Harem (17 page)

‘Ah.’

‘To someone who knows this story, it would make sense. And Mr Sivas obviously did because he didn’t open the box.’ İkmen sighed and then put his hand up to his head because it was starting to hurt. ‘He just ran away from a house full of police officers and is now either in danger or has gone into hiding. How did this happen, Sergeant Çöktin?’

Çöktin, who was well enough acquainted with İkmen to recognise that his outward calmness was not destined to last, began, ‘Well . . .’

‘It happened because you all fucked up, didn’t it?’

‘Er . . .’

‘You did not stay with Mr Sivas at all times as you had been instructed and you also failed to sustain effective observation over this property.’ He sat down beside İskender on the brocade-covered bench outside Hikmet Sivas’s bedroom. ‘You all behaved like a bunch of amateurs. You facilitated a catastrophe.’

Metin İskender, who had now just about managed to stop vomiting, looked up.

‘Sivas had been up to his room alone before,’ he said, ‘to go to sleep.’

‘Not when I’ve been in this house!’ İkmen roared as the floodgates of his anger finally burst. ‘When I’ve been here there has always been one man at least outside rooms containing Sivas family members! Even when the sister goes to the toilet!’

‘Inspector—’

İkmen turned on İskender. ‘You and I both felt that Sivas was hiding something. Now that he’s gone we have lost the only, admittedly tenuous, connection we might have had with Kaycee’s murderers! You have messed up in a big way!’

İskender’s already white face turned grey.

‘And as lead officer in this investigation,’ İkmen said fiercely, ‘I am as of now taking personal charge.’ He looked around at all the other officers on the landing before he returned his gaze to İskender. ‘No more working alongside each other. You do as I say at all times and if you can’t do that then you do nothing!’

‘But that is for the Commissioner—’

‘The commissioner, when he finds out about this, will go berserk!’ İkmen shouted into İskender’s face. ‘You were in charge! You messed up and you will take the consequences like a man!’

He stood up and addressed Orhan Tepe. ‘Well, we’d better take a look at what’s in there and then I’ll have to set about salvaging something from this catastrophe.’

‘Yes, sir.’

İkmen walked towards the bedroom door, took a deep breath and entered.

The box was exactly as İskender had left it. The lid was off and the bloodstained newspaper that had padded it out was strewn haphazardly across the floor.

Before his courage failed him, İkmen marched across to the box and looked inside. The face was uppermost, obviously in order to have maximum impact on the person opening the box. And although the eyes were only half open, the look that Kaycee Sivas seemed to be giving him was one filled with accusation. Whoever had severed her head had done it very cleanly just below the chin. They had then pulled her long blonde hair up on top of her head so that it looked like a large pillow at the crown of her skull.

İkmen moved away to allow Tepe to glance just briefly at the head.

‘Inspector İskender and I saw a head like this out in Edirnekapı when I worked with him some years ago,’ Tepe said, using words to prevent sickness rising in his own throat. ‘That’s probably why the inspector has been so ill now.’

‘I don’t really care just at the moment, Tepe.’ İkmen sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. ‘We’ll have to inform Dr Sarkissian. See what he can tell us about this thing.’

‘Yes, sir.’

İkmen took a deep drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out on a sigh.

‘I’ll need to interview the brother and sister,’ he said. ‘Arrange it.’

‘Yes, sir. Do you want me to contact Dr Sarkissian too, sir?’

‘No. I’ll do that.’

Tepe gratefully left the room. İkmen, now alone, took his mobile telephone out of his pocket and keyed in the doctor’s number. As he waited for the familiar voice to answer, he looked at the box again for just a second, and then he shut his eyes. Kaycee Sivas had been young and very beautiful and whatever she may or may not have done in her life, she hadn’t deserved such an horrific end. She must have been so terrified . . .

But İkmen didn’t, couldn’t dwell on such matters and when Dr Sarkissian eventually answered the telephone he gave him the information he needed with cold detachment.

The man the whole district knew as Rat was dead. Under torture he had confessed to speaking to İkmen about something he shouldn’t. And then they had killed him. Just to be certain they’d also burned his body on some tip up by the wretched Topkapı Bit Pazarı, the ‘louse market’ where poverty meant clothes that fell apart in your hands and a man’s body could be burned like a piece of old rag. Rat, whoever he was, had been, would never be found now.

Hassan Şeker wept as he thought about these things. He wept because he was guilty. If he hadn’t let on that he’d seen Rat follow İkmen into Ticarethane Sokak, none of this would have happened. But he had; Rat was a well-known police informant and Hassan had been scared. So scared!

He still was. The fear hadn’t receded. As his wife was so fond of saying when one or other of his ‘business partners’ showed up at the pastane, ‘You see these flash, rough boys but you don’t really know who they’re working for, do you?’

Suzan was wrong in this instance. Hassan did know now, which was why his blood was like ice. Even though he had done everything that he could to please those whose names he couldn’t even think of for fear of discovery, he knew that they blamed him for so much that had gone wrong – simply because of his romantic connection to Hatice. If only he possessed his father’s strength! Kemal Şeker had always and with passion resisted all advances, offers and threats from such people. No good could ever come of it, he said. And he was right. In spite of all the handouts and favours Hassan had received, what he was experiencing now, the agony of fear, was not worth any of it.

Rat aside, what had happened to little Hatice was beyond endurance. Not that he’d had anything to do with it himself. Indeed if he’d known what had been planned, what had really been planned, as opposed to the half-truths they had fed him he would never have got her involved. The girl, Ekrem said, had been seen and had been greatly desired. And even though Hassan had told them she was in love with him, it had made no difference – not with ‘that man’ involved. No. But then, if he hadn’t given her to them, to that unnameable man, they would have taken her anyway. Nothing would have changed.

But thinking of Hatice’s death as an inevitability didn’t make him feel any better. He would miss her, she’d been so sweet. And he’d done himself no good by his actions anyway. Not now that another, more powerful and, to his ‘friends’, far more useful associate was involved. Apart from the money that he paid them on a monthly basis, Hassan was almost redundant now. Almost, but not quite. Someone to take the blame for their actions was always useful and the policeman İkmen, despite all of Hassan’s best efforts, was continuing to pursue him. Soon he would be back, asking questions, moving in. What was Hassan going to say, what could he say without letting something slip?

Hassan Şeker lowered his head into his hands and wept again. This time his wife, hearing noises that sounded like an animal in pain, entered her husband’s office without knocking. She stood in the doorway and watched him. Poor weak thing, he’d really made his life a misery getting mixed up with people like Ekrem Müren. Or maybe he was just crying because Hatice was dead. Unlike all the other girls he’d seduced over the years, Hassan had really seemed to care for her. Not that this knowledge made it any easier for Suzan. She loved and hated her husband in equal measure and so instead of going over to comfort him she just pushed the door to his office shut with her foot and went about her business.

‘I’m going to need help,’ İkmen said as he paced agitatedly backwards and forwards across the room, a cigarette ever present at his lips.

‘And you shall have it,’ his superior replied. ‘Name who and what you want and it shall be given to you.’

Ardıç had been at the Sivas house for just over half an hour. During that time, İkmen and his officers, including İskender, had acquainted him with the facts regarding Hikmet and Kaycee Sivas. At times he had looked thunderous, but he had not gone berserk. In view of what had happened and how it had in effect been allowed to take place, this was startling. Ardıç was famous for his volcanic temper and given the high profile nature of this case, one might expect him to be furious. But he wasn’t, which made İkmen feel unnerved and deeply suspicious.

‘If Ahmet Sılay is right about Sivas’s connections with the Mafia,’ İkmen said, ‘then I’m going to need to speak to officers in America. In fact I should speak to them now if Sivas is “known”.’

‘Yes, well in time that will be possible,’ Ardıç replied, wiping his heavily sweating face with a handkerchief as he spoke. ‘But because that is all rather speculative . . .’

‘Well, it’s quite enough evidence for me!’ İkmen cried. ‘Even the suggestion that the Mafia might be amongst us is enough for me. Our own families are bad enough, but these people are experts. They invented organised crime!’

‘We have no evidence.’

‘I want to know what, if anything, the Americans know.’

‘And I’m saying that until we have something more than the bitter memories of a jealous and inebriated rival, possessed of a fertile imagination, I can’t just—’

‘Yes, you can!’ İkmen was close to Ardıç now, close enough to see the agitation in his veined cheeks. ‘You are the Commissioner of Police, you have reason to suspect that Hikmet Sivas has connections with the Mafia!’ He thrust one arm towards the stairs that led to Sivas’s bedroom. ‘I’ve got his wife’s head up there! It doesn’t get any more serious than this!’

Ardıç, with an act of self control seldom associated with him, lowered his tone. ‘As I have told you before, İkmen,’ he said, ‘we will observe procedure. You and I will interview Vedat and Hale Sivas. Based upon that and any information our officers glean from people in the surrounding area we will mount a search for Hikmet Sivas.’

‘He could be anywhere!’ İkmen put what was left of his cigarette out in one of the ashtrays and lit up a fresh one.

‘Which is why we need to speak to those closest to him,’ Ardıç replied, ‘in order to find out where he might have gone.’

İkmen knew that on one level Ardıç was right. Without some sort of notion about where Sivas might have gone, the police would just be moving around to no good effect. Not that either Hale or Vedat Sivas had been particularly forthcoming, as yet. The woman had just spouted religiously inspired laments through her tears while her brother, his face a sweaty shade of grey, had simply sat in silence, like one in a fugue. Undoubtedly shocked, they would, İkmen felt, talk soon. But when they did, what would they say? Their brother Hikmet hadn’t lived in the city for forty years; how would they know where he might go? Unless of course they had family connections too. İkmen thought it unlikely that Hikmet had had any part in or knowledge of Kaycee’s kidnapping and death. It looked as if he had just read the note pinned to the side of the box, realised exactly what it meant and then in his distress gone to face whatever was in store for him – either that or he had just run away in terror. Written in Turkish, probably so Hikmet could make no mistake about its meaning, the note had been cleverly targeted at a man who was known to be fascinated by his nation’s history and whose nickname in his early Hollywood days had been ‘the Sultan’.

Ardic, although in no way an intuitive person, was also thinking about the language the note was written in.

‘The fact that the note was written in Turkish doesn’t suggest the Mafia to me,’ he said as he watched the gentle reflection of the Bosphorus waters outside form patterns on the ceiling of the enormous salon. ‘I mean, have you ever met an American who can speak Turkish? They have no need for Turkish. And as for Sicilians . . .’

İkmen sighed. He didn’t know whether Ardıç was being deliberately obtuse or just plain stupid. ‘I hardly think, sir,’ he said tightly, ‘that Turkish is such an obscure language that sophisticated international crime families don’t have access to it.’

‘I doubt our own families can even write their own language.’

‘Sir, we’re not talking about our own families!’

‘We were at the briefing this morning.’

‘Yes, because Inspector İskender felt that family involvement was possible because of the silence on the streets,’ İkmen said. ‘But Kaycee’s head up there in a box apparently spirited into this house by djinn, together with what I’ve gleaned from Ahmet Sılay today, suggests a level of sophistication far more advanced than anything one would find in Edirnekapı. According to İskender you yourself wanted me to find out more about Sivas’s background. I thought I might start with this agent, Gee.’

‘Mmm, we must be careful, İkmen.’ Ardıç frowned. ‘Sivas is a very respected movie star. He took American citizenship some years ago. He is one of their own now. This country has good relations with the USA. Any suggestion that their crime empires are operating elsewhere could cause offence unless well-founded, and if wrong could be extremely embarrassing for us.’

İkmen, exasperated, threw his arms in the air. ‘Oh, please don’t let us cause offence or look stupid to the Americans!’ He stared into Ardıç’s face. ‘Has it occurred to you, sir, that their law enforcement agencies might be glad of such information? If we talked to them we could establish where they stand. That’s all I want to do.’

‘All right! All right!’ Ardıç, seemingly defeated, sighed. ‘But
I
will speak to them, and to this agent too, if you wish, not you. And from now on we surround this case with silence. The media will report nothing further on the matter – I have already seen to that.’

‘Sir—’