Dance with Death (21 page)

‘Ziya Kahraman killed her and he is dead,’ Nalan Senar snapped back unpleasantly.

‘How do you know that?’ İkmen asked. ‘You don’t, do you?’

‘I know how badly he treated her.’

‘And yet you prevented your son, Kemalettin, from marrying the girl in the knowledge that Ziya Kahraman would court her himself. Ziya in fact paid you to do just that.’

Nalan Senar shot İkmen a furious look. ‘Yes, and why not? Haldun Alkaya has nothing. I wanted better for my son.’

‘Who is now alone,’ İkmen said. ‘Your sons were together on the night that Aysu Alkaya disappeared, weren’t they, Mrs Senar?’

She looked across at Erten and said, ‘I told the police in Nevşehir where my sons and everyone else were twenty years ago.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Kemalettin and Turgut were here with me and their father. My husband was dying then. He had cancer.’ She looked briefly across at a portrait of a fair-haired man that hung over the fireplace. Her husband. ‘The boys were always with me then, they are good sons.’ She turned back to look at İkmen again. ‘Ziya Kahraman killed her. But he is dead and so we will never know.’

‘On the contrary,’ İkmen replied.

Nalan Senar frowned.

‘Provided Nazlı Hanım is prepared to let us take a swab from inside her mouth we will be able to make a comparison,’ İkmen said. ‘We can identify family connections through these samples, Mrs Senar.’

‘Which is why we don’t need to bother everyone connected to Aysu Alkaya for samples at the moment,’ Erten put in. ‘Once we have the results from İstanbul I will ask our doctor to take samples only from one person in each family.’

‘But what if that person is not connected to that murder? What if he or she is just related to the evil one?’

‘Then at least we will know we are looking in the right direction,’ İkmen said. ‘Only at that point will other members of that family be asked to provide samples of their own.’

‘So my boys . . .’

‘One or other of your boys may volunteer,’ İkmen said. ‘Or you may yourself.’

‘And Kahraman . . .’

‘Nazlı Hanım will be asked,’ İkmen said. ‘Although as I’m sure your son Turgut has told you, Aysu Alkaya was with child when she died . . .’

‘Baha Ermis spreads that poison! Pah!’ Nalan Senar spat. ‘That lying fool!’

‘Our doctor thinks the girl was in the early stages of pregnancy,’ Erten said.

‘Which would seem to rule out Ziya Kahraman who so wanted a son, or so I am told,’ İkmen said.

‘But Nazlı . . .’

‘Oh, Nazlı Hanım could have done it, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘She would have had a motive. Unless, of course, the child wasn’t Ziya’s. But we can determine the parentage of the foetus, or rather our scientists in İstanbul can and will do that.’

‘Will they.’ It was far more of a statement than a question.

‘Yes.’

Their conversation was interrupted by angry voices from outside in the courtyard. Zeytin the kangal, temporarily locked into the Senars’ kitchen, began to bark and howl. In fact the noise that she made was so terrific İkmen wondered whether the beast was in fact alone.

‘What . . .’ Nalan Senar got up and made her way over to the front door. She was closely followed by Çetin İkmen who peered round her shoulder as she opened the door.

Outside were Nalan’s two sons, Turgut and Kemalettin, and the American woman, Dolores Lavell. Turgut, holding the American’s hand as he did so, was shouting into his brother’s face.

‘You disgusting animal!’ he screamed above the dog’s wild howling. ‘Apologise to Miss Lavell immediately!’

‘But I . . .’

‘It’s really OK, Turgut,’ the American said as gently as the furiousness of the situation would allow. ‘I’ve seen your brother do it before . . .’

‘Don’t wank in front of her!’ Turgut growled in Turkish. And then he hit his brother, already cowering on the ground in front of him, with a hard, closed fist. ‘Not her!’

‘Turgut!’

He looked across in response to his mother’s voice.

‘What are you doing?’

‘This is the lady I told you about, Mother,’ he said. ‘Kemalettin was masturbating when we opened the outside door. Imagine! In front of her! Can you think of anything . . .’ And then he saw İkmen with his mother and he stopped talking immediately.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kemalettin murmured as he nursed the blow he had taken on his head from his brother. ‘I’m so, so sorry!’

‘Shut up.’ Turgut took another swipe at his brother.

‘Stop it!’ the American squeaked. ‘This is just brutal! I can’t be here for this!’

And with that she walked out of the courtyard and back into the street. Just as he was about to comment on this, İkmen’s mobile phone began to ring.

A team of firefighters, together with some nurses and doctors from the nearby Italian and Cihangir Hospitals, were making their way gingerly but swiftly into the Cohens’ apartment building. When Mehmet Süleyman asked if he could join in with their efforts he was told that he’d be welcome provided he allowed all of those present to do their jobs.

‘I’m not interested in why this happened,’ a young doctor from the Cihangir told him. ‘My only priority is to make sure that anyone who is still living, stays that way.’

‘The people on the first floor, the Cohens, are like my second family,’ Süleyman replied. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if anything has happened to them.’

The young doctor just smiled by way of reply. After all, what could he say? He didn’t know whether all or any of the Cohens were alive any more than Süleyman did.

Because the Cohens’ building was old, of nineteenth-century vintage, it was also strong, especially at its core. So in spite of the fact that the façade had crumbled to almost nothing, the stairwell and, the firefighters said, the back of the building was probably intact. So progress up to the first floor was swift for those not engaged in attending those very few survivors at ground level. Getting through the Cohens’ stout old front door proved rather more time-consuming. As the firefighters attempted to smash it down with their axes, Süleyman found himself becoming both impatient with their efforts and afraid for what might be behind that door in equal measures.

‘Come on! Come on!’ he muttered as the door finally gave way under a ferocious assault by fire-axes and fell backwards into the Cohens’ hallway.

Without a thought in his head save the fate of his friends, Süleyman rushed forwards only to be held back by the large, meaty arm of a senior firefighter.

‘You can only be here if you’re prepared to do what we tell you,’ the man said roughly. ‘There could be ruptured gas bottles or anything in there. This is our territory, Inspector. Keep back.’

Chastened, the policeman stood to one side as the senior fire officer and two of his men stepped over the shattered door and walked into the Cohens’ apartment. A fourth officer stood at the entrance, holding the medics and the policeman at bay until his colleagues gave him the all clear.

After what seemed like an eternity, one of the men inside the apartment called out, ‘Nazir!’

‘Sir,’ the man at the entrance replied.

‘Clear in here. Three live ones. Send the medics through.’

Three live ones. Three! As the doctors and nurses pushed past him in order to get to the family, Süleyman just took a moment to revel in the fact that the Cohens were alive. He didn’t know what kind of condition they were in but they were alive, and so as soon as the doctors had passed him, he followed them through into the apartment.

He had to climb over a lot of familiar but shattered furniture in order to get to the main living room. Once there, however, everything was unfamiliar – the paucity of flooring, the lack of anything even resembling furniture, the doctors and nurses leaning over tiny, hunched figures, the huge blood spatters on the wallpaper. And when one of the figures suddenly and piercingly screamed, Mehmet Süleyman felt his mind melt with the horror of it.

Although İkmen knew from what Fatma had told him that Hulya and the baby were all right, he felt his legs go weak and he had to sit down. What were believed to be terrorist attacks on two İstanbul synagogues, the Neve Şalom in Karaköy and the Beth Israel in Şişli, had resulted in heavy casualties. Mehmet Süleyman was, apparently, at the scene in Karaköy and had taken it upon himself to let Hulya know about her husband and in-laws as soon as he could. The Cohens lived opposite the Neve Şalom. İkmen could see their building or rather what remained of it, on Dr Ali’s small black and white television set.

‘Well, it’s good that your daughter and grandson are safe, isn’t it?’ Inspector Erten said nervously as he watched the elderly doctor pass İkmen a glass of water.

‘Yes.’

‘And if her in-laws . . .’

‘Balthazar Cohen is someone I’ve known all my life,’ İkmen interrupted. ‘As well as a grandchild, we share memories, you know . . .’

Erten looked away, although whether this was because he was embarrassed by İkmen’s anxiety or alarmed at Cohen’s Jewish name, the İstanbul policeman neither knew nor cared.

‘Drink your water, Inspector,’ Dr Ali said through what seemed to be a set of very ill-fitting false teeth. ‘It will make you feel better.’

‘Can I smoke?’ İkmen asked as he dug a hand into one of his jacket pockets.

‘This is Turkey,’ the doctor shrugged as he, too, retrieved cigarettes and a lighter from his jacket pocket and lit up. ‘I know as a doctor I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’ve resolved only to give up once we’re in the European Union. They’ll have banned it by then, anyway – look at Ireland.’

İkmen, who had now lit up himself and who continued to stare open-mouthed at the television screen, didn’t answer. In view of what was happening in İstanbul everything else that was going on seemed very trivial – even his own state of health. In the wake of Fatma’s telephone call, İkmen had felt very sick and so Erten had immediately brought him across to the local doctor, Ali. When they had arrived, the elderly doctor was already glued to his television, watching the events Fatma had told İkmen about on the telephone unfolding bloodily across the screen. He duly took İkmen’s blood pressure, which was surprisingly normal, and then gave him a glass of water. It was only when TRT switched their reportage from Karaköy to Şişli that İkmen began to think about the other possibilities inherent in his current situation. After all, if Dr Ali was the only local physician in the village, it was very possible he knew just what afflicted Kemalettin Senar. He had certainly, according to Erten, attended the late Aysu Alkaya. Not that Dr Ali, in the absence of an official order, was obliged to say anything about his patients to anyone, police or otherwise, as İkmen well knew. But Dr Ali was not, it seemed, averse to such a conversation.

‘It is said, Inspector İkmen, that Nalan Senar’s father, “deli” Yurt, as he was known in the village, was an idiot,’ the doctor said.

With half an eye still on the television screen and half on the doctor, İkmen said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that Yurt drooled, talked nonsense and, on occasion, was known to expose himself.’

‘Like Kemalettin.’

‘Yes. In fact Kemalettin even looks a bit like old Yurt who was also dark, if not as dark as his grandson. But that is by the way. In spite of the nature of Kemalettin’s distracted condition one cannot, necessarily, attribute it to his grandfather. That would be most unscientific. After all’ – the doctor smiled – ‘diagnostic techniques were very primitive when Yurt was alive.’

Although not entirely willing to tear his gaze away from the television screen, İkmen did, however, do so and, intrigued, looked the old man hard in the eyes. ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘I know that you can’t actually tell me what Kemalettin Senar is suffering from, but do I take it that some sort of genetic, er . . .’

‘Some genetic diseases are now far more simple to track than they were in the past,’ Dr Ali said. ‘For instance, let us take, say, Huntington’s disease.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It is a form of early onset dementia. In Europe they called it something or other’s dance, because of the trembling the disease produces, like some saint’s movements, I don’t know. Anyway, initial signs first manifest at around about thirty or forty years of age. If it hasn’t started to show itself at fifty, one is probably OK. It is incurable and terminal but in recent years we have been able to test people both for the disease itself and for carriers of it.’

İkmen raised his eyebrows. ‘And it’s genetic, you say.’

‘Yes. If a person has one parent who either develops the disease or is a carrier, he or she has a fifty per cent chance of developing the condition. If both parents are affected, it is one hundred per cent certain that any offspring will be affected. Of course with grandparents . . .’

‘So this Yurt had this condition?’

‘I don’t know,’ the doctor shrugged as he knocked his cigarette against the side of his ashtray. ‘He was never tested, they couldn’t do it in those days. Huntington’s is only one possibility for Yurt’s condition.’

‘But then surely,’ Inspector Erten, who had been listening intently to this conversation, now joined in, ‘Nalan Senar, assuming that Kemalettin has this disease, has to carry it in her DNA, doesn’t she?’

‘Nalan Senar has never had a medical test in her life,’ the doctor replied with a smile.

TRT’s coverage of the tragedies in İstanbul switched back to the devastated scenes on the streets of Karaköy, forcing İkmen’s eyes to fully attend to them once again. Not that he could make out anyone he knew from the small, grainy picture on the screen. Only what was left of the Neve Şalom synagogue and the façade of the Cohens’ apartment building could be seen with any clarity. If only he had taken Hulya up on her offer for her and Berekiah to come and look after the children while İkmen took Fatma with him to Cappadocia. But that would have meant that he would have had to tell his wife about Alison, and that would never have done! It would, however, have been preferable to what had happened . . .