River of The Dead

Copyright © 2009 Barbara Nadel

The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 0 7553 7894 4

HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

An Hachette UK Company

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London NW1 3BH

Table of Contents

About the Author

Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time and has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel
Deadly Web
in 2005. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Francis Hancock series set during World War Two.

Praise for Barbara Nadel:

‘The delight of Nadel’s books is the sense of being taken beneath the surface of an ancient city which most visitors see for a few days at most. We look into the alleyways and curious dark quarters of Istanbul, full of complex characters and louche atmosphere’

‘A colourful and persuasive portrait of contemporary Istanbul’

‘Nadel’s novels take in all of Istanbul – the mysterious, the beautiful, the hidden and the banal. Her characters are vivid. A fascinating view of contemporary Turkey’

‘Nadel’s evocation of the shady underbelly of modern Turkey is one of the perennial joys of crime fiction’

‘Nadel makes full use of the rich variety of possibilities offered by modern Istanbul and its inhabitants. Crime fiction can do many things, and here it offers both a well crafted mystery and a form of armchair tourism, with Nadel as an expert guide’

‘The strands of Barbara Nadel’s novel are woven as deftly as the carpet at the centre of the tale . . . a wonderful setting . . . a dizzying ride’

To Alex, Pat and Lisa - fellow travellers

on the road to the east.

Cast of Characters

Çetin İkmen
– İstanbul police inspector

Mehmet Süleyman
– İstanbul police inspector – İkmen’s protégé

Commissioner Ardıç
– İkmen’s and Suleyman’s boss

Sergeant Ayşe Farsakoğlu
– İkmen’s deputy

Sergeant İzzet Melik
– Süleyman’s deputy

Dr Arto Sarkissian
– İstanbul police pathologist

Fatma İkmen
– Çetin İkmen’s wife

Zelfa Süleyman
– Mehmet Süleyman’s wife

Çiçek İkmen
– Çetin İkmen’s daughter

Bekir İkmen
– Çetin İkmen’s son

Kemal İkmen
– Çetin İkmen’s son

Bülent İkmen
– Çetin İkmen’s son

Yusuf Kaya
– escaped prisoner

Ramazan Eren
– prison guard

Cengiz Bayar
– prison guard

Ara Berköz
– prisoner

Mr Aktar
– hospital administrator

Dr Eldem
– neurologist

İsak Mardin
– nurse

Murat Lole
– nurse

Faruk Öz
– nurse

Sophia
– Bulgarian girl, a beggar

Inspector Edibe Taner
– Mardin police inspector

Captain Hilmi Erdur
– of the Birecik Jandarma

Seçkin Taner
– Edibe Taner’s father

Seraphim Yunun
– a Syrian monk

Gabriel Saatçi
– a Syrian monk

Musa Saatçi
– Gabriel Saatçi’s father

Zeynep Kaya
– Yusuf Kaya’s wife

Bulbul Kaplan
– Yusuf Kaya’s aunt

Anastasia Akyuz
– a prostitute

Elizabeth Smith
– an American

İbrahim Keser
– works for Elizabeth Smith

Lütfü Güneş
– a Kurd

Lucine Rezian
– elderly Armenian woman

‘I’m going to be sick!’

The figure in the wheelchair slumped forward as if to emphasise the point. Prison guard Ramazan Eren, who was pushing the chair, said, ‘Hang on, Yusuf, we’re nearly there.’

‘You should have cuffed him,’ police constable Mete said angrily.

‘He’s having a heart attack!’ Eren responded sharply.

There were four men with the individual in the wheelchair – two police constables and two prison guards. The man in the chair, their charge, was Yusuf Kaya: drug dealer, murderer and one of İstanbul’s most notorious criminals. Late the previous evening, back in his cell at Kartal High Security Prison, he had started experiencing chest pains. The prison doctor had been called and had found little to concern him. But then in the early hours of the morning Kaya’s condition had seemed to deteriorate. The prison governor ordered Ramazan Eren, the guard who had first reported Kaya’s illness, and a colleague, Cengiz Bayar, to take the prisoner to the Cerrahpaşa Hospital for further tests and possibly treatment. There they had been joined by two police officers. Yusuf Kaya was known to be a very violent offender and, sick or not, no chances were being taken.

The officers had just rounded the corner on their way to the cardiology clinic when Yusuf Kaya began to complain of feelings of nausea. Up ahead was a group of young men, a couple of whom appeared, to Cengiz Bayar, to be in uniform.

‘Look, Yusuf, there are some nurses,’ he said. ‘We’ll get them to find you a bowl or something.’

He called out to the men, four in all, who began walking towards the officers and their wheelchair-bound charge.

‘We’re taking this man to cardiology,’ Cengiz Bayar said as the group drew level with them. ‘Could you—’

But the pain from the knife or whatever it was that one of the men thrust into his chest was so awful it took his power of speech clean away. One of the police officers began to shout, but Yusuf Kaya soon put a stop to him. Miraculously well again, he leapt up from the wheelchair, took something sharp from the hand of one of the unknown men and killed the policeman stone dead.

The last two things prison officer Cengiz Bayar saw in this world were his colleagues collapsing around him in fountains of blood and a very fit Yusuf Kaya running off to freedom down the hospital corridor.

‘Who are you?’ Kemal İkmen asked.

‘Who are
you
?’ the man with the thick gold chains round his neck replied. There was something aggressive in the man’s approach that Kemal, for all his teenage bravado, didn’t like. There was also, more strangely, something about him that was vaguely familiar too.

‘Listen, son, does Inspector Çetin İkmen live here or not?’ the man continued gruffly. ‘If he does, I’d like to see him, and if he doesn’t—’

‘Yeah, but who wants to know?’ Kemal interrupted. The boy’s father, Çetin İkmen, was a high-ranking and successful officer in the İstanbul police force. He therefore had a lot of enemies as well as some very odd and unnerving relatives who, like Çetin İkmen’s late mother, came originally from Albania. It was well known that some Albanian gang members could be very ‘flash’, just like this gold-covered creature at the apartment door.

‘You’re beginning to get on my nerves, boy!’ the man said.

Kemal, for all his bluster, felt his face go cold with fear.

‘Does Inspector İkmen live here or not?’

If this man was a relative he was, if Kemal were honest with himself, really out of character. The Albanian relatives were weird – one of them even dressed up as a woman – but they weren’t exactly frightening, not like this man. Cold sweat invaded the underside of Kemal’s shirt collar. Almost unconsciously he said, ‘Dad?’

But his father didn’t appear. Instead it was his mother’s voice that came from inside the apartment.

‘Kemal, who is it?’ Fatma İkmen said.

The man in front of him blinked as if reacting to something irritating around his eyes, and nervously licked his lips.

‘It’s a . . .’ Kemal began, but then his words simply faded in his throat. ‘It’s . . .’

‘Oh, for the love of . . .’ The sound of a woman grunting somewhat painfully to her feet was followed by the shuffling of slippers across carpet. Fatma İkmen, her head covered with a floral scarf, burst out of the living room into the hallway behind her youngest and, she often thought, silliest child Kemal. How difficult was it to answer a door? She pushed Kemal roughly out of the way, and then she stopped.

Kemal, who could only see the strange man’s face from where he was standing, frowned when he saw this person give his mother what he felt was a very familiar smile. His mother in response said only, ‘No!’

‘Oh, yes!’ the man said as he opened his arms in front of her. ‘Oh yes it is!’

‘I can’t . . .’

‘Mum, it’s me, Bekir!’ the man said.

‘It is? It
is
!’ Fatma İkmen threw her short, plump body into the arms of someone Kemal had always thought of as almost a myth. Bekir, his bad boy rebellious brother, had run away from home when he was fifteen. Kemal hadn’t even been born then. And until this moment not a word had been heard nor hair been sighted of him since. His father, Çetin İkmen, who had followed the boy’s mother out of the living room and was now standing beside Kemal with a smouldering cigarette between his lips, had privately believed that his third son had died some years before. While Fatma cried copiously into the arms of her long-lost child, Çetin didn’t move from his position at all. He just looked. And when the man Kemal now knew was his brother smiled at their father, the youngster noticed that Çetin İkmen did not smile back. In fact, if anything, Inspector İkmen looked appalled about the appearance of this ghost from the past.