River of The Dead (35 page)

‘Outside,’ his colleague replied.

‘Let’s go and join him,’ Taner said. ‘There’s no point being in here; there’s nothing.’

They went outside to where Brother Gabriel stood beside Taner’s car looking up at the stars. He wasn’t supposed to have left the vehicle and Edibe Taner was very quick to hustle him back inside. Süleyman meanwhile took his small pencil torch out of his pocket and switched it on. The earth was poor, dusty and rutted, and as he made his way towards the back of the property he was very aware of the fact that his shoes were really quite unsuitable for the countryside.

Private Güzer, a figure also shining a torch down towards the ground, was over by an outbuilding of some sort, a garage or a barn.

‘Anything?’ Süleyman asked as he walked over to where the young man was standing.

‘Not in that shed, sir, no,’ the jandarme replied. Then he frowned. ‘But if you look on the ground there are some fragments.’ Cloth by the look of them, torn pieces that looked as if they had been dragged into or embedded in the dust. Some of them were quite bright, like fabric women might favour.

‘Have you looked behind the shed yet, Private?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No, sir. Not yet. I’ve only just got here.’

‘Let’s do that now, shall we?’

They walked together round the side of the shed, past what Süleyman imagined was a very old piece of agricultural machinery – a large rusted metal thing. The smell he’d noticed earlier was getting stronger.

‘Nothing inside, sir?’ the young private asked as they rounded a corner of the shed.

‘No,’ Süleyman replied. ‘No one in. Do you have any idea about where Mr and Mrs Kaplan may have gone, Private?’

‘No, sir,’ Güzer said. ‘People out here in the country generally don’t go far. Especially not the old folk. Not at night.’

Süleyman scanned what he could see of the flat area around the house and its outbuildings. His small torch was useless here and so he just squinted unaided into the darkness. The banks of the Euphrates were less than half a kilometre away and he began to wonder whether indeed this was where Yusuf Kaya had met his death. At the hands of his aunt? Could that possibly be the case? Could the old lady have done it on her own, or—

‘Sir, the earth’s been turned.’

‘What?’ He’d seen something, just very faintly against the almost black horizon, something sticking up above the olive trees in the field behind the house.

‘Sir, the earth has been turned here,’ Private Güzer said.

Because he couldn’t make out what the object in the field might be, Süleyman looked down to where the jandarme was shining his torch. At his feet was a large area of churned and scuffed-up earth.

‘Do you want me to get a shovel?’

But Süleyman just pushed at it with his foot. The smell he’d noticed earlier became much stronger. It didn’t need any more force than a foot because in less than thirty seconds a very dead and dusty human hand had come to light. It was attached to an equally dead and dusty arm.

Mrs Bulbul Kaplan wasn’t alone in what was in fact a very hastily dug and shallow grave. Captain Erdur lay beside her, his throat cut, his still open eyes filled with surprise. Private Güzer put a hand up to his head and then breathed deeply through his mouth. The captain had been his superior, and he had respected him.

Süleyman took his mobile phone out of his pocket and said, ‘We’ll need the services of the police in Şanlıurfa. This is a crime scene; we need forensic support. I hadn’t been expecting this. I don’t think any of us had.’

He had just started to work through the directory of numbers in his mobile and had heard what he thought was Güzer shuffling his feet next to him when the phone was suddenly and violently wrenched out of his hand.

‘Güzer!’

But Private Güzer hadn’t touched Süleyman. In fact Private Güzer was unlikely to touch anything again. Before he could even look to see where his phone had gone, Süleyman gazed on horrified as Private Güzer slumped slowly to the ground. Blood poured out of his mouth and also out of the great gaping stab wound in his back. The person standing behind him holding what had certainly killed the jandarme was a man he had never seen before. Probably in his early thirties, he held, as well as the knife, a small pistol which was pointed at Süleyman’s head. He said nothing. Even when Süleyman wheeled round to try to locate his other colleagues the man just stayed where he was, smiling.

‘What?’

And then lights! The thing he had vaguely seen on the horizon in the darkened field behind the house lit up. Its engine roaring into life as its lights came on, a truck of some considerable size lumbered through the trees and over towards what was a very rickety back fence. The person who had knocked Süleyman’s phone out of his hands, the person standing behind him now, rammed the barrel of a gun hard into his temple and then ripped his own gun out of its holster underneath his jacket.

‘Who . . .’

‘Get them all over here; we’ll finish the lot of them together!’ a male voice behind his head called. Süleyman tried to speak but as he watched the truck heading towards the fence he found that he was completely dumb. What were these people going to do, run them all over? And where were the others anyway? Where were Inspector Taner and her beloved monk? Where was Private Bilge? The person behind him pushed Süleyman in the direction of the smirking man who had killed Private Güzer. Stumbling over the bodies of Bulbul Kaplan and Captain Erdur, he almost fell on to the outstretched knife, but he recovered himself in time. However, as he stumbled, he did look behind again and saw that Taner, Private Bilge and Brother Gabriel were being herded by the man who had grabbed him plus someone else too. It was a woman.

‘You can’t get any more in that pit, for God’s sake!’ Elizabeth Smith said to her two men. ‘In fact let’s just finish them and leave them where they fall. We’re leaving. What does it matter?’

The truck had stopped moving now and someone had got out. As the figure moved towards the rickety garden fence, Süleyman saw that it was İbrahim Keser.

Her face a splash of white horror in the darkness, Edibe Taner looked down at the body of Bulbul Kaplan and said, ‘Did you kill her? What—’

‘She’d done her bit,’ Elizabeth Smith said simply. Then, leaning in to place her gun against Taner’s head, she said, ‘That’s how this operation works, Inspector. Haven’t you worked that out yet?’ She smiled. ‘Yusuf did his bit when he set the whole thing up. All sorts of people did their bit when he got out of prison and then escaped from the hospital. Now . . .’

‘The Wormwood Route. You or your people have just killed for it as you’ve gone along, haven’t you, Miss Smith?’ Süleyman said. ‘That’s what it’s been about all the time – money.’

‘Yes and no,’ she responded. ‘Very good detective work.’ Then she turned to the man at her elbow and said, ‘Bekir, this is Inspector Süleyman.’

The young man was far from the image of his father but he was enough like Çetin İkmen for the experience of seeing him to take on an air of the surreal. Süleyman stared. To be killed by someone who looked like his friend, was indeed part of his friend, was a monstrous concept. Bekir looked at him with barely contained glee. It was almost as if he were looking forward to it.

‘You need money to survive in the cradle of civilisation,’ the American said. ‘Money buys you immunity from all sorts of clan violence and terrorist activity. Like the Persians and Byzantines, Inspector Süleyman, I want my little empire and I want it to be here. Yusuf would have squandered the money on women and shitty apartment blocks in new Mardin. Now get over to the pit.’

Pushing and shoving, the American’s men lined them up behind the pit where Bulbul Kaplan and Captain Erdur lay. Like a firing squad. Every part of Süleyman’s body was cold and although he wanted to turn to Edibe Taner and tell her he was sorry for not having at least attempted to protect her, no part of him could actually move. As the three men now in front of them prepared their weapons to fire, Süleyman inwardly railed at the fact that İkmen’s child was part of this. And all for what? For a method whereby death-giving drugs were about to swamp every city, town and village not just in Turkey but in many other countries as well. All because Elizabeth Smith wanted to live in some sort of eastern fantasy.

‘Put your weapons down.’

For just a moment he thought that they were saved, that maybe the other Mardin constables and the jandarmes they were with had come to rescue them. But the voice that urged Miss Smith and her men to give up their violence was neither demanding nor in any way alarming.

‘Put your weapons down and just go,’ Gabriel said. ‘You were leaving anyway, so leave. We will not follow. You’ve taken the officers’ weapons and telephones. What can we do if you go?’

He was, Süleyman noticed, moving very slowly towards the American and her cohorts.

‘Go!’

‘Brother Gabriel!’ Süleyman said.

The monk turned, and by the light of the truck’s headlights Süleyman saw him smile.

‘It’s all right,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s fine.’

And then he began to run towards them. Edibe Taner screamed. ‘Gabriel!’

All three men shot at him and all three men had terrified expressions on their faces as they did so.

‘Allah, what was that!’ Bekir İkmen said as he turned to the man on his left. ‘What happened there?’

Edibe Taner, screaming, threw herself across Gabriel Saatçi’s body and shook him by his lifeless shoulders.

‘That was a saint,’ İbrahim Keser said with both arrogance and fear in his voice. ‘You killed a fucking saint! I killed a fucking saint!’

‘Bekir,’ Süleyman began, ‘you—’

It was like a curse at first. There was nothing to hear and yet suddenly there was blood. Pouring out of Bekir İkmen, out of İbrahim Keser and out of the mouth of the other man who stood beside them. They’d killed a saint and now they were paying. And to think that he, Süleyman, hadn’t believed in any of this! To think that Edibe Taner, an officer hidden away and obscured in the country, had known what he had not. There was something, there was a—

‘Don’t move, Miss Smith! If you move I’ll kill you too!’

Whose voice was that? He couldn’t make any sense of it until he heard Taner screaming once again.

‘Selahattin! Selahattin, help me!’

And then the men came forward out of the darkness. Two Mardin policemen and three jandarmes. They all held pistols with silencers attached. Two of them grabbed the American by her arms and then forced her down on the ground so that they could search her.

‘Madam!’

Constable Selahattin ran to Taner and helped her to cradle the monk’s head against her shoulder. Her clothes were drenched in his blood, her mouth full of it where she had kissed and kissed and kissed his face.

Once he could speak again, Süleyman said to Private Yüksel, ‘How did you . . . how did you get here?’

Private Yüksel put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘It was the river again, sir.’

‘The river?’

‘When we got into town some kids reported seeing a vehicle down this way in the river. They said they thought it might be a jeep.’

‘And?’

‘And, sir, we don’t know yet,’ Yüksel said as he looked down at the dead body of his former boss, ‘but I imagine it was probably . . . his.’ He grimaced. ‘Sir, the river gives and takes – bodies, vehicles, everything.’

‘I must go to Inspector Taner,’ Süleyman said. And he stepped over corpses and mindlessly went to her.

‘Edibe . . .’

Her eyes were blasted. A for ever sleepless, tortured and brutalised animal. She folded herself over the dead body of her love and then she began to ululate her grief. A trilling mourning overpowering and snuffing out the sounds of the American being led away, and the death agonies of the three men on the ground in front of her.

Bekir İkmen didn’t actually die until he had been in the ambulance on the way to hospital in Şanlıurfa for nearly half an hour. Süleyman, who chose to ride alongside his old friend’s son, saw all the efforts that were made to save his life, but he knew inside that none of them would work. The young man’s internal organs were shattered by bullets. There was no way back.

When the vehicle arrived at the hospital he was given the option of having the doctor who pronounced life extinct call Çetin İkmen. But Süleyman said he would do that himself. He owed it to İkmen to let him know that he had failed. Bekir İkmen had proved impossible to save.

‘You didn’t kill him,’ İkmen said when Süleyman’s story finally came to its bloody and horrific end. ‘And even those who did, did so for a good reason.’

His voice was not only tired, it was dead too. Like a ghastly horror movie one can only just stand. In the background the sound of Fatma İkmen screaming a hellish soundtrack.

‘Çetin, I am so sorry.’

He didn’t reply. The screaming continued and then he just said, ‘I will get the first flight that I can.’

Süleyman heard his friend light a cigarette and then he heard his wife berate him for it. İkmen did not react at all. İkmen was just doing what he always did, getting everything done. There was almost no option, for Süleyman at least, but to take the same stance himself.

‘I have to go back to Mardin,’ he said. ‘Inspector Taner needs me. She can’t interview the American woman without some support. And . . .’

‘And you want to know how this all came about,’ İkmen said. ‘Of course you do. Of course you do.’

‘Çetin, I will tell you everything. I—’

‘My dear Mehmet,’ İkmen said, ‘we already have part of the picture. If this American is to be the key to more knowledge about the Wormwood Route . . .’

‘I think she knows it,’ Süleyman said. ‘I mean all of it. I hope that is the case.’

‘So . . .’

‘It’s my belief that Elizabeth Smith orchestrated almost everything.’