A Knife to the Heart

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Mystery; International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

The twenty-first chilling Istanbul crime thriller starring Çetin Ikmen, 'the Morse of Istanbul' (Daily Telegraph), from Silver Dagger Award-winning author Barbara Nadel. Not to be missed by fans of Donna Leon.

A derelict villa near Istanbul holds dark spirits, secrets and murder...

Retired inspector Çetin Ikmen must confront his demons to reveal the shocking truth behind a young girl's death...

When historian Suzan Tan is asked to examine the contents of a derelict villa on the Bosphorus, she is intrigued to discover a Ouija board among the artefacts. Forty years ago, a young girl was found with a knife in her heart in this villa. It is said that before her death this very Ouija board spelled out her name.The verdict was suicide - but what if it was a brutal act of murder and her killer was still walking free?
Suzan asks Ikmen to solve the case, and despite his reluctance to get involved, he soon finds himself drawn into the mystery. With the help of his friend Inspector Süleyman, Ikmen delves into Istanbul's dark underbelly to uncover a terrifying tale of secrets, lies and murder.


(P)2019 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: May 16, 2019

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

It had been when she had been sorting through a pile of water-damaged photograph albums on the top floor of the yalı that she’d come across the ouija board that had, indirectly, led her to this stifling apartment listening to the sobs of a woman old enough to be her mother. Not for the first time, she wondered what she was doing. Especially when Aylin Tonguç scuttled towards her in the darkness and whispered, ‘Does anyone know you are here?’

Aylin sounded like a little girl. And in the thick darkness of that oven-like room, she could have been a child, had Suzan not known better. Aylin Tonguç was fifty-six and she was drowning in tears. Now that she was here, Suzan just wanted to get up and go, but how could she? She’d asked for this meeting. It had taken her weeks to arrange. If only she’d never seen the amazing villa known as the Kara Lale Yalı! If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be sweating herself dry in this creepy apartment in Nişantaşı. But the architect of her discomfort was neither this keening woman nor even the yalı; it was the man who had become her uncle.

Suzan had always liked her mother’s younger sister, Aunt Nalan. Nalan had always supported her; in fact she was in her car downstairs right now, ready to whisk Suzan away as soon as this meeting was over. But Nalan’s latest husband was another matter. Tayfun Yıldırım, on the face of it a pious government supporter, was actually a ruthless property developer, not a million miles away from a Mafia boss. When Suzan had heard that Yıldırım had bought an historic wooden villa in the Bosphorus village of Bebek, she had been horrified. He’d torn down historic houses and apartment blocks all over the city of İstanbul. Now he was going to replace a nineteenth-century wooden summer house in what had once been an idyllic village with a monstrosity in glass and steel. She had begged her aunt to ask her husband to let her make a record. At least if the yalı and its contents were properly documented, the fact of its existence wouldn’t be lost. Reluctantly he had agreed. But only when Nalan had explained to him the kudos he would gain from allowing an actual historian to investigate his property. Maybe Suzan would even write a book?

Suzan didn’t know what to say. The woman’s face, hairy and scented with musk, brushed against hers. Then a tiny, thin hand held her fingers.

‘I keep everything closed so it can’t get in,’ she continued.

‘What?’ Suzan asked. No one had told her the woman was actually mad. Maybe her aunt should have come in with her.

Aylin Tonguç’s cheek pressed into Suzan’s and she smelt her sour breath.

‘Kismet,’ the woman whispered. ‘Kismet.’

Marlboro the cat wouldn’t sit on Çetin İkmen’s lap when he chose to rest out on the balcony. He also wasn’t keen on the kitchen these days.

Ever since his wife Fatma had died, İkmen had become almost a stranger to himself. Alone in his apartment with his unemployed daughter and, when she deigned to turn up, his transsexual cousin Samsun, he lived in near silence, smoking furiously and talking mostly, according to his daughter Çiçek, to the ghost of his dead wife. All his friends, both inside and outside the police force, worried about him. Fatma’s death had been a bolt from the blue.

‘I know you’ll say it’s because of the djinn,’ İkmen told his wife. ‘Animals are sensitive. And yes, I know, I know, an exorcist. But I can’t face getting one of those in. Either some crypto-businessman who will also want to sell me some bloody amulet that’s been made in China, or a half-mad illiterate who stinks of goat.’ He smoked, then he said, ‘Yes, I know it’s been there for well over a year. I’m not entirely indifferent to it. Angels and demons, like that bloody djinn, have always followed me about one way or another.’ He turned his head away. ‘I’ve had better things to do.’

Retirement had never been on Inspector Çetin İkmen’s agenda. With a forty-a-day smoking habit, plus a liking for alcohol, he thought he’d be dead long before that happened. But circumstances had dictated otherwise, and so, after almost forty years on the İstanbul police force, he had finally gone. It had been that or be thrown out. It had left a bitter taste.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I must try and put on a happy face when Çiçek gets in. She didn’t get that job at the Four Seasons and so she’ll be depressed. I don’t blame her, but I need to try and keep her spirits up. She says she’ll never work again, and I know that’s a possibility these days. But I can’t say that to her, you know. How can anyone think that a girl like that, raised by me, would follow some mad sheikh who lives abroad? I mean, I know you wanted all the children to be religious, but it never happened. How can they think my Çiçek . . .’ He shook his head. ‘They think it because they choose to. Because they want scapegoats . . .’

‘Dad!’

She was back. İkmen walked through the French windows and into his vast, messy living room. His daughter, an attractive woman of forty, wasn’t alone.

‘I met Hülya in the Hippodrome,’ she said.

‘I was coming to see you,’ Hülya added.

İkmen kissed both his daughters and sat down.

Hülya, the younger of the two, sat next to him. He took her hand.

Çiçek said, ‘I’ll go and make tea.’

She looked crushed, and although in a way İkmen wanted her to talk about her fruitless interview, in another way he didn’t. After leaving her job as a flight attendant at Turkish Airlines, Çiçek had worked for budget carrier Marmara Air. But after the failed military coup in July 2016, they had dismissed her for having the same messaging app on her phone as the religious organisation that had apparently instigated the putsch. The difference being that Çiçek had never belonged to any shady religious group and she’d never actually used the offending app. But she was marked, which meant she had lost just about everything, including her apartment.

‘We saw Samsun outside the Mozaik,’ Hülya said. She gave her father a cigarette and then lit one for herself.

‘Yes, it’s now her local watering hole,’ İkmen said.

‘Used to be yours.’

‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘Samsun has her own friends and Resat Bey is entranced. I believe he thinks she’s good for tourist dollars.’

‘I’m sure Samsun would be delighted if you joined her . . .’

‘Please don’t push me to go out, Hülya, there’s a good girl,’ İkmen said.

And so his daughter became quiet. The thing she’d come to see her father about still trapped inside her head.

Street brawls were not Inspector Mehmet Süleyman’s purview. In his role as an İstanbul homicide detective, he didn’t usually get involved unless someone died. But this was different. This was Cihangir, his home turf.

‘What he does is his business!’ he yelled at the frothing middle-aged man he held by the neck against a wall. On the pavement, a young man with dreadlocks groaned. He nursed a broken beer bottle against his chest, and his face was covered with blood.

‘He and those other devils were breaking the Holy Fast!’ the older man cried.

‘As I say, his business,’ Süleyman reiterated. ‘His choice, his soul. What’s it to you?’

‘I find it offensive.’

‘So go and complain to your friends in your local coffee house. Tweet about it, mortify your own flesh for all I care, but don’t attack other people.’

‘His drinking is like a slap in the face . . .’

‘No it isn’t,’ Süleyman said.

He didn’t know the older man, although the youngster was familiar to him. He worked at a tiny bar on Akarsu Caddesi, one of liberal and trendy Cihangir’s many alcohol-serving establishments.

‘Where do you come from?’ Süleyman asked the older man.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘I’m a police officer.’

‘Then you should be on my side!’ the man wailed.

‘No he shouldn’t.’

The unfamiliar voice didn’t come from the man on the ground, who had just discovered he’d lost a tooth, but from a smartly dressed man probably in his forties.

When he saw him, the older man hung his head. ‘Metin Efendi . . .’

Süleyman said, ‘What’s going on here? Who are you?’

The man smiled and bowed slightly. ‘I am Selçuk’s imam – and his friend. He also works for me; I’m a tailor by trade.’

‘Selçuk?’

‘Me,’ the offender said. ‘Selçuk Çeviköz.’

‘We come from Gaziosmanpaşa district,’ the imam said. ‘Selçuk’s brother has not been too well; I accompanied Selçuk here in order that he could visit.’

‘This part of the city makes me nervous,’ Selçuk said.

‘Makes you nervous!’

The young man who had been on the ground stood up. ‘I’m the one who lost a tooth!’

‘Metin Efendi, he was drinking beer. In front of my eyes!’

The imam put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Selçuk, you may mean well—’

‘Mean well!’ The young man looked as if he was about to explode. ‘He came out of nowhere! I was having a drink, minding my own business—’

‘You shouldn’t drink during Ramazan. It’s an abomination!’

‘Shut up, all of you!’

They looked at the policeman and then at the ground.

‘You,’ Süleyman said to the injured man. ‘Do you wish to press charges?’

The youngster sighed. ‘What’s the point?’

‘The point is that you’ve been assaulted.’

‘You know what I mean.’

And Süleyman did. Under the tutelage of the ruling party, religion had become much more visible in everyday life. In fact many secular Turks felt oppressed by it. Some, like this man, felt powerless to live their lives as they saw fit. Many believed that not even the police would stand up for them.

‘Well?’ Süleyman asked.

‘No,’ the young man said. ‘The dental work will cost me a fortune, but if I have to wait for him to pay, I suspect I’ll be an old man by the time I get reparation.’

‘You have the right.’

But the young man was already walking away. Süleyman let go of Selçuk Çeviköz and said, ‘Seems like it’s your lucky day.’

‘I give my thanks to God . . .’

‘Yes, right. But if you assault anyone again, you won’t be so lucky.’

The imam began, ‘Officer—’

‘Inspector Süleyman.’

‘Inspector Süleyman, I can assure you—’

‘Just take him back to Gaziosmanpaşa and get out of my sight,’ Süleyman said. ‘I’m sick to death of people throwing their weight around in this city. There is something called tolerance, you know. I believe God is quite an enthusiast.’

He walked away.

Aged fifty, he remembered a time when the observance of Ramazan had been a choice. Although if he were honest with himself, back in his childhood, most people didn’t observe the fast. Hard-line secularists saw it as reactionary. And that had been wrong too.

The smell of the beer the young man had spilled when he’d been hit made Süleyman want a drink. In the old days, when İkmen had still been grumpily walking the streets of İstanbul, he would have called him up and they would have met at the Mozaik and probably got drunk. But that wasn’t going to happen. İkmen didn’t go to the Mozaik any more. In fact he hardly ever left his apartment.

Süleyman put a cigarette in his perfectly shaped mouth and lit up. A man across the road glared at him. Süleyman muttered, ‘Fuck off.’

‘Suzan Tan.’ İkmen smiled and shook his head. ‘Was she in the same year as you?’

‘One year above,’ Hülya said.

Four of İkmen’s nine children had attended the prestigious İstanbul Lisesi. It was a selective school, and they had had to compete with children from all over Turkey. But then the İkmen children, like their parents, were bright.

‘Didn’t her family live somewhere posh?’ he asked.

‘Kadıköy, just off Bağdat Caddesi. So her mum could be close to Gucci and Prada.’

Bağdat Caddesi was probably the most glamorous shopping street in the city. Even those who, like İkmen, lived on the European side would go to Asia to sample the delights of Bağdat Caddesi.

‘Didn’t Suzan become an academic?’ İkmen asked as he took a glass of tea from his older daughter.

‘An historian, yes,’ Hülya said. ‘And that’s why I’m here, on her behalf.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She’s been compiling a history of a wooden yalı in Bebek. Her uncle’s bought it or something. I don’t know, she witters on, and I was trying to get Timur to go to bed when she phoned. Anyway, this yalı was the scene of a murder back in 1976. She wondered whether you’d remember it?’

İkmen lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was a constable back then. Little more than a kid.’

‘You had three children already,’ Çiçek said.

He shrugged.

‘Well anyway,’ Hülya said, ‘according to Suzan, a young woman called Deniz Tonguç was found dead in the garden of the yalı, which belonged to her parents. At the time, her husband was the primary suspect, but that didn’t come to anything. Don’t know why; maybe he had a good alibi.’

İkmen frowned.

‘I don’t know what the outcome was in the end,’ Hülya said. ‘But Suzan says that this event is still having repercussions in the Tonguç family now. Long and short is that she wants to talk to you.’

At first İkmen said nothing. Talking to people was something he’d rather got out of the way of.

‘She’ll come here if you want,’ Hülya continued. ‘But then she’d be equally happy to take you for a drink.’

‘Do you know how this woman died?’ İkmen asked.

‘Oh yes,’ Hülya said. ‘Sorry, I left that out. She was stabbed through the heart.’

Although she still liked to refer to herself as a ‘party girl’, İkmen’s cousin Samsun Bajraktar was nearly seventy and would soon be home wanting food. Then she’d fall asleep in her chair, snoring like a rhino. Unable to afford the bills on her old flat in Beyazit, Samsun had moved into the İkmen apartment shortly after Fatma’s death.

And because, left to her father, no one would ever eat again, Çiçek went into the kitchen to begin preparing the evening meal. It was a sort of İftar meal – the breaking of the Ramazan fast – but not, as no one in the İkmen apartment was fasting.

Her sister, Hülya, had had an agenda with their dad. Not that her story about Suzan Tan wasn’t true; it was. But it had been Hülya and not Suzan who had suggested that he might be able to help. Anything to get him out of the apartment and involved in life once again!

Çiçek cut four aubergines in half and sprinkled them with salt, then began chopping onions and garlic. She knew she was being watched, even though she could only see it out of the corner of her eye. It had started about three months before the failed coup, according to her father. Only Çiçek, her dad and her brother Bülent had ever seen the djinn. And her mother, of course, briefly, in the weeks before her death. Because that was what djinn did.

Beings of smoke and fire, the djinn were situated in Islamic mythology somewhere between humanity and the angels. More often than not demonic, they often presaged a death in the family. Living mainly in dark corners and behind pieces of furniture, they watched, only sometimes revealing themselves in all their snaggle-toothed, fur-covered glory. They could be tiny or enormous. İkmen had once seen one grow so tall, its head popped out through the roof of a house. They were always a problem.

Çiçek muttered under her breath, ‘Go away.’

But nothing changed. Nothing would until her father resumed his life.

‘There was a seance,’ İkmen said. ‘The mother was a spiritualist. I don’t know how or why. I heard all of this second hand, you have to remember. I was walking the streets telling kids to get to school and picking up dope-heads at the time. The seance was before the girl died. I don’t know how long. But apparently someone asked the spirits, or whatever you like to call what may or may not exist, who was going to die first. I don’t know if it was just the family in the room or whether others were present, but the thing spelt out the eldest daughter’s name.’

‘Deniz?’

‘If that was the girl’s name, yes,’ he said.

He could hear Çiçek chopping vegetables in the kitchen. He could feel her anger at being watched by that bloody djinn.

‘I think if I remember correctly her death was declared a suicide. A classic case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

Hülya said, ‘Isn’t it difficult to stab yourself through the chest?’

‘One would think so, yes,’ he said. ‘But don’t take my word for it. Your uncle Arto would know better than I.’ Not that İkmen had seen his oldest friend, the pathologist Arto Sarkissian, for months. He’d kept him at arm’s length, like he had everyone.

‘So, will you speak to Suzan?’ Hülya asked.

‘For what it’s worth, yes.’

The silence between them became painful. Hülya was struggling to know where to go next, and İkmen felt her anxiety.

‘She can come here,’ he said.

He watched as Hülya looked around the chaotic room. You didn’t have to be a mind-reader to know what she was thinking. And the awfulness didn’t stop at the look of the place. The whole apartment reeked of cigarettes and Samsun’s heavy Arabian perfume.

‘Or not,’ he added.

Hülya breathed in deeply. ‘Dad, Suzan lives in Galata now. I know it’s not far, but she’s really busy with this project and doesn’t get much time to herself. She’d really appreciate it if you met her over there.’

He didn’t say anything, mainly because he knew she’d be disappointed if he said no. But also because he feared saying yes. To be out would not just mean leaving the apartment to the tender mercies of the djinn in the kitchen; it would mean leaving poor Fatma too. Feelings he didn’t want to acknowledge jangled for position in his head, rendering him mute.

Eventually Hülya spoke. ‘Dad, I know you don’t want to leave because of . . . Mum . . .’

He watched her lower her head. Hülya, in common with all of his children except Çiçek and Bülent, had never understood. It wasn’t her fault. He put a hand on her shoulder and smiled. He knew what she was going to say next.

‘It’s been nearly a year since Mum died,’ she said. ‘You have to start letting go.’

Back when you couldn’t see the high-rises of Esenler cluttering up the skyline, Karayolları mahalle had been a good place to live. Everyone had been poor back then, but there had been a sense of community. Back in the sixties and seventies, although there had been political unrest, it hadn’t been the same. Only last week, the police had raided the apartment above the pharmacy and taken away a rocket launcher. What was wrong with people?

Imam Metin Demir smiled when he recalled the dried peppers his school friends used to grab from their roofs before heading to school. Usually they’d give him some, unless of course his dad had been in a fight with one of their dads. It couldn’t have been easy for Regep Demir trying to bring up his son on his own. But he only had himself to blame. A bully, a drunk and a thief, Regep had beaten Metin’s mother so hard that one night she had left the family home never to be seen again. At least that was what Regep told people. There were those who were convinced he’d killed her and then dissolved her body in acid he’d stolen from one of the chemical factories on the Golden Horn. Metin always gave his father the benefit of the doubt.

Suhoor had been hours ago and Metin had stuffed himself fit to burst, but he was already hungry again and wondered how he was going to make it through the day. He certainly wasn’t going to venture back into the city, especially not with someone like Selçuk Çeviköz. Metin felt sorry for Selçuk because one of his brothers was sick, but that didn’t excuse what he’d done when he’d attacked that young man the previous day. They’d both nearly ended up getting arrested. Such lurid religious fanaticism was concerning and saddening. As both his imam and his employer, Metin had spoken firmly to Selçuk on the way back to Gaziosmanpaşa, but he knew his words had not sunk in.

Metin glanced at his father’s old lokum box and wondered, not for the first time, whether he should look through it properly. Apart from a house and his now broken old watch, which Metin always kept in his pocket, the only thing Regep had passed on to his son was this old sweet box full, as he had told Metin, of ‘treasure’. Probably stuff he’d robbed from houses and handbags, Metin suspected. He didn’t really want to look too closely at what the box contained. If he did, he’d feel duty-bound to get those things back to their owners, and that was potentially a very big job.

Another day without food or drink was a daunting prospect, particularly for a man with a big appetite. Dr Arto Sarkissian wasn’t even a Muslim, but as principal pathologist for the İstanbul city police department, he felt obliged to support his staff. An ethnic Armenian Christian, Arto dreaded Ramazan and lived for the few moments when he could escape from his laboratory and hide behind the dustbins with a bottle of water and a tiny sigara börek. Not that anyone, apart from people he didn’t care about anyway, would blame him even if he was caught.

Now he leaned on one of the stainless-steel dissection tables and breathed out. Thank God for air conditioning! Ramazan falling in June meant it was hot, which meant dehydration. The last thing an overweight man in his sixties needed. That morning’s entertainment was to involve a man his own age who had died while in sexual congress with a prostitute in one of Karaköy’s last remaining legal brothels. Arto wondered whether this unfortunate incident – probably a heart attack – would be used by the local authority as a pretext to close the place down. He smiled briefly when he tried to imagine what his old friend Çetin İkmen would have said about it back in the day. Something along the lines of ‘Fucking puritanical bigots, they’re probably all screwing little girls!’ Even when he’d first retired, İkmen had still retained his fire. But not now.

The night of the coup, 15–16 July 2016, had been a confused and terrifying time. The plotters had bombed the parliament building in Ankara, blocked the Fatih Bridge over the Bosphorus and attempted to assassinate the president. İstanbul had been fired on. As soon as he could, the president made contact with the people and urged them to fight back. Thousands took to the streets, including Fatma İkmen. A ruling party loyalist, unlike her husband, Fatma had run out on to Divanyolu at five o’clock on the morning of the 16th, ready to do her bit against the coup, and had been struck by a car. It had been an accident and the driver had been inconsolable. Luckily Fatma had died instantly.

In common with many things she’d found in this house, Suzan came across the little gold cross by accident. Ornate and delicate, it was clearly a khachka or Armenian cross. She wondered whether it had belonged to one of the old family’s servants.

A voice over her shoulder made her start.

‘That gold?’

She turned. It was Tayfun Yıldırım. Her uncle had a habit of turning up unannounced. Suzan failed to keep the contempt off her face.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Yes, it is gold.’

‘Take it to the bazaar, see what price you can get,’ he said.

‘No!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it probably belonged to a member of the Tonguç family, or their servants,’ she said. ‘I’ll send it on to one of them.’

‘You don’t want to get too close to that family,’ Yıldırım said. ‘You know why.’

She did. The ancient head of the family, eighty-eight-year-old Admiral Alaaddin Tonguç, was currently in prison awaiting trial on charges of treason. Another adherent, it was said, of the shady religious organisation and its sheikh.

‘Halide Hanım isn’t implicated,’ Suzan said.

‘How do you know?’

‘Just because she’s the admiral’s wife doesn’t mean she’s necessarily involved.’

Yıldırım was fifteen years younger than Suzan’s aunt. At forty-three, he wasn’t much older than Suzan herself. In what many considered the prime of his life, he wasn’t unattractive if, as Suzan had once remarked to a friend, you liked that sort of thing. And by that she meant a man with a short, brutish neck, a chest like a barrel, and eyes that never contained emotion. If he had been a house, Tayfun Yıldırım would have been empty.

He said nothing. He enjoyed being close to power. It meant he could make veiled threats. Not that anyone seemed to know how close he was to anyone with real clout. He was rich an. . .