River of The Dead (11 page)

Taner frowned. ‘What for? Weren’t you worried about that?’

‘In case he took revenge on behalf of our clan? No,’ Bulbul Kaplan said. ‘He came offering the hand of friendship and I saw no reason not to take it from him. To me he was kind and polite.’

‘And your husband?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What did your husband make of that?’

Clan rivalries, especially in the east, were notoriously intractable. He could no more imagine Yusuf Kaya and Bulbul Kaplan cosying up after such an incident than he could see the convict figuratively in bed with her husband.

Bulbul Kaplan looked down at the floor. ‘Gazi was in hospital at the time. His eyes . . . He has operations from time to time . . .’

‘So Yusuf Kaya came to visit you when your husband was in hospital,’ Taner said. ‘Did it not occur to you, Mrs Kaplan, that perhaps that was planned? For Yusuf to see you alone? To accept your hospitality . . .’

‘Yusuf appeared and I have no doubt that it was planned, but . . .’ She smiled a little. Her face was round and pleasant, only her amazing blue eyes giving a clue as to the beautiful girl she must once have been. ‘My husband’s family have been good to me, but they are not my blood. Yusuf,’ she looked up and said simply, ‘is. He’s a nice man, at least he was to me. What he has done—’

‘Yusuf has killed people,’ Süleyman said. ‘Until we arrested him he was one of the most powerful drug dealers in İstanbul.’

Bulbul Kaplan shrugged. ‘He is my nephew. When I spoke to Yusuf it was like talking to my father once again.’

‘Did he ask you for money?’

‘I gave him food and drink, he stayed one night,’ she said. ‘He came because he was curious to meet me, that was all.’ She sat up straight and added, ‘I appreciated it too. But I haven’t seen him since. I couldn’t allow it anyway, not with Gazi . . .’

‘No.’

She seemed to be genuinely sad about not being able to see her nephew again. They must have got on well but, as Süleyman at least knew only too well, whatever their relationship might be it was purely on Yusuf Kaya’s terms. Bulbul Kaplan might think that Yusuf Kaya loved her, but that was unlikely. Yusuf Kaya loved only himself. He’d come to her in all probability because he needed somewhere in the Gaziantep area, apart from Anastasia’s brothel, to hide out at the time.

After they left, Inspector Taner confirmed his suspicion. ‘Kaya was seen back in Mardin in March of last year,’ she said. ‘We received a report that he and his brother Metin, another delightful character I do not think, were doing drug deals with some of the gypsies out on the Ocean. But when we arrived the two men had gone and we were left with one young boy with powder round his nose and a woman out of her mind on ketamine. I assume Yusuf headed up here after that.’

‘He wasn’t seen again in Mardin?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No, but Metin was,’ she said. ‘I found him myself with his head down the toilet of a local restaurant. Dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Coke overdose. That or his brother made him snort enough to kill him. That would not be outside Yusuf’s range of behaviours, as you know. Not of course that his family would ever believe that.’

Süleyman looked up above the olive trees outside the Kaplan house towards the now darkening sky. It had been a long and ultimately frustrating day. ‘What now?’ he said to Taner as she fired up the engine of her gutsy Volkswagen Golf.

Taner lit a cigarette and said, ‘If Kaya isn’t in Gaziantep any more and he isn’t here . . .’

‘You don’t think he’s here in Birecik?’

She shrugged. ‘Bulbul Kaplan could be lying. She did lie, as we know, when we first spoke about Yusuf. Her relationship with him, if it indeed exists, is odd for those involved in clan business. I will ask Captain Erdur to keep watch on Bulbul Kaplan and her farm.’

‘And so . . .’

‘And so on to Mardin,’ Taner said with a smile. ‘As far as we know Kaya has not left the country and if he hasn’t done that then he’ll be with the people who love him most. His family.’

There was no way anyone could have got any sort of idea what the Mesopotamian plain looked like under cover of darkness. All Süleyman knew as he sat beside Taner as she wrestled her car over uncomfortably rutted road surfaces was that he was exhausted. After a night of very little sleep, he’d been up since the crack of dawn and now here he was powering on into the back of beyond where the only lights that could be seen came from tanks on their way out east to fight the Kurdish separatists, the PKK. Someone – an informer, the local Jandarma had reckoned, Taner told him – had been beheaded by one or other group of terrorists in a village near to Mardin. It was not, after all, just the PKK who operated in this area. There was also Hezbollah and possibly al-Qaeda too, Taner expounded breezily, as well as some other little splinter groups – Marxists, religious fundamentalists, ultra-nationalists. That she seemed to be happy going back to what to Süleyman appeared to be a hotbed of violence was odd. But then Edibe Taner was not your run of the mill policewoman.

Through half-closed, bloodshot eyes he looked at her. She was a very attractive woman and yet, strangely for him, he felt nothing for her. Mehmet Süleyman was and always had been in love with his wife. But that he had a weakness for other women he was the first to admit. It was partly because he himself was attractive and women came on to him. But he could also make the running himself, as he knew only too well. Inspector Taner had the look of a woman who would make any feelings she might have for a person well and truly apparent. But maybe that was just an illusion. Maybe the fact was that, however professional and liberated she appeared, she was still an eastern woman with all the modesty and restraint that went with such a background. But then again, perhaps in view of the fact that she had shown absolutely no romantic interest in him he was just choosing to think that that was so. It was possible she was indeed a very liberated woman who simply did not fancy him.

‘You’d still like to stay at St Sobo’s?’ she said suddenly, in that harsh staccato way of hers.

The monastery where Dr Sarkissian’s friend lived was, so Taner had told him, about ten minutes by car from the centre of Mardin. In the scheme of the geography of the city it was no further away from police headquarters than the hotel Taner had had in mind for him. That Taner herself obviously wanted him to stay at one of the new hotels in town was evident – she was nothing if not a woman imbued with civic pride – but that was not really his problem. Brother Seraphim and a degree of peace and quiet had the feel of something far more attractive to Süleyman.

‘Yes, I would,’ he replied into the darkness of the road ahead.

‘I don’t blame you,’ Taner said with a sigh. ‘The monks are interesting and, like you, educated. In the hotel you’d be bombarded with Syrians who’ve come over the border for the Easter services at our churches and monasteries.’

He turned to look at her. ‘Easter? Is it Easter?’

‘Next weekend, yes,’ she said. And then she yawned. ‘We’ll all be on duty then – cops, Jandarma, military.’

‘In the churches.’

‘Protecting the Christians, yes,’ she said. ‘We wish them happy Easter as they go in to worship while we wait outside with tanks and guns just in case any lunatic or band of lunatics might have ideas about killing them. But then I believe you protect the churches in İstanbul, don’t you?’

There was a measure of security in all places of worship in the city, but rarely were tanks employed as part of the process.

‘Yes . . .’

Far, far away in the distance, unless he was very much mistaken, a glimmer of light was just beginning to be discernible. He didn’t have any idea about how long they had been on the road, whether he had in fact slept for a short time or not, but he felt that dawn had to be happening some time soon. That could be the beginning of it.

‘We’re about an hour away now,’ Taner said as she lit yet another cigarette. She’d chain-smoked ever since they’d left Birecik. ‘When we reach Mardin we’ll get some breakfast first and then I’ll take you out to the monastery. I expect you’ll want to sleep for a while.’

He looked across at her. ‘Won’t you?’

She laughed. ‘Maybe. Paperwork, you know?’

He did. From İstanbul to Mardin and beyond, they all had paperwork. Süleyman’s head slumped forward and he went to sleep, to Taner’s amusement, yet again. When he woke up he was looking down upon what appeared to be a vast, green sea.

İkmen had just finished e-mailing the main points about his visit to the Kartal Prison the previous day to Süleyman when İzzet Melik entered his office. Such a marvellous thing, e-mail! And everyone had it! Even monasteries! Arto Sarkissian said it would be absolutely no problem for Süleyman to pick up his messages at St Sobo’s.

Melik shut the door behind him and sat down.

‘Yes,’ İkmen said, still staring fixedly at the screen with an expression of wonder on his face.

‘That nurse, at the Cerrahpaşa, sir,’ İzzet Melik said, ‘Murat Lole . . .’

‘What about him?’ İkmen said as he closed down his system with a contented sigh. It had only been in the last month that he’d been able to do this.

‘He’s gone back to work at the hospital, sir,’ Melik said.

‘No reason why he shouldn’t,’ İkmen said. ‘We have no evidence that he was involved in Kaya’s escape.’

‘Sir, we’re coming up negative with searching the hospital rubbish.’

‘You’ve found nothing that could be a nurse’s uniform? Stockings?’

‘No.’

İkmen frowned. ‘Glass?’

‘Oh, there’s a lot of that,’ İzzet said wearily. ‘Tonnes. But it’s going to take forensic some time to first sift through it and second match any blood found on the glass to that of Kaya and his accomplices or victims. The glass has to be matched to the fragments Dr Sarkissian found inside the bodies.’

‘No shards have been found that could conceivably have been used as weapons?’

‘The killers either smashed them up or took them away,’ İzzet replied. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

İkmen looked gloomily down at the top of his desk. ‘No news about the surviving prison guard, I suppose, İzzet?’

‘No, sir. Still in a coma, I’m afraid.’ He rose to his feet and made ready to go. ‘I tell you who I do have news about however, sir, Hüseyin Altun.’

İkmen looked up sharply. ‘The king of the Edirnekapı beggars?’

‘The same.’

‘What of him?’

‘He’s dead,’ İzzet said with an unconcerned shrug. ‘Been so for some time, apparently. Stabbed.’

İkmen was shocked. Not that he’d actually known Hüseyin Altun personally. For all his faults the talented beggar, who came from and lived in the run-down district of Edirnekapı, had never killed anyone. Even when his need for heroin had been at its most acute, Altun had always preferred street-based extortion – often via his ragged gang of street kids – to murder. Altun, İkmen knew, was known to have bought his drug of choice from dealers in or around his begging beat in Beyoğlu. Whether he had ever bought from Yusuf Kaya, İkmen didn’t know. But Altun had been a junkie and so anything had to be possible. İkmen made a mental note to try to find out about the circumstances of Hüseyin Altun’s death and what the dead beggar had actually been stabbed with.

‘Do you know, İzzet, whether a post-mortem was performed on Altun’s body?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ İzzet replied. ‘Dr Sarkissian’s assistant did it.’

‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ İkmen said as İzzet Melik left his office. A very brief visit from his friend’s junior but one that had provided some illumination. As he watched İzzet figuratively dance round Ayşe Farsakoğlu in the corridor, İkmen pondered yet again on how well Yusuf Kaya’s escape had been planned. So far there was no evidence at all, either material or human.

‘Now you see why we call it the Ocean,’ Edibe Taner said as she swept her arms outwards to encompass the vast plain below them. Although she had planned to take Süleyman actually into the city of Mardin for breakfast that morning, a telephone call to Brother Seraphim at the monastery of St Sobo had changed her mind. The Brothers would be delighted to offer Inspectors Süleyman and Taner breakfast in their refectory. Now, parked on an outcrop of rock just outside the ancient honey-coloured monastic building, Taner and Süleyman were standing beside her car looking down upon just a fraction of the Mesopotamian plain.

‘Perhaps because this area, whether you are religious or an atheist, is acknowledged as the cradle of civilisation it has many names,’ Taner continued. ‘The plain in its entirety from Diyarbakir to Baghdad is called Al Jazeera. That is an Arabic term meaning “the island”.’

‘The island? I thought it was an ocean,’ a horribly weary Süleyman replied. There was a slightly chill wind coming off the vast patchwork of bright green, pale green and yellow fields and settlements below. Contained only by the mountains and hills that seemed to provide almost a frame for the vast shimmering plain, the ‘island’ was an almost overwhelming onslaught of colour, shape and competing smells – flowers, animals, the earth itself. Süleyman felt dizzy.

‘To the Arabs it was an island, but to the Suriani this area is called the Tur Abdin,’ Taner continued. Remarkably she seemed to be not only awake but really quite fresh-looking too. ‘Tur Abdin, which is Aramaic, means the “Slaves of God” which refers to the fact that this place was, and to some extent still is, a place of monasteries. It is a sacred place, special.’ She looked at him pointedly. ‘I believe this, even though I know that it is tainted.’

‘Tainted?’

She breathed in the cool air deeply, all cigarettes well and truly out now. ‘By gangsters like Yusuf Kaya,’ she said. ‘People like that make trouble for the ordinary people of Mardin. I don’t like that. There are others too, but . . .’ She stopped there, as if she’d said too much, and then she smiled. ‘People here in Mardin do not always speak what you would recognise as Turkish,’ she continued. ‘We are close to Syria here and so many people speak Arabic. The Suriani speak Aramaic amongst themselves. Then there are the Kurds who have their own dialects. I speak both Arabic and Aramaic and so you don’t have to worry about those. The Kurdish dialects . . .’ She looked down at the ground briefly. ‘We can manage.’