Dance with Death (13 page)

‘So maybe if you go out hiking with Turgut, you might learn a thing or two,’ Rachelle said. ‘Or maybe not. Turgut can be a bit tight-lipped, especially about his family.’

İkmen was rather more alarmed by the word ‘hiking’ than by the prospect of spending time with a man of few words. Exercise had always been anathema to the policeman and the guide he had imagined had had a jeep like Altay Salman.

When the two women finally left, Menşure turned a very stern eye upon İkmen and said, ‘Can’t stop yourself being the charmer with women, can you? You should smile less and not take their compliments as easily as you do. It’s indecent. If you don’t behave yourself, I will let Kismet into your room one day when you’re out.’

In spite of the fact that it just wasn’t logical to get so worked up about a dumb animal, İkmen felt his face blanch. ‘He’s still alive?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Menşure said with what seemed to be a degree of smugness, ‘And despite being so very, very old, he is still quite capable of frightening his peers, small children and middle-aged policemen. Careful breeding, you see, Çetin. Healthy blood. My father, you know, said that my grandfather mated Kismet’s mother with a lion.’ She raised a warning finger up to heaven. ‘So be warned, Çetin, no more smoking in public and no flirting with anyone. And remember that I have eyes in every place in this village.’

A whole society made up of informants! It put İkmen in mind of the tens of thousands of spies who had been employed by the paranoid nineteenth-century Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Although the snow had started to melt now, it was still very cold outside – but that didn’t prevent İkmen from opting to continue his researches away from Menşure’s hotel. As he left, however, he checked to make sure that he didn’t inadvertently step on Kismet. After all if he was still alive and active he – and his ‘healthy’ blood – could be just about anywhere.

Mehmet Süleyman didn’t mention what he thought he might have seen in Zelfa’s garden in the early hours of the morning. In fact he and his wife didn’t really speak at all before he left for work. If not exactly embarrassed by what had happened between them, they didn’t know quite what to say to each other.

As he walked into the station, he saw İzzet Melik leaning against his office door talking to İkmen’s deputy, Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu. She, to her credit, was ignoring his leering expressions with some dignity.

‘Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?’ Süleyman asked as he broke up this somewhat disturbing tableau with just the sound of his voice. Looking İzzet straight in the eye, he continued, ‘The Aydın boy. Someone needs to be there in case he wakes up.’

‘Well, there’s Constable . . .’

‘I mean someone with some experience of asking questions of – note I do not use either the word “questioning” or “interrogating” – victims of crime.’

‘Yes, sir.’ For a moment İzzet just stood there, awkwardly shifting from foot to foot, still half smiling at Ayşe Farsakoğlu.

‘Well, off you go, then,’ Süleyman said as he pushed open the door to his office and walked inside.

‘Yes, sir.’

Süleyman was just about to close the door behind him, when he noticed that Ayşe Farsakoğlu was still standing outside, obviously waiting to see him.

‘Yes?’ he asked nervously. ‘Sergeant?’

As well as being very beautiful, with long dark hair and a perfectly curvaceous figure, Ayşe Farsakoğlu was also a young woman with whom Süleyman had enjoyed a brief affair just prior to his current marriage. And although that was all very firmly in the past now, he was still not entirely comfortable with her. She was, he knew, if not still exactly in love with him, still vulnerable to feelings that he did not share.

‘Inspector İkmen said that I was to help you as much as I could during his absence, sir,’ she said without preamble. ‘Sergeant Melik was just telling me about that poor boy in hospital.’

‘Possibly the peeper’s latest victim, yes,’ Süleyman said as he sat down behind his desk and lit a cigarette.

She’d been off sick for a couple of days and so, in a sense, it probably had been useful that Melik had brought her up to speed. After all, it saved him from having to do so himself and he did, he knew, want to use Ayşe where he could in this investigation. Apart from anything else she was going to be a lot more sympathetic with the peeper’s young, mainly gay victims than Melik was.

‘I’ve received intelligence,’ he said, referring to his recent conversation with Metin İskender, ‘that there is a belief within the homosexual fraternity that the peeper is an enemy of their kind.’

‘But I thought that he’ – she swallowed hard before using the word – ‘masturbated in front of them. And wasn’t one boy sexually assaulted?’

‘In the same way that misogynists sometimes assault or even rape women, so there is a school of thought that says men who dislike homosexuals sometimes seek to humiliate them by asserting sexual supremacy over them.’

Ayşe sat down in front of him. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘What I want you to do, Ayşe, is to check our records for men who have been convicted of offences against homosexuals in the past. Now, as you may or may not know, Sergeant Melik has already run a check, but what I’d like you to do is look at the details surrounding the offences committed by these individuals. There is a possibility that the peeper is connected to, or habitually present at, homosexual meeting places – clubs, hamams. Find out which of our offenders is either known to frequent such places or was maybe apprehended in a homosexual meeting place.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He took several sheets of paper out of his desk drawer and passed them across to her. ‘Here is the list,’ he said, and then added with a smile, ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you which clubs are which, do I?’

She smiled too. ‘No, sir.’

‘All right then.’

Taking this as her cue to leave, Ayşe made her way towards the office door. Just before she turned the handle he added, ‘Oh and Sergeant, if Sergeant Melik . . .’

‘Oh come on, sir,’ she said with a smile, ‘I can handle a maganda.’

And with a slight raising of her eyebrows she was off. Süleyman laughed. The concept of the maganda, a coarse, arrogant, sexually inept macho man, had been born out of the satirical İstanbul weeklies of the early 1990s. Read, in the main, by youthful intellectuals, these magazines had sometimes slipped into Süleyman’s world via his young friend Berekiah Cohen who found them very amusing. The maganda, Berekiah was fond of saying, bore more than just a passing resemblance to his father, Balthazar.

However, memories of Berekiah also brought to mind images of the hamam in Karaköy which he had spent some hours watching two nights before. In view of what he’d seen in Zelfa’s garden, was it possible that someone had seen him there, followed him to his car and then pursued the white BMW home the following night? Could it possibly be the peeper who maybe thought that
he
was homosexual? He’d spoken to a rather smart man who had appeared to be attracted to him – they had indeed watched each other leave the vicinity. There had also been that fellow lurking further away, down the hill in a shop doorway. It was all speculative and tenuous, of course, but then it was well known that middle-aged homosexual life in the city was itself furtive and opportunistic. Süleyman ground his cigarette out in his ashtray and then shook his head impatiently. But this was all utterly ridiculous – and paranoid. Why anyone should follow him home was stupid. He wasn’t young, he wasn’t gay – not really. What he was was somewhat guilty about his unofficial trip to the hamam as well as being aware of the effect that his undisputed good looks had had upon some of the men outside the bath. But to think that one of them would go so far as to follow him home had to be a deeply paranoid and arrogant notion on his part. He resolved to put it to the back of his mind. He did not, however, resolve not to observe the Saray Hamam ever again.

‘Up there it is a completely different experience,’ the German said with a smile. ‘In a sense you can almost see those ancient tectonic catastrophes as they happen.’

He was so enthusiastic, it was difficult not to be carried away by it all. However, as he had told İkmen in some detail, balloon flights were not cheap.

‘Because we have to be expert pilots and because of the maintenance we have to do on the equipment,’ he’d said in English and had then gone on to quote İkmen a price in US dollars which translated into a truly horrific lire tariff.

‘I was actually thinking of hiking through the valleys, maybe with Turgut Senar,’ İkmen said as he downed the last dregs of his cappuccino before calling for another. The Cappudocia Coffee Bean, or rather its signature product, did its Anglo-Turkish management proud. As a meeting place for expatriates of various hues it was also quite interesting too. Maybe outside Ramazan they were not so conservative in their beverage tastes, but certainly in the Holy Month cappuccino in the hours of daylight seemed to be de rigueur. Ferdinand, the German hot air balloon pilot, obviously used the place a lot because it was directly across the road from his own business, Muratpaşa Balloon Flights.

‘Well, now that you say this,’ Ferdinand said with a smile, ‘did you know that we do a combined short flight and then a hike with Turgut through the White Valley and up into the Valley of the Saints?’

İkmen’s ears pricked up at the mention of the latter destination.

‘We fly out to the head of the White Valley where we land and then customers go off with Turgut to walk to the Valley of the Saints – five kilometres.’

Appalled at the way this man so glibly uttered such a vast distance, İkmen nevertheless managed to quash the urge to laugh nervously and instead smiled at the English partner in the Cappudocia, the very lively Marion.

‘Cappuccino with cinnamon sprinkles, Inspector,’ she said as she placed a huge white cup and saucer down in front of him.

‘Thank you.’

‘And when Turgut has shown you the Saints, one of our support vehicles will come to bring you back to the village,’ Ferdinand continued. He then mentioned a rather smaller dollar figure for this service and, once İkmen had told him that he was related to Menşure Tokatlı, that figure reduced still further. It was good to see that at least one of the many foreigners resident in the village had some understanding of its hierarchies.

However, it was still rather a large amount of money for a mere policeman to afford and İkmen knew that he should speak to Fatma about it first. But then he thought about how hard he had always worked and how much he deserved that one, paltry credit card that only he knew about, and so he signed up with Ferdinand right away.

‘You won’t regret it,’ the German said as he handed over a handwritten ticket for the next day’s flight. ‘The snow will be almost gone by the morning and the air will be as clear as spring water. I know these conditions, trust me.’

It was only then that Ferdinand hit İkmen with the news that they would be setting off at 4 a.m. in order to catch the sunrise over the valleys. But by then it was far too late.

Once the German had gone, İkmen, alone with his cappuccino, began to wonder about the advisability as well as the utility of what he had just done. In order to see where Aysu Alkaya had been killed he needed to get out to the Valley of the Saints and, had he asked him, Inspector Erten from Nevşehir would probably have arranged it for him. But there was a lot about being guided there by Kemalettin Senar’s brother that intrigued him. That someone who had, at one time, been suspected of killing the girl had a brother who knew the valleys so well had to be known to the police in Nevşehir. He wasn’t therefore doing anything that he shouldn’t. The balloon flight itself was, of course, a total extravagance that so ably demonstrated his own physical laziness. But even so, five kilometres . . .

Leaning back in his chair, İkmen lit a cigarette and then closed his eyes. The American woman, Dolores Lavell, had said something rather interesting. Her father who had, apparently, been in the US army in the fifties and sixties had visited Cappadocia with his ‘buddies’. Had any of them, İkmen wondered, brought their side arms with them, the odd Colt 45, perhaps? Considering that Dolores’ father was dead, there was no way of knowing now. But it was an interesting line of speculation, namely because it raised the issue of how such a weapon had come to be in Muratpaşa. Mr Lavell had, of course, visited long before Aysu Alkaya’s death, but other visitors from the US had been coming ever since as Nazlı Kahraman had told him.

İkmen’s mobile phone rang, and so he opened his eyes, took it out of his pocket, and answered it.

‘Çetin, it’s Arto,’ a familiar voice began. ‘Something about forensic samples or . . .’

İkmen moved out on to the café’s balcony and briefly explained what he had had in mind to the pathologist.

‘I thought that if we could get their doctor in Nevşehir to take samples from the woman and the foetus, I could arrange for them to be sent to you,’ İkmen said.

‘Or I could take the samples myself,’ his friend replied.

‘You can’t come all the way from İstanbul! I wouldn’t ask it of you!’

‘But I’m not in İstanbul,’ Arto replied with an obvious smile in his voice.

‘So where are you?’ İkmen asked.

‘I’m in Ankara. Four hours from you if I put my foot down.’

‘What are you doing in Ankara?’

‘I’m showing a guest the sights,’ he said. ‘The Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Anıt Kabir. It’s my cousin Atom – you know, my Aunt Sylvie’s son. He’s a lot younger than Krikor and me. Atom was born and brought up in Munich.’

With Arto one usually got the entire story of almost everyone’s lives.

‘But if you are showing Atom the country . . .’

‘Then I could take him home to İstanbul via Muratpaşa,’ Arto said. ‘We’re leaving here on Saturday. I could drive us all back home once I’ve collected the samples, if you like.’

After silently offering up thanks to Allah for his good fortune, İkmen resorted to an old Ottoman expression of self-abasement in order to express his gratitude. ‘You know, Arto,’ he said, ‘that I am not fit to pour water for you to wash your hands.’