River of The Dead (32 page)

‘Inspector İkmen, I am a weak man, I know that,’ he said. ‘I am not a fool, however, and I know, as you do, that I would sell my soul to Satan for some of my dear, vile drug now.’

İkmen lit a cigarette and then said, ‘I know.’

Mr Aktar sighed. ‘But I do love my wife and my two sons and although I know that I have put them at risk both now and in the past, I cannot subject them to real, actual harm.’ He looked up into İkmen’s eyes and said, ‘Do you know what I mean?’

He was trying to say something possibly about his involvement with Kaya, but he was a junkie. Could what he was saying be trusted?

İkmen frowned. ‘No, Mr Aktar, I do not,’ he said. ‘But why don’t you tell me?’

‘Do you swear before Allah that Yusuf Kaya is dead?’ Aktar said as he leaned, sweating and panting, across the interview room table. ‘Do you swear it?’

He was clearly coming apart after his night without heroin. But was what he was about to tell İkmen, if anything, the truth? There was only one way to find out. İkmen raised his right hand. ‘I swear.’

Aktar licked his lips once, looked over his shoulder at the absence of anything except a wall behind him and said, ‘Can I get out of here afterwards?’

‘Mr Aktar, that will depend upon what you are going to tell me,’ İkmen said.

Several moments passed before Aktar breathed in deeply just the once and then said, ‘It’s called the Wormwood Route. It is, or was, going to make us all very rich. Myself and Mr Oner were going to be set up for life. Yusuf Kaya and Mr Oner were friends from way back. When Mr Oner died the plan was already in place. I knew nothing about it or who, apart from ourselves and Kaya, were involved until it happened. Kaya planned it that way. He also told me that, apart from owning up to knowing him or giving his location away, I was to give you whatever information you asked me for. I was to protect no one but Kaya. He called me to tell me specifically. He also wanted to assure me that I could have, come the day, all the junk I could ever want. Only if I betrayed him would bad things happen. If I betrayed him, he said, my wife and children would be raped and murdered in front of my eyes. He’d said the same thing to Mr Oner, his old friend. That was why he killed himself. He couldn’t back out and he knew he couldn’t go through with it either. He didn’t want his family to die. He was half mad with desperation. You are sure, aren’t you, Inspector İkmen, that Yusuf Kaya is dead?’

The front door of the house was open, but there was no one at home. Süleyman and Taner went right through the building but found not one living soul anywhere. There were signs, however, in what had to be or have been the American woman’s bedroom, that Elizabeth Smith was probably on the move. Clothes from an open wardrobe were scattered across an unmade bed, while someone had spilled a number of aspirin tablets across the floor. Neither of the officers spoke. Occasionally one or other of them would look out of a window at the constables searching in and around the garden. But everything out there was quiet too.

After a while, and mainly because he just couldn’t stand the silence any longer, Süleyman said, ‘She’s gone.’

Edibe Taner stood still for just a moment, looked at him, and then continued to go through a stack of papers on a table. Elizabeth Smith had definitely said she would see the police in the morning. But she wasn’t anywhere to be seen and neither were her guards, keepers or whatever the men who lived with her were called. Süleyman at least had a creeping sense of something happening over which he was failing to exercise control. It was not something pleasant.

They continued looking, playing the answerphone machine, reading letters and notes in a kind of frozen fugue until eventually, and almost mercifully from Süleyman’s point of view, Taner’s mobile phone began to ring. She answered it and, although he couldn’t make out a word of what the person at the other end was saying, he could hear that he or she was shouting. When Taner finally came off the phone her face was white.

‘We must get back to the city,’ she said as she pushed the mobile back into her bag and got her car keys out of her pocket. ‘Something terrible has happened.’

Constable Selahattin had never seen anything like it. He, like all Turkish men, had served in the army and had seen action and violence. Since he had been stationed in Mardin he had been witness to the aftermath of gang and clan violence. But this was off the scale.

‘They’re all dead,’ he said as he stood in the middle of the Kaya family’s courtyard. ‘Five adults, including Kaya’s wife and mother, and eight kids. One was a baby.’

Tayyar, the two-year-old child had been called, Edibe Taner remembered. Conceived she imagined on some visit home when Yusuf Kaya was still free. She looked down at the splashes of blood that had settled in the dust of the courtyard and fought to hold back her tears. Zeynep had been a silly, weak and easily manipulated woman but she had once been a Taner and Edibe was sorry that she and all her poor children were dead. Even Yusuf Kaya’s indulgent mother hadn’t deserved to die.

‘No one saw anything, of course,’ Constable Selahattin added bitterly. ‘Thirteen people are shot and no one sees or hears a thing.’

Ignoring the ire in his voice, Edibe Taner said, ‘If they were all shot as they slept then I expect the assailants used silencers.’

‘There are several sets of footprints in the house,’ Selahattin said as he pulled himself and his emotions back to business once again.

‘It would be difficult for one person to shoot thirteen even with a silenced weapon,’ Taner said. ‘I’d like to know exactly how many sets of footprints we have, please, Constable.’

‘Madam.’ He nodded his head.

Edibe Taner looked up at Süleyman. ‘The scene will have to be forensically examined. Whoever did this cannot have arrived too long after we left last night. I can’t see that the entrance has been forced.’

‘No.’ He waited until Selahattin had gone to join his fellows in the family’s bedrooms before he took Taner to one side. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘we must follow up the American and her men.’

She frowned. ‘You think they did this? Why?’

‘How should I know?’ He wanted to add that he didn’t come from the back of nowhere where people believed at least five impossible things before breakfast as she did. But he just about managed to restrain himself. What had happened wasn’t her fault, but this mass slaughter was so shocking and sickening that he had to get at least some of his anger out of his system. ‘All I know, Inspector, is that these people are dead and Elizabeth Smith and her men are missing.’

‘You don’t think it could be some sort of power struggle, do you?’ she said. But before he could answer she saw something that made her jerk up her head and run over to the entrance to the mansion. Süleyman took the opportunity afforded by her temporary absence to think. With someone as powerful and pervasive as Yusuf Kaya dead all kinds of fault lines could open up in his family. Even Yusuf in prison had probably had a kind of control, but Yusuf dead was just a void, an emptiness which would either remain empty or be filled. He was wondering whether any Kaya family members still remained alive and if so who when Taner returned with her father, the Master of Sharmeran.

‘My father would like to speak to you,’ Inspector Taner said to Süleyman in what amounted to an almost sulky tone. And then she left to walk towards the stairs leading up to the family rooms on the first floor of the building.

Seçkin Taner took Süleyman by the arm over to a far corner of the courtyard. Once there he spoke in surprisingly good English. ‘I am speaking this language because not a great many people here can say more than a few words in it,’ he said. ‘Inspector Süleyman, because of who and what I am, people do not tell me so much of their lives, if you know what I mean. I will not lie, and no one would dare try to silence me so I know very little. But there are exceptions to this.’

‘Mr Taner—’

‘I tell you because I know you will use what I say with wisdom. You are not involved,’ Seçkin Taner said. ‘Inspector Süleyman, a person known to me has told me that figures were seen coming out of this house just before dawn. One of those figures was definitely İbrahim Keser. Apparently he had been staying with Bilqis Hanım and her family since last night.’

‘But we were here last night, Mr Taner,’ Süleyman said. ‘Telling the family of Yusuf Kaya’s death.’

‘Then he was probably being hidden,’ Seçkin Taner said. ‘He was one of Yusuf’s men. They would have trusted him.’

‘Which would have allowed him to be here and possibly let others in to kill them,’ Süleyman said. ‘But why? Why would he do that?’

The Master of Sharmeran shrugged. ‘That I don’t know,’ he said.

‘If it had been just a large amount of heroin then the idea that everyone not absolutely key to the operation was expendable would not have been worth the risks involved,’ Mr Aktar said. ‘The Wormwood Route is—’

‘About getting heroin into the city amongst packets of wormwood leaves,’ İkmen said. His face was dark, bitter at the thought of what he had found in Bekir’s rucksack. And the terrible boy hadn’t even cared! Holed up with his very convenient police officer father! Had Bekir helped Yusuf Kaya to escape from the Cerrahpaşa, or from the prison? Had he killed his old boss Hüseyin Altun for that, that . . .

‘No, it’s more than that,’ Mr Aktar said as he gulped greedily from the bottle of oral morphine İkmen had requested for him from the police station doctor. Already he’d drunk enough to knock over a camel, but Mr Aktar was a junkie and so it just had the effect of making him calmer, more ‘normal’. ‘The Wormwood Route is what it purports to be: a route, a way in which, basically, heroin can get out of Afghanistan, through Iraq and into this country.’

‘So it’s a mapped-out route, a safe route through friendly towns and villages?’

‘In part,’ Mr Aktar said. ‘I don’t know the details. I was only interested in the product, you understand. I was promised money but I wanted my fix. That’s it, that’s . . .’ He sighed. ‘The Wormwood Route is more than a map. It’s also contacts, names, faces, drop-off points, bribable border guards . . . Apparently it took some years to organise and only Yusuf Kaya, it was said, knew every detail of it. My predecessor Mr Oner knew Yusuf Kaya as a child; they went to school together. He told me before he died how ruthless Kaya was. He told me that he killed the Russian Mafia boss, the one he was sent to prison for, because the Russian had been competing for parts of the Wormwood Route. I should have got out then. Gone. Where? I—’

‘Mr Aktar,’ İkmen said, ‘are you sure that Kaya was the only person to know the precise details of this route?’

‘That is what Mr Oner said.’

İkmen sat back in his chair and briefly looked up at the ceiling. Kaya was dead and so, possibly, if what Aktar had said was true, was the Wormwood Route. But that was assuming that whoever killed Kaya hadn’t managed to get the information from him first. ‘Mr Aktar – the nurses, Lole, Mardin and Öz,’ İkmen began.

‘Öz, or whatever his real name was, was some relative of Yusuf Kaya. Mr Oner knew him too,’ Aktar said. ‘Anyway, Mr Oner gave him a job. Lole was a friend of Öz, but I knew nothing about him. Apparently his name is Armenian and that was some sort of joke to Mr Oner, although I never understood it myself.’

Lole, İkmen recalled, had been the name of Mardin’s greatest architect. Clearly a ‘joke’ only for those in the know.

‘Whether Lole and Öz were recruited to help in Kaya’s escape, if they actually did, I don’t know,’ Mr Aktar said. ‘But I have always been suspicious about İsak Mardin, the third nurse. Mr Oner took him on not long before he . . . before he died. They spoke a lot, Mr Oner and Mardin. Maybe he was brought in for . . . You have to understand my role was to know nothing. Nothing!’

‘And so Dr Eldem . . .’

‘Did Dr Eldem kill the prison guard? I don’t know,’ Mr Aktar said. ‘If he did then it was via an arrangement with Kaya that I know nothing about. You have to understand, Inspector, that things like the Wormwood Route are only secure so long as as few people as possible know exactly what is going on. This route is worth billions of dollars! People die for this thing!’

‘We will provide you with protection.’

‘What?’ Mr Aktar laughed. ‘You’ll what? Inspector İkmen, with all due respect, even with Kaya dead, your men can’t protect me. Half if not more of the people involved in this will know of my existence at least. They will know when someone talks. They’ll have contacts in the police. I could be shot dead leaving this station now. Not that it matters.’ He leaned forward across the table and frowned. ‘Look after my family. With Kaya gone they might stand a chance. But forget me. If they want me dead for talking to you, that is what they will have. Save my wife and children. They are innocent.’

İkmen looked into the drug-hazed eyes of the administrator and then gravely nodded his head. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you want to be ruthlessly honest . . .’

‘I do.’

‘Then tell me absolutely everything you know.’

‘And you’ll get my wife and children out of the city?’

‘I will put your wife and children where no one will find them.’

Mr Aktar thought about it for a few seconds and then he said, ‘All right. All right. I know something about Dr Eldem . . .’

‘Just let me make a call first,’ İkmen said as he took his mobile phone out of his pocket and activated the keypad. ‘I must update my colleagues in Mardin first.’

No one spoke until they were inside the car. The old man, Musa Saatçi, was tired, anxious and very grateful to be getting away from Mardin Prison. He was also keen to see his son.

‘Can we go to see Gabriel at the hospital now, Edibe dear?’ he said as soon as Inspector Taner had started up the engine.

‘Of course,’ she said. She was just about to ask the old man something when Süleyman’s mobile phone rang. She waited a few moments for him to finish the call, but when it became clear that he was going to be some time she spoke to Musa Saatçi again. ‘Uncle,’ she said, ‘do you have any idea why İbrahim Keser wanted you to hide those armaments for him?’