Petrified (31 page)

‘The car that arrived at the Akdeniz house this morning,’ İkmen said.

‘Yes.’

Suleyman cleared his throat. ‘Who was driving, Dr Keyder?’

‘Someone totally innocent,’ she replied. ‘A foreigner.’

‘A Russian.’

‘A foreigner, yes,’ she smiled.

‘And yet if you hadn’t willingly owned up to being the person responsible for the body of Miguel Arancibia, we wouldn’t be in this room now,’ Suleyman said with a frown, ‘and you wouldn’t be facing very serious charges. Why did you do that, Dr Keyder? Why did you turn up at the mortuary with that peculiar Spaniard?’

‘Orontes?’ Yeşim Keyder laughed. ‘He was trying to break into my brother’s apartment when I found him,’ she said. ‘He was under the impression that he might find some of Dr Ara’s balm in there.’

‘Was he right?’

‘No.’ Her face became grave again. ‘That is made in only small quantities and had, I knew, been used up.’ She looked down at her handbag. ‘I engaged Orontes for my own purposes,’ she said, ‘but I claimed Miguel for myself because I had to have him buried with Rosita. If I didn’t I couldn’t take possession of Veli’s apartment.’

‘But surely you, with all your “clients”, your yalı, can’t need an apartment in Kuloǧlu?’ Suleyman said. After all, as he knew only too well, Yeşim Keyder lived in some style.

She turned upon him with fierce eyes. ‘Have you ever been poor, Inspector?’ He didn’t so much as blink. ‘No, I thought not,’ she said, her voice thick with contempt. ‘Well, I have. Veli and I worked every hour in the day to get out of Balat. My brother was a brilliant man – unappreciated here, which is why we went to South America. There were a lot of Jews in Buenos Aires back in those days. My brother rose very quickly – we entered the magic circle of Peron. I met Ara and, strangely he always said for a woman, I didn’t back away from him when he told me what he did. He liked that and so he showed me his work – his perfect ballerina – frozen in mid-step, eternally beautiful. I have subsequently produced such a work myself, another dancer . . .’ She smiled. ‘You know, it was as if Ara were a god, imbued with the power of eternity. I saw through him a window into immortality as well as a way of ensuring I would never be poor again.’

Suleyman made as if he wanted to cut in but was prevented from doing so by one of İkmen’s upheld hands.

Yeşim Keyder, now seemingly quite far away from them, continued, ‘He let me work with him maintaining Miguel. It was electrifying.’ She sighed. ‘But then when Peron’s regime fell apart Veli and I, together with Rosita, had to come back here. There was nowhere else to go. We brought Miguel, I maintained him, but we had no money. Veli got a poorly paid job in a department here. We all lived in one small room . . . But then one day Rosita came back from church and told me about a little old lady who wanted to have her husband embalmed but couldn’t afford the outrageous prices the Greeks and the Armenians were charging.’ She looked up. ‘It grew from there. I made the money that funded my brother’s famous experiments. I looked after Miguel and Rosita. And in answer to your question, no I don’t need the Kuloǧlu apartment, but who knows if I might do in the future? Besides, it’s mine, I’ve earned it.’

İkmen spent a few moments in silent thought. It was, he felt, very fitting that Dr Keyder should be so fixated on what was hers. Preservation and just simply ‘holding on’, as she was with the apartment to what was hers, represented her entire life. Selfish. Not to let the dead go was selfish. Putting all of this effort into preserving what had gone had to be an act of desecration. Maybe, he thought, the old Turkish idea about the soul of the deceased being in pain until the body was buried had a more practical application that extended beyond mere superstition. Perhaps that custom had sprung, originally, from the desire of learned men to see people move on – to prevent that protracted fall from the Lightning-Struck Tower and to ease the soul’s torment.

‘You will be charged with aiding and abetting a murderer,’ İkmen said dully, ‘but then I imagine that, in view of the fact that Melih’s “performance” was to be a public display, you always anticipated this possibility.’

‘Yes,’ she sniffed unpleasantly. ‘My work has been in the shadows for too long. I’m old now, I need the world to see my genius before I die. And besides, I didn’t kill those children, I have nothing—’

‘But you knew what Akdeniz was going to do!’ İkmen yelled.

‘Yes, although he was going to shoot himself in front of the press . . .’

‘You knew that one crime had been committed and that a suicide was about to take place, but you didn’t report it did you?’

‘No.’

‘Then you must share in the responsibility for these three deaths!’ İkmen, his hands shaking with both anger and tiredness, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Like Melih Akdeniz you are evil, Dr Keyder. Even human life is subsumed beneath this unhealthy passion you still possess and he did have for your “work”.’

‘Embalming isn’t work,’ Dr Keyder said contemptuously, ‘embalming, as I learned it from Ara, is a magical art. Melih knew this. That Christian pathologist Sarkissian, for all his professional veneer, was staggered by Miguel.’

‘Perhaps as a scientist, yes,’ Suleyman said, ‘but Dr Sarkissian didn’t
like
what he saw. There was nothing pleasing . . .’

‘Art isn’t meant to be pleasing!’ she laughed at him mirthlessly. ‘Art is about making people think. It’s about saying things we all want to say but are too afraid to do so. Nobody wants their loved ones to die, nobody actually wants to die themselves. My art is about the expression of those desires and, because Ara taught me to capture the very spirit of the subject, it’s about re-establishing a mystical link with the deceased too. Every body is a unique work of art. Melih’s death, my incarceration – these are such small prices to pay for the opportunity to make such a gigantic statement. For me to be able, at last, to show my unrivalled skills to the world.’

İkmen just shook his head in disbelief. He looked at Suleyman and said, ‘I can’t listen to any more of this now. Take her down to the cells, constable.’

They all thought that Dr Keyder would continue either to resist still further or carry on talking about her work. But she didn’t. She just let the constable place the handcuffs around her wrists and lead her out of the room. As soon as she had gone, İkmen keyed a number into his phone and placed his head in his hands as he waited for someone to answer.

Ayşe Farsakoǧlu was standing in the corridor outside one of the cells when İsak Çöktin and one of his men approached with Reşad Kuran. As soon as the artist’s brother-in-law had been pushed, silently, into what Çöktin knew to be one of the hotter station cells, he approached her.

‘How are you?’ he said. She looked very pale, her eyes were glassy and had a sore appearance. The discovery of Yaşar and Nuray’s bodies had affected everyone very badly. What had been done to them had been so bizarre, the reasons behind it so mad, none could quite take it in.

‘You know Inspector İkmen had one of his feelings about the children,’ she said as she took a packet of cigarettes out of her handbag and offered it to Çöktin.

Çöktin took a cigarette from the packet and then lit up both for her and for himself. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve just put Eren Akdeniz away for the night,’ she replied. ‘You know she told me she killed her husband because he asked her to?’

‘What do you mean?’

Ayşe drew on her cigarette before replying, ‘She said that once she told Melih that we were outside and that Inspector İkmen knew that the children’s bodies were inside, he told her to kill him.’

Çöktin frowned. ‘But hadn’t Akdeniz invited you to his performance anyway?’

‘Yes.’ She looked up into his eyes and shook her head just gently as if in disbelief. ‘Apparently his final “statement” was always going to be to shoot himself. Standing between the two children at the end of the shadow performance. By arriving early we ruined his tableau. Infanticide and suicide as art. She also rambled on about the contrast between Melih’s rotting body and the preserved bodies of the children – something about decomposition and permanence.’ Tears sprang into her eyes. ‘She must be insane.’

‘I don’t know,’ Çöktin shrugged, ‘I would think so. But legally it would depend upon what the psychiatrist says. Have you contacted Dr Sadri?’

They started walking together back towards the stairs.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘He’ll come in the morning.’

‘She doesn’t need to be sedated then?’ Çöktin asked as he tipped his head back towards the grim row of cells behind them.

‘No,’ Ayşe responded with a sigh, ‘no, she’s quite happy in a strange sort of way.’

‘Because her husband and little ones are all together in paradise?’ Çöktin said acidly. He’d come across people like this before, those who killed their nearest and dearest in order to unite them in heaven.

‘No,’ Ayşe said frowning, ‘because the statement, as she calls it, is now complete. Our photographers have taken hundreds of pictures of Melih’s performance. It’s been recorded as a crime, as a news item and, so she says, as a work of art. This “event”, because we have recorded it, will live for ever.’ She shook her head again, frowning. ‘We’ve actually helped Melih and Eren. We’ve had no choice but to do so, but if I’ve got this right, we too are part of the performance, if you can understand . . .’

Çöktin didn’t really understand anything she was saying, but he put a hand on her shoulder in order to provide her with a little comfort in her agitation.

‘Do you think that such a thing can be art, İsak?’ she said as she looked up into his bright blue eyes. ‘Can it really be something that hurts people? Can it really be anything an artist wants it to be?’

But Çöktin didn’t have any answers. To him art was the statues of Atatürk in every town square, art was the graceful, soaring dome of the Süleymaniye Mosque, art was even the picture of a stag standing by a Scottish loch that hung on his mother’s living-room wall. To him, art was something that people had to like. In that way it was similar, if not the same, as alcohol.

‘I think we should go and have a beer,’ he said, as he led her up the stairs and away from the cells.

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘And talk about something banal, like television,’ he continued. ‘You need to stop thinking, Ayşe,’ he said gravely. ‘We’ve had a long and very odd night. We’ve moved into the land of the sick. Now we need to heal ourselves.’

They’d never been close. In fact Çöktin didn’t always feel that he could entirely trust Ayşe Farsakoǧlu. She was, he’d sometimes thought, a rather arrogant woman. But for tonight he put that aside and took her for a drink.

Arto Sarkissian wasn’t accustomed to being interrupted in his work. Post-mortem examinations, once begun, tended to proceed until they were complete. However, in view of the fact that the interrupter was none other than Commissioner Ardiç, Arto was left with little choice but to leave what he was doing and return to his office.

‘Commissioner,’ he said as he extended a hand he knew the other man would suspect of having recently left the inside of a corpse. Ardiç’s expression confirmed this.

‘So these mummies or whatever you like to call them and the artist from Balat are now in the building?’ Ardiç said as he eased himself slowly into a chair opposite Arto’s desk.

‘Yes,’ the Armenian replied. ‘As yet, I’ve only looked at the external condition of the bodies. I’m currently working on what I’m coming to believe is a female suicide . . .’

‘Vile business!’

Arto sat down. ‘Suicide is always distressing.’

‘I mean the mummies!’ Ardiç shook his head and, the doctor observed, visibly shuddered. ‘That anyone should think that murder and that abominable embalming practice is art, is beyond me. İkmen, as one would expect, is bending his mind to the deeper philosophies behind all of this, but then that is what he does.’

Arto smiled. However appalled his friend might be by the acts of violence and hatred that came his way, he always had to make some sense, however peculiar, out of them. Murder, he always said, had to have a reason, even if that reason was not anything that could be conventionally called real.

‘So when,’ Ardiç continued, ‘will you be able to start work on the Akdeniz children, Doctor?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’ It was late now and both he and his team of assistants were already tired.

Ardiç nodded gravely. ‘Mmm.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘No,’ the policeman looked up sharply, ‘no it isn’t. But I do feel that I have to warn you, Doctor, that we are expecting some more of this type of corpse.’

‘More embalmed bodies?’

‘Possibly.’

Arto remembered what Suleyman had told him about the vogue for embalming that allegedly existed amongst Russian mobsters. But he knew better than to reveal his knowledge to Ardiç. Although he himself worked for the police he was aware of the fact that information like that, given to him by a serving officer, would be frowned upon.

‘I came here because I feel that you deserve to know this,’ Ardiç went on. ‘Dealing with such bodies must be particularly abhorrent.’

‘Yes, but when compared to a drowned body or one consumed by fire.’

‘It’s an abomination!’ Ardiç blustered. ‘Keeping the dead out of the ground! It’s unnatural! What do they think they’re doing? What do they do with them? I dread to think.’

The commissioner had, Arto felt, momentarily forgotten that he originated from a society where the preservation of the dead was considered to be normal. For Arto, the main difficulty was a scientific one. Establishing the cause of death was much harder in these cases.

When Ardiç spoke again it was in a calmer and more mollified fashion. ‘But then whatever we may think,’ he said, ‘I feel it may be prudent for you to prepare your staff and your facilities for something of an influx.’

‘Yes . . .’