Dance with Death (20 page)

‘My colleague the pathologist won’t be able to get here until tomorrow,’ İkmen interrupted. ‘Some problem with his car. Can we still get in to the mortuary and take samples tomorrow?’

Erten, still nervous in his manner but smiling now, said there was no problem and so Arto Sarkissian made arrangements to pick İkmen up first before going on to Nevşehir the following morning. Once all of this had been organised, İkmen turned back to the young Englishman and said, ‘So it would seem I have an extra night here, Tom.’

‘That’s great,’ the boy replied. He had really taken to İkmen – a feeling the Turk experienced as mutual. ‘Maybe dinner tonight, or . . .’

‘I’d love to,’ İkmen said.

Tom stood up and, nodding towards Erten, said to İkmen, ‘About eight? Here in the restaurant? I’m off to the underground city at Derinkuyu today and I can see you’re busy.’

‘Fine. That’s OK,’ İkmen said, smiling as he watched the young man walk out of the large, bright restaurant. He then turned his attention fully on to Erten. ‘So, you need to speak to me?’

‘I came over here this morning, Inspector,’ he said, ‘because, as I understand it, we will need to take some samples from those involved in the Aysu Alkaya case for comparison with what may be discovered in İstanbul.’

İkmen, frowning, lit up another cigarette.

Erten, mildly shocked by this behaviour, muttered, ‘Oh, I say.’

‘Yes? And?’

‘Oh, er, well, I was . . . Do we have to do that now, so that all the samples from everyone can be sent off to the laboratory together as it were?’

‘That would be ideal,’ İkmen said, ‘although unless you actually have a suspect in custody, you will either have to ask permission from those you wish to test or get a warrant to do so.’

‘Ah, yes . . .’ İkmen noticed that he was looking hungrily at the cigarette he was so casually smoking.

‘And you need swabs,’ İkmen continued. ‘Didn’t you speak to your doctor about all this?’

‘Yes. Yes.’ Erten smiled his vague little smile and said, ‘But he said he’d never done such a thing. DNA, you know. He’s near to retirement, you see, and . . .’

‘Look, Dr Sarkissian can’t now get here until tomorrow, so let’s just let him take his samples, have the tests done and see what happens,’ İkmen said. ‘It may well be that we don’t get any samples to form comparisons with. And if that is the case, going through this process that I know some of these villagers fear will have all been for nothing.’

‘You’ve spoken to some of the villagers about DNA testing?’ Erten asked nervously.

‘I’ve spoken to Turgut Senar,’ he replied. ‘A rather worried man, I felt.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mmm.’ Erten placed one thin hand up to his lips and then said, ‘You know I have to re-interview the Senars, the Kahramans and Haldun Alkaya. I have to do that anyway.’

‘Yes, I know.’ İkmen smiled. ‘I’ve actually met most of them myself. I expect you know that I knew an English girl who went missing here some years ago.’

‘I heard something about that, yes.’

‘And so I’ve spoken to some people . . .’ It was not, İkmen felt, a very good idea, even to one as mild-mannered as Erten, to let on just how much information he had gleaned about Aysu Alkaya from these individuals. However, there was one person he had not yet seen or spoken to, and in spite of his reservations he couldn’t resist letting this slip to the man from Nevşehir. ‘Not Kemalettin Senar’s mother, though, Nalan, is it? I haven’t yet seen her . . .’

‘Oh, right,’ Erten said, and as he watched İkmen first extinguish one cigarette and then immediately light another, he said it again, ‘Oh, right.’

Menşure Tokatlı, who had been listening to some of this conversation from her position over by the breakfast buffet, sighed with impatience. All these niceties, hints and suggestions these grown men used, were such a waste of time! Çetin was much more intelligent and important than that little bundle of rags from Nevşehir. Why he didn’t just tell the man he was going to see Nalan Senar and question the woman, Menşure couldn’t imagine. Irritated, she went off to get more coffee for her guests.

It was impossible to know exactly what Zelfa was thinking about the situation just from idle conversation. Mehmet Süleyman had telephoned his wife the previous evening in order, he hoped, to try to discuss their relationship – if indeed such a thing existed. But she had been too distracted to talk and so that was why he had arranged this small shopping trip to İstiklal Caddesi. Saturday was, after all, supposed to be his day off and so although his mind was still troubled by the peeper, by the disturbing Mürsel Bey and other worries, he decided that a trip to the music shops and bookshops along İstiklal Caddesi would make both himself and Zelfa feel better. And with his mother and father looking after Yusuf for the morning it would not only be like the ‘old days’ for the couple, but would also give them a chance to talk.

Usually when he went up into the Beyoğlu area, Süleyman parked his car outside the Cohens’ apartment in Karaköy on Büyük Hendek Sokak. But Saturdays were a bad time for parking in that area. The Cohens’ apartment was almost opposite the Neve Şalom Synagogue, and as there was a ban on parking directly outside it, combined with the many cars of those attending Saturday prayers in the vicinity, parking was virtually impossible. So, after an early and really quite promising start (Zelfa had kissed him passionately just after they left his parents’ house in Arnavautköy), he parked up on Tomtom Kaptan Sokak, up by the rear of the Catholic church of St Mary Draperis. From Tomtom Kaptan it was a short walk up to İstiklal Caddesi and the Robinson Crusoe bookshop where Zelfa could indulge her interest in English language literature. One credit-card transaction for books including Peter Ackroyd’s
Hawksmoor
and Mark Twain’s
The Innocents Abroad
later, they left and were about to seek out coffee and maybe cakes when a familiar figure pushing a buggy came towards them.

‘Hulya!’

The young woman looked up into the faces of friends she thought were no longer talking to each other. The fact that they were together and holding hands made her smile.

‘Hello, Mehmet, hello, Zelfa,’ she said, then looked around for the couple’s child. She frowned. ‘No Yusuf?’

‘My parents are looking after him for the morning,’ Mehmet said as he looked down and smiled at the sleeping infant in Hulya İkmen Cohen’s buggy. ‘You know how grandparents like to spoil the grandchildren.’

Hulya rolled her eyes. ‘Oh yes. Timur already has every toy that money can buy for babies his age, and older, and clothes . . .’

‘Your parents?’

‘And Berekiah’s mother,’ Hulya replied. ‘Honestly, it’s like a sultan has just been born!’

‘How is Berekiah?’ Zelfa asked as she looked into the buggy and clucked just a little. ‘He’s at work today, isn’t he?’

‘No,’ Hulya said. ‘Old Mr Lazar is religious and so Berekiah always gets Saturdays off to go to synagogue. Not that he ever does go.’ She laughed. ‘He’s still asleep.’

Mehmet looked at his watch and saw that it was almost ten. He raised his eyebrows, but then he smiled again. ‘Ah, but the gold merchants open early and shut late for the rest of the week . . .’

‘When your husband works in the Kapalı Çarsı you don’t get to see too much of him,’ Hulya said to Zelfa.

‘I know something of how that feels,’ the older woman said as she looked up at her tall, handsome husband. ‘Yes, I do.’

Mehmet Süleyman was about to add something to the conversation which he felt was amusing, when the whole of İstiklal Caddesi seemed to take a leap sideways. People stopped talking, faces assumed a greying pallor and, as soon as some sort of grasp was gained about what may or may not have happened, men and women looked up to see a thick pall of smoke scar the morning sky. It hung, like a threat, over the Karaköy area.

For a second, Hulya just stared and then she said quietly, ‘Berekiah.’

People were screaming now and first one, then what seemed like hundreds of sirens, rent the air with their ominous wailing.

Mehmet looked at his wife and said, ‘Take Hulya and Timur to the car and drive home.’

He took his car keys out of his pocket and dropped them into her hands.

‘Berekiah!’ The girl turned as if to make her way back down İstiklal, the buggy under her hands, her eyes full of tears.

Mehmet Süleyman moved quickly to block her path. ‘No, go with Zelfa now, Hulya.’

‘Berekiah!’ She looked up at the ever-rising pall of smoke and screamed.

‘We don’t know what’s happened,’ Süleyman said as he took hold of her shoulders and held her tightly in front of him. ‘I will go and find out. I promise. But you and the baby must go with Zelfa. You must make sure that Timur is safe.’

Zelfa moved forward to get a hold on the young woman and thereby allow her husband to leave. For just a brief moment the two of them shared a terrified glance and then Zelfa said, ‘Be careful, Mehmet. Please.’

He leaned in to kiss her quickly, and then he was gone, running down towards the Tünel funicular railway station, towards the raffish old district of Karaköy. Every step he took brought him closer to the smoke and to the ghastly and awfully familiar smell that accompanied it. The human body first cooks before incinerating when it comes into contact with fire. This was a gas explosion or, worse, a bomb. As his chest began to heave with the lack of oxygen, Süleyman couldn’t help but think of other explosions in other parts of the world and of those who had perpetrated them. He thought also of those they had been perpetrated against. By the time he reached Ilk Belediye he knew. Everything was leading him towards Büyük Hendek Sokak and the Neve Şalom Synagogue. As he drew level with the intersection between Ilk Belediye and Büyük Hendek, he even closed his eyes for a moment, in order to give himself the illusion of denial for a few seconds longer. But when he opened them it was like the aftermath of the 1999 earthquake all over again – craters in the ground, bodies – some still living – pinned beneath glass and stone and wood, and the screaming . . .

‘Sir!’

Although he was out of uniform, Constable Hikmet Yıldız was instantly recognisable and in this inferno was a slight comfort to him.

‘Yıldız!’

The two men briefly, if fiercely, embraced.

‘They’ve taken out the front of the synagogue,’ the young man said and then, suddenly gripped by the full horror of what he had just seen, he screamed, ‘There’s a girl with no head! Allah, save us!’

‘Who’s taken out the synagogue?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What?’

‘I don’t know!’ Yıldız replied. ‘I don’t know! I was just going up to buy a CD and then . . .’

He began to cry. Süleyman put an arm round his shoulders and moved him towards a group of uniformed officers who had arrived to keep the public back from the terrible scene and the work of the medics who were fighting to save what lives they could. As he approached the officers, he took out his ID card and showed it to them. They saluted.

‘What’s happening here?’ he asked.

One of the men broke ranks and pulled Süleyman and Yıldız to one side. Crowds, many of them wounded and crying, were beginning to form and the officer was keen to keep this senior policeman out of their way.

‘We think it was a car bomb, sir,’ he said. ‘Suicide. Driven into the front of the synagogue, right at the people at prayer.’

‘Allah.’

‘Men, women, children.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘They didn’t stand a chance!’

And then once he’d torn his gaze away from the front of the shattered synagogue, Süleyman made himself look at what, for him, was an even more painful sight – the apartment buildings, or rather what remained of them, opposite the place of worship. Shattered windows were just the least of it. In some places whole chunks of the façades, people’s living rooms, were hanging down into the street. On the first floor, the level upon which the Cohen family lived, a large iron bedstead hung from what had once been a window. There was no sign of life from that quarter. Amid the screams of the dying and the tears of the living there wasn’t a sound from the apartment building or anyone in it. Berekiah Cohen had, Süleyman knew, been in his bed . . .

Nalan Senar was a woman who, İkmen felt, liked to make an impression. On the one hand she was a pious, covered village woman, the very image of respectability, but on the other? Nalan Senar wore far too much jewellery on and around her heavy clothing to be the ‘poor peasant’ she purported to be. In addition, her house, as well as being home to a very large dog, was also the site of a huge amount of very sophisticated electronic equipment. Not that any of it was actually working when İkmen and Erten went to visit the woman that grey Saturday morning.

‘Kemalettin knows how to do this stuff,’ she said as she held a handful of remote controls up for the policemen to see. ‘He is the watcher of television.’

‘Where is Kemalettin, Mrs Senar?’ Erten asked as he first took off his shoes and then sat down in the seat the woman directed him to.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied with some resentment in her voice. ‘Why? Did you want to see him?’

‘No,’ the Nevşehir man said with a smile. ‘It is you we’ve come to see. I expect you’ve heard about Inspector İkmen from İstanbul and what he has arranged for Aysu Alkaya’s remains.’

‘Yes.’ She eyed İkmen narrowly before offering him a seat alongside that of his rural colleague. ‘Some tests,’ she said as she, too, sat down, pulling her headscarf tightly down round what looked like a lot of blond hair as she did so. ‘Turgut has told me a little about it. He says they show what a man really is.’

‘In a way, yes. They’re called DNA tests,’ İkmen expanded. ‘If tissue – skin, hair or nails – from whoever was with Aysu on the night that she died has survived from that time then our scientists will be able to match that to people known to have been involved with the girl.’