutely outrageous. Mrs Taşkiran did this work for love rather than money – which was, of course, another reason why Çetin İkmen was so keen on her stuff. But then, Mrs Taşkiran – whose last exhibition had, Arto recalled, been entitled ‘Forest Mummies’ and had consisted of a load of mummified moles and rats mounted on card – didn’t exactly need cash. A lifetime resident of the pretty Polish refugee village of Polonezköy, Dorotka was the daughter of two Polish doctors of some note and had married well into good Turkish Republican money. Skilled as she no doubt was as an artist, her large cushion of wealth had to take more than a little blame for her obvious howling insanity. That, and of course the nature of the place to which her parents had come. Although far more scarce than they had been during the Belle Époque when Dorotka’s parents had lighted upon the shores of the Bosphorus, İstanbul could still produce some startling eccentrics: like the old Ottoman general, now long dead, whom Arto could remember from his childhood. He had fought most bravely during the First World War despite suffering from the delusion that both of his legs were made from glass. Every morning, it was said, his men had to lift him on to his horse taking great care neither to chip nor shatter his legs. It was, Arto had thought even then, an eccentricity – like Mrs Taşkiran’s dead bird like the city itself – almost palpably tainted by the typically Stambouline obsession with sorrow and frail mortality.
‘It is my opinion,’ she said, resurrecting Arto from his thoughts, ‘that this dear boy was quite a pampered little soul.’
‘Not all those who take drugs are on the street.’
‘True. But I do know quality when I see it and I see it very clearly here,’ she continued. ‘Those hands of his are barely touched by the lines of time and his feet have not for a long period, if ever, climbed up and down our lovely seven hills.’
Rather than dignify her ramblings with a reply, Arto took a handful of clamps and placed them in rows inside a drawer.
For a few moments following this exchange, the two of them worked in silence until, and addressing the corpse rather than the doctor, the old woman said, ‘It is a little known fact that Atatürk once graced our little Polonezköy with his presence. My mother was just pregnant with my brother at the time. But my father sent her away anyway when the great man came. Just in case his eyes should light upon her and … He was like that, our beloved Ghazi, bless him. Poor mother always said she wished she could have just danced with him once. If I believed in heaven, which I don’t, I might like to imagine my mother and Atatürk waltzing in the afterlife, dressed in evening clothes, of course.’
It wasn’t easy to concentrate on anything much with all this nonsense going on, but Arto Sarkissian was grateful that what he was doing now was at least quite boring and mechanical. During the course of his time with her the doctor was vouchsafed many things about Mrs Taşkiran – second hand of course – some of which he already knew and some that he didn’t. Principal amongst these facts was the origin of the little bird on her hat. She had, apparently, throttled the poor thing just that morning and was using her hat to transport it home for mummification. She liked it, which was just as well, because he doubted whether anybody else would find it attractive.
A rather interesting story about how she had once taken Çetin İkmen out to dinner, at McDonald’s, had just begun when the telephone in the corner rang. Arto picked it up and, having murmured his name into the receiver, recognised the voice of Dr Deminsan who was in charge of forensic testing.
‘I have those toxicology results for you,’ she said in that cold I-am-a-woman-and-a-professional manner of hers.
‘Oh, yes,’ Arto answered in a similar, but masculine vein. ‘And?’
‘Your victim was loaded with pethidine,’ she said.
Arto creased his brow, partly in response to what Dr Deminsan had said and partly because Mrs Taşkiran now appeared to be sharing a joke with the corpse. ‘Pethidine? Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure, Dr Sarkissian,’ that same icy voice insisted. ‘I did the tests myself. I’ll put the report in the internal post or, if you wish, we could meet in about an hour.’
Time spent in Dr Deminsan’s company tended, in Arto’s experience, to make one feel a little inferior. He opted therefore for the former suggestion and, with a short word of thanks, put the telephone down again. This toxicology information was both perplexing and unexpected and, for a few moments, he just stood motionless by the bench, thoughtfully stroking his chin. Dr Deminsan’s results were raising all sorts of questions in his mind, questions that were, in reality, the province not of himself, but of the investigating officer. When Mrs Taşkiran had finished her work, he would have to call Çetin İkmen and explain all this to him. His friend was not a medical man and so the significance of this discovery would need to be outlined for him. And, as he watched the old woman rendering the face of the stranger in their midst in lines of graphite, he found that he was suddenly almost irresistibly drawn back to her and her sitter.
Seeing his movement, the old woman looked up from her work and smiled. ‘He’s really very lovely, isn’t he?’ she said.
‘He was a handsome youth,’ the doctor agreed.
‘It is the preserve of the rich to be so,’ she continued, her hand flying deftly across the paper, ‘good food, clean and warm conditions all one’s life. I was a great beauty myself, in my day. Had I been poor, it would have been a different story, but—’
‘You think this boy was wealthy?’
‘Oh, undoubtedly. As I said before, his hands and feet haven’t seen a lot of service, even for one as young as he. I have, as I expect you have too, worked on children much younger than this whose skin is already wrinkled by sun and wind and work.’ She looked up briefly from her labours, her nose creased slightly in disgust. ‘Street urchins and the like, you know.’
And, usually, drug users too, he thought. But then that was just it really, wasn’t it? Given his telephone call from Dr Deminsan, could this boy still be considered a drug addict in the conventional sense? And if he wasn’t then what was he? As he watched Mrs Taşkiran put the finishing touches to her sketch Arto Sarkissian realised that he could not answer either of those questions.
As soon as Mehmet Suleyman entered the office he knew that the time had come. İkmen’s deeply thoughtful face said it all. Now was review time when everything that had been discovered so far would be looked at and a strategy for moving forward decided. Unlike most other detectives, İkmen kept all the salient facts regarding cases he was working on almost exclusively in his head which meant that very soon he would blurt it all out in one long and really quite impressive stream.
Suleyman did what was expected of him and sat down and waited. İkmen as ever, began by taking a deep breath in.
‘So, Suleyman,’ he said, ‘where are we now then?’
This was the sergeant’s cue to give an account of what he had done in the last few days. ‘Well, sir, I’ve circulated a description, such as it is, of Mr Zekiyan to all forces in Turkey and I’m in the process of checking the major ports and air terminals. I’m having a list drawn up of all known addicts, some of whom may also be dealers, in the Sultan Ahmet area and Sergeant Farsakoǧlu is currently with a man who has stated that he wishes to confess to the crime.’
İkmen raised an eyebrow. ‘Know his name?’
‘Well, Cohen told me that it was Lenin, but …’
İkmen laughed. ‘Oh, yes, I know him,’ he said, ‘he regularly dosses in a doorway near my apartment. The children call him Red Ahmet. I haven’t a clue as to his real identity, but his declamation of the Communist Manifesto is something to behold.’
‘So, he’s just a …’
‘Mad person, yes, Suleyman. When I’ve finished here, I’ll go down and see him and sort it all out. Anything else?’
‘I’d like to talk about the house.’
‘OK.’ İkmen lit a cigarette and settled back comfortably in his battered leather chair. ‘Let’s talk it all through, shall we?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right. The boy died, according to Dr Sarkissian’s calculations, at around about ten p.m. on the evening before the day he was discovered. He died by strangulation via a cord or ligature. We know that the boy used drugs because of the track marks on his arms although I am still waiting for the toxicology report on that as well as Mrs Taşkiran’s portrait of the boy for the papers and others.
‘Now, we know that the house was rented out to a man called Zekiyan who is, as yet, nowhere to be found. It seems, but until we find Mr Zekiyan we cannot really know for certain, that he actually created the self-contained little apartment at the top of the house for some reason and, further, he failed to tell his landlord about this. We think this man is probably Armenian and there is a strong possibility that the dead boy is also of that race.’
‘Didn’t Professor Mazmoulian disagree with that though, sir?’
‘Yes, he did, Suleyman, and I am taking his opinion into account even though Commissioner Ardiç says that I am a fool to do so.’
‘Well, the boy was uncircumcised and—’
‘Ah.’ İkmen smiled. ‘Yes, that is so, but to assume that he is Armenian just because of that may lead us into error. He could originate from almost any ethnic group which does not practice circumcision – or even, perhaps, one that does.’
Suleyman looked shocked. ‘You mean that he could even have been Turkish?’
‘Yes. Why not?’
‘Well, because of his uncircumcised state.’
‘It’s a possibility you find shocking, I feel, Suleyman. And because you are a traditionalist Turk I can see that you would. But it is something I feel that we cannot afford to close our minds to.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Anyway …’ İkmen held up his hand to silence his deputy. Further discussion of this detail at this very early point in the investigation would do nothing more than embroil them both in a largely unresolvable argument. ‘So, in the absence of Mr Zekiyan and with no witnesses beyond the woman who first reported the unlocked state of the property, we only have the house and the boy as significant sources of evidence at the moment.’
‘There was also the testimony of the old woman, Emine, who remembers seeing Zekiyan with a child some years ago.’
İkmen inclined his head in recognition. ‘True. And I will come to that in a moment. But for now, the house. What can we say about that, Suleyman?’
‘Well …’
‘Well, basically we have a clean house, don’t we? No fingerprints, no mess, no food or drink, no items of clothing or toiletry. Just furniture, some household equipment, including a recently used and emptied vacuum cleaner, and a dead twenty-year-old.’
Suleyman frowned. ‘No fibres from the carpets or soft furnishings then?’
‘A few. Forensic are working on it now.’
‘So it looks like whoever killed the boy cleaned the house afterwards.’
İkmen scrunched his cigarette out in his ashtray and then lit another. ‘Yes. Which means that he must have been quite busy that night. He must also have had to dispose of quite a bit of stuff too. Unless he never ate and walked around naked there would have been food and clothes to get rid of and perhaps other, more personal items, too. My theory is that he did all this in the early hours of the morning, although I can’t see how he could have done it without transport.’
‘He must have had a car then. There is space for one to the right of the property if I remember correctly.’
‘Possibly. Unless he cleaned and removed everything the previous day, knowing what he was going to do.’ İkmen sucked thoughtfully on his teeth. ‘He obviously went to a lot of trouble.’
‘Well, he doesn’t want to be caught, does he?’
‘No. And yet’ – İkmen reached down into the drawer of his desk and pulled out the crystal miniature he had received the previous day – ‘he is an exhibitionist. This figure comes from the same series as the ones in the top apartment. I compared them this morning before I came in.’
‘You’re saying you definitely think that this was sent to you by the killer?’
İkmen shrugged. ‘I have no evidence to suggest that it wasn’t and as you know I do not hold with serendipity. I know that a lot of people have these things but I don’t personally know any of them. Friends or relatives would have included a note of some sort and besides there is no reason to send me a present at this time, especially one like this that would not appeal to me.’
