He’d just put the receiver down when there was a knock at his door followed by the appearance of a thin young man in front of his desk. He carried a small paper bag, which he placed, rather ceremoniously, on top of İkmen’s ink blotter.
İkmen looked at the bag, which appeared to be gently steaming and said, ‘I take it this is my final warning?’
‘Yes,’ the young man said. ‘Sigara börek. Mum just made it. Eat it first, then please come home, Dad. She’s driving everyone mad.’
İkmen sighed, indicated that his son should sit down opposite him, and then opened up the bag. A great waft of steam came floating out at him. He looked up at his son and said, ‘You know, Bülent, that if I plunge my fingers in there I’ll be scarred for life. You must have run like the wind to get here with these!’
‘Mum is very angry with you,’ Bülent replied. ‘So the oven was hot and my escape route was very short and rapid. What have you been working on, Dad?’
‘Oh . . .’
His office telephone began to ring.
Bülent said, ‘Oh please don’t answer that, Dad!’
The phone continued to ring.
‘I have to,’ İkmen said as he went to pick up the receiver. ‘If I’m in the building I have to answer my phone.’
‘Dad!’
İkmen spoke into the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘Çetin, it’s Mehmet,’ the familiar voice of his friend Mehmet Süleyman said. ‘I need to speak to you. I must!’
He sounded both breathless and rattled. İkmen said, ‘When and where?’
‘I don’t know when. Oh, Allah, Allah!’
‘Ssh! Ssh!’ Poor Mehmet sounded as if he was in the midst of a crisis. His voice was full of tears. ‘Come on, Mehmet, I will meet you. Just tell me where. I will wait. I promise.’
‘Oh, er, at, at . . . Meet me at Uç Horan, you know, the Armenian church in the Balık Pazar. Dr Sarkissian’s friend is custodian there . . .’
‘Garbis Bey, yes, I know him,’ İkmen said. And then, shrugging helplessly at his son, he added, ‘I’ll go there right away.’
Bülent waved his hands in the air and mouthed the word ‘no’ most emphatically.
‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be, Çetin,’ Süleyman continued. ‘Something has happened that I have to deal with first, I . . .’
‘I will be with Garbis Bey in under an hour,’ İkmen said.
When he put the phone down, İkmen lit a cigarette before he looked up into his son’s face.
Bülent, shaking his head sadly from side to side said, ‘Dad, you are dead.’
‘Yes,’ İkmen responded gloomily. ‘I know.’
Permçemli Sokak was cordoned off by the time Süleyman arrived. Uniform had been very quick and efficient. Mürsel, who was leaning over a body that appeared to be in the middle of the little street, had called straight through to Ardıç. As Süleyman approached, Mürsel straightened up and smiled.
‘Haydar,’ he said as he tipped his head, seemingly dispassionately, in the direction of the ground. ‘I shall miss him.’
Süleyman, shocked, took him to one side, away from the uniformed officers. ‘How did it happen?’
Mürsel lowered his voice. ‘I ordered Haydar to get in behind our man, but he was too quick for us. He cut Haydar’s throat. He’s very good.’
‘But still, apparently, without a name,’ Süleyman said exhibiting impatience with the apparently endless subterfuge.
‘You have no need of a name, Inspector,’ Mürsel said as he moved towards Süleyman with his smile still fixed upon his face. ‘You will never catch him.’
‘Which will put me on an almost equal footing with you,’ Süleyman responded sharply. ‘Those who assist me are still alive. What were you doing here, anyway?’
‘There’s a girl,’ Mürsel said as he gestured towards the synagogue. ‘Some functionary at the museum. He killed her.’
‘What?’
‘The peeper, he killed a girl in the synagogue,’ Mürsel elaborated. ‘What . . .’
‘How did you know?’ Süleyman asked. ‘What made you come here in the first place?’
At the end of the small street the heavy traffic on Yüzbaşi Sabahattin Evren Caddesi thundered past in glorious oblivion. Out on the Bosphorus, night-time ferries sounded their horns to announce their arrival at Eminönü, Kabataş and Üsküdar.
Mürsel Bey’s eyes glittered. ‘Intelligence,’ he said.
‘What intelligence?’
He smiled again. ‘If you remember, Mehmet Bey,’ he said, ‘when this business began and my agency and yours started to co-operate, it was understood that intelligence would only proceed in one direction. I don’t have to tell you anything.’
Some of the uniformed officers around the scene began to look at the two men with some curiosity. Feeling rather vulnerable without İzzet Melik, Süleyman went through the archway to the courtyard in front of the synagogue without another word.
The Zulfaris Synagogue, now the İstanbul Jewish Museum, was a nineteenth-century building and one of the very many, particularly Sephardic, synagogues that were built in the Karaköy area of the city. The main body of the synagogue, with the women’s gallery looking down from above, was exactly as it would have been when the place was built. Now, however, display cases and large bodies of text have replaced worshippers and down beneath the main hall there is a small ethnographic display. It was to the lower level that Mehmet Süleyman was directed by the uniformed officers stationed at the main entrance. Dr Sarkissian and another man Süleyman didn’t know were with the body.
As Süleyman approached, the Armenian turned towards him and said, ‘Her name is Leyla Saban. She was twenty-nine and a member of the local Sephardi community.’
Süleyman wondered whether his old friend the Sephardi Balthazar Cohen had known her. Or, given Leyla’s age, whether his son Berekiah had. Not pretty like Berekiah’s wife, İkmen’s daughter Hulya, Leyla Saban was nevertheless a handsome-looking woman. And if it hadn’t been for the huge bloodstain across her chest she might have looked as if she were just sleeping. Her features were at rest and seemingly untroubled.
The other man, whom Süleyman did not know, spoke next. His eyes full of tears, he said, ‘She was a great scholar of her people’s history. Leyla helped to run this place. She was a good girl!’
Süleyman looked at Arto Sarkissian who said, ‘This gentleman lives across the road.’
‘I am a Muslim scholar, Leyla was a Jewish scholar,’ the man, who had to be at least eighty, continued. ‘We were friends. We spoke of and enjoyed the differences between us. It is the Turkish way.’
‘Yes . . .’
‘My grandfather, he was an Armenian,’ the old man said. Though still tearful, he was nevertheless in his stride. ‘I don’t care who knows it! Leyla knew it. You know what she was doing in here so late into the night on her own? She was going through archives taking notes for a book she wanted to write – a book about all the Turks who saved Jews from the concentration camps in the Second World War. If this is the work of people who call themselves religious . . .’
‘This is not the work of fundamentalists of any kind, sir,’ Süleyman said. ‘Of that you can be certain.’
Arto Sarkissian looked up at Süleyman again and frowned. ‘You sound very sure, Inspector.’
‘I am.’
‘Well, she was stabbed,’ the Armenian said. ‘One thrust to the heart. Left-handed assailant.’
Just like the peeper.
‘Doctor, who actually found the body? Was it . . .’
‘No, it wasn’t this gentleman,’ Arto Sarkissian said as he smiled gently at the distressed old man. ‘He just came over when he heard the commotion.’
‘I knew that Leyla was in here on her own,’ the man said. ‘I have given the name of her father to your officers. He lives out in Şişli. There are many Jews in those districts to the north these days.’
‘So who actually found the body?’ Süleyman asked.
‘Oh, it was that officer from out of town,’ the doctor said as he turned his attention back to the corpse. ‘You must have seen him on your way in. A Mürsel Bey.’
‘Was it.’ Süleyman felt cold. Mürsel. How had he known that the peeper, if indeed it was him, had struck inside the museum? Intelligence? What did that mean, exactly? And what, he wondered, could the peeper have had against poor Leyla Saban? How had she transgressed his seemingly evermore stringent and deranged moral standards?
‘Yes, his sergeant was killed trying to apprehend Miss Saban’s killer, so it would seem,’ the Armenian said. ‘I will attend to him in due course. By the way, Inspector Süleyman, where is your sergeant tonight?’
‘Hakkari.’ İzzet Melik and Süleyman did not always see eye to eye but he missed his sergeant’s blunt, but honest loyalty now.
‘What is he doing there?’ the doctor asked. ‘God, but that’s the end of the earth almost!’
‘It’s a long story,’ Süleyman said and then he turned to the elderly erstwhile friend of the murdered woman. ‘Sir, if you wouldn’t mind coming outside and telling me exactly what happened from your point of view . . .’
‘You will find him, won’t you? Leyla’s killer . . .’
At that moment Mürsel came into the room and just before he turned aside to look at a display cabinet given over to nineteenth-century wedding dresses, he smiled at Süleyman who fixed him with his eyes and said, ‘Oh, yes, sir, we will find Leyla’s killer, you have my word on that account.’
His English friend was very drunk, but then if Wim Klaassen had just lost the equivalent of approximately two hundred thousand euros, he would probably be drinking heavily too.
‘How could he do it?’ Peter Melly said as Doris poured him yet another large gin and tonic. ‘What a shit!’
Doris gave her husband a meaningful look and then made off into the kitchen to make some coffee. It was very late and she, for one, wanted to go to bed.
‘It was his uncle who stole the carpet, not Yaşar,’ Wim said. ‘And to be fair, Peter, I don’t think that it was in Yaşar’s plan to die before he completed his deal with you.’
But Peter Melly was in no mood to listen to facts. ‘Yaşar lied! And now the fucking police are actively looking for the family of bloody Lawrence’s batman, Roberts. Fucking Yaşar’s uncle stole the carpet from them, so they think, and so legally it belongs to them. And where does that leave me?’ He drained his glass and leaned in shakily towards his host. ‘Fucked is where it leaves me! What am I going to tell Matilda?’
‘Just what Inspector İkmen told you to tell her,’ Wim replied calmly. ‘The truth.’
‘The truth? The truth! The truth is, Wim, old mate, that my wife and I were mortgage-free, I’d paid the fucker off until Yaşar came into my life. The house I bought in good old Henley-on-Thames just before I got married for a hundred and fifty grand has now doubled in value. That’s three hundred grand to go home to – except that it isn’t. Now it’s one hundred and eighty. It’s less if I go ahead with the loan I’d arranged with the bank to pay Yaşar the rest of his money. That leaves me with about fifty grand. Do you know what kind of hovel you can expect to get in Oxfordshire for that sort of money these days? For our three hundred thousand we were going to buy a flat on the river when we went home. Matilda has her heart set on it. That the house was never hers is immaterial. She’s been married to me for ever so she expects things. What will I be able to give her now? A fucking bedsit in Reading! Men get divorced, taken to the cleaners, for less! I haven’t lived alone since I was at Oxford, for God’s sake!’ He began to cry.
Wim passed him a box of tissues and then excused himself to go into the kitchen. As he entered, Doris was pouring water into the coffee percolator, shaking her head.
‘I want Peter to go home,’ she said forcefully to Wim. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him!’
‘I know.’
‘You’ll have to drive him home yourself if necessary, Wim,’ she continued.
‘He won’t be easy to shift. He doesn’t want to go home and have to face Matilda.’
‘Well, he’ll have to sometime.’
‘I know, but . . .’
‘By turns he deceives that woman and then treats her as if she were some kind of saint,’ Doris said as she angrily wiped down an already clean work surface. ‘Matilda Melly has flaws just like the rest of us. More than some of us!’
Wim looked hard at his wife and frowned. ‘Matilda is very quiet, very meek. But of course she’ll be angry when she finds out about their house . . .’
‘Oh, you men are so slow! Sometimes, Wim, appearances can be deceptive,’ Doris said. She regretted it instantly.
‘Doris?’ Wim moved in close to her and said, ‘Do you know something about Matilda that I don’t?’
She looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘No.’
‘Doris?’ He knew that she was concealing something. Women could be very hard to read, in his experience, but Doris was in general easier than most.
She turned away from him. ‘Wim, I don’t know anything about Matilda. I just find it difficult to believe that she is really so perfect.’ She looked back at him again. ‘Maybe I’m just a bitch.’
He smiled. Doris was about as far from being a bitch as a woman could get. But he let whatever it was that was buzzing about in her head go and said, ‘I must go back to Peter. Perhaps some coffee . . .’
‘Absolutely. Any minute.’ She watched him go with a smile on her face. But then her features dropped as she turned back to the percolator and her own thoughts. Yes, Matilda did annoy her with her good works and her knitting and her soft, soft voice. But what really annoyed Doris was the fact that the domesticity and devotion were only part of the picture that was Matilda Melly. If Peter had financial secrets from Matilda, she had a few secrets from him that were of an entirely different nature. But that was not, Doris reminded herself firmly, any of her business. Unlike her husband, Matilda had never come to either herself or Wim in order to pour out her heart. No, what Doris knew about her had been stumbled upon on a flying shopping trip one afternoon late on in the previous year. Matilda had not even known that Doris was there.
It was half past two in the morning by the time Mehmet Süleyman reached the old door, which was slightly ajar, leading to the Armenian church of Uç Horan. The figure that sat, red-eyed, in the little wooden hut just in front of the church grounds said, ‘You know that when my son Sınan was little he used to call this place “The Church in the Cupboard”. We all came to Arto’s cousin Sylvie’s wedding here. Sınan must have been about four and from then on it was “The Church in the Cupboard”. He still calls it that.’ İkmen smiled softly at this, his own fond memory, and repeated, ‘The Church in the Cupboard.’