River of The Dead (26 page)

‘We know that Kaya and Altun knew of each other at least. Kaya supplied Hüseyin or his people with drugs. But the connection only really exists through Hüseyin’s lieutenant Aslan and his girlfriend Sophia. Altun’s death may or may not be connected.’

İzzet didn’t answer. Like Ayşe he just sat and looked ahead at nothing much really. The station was quite quiet, a lot of the uniformed officers having been assigned to the various Orthodox Christian churches in the city which were celebrating Easter. The official protection of most places of worship now was a sad fact of modern life. Some people, or so it seemed, would not even consider leaving others alone to do what they wanted to do in peace. But then peace wasn’t something İzzet and Ayşe were to experience for very much longer themselves. İkmen, looking even more tired and worn out than usual, burst into his office in a vast ball of grey cigarette smoke. For a moment he just looked at his sergeant sitting frowning at her desk and at İzzet Melik and then he said, ‘We’ve got to find this man.’

He held up the photograph of Bekir that his daughter Çiçek had put on to the computer for Fatma. Bülent had printed this copy out on to a large piece of photographic paper. İzzet looked up at the picture and said, ‘Who is he? What’s he done?’

‘He’s a shit who gives cocaine to children!’ İkmen said with real poison and yet at the same time real misery in his voice too. ‘He’s—’

‘That’s Aslan!’ Ayşe Farsakoğlu said as she peered at the picture, nodding her head as she did so. ‘Hüseyin Altun’s old lieutenant. That’s a really good picture. Sure he sells cocaine to kids, I don’t know about giving . . . Sir?’

İkmen had almost fallen down on to the top of his desk. ‘Are you sure? You’ve seen him so infrequently,’ he said in what for him was a very small voice. ‘
This
is Aslan?’

‘We’re looking for him anyway, aren’t we?’ İzzet said. ‘Handy to get a photograph though, sir. Where did you get it from?’

There was a pause during which both Ayşe Farsakoğlu and İzzet Melik became rather concerned about the extraordinarily pale colour İkmen’s face had gone.

‘I got it from my printer at home,’ İkmen managed to say at last. ‘This man – Aslan – is also known as Bekir İkmen. He is the third and most troublesome of my sons.’

There had been no signal that Süleyman could discern to suggest that the service had actually started. The church just filled up with men wearing either very cheap and unfashionable suits or ensembles so up to the minute and expensive he was almost jealous. The old man who stood next to him was one of the former, a peasant in a jacket and trousers he had probably been married in. Beside him, all in a shade of cream that had, Süleyman recalled, been quite the thing for a while back in the 1970s, was a ‘simple’ man of about fifty. In all probability he was the older man’s son. Occasionally he made strange hooting noises and rolled his eyes and drooled, but nobody took any notice. Not even the headscarfed, clearly Muslim ladies who sat on the benches at the back of the women’s area of the church. In front of them were the far more aquiline and elegantly dressed Suriani ladies. Although much taller than most of the other women, Edibe Taner, right in the middle of the Christian group, looked very different from those around her. Her face was broader, more Asiatic. These Surianis were plainly Arabs. There was not, however, as yet, any sign of the American woman Elizabeth Smith, or of the Kaya men who guarded her.

The priest raised a smoking thurible of incense up until it swung and then proceeded to walk up and down the aisle blessing the congregation with its pungent contents.

Ayşe Farsakoğlu had been to İkmen’s apartment several times before. She knew it as a joyfully chaotic place where food and drink were always being pushed on anyone who came over the threshold. This day, however, was different. For a start, either the younger İkmen children were out or they were unnaturally quiet and Mrs Fatma İkmen was nowhere to be seen. Once Ayşe and İzzet had taken their shoes off at the door, İkmen led them to their left and into a small messy room.

‘This was Bülent’s room,’ İkmen explained as he closed the door behind them. ‘We let Bekir stay here when he turned up out of the blue. Then my youngest son, Kemal, began spending a lot of time with him. You can smell, even now he’s out, that ghastly spot cream or lotion or whatever it is that Kemal has taken to slathering himself with lately.’

Ayşe didn’t know what İkmen meant. The smell he was referring to meant something quite different to her. But she put on the plastic gloves they had all brought with them and began looking around.

‘My wife and the two younger children are spending the day with family,’ İkmen said. Fatma had taken the kids over to the home of the eldest İkmen child, Sınan. A doctor, Sınan was due to go abroad for a job interview the following day. If things went to plan he would soon be working in London. Just the thought of it made İkmen’s chest tighten a little with tension. Of course if Sınan got the job in London he would have to take it; it was what he wanted. But the loss of him on top of Bekir was not going to be easy for Fatma. Her children were almost gone now. Even her youngest was no longer really a child. İkmen tried hard not to think about Kemal snorting coke probably from the back of a battered old tobacco tin or something equally disgusting. His mobile phone began to ring. Ayşe Farsakoğlu picked up what had been Bekir’s rucksack and looked inside.

İkmen signalled for her to put the rucksack down and then said, ‘İkmen.’

‘Çetin, it’s Arto,’ the familiar voice of the Armenian pathologist said. ‘It’s about your dead prison officer.’

‘Ramazan Eren?’

‘Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’

İzzet Melik, who had been looking at the old Galatasaray football posters on the walls, turned round and looked at İkmen, frowning.

‘Yes?’ İkmen asked the Armenian. ‘And so?’

‘The toxicology came back with a positive result for diamorphine,’ the doctor said. ‘Enough to kill an ox. This death was not natural, Çetin. Who was the attending doctor over at the Cerrahpaşa?’

‘Eldem,’ İkmen said after a pause.

‘Well, Dr Eldem has some questions to answer,’ Arto said. ‘I suggest you get him in right away.’

‘I will,’ İkmen said. After thanking the doctor for his prompt attention he closed his telephone up.

‘Dr Eldem in trouble, is he?’ İzzet asked.

‘Yes,’ İkmen replied. ‘It would seem that someone gave Ramazan Eren an overdose of diamorphine.’

‘Dr Eldem.’

‘He would seem to be the most likely candidate at this time,’ İkmen said. ‘İzzet, I’d like you to get over to the Cerrahpaşa and pick him up. If he isn’t there get the director to give you his details. At the very least, Dr Eldem has some explaining to do.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Once Sergeant Farsakoğlu and myself have finished here, we’ll go back to the station and hopefully see you there,’ İkmen said as he escorted İzzet Melik back to the front door of the apartment.

‘Eldem may already have gone,’ İzzet said just before he left. ‘He was behaving cagily at the hospital yesterday, wasn’t he?’

‘If that is the case then I’ll have to go to Commissioner Ardıç,’ İkmen said. ‘As it is I think we’ll soon be needing more men and more powers to really get to grips with just where the trail of Kaya’s influence is taking us.’

‘Yes, sir.’

İkmen returned to Bekir’s bedroom where Ayşe Farsakoğlu was still looking down at the rucksack he had asked her to leave.

‘Bülent found the syringe in there,’ he said. ‘And some cocaine powder. I want the whole bag analysed. There are some twigs or something in there too. Not cannabis, but—’

‘Wormwood,’ Ayşe said with absolute confidence. ‘Like the tattoo on Faruk Öz’s arm. I recognised the smell as soon as I entered the apartment. The leaves in that bag are wormwood leaves.’

‘Ah, but the smell is Kemal’s cream.’

‘No, sir. If Kemal told you that was the smell of his cream, he was lying. The smell is wormwood,’ Ayşe said. ‘My grandmother used to put wormwood leaves amongst her clothes to discourage moths. It’s awful. I’d know it anywhere. This room reeks of it!’

‘We assumed that because Kemal was using some new cream,’ İkmen said slowly, ‘it had to be him. Since he developed spots he’s used some foul things on his skin. He told us he was using some new stuff. He told us it smelt just like this.’

‘As I said, he lied to you. The smell is wormwood,’ Ayşe persisted. ‘And, sir, I would suggest that it was being used to cover the scent of any narcotics Bekir might have been carrying in that bag. Your son was using heroin himself, as well as sniffing coke and giving that to your other boy. He might have been carrying cannabis too at some stage and that really can smell. But with wormwood around he’d know no one would be able to detect anything else he was carrying. He’d even maybe be confident enough to leave the apartment and go down the street with the stuff. Only our own drug dogs would get past wormwood – maybe. And your son wasn’t likely to come up against one of those, was he? Have you found any more drugs in this room?’

İkmen, suddenly deflated by being taken for what he felt was a fool, sat down shakily on Bülent’s old bed. ‘No . . .’

‘Have you looked?’

‘No, not . . .’

He looked awful. Ayşe went and sat down next to him.

‘Sir, I will look round and then we will, as you have suggested, call forensic,’ she said gently. ‘I suspect if your son had a large amount of heroin, cocaine or whatever here in this room he has now taken it with him. You have no idea where he might have gone?’

‘No.’

‘Well, sir,’ Ayşe said as she looked around the room once again, ‘all I can suggest at this stage is that, assuming that your son Bekir and the late Hüseyin Altun’s lieutenant Aslan are one and the same, we pick up Sophia the Bulgarian girl again.’

‘Sophia?’ For a moment İkmen looked confused. But then as light began to dawn in his brain he said, ‘Of course, Sophia! The girl who was, er, um . . .’

‘The girl who is pregnant, she says, with Aslan’s child,’ Ayşe said.

There was no accompaniment of any sort. When the beautiful young women in the Suriani choir began to sing their voices soared alone until they were answered by the deeper sounds of the men’s choir which now, as if by magic, appeared from behind a large spangled cloth that hung beside the altar. Beyond was a rough-cut stone doorway out of which now processed men and boys of all ages from ten to eighty. Both men and women continued to sing until the areas to both sides of the altar were filled with people and with sound. The service had been going on, so far as Süleyman could tell, for at least an hour and a half. Where on earth was the American woman and why didn’t Edibe Taner look at all agitated about the fact that she hadn’t shown up? But then, if she had the house outside Dara under surveillance, maybe she knew something that he didn’t. He looked across the aisle meaningfully, or so he thought, at the policewoman, but she didn’t respond. She was, like the rest of the congregation with the exception of Süleyman, singing. More unintelligible minutes passed. Then the priest, carrying before him a large metal cross wrapped closely in a blood red cloth, began to process round the church, followed by the men’s choir.

He’d heard Arab women ululating before – from a distance. Close to, as it was now, it was both eerie and deafening. What it meant in this context he didn’t really know, although from the tears in the people’s eyes he assumed they were probably mourning the suffering of their Christ. All of them wanted to touch the red-robed cross as it passed, and if they managed to do so they smiled at those around them. It was as he was watching the procession move round the back of the church that he saw a covered woman, surrounded by the guards he’d seen at Elizabeth Smith’s house, walk through the door. The group separated, she slipping to the women’s side of the church and her guards coming to stand behind Süleyman and Seçkin Taner on the men’s side. No one had reacted in a noticeable fashion to their arrival. The women’s ululations continued to roll around the inside walls of the church, making every hair on Süleyman’s head and body stand up as, in his mind at least, the Cobweb World all but enveloped him.

Between his apartment on Büyük Hendek Alley and some nameless little street somewhere, probably less than a kilometre away in the district of Cihangir, Murat Lole managed to lose his police ‘tail’. One young constable, whose first time on such an assignment this was, plus one slightly older and more experienced officer were the culprits. Apparently the younger one had been distracted by the sight of a group of dancing girls crossing a street on their way to one of the nightclubs of Beyoğlu. His older colleague had clearly been equally entranced. İkmen was incandescent with rage, but not just with the two officers. In fact he didn’t spend very much time berating them at all, because when İzzet Melik brought Dr Eldem in he turned his attention to him.

‘Our pathologist, backed up by toxicology reports from the forensic institute, has proved that the cause of the prison officer Ramazan Eren’s death was not spontaneous multiple organ failure,’ İkmen said as he sat down opposite the doctor. ‘Cause of death was poisoning via a massive overdose of diamorphine. You were in charge of this patient, Dr Eldem. Explain this, will you.’

The doctor didn’t answer. He sat, impassively, in front of İkmen and İzzet Melik, his face expressionless. For a moment İkmen just looked back until he turned to İzzet Melik and said, ‘Sergeant, did you say that Dr Eldem has waived his right to legal representation?’

‘Yes, sir,’ İzzet replied. ‘I don’t know why; he wouldn’t say.’

İkmen leaned across the interview room table towards the doctor and said, ‘That wasn’t very bright, Dr Eldem. As the responsible physician to a man who has died via an overdose of hospital quality diamorphine you’re not in a particularly good place at the moment.’

‘Other people had access to that room apart from me,’ Dr Eldem said calmly. ‘I know I didn’t kill the guard. It’s up to you to prove it.’