Deadly Web (16 page)

When Süleyman didn’t answer, İkmen continued, ‘It says in the text that the Goat’s penis is ice cold. Some acolytes describe it as metallic . . .’

‘Çetin, another girl was discovered with a knife in her heart this morning. Dr Sarkissian has just told me that this second girl, like the first, was assaulted from behind with something he thinks might have been made of metal. He’s just confirmed that the girl was murdered.’

The two men looked at each other for a moment, sweat running down their faces.

‘Max told me that he’d recently had an altercation with some Satanists. He said he’d seen them off,’ İkmen frowned. ‘Maybe he only thought that he had.’

‘Maybe. One boy has committed suicide with a knife, two girls have been murdered.’

‘I don’t know where suicide comes into it,’ İkmen said, ‘but then what do I know? The thing I asked Max to look at, the image scrawled on the wall of the Panaghia, was what Max described as atypical.’

‘The one with thirteen penises?’

İkmen went into his drawer again and retrieved his Polaroid photograph of the drawing.

‘Max had never seen anything like it before. Two penises, yes sometimes, but not thirteen. He was looking into its possible origins when he disappeared – or whatever.’

‘Do you think he could have disappeared
because
he was looking into its possible origins?’

‘I don’t know,’ İkmen sighed. ‘So what of your Mendes, Mehmet? The hacker?’

‘Not an easy person to contact,’ Süleyman replied. ‘I’ve left it with Çöktin. In light of what we’ve been talking about, however, I think I do need to reinstruct him. I know Çöktin doubts any Satanic connection to his hacker, but the name Mendes is a very unusual one. Maybe we need to ask Mendes why he uses it.’

‘You need to be careful how you do that,’ İkmen said. ‘People involved in magic are very secretive – they look for double meanings in everything. And so if he is into Satanism and he does suspect you are on to him he will disappear. Not literally, of course, but—’

‘I know what you mean, Çetin.’

‘Conversely, there may be no connection at all between your hacker and either the suicide, the murders or Max. I mean, your actual aim in contacting him is to get help from him to trace those weird messages on the kids’ computers.’

‘Yes.’ Süleyman did, for just a second, think about telling İkmen how and why Çöktin knew so much about Mendes, but then he thought better of it. Çetin was, he knew, far safer if he didn’t know, both from their own superiors and what would be his own divided loyalties.

‘So I’d do that,’ İkmen said. ‘What else are you doing?’

Süleyman went through a list of avenues he was currently exploring finishing with ‘. . . and although Gülay got out of the scene, I still want to talk to these Goths. I don’t know why, but I feel that the Goth scene was, if not the cause, then the gateway to whatever the girl subsequently became involved with. And if this new victim was involved as well . . .’

‘I’m not saying kids into Gothic clothes and black and everything are necessarily Satanists,’ İkmen said, ‘but I would go along with you about the gateway theory. After all, if you’re going to recruit people to the cause of evil, why not do so from amongst the ranks of those who already wear the uniform and love the colour scheme?’

Süleyman smiled.

‘So what are your plans for getting to these kids, Mehmet?’ İkmen asked. ‘They’re not easy to access.’

‘Gülay used to go around with a little group of friends. I’ve interviewed one already. I’m in the process of contacting the others.’

İkmen riffled in his pockets for his cigarettes and when he’d found them he first offered one to Süleyman and then lit up himself.

‘Do you honestly think they’ll tell you anything, Mehmet?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think it’s unlikely.’ İkmen remained silent for a few moments, biting down on his bottom lip until he said, ‘Have you ever considered sending someone in to these clubs, undercover?’

‘I have but that takes time.’

‘If only we had an “in” on the scene, eh?’

‘Yes,’ Süleyman replied, ‘if only we did.’ And then he leaned back into his chair and smoked in silence for a while. He was, İkmen felt, mulling over something, possibly difficult, in his head.

Before İskender returned, İkmen felt a visit back to Max’s apartment was imperative. Whatever Süleyman might or might not be doing, it was important for him to try to track down Max’s address book and find his friends – if indeed he had any.

İsak Çöktin entered the house in the middle of the block just before midday. An extensive search had been made of the other properties in the street, including the one outside of which the girl’s body had been found. This one, however, number eight, had been empty for a number of years, which in such an overcrowded area struck Çöktin as odd.

‘It is a place of mischievous djinn,’ a local woman explained just before the officers entered. ‘Sometimes at night you can hear them about their naughty ways.’

Or, Çöktin felt, the rather more likely scenario of kids getting in there to sniff gas and beat the place up. However, once he’d entered the upper storey of the property he quickly changed his mind. Whatever one might think of the street kids, they rarely actually killed each other, which is what must have happened in that room.

‘There’s blood everywhere, sir,’ he said when he telephoned Süleyman.

‘OK, we’ll need a comparison with the blood of the victim. I’ll order a full forensic examination.’

‘Right.’

Once the call was over, Çöktin placed his phone back in his pocket. But it rang again almost immediately.

‘Çöktin.’

‘Mendes has just replied to my message,’ a smooth, if slightly hyper voice said. ‘He’d like to talk to you.’

‘I assume you mean over the Net,’ Çöktin replied.

Hüsnü laughed. ‘I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘It’s up to you. I’m always here.’ And then he cut the connection.

Man of mystery, Hüsnü, or at least that was what he wanted to be. Quite what he was, aside from a techno-junkie with money, Çöktin didn’t know or even really want to be concerned about. But he would go out to Cihangir once he’d settled things in Yediküle – if indeed things could be settled. He’d seen some gruesome crime scenes in his time, but nothing quite like this. There had, it seemed, been a torrent of blood let loose in this creaking wooden room. Whoever had killed her must have thrown her body around in order to get this awful spattering effect. For some reason. Dr Sarkissian was, he knew, of the opinion that the girl, like Gülay Arat, had been sexually assaulted by someone. In addition, someone, probably her killer, must have thrown her body out of the window and into the street as the ledge was too high for her to have fallen without assistance. But why the seemingly wild distribution of blood? Anyone in the room with her must have been covered in the stuff. But then maybe that was the point of the exercise.

The not inconsiderable number of half-eaten limes that littered the floor were, however, rather less comprehensible.

İkmen had seen Max refer to his address book on many occasions and so he recognised it immediately. Old, black and held together with elastic bands, Max’s book was, İkmen thought with a smile, exactly what one would have expected of him. What, however, was unexpected was the fact that he couldn’t read it.

‘Oh, Max,’ he murmured as he turned over pages filled with what looked like random letters and numbers. ‘What is this?’

That Max was a magician was something İkmen knew would complicate matters. If his understanding was correct, when one moved in higher arcane circles one was more likely to pursue secrecy in all aspects of one’s life. But quite where a person might begin to unravel such a system or systems he didn’t know. As well as being a Kabbalist, Max had also studied Enochian magic, Egyptian magic and was well-versed in the rites and rituals of pre-Christian England and Scandinavia. Max had once told him that some of the systems he used involved alphabets that were quite different from the Roman or Turkish alphabets. Not that the address book gave any evidence of those. Numbers, some of which were recognisable as telephone numbers, were listed alphabetically according to the Turkish system. So under S, for instance, there was a list of numbers all prefixed by, first, S, then a one- or two-digit number followed by either a foreign or domestic telephone number. There were no actual addresses at all, just more numbers, in groups that could, İkmen felt, be some sort of coded address. But how he could decipher such a thing without Max’s mind to guide him, he didn’t know.

There were code breakers. MİT had people who worked on codes all the time – shadowy people, dedicated to the protection of the state and therefore, of necessity, unknown and unknowable. İkmen had only ever, metaphorically, brushed against such people during the course of his career and he was quite glad about that. Intelligence agents were not people it was either wise or beneficial to be in contact with. And although İkmen had little doubt that these people could help him with Max’s code, he was not going to give it to them. Apart from anything else, they’d ask why he was so interested in the book, which would lead to all sorts of explanations he didn’t really want to get into. And anyway, with Max only officially missing, that was going a bit far. Maybe, he thought, I should just call some of these numbers that look local and see what happens.

But then maybe not. İkmen put the address book to one side and then took one of the big tomes down from Max’s shelf.
Malleus Maleficarum
– the so-called
Hammer of the Witches
, a fifteenth-century treatise on how to spot witches and magicians and bring them to ‘justice’. Not that İkmen could read this obviously old book. But he knew of it, and as he turned it over in his hands he reasoned that it was probably of nineteenth-century production. Still rare and probably obtained back in England as opposed to from the shelves at Simurg.

However, if Max hadn’t obtained this book and others like it from England, then where, locally, could he possibly have got them from? There was only one place and it wasn’t Simurg or any other bookshop – İkmen could easily go there and then drop down the hill to the Mısır Çarşısı and the man known as Doğa. He moved over to the window and looked at the view of the Imperial Tombs that Max so much enjoyed. The Sahaflar, the book market, was only a few minutes down the road.

Zuleika had certainly improved her social standing since their divorce. Her second husband, Burhan Topal, was obviously deriving a very good living from his now established and respected media agency. As Süleyman walked through the gates leading up to the couple’s Büyükada yalı, or summer house, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the sight of several gardeners tending the very green lawn as well as ministering to the numerous flowerbeds. The view from the front of the property, of Heybeliada, floating majestically amid the deep blueness of the Sea of Marmara, in the summer was magnificent.

But then, as Süleyman observed while he waited for someone to answer the doorbell, Zuleika had been born and bred in the Princes’ Islands. In fact her mother, his Aunt Edibe, still lived only ten minutes away down the hill on Çankaya Caddesi. As a child, he had often been brought out here to visit his mother’s sister and her family. Like his mother, his aunt had married into a family connected, if in this case loosely, to the old Ottoman élite. His marriage to his cousin Zuleika, with whom he had never been close, had been at the instigation of these two powerful Anatolian women. It had been a mistake.

They were taking a long time to answer the door. He’d telephoned ahead. He’d spoken to Burhan Bey’s daughter, Fitnat, and told her he was coming to speak to her father. On the street in front of the house a phaeton, driven by a gypsy and full of white-uniformed naval cadets, passed by on its way to the summit of the island’s southern hill. No cars are allowed on the islands and so people have to get around by either phaeton, bicycle or on horseback. All laughing, their voices full of youthful arrogance, the cadets and their transport presented a particularly nineteenth-century tableau as they jogged past houses that had once belonged to luminaries in the old Imperial order. There was and always had been an overpoweringly
fin de siècle
atmosphere in the islands. Perhaps that was why he still had a sneaking affection for them.

‘Mehmet Bey.’

He turned round and smiled at the girl standing in the doorway.

‘Hello, Fitnat.’

She was wearing something he felt might be more appropriate to a film set. The skirt, which was made up of several layers of black lace, hit the ground in a welter of ruched satin that matched the very tightly fitted bodice above. Pulled in via a row of laces at the front, this bodice, while accentuating much, didn’t cover a great deal.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ve set a table out by the pool.’ She turned to look at him with undisguised appreciation. ‘You don’t mind being outside?’

‘No. As long as that is agreeable to your father.’

She led him through the central sofa area of the yalı and out into the extensive gardens at the back of the property. Although Süleyman observed that the furnishings in the yalı were all very tasteful, they were far from contemporary. Zuleika hadn’t, he thought, put her mark on it yet. But then, she’d only been married to Burhan for a year – barely enough time to get settled, really. And besides, to do too much too soon would not be politic in this case. Zuleika’s husband, widowed only five years previously, was a lot older than she was and still, it was said, revered the memory of his first wife, Fitnat’s mother.

The Topals’ swimming pool was large and very clear. Very inviting, in fact, to a hot and tired policeman in a suit. Fitnat, or rather one of the little servant girls Süleyman had seen dotted around the house and out on the terrace, had set a table and two chairs under a willow tree at the top end of the pool.