River of The Dead (7 page)

Instinctively – for this long dead sultan, for all his faults, was one of Süleyman’s forebears – the policeman put his hand up towards the portrait.

The old woman said, ‘You have a connection to the Cobweb World. I know it and I can see it too.’ He turned to look at her and saw that she was smiling. ‘The Cobweb World is Ottoman, it is Armenian, Syrian, Jewish. Ancient, even beyond the Byzantine times. It has always been,’ she said. ‘You will find the Cobweb World everywhere if you go to Mardin.’

He wanted to know how she apparently knew about his possible trip to Mardin; how she knew or claimed to know that he was from an Ottoman family, for that matter. But he just went on staring at the portrait of Sultan Abdul Hamid. During the latter half of his reign some of his opponents had ‘accused’ him of having Armenian blood. ‘This Cobweb World of which you speak . . .’

‘Is what remains of things gone by. Meaningful things,’ she said gently. ‘In other places things die, but here . . . Belief means that some corpses retain some life. Then again, some things never die in the first place. Some faiths are alive and—’

She was cut off by a furious female voice coming from the ornate doorway. Turning slowly and reluctantly from the portrait in front of him, Süleyman saw the angry figure of Inspector Taner berating the old woman roundly. What language she was speaking he didn’t know, but the effect it had on the old woman was instant and she moved away quickly without another word. Taner, breathing heavily, looked across at Süleyman and smiled. ‘I apologise for that,’ she said. ‘She speaks out of turn. Madly.’

‘She was actually quite interesting,’ Süleyman said. ‘And this building—’

‘It’s very late,’ the policewoman cut in, rudely, he thought. ‘The stupid old woman has let our food get cold. Rafik will take you back to your hotel now. We have to start early in the morning.’ She held her arm out towards him in a gesture that he felt would brook no argument. ‘Come. Let’s go.’

‘This is a marvellous place. It—’

Taner moved forward and took Süleyman physically by the arm. ‘It’s an old, dead house,’ she said matter-of-factly; ‘it has no interest or meaning for someone like you. Dinner is over. Come.’

She pulled him roughly out into the cool, southern night.

Secretly, İkmen had expected more. Scientific procedures were so sophisticated now that near miracles were, or seemed to be, almost daily occurrences. He passed the photographs in his hands over to the pathologist and sighed.

‘Useless,’ he said. ‘They tell us nothing.’

Dr Arto Sarkissian adjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his nose and squinted. ‘Çetin, to be fair,’ he said, ‘these men are wearing stockings over their faces. The enhancement shows that very clearly. We couldn’t see that before. All we had was some security film of men dressed as cleaners and nurses.’

‘Now we have men dressed as cleaners and nurses with stockings over their faces,’ İkmen responded caustically. ‘Hardly useful.’

‘Hardly possible, in the real world, for photographic enhancement to peer through the distorting effect of ladies’ hosiery,’ Arto said, himself peering sternly over the top of his glasses at the policeman. ‘I think that the laboratory has done extremely well.’

İkmen grunted. Arto Sarkissian and Çetin İkmen had been friends since childhood. Their fathers had been friends also and the two boys, together with İkmen’s brother Halıl and Arto’s brother Krikor, had spent almost every waking moment together when not at their respective schools. Although financially far and away above İkmen with his huge, riotous band of children, the pathologist retained a closeness to his old friend that was entirely free of competition or artifice of any sort.

‘I suppose now I’ve got to start looking for ladies’ stockings in dustbins and on landfill sites,’ İkmen said gloomily.

‘At least you know now that you have to look for stockings,’ Arto replied. ‘The men who freed Yusuf Kaya may even have discarded their masks amongst the clinical waste at the Cerrahpaşa. There are many avenues you can go down in pursuit of DNA samples, Çetin.’

‘Mmm.’ İkmen lit a cigarette and sighed. The doctor had come to the policeman’s office in order to discuss the post-mortems he had performed on the police officers and the prison guard who had died during Yusuf Kaya’s escape. That he’d walked into an examination of stills from the Cerrahpaşa security camera film footage was purely accidental.

‘I thought that stockings were a thing of the past these days,’ İkmen said, still miserably. ‘I thought those wishing to hide their faces these days wore scarves or novelty George W. Bush masks.’

Arto laughed. ‘Maybe Yusuf Kaya’s team are just old-fashioned boys,’ he said. Then, pointing at the photograph in his hand, he added, ‘But maybe not. You know that the weapons used to kill the men I examined were not knives.’

‘Not knives?’ İkmen frowned.

Arto waddled heavily over towards his friend and put the photograph on his desk. He was a short, very stout man just on the brink of actual obesity.

‘What the enhancement shows very nicely here is an absence of knives,’ he said, pointing at the photograph. ‘See here. Something glints, but as to what that thing is . . .’

Çetin peered downwards and then said, ‘Yes, but the glinting is . . . Admittedly I can’t actually see anything . . .’

‘That’s because the weapons they used were glass,’ Arto said.

‘Glass?’

‘Admittedly large and very sharp shards of toughened glass, but glass nevertheless,’ Arto said.

His friend looked up and asked what even he knew was a pointless question. ‘Are you sure?’

Arto Sarkissian was always sure; that was why he was so good at his job. ‘Wounds to all three bodies contain glass particles. Also, the shapes of the incisions are so irregular they can’t have been produced by a conventional blade. These stills, which show an apparent absence of actual weaponry, only serve to confirm my findings.’

‘Yes, but . . . Glass?’

Arto stumbled back to his chair and sat down again. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Glass is very effective as a weapon, and if a piece of glass is found on a cleaner or a nurse it is unlikely to be confiscated even by a police officer.’

‘Well . . .’

‘They could be in the process of disposing of a dangerous shard found on a ward or in a corridor. Glass can turn up anywhere. In the right context, like that of a cleaner, being found in possession of glass can be viewed as a good thing.’

He was right. It could be looked upon as entirely innocent. But far from giving the policeman a sense of progress in the Kaya case, the new information only served to unsettle him still further. Frowning again, he said, ‘The more I learn about Kaya’s escape the more I am convinced it was planned down to the last second. Glass! They might have considered different weapons for weeks . . . months!’

‘And yet planning at such an exact level implies, to me at least, complicity from the only person who could possibly engineer Kaya’s escape from the beginning: the prison governor. Or am I being simple-minded?’

Çetin İkmen nodded his head. ‘I can see your point,’ he said. ‘And yet so far I can find no evidence for that. The governor made a decision based upon what the prison doctor and then the guards told him about Kaya at the time. It took him some hours to come to the conclusion he reached and Kaya’s condition had deteriorated before he did anything. You don’t send a dangerous psychopath out of incarceration unless you’re very certain that something is really wrong.’

‘What about the prison doctor?’

‘He was interviewed only hours after Kaya’s escape,’ İkmen said. ‘The officer who interviewed him reported that he smelt of alcohol, although whether or not he had examined Kaya whilst drunk isn’t known. He says he didn’t recommend immediate transfer to the hospital. Kaya had raised blood pressure but in the doctor’s opinion he was more likely to be having a panic attack than anything else.’

‘So how did Kaya come to get a transfer to the Cerrahpaşa?’ Arto asked.

‘The governor says that his guards recommended it,’ İkmen replied. ‘They claimed, he says, that Kaya was breathing with difficulty and had turned an alarming shade of grey. The governor duly went to see Kaya and found him as he had been described. He then called the Cerrahpaşa to request an ECG and asked the guards to prepare the prisoner for transfer.’

‘That’s his version of the story,’ Arto said.

‘Without Yusuf Kaya himself and with the only surviving prison guard still in a coma, there can only be one version at this time,’ İkmen said. ‘I’ve looked at telephone calls into and out of the prison, both landline and mobile – I’ve found nothing in the least bit suspicious.’

‘And so you question absent nurses and speculate about chimerical cleaners,’ Arto said. ‘By the way, DNA samples gathered from the scarf said to belong to one İsak Mardin came up with no matches to anyone known to us.’

İkmen sighed. ‘Oh, joy,’ he said gloomily.

The doctor cleared his throat. ‘So Mehmet Süleyman is out east in pursuit of Yusuf Kaya.’

‘He’s in Gaziantep at the moment,’ İkmen replied. ‘Kaya was picked up on a security camera at a patisserie down there.’

‘What happens if Yusuf Kaya isn’t in Gaziantep?’

İkmen shook his head wearily. ‘Then my friend will have to go to his home city of Mardin.’

‘Oh, yes, of course, I remember now,’ Arto said. ‘A real eastern boy, Yusuf Kaya.’ They sat in silence for a moment and then he said, ‘You know, I’ve an old friend in Mardin, a Syrian. Seraphim Yunun he’s called. He’s a monk at the monastery of St Sobo, which is just outside the city.’

İkmen, who had never heard of Seraphim Yunun, said, ‘How did you get to know him?’

‘Oh, Christian circles, you know,’ the Armenian said breezily. Not that he was religious in any way, as far as İkmen was aware. But unlike the policeman, who was nominally a Muslim, Arto was nominally a Christian, and in a country that was over ninety per cent Muslim, like Turkey, the minorities did tend to know one another.

‘Nice man, Seraphim,’ the Armenian continued. ‘I wonder, if Mehmet Süleyman does go to Mardin, whether I should put him in touch? I mean, I don’t want to labour the point, but one cannot encounter too many friendly faces in such an outlandish place.’

‘Call him on his mobile.’

‘Mm.’ Arto frowned. ‘I might just do that,’ he said. ‘My recollection of accommodation in Mardin, admittedly some years ago now, is not a pleasant one. I imagine that much has changed in twenty-odd years, but if Inspector Süleyman does find himself in need of a clean bed and intelligent company, he could do worse than stay at the monastery of St Sobo.’

‘Police!’

Less than a second later, and without further warning, a constable smashed in the front door of the brothel with a pickaxe. Inside, women screamed while the deeper voices of their erstwhile customers howled in fury. Armed police, both plainclothed and in uniform, pushed their way into the building shouting, ‘Stay where you are!’ Taner and Süleyman, bringing up the rear, arrived inside when the raid was all but over.

Some of the brothels in İstanbul, in Süleyman’s experience, were rough but this filthy little house in Gaziantep was just pathetic. The madame, the Anastasia Akyuz of whom Taner had spoken the previous evening, had obviously once been attractive. Now in her late forties, she was overweight, unkempt and disappointed. Badly dressed in a thin, dirty-looking housecoat, she stood smoking beside the shattered front door of her premises as officers from the Gaziantep police constabulary made her various ‘girls’ and their clients step outside. Several ‘respectable’ people from nearby flats and houses hurled random insults at the women as, in dribs and drabs, they appeared.

‘I haven’t seen Yusuf for years,’ Anastasia said to a clearly sceptical Taner, when she and Süleyman emerged from the sad little house of ill repute.

‘Anastasia,’ Taner replied with a smile, ‘don’t protect him. He married a Muslim girl and gave her a lot of children. Money but no active support, you know how he is. He was convicted in İstanbul for, amongst other things, the murder of his mistress. Who knows how many more women he has, how many children? Yusuf Kaya is totally faithless and not worth a thought!’

Anastasia Akyuz put her hands on her ample hips and said, ‘Edibe, I don’t know where he is.’

‘He’s a shit!’ the officer from Mardin said.

Two women, neither of whom Süleyman felt could be under sixty years of age, came out of the brothel clutching ugly nylon nightdresses around their skinny varicose bodies. Someone in a house nearby shouted out, ‘Filthy whores!’ Inside the brothel the sound of crockery being smashed against floors and walls underlined the fact that the local police were being far from low-key about this raid.

One of the sixty-year-old hookers looked at Süleyman, cleared her throat and then said, ‘What are you looking at?’

He didn’t respond.

Inspector Taner, who didn’t turn a hair at all the violence and shouting emanating from the brothel, said, ‘Anastasia, where is Gülizar? Is she with her father?’

‘Gülizar is at college in Damascus. She’s a good girl,’ the woman said.

‘You brought her up in this brothel!’

‘Yes, and I protected her!’ Anastasia pointed to her own chest, a large mound of flesh surmounted by a thick, gold crucifix. ‘I sent her to university! I pay!’

‘Not Yusuf Kaya?’

‘No! I don’t see Yusuf, as I told you.’

‘Yusuf Kaya who, until he was arrested in İstanbul last year, was in charge of a drugs empire worth tens of thousands of dollars,’ Taner said. ‘Not a kuruş for his daughter, though, no?’

Süleyman remembered that squalid flat in Tarlabaşı where Yusuf Kaya had lived. Thousands and thousands of lire in sports bags in his filthy bedroom as well as in bank accounts all over the city.

‘Give him to me, Anastasia.’ Taner bore down relentlessly on her victim. ‘He’s been seen here in Gaziantep. Where would he stay if it wasn’t with you, eh?’