But Süleyman wasn’t so sure. There was both a hardness and an inappropriately childish petulance about Rahmi Soylu he really didn’t like. Grief or no grief, to be so cruel to his stepmother was inexcusable. And what was that about Emine having given birth to a demon?
‘What are you doing here?’ İkmen said as he walked over to and then embraced his friend the pathologist, Arto Sarkissian.
There were five vehicles parked somewhat precariously by the side of the road, perched, as it were, on the lip of the steep gorge below. There was Inspector Metin İskender’s Audi, a standard police squad car, an ambulance, İkmen’s beaten up old Mercedes and a much newer and sleeker model of the same make that belonged to the Armenian.
Arto leaned in towards İkmen and said, ‘Both Inspector İskender and the attending medic reckon that the victim was shot at some point during his recent “adventures”. I’m here to cast my eye over the body. Although, looking down there . . .’ He pointed into the deep darkness of the gorge and was not, in tandem with İkmen, comforted by the sight of İskender, his sergeant, and a white-coated medic coming up through the trees towards them.
‘It’s a long way down, isn’t it?’ İkmen said as he lit up a Maltepe cigarette. ‘I wonder if it’s slippery down there, or . . .’
‘If I fall over, at my weight, I will break something,’ the Armenian said with some passion in his voice. ‘Either the rest of you will have to hold me as I walk down or we will have to get a crane in from somewhere!’
İkmen rolled his eyes up towards the bright blue spring sky. ‘Arto, I don’t think that industrial machinery will be required,’ he said. ‘I think that’s just a little over-dramatic.’
‘Do you! Do you!’ His large face was white with fear, his small dark eyes staring out wildly from behind the thick lenses of his spectacles.
‘Yes, I do.’
Fifteen minutes later, however, having struggled alongside his colleagues to get the terrified Arto Sarkissian down into the gorge unharmed, İkmen was no longer as sure as he had been about the amount of dramatic potential inherent in a crane. In retrospect it seemed to be almost a missed necessity. Sweating heavily after his long slide down the gorge, İkmen, along with Metin İskender, surveyed the overturned Jeep while the doctor got to work with the body on the forest floor.
‘What makes you think that Yaşar Uzun has been shot?’ İkmen asked as he offered his colleague a cigarette.
İskender took the proffered Maltepe with a grunt and then said, ‘The large hole between his shoulder blades was a bit of a clue.’
A dapper and attractive man in his early thirties, Metin İskender had the reputation for being a somewhat spiky individual. Not that he was as bad as he had been when he’d first joined the force. Although the majority of Turkish police officers originate from working-class families and districts, the tough Istanbul neighbourhood of Ümraniye, which was where Metin was born and brought up, had a fearful reputation for poverty and ignorance. Pulling oneself out of such a place, as he had done, was an act of great willpower and courage and did not allow one to tolerate either prejudice or criticism.
‘Oh.’
‘I also noticed something odd about the tyre tracks,’ İskender continued.
‘What was that?’
‘They only appear to start halfway down the gorge. The ones near the road have been brushed over – literally – with an actual broom, by the looks of it.’
İkmen sucked on his cigarette and then said, ‘So someone didn’t want Mr Uzun and his lovely car to be discovered.’
‘It would seem so,’ İskender replied. ‘The “mob” strikes again if I am not much mistaken, Inspector İkmen.’
The latter sighed and then said, ‘Yes. Or so it would appear.’
As well as being very beautiful and healthy, the Forest of Belgrad had for some time had a more sinister reputation as graveyard for the various poor souls who had had the misfortune to cross one or other of the city’s brutal Mafia bosses. Gorges like it provided excellent natural dumping grounds.
‘The last whereabouts of Mr Uzun are back in the village,’ İkmen said as he looked up the gorge to the road above. ‘Monday night.’
‘Any idea what he might have been doing?’ İskender enquired.
‘Selling carpets to foreigners,’ İkmen replied.
‘Oh. I see.’ The words were spoken with a slight curl of the lip as if Metin İskender had a bad smell under his nose.
İkmen laughed softly. ‘Not keen on carpet dealers, Metin?’
‘It’s a job.’ He shrugged. ‘Men must work. What more can be said?’
‘Ah, but there are carpet dealers and there are carpet dealers, are there not?’ İkmen said.
‘Well . . .’
‘And this particular carpet dealer was assistant to Raşit Ulusan, one of the oldest and most respected dealers in the Kapalı Çarşı. Raşit Bey can boast ambassadors and industrialists amongst his customers as well as the Süleyman family. Mehmet’s family and the Ulusans have been trading, apparently, for many years.’
Metin İskender grunted by way of reply. He, too, knew and liked Mehmet Süleyman but he, probably rather more than most, found the issue of the man’s Ottoman past difficult. Although married to a very successful middle-class business woman, Metin’s understanding of once-powerful people from pre-Republican families was limited. He also, in common with a lot of people, had little patience with such families’ avowed poverty in the twenty-first century. It was Metin who changed the subject.
‘Of course some of the body and about half of the face has been eaten by something,’ he said as he started to make his way over to the corpse and the doctor attending to it. ‘I don’t know what animals live in this forest, but I expect our friends in the mob are only too educated on the matter. Luckily both his wallet and his mobile phone seem to be intact.’
‘Yes.’
İkmen began to move over towards the body too, but then stopped just as the rich, meaty smell of rot began to assault his nostrils. Yaşar Uzun’s death did look, on the face of it, like a classic Mafia hit – except that most mobs he knew very rarely took the time to cover their tracks or even bother to hide what they had done in any significant way. He did have a feeling about Yaşar Uzun – he’d experienced it right from the start – things here were not all that they seemed. As he took his mobile phone out of his pocket, İkmen smiled. His late mother had been exactly the same. But back then, in the forties and fifties, her abilities had been interpreted as the result of witchcraft. In Üsküdar where the İkmen family lived in those days, Ayşe İkmen had been the local witch. As he flicked his phone open, İkmen wondered whether the district still had a witch and, if so, whether she was any good. He lit yet another cigarette as he scrolled through the host of numbers he had stored in the telephone’s memory and then, coming to the one that he wanted, he sighed and pressed the ‘select’ button. A few seconds later an elderly voice answered.
‘Ah, Raşit Bey,’ İkmen replied. ‘I am so sorry to bother you at this difficult time, but could you please give me the name and address of the person who hosted your carpet show last Monday night?’
The old man said that he would, provided İkmen could wait for a few moments while he went into his office to retrieve the information. İkmen said that was fine and, while he waited, he looked at the deep, still slightly misty forest around him. It was gorgeous.
Chapter 3
‘Yes, I remember Emine Soylu, or Koç as she was then, and Deniz, her son, too,’ the phlegm-swamped voice of someone Süleyman could barely understand in the Hakkari gendarmerie said. Some of the eastern accents were difficult to decipher. But then for some of the people ‘out there’ Turkish was not really their first language. Often it was Kurdish and, in the case of the Suriyani Christians, it was Aramaic. Not that this man, whatever his name was, was likely to be a member of either of those groups. No, he was just a member of the local jandarma, a paramilitary force that acts in lieu of the police in some rural districts, and he had an accent you could cut with a knife.
‘I believe that Cabbar Soylu married her and took on the boy, Deniz?’
Süleyman was sitting in his car outside his parents’ house with his mobile phone jammed against his ear. He’d started making inquiries of Hakkari as soon as he’d left the Soylus’ house. After all, if this investigation was to proceed as usual, and Mürsel was very keen for it to do so, he had to explore the background of the victim at the very least. Also it was quite propitious that this roughly spoken man had called at this time. He had not, after all, relished the prospect of telling his father about the death of Raşit Bey’s assistant. Death in all its forms, even of those he didn’t know, saddened Muhammed Süleyman to a quite disproportionate degree these days.
‘No,’ the other replied shortly. ‘Cabbar married Emine all right, but Deniz went to the hospital at Van.’
Rahmi Soylu had described Emine’s child as a ‘demon’. Süleyman wondered whether he was deformed but his colleague in Hakkari said that he wasn’t.
‘Deniz Koç was mad,’ he said. ‘Cabbar had him put into the institution outside of Van. It was for the best.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Oh, he was violent, biting –’ had he said ‘biting’? – ‘touching, hitting . . . you know . . .’
Süleyman did have some experience of psychiatric institutions. Apart from the fact that his psychiatrist wife had patients in several of them, over the years his job had taken him into a few in and around İstanbul. Then of course there had been his mother’s uncle Ahmet who, due to shellshock sustained during the First World War, had died in one such place. Not that anyone ever spoke about him except in whispers. If Cabbar Soylu had put his stepson into an institution it cannot have been a decision lightly taken – madness, even by association, remained a palpable stain upon one’s family.
‘I believe Deniz died,’ Süleyman continued. ‘I get the impression that was some time ago.’
The phlegmy man seemed to laugh. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Deniz Koç died last year. September. He killed himself. They always do.’
‘Oh, I . . .’ He turned to see the confused face of his mother at the car window, her fingers tapping on the glass.
‘Mehmet! What are you doing?’
He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘Mother, I’m on the phone! I’ll be in in a moment.’
‘Mehmet?’ She looked confused, her heavily powdered face frowning against the outside of his window.
‘Yes,’ the man on the phone continued, ‘took his own life and condemned his soul to damnation.’
‘Right . . .’
Süleyman pressed the button to lower his window and then said to his mother, ‘I’ll be in in a moment! This is business, Mother!’
‘Oh, well, if you must shout at your poor mother . . .’ His mother flounced off back into her small wooden house with more of the air of a teenager than that of an elderly woman. But then that was his mother all over, she had never – and would never – grow up. His father had indulged her too much for that to ever be possible.
‘Inspector Süleyman?’ the voice at the other end of the phone said.
‘Yes . . .’ Süleyman raked one nervous hand through his thick, greying hair. His mother always had an adverse effect upon him in almost every scenario he could name. But he cleared his throat and said, ‘So, but, Cabbar Soylu, what did you make of him . . . ?’
‘Cabbar?’ the man laughed, properly, so it seemed, this time. ‘A loveable rogue. He has a record, as you must know, but here he was just involved in petty crime. He stole from bakkal shops, dealt illegal cigarettes to soldiers, you know . . .’
‘You wouldn’t describe him as a gangster?’
There was just a moment of silence before the other man said, ‘No, not here in Hakkari. I heard he later did well in İstanbul and I wondered if it was by that criminal method, but Cabbar left no family behind when he went away from Hakkari. His mother went with him, his father and brother were dead by that time. Last I saw of Cabbar was at Deniz’s funeral here last year. Word was that he and his family were off to start a new life in Europe somewhere.’
‘Emine Soylu didn’t mention it,’ Süleyman said.
‘Oh, well, maybe he changed his mind,’ the other said. ‘But whichever way it was, it was kismet that he die at this time. Where it happens matters little.’
‘Somebody killed him,’ Süleyman said slowly. The idea that kismet, the Islamic concept of a preordained fate, was the prime mover in the death of an individual was still a prevalent notion, even amongst sections of the police force and particularly in the countryside among the peasants and the jandarma. Süleyman, for whom kismet wasn’t a totally serious consideration, tried to be patient with this man’s point of view.
‘Yes, but it was his time, Inspector,’ the man continued almost cheerily. ‘Life, which must conform to the Will of Allah, was always so.’
‘Yes . . .’ And then amid a brief further exchange of religiously inspired niceties their conversation finished.
Süleyman took a few moments to think about what he had just been told before getting out of the car and going towards his parents’ house. Deniz Koç had been, apparently, ‘mad’, although quite what his actual diagnosis had been, he didn’t know. Out in the wild and remote east maybe he didn’t even have a diagnosis. After all, Cabbar and Emine Soylu must have put him in that place towards the end of the seventies or early eighties at the latest. A time when things had been very bad, very violent all over the country. Political unrest of the rightists, leftists and the Kurdish population had culminated in the imposition of martial law in 1981. Süleyman remembered it well. Cabbar Soylu’s early years in İstanbul must have been tough, he’d subsequently done very well for himself. His success, however, could not, by its very nature, be applauded. Soylu had been a gangster and a thug and his life was not going to be any great loss to anyone beyond his family. If the peeper had killed Cabbar Soylu, did this mean that the peeper, as well as disliking homosexuals, hated gangsters too? Süleyman got out of his car and wondered about the types of people the peeper could conceivably dislike and how Mürsel could possibly know about that.