A Passion for Killing (8 page)

‘Our War of Independence.’ İkmen smiled. A lot of foreigners still failed to appreciate that, at that time, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and all the rest of the Turkish nationalists were literally fighting for the existence of their country.

‘Yes, well, exactly. It must have been a very confused and confusing time for all concerned. Vis-à-vis the carpet, however, what happened next I don’t know for certain, but it would seem that Roberts gave the Kerman away to someone in İstanbul.’

‘Which was how Mr Uzun eventually came into possession of it, I assume,’ İkmen said.

‘Not exactly,’ the Englishman replied. ‘Yaşar is from Antalya on the Med coast. He came into possession of it there. He says he got it from some old chap in an ancient back-street antique shop in the old town. The story goes that the Kerman came into Antalya on a cruise ship sometime back in the 1980s. A member of the crew, a Turkish chap, told the tale I’ve just told you and sold it to the antique dealer who squirrelled it away for years. Somewhere along the line, or so Yaşar said, the Kerman had gained the reputation for bringing ill fortune. Maybe the bloodstains on it helped to build that reputation. Load of rot, of course.’

And yet İkmen knew how powerful the designation of something as ‘unlucky’ could be across so many levels of Turkish society. In spite of whoever had owned the carpet and whatever it might have been worth, İkmen could imagine that an elderly back-street antique dealer would be wary lest such a thing attract the attention of the Evil Eye and bring misfortune in its wake.

‘And you have proof that this Kerman carpet did indeed belong to Lawrence?’ İkmen asked as he lit up another of his cheap Maltepe cigarettes. ‘I mean, the reports of a man on a cruise ship can hardly be regarded as reliable.’

‘Yaşar found a photograph of the carpet on the Internet,’ Peter Melly replied. ‘It’s of Lawrence and Roberts with the Kerman in Cairo. When I saw it the rug came in a wooden chest, which I think Roberts, or someone, must have put it in later. But the photograph, which I have also seen in books, was taken by the American journalist, Lowell Thomas, who followed Lawrence during the latter part of his career in the desert. I’ve a copy of the picture myself if you want to see it. It shows the carpet clearly and in its entirety.’

‘You have nothing to prove to me in that regard, Mr Melly,’ İkmen said. ‘Whether this carpet is genuine or not is of no interest to me. What I do have some interest in, however, is your relationship with Mr Uzun. Had you paid for this Kerman – is that its name?’

‘Yes. From the city of Kerman or rather the nearby town of Lavar – hence Lavar Kerman – in southern Iran,’ Melly said as if by rote. ‘Yes, I had, or rather in part.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’d paid him half and I was to get the other half. Money like that doesn’t grow on trees.’

‘How much money are we talking about?’ İkmen asked as he flicked a long sausage of ash from his cigarette into his ashtray.

Peter Melly lowered his head as if ashamed of what he was to say next. He took a deep breath. ‘A hundred and twenty thousand. Pounds. I raised it on the house I own back home.’

The Klaassens, who obviously hadn’t known about how much their friend was willing to pay for this carpet, exchanged shocked looks.

‘That was the first payment,’ Melly continued.

‘The first payment!’ İkmen, his cigarette now shaking between his fingers, nearly fell off his chair. ‘What . . .’

‘We agreed, Yaşar and myself, on an overall price of a quarter of a million pounds,’ Melly said quickly.

‘A quarter of a . . .’

‘Inspector, this is Lawrence’s valuable Lavar Kerman carpet we’re talking about here!’ Peter Melly leaned forward in order to make his point more forcefully. ‘Not only that, it’s a fabulous piece! I’ve got carpets from all over the world but I’ve never seen or experienced anything like this before. The central motif is a glittering weeping Tree of Life, quite unique, almost alive . . . I had to have it!’

Or, İkmen thought, if Raşit Bey and his magic theory was to be believed, maybe the Kerman had to have Peter Melly.

‘So what you are telling me then, Mr Melly, is that you do not yet have the Lawrence carpet in your possession.’

‘No.’ Suddenly deflated he put his head down again, on to his chest. ‘No, Yaşar still has it. The deal was that I only got it once full payment had been made.’

‘And that will not happen now, will it?’ İkmen said.

‘I’ve almost raised the other one hundred and thirty . . . I’ll gladly pay Yaşar’s family for it,’ the Englishman replied.

İkmen sighed. ‘Well then, I had better find the Lawrence carpet so that they can take possession of it, hadn’t I, Mr Melly?’

‘The bullet that killed him came, so ballistics tell me, from a Beretta 92 pistol. You will, Çetin, be familiar with this weapon because . . .’

‘I have one myself,’ İkmen said. ‘The department obliges me to carry one.’

‘Even though you so very often conveniently leave yours locked inside your office drawer.’ Arto Sarkissian smiled. ‘Yaşar Uzun was killed by a weapon that is a standard issue police department piece.’

‘Doesn’t mean that he was shot by any of our officers,’ İkmen said.

‘Doesn’t mean that he wasn’t either,’ the Armenian replied. ‘Ballistics are going to want to check everyone’s gun.’ Then holding his hands aloft he said, ‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘I know.’

They were in the doctor’s office which, mercifully and unlike his laboratory, had windows. Not that the sight of the grim, litter-strewn car park outside, now darkening under the evening sky, was anything one might actually want to look at. But just having visible access to the outside world gave İkmen some little comfort in what was otherwise a place of confinement, reeking of bodily fluids and death. How his friend managed to work and remain cheerful in such a place had always been a mystery to him.

‘I hate guns,’ İkmen said as he lit up a cigarette and then gulped down what remained of the rather nasty coffee Dr Sarkissian’s assistant had made for him.

‘I know.’

‘I hate the way they make some people feel powerful. So often a gun is just a smokescreen used to cover an inadequacy a sick individual feels he has to make up for in some way.’ And then changing the subject rapidly, he said, ‘Mehmet Süleyman’s peeper victim, Soylu, he was stabbed, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’ The Armenian took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes and then put his glasses back on again. ‘I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about that, Çetin.’

‘Why?’

The doctor told him about ‘clean’ corpses, both Soylu’s and that of the rent boy, the peeper’s first actual fatality.

‘This is all new to me,’ İkmen said in response to this barrage of worrying information from the doctor. ‘Who, if not the Forensic Institute, is cleaning these bodies up, do you think?’

‘Nizam Tapan the rent boy was taken to some laboratory outside the city before he was given over to the Institute, or so Sergeant Melik asserts.’

İkmen frowned. ‘Does he.’

‘In Soylu’s case, the body went straight to the Institute but was not, I understand, seen by the usual team until he’d already been in the building for some time. Dr Arslan, who heads up the team these days, said the corpse was clean of almost all environmental evidence by the time it got to him. It certainly was when it came to me.’

‘Any idea why?’ İkmen asked.

‘Not a clue.’ There was a pause before he spoke to İkmen again. This wasn’t easy. ‘But I fear that Mehmet Süleyman does.’

For a moment the Armenian’s words just hung in the air like a bad smell. İkmen barely, or so it seemed, breathed.

‘Both Sergeant Melik and my assistant Dr Mardin certainly brought the Nizam Tapan case to his attention last November,’ Arto Sarkissian continued. ‘He said that he would do something about it and then – nothing; the case was dropped. Now this. I don’t even know why Cabbar Soylu has been designated a peeper victim anyway, no one does. Except Inspector Süleyman.’

Outside, the sunset call to prayer began its sinuous wash across the many, many mosques of İstanbul. İkmen imagined his wife as he knew she would be, praying. How nice it must be, he thought, to have such ironclad certainty in your life!

‘Mehmet Süleyman is not corrupt,’ İkmen said softly at length.

‘No . . .’

‘And yet, Arto, I assume this conversation has to involve you asking me to challenge him about the events you have described.’

‘Don’t you think this is serious, Çetin?’ the Armenian asked.

‘Yes.’ İkmen looked up into his friend’s face, frowning. ‘And I don’t doubt that what you, Dr Mardin and Melik say is true. But Mehmet Süleyman? I can’t believe him capable of wrongdoing . . .’

‘I don’t believe that he is willingly concealing evidence either,’ Arto replied. ‘But what has happened is nevertheless wrong and I, at least, need some clarification. I’ve tried to talk to him myself, but to no avail. So, Çetin, yes, I do need you to talk to him about this. You are his friend, he loves and respects you, and I don’t want to have to take this up to Ardıç, I really don’t.’

‘No.’ Quite what the explosive commissioner of police, Ardıç would do about such a situation, İkmen didn’t know. Old and disillusioned as he was, Ardıç still had the reputation for being a vicious and unpredictable adversary. İkmen shook his head as if to dislodge the image of a fat, enraged Ardıç from his mind and said, ‘But to get back to my body, Arto. Is there anything else I need to know?’

‘Yes. Your carpet dealer was shot after he had brought his vehicle to a halt. He was in his car when he was shot. From short range and, I think, he turned away from his assailant. So the murderer was outside and shot into the car as Uzun twisted his body away.’

‘So he pulled over for some reason.’

‘Yes, but then once he was dead, he and the vehicle were pushed down into the forest below. Then the tracks were, as we’ve seen, erased.’

‘Mmm.’ İkmen frowned.

‘Apart from that,’ Arto said, ‘Yaşar Uzun was in good health. He smoked cigarettes and, sometime recently, cannabis, too. But he wasn’t what I’d call a user of cannabis. I think he was just a man who enjoyed the occasional – what do they call it – joint?’

‘Yes. So no grim diseases or heroin abuse or anything like that?’

‘No. You know, Çetin, that Inspector İskender thinks this might have been a Mafia hit.’

‘Yes.’ İkmen sighed. ‘But then we all know that their influence stretches into most corners of society, carpet trading being only one of the more obvious arenas. All I have to do is to work out which particular mob is responsible. Could it be the delightful Edip family of Edirnekapı, or maybe what remains of my local gangsters, the Müren family? But then again maybe . . .’ He rubbed his tired face with his rough, leaf-dry hands. ‘Arto, do you know much about the English soldier called Lawrence of Arabia?’

His friend knew as much as İkmen, basically what he had gleaned from the famous 1960s film. But he didn’t know anything more and certainly the whole carpet thing was a total mystery to him – except in one regard.

‘I do know that provenance is important,’ the Armenian said. ‘For instance a carpet that can be proven to have belonged to a significant member of the old imperial family could fetch a very high price. Even those enormous carpets that can be difficult to sell because of their size can fetch big prices if they belonged to, say, a sultan or maybe a prominent grand vizier.’

‘Yes, but Arto, a quarter of a million sterling!’ İkmen said as he shook his head at the vastness of the amount. ‘Sterling!’

‘To an Englishman it is probably worth that,’ the Armenian replied. ‘My brother recently paid over a hundred thousand dollars for a genuine nineteenth-century palace carpet that was proven to have belonged to the Ottoman architects, the Balian family. They built Dolmabahçe palace and so most Turks know of them, but to us they are especially significant as the most important Armenian architects in history. My brother was happy to pay what he did in order to secure what he feels is part of our heritage. This Englishman, Melly, obviously has similar feelings.’

‘Yes,’ İkmen sighed. ‘But now I’ve got to go and look for the fucking thing.’ He took a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and then unfolded it, spreading it out across the doctor’s desk. ‘Here’s what it looks like. Melly gave me this printout of a photograph Uzun took off the Internet.’

The black and white printout showed two men holding a carpet up between them. The man on the left of the picture was young, tall, and wore a slightly dusty-looking military uniform. The man on the right was much smaller and older and, although his features were of an obviously western European type, he wore traditional Arab robes, even down to carrying a curved knife in the belt around his waist. İkmen pointed to this figure and said, ‘That’s Lawrence.’

‘I gathered that,’ Arto replied. ‘With, I assume, this Roberts person you spoke of and the famous carpet.’

‘Yes.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Yes,’ İkmen said, ‘isn’t it.’

Although it wasn’t possible from the photograph to see what colours had been used in the Kerman, one could deduce the approximate size of the piece, which had to be around about one and a half metres long by one metre wide. And, although it wasn’t possible to make out everything in the way of detail around the borders of the carpet, the central section was very clear to see. It was also extraordinary. A tall thin weeping willow, or Tree of Life, as Melly had described it, dominated the carpet. Delicate and at the same time sinuous, in the hands of these two foreign and, in Lawrence’s case, alien men, the Kerman was like a precious traveller from another time if not another world entirely. Its central design struck something deep inside İkmen. He didn’t know what it was, but when he had first seen this picture tears had risen, as from a great underground river, and burst across his eyes like a rain shower. The Englishman, Melly, had said he completely understood why that had happened.