On the Bone

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Mystery; International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

In Istanbul—the golden city on the Bosphorus—ancient myths and modern evils are at work....

On a buzzing street in the fashionable district of Beyoglu, a young man drops dead. Ümit Kavas' death was natural, but the autopsy betrays a shocking truth: his last meal was human flesh.

Under desperate pressure from their superiors, Inspector Cetin Ikmen and his colleague, Mehmet Süleyman, begin their most obscure investigation yet. How did Ümit Kavas, apparently a good, liberal man, come to partake in the greatest taboo of all? Did he act alone? And who was his victim?

Soon they find themselves embroiled in a dark web of underground worlds: Turkey's old secular elite, a community of squatters, and a new gastronomy scene breaking every boundary. But where does the truth lie?

Release date: January 14, 2016

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 302

Sample

‘Does this have to be done now?’

Fatma İkmen looked up at her husband. Surrounded by tins, she was sitting on the floor in front of the food cupboard. She was uncomfortable and angry.

He answered his own question. ‘I see it does.’

He lit a cigarette.

‘Out!’

Cetin İkmen loved his wife. They’d been together for over forty years and he had never regretted a day of it. But there were limits.

‘No.’ He sat down at the kitchen table.

Fatma’s plump face turned red. ‘Nobody smokes indoors now,’ she said. ‘Only in brothels and drug dens.’

‘Is that so?’ He drank the tea she’d made for him before she started cleaning out the food cupboard. ‘Can’t say I really notice cigarettes when I’m raiding a bonzai factory in a godforsaken suburb full of hopeless addicts.’

Synthetic cannabinoid, or bonzai, had been popular in Turkey for almost five years. Cheaper than cannabis or heroin, it was highly addictive and deadly. And although Inspector Cetin İkmen’s task in the Istanbul police force was to apprehend murderers rather than drug dealers, sometimes his quarry was one and the same.

‘Anyway, all that’s nothing,’ Fatma said as she wafted his smoke out of her face. ‘Are you going to help me sort out these tins?’

‘I’m going to work in a minute.’ He smoked.

‘Ah, what am I to do! It’s all over the television,’ she said. ‘Anatolia Gold.’ She looked at the tins and shook her head. ‘How could they?’

İkmen rolled his eyes. Product giant Anatolia Gold had owned up to selling tinned products that contained traces of pork. Actually they’d been found out by government scientists, who had checked their white beans after people had complained that they tasted odd. They’d found the beans contained pork products, and in a Muslim country, that was headline news. All over Turkey, women just like Fatma İkmen were clearing out their food cupboards and wondering how much pork they’d already unwittingly eaten. Most of them feared for their souls and the souls of their loved ones. Expressly forbidden in the Koran, consumption of pork was considered a sin in Islam. Eating this unclean animal, either by accident or design, was a very serious infringement of Islamic law.

‘Are you not just a little worried that you might’ve eaten pork?’ Fatma said.

‘No.’

She shook her head again. ‘I will never understand you, Cetin.’

He smiled. ‘Well you haven’t done badly after forty years of marriage,’ he said. ‘Putting up with an atheist. But then I’ve not always found you easy to live with either. Now, I think, is one of those times.’

She scowled.

‘Fatma, you’re one of the most genuinely pious people I have ever met,’ Cetin said. ‘You are the real thing, and that is rare these days. These women covering themselves in black …’

‘That’s not Islam. That’s an Arabian custom.’

‘I know that, and so do you, but sadly, certain young women who wear far too much eye make-up do not,’ he said. He leaned down towards her. ‘You’re not going to eternal damnation, Fatma.’

‘How do you know? You don’t believe in anything.’

He shrugged. ‘Because it doesn’t make sense. If your God is as kind and loving as you always say he is, why would he condemn good people? Now if you’re talking about the God of the jihadis …’

‘Ah, don’t even think about them! It’s madness!’

‘Maybe.’ He stood up. Put his cigarette out and then lit another. ‘It looks like it to me, but not to everyone, and also you can’t arrest someone for talking out of their backside, can you? Or rather you shouldn’t.’

Fatma stopped looking at tins. She frowned. ‘I think maybe you should, sometimes,’ she said. ‘All I see is hatred spreading.’

‘Some people don’t mind that.’

She looked up at him. ‘Well they should.’

He bent down to kiss her. ‘I agree.’

The youngest of the İkmens’ eight adult children, Kemal, had just told his mother he was gay. His father had known for some time. Fatma had not been happy, but she had accepted what, deep down in her soul, she had known was coming anyway. Now all she had to do was reconcile her son’s sexuality with her faith. She seemed to be making a start by condemning religious fanatics.

‘If it were up to me, I would lock them all up,’ she said. Then she went back to her tins.

Her husband smiled, said, ‘Yes,’ and left.

‘Human flesh? Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ the doctor said. ‘And what is more, it has been cooked and was accompanied by an apple and plum sauce. Makes one wonder how that combination was arrived at. Was the apple included because it is claimed by some that human flesh is similar to pork?’

‘God knows.’

‘But I’m afraid, Commissioner, that someone died to provide Mr Ümit Kavaş with his last meal,’ Dr Arto Sarkissian said. ‘Which means that his body is now a crime scene.’

Commissioner Hürrem Teker ran her fingers through her thick dyed hair. The pathologist was right. Kavaş’s body, although he had died of natural causes, couldn’t be released to his family.

‘The general will not be pleased,’ she said.

‘General Kavaş can be as displeased as he likes,’ the doctor said. ‘I can’t release the body.’

‘No.’

It was easy for Sarkissian to say. As an Armenian Christian, he couldn’t understand the frantic need Muslim families had to bury the bodies of their loved ones. Christians didn’t believe a soul was in torment until its body was in the ground. Not that Hürrem Teker thought that General Kavaş believed in such things for a second. He had been a shaven-headed committed secularist, a follower of Atatürk, in his youth. He probably still was. But since he’d served a term in prison for alleged involvement in a plot against the Islamically rooted AK government, his public stance had altered. Now he prayed. Now he was on the phone every five minutes demanding the return of his son’s body.

The Armenian said, ‘The meat was rare. But that didn’t contribute in any significant way to Ümit Kavaş’s death. Though only thirty-five, he had advanced coronary artery disease.’

‘Like his father. He had a heart bypass years ago.’

Hürrem was from a military family. Her father had known General Kavaş.

‘Pity the son didn’t,’ the doctor said. ‘What are you going to do, madam?’

She leaned back on the side of a sink.

‘Well we can’t start yelling about cannibals. The more lurid media outlets will have the public hiding under their beds. It will be a zombie apocalypse, a left-wing plot, an attack on family values. Every testosterone-fuelled kid will be out on the street with a gun.’

‘That’s why I called you directly.’

‘Which I appreciate,’ she said. ‘It’s not easy. The area where Kavaş was found is jammed with restaurants and bars.’

‘I doubt that what Mr Kavaş ate had been served commercially,’ he said. ‘If anyone is trying to pass human flesh off as animal meat, then it can only be as pork. And as far as I know, there’s only one pork butcher left in this city.’

‘An Armenian?’

‘No, a Rum.’

Rums, or Istanbul Greeks, were rare in the city now. Even rarer was one who butchered pigs.

‘Tayyar Zarides,’ the doctor said. ‘To his friends he uses his Greek name, Cyrus.’

‘Are you this man’s friend, Dr Sarkissian?’

He smiled. Accustomed to the idea that all Turks thought that all non-Muslims knew each other, it still mildly amused him. ‘My brother is a fan of pork,’ he said. ‘Mr Zarides’s product is very good. He rears at a small farm in Thrace, and I am told his butchery skills are second to none. So why he would want to taint his product with human flesh …’

‘He probably doesn’t,’ she said. ‘But we must start somewhere. I imagine you’ve heard about this Anatolia Gold scandal?’

‘Pork fat in the beans. Yes.’

‘Tensions are running high. One of their factories in Kayseri has already been attacked.’

‘Exactly. If you go into Tayyar Zarides’s place under these circumstances …’

‘Oh, I won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll send your friend Cetin.’

Arto Sarkissian frowned. His childhood friend Cetin İkmen was one of the best-known policemen in the city. Scrupulously honest and fair, Istanbul’s quirkiest cop had been helping to make the city a safer place to live for decades. Everyone from street sweepers to millionaires knew him. Love him or loathe him, İkmen was very visible. Surely if Teker wanted to keep a lid on this thing, using İkmen wasn’t going to help her?

‘I can’t help thinking that’s not entirely a good idea …’

‘No?’ she said. ‘Because he’s a known face? He is. But he’s also known as an out-and-proud atheist. Not many of those about in public life any more. But İkmen remains. And when people see him in a pork butcher’s, they won’t think, “Oh there go the police persecuting minorities”. They’ll think, “If İkmen’s with Mr Zarides then they’re probably friends”. They might not like it, but I think they’ll accept it. At least I hope so.’

‘Oh. I see.’

She had a point.

‘We’ll need a team to investigate this situation,’ she said. ‘And I can’t think of anyone better for that job than İkmen. Can you?’

People went missing in Istanbul all the time. Children and teenagers ran away from home, tourists got lost or fell in love and then tumbled off the radar, and elderly demented people wandered. Few were never found. But occasionally a body would turn up. In the waters of the Bosphorus, behind some dustbins in a quiet, pious suburb, dumped on the metro tracks. And it was then that a select few officers would be assigned to what was possibly a murder. But they usually had some visual clues or formal ID to go on.

Cetin İkmen was still frankly reeling from the case Commissioner Teker had presented to him. Apart from the contents of a cadaver’s stomach, there was no physical evidence that his victim had ever lived. His sergeant, Kerim Gürsel, was checking missing persons records, and the only other officers who were going to be assigned to this very low-key investigation were out. There was, however, always Arto. And as happened so often, the doctor was way ahead of him. İkmen’s phone rang.

‘I can get you into Tayyar Zarides’s place with no problem at all,’ Arto said in answer to İkmen’s question about the pork butcher. ‘Although as I said to the commissioner, I don’t think it’s an entirely good idea at the present time.’

İkmen laughed. ‘You think.’

‘What I’ve done is ordered some further DNA tests on the meat,’ Arto said. ‘With a city full of unnamed and unaccounted-for Syrian refugees, it could be useful to know the ethnicity of the victim if we can.’

‘I wonder if the diner knew what he was eating,’ İkmen said. ‘I don’t know much about General Kavaş and his family, but I don’t picture them on the outré side of the tracks. Especially not now.’

‘Mmm. But remember that lurid stories circulated about them for a couple of years.’

‘When he was public enemy number whatever it was,’ İkmen said. ‘But he was exonerated last year, Arto. And according to Teker, who knows him, he and the rest of the family have been keeping their heads below the parapet ever since.’

‘Maybe Ümit was tired of being a good boy.’

‘Bit of an extreme way to break out, wouldn’t you say?’

‘We live in extreme times,’ the doctor said. ‘Why do otherwise perfectly civilised young men go to Syria to fight for something they barely understand? Why are they persecuting completely benign groups like the Yezidis? And beheading? In 2014?’

The rise of ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, was as worrying as it had been rapid. Born out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, it had hacked its way across Iraq and Syria and was now at the Syrian border with Turkey. Young Muslims had gone to join ISIS from all over the world, hoping to build a modern caliphate out of countries artificially created by the old imperialist powers of the twentieth century.

‘I think we have to destroy ISIS completely,’ İkmen said. ‘They’re people who have been brainwashed. I’ve seen them in districts like Çarşamba.’ Çarşamba was home to many of the ultra-religious. ‘I’ve listened to them. As a liberal, I have to defend their right to talk absolute nonsense, but I can’t condone what they do. I don’t want my children to have to live around them. There is no circumstance under which it is right to kill innocent non-combatants.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, Teker tells me that she’s going to see General Kavaş to try to get him off your back.’

‘He wants his son’s body.’

‘Of course. She is going to tell him about the, you know, the eating …’

‘Is that a good idea, do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘As long as General Kavaş and his wife keep it to themselves. Ümit was their only child. Tragic for them, but maybe, from our point of view, it will make it easier for the story to be contained.’

‘The commissioner is very keen to keep this low-key,’ Arto said.

‘And with good reason. Imagine what some of the tabloids would do with a story like this. It would go, what is it? Viral, online. Teker knows it has the potential to spawn all sorts of conspiracy theories and mad quasi-religious violence. She wants it solved yesterday.’

‘I pity you, my friend.’

İkmen smiled. ‘Luckily I won’t be alone,’ he said.

‘Well, you have Sergeant Gürsel …’

‘And my dear friend Mehmet Süleyman, and Sergeant Mungun,’ İkmen said. ‘The best.’

What stuck in the craw almost more than the crime itself was the man’s own attitude to what he’d done.

‘She was a whore,’ he said. ‘It’s not my fault you people don’t do your job with such women any more.’

Inspector Mehmet Süleyman bundled the man, Musa Şahin, into the custody van and slammed the door. One of the constables standing guard outside the Şahins’ apartment frowned.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Süleyman said. ‘He killed his wife.’

‘He admitted it,’ the constable said.

‘Which makes it OK?’ Süleyman walked over to the boy, who coloured. ‘He phoned us because he’s proud of himself,’ he continued. ‘Now, after years of beating the poor woman, he can congratulate himself on becoming man enough to stab her in the stomach.’

He walked back to the custody van and banged on the door to let the driver know he should go.

Süleyman’s sergeant, Ömer Mungun, shook his head. ‘What are we supposed to do with this, sir?’

‘Charge him, wait for forensics to deliver their results, just in case he’s covering for one of his sons, and then let him have his day in court,’ Süleyman said. ‘It’s obviously what he wants.’

They’d been called out to a crime scene that was apparently a formality. Fifty-year-old Musa Şahin, a resident of Ayvansaray, had phoned the police to say he’d killed his wife of thirty years, Melda. When they’d arrived, they’d found Şahin in a state of what appeared to be righteous rage and the body of a woman in her forties. She’d been stabbed in the stomach, but a preliminary examination had revealed that she had also sustained heavy bruising over what could be a long period of time. Şahin had admitted he’d beaten her. Apparently she habitually looked at other men.

‘We saw a lot of this in Mardin,’ Ömer Mungun said. ‘I didn’t think I’d see it here. Don’t know why.’

‘Nor I,’ Süleyman said. ‘Sadly.’

Mardin, a wonderful ancient honey-coloured town, had always been a melting pot of races and creeds from all over the region. However, it was also the wild east, where men were men and women frequently lived in fear. Now on the very edge of the new ISIS caliphate, it was a place Mungun still felt connected to because his ageing parents lived there. In recent months he had asked them to move to Istanbul, but they had refused. They had said that many of the horrors that happened around Mardin happened in Istanbul too. And if this case was anything to go by, they were right.

They began to walk back to Süleyman’s car. The inspector’s phone had buzzed a couple of times when they were in the Şahin apartment. Now he looked at who might have contacted him.

‘Commissioner Teker wants to see both of us as soon as we get back to the station,’ he said. ‘I wonder what we’ve done wrong, Ömer.’

Life had never been easy for Mehmet Süleyman. As a member of the former Ottoman royal family, he’d grown up in the 1970s under a rampantly secular administration that had openly derided people like him. Tall, handsome and clever, he had quickly made a name for himself in the police, and under the tutelage of Cetin İkmen had found a way to largely erase the handicap of his background. And then the world, as it will, had turned. Now under the religiously inspired AK government, the Ottoman Empire was back in favour, but Süleyman was still uncomfortable. Neo-Ottomanism, with its emphasis on religion and ‘right’ behaviour, was not something a man given to many vices could approve of. In the last year he had been criticised for his romantic involvement with a gypsy artist who he continued to see. But then if Teker had called both himself and Ömer into her presence, it was unlikely to be about that. Nevertheless, as he got into his car and fired up the engine, he couldn’t help feeling a little anxious about what might await them.



‘Rare? Are you sure?’

‘That’s what Dr Sarkissian told me,’ İkmen said. ‘If you want to argue with an expert, then go ahead.’

‘No, of course not.’ Süleyman sat down.

Crammed into İkmen’s small, untidy office, two of the officers had had a chance to get over the shock of their new case, while two, who had come straight from Commissioner Teker’s office, had not.

‘Why would anyone eat another person unless he was starving?’ Ömer Mungun said.

İkmen shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I find some of the food in these new gourmet restaurants in the city quite incomprehensible without bringing human flesh into the equation. You know what my son Orhan had the other day? Textures of tomato with a goat’s cheese foam. Fifteen lira. What the hell is that?’

‘But no one is going to serve human flesh in a restaurant, high end or otherwise,’ Süleyman said. ‘Are they?’

‘The fact that you’re thinking like that, Inspector, may be their best defence,’ İkmen said. ‘As a first reaction I thought exactly the same way. But now it’s sunk in, I wonder, why not? Of course we’d discount restaurants, but we shouldn’t. Even though I can’t come up with any plausible reason why any restaurant would want to sell human flesh, it doesn’t mean they’re not.’

İkmen opened his office window with his foot and offered Süleyman a cigarette. Neither of the two younger men smoked, but Kerim Gürsel dutifully locked the office door when the senior officers lit up. Not smoking in enclosed spaces, which had been illegal since 2008, was not easy for İkmen and Süleyman.

‘It’s about as niche as it gets, though,’ Süleyman said. ‘I mean, what would you say if someone invited you to eat human flesh?’

‘I’d say no,’ Ömer said. ‘Why would you want to?’

‘Curiosity?’ İkmen suggested. ‘For the thrill of breaking one of the oldest taboos we have? If you put religion aside, even the completely secular won’t go there. I’m sure that certain religious types would like to accuse the secular of such behaviour …’

‘Isn’t there some sort of notion that the Yezidis eat human flesh?’ Kerim said.

‘That’s nonsense,’ Ömer replied. ‘They’re not devil-worshippers either.’ Then he added awkwardly, ‘I knew some. Back home.’

‘People like to believe myths about people who are different, as we know,’ İkmen said.

‘Isn’t cannibalism a way of dominating your enemy?’ Süleyman said.

‘Or ingesting his power and taking it into yourself,’ İkmen added. ‘But we’re not on a battlefield here, much as it might feel like it sometimes.’

‘And yet we’re talking about a warrior’s son,’ Kerim said.

‘Indeed. Who collapsed outside the church of St Antoine last Saturday night and died of a heart attack and whose last meal was human flesh. An e-mail from Dr Sarkissian half an hour ago enlightened me further. Apparently meat is not easily digestible in humans, and in his opinion, Ümit Kavaş’s body had barely begun to digest his last meal.’

‘So he ate it in or around İstiklal Caddesi?’

‘Unless he got a taxi to İstiklal,’ İkmen said. ‘He lived in Karaköy, Hoca Tahsin Sokak, so he may have been on his way home when he collapsed outside the church. We’ll need to try and find out when he left his apartment. So far we’ve only got CCTV picking him up a few metres from the church. As you know, all you need is one broken or non-functioning camera and you’re screwed. People appear and disappear as if by magic.’ He rolled his eyes. A city bustling with CCTV cameras was only safe if said instruments worked.

‘Kapıcı.’

‘Yes,’ said İkmen, ‘though you know what gossips they are about the people in their buildings.’

‘So …’

İkmen looked at Süleyman. ‘We’ll have to inform the kapıcı Mr Kavaş is dead. But I also think we’ll have to invent a small crime in the vicinity of Kavaş’s apartment. To justify our presence in the absence of the dead man’s family.’ He turned to the two sergeants. ‘A job for you two, I think.’

‘That’s a very chic area these days. Some drink-related antisocial behaviour?’ Ömer suggested.

‘Perfect. Oh, and Kerim, what about missing persons?’

‘Discounting historicals, we’ve currently got five Turks and three foreigners, which includes one Syrian,’ Kerim said. ‘But there could be more Syrians because they don’t report things, as we know. The other two foreigners are tourists, one American, one French. All three are male.’

‘Male.’ İkmen looked up at the ceiling as the smoke from his cigarette curled against the light fitting before disappearing out of the window. ‘You know, that’s odd. Hard as I try, I can’t perceive of this unknown victim being anything other than male.’

Süleyman put his cigarette out. ‘Do we know what gender it is?’

‘Not yet, no. Maybe I can’t bear the thought of a woman being eaten. Or perhaps, given that cannibalism can be an act of dominance, I don’t see why a man would eat a woman. It’s not that kind of male–female dominance, to my mind.’

‘No, Ömer and myself have just come from one of those,’ Süleyman said. ‘So what now?’

‘Now we begin with the obvious and proceed to the obscure,’ İkmen said. ‘Commissioner Teker is with the Kavaş family to explain the situation. It’s going to be a terrible thing for them to have to take in. But then we will have to interview them – quickly. We’ll have to trace Ümit’s movements, inasmuch as we can on Saturday night, and I must meet Istanbul’s last pork butcher.’

‘The Greek in Nişantaşı?’

İkmen had known that Süleyman would know. His brother Murad had been married to an Istanbul Greek until she’d died in the earthquake of 1999. Murad’s daughter had a Greek family and so the Süleymans knew most members of the community.

‘Tayyar Zarides.’

‘Why a pork butcher, sir?’ Kerim asked.

‘Because human flesh is said to taste more like pork than anything else,’ İkmen said. ‘So it’s possible Ümit Kavaş bought that meal as pork.’

‘He was a Muslim,’ Kerim said.

‘Who may have been curious to taste pork,’ Süleyman said. ‘Perhaps it was sold to him on that basis.’

‘As pork.’

‘Maybe.’

Kerim shook his head. ‘My wife and a friend have been throwing out Anatolia Gold tins all day. Is this a time to go to a pork butcher’s shop? People are wound up about this.’

İkmen smiled. ‘If I go, most people will see not a policeman but an atheist, and who else would they expect to see at a pork butcher’s shop? Anyway, it’s in Nişantaşı, where people don’t worry about such things.’

‘Which leaves me, I imagine, with the Kavaş family,’ Süleyman said.

‘When Commissioner Teker calls you, yes,’ İkmen said.

There had been a time when Hürrem Teker had called General Abdullah Kavaş ‘uncle’. She remembered the colourful little orchid greenhouse he’d had on the balcony of his palatial Nişantaşı apartment. It was still there. But like the general and his wife, ‘Auntie’ Belgin, the greenhouse was old and neglected and broken.

‘I am sorry that you never got to know Ümit,’ the old man said. He sat in the same chair Hürrem remembered him sitting in when she was a child. He’d fallen out with her father during the 1980 coup. Commander Recep Teker had opposed the military tribunals that had taken place in the wake of the coup, and the two families had become estranged. Ümit had only just been born.

‘I too am sorry,’ Hürrem said.

The Kavaşes had not had their one child until late. Hürrem didn’t know why. It wasn’t something people talked about.

‘Had you known him, you would realise that he could never have done such a thing,’ Kavaş said. ‘For better or worse, my son was a liberal, Hürrem Hanım. Against his mother’s advice he took part in the Gezi protests.’

He didn’t say that he himself had been in prison at the time and so unable to advise his son. Hürrem didn’t allude to that time either.

‘General, I wish I could say that my pathologist’s findings are a mistake, but they’re not,’ she said. Auntie Belgin sobbed.

‘He has checked his results, and also, I trust him implicitly.’

‘He must have an agenda,’ the old man said. ‘What is he? One of these new men?’

She knew what he meant. There was a certain type of person who would do anything to discredit the old secular elite.

‘Why won’t they leave me alone, eh? I was exonerated. Why can’t I die in peace now?’

‘My pathologist is an Armenian,’ she said.

‘Ah. Them.’

She’d forgotten how anti-minorities the general and many of his friends had been. Something else he’d fallen out with her father over.

‘And so he has no agenda,’ she said. ‘If that is what you fear, sir.’

‘My son did not eat human flesh. Why would he?’

Belgin Kavaş left the room.

‘I don’t know,’ Hürrem said. ‘It’s very possible he didn’t know that was what he was eating. We know it was cooked.’

‘And so what type of meat would it have been mistaken for?’

Hürrem cringed. She knew that the general was a secularist, but she also knew he was trying to behave as if he’d changed his life.

‘Biologists reckon it’s closest to pork,’ she said.

He nodded his ash-grey head. ‘And so the slander continues.’

‘No. No,’ she said. ‘General, everyone involved in this investigation, scientists and police officers, is sworn to secrecy. Istanbul is as volatile – if not more so – as it was back in t. . .