River of The Dead (20 page)

The woman in front of them was not exactly beautiful. But she was tall, slim and angular and had the most startling cascade of thick red hair hanging down her back. She was, Süleyman reckoned, probably somewhere in her mid-thirties. When he, Taner and the two officers behind them had all crossed the threshold, they’d seen that the woman was surrounded by a group of heavily armed local men. Seemingly they had been waiting for them. The woman, when she spoke again, did so once more in English. She had an American accent. For a while Taner, Süleyman and the others assumed it was the only language available to her.

‘We always have at least one man a kilometre in front of the house,’ she said in what Süleyman could now tell was probably an east coast, New England type of accent. ‘The house is not accessible by road from any other direction. We knew you were coming. What do you want?’

Edibe Taner cleared her throat. She knew, by sight at least, all of the men who surrounded the woman. They’d passed her on the streets of Mardin before. There was one man in particular with whom she knew she had shared polite greeting in the past. But not now. Now all of them stared down the officers with snarls on their faces. ‘I have papers to search this house,’ she said in English, holding up her authority to search for all to see.

‘Search this house?’ the woman said as she just very slightly smiled. ‘Whatever for?’

‘We think this house is property of a prisoner who escaped,’ Taner said.

‘Oh, you mean my husband? Yusuf?’ The woman laughed. Then, turning very pointedly towards Süleyman, she said, ‘I assume you are in charge—’

‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘Inspector Taner is lead officer here. My name is Inspector Süleyman. I come from İstanbul.’

The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘Of course. It was you who arrested my husband.’

‘I put Yusuf Kaya in prison for what should have been his whole life,’ Süleyman said. ‘I saw first hand, madam, what your husband was capable of.’ Her face quickly clouded.

‘What is your name?’ Inspector Taner asked.

The woman looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘Hürrem.’

The men around her, though armed, shifted nervously. Süleyman hoped that none of them lost their nerve and accidentally let off the odd automatic magazine. No one in the house would survive.

‘Your American name,’ Taner persisted.

‘My—’

‘You are a foreign person,’ Taner said. ‘I must see your passport.’

‘I don’t know that I have it to hand. I—’

‘Just tell us your name for the moment,’ Süleyman cut in. He was getting tired of this woman’s game-playing and wanted to get on with the search. While all this was going on, Kaya could be trying to slip out of the building. ‘What is it?’

The woman sighed. ‘My passport is in the name of Elizabeth Smith, the name I was given at birth.’

‘Thank you,’ Süleyman said. ‘So, Miss Smith, I assume that all of these guns you have here are registered?’

‘But of course.’ She smiled.

‘Excellent.’ Süleyman bowed his head slightly and then turned to Taner and said in Turkish, ‘Let’s go through this place.’

The armed men in front of them moved forward as if to try to mount a challenge, but Elizabeth Smith told them, in Turkish, to put their weapons down. Continuing now in Turkish, she told the officers, ‘We don’t, after all, want to have any sort of accident, do we? Yusuf my husband isn’t here. Search anywhere and everywhere you like.’

‘You can speak Turkish,’ Edibe Taner said.

‘Well, of course I can,’ Elizabeth Smith responded acidly. ‘Your country is my country now. I have adopted it. I said before, do your search. Get on with it.’

And so they did. For the secret love nest of a wealthy gangster, Yusuf Kaya’s house was very sparse. It was traditional too. There were no beds here, just rolled-up mattresses. No apparent concessions to someone who at least sounded like an educated American lady. Outside, empty outhouses gave forth nothing, as did the large cellar beneath the building.

‘When did you last see Yusuf Kaya?’ Taner asked the American as their search was coming to a close just over two hours after it had begun.

‘I saw my husband at his trial in İstanbul,’ Elizabeth Smith replied. She then added sneeringly, ‘Only the once. I went with your cousin, Zeynep. Yusuf’s other wife.’

But Edibe Taner betrayed no obvious emotion. She had deduced some time before that her cousin and Kaya’s mother and probably all of his family had to know about this Elizabeth Smith. On some level at least they obviously told her things about themselves, like who they were related to. One of the men guarding the American rolled up one of his sleeves, revealing the wormwood flower tattoo on his arm. The scorpion within Edibe Taner wanted to hiss with disdain. But she was not in this house to pursue old clan rivalries. Besides, in her position both as a police officer and as the daughter of a Master of Sharmeran she had to be above all that. After all, her own family, if reluctantly, had allowed her cousin Zeynep’s marriage to a hated wormwood.

‘Your husband was handed down a life sentence by the court in İstanbul,’ Süleyman said to the woman as he looked around the hall in case there was any piece of evidence present that he might have missed. ‘I personally requested that he serve a minimum of thirty years. Why do you stay? Your husband is never going to be able to live with you.’

Elizabeth Smith smiled again. ‘But Yusuf is out of prison now.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Süleyman said. ‘And I do hope, Miss Smith—’

‘Mrs Kaya, please.’

‘Mrs Kaya,’ he said with some irony in his voice, ‘that you did not assist his escape. Because if you did . . .’

‘I would spend a very long time in a Turkish jail. Inspector Süleyman,’ she said, ‘I stay because I have made this place my home. I have nowhere to go back in the States. My husband has left me well provided for here. I have money, a home, I am guarded, I have friends . . . Also I can visit Yusuf. My home town, Boston, is a very long way from Kartal Prison, İstanbul.’

‘Mrs Kaya,’ Edibe Taner joined in, ‘this house is very empty. With your guards you are six people. But there is very little here. Are you going somewhere?’

‘No.’ Elizabeth Smith shrugged. ‘I live simply. What can I say? Besides, it’s Lent. Christians don’t adorn their homes until after Easter. It’s not the custom, is it?’

‘You are a Christian, Mrs Kaya?’

‘No, but a few of the men are. And I was raised a Christian. Now I attend the Suriani services when I can. Because that’s what we do in the Tur Abdin, isn’t it? We all join in with and respect each other’s beliefs. Or we should. My husband is of course a Muslim and has Muslim children by Zeynep. But he respects other religions and beliefs.’

‘My recollection of your husband, Mrs Kaya,’ Süleyman said, ‘is of a man not overly given to religion. And as for this area being free from factional strife . . . Why do you think that the army is here, Miss Smith? Why do you think the Turkish Republic guards places of worship out here?’

The room went silent as the rough men who guarded this woman looked at the guns at their feet with relish. They then looked at Süleyman with equal homicidal fervour. But under the gaze of the small troop of police officers, none of them moved.

‘Mrs Kaya,’ Edibe Taner said after a moment, ‘please do not leave the environs of Dara.’

‘Ah, but the Easter service in Mar—’

‘You may attend church in Mardin on Easter Sunday,’ Taner said. ‘In fact I will be there to make sure that you can go. But otherwise stay where you are, where we can easily see you. Oh, and I will need your mobile phone number too. I assume you have one of those.’

Elizabeth Smith said nothing then until Taner and Süleyman were nearly at her front door. Suddenly and angrily she burst out, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong!’

‘Haven’t you?’ Süleyman turned to look her straight in the eye. ‘Madam, how much do you know about this country?’

The American woman frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Did you meet your husband shortly before you married or were you together for some time prior to that?’

‘I lived in Turkey five years before I met Yusuf,’ Elizabeth Smith replied. ‘I was teaching English in İstanbul. I met Yusuf in İstanbul. I was with him for a while, you know.’

Süleyman resisted the temptation to ask her how she, an apparently decent American teacher, met a local drug dealer. There had been no drugs found in the house and so, on the face of it, this woman probably wasn’t a junkie. There was something else, however. ‘Do you understand where Turkish law stands on the subject of polygamy?’

‘I know it is illegal, but—’

‘Absolutely,’ Süleyman said. ‘It is illegal and yet you—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ she said, slipping into English. ‘People out here don’t worry about that. They—’

‘Well then people out here should worry!’ Süleyman replied, also in English. ‘Polygamy is against Turkish law. You, madam, will not leave this area until this matter, if not the return of your “husband”, is resolved.’

He then turned back to follow Edibe Taner and the other officers out of the door. Once out in the cold night air, he breathed deeply in order to settle his nerves. The officers who had been patrolling the outside of the house came over to join them.

‘Nothing here tonight,’ Taner said with a look of disappointment on her face. She then turned to Selahattin, who had been searching through the outhouses, and said, ‘We’ll keep the house under surveillance.’

‘Yes, Inspector.’

She told the men to get in the truck and head back towards the city. Just before she got in her car to follow on behind, Süleyman took hold of her arm, sniffed hard and then said, ‘What’s that smell? Sort of sharp and musty?’

Edibe Taner shook her head and assumed a lugubrious air. ‘That’s the smell of you being right,’ she said.

Mehmet Süleyman frowned.

‘You conjectured that Kaya’s American woman was actually surrounded by wormwood.’

‘She was, as you had predicted, surrounded by men of the wormwood clan.’

Edibe Taner smiled. ‘She’s also surrounded by actual wormwood too. It seems that the family grows it just behind the house. And the Kayas are traditionally growers of herbs. That smell you’re getting is the reek of the plant itself. Horrible, isn’t it?’

Çetin İkmen didn’t get round to making a call to Mehmet Süleyman until nearly midnight.

‘I had to check first of all that Murat Lole was still alive before I assigned someone to watch him,’ the older man said. ‘Couldn’t, after all, give over precious human resources to a dead man. Think of the waste!’

Süleyman, although now very sleepy, nevertheless smiled. Everything in the city was budget-related these days. It was almost as if the police department had been hijacked by a party of particularly sour and puritanical accountants.

‘But anyway, Lole is under surveillance,’ İkmen continued. ‘All we have to do now is find nurse number three, İsak Mardin.’

‘You say that the dead nurse, er . . .’

‘Faruk Öz.’

‘Faruk Öz had this wormwood tattoo on his bicep?’

‘Yes. Which, if what you told me earlier, Mehmet, is so, could denote membership of Yusuf Kaya’s clan.’

They’d talked about the ‘wormwoods’ as well as the ‘scorpions’ earlier on in their conversation. The possible tattoo connection between Faruk Öz and the city and people of Mardin, as well as actually to Yusuf Kaya, had been a revelation. Öz, it had been thought, had originated in the west; now this was open to doubt. That Öz had started working at the Cerrahpaşa well before Kaya’s arrest meant that he could in no way have been a plant. But he had in all probability been a fortuitous resource with regard to Yusuf Kaya’s escape.

‘Öz may or may not have been his real name,’ Süleyman said. ‘But I’ll speak to Inspector Taner. Maybe if you can e-mail us a photograph . . .’

‘I’ll certainly get Ayşe to e-mail you a photograph,’ İkmen replied. Süleyman smiled. The older man, famously, didn’t ‘do’ technology, and although he could use e-mail now he was still way off sending attachments and preferred that his sergeant did that. ‘So you have discovered a second wife then, Mehmet. A woman, you say, surrounded by men with wormwood tattoos.’

Lying on his narrow but comfortable monastic bed, Mehmet Süleyman wearily shook his head. ‘Yes. Wormwood grows in the fields around the house where she lives, too. Stinks. She’s an American, the woman. Educated, a teacher by profession, quite attractive. What can she possibly get out of a relationship with a man who is not only in prison but already married to someone else?’

‘Exoticism? Adventure? That odd thing some women have for murderers? But then, Kaya has money . . .’

‘True, but there’s more to life than that. Kaya’s a cretin,’ Süleyman said. ‘I’m sure this woman could do better.’

‘Maybe she really does love him,’ İkmen said gloomily. ‘Maybe she is besotted by his bad boy image, or perhaps the strange myths that surround Mardin keep her inside what to me sounds like a harem-style fantasy.’

Süleyman shook his head and sighed. ‘I know my own wife is half Irish, but she has always known this country. What is it with these western women? What brings them here, makes them cover themselves in some instances?’

‘The irresistibility of the Turkish male,’ İkmen said, and laughed. ‘But seriously, maybe there is something here that they find chimes with them, a meaning they have not found back in the west.’

‘They’re running away.’

‘Or running to something.’ İkmen sighed. ‘You know, when I was a boy, I often used to dream about working in a foreign country. I think it is a common fantasy amongst women and men.’

‘Possibly.’ Süleyman paused to light a cigarette and then said, ‘Çetin, you know this snake goddess they have out here?’

‘The Sharmeran. Yes, I know of it.’

‘You know it’s real to the point that people actually believe that they see the thing?’