Ikmen 16 - Body Count (35 page)

He dipped his perfectly groomed head for a moment. ‘Did you see him?’

‘No.’

‘So why did …’

‘Why did he tell me he knew now?’ she said. ‘Because hearing me telling that policewoman was too much for him. Knowing that someone else knew damaged his pride.’

‘So does he want a divorce?’

‘No.’ But she said it tetchily, as if she had wanted him to. ‘He wants it, us, to stop.’

‘You want him to divorce you?’ Cem said.

‘No, yes, I don’t know.’ She leaned her head against his shoulder and sighed. ‘I just want to be with you, that’s all.’

He looked down at her and smiled. ‘But you’ve always said you didn’t want to hurt Selçuk. You and I have done a lot to avoid hurting him. He is, after all, one of the good guys, isn’t he?’

‘I know.’ She kissed the side of his face. ‘But Cem, the night Leyla Ablak died …’

‘When we were together, yes.’

‘Now that the police know that I am Selçuk’s wife as well as your lover, they might not believe that,’ she said.

‘Why not? There is no connection, beyond the loose association that existed through my brother-in-law, between Leyla Ablak and ourselves.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but if they start digging around, if they talk to my parents, they’ll realise that we weren’t at their house the night the Ablak woman died.’

‘You told this policewoman we spent that night at your parents’ house?’

‘I told her they were away, yes. But they weren’t.’

He thought for a moment, and then he said, ‘Well then, you’ll have to tell this policewoman you were wrong and that we spent the night at your marital home.’

‘Oh, Cem, what—’

‘What? What do you mean, “what”?’ he said. ‘What are we going to do? Nothing, Hatice. You’ll tell your policewoman you were mistaken about that night and then we will do nothing. And do you know why that is?’

She looked up at him.

‘Because we’ve done nothing wrong,’ he continued. ‘Nothing!’

‘No, no,’ she said. She took one of his hands and put it between her legs. ‘Cem …’

He pulled his hand away. She put her hand on the front of his trousers. He looked into her eyes.

‘I’m frightened,’ she said. ‘I need you.’

‘There’s no need to be frightened,’ he said. He watched as she unzipped his fly and moved her hand up and down the shaft of his penis, which hardened. ‘You’ll hold your nerve, Hatice.’

‘Cem …’

‘Hold your nerve and I’ll let you,’ he said.

‘I need a lollipop,’ she said in a little girl’s voice. ‘That’ll make me feel better, Cem. I’ll do whatever you say, I promise.’

She watched him make her wait. He always made her wait. It was so exciting.

Eventually he said, ‘All right, you’ve been a good girl, you can have it, Hatice.’

‘Thank you, Professor,’ she said. And she took him gratefully into her mouth.

‘Why did you mourn the death of Abdurrahman Efendi so very effusively, Suzan?’
İ
kmen asked.

The girl looked confused.

He said, ‘All right, why were you so upset when Abdurrahman Efendi died?’

‘Because he was my master,’ she said. ‘He gave me shelter, he was kind to me and—’

‘You told me yourself that he made you sleep in a wooden box outside the kitchen!’
İ
kmen said. ‘In what way is that kind?’

‘Lots of people don’t want their servants sleeping in their beds,’ she said.

‘Really?’ He shrugged. ‘Well, even if I, as a person without servants, accept that that is true, what I can’t get around are my own observations, plus independent verification that Abdurrahman Efendi treated you with utter contempt.’

‘Who said that?’ she said. She looked afraid.

‘It’s not important,’
İ
kmen replied. ‘I know, that’s all. Where’d you get the money, Suzan? Did someone pay you to let them into the apartment the day Abdurrahman Efendi died?’

Someone had let the killer into the Efendi’s apartment, and that someone came down to either the old man or his servant.

‘I never let anyone in,’ the girl said.

‘Then maybe you just left the door open,’
İ
kmen said. ‘I can understand it. The life of some awful old man who treats you like rubbish, or five thousand lira in cash for you to spend on whatever you like.’ He frowned. ‘Talking of which, why didn’t you just buy yourself some earrings if you had all that cash on you?’

The girl said nothing.

‘I mean, had you spent, say, a thousand lira on a pair of Vakko earrings, you wouldn’t be here now, would you? Strikes me that you took a somewhat silly risk.’

‘You had to know that if you got caught you’d be handed over to us,’ Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu said, ‘and that we’d find your money.’

‘No spending sprees for you until we find out where it came from,’
İ
kmen said. ‘No designer handbags, no jewellery, no clothes …’

‘I never wanted to use it for that!’ Suzan said. ‘Why’d you think I wanted to use it for rubbish like that?’

‘Well I think that a clue may be found in the fact that you tried to steal a very pretty pair of diamond earrings from a customer in Vakko,’
İ
kmen said.

‘Only for what they were worth!’

‘For what they were worth? You mean you intended to sell them?’
İ
kmen said.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘To get money,’ she said.

‘You had money, Suzan.’

‘Well I needed, I need more,’ she said.

‘What for?’

She looked down at the floor. ‘My mother’s sick.’

İ
kmen, who had heard more than a few sob stories concerning sick mothers in his time, said, ‘Sick with what?’

‘She has lung cancer,’ the girl said. ‘She needs an operation to take one of her lungs away. I got this money for her operation and then my father, he tells me that she needs more. That’s why I stole the earrings.’

‘To top up the money you’d got?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not that you’d saved?’

‘Yes, saved, got. Money I had.’

‘Suzan, where did you get the money from?’
İ
kmen reiterated.

‘I told you …’

‘Yes, and I told you that I didn’t believe you,’
İ
kmen said. ‘Because I don’t.’ He leaned forward. ‘Suzan, we are staying here until you tell me the truth. Your employer, Abdurrahman
Ş
afak, was murdered, and it seems to me that the coming together of his death, your need for money and an unaccounted-for five thousand lira has to be more than mere coincidence.’

‘I didn’t kill him!’ the girl said. ‘I didn’t!’

‘I’m not saying you did,’
İ
kmen replied. ‘But I think you may have a good idea who might have done.’

Still the girl said nothing.

Selçuk Devrim put his phone down on his desk and sank his head into his hands. Why Hatice suddenly wanted to talk right now wasn’t clear to him. Had she spent the day with the Atay man, and was she going to ask him for a divorce? Selçuk had told her that he didn’t want one, but what did that matter? She was besotted.

He raised his head and said to his assistant, ‘I have to go home early.’

He’d planned, as he so often did, to work late into the night.

The assistant, a small man in his fifties, said, ‘I hope nothing is amiss, Selçuk Bey?’

‘No, nothing is amiss.’ He stood up and put his jacket on. Hatice’s obsession with her old tutor was, in a way, understandable. When she’d been at an impressionable age, he’d been her academic hero, and he had also been her first lover. But what he saw in her was rather more difficult to fathom. Yes, she was attractive, and she was good in bed, but she was hardly ideal consort material for a celebrity academic. And Cem Atay was still, officially, married.

Selçuk shut his computer down and locked his papers in his desk drawer. He didn’t like working in the office. Being out in the field in places like Siberia was more his style. But those absences had done him no favours. Selçuk began to walk. He’d known right from the start that Hatice had had an affair with Cem Atay when she’d been a student. But he hadn’t known that they’d resumed their liaison until he’d gone to Tarlaba
ş
ı
one day to make sure that his brother was still alive.

‘I know a man round here who knows the professor,’ Levent had told him. ‘He said he’s seen him with your wife.’

Selçuk had asked, ‘How does he know me? How does he know my wife?’ He’d thought that Levent was just making trouble, because that was what druggies did.

But then Levent had said, ‘He said the woman was called Hatice Öz. He said she was blonde and he told me, this man, that she had mentioned that she lived in Bebek. I can still put two and two together, you know.’

Even taking into account the obvious coincidences inherent in Levent’s story, Selçuk couldn’t believe him, not until Hatice went out one day and he decided to follow her. She went to a house in Arnavutköy, where she kissed the male owner, the professor, on the doorstep. Selçuk had cried.

He left his office and got into his car. He’d said nothing to Hatice after he’d discovered the affair because he hadn’t known what to say. Although he had been hurt in a way he’d never been hurt before, he’d known right from the off that he didn’t want a divorce. And then Levent had been murdered and his mind had gone elsewhere for a time. What he hadn’t been able to bear had been Hatice telling other people, namely that policewoman. Why, he didn’t know, but something inside him had just given way. Had it been because when she’d spoken about it, Hatice had appeared to be so unashamed?

He put the car in gear and drove it up the ramp that led from his office car park and on to
İ
nönü Caddesi. It was nearly five o’clock and so the roads were packed. He thought about calling Hatice to tell her that it would take him some time to get home, but decided against it. She would know that anyway.

Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu sat down opposite the girl and offered her some börek. Neither
İ
kmen nor Süleyman were anywhere to be found and she wanted to eat her pastry before it got cold. And why not give Suzan Arslan one too? Ay
ş
e had bought far too many for just the two men and herself, especially in view of the fact that
İ
kmen hardly ate anything anyway.

‘Have some börek, Suzan,’ she said as she pushed one of the cheese and spinach pastries across the table towards the girl.

‘No.’

‘Go on, it’ll do you good.’

‘I can’t, I’m too nervous,’ she said.

Ay
ş
e, who had been ravenous, finished her börek before she spoke. ‘Listen, Suzan, if you just tell us the truth, then everything will be all right.’

‘But it won’t be!’ the girl said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I …’

‘Because you what?’ Ay
ş
e asked. ‘What did you do, Suzan? Did you kill Abdurrahman Efendi?’

‘No!’

‘Did you steal the money you had in your bag when you were arrested?’

‘No!’

‘Well then, what can be so terrible?’ she said.

‘I have to get that money to my mother or she’ll die,’ Suzan said. ‘You have to let me go home, Han
ı
m.’

‘I can’t do that,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘Suzan, you have to understand that you will be charged with theft whatever happens. Of the earrings. In order to make bail you’d have to go to court, but we could, possibly, transfer your money to your parents, if you can prove to us that it is in fact yours.’

‘It is mine!’

‘So you keep saying, but look at if from our point of view. You didn’t earn enough money from your employer to allow you to save five thousand lira. All the notes are sequential, so they came from a bank. But you don’t have a bank account. Can you see how this looks?’

She looked down at the table in front of her and said nothing.

‘Suzan, if you’re being threatened by anyone …’

The girl looked up sharply. And then Ay
ş
e knew. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You’re being threatened to say nothing.’

Still the girl didn’t speak.

‘What are they saying will happen to you if you talk? Because you know that we can and will protect you,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘If you know who killed Abdurrahman Efendi and you’re being threatened to keep quiet about it, what makes you think that those people who paid for your silence will let you get all the way home with their money? Eh?’

Suzan put her head so far down she looked as if she was trying to tuck it under her arm.

‘If you know something, you have to tell us,’ Ay
ş
e said. ‘Suzan, if you’ve come by this money from criminals, then they’re not going to let you leave this city alive – and they’ll take back their money. Your mum will never get it. Do you understand?’

The girl looked up at her. ‘Mum won’t get it now anyway,’ she said.

‘Well if that’s the case, then you’ve nothing to lose, have you?’ Ay
ş
e said.

Suzan Arslan looked back down at the table once again.

Time became odd. It extended so that it seemed as if he’d been in that room for ever, but also contracted to make that second he touched her face almost disappear. She was red from the neck downwards, the colour uneven as if she’d been splashed with paint. At her throat the redness was black. When Selçuk Devrim managed to have a thought, it was
How could she have done this to herself?
But he wasn’t sure that she had.

Had
he
done it? He took one of her hands, which was still slightly warm, in his and tried to reconstruct his route from the front door to the kitchen, where he was now. But his mind wouldn’t obey him. And what was he supposed to do now? Hatice was dead; what did you do when you found somebody dead?

Or
was
she dead? He looked up into her green-white face and found that he couldn’t marry that image to the warmth that was in her hand. Did she still live in spite of the slash to her throat? If she did, he had to get a doctor! Sobbing now, he put one of his hands into his jacket pocket and took out his phone. Somehow, and in spite of the blood he was smearing over the screen every time he touched it, he found his contacts, but then he failed at the final hurdle when he couldn’t locate or even remember the name of his doctor. But if he didn’t find his doctor then Hatice would die! Unable to find what he needed or even think straight, Selçuk threw his phone to the floor, where it smashed.