Arabesk (3 page)

Of course to someone of Çöktin's age, such a strange course of action had to have reasons that had nothing to do with love. There were numerous possibilities. When he first came to the city, Erol had been fresh and lacking in credibility. The vastly experienced Tansu would have given him that as well as enhancing her own flagging career with his vibrant and youthful presence. What that presence did for her bedtime activities was also quite easy to see as well. And with managers and agents, if the press were to be believed, involved in every aspect of the lives of the rich and famous, who could even begin to guess what influence they were also exerting upon this pair? Not that Erol and Tansu's relationship was in any sense a secret. Pictures of them holding hands, kissing or just shopping appeared almost weekly in most of the newspapers. What was a secret, however, and a big one, was the existence of the girl now lying dead in Urfa's kitchen. If the woman who looked, even in death, like a peasant girl of no more than sixteen was indeed Erol's wife then firstly, why had he kept her a secret and secondly, why had he married her after the beginning of his affair with Tansu? 'Sergeant Çöktin?'

He turned round quickly at the sound of his name and found himself facing a police photographer. 'Yes?'

'Inspector Suleyman wants you.'

With a brief nod of acknowledgement, Çöktin glanced just once more at the motionless Erol Urfa before moving off in the direction of the kitchen.

Although for some the mere appearance of men within a kitchen is incongruous, the two that Çöktin found himself facing as he entered looked far more comfortable in that setting than the dead woman at their feet must have done when she was alive. Although not nearly as elegant as the younger, slimmer Suleyman, Dr Arto Sarkissian possessed the same sort of casual grace and wore similar, if larger, designer suits. Both blended very easily with the clinically beautiful, all-metal German kitchen. The girl, in her multi-coloured, multi-layered, heavily headscarfed ensemble, looked like little more than a bundle of rags.

'Well, Çöktin,' the Armenian said with his customary, almost unfathomable jollity, 'you were right, I believe, about the substance involved.'

'Cyanide?'

'A distinctive bitter almonds smell plus the livid appearance of the hypostasis would seem to suggest death by oxygen starvation. Carbon monoxide can cause the same effect in the skin but not the bitter almond aroma. A most excellent preliminary deduction on your part. Well done.'

‘Thank you, sir.'

Then, turning to Suleyman once again, the doctor continued, 'I will of course have to test in order to confirm my findings, but I think it is only a formality. There are some interesting deposits in Mrs Urfa's mouth which suggest she may have ingested the substance in food, but we'll see.'

'Could she have done it herself?' Suleyman asked as he looked down at the dead woman with more, or so Çöktin thought, than a little distaste.

The doctor briefly sucked his bottom lip before answering. 'Mmm. Suicide. Could always be, of course, but with, so far, no note to that effect I can't be certain. There is a pen, as you can see, on the table, but . . . Once the forensics are completed I'll be in more of a position to say. However . . .'

'Yes?'

'I have my own thoughts. Strange as it may seem in a world characterised by the Internet and remote guidance weapons systems, we could have a good old-fashioned poisoning on our hands.'

Suleyman smiled. 'I wasn't aware that that method had gone out of style.'

'Oh, it hasn't. As you and I both know, Inspector, people are regularly despatched via overdoses of drugs both prescribed and illicit But real, honest-to-God poisons are unusual. With the exception of weedkiller, actual poisons rarely turn up in our line of work - ask Çetin Ìkmen if you don't believe me.'

Çöktin, who had been listening very attentively to all this, bent down and looked searchingly into the woman's horrified open eyes. When alive, he imagined she must have looked something like his own mother when she married his father. Child brides both, certainly in his mother's case, from some little village so insignificant it barely boasted a name.

'When women are poisoned,' the doctor continued, 'I subconsciously, I must say, see the shadow of the harem.'

Suleyman gave Sarkissian one of his almost obscenely perfect smiles. 'You are, I take it, theorising that a woman may have perpetrated this act?'

'Oh no,' Sarkissian replied, waving his hands dismissively in front of his face. 'I am just a doctor, not a theorist. That is your job, my dear Suleyman.'

'But?'

'But,' he was smiling again now, obviously pleased to give vent to his thoughts however off kilter they might be, 'our Mr Urfa is extremely popular with women. I thought, as I expect you did too, that he was solely involved with the lovely Tansu Hanim. And if I am shocked that he has this little wife then perhaps others were surprised also. Surprised and envious maybe. Not that my silly, florid mind is totally obsessed by old harem tales of women slipping poisons into the sherbet of their rivals, you understand...'

'But it is a most unexpected turn of events nevertheless,' Suleyman concluded.

'Talk!'

All three men turned to face the source of the harsh, rather common voice that came from the man now slumped against the doorway of the kitchen.

'While you talk you do nothing about my Merih’ Urfa growled, pushing roughly against the hand of a young constable who was now, too late, attempting to restrain him.

Moving forward in order to protect the gaze of his live patient from the face of his deceased charge, Arto Sarkissian put one friendly hand out towards the famous singer in a gesture of concern. 'Now—'

'Merih,' the man repeated the name, his voice now clearly exhibiting that deliberate but slurred quality of the unhappily sedated.

'No, Ruya,' the doctor corrected, 'or that was what I thought you said your wife's name was.'

'Yes, Ruya, my wife, she was, is. . .' Urfa slumped forward a little, his head dropping towards the doctor's shoulder in a movement of despair. 'And Merih ...'

Suddenly and for no reason that he could logically fathom, Suleyman was possessed by a shiver of apprehension. The sort of feeling Ìkmen had always told him he must learn to trust 'Who is Merih, Mr Urfa?' he asked. 'If Ruya was your wife, then Merih is . . . ?'

Looking past the doctor's shoulder, directly at the body of his wife, Urfa whispered, 'She is our daughter. She is just ten weeks old.'

'But. . .'

Then, his eyes filling and finally overflowing with tears, Urfa choked, 'She was with her mother. She was always with her mother! But now she has gone. I see her nowhere.' And with that his eyes turned up inside his head as he lost consciousness.

In retrospect, a pink, open-necked shirt was not as respectful an ensemble as he would have liked for the occasion, but then when one is in a hurry one does not always think of such things. And Ibrahim Aksoy had been in a tearing hurry as soon as he had put the phone down on the luminous Tansu Hanim less than half an hour before. When, so the star had told him, she had earlier that morning attempted to contact Erol Urfa at his Ìstiklal Caddesi apartment, she had been answered not by her beloved but by a very curt man who had informed her that Mr Urfa was currently 'indisposed'. Quite who this person was, why he was in Erol's apartment and what this 'indisposition' might consist of was not disclosed. But Tansu had been worried enough to contact the only person she knew she could really trust vis-a-vis Erol, his manager Ibrahim Aksoy. As, effectively, the owner of the young superstar, Aksoy would either maximise publicity for his charge's indisposition, if that were appropriate, or cover it up in as diplomatic a fashion as possible. Either way he would sort it, just as Tansu's own manager had, over the years, dealt with such indispositions of hers -her jealous lovers, her plastic surgery operations, all those abortions.

Quite what Ibrahim Aksoy had been expecting as he made his way to the Ìzzet Pasa Apartments, he could not now recall. That it included neither clusters of armed policemen nor an earlier, almost surreal encounter with a peculiar man who claimed to be a neighbour of Eroi's was pretty certain. If asked, Aksoy would probably have described the peculiar man as retarded. This man had, unbidden, approached the corpulent manager as the latter puffed his way past the old French consulate at the Taksim end of Ìstiklal Caddesi.

Barrelling out from Zambak Sokak on the right and lumbering rather more closely to Aksoy than the latter found comfortable, the man simply said, 'Mrs Ruya is dead.'

Aksoy knew that Ruya was the name of the contentious country wife his client insisted upon keeping.

'Mrs Ruya who?
he asked, anxious as one in his position would be to clarify matters.

'Mrs Ruya across the hallway.'

'Across the hallway? Across the hallway where?'

'From my apartment' Spoken through a long, thin strand of drool, the man's words smelt as well as sounded. Aksoy took a handkerchief out of his pocket and placed it delicately across his outraged nose.

'And your apartment is where?' he inquired.

'Mine is Ìzzet Pasa Apartments 3/10,' he said.

Aksoy's lipid-encmsted heart, aware just like his brain that Erol's address was Ìzzet Pasa 3’12, did not know whether to jump for joy or sorrow. If this congenital idiot was correct, then the inconvenient child bride was now no more. Just to make certain, however, he asked,'You do mean Mrs Ruya Urfa, I—'

'Didn't do it myself!'

'Eh?'

Quite suddenly this extraordinary creature had, for some reason, taken fright. Why, Aksoy could not imagine. He had, as far as he was aware, been quite polite to the fool, or at least he thought he had. For a few moments he stopped and watched as the man, the fat on his back wobbling over the creases in his shirt, retreated down the road, muttering things that Aksoy could not catch.

Later, as he approached what turned out to be a knot of policemen standing in front of the entrance to the apartments, Aksoy prepared himself for the fact that what the 'idiot’ had just told him might actually be true. He also readied himself to use that information if necessary.

Aksoy was intercepted by a tall, uniformed man. 'Yes, sir,' he said, 'may I help you?'

'I have come to see my client, Mr Urfa,' Aksoy said with a smile. 'I am his manager, Ibrahim Aksoy. You may have heard—'

'Nobody is permitted to visit Mr Urfa at the present time, sir.'

'Oh. Is he in trouble then, or unwell?' Aksoy, whose mind was in reality exploring all the possibilities that would now exist for Erol if Ruya really were dead, placed a concerned expression upon his face, hoping it might just belie the loudness of his shirt.

The officer remained coldly impassive. 'I cannot comment, sir.'

'Oh.' With a twirl of his moustache Aksoy feigned moving away and then, thoughtfully, twisted round to speak to the officer again. 'It isn't anything to do with his wife, is it?' He watched the policeman's eyes narrow. 'Little Ruya?'

'Why would you think that?' The 'sir' bit had quite gone from the officer's speech now.

'Oh, just a passing comment somebody made to me.'

'What do you mean? Who?' Both the policeman and his gun leaned down menacingly towards Aksoy who felt himself go just a little bit pale.

'Well, it was a man.' Then looking quickly from side to side to ensure that no one else was listening, Aksoy added, 'An idiot type actually. Said he lived here at the apartments.'

'Yes.'

'Just mentioned that Mrs Urfa, Ruya, may have, well, er, may have sort of died and—' 'This man was a neighbour?' 'So he said.'

The expression on the policeman's face was, for just a moment, almost indecipherable. A mixture of what could have been suspicion coupled with stone-faced gravity. Ibrahim Aksoy found it, whatever its composition, really rather frightening. He quickly changed the subject back to one that directly impacted upon himself.

'So,' he said, 'can I see Mr Urfa now? Offer him comfort, the loving shoulder of a true friend . . .'

Although it seemed like so much more, probably only a second or two elapsed before the policeman replied.

'No,' he said, and grabbed hold of the manager's shirtsleeve, pinching just a little of the plump man's skin between his fingers. 'But you can come and see the inspector. He'll be very interested in your idiot.' Then turning to one of his colleagues he suddenly smiled and said, 'Did you see the match last night?'

Leaving Çöktin to sit with the now conscious Urfa,

Suleyman quietly took hold of Dr Sarkissian's elbow and led him out into the opulently mirrored hall.

'What I don't understand.' he said as he tried, but failed, to avoid observing his own figure in the glass, 'is why Erol Urfa didn't tell us his daughter was missing in the first instance. I mean, surely as soon as he could see that his wife was dead his first thought must have been for his child.'

The doctor, who had managed to position himself so that he could not see any part of his own body in the numerous mirrors, sighed heavily. 'In theory you are right However, shock can do very peculiar things to people. Finding one's wife dead, although I cannot speak from my own experience, could I believe temporarily rob a man of his everyday wits.'

'Yes, but even so, with a child involved . . .'

'More of a baby than a child. Ten weeks old. It's very new and Urfa does not even live here in the accepted sense.' He paused briefly and shook his head. 'But then perhaps we are not the best of men to be considering whether or not a man may easily forget his newborn infant. Although, as you lot say, Insallah you will know the joy of parenthood one day, my dear Suleyman, even if I may not.'

Not a little embarrassed by what the much older and rather regretful man had said, Suleyman smiled briefly before changing the subject. 'So what we have then is a possibly murdered woman and a missing child.'

'Who may,' Sarkissian said, raising one finger to make his point, 'be the key to the mother's death. Somebody may have killed Mrs Urfa not out of desire for the woman's husband but in order to possess the child.' Then clapping one hand affectionately across Suleyman's back, he added, 'Could be awfully melodramatic this, you know.’