Ikmen 16 - Body Count (22 page)

‘Did you sleep with him?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

She heard her brother clear his throat and spit in disgust.

‘And if I hadn’t, how much slack do you think the police would have cut you, eh?’ she said.

‘Oh, so you sacrificed yourself for me.’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, I did,
Ş
ukru. Süleyman can come after you whenever he wants, but he left you to me.’

‘Because you opened your legs to him willingly.’ His voice was bitter now, and Gonca began to feel just a little bit afraid.
Ş
ukru was capable of murder; he’d done it before. Even if she had given herself to Süleyman to protect him, he wouldn’t forgive her.

‘
Ş
ukru, come back,’ she said. ‘Come now and I will never have anything to do with Süleyman again.’

But he put the phone down on her, which was frustrating, but which at least meant that she didn’t have to lie to him about Süleyman, not in the near future. Now that she had Mehmet Süleyman in her life again, she was never going to let him go.

It was late by the time Süleyman returned to the station. He’d sent Ömer Mungan home when they left the office of Selçuk Devrim, the late Levent Devrim’s brother. Try as he might, Selçuk had not been able to make any sort of connection between his own family and that of the deposed Osmano
ğ
lu dynasty. The Devrims had been high-ranking soldiers and faithful followers of Atatürk.

‘Unlike poor John Regan’s family,’
İ
kmen said when his friend and colleague entered his office.

Süleyman sat down at Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu’s desk. ‘What happened?’

İ
kmen told him about Abdurrahman
Ş
afak and his low opinion of his nephew’s now defunct literary project.

‘But of course they’d hate it,’ Süleyman said. ‘Especially now.’

‘What do you mean?’
İ
kmen asked. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth for comfort. Soon he’d suggest that they both went down to the car park for a smoke.

‘Because this government is the first one since Atatürk to pay them any attention,’ he said. ‘The AKP like the Ottomans, provided they present themselves as good Muslims.’

‘But half your ancestors were drunks!’
İ
kmen said.

Süleyman laughed. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘But don’t say it too loud, Çetin; some of these old efendis almost see themselves as constitutional monarchs these days.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘Tell that to my mother.’

Briefly they both laughed.

But then Süleyman’s face dropped. ‘It’s like resurrecting a corpse,’ he said. ‘Our time has come and gone.’

‘Ah, it’s not a connection that works across all our victims anyway,’
İ
kmen said. But there had been something particularly creepy about Abdurrahman
Ş
afak … He said nothing.

Süleyman leaned his elbows on Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu’s desk and said, ‘You know, Çetin, when I was with Levent Devrim’s brother, I began thinking about those equations we found scrawled across his apartment walls.’

‘In what sense?’

‘In the sense that although we know that the formulae are mathematically insignificant, we don’t know if they have any other sort of meaning.’

‘Didn’t you check out occult meanings? Mr Devrim was a somewhat alternative man, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, but nothing came up,’ Süleyman said. ‘Doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Maybe the right person just hasn’t seen them yet. What if we publish photographs of the equations from the apartment?’

‘In the press?’

‘Yes. Maybe they were just mad numbers in his head. If so, we’ve reached a dead end. But what if they have meaning for other people too? People we just haven’t accessed yet?’

İ
kmen frowned. ‘We’ve had enough trouble with the number twenty-one, if you remember, Mehmet. I’ve more unsolicited tarot cards than—’

‘Yes, I am aware of the possibility that every lunatic in the city and beyond may very well contact us with the intimate details of their theories of life, death and everything in between, but if that means we find someone who can really unravel those numbers …’

‘Mmm.’

The office door opened and Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu came in carrying a large sheet of paper. When she saw Süleyman she said, ‘Oh, Mehmet Bey, I didn’t know …’

‘Ay
ş
e,’
İ
kmen said, ‘you may as well finish for the day. Inspector Süleyman and myself are just discussing a few points.’

‘Oh. Right.’ She pulled a tight smile and put the document she was carrying on
İ
kmen’s desk. ‘That’s the photocopy of Mr
Ş
afak’s family tree,’ she said.

‘Thank you, Ay
ş
e.’

‘Sir.’ Reaching behind Süleyman, she took her jacket off the back of her chair. Briefly their eyes met but neither of them said anything. Then she left.

İ
kmen, who had been looking at the document she had given him, said, ‘And here we have John Regan’s Osmano
ğ
lu relatives. Endless, endless relatives.’ He looked up. ‘How, if our murderer is targeting this family – maybe Levent Devrim was a mistake – are we supposed to warn all these people without alarming them, and how can we possibly provide them, or rather you, with protection?’

‘Me?’

‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’
İ
kmen said. ‘How extensive is the Süleyman side of the family?’

‘It’s big.’

‘Precisely,’
İ
kmen said.

For a moment they sat in silence, and then Süleyman said, ‘We can only do what we can. We can’t control everything. I’ll be honest, Çetin, I feel as if I’m losing touch with some of the early details about these deaths, like the maths on Levent Devrim’s walls, like the testimony the boy Hamid gave about having seen a monster leaning over Levent Bey’s body.’

‘Which takes us back to the gypsy
Ş
ukru
Ş
ekero
ğ
lu,’
İ
kmen said.

Süleyman looked uncomfortable.
İ
kmen ignored it. ‘Once he is back … But I leave that to you.’ He looked down at the
Ş
afak family tree again. ‘I do agree with you about Levent Devrim’s equations, though,’ he said. ‘Let’s clear it with Ard
ı
ç and see what happens. How bad, after all, can a deluge of delusion actually be?’

İ
kmen left before Süleyman, who had to go back to his own office to collect his briefcase. When he went out to his car,
İ
kmen had already gone. But Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu was waiting over by the entrance to the car park, smoking. ‘Are you coming over tonight, or …’

He lifted up the briefcase and said, ‘Sorry. Things to do.’

As he got into his car, he watched her face cave in on itself with disappointment. But he stuck to his guns and started the engine. Across the car park he saw her walk slowly towards her own car and get in, and he felt more than just a twinge of guilt. Once out of the car park and headed towards Balat and the waiting arms of Gonca, though, he soon started to feel better.

Her daughter and her friends stayed in the house in spite of the good weather, but Gonca preferred to sit outside. The sun was warm, and with H
ı
d
ı
rellez only two days away, she wanted to make sure that her plants looked good for the festival. As a girl, before her first marriage, Gonca had always become very excited just before H
ı
d
ı
rellez. Not only was it a time of feasting and fun, it was also a small window of opportunity when young gypsy girls might meet young gypsy boys and fall in love. Back then she’d been in love with at least ten boys and had flirted with them all. Now she was in love with just one, a man whose name she was going to write on a ribbon and fix to the mulberry bush in the corner of the garden the night before the festival. Her need for him would be blessed by the prophets H
ı
z
ı
r and
İ
lyas, whose meeting on the earth thousands of years before was celebrated every spring at H
ı
d
ı
rellez.

But Gonca’s thoughts were not just concerned with Mehmet Süleyman. She hadn’t seen him for days. This was, he said, because he was very busy. She hoped he wasn’t lying to her. But Gonca also thought about her brother. After the business with
Ş
eftali the prostitute’s son, he’d gone to stay with some relatives in Edirne. He hadn’t told her himself, but when Gonca had called an old aunt of theirs in Edirne, she’d quacked with the pleasure of having ‘our dear
Ş
ukru’ in the town again. Gonca hadn’t told her lover any of that, even though she had promised on her honour to do so. What was honour anyway? What use did she have for something non-gypsies had always denied her people? Her only fear was if Süleyman found out that she knew where her brother was. Would he leave her and go back to that insipid policewoman if that happened?

Her job was to keep Mehmet Süleyman in her arms for ever and to protect her brother at the same time. But she nevertheless had an anxiety about
Ş
ukru that just wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t reconcile what he had said about the discovery of Levent Devrim’s body with what she knew to be the truth. He’d told the police that he’d been out collecting wood for the family’s fire. But all the men had been out the day before collecting wood because everyone had known that snow had been forecast for that night.
Ş
ukru had had no reason to be out that early in the morning. Except that he clearly had.

Would she be able to protect
Ş
ukru while still holding on to her policeman lover? If the prophets H
ı
z
ı
r and
İ
lyas were with her, yes. She couldn’t bear to lose him a second time. If that happened, she’d kill herself.

As Çetin
İ
kmen had predicted, once the photographs of Levent Devrim’s equations had been released to the press, and put on the Internet, every lunatic in the country came forward to offer his or her interpretation of them. And because the numbers were so arcane and apparently without meaning, it was difficult to sort the simply delusional from those whose theories could have a point. One woman even managed to ‘prove’ that some of the figures corresponded to the exact distance between the Great Pyramid of Giza and Sirius the Dog Star. It was quite an intellectual feat, which left Çetin
İ
kmen, not the world’s greatest number-cruncher at the best of times, exhausted.

Just occasionally a person of rather more substance would either arrive at the station or call, and these would usually be directed to the office of Mehmet Süleyman. One of them was a man that Çetin
İ
kmen had met before in connection with the death of Leyla Ablak. He was also someone that Süleyman was more accustomed to seeing on the television.

‘Professor Atay,’ he said as he stood to receive his guest in his office.

Cem Atay was as good-looking and as carefully groomed in the flesh as he was on the screen. In his mid fifties, he looked more like a well-preserved forty-five-year-old. He put his hand out to Süleyman, who shook it. ‘Inspector Süleyman, I met your colleague Inspector
İ
kmen some time ago in connection with the death of a lady …’

‘Leyla Ablak.’ His alibi for that evening, provided by a very attractive woman who lived with her aged parents, had been checked out by Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu, and Cem Atay had not been considered a person of interest since. Now, according to Ömer Mungan, who had met him when he’d booked in at the desk downstairs, he had come in to talk about Levent Devrim’s numbers.

‘Yes.’

Süleyman gestured towards the chair opposite his desk and said, ‘Please do sit down, Professor.’

‘Thank you.’ He sat.

Ömer Mungan, who had ushered the professor into the office, now stood behind Süleyman at the back of the room.

Süleyman, smiling, began. ‘Professor—’

‘The calculations that you found on the dead man’s walls relate to the Mayan Long Count calendar,’ he said.

For a moment, Süleyman thought he had misheard him. He’d certainly heard about the Mayan Long Count calendar, from Gonca. A lot of end-of-the-world superstitious crazy stuff as far as he was concerned. Could this very eminent historian possibly believe such nonsense? And wasn’t this Mesoamerican apocalypse meant to be happening in December? ‘Professor Atay …’

‘Just to be clear, Inspector Süleyman, I in no way believe that the world is going to end this year,’ he said. ‘But I have been engaged in a project aimed at comparing and contrasting the Ottoman Empire with that of the Imperial Spanish Empire – a project that has been picked up by a documentary film company and will eventually be televised – and during that time, of course, I have come across ideas that stem from the civilisations of ancient South America that were conquered by the Spaniards, including the Mayans.’

‘You’ve studied this, er …’

‘Long Count calendar, yes,’ he said. ‘Not in depth, but enough to know that what you describe as equations are in fact Mayan dates.’

‘Right.’ Süleyman looked down at his desk. This was either going to prove to be another complete waste of time, or Professor Atay had opened a door into Levent Devrim’s world that might prove to be the key to his death. He looked up again. ‘Professor,’ he said, ‘if you can explain this to me …’

‘I can try.’

‘Then I would like my colleague Inspector
İ
kmen to be present too.’

‘A very charming man,’ the academic said. ‘Yes, Inspector, I am happy to explain the Mayan Long Count calendar to him as well.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Süleyman said. He turned to Ömer Mungan. ‘Will you go and ask Inspector
İ
kmen to come to my office, please, Sergeant.’