Dance with Death (2 page)

‘I think I’ll go outside and see if it’s raining,’ Türkân said.

‘If you want to,’ Hande replied. ‘But do be careful, won’t you? You don’t want to fall over and hurt yourself all the way out here.’

Türkân smiled. How nervous Hande was of the countryside! ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I know the chimneys and they know me.’

And then she walked out through the rough-hewn doorway and made her way outside. This left Hande and Ferhat alone in a natural geological structure known locally as a Fairy Chimney. Made of a volcanic substance called tufa, the chimneys were conical structures that over the thousands of years of their existence had provided shelter and places of work and worship for the local inhabitants. There were, as Hande and Ferhat had discovered since they had moved into the area, tens of thousands of these things, many of which were decorated with frescos and carvings.

After they’d stared at the fresco, which featured indistinct figures weathered by time, Ferhat and Hande decided to go a little deeper into this cluster of chimneys through a small tunnel off to the left.

‘Don’t you think we should tell Türkân what we’re doing?’ Hande said as she nevertheless allowed her cousin to pull her along after him.

‘We’ll only be a minute,’ Ferhat said. ‘She can wait that long, can’t she?’

He wasn’t really taken with any of the locals, male or female. A lot of them were religious, which Ferhat wasn’t, and those that weren’t seemed to him to be interested in little beyond making quick money. Some of them were decidedly odd, too, something his friend and fellow jandarma, Abdulhamid, said was due to ‘inbreeding’. ‘You get that in villages,’ Abdulhamid, who was from İzmir, had said. ‘Family relationships that are far too close, if you know what I mean. And here with all of these penises around . . .’ All of the young jandarma had laughed at that. The locals may well call them ‘Fairy Chimneys’, but everyone knew what they REALLY looked like, including young high school girls like Hande and Türkân.

Once through the tunnel, what Ferhat and Hande found themselves in wasn’t actually another chimney, but a cave in the side of the escarpment behind the cluster of chimneys. It was very dark and smelt rather more earthy than the volcanic tufa had done. Ferhat switched on his torch once again and quickly flashed its beam around what appeared to be a considerable space.

‘I expect these caves go on for kilometres,’ he said. ‘You know, back into the escarpment.’

‘It doesn’t smell very nice in here,’ Hande said as she wrinkled up her nose at the rich smell of damp and rot. ‘I think that we should go back for Türkân now.’

‘I thought we were meant to be exploring,’ Ferhat said. ‘Just because she thinks I’m going to touch her or something . . .’

‘Ferhat!’

‘Well,’ he said as he hunkered down and then shone the torch into yet another, even smaller, tunnel into the ground, ‘I’m sorry, Hande, but this place does make me tired. Everyone looks at us as if we’re some kind of threat. Even the tourists give us a wide berth! The gendarmerie is here for their benefit as much as anyone else’s.’ And then, almost folding himself in half, Ferhat slipped into the tunnel and disappeared.

‘Ferhat!’

‘It’s all right,’ she heard him say through the almost total darkness. ‘I’ll just be one minute.’

‘But it’s dark!’ Hande cried. ‘Don’t leave me!’

‘I’ll be just one minute!’ she heard his disgruntled and muffled voice pour through the rock. ‘It won’t kill you just to wait for a minute.’

Hande thought about trying to find somewhere to sit down but then thought better of it. This cave stank and who knew what ‘things’ or creatures it might have within its walls? Local people and even some of the jandarma told stories about bats and wolves living in the far-flung valleys of chimneys, like this one. Then, of course, there were supernatural stories, too – about malignant peris and djinn waiting in dark places to rob men and women of their souls. It was all rubbish of course, but as ‘a minute’ turned into several minutes, Hande began to feel an irrational panic settling on to her chest.

‘Ferhat?’ she said, quietly at first, and then, when he didn’t answer, with more force, ‘Ferhat!’

But neither sound nor light came from the small tunnel that Hande could no longer actually see. What was going on? She hadn’t heard any noise from where Ferhat had gone and so she couldn’t imagine that he had fallen over or anything like that. Had he, perhaps, gone off somewhere else? He’d said that he wouldn’t do that, but maybe if he’d found something, another tunnel, maybe that really interested him . . .

‘Ferhat!’ She was getting a little angry now and it showed in her voice. ‘Ferhat, I’m all alone here, in the dark!’

But when that didn’t appear to elicit any response, Hande wondered whether she should try to find the way they’d come into this cave and go outside to join Türkân. But she could no more find that tunnel than the one that Ferhat had slithered down and so, more out of frustration than anything else, Hande began to cry. She was, after all, only thirteen years old, little more than a child, really – even though the city-bred Hande would rather have died than admit it. If Ferhat did ever turn up again and he told anyone about it, she would just deny that she’d cried at all. İstanbul girls did not, after all, do such things.

‘Hande!’

The torch caught the tears on her cheeks before she could even think of wiping them away. Not that it mattered much because Ferhat was back now and, suddenly, that was all that she cared about.

‘Hande,’ he said breathlessly, ‘we have to get back to the gendarmerie.’

There was something different about her cousin that went beyond the sudden paleness of his skin.

‘Ferhat?’

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her after him with what seemed to Hande to be tremendous urgency.

‘Ferhat, what is it? What . . .’

But he didn’t speak again except, when they got outside, to tell Türkân to come with them. It was raining a little bit now and so it would have seemed more sensible, to the girls at least, to shelter amongst the chimneys until the weather cleared up. But Ferhat wanted them all to go back to the jeep and quickly.

‘Come on! Come on!’ he said to the girls as they struggled to keep up with him. Rocky, uneven ground like the terrain around the chimneys isn’t kind to ordinary, non-military shoes and so Hande and Türkân were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to following Ferhat.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ Türkân asked as she and Hande watched Ferhat race down a slope towards his waiting jeep.

‘I don’t know,’ Hande said. ‘It’s almost as if something in that cave frightened him.’

By the time the girls reached the jeep, Ferhat was already on the radio.

‘Captain Göktaş?’ he was saying and then he followed this with, ‘Yes, sir . . . I’ve found a dead body, sir . . .’

Türkân and Hande looked at each other with big, frightened eyes.

‘In a cave at the northern end of the Valley of the Saints,’ Ferhat continued.

‘Ferhat . . .’

He held up a hand to silence his cousin and then spoke again into the radio. ‘Well, neither, really, sir . . . No, it’s old but it isn’t a skeleton. I think it’s a, well it’s sort of a mummy, I suppose, sir.’

A mummy? In that cave Ferhat had slipped into, the one next door to the cave where she had stood alone in darkness for all that time? Hande first put one fist up to her mouth and then buried her head in the folds of Türkân’s headscarf. Türkân looked at Ferhat, at the fear she could now see in his eyes, and then gently stroked her friend’s hair.

Something unpleasant had come to pass in the land of the Fairy Chimneys and for once Hande, the city girl, was a lot more frightened than Türkân. After all, as any Cappadocian will tell you, out amongst the chimneys anything is possible.

It was one of those rare autumn days in İstanbul when the sun is hot enough to allow people to sit comfortably outside. Provided one goes to one of the old imperial parks or has a balcony or garden to sit in, days like this can be extremely pleasant. Indeed, one such private garden attached to a rather down-at-heel Ottoman house in the Bosphorus village of Arnavautköy rang to the sound of the companionable chatter of men, if not at peace with the world, at least getting along with it. Watched by a much older, elegant man sitting at a table, two attractive men in their forties were slouching in garden loungers, talking. The taller and more striking of the two was wearing swimming trunks and smoking a cigarette.

‘Well, look, if you want to go out to a club, then you go,’ he said to the other man who was slightly older and much more amused.

‘Mehmet, you haven’t been out for, how long?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t think about such things,’ Mehmet replied a trifle tetchily.

‘Murad is only thinking of your happiness, Mehmet,’ the elderly man at the table put in. ‘It isn’t right that you should be so lonely at your age.’

‘Father, I am not lonely,’ Mehmet said as he shot an arrogant glance across at Murad. ‘But if my brother wants to go to clubs and probably make an idiot of himself with women half his age then that is his affair.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in his ashtray and then immediately lit another.

Muhammed Süleyman looked upon all of this with gently amused eyes. Both of his boys were currently without a wife and, he felt, quite unhappy too. But Murad, his eldest, was at least admitting it. A widower since the terrible earthquake of 1999, Murad had sole custody of his daughter Edibe and was very happy with that. But he recognised that now, four years on from that event, he needed something more than work and fatherhood in his life. Mehmet, on the other hand, had thrown himself into his work as a senior police officer as never before. Separated from his wife for a year, he still loved her and the small son he was forced to spend most of his time away from. Mehmet was, his father felt, a deeply unhappy man, now quite incapable, for most of the time, of enjoying himself. That both of his boys had come home to live wasn’t ideal either, mainly because their mother, who was mercifully out shopping now, nagged them about everything from remarrying to their choice of bread. Poor boys, Muhammed Süleyman thought sadly, it shouldn’t have been this way for you.

‘So how are you getting on with this new sergeant of yours?’ Murad said brightly. It was always better to change the subject when Mehmet was being moody and his work was generally a pretty safe topic of conversation.

‘İzzet Melik is an insufferable peasant!’ Mehmet snapped.

‘Ah, now come along, child,’ his father put in, ‘there is no class in modern Turkey. I know that we, our family, are of the old order . . .’

‘I was speaking psychologically, Father,’ Mehmet said. ‘İzzet’s people are probably far better off than ourselves. They’re middle-class İzmir folk. But the man is coarse, devoid of taste, and I don’t like the way he treats our female officers. It’s crude and offensive. My dislike of him has nothing to do with what we are, or were.’

Until what was left of the Ottoman Empire became the Turkish Republic in 1923, the Süleyman family had been extremely wealthy. Related by marriage to several Sultans, the family had once owned property on the Bosphorus, which had only, finally, been sold when Mehmet was a child. Muhammed’s father had actually been a prince and there were still some, generally elderly, people, who insisted upon referring to the older Süleyman by the princely title of ‘Effendi’.

‘It’s a pity that İsak left,’ the old man said. ‘He was a nice lad, you seemed settled with him.’

‘Yes . . .’

It had now been almost a year since Sergeant İsak Çöktin had resigned from the İstanbul police force. A follower of the native Kurdish religion of the Yezidi, İsak had felt unable to continue with his duties when his private and professional lives had come into almost disastrous conflict the previous year. Since then Inspector Mehmet Süleyman had suffered first one young woman who couldn’t get on with what his department did and now İzzet. But then working in homicide was not, as Mehmet would have been the first to admit, for everyone. As the man who had been his own boss many years before, Inspector Çetin İkmen, was fond of saying, murder can be performed in any sick and foul way one cares to imagine and many that one cannot. Bringing those who engage in it to justice is not a task lightly done.

‘But then maybe what we’re doing at the moment isn’t stretching İzzet to his full potential,’ Mehmet said. ‘Who knows what he’s really like under pressure?’

What they were currently engaged in was not actually a homicide investigation. Someone, as yet unknown, had been first peeping in to rooms occupied by young, unmarried men and then, later, this had escalated to sexual assault. Nobody had been killed yet, but as Mehmet Süleyman knew from experience, these situations did tend to progress and the assailant, a large man by all accounts, was apparently armed. In addition, the victim of a male rape was currently so traumatised that his psychiatrist had put him on suicide watch. It was, as his wife would have said in her native English language, ‘all going to come on top’ very soon.

Muhammed Süleyman fitted a cigarette into his silver holder and waited for one of his sons to provide him with a light. It was one of the few vestiges that remained from the old man’s servant-crowded past and so his sons generally indulged this small peccadillo without complaint. Murad got up and lit it for him just as they heard the front door bell ring.

‘I’ll get it,’ he said as he looked at his elegantly unmoving father and barely clad brother.

‘If it’s your Uncle Beyazıt, come and warn us, won’t you?’ Muhammed said to Murad. ‘You know how he is and if he sees us smoking in the hours of daylight . . .’

‘He’s still very strict about Ramazan?’

‘My brother is still very strict about everything,’ Muhammed said gloomily. ‘But then I can remember when you were a good Muslim too, Mehmet. Not too many years ago.’