It was easy to see why. The main entrance to Uç Horan and the courtyard around it is accessed via a small, ancient door in the right-hand wall of the Balik Pazar. Back in the fishy crowdedness of the Balik Pazar, it is difficult to imagine that anything larger than a wardrobe can possibly be behind such a door, much less a church built for, at one time, a very large Christian minority. Now, however, in the depths of the night, all was quiet, almost reverential.
‘Where is Garbis Bey?’ Süleyman asked as he watched İkmen lock the outer door behind them with a very rusty-looking key.
‘I had Bülent take him home,’ İkmen said. ‘He’s too old to stay up all night.’
Süleyman looked around rather nervously. ‘Is Bülent here?’
‘No. I told him to take Garbis Bey home and then go back to Sultanahmet. He wasn’t exactly overjoyed, but then who would be at the prospect of an interrogation about me and my movements from my wife?’
Süleyman frowned.
‘I haven’t been home for more than an hour in almost three days. My life is full of dead carpet dealers, filthy, mythical rugs and news that our case against the acid killer has been postponed. Poor Ayşe, after all that preparation . . . Now I’ve promised to be here until eight when I’ll let Garbis in to do his job.’ He shrugged. ‘Fatma is not happy and who can blame her?’
The two men embraced.
As he pulled gently away from his friend, Süleyman said, ‘The peeper has struck again. A young Jewish woman in Karaköy.’
İkmen shook his head sadly. ‘Do you have any . . .’
‘Çetin, can we go into the church?’ Süleyman asked, looking around at the empty courtyard with a considerable amount of nervousness.
‘You told me that you wanted to talk,’ İkmen replied. ‘So we will. I’m quite happy to go into the church if that is what you want. I’ll just go and put the lights on.’
‘No!’ Süleyman nervously placed a hand on İkmen’s arm. ‘Can’t we light a few candles or something. I don’t want too much light – it might attract attention.’ İkmen shrugged. His friend was obviously very nervous. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you want, Mehmet.’
A box of candles was by the front door and as Süleyman followed İkmen into the church they lit two apiece and both watched the enormous, incense-scented space flicker in the pale yellow candle-light Süleyman whispered, ‘Çetin, I want to tell you something, but I’ve been told that if I do, you and I will be killed.’
İkmen looked up at his much taller friend and then, holding his candles aloft, at the enormous crystal chandeliers that hung from the vaulted ceiling of the church, he asked, ‘Who said that, Mehmet?’
From outside there came a noise that might have been a footfall. Süleyman paled and ran quickly outside the church to find out what it was. But there was nothing to see out there and so he returned, sweating, re-lighting the candles that had snuffed out when he ran.
‘I don’t know,’ Süleyman said as he made an effort to calm down. ‘Ardıç says it would be foolish to use names like MIT . . .’
‘Oh, spies!’ İkmen smiled. ‘Ardıç is involved?’
‘Not with the threats of death, but yes, he knows about these people. Like me he is obliged to work with them. It’s to do with the peeper . . .’
‘And no doubt the fact that the bodies of his victims frequently go to places Dr Sarkissian thinks they shouldn’t.’ İkmen took his friend’s elbow and led him to a pew at the back of the church. They both placed the candles in the sand box positioned in the niche in the church wall. ‘Arto asked me to talk to you about this, Mehmet,’ he said.
‘But Çetin . . .’
‘And if MIT or whoever want to threaten me personally, they can come and see me themselves,’ İkmen said as he sat down. ‘So come on, what’s this all about?’
Although his voice quavered as he spoke, Süleyman told İkmen everything about Mürsel and Haydar, about who the peeper might be and what his motives were perceived to consist of. He was scared but he was also relieved, in a way that he hadn’t been when he had told İzzet Melik only part of the truth in the patisserie. When İkmen asked him why he had chosen this moment to break his silence, and had chosen to talk to him and not to Ardıç, he said, ‘As I told you, Mürsel’s bosses speak to Ardıç. Mürsel and his superiors have the bodies of the peeper’s victims examined and keep the results to themselves. Dr Sarkissian is quite correct to be concerned. But it seems that Ardıç trusts these people and, by extension, Mürsel. But I don’t. The bosses I don’t know about, but I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Mürsel Bey is not all that he seems. Even if he doesn’t appear at a murder scene he seems to know where the peeper has just been and what he has just done for a lot of the time. Earlier tonight the peeper apparently killed Mürsel’s sidekick, Haydar. Mürsel says that the man we know as the peeper is a highly trained agent who is expert at avoiding detection and capture. The police have no hope of apprehending him. But so far Mürsel, himself one of these “people”, is not having any more success than ourselves. The body count of peeper victims is mounting. He must be stopped!’
‘Mmm.’ İkmen frowned. ‘What do you think this Mürsel character might be up to?’
Süleyman pushed his fingers up into his hair. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t feel that he is, for whatever reason . . .’ And then he shook his head and said, ‘No, that’s not true. If I am honest, as I always am with you, I fear that Mürsel is actually assisting this peeper.’
‘But surely his spymasters or whatever one calls such people would be aware of that?’ İkmen said. ‘These are people who, if I’m not mistaken, are psychologically evaluated on an almost permanent basis, are they not?’
‘So we’re led to believe, yes. Look, Çetin, I know this is all completely crazy and I don’t have any evidence for it, but I have this terrible feeling . . .’ His normally handsome face was almost ghostly in the thin, eerie light from the candles.
‘I, as you know, always trust such intuitions myself,’ İkmen said. He let his eyes wander across the just discernible pictures of saints and angels that adorned every wall of the church and then he said, ‘What are you going to do? If this Mürsel is trained in the art of espionage, it’s unlikely you will catch him out.’
‘I know.’ He sighed. ‘There is one way, by getting closer to him, that might work.’
‘What do you mean?’
In spite of the overtly religious nature of his surroundings, Süleyman saw in his mind a replay of the occasion upon which Mürsel had attempted to paw him. The look of the spy’s greedy, drooling mouth had made him shudder. But he didn’t share Mürsel’s passion for him with İkmen. He knew that the older man would consider the course of action he was contemplating to be far too dangerous. It was. But it was something else too, something that made the ends of Suleyman’s fingers fizz with what could be excitement. He said, ‘I don’t really know, it’s just an idea. I need to think about it.’
‘You know that you should go to Ardıç.’ İkmen held up a hand in order to silence his friend’s protest. ‘Yes, he is involved, but from what you have told me he doesn’t know what you suspect about this Mürsel.’
‘But can I trust him?’ Süleyman asked and then qualified what he had said, ‘Sometimes I do think that maybe he shares some of my suspicions about Mürsel, but then again that could just be a bluff of some sort. Not meaning that Ardıç is corrupt, you understand. Just that this higher agency takes precedence over him and even his superiors. National security, you know?’
‘Mmm. Yes, it would take some confidence to approach such a subject. Well, it certainly puts my case of the dead carpet dealer in the shade,’ İkmen said with a small, weary smile.
‘Yaşar Uzun.’
‘Yes.’ İkmen rubbed his almost scarlet eyes with his fingers and said, ‘His, it would seem, is a long story. Oh, by the way, I saw your father at Raşit Bey’s shop this morning.’
‘Yes,’ Süleyman shook his head and sighed. ‘Poor Father. He called me. He gave Raşit Bey an absolutely enormous court carpet to value the day you started looking for Yaşar Uzun. Father is in the same financial situation he is always in, but he had great hopes about this piece, which is very beautiful. Sadly for Father, Raşit Bey says that the carpet will not realise as much as could be hoped because of its size. It’s lovely, but far too big for a modern house or even an ordinary old one. It came from a palace. But Father is unhappy and thinks that Raşit Bey is being overly pessimistic about its value. I am inclined to think that Raşit Bey is probably in reality overvaluing the carpet to save my father’s feelings. But what can one do?’
And then in spite of the fact that Süleyman had opened their discussion with such dangerous and frightening ideas and information, the two men now turned to rather more trivial matters. A lot of it was about carpets and most specifically about the Lawrence carpet itself. İkmen had developed quite a fascination with this item. Süleyman didn’t know a great deal about T. E. Lawrence, but he had seen
Lawrence of Arabia
on several occasions. It was not, he admitted, easy viewing for him.
‘Those Ottomans who fought in the desert were my ancestors,’ he said.
‘And mine,’ İkmen added. ‘At least two of my grandfather’s brothers fought in the Great War.’
‘Yes, but with respect, Çetin,’ Süleyman said, ‘I expect your ancestors were of the peasants with no boots variety.’
İkmen smiled. ‘They were poor
Mehmet
s
*
who fought for their sultan, yes.’
‘Whereas mine sat about in places like Damascus drinking champagne and listening to Offenbach.’ Süleyman shook his head yet again. ‘You know they used to actually talk in terms of the men being replaceable entities? Thousands would die and they’d just send back to Anatolia for more! The Arabs, and that Lawrence person, humiliated us!’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘The film wasn’t.’
They looked at each other but neither of them said anything. There was a scene in the film where T. E. Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, is sexually propositioned by the Turkish governor of the Arab town of Deraa. It was not easy viewing for anyone, but especially not for patriotic Turks. It also, for Süleyman, brought to mind the image of the very sexual Mürsel yet again.
Süleyman finally left İkmen at just before six in the morning. He needed to go home and wash and prepare for a day of autopsy reports, press releases and, hopefully, some information from İzzet Melik in Hakkari. He wondered whether he had yet discovered who had made that mysterious phone call to his office from the Hakkari jandarma station.
İkmen opened up the main door out into the Balık Pazar and then embraced his friend before he walked through it.
‘Be careful, Mehmet,’ he said. ‘Those people, the ones we spoke of earlier, they are not like us. They have no restraints . . .’
Süleyman stepped out into the fish market which was now coming alive in a whirl of red snappers, mussels, lobsters, squid tubes, shouting men in flat caps and hordes of very loud, hungry cats.
İkmen closed the ‘Church in the Cupboard’ off from the rest of the world again, took his mobile phone out of his pocket and, with a very grave expression on his face, he made a very important call.
Chapter 9
That a lot of police work so often involves nothing more than the relentless pursuit of paperwork trails has become something of a cliché. It doesn’t, however, make it any less true.
After first organising tea and some spare packets of cigarettes for her superior, Ayşe Farsakoğlu settled down to tell İkmen what she had discovered.
‘First,’ she said as she took a light from İkmen’s shakily proffered lighter, ‘I had a call from England just before you arrived, sir. Scotland Yard say that they have identified a Roberts in the north district of London whose grandfather, he says, was the servant of T. E. Lawrence. They will send someone round to interview this man.’
‘That’s good.’ İkmen rubbed what he knew was a ghastly visage with a nicotine-reeking hand. If only he’d accepted Garbis Bey’s offer of breakfast . . .
‘Now with regard to Mr Yaşar Uzun . . .’
İkmen’s phone began to ring. He visibly froze. Ayşe flicked her long black hair behind her ears and bent over his desk in order to pick it up. But before she did so, she said, ‘Fatma Hanım has called several times already to speak to you, sir.’
İkmen puffed on his cigarette and then said, ‘Call me a coward if you must, Ayşe, but I cannot speak to my wife just at the moment.’
Ayşe took the call which was from Fatma İkmen. She told her that her husband was indeed at work but out at the present moment. She lied well and without apparent embarrassment which, İkmen felt, could be seen as either an advantage or a disadvantage in one’s inferior.
‘All right,’ Ayşe said as she retrieved a sheaf of papers from her desk and then sat down in front of İkmen again. ‘Mr Uzun had only one bank account as far as I can tell. It’s with the Yapı Kredi in Beyoğlu and on 1 October last year he deposited sixty thousand pounds sterling in cash into that account. That is on exactly the same day that Mr Melly from the British Consulate claims he gave one hundred and twenty thousand pounds sterling to Uzun as a deposit on the Lawrence carpet.’
‘Has Mr Melly given us the receipt Yaşar Uzun gave to him yet?’
‘We have a faxed copy of a receipt for one hundred and twenty thousand pounds signed by Uzun, but it doesn’t say what the money is in respect of. Although apparently his UK bank, HSBC, as requested, took down the serial numbers of the sterling notes issued. He must have been nervous about the transaction.’ She pushed a piece of paper with the Yapı Kredi Bank logo at its head over the desk towards him. ‘But as you can see there is a shortfall of exactly a half.’
‘Yes. Maybe Mr Uzun, buoyed up by his immense good fortune, decided to go on a spending spree.’
‘There is some truth in that, sir,’ she said. ‘For instance, he moved into his Nişantaşı apartment within days of that deposit and he may well have paid for his beloved Jeep with cash. I have yet to follow that up. Mr Uzun also possessed some nice clothes, a few of them Italian, and some reasonable furniture. But nothing spectacular. However, so his landlord has told me, in spite of all that money, his rent was three months in arrears.’