The House of Four

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

THE HOUSE OF FOUR is the brand new Istanbul crime thriller featuring Inspector Ikmen, 'the Morse of Istanbul' (Daily Telegraph) from Barbara Nadel. Perfect for fans of Donna Leon.

Everyone in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Moda knows the Devil's House. A crumbling Ottoman mansion, and once the home of a princess, it is a place associated with ill fortune.

The princess's four children, now in old age, still live in separate apartments on different floors and are rumoured never to speak to each other. Then one of them is found dead, stabbed through the heart, and it is discovered that the other three siblings have met an identical fate. There is no sign of forced entry or burglary, and all evidence must be gained from letters and diaries, but as Inspector Ikmen digs into their past it becomes clear they have been harbouring a secret...

Meanwhile a young couple are arrested for a series of seemingly random killings on the streets of Istanbul. They claim to have been squatting in the Devil's House. But this fiendish mystery is far from over and it will take Inspector Ikmen to the darkest and most devilish depths of this ancient city.

(P)2017 Headline

Release date: January 12, 2017

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 416

Sample

Another day, another torment. The old woman was going mad and had lately taken to following her around the house talking nonsense at her. Cleaning the toilets was bad enough without having her raving on about voices in the walls. But a job was a job, and as Bilal always said, maybe Fatima Hanım would leave her something when she died. She’d told him he was living in a fantasy if he thought that. The old witch was mean as well as wicked.

Selin opened the apartment door and went inside. Most of her employer’s possessions made her shudder anyway. Who would want massive faded sofas stuffed with ancient horsehair? She actually hoped they weren’t going to come her way when Fatima Hanım died. Although she did like the old woman’s dressing table, which was made entirely of gilded glass. She had a notion it was French, although it was more likely German because that was where Fatima Hanım’s father had been born.

Mercifully the apartment was quiet, which meant that Fatima Hanım was probably still asleep. Selin went straight to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. As usual, every surface was covered with the detritus the old woman left in her wake whenever she tried to cater for herself. Cheese, uncovered by the sink, a half-sliced onion, broken biscuits scattered on the floor and round the waste bin. What she really needed was live-in help, but that wasn’t going to happen. No one in their right mind would actually want to sleep in that awful rotting building. It was bad enough visiting almost every day.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, Selin had a cigarette. Bilal had forbidden smoking ever since he’d become a member of the AK Party, and so she had to get her cigarettes in where she could. The old woman didn’t mind. In fact she sometimes smoked too. It felt good to have a quiet smoke after a whole weekend of abstinence. Bilal had made them all go to a party rally, even the kids, and Selin had been required to be on her best behaviour. Surrounded by pious, covered women, she’d felt completely out of her depth. Bilal reckoned it was because she wasn’t covered. She knew he wanted her to cover, but she wasn’t going to do it. She hated covering.

There was still no movement from the old woman’s room. Selin made the tea, and while she waited for it to brew, she had another cigarette. The smoke helped to keep at bay the smell of old person, which was strong on this occasion. But then it always was when Fatima Hanım had been alone all weekend.

A fucking mosquito! Ali Baykal winced. With a pile of folded kilims on his head, he couldn’t very well stop and scratch where the bastard had bitten him. And it hurt! If only he’d worn that awful jacket his mother had tried to get him into, maybe he wouldn’t have been bitten. The tiniest vest in the world just didn’t do the job when it came to determined insects. But it was as hot as a kettle in the Grand Bazaar in July, and also, girls didn’t like boys who wore their fathers’ jackets. Especially when their father had been dead for ten years.

People were looking at him now. Was he pulling a face as he tried to deal with the pain? It was getting worse! What kind of mosquito had attacked him? It was agony!

Ali put his bundle down. He’d have to take a look. A man came over to him and said, ‘What’s happened?’

He put a hand on Ali’s shoulder.

‘I’ve been bitten,’ he replied.

‘Bitten?’

‘Yes.’

Ali looked down, and it was then that he saw blood. Pumping out of his side, running down his vest and into his sweat pants. Suddenly he felt very weak . . .

The cleaner’s name was Selin İnce. A plain, uncovered woman in her forties, she kept saying that she hadn’t done anything wrong, and Çetin İkmen tended to believe her.

‘Bilal is always saying that bad things will happen unless I cover,’ she said as she visibly trembled. Only the cigarette between her fingers was holding her up.

Inspector Çetin İkmen of the İstanbul police led her towards a dusty sofa and made her sit down.

‘I don’t think your employer’s death has anything to do with your choice of clothes,’ he said.

Away in the largest bedroom of what was a vast nineteenth-century apartment, the department’s pathologist, Dr Arto Sarkissian, was already at work on the corpse of a very old woman. But it was only a formality. The blood-soaked hole in her chest left little doubt as to the cause of death of Miss Fatima Rudolfoğlu.

İkmen sat down opposite Selin İnce. From there he could also watch his officers as they began to search for the bladed instrument that had killed the old woman.

‘Have you seen anyone hanging around the building in the last few days?’

‘No. People don’t come here any more. Haven’t done for years. Only me and Mr Yücel’s man, Osman.’

İkmen frowned. ‘Mr Yücel’s man? Who’s Mr Yücel?’

‘He’s Fatima Hanım’s brother. He lives on the ground floor. Osman does odd jobs for him. Shopping and things.’

İkmen had been having a wonderful breakfast of heavily sweetened Turkish coffee and three cigarettes at his desk when he’d got the call to an address on the Asian side of the city. All he knew about the district of Moda was that it was fashionable and expensive. Although close to the old disused Moda ferry stage, which he had visited as a child, fifty years ago, the huge Ottoman house that contained Fatima Hanım’s apartment was unknown to him.

‘So does this brother know . . .’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘They don’t . . . they didn’t speak. None of them do.’

Finding the unnamed alleyway between a coffee shop and a fashion house that led to number 130 Moda Caddesi had been a mission in itself. Unearthing the mansion behind its protective curtain of bindweed, ivy and rotting garden furniture had challenged İkmen and his officers still further. The pathologist, Dr Sarkissian, who had been obliged to park his car down near the ferry stage, had arrived exhausted. And now there was not only a dead woman, but an uncommunicative brother too. And what had the cleaner meant when she’d talked about ‘none of them’?

‘None of who?’

She put one cigarette out and lit another. İkmen saw little hope for Selin İnce as a modest, covered woman.

‘Mr Yücel, Mr Kanat and Mr Kemal,’ she said. ‘They don’t speak, any of them.’

‘And Mr Yücel is Fatima Hanım’s brother?’

‘And Mr Kanat and Mr Kemal,’ she said. ‘There are four siblings. They all live in this building, in different apartments. But they’ve not spoken to each other in my lifetime. Probably not in yours either.’

İkmen had been born and brought up on the Asian side of the city, in the working-class district of Üsküdar. Now that he lived in the European part, he, in common with most ‘Europe dwellers’, rarely ventured to this side of the Bosphorus. It was a whole other world, and this one in particular was clearly out of the ordinary.

Selin İnce began to cry again. ‘You won’t put me in prison, will you?’ she said.

İkmen’s sergeant, Kerim Gürsel, waved at him from the kitchen. İkmen stood.

‘I doubt it very much, Mrs İnce,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being called . . .’

Kerim Gürsel was a good-looking man in early middle age. He was also, to İkmen’s delight, a person of great initiative.

‘I bought some cappuccinos from that café on the corner,’ he said. He pointed to a box containing cardboard cups on top of the cooker. ‘I talked to the owner.’

‘He must’ve seen us fighting to get in,’ İkmen said.

‘Let’s say he was intrigued. Wanted to know why we were here. I told him we’d had a call.’

‘Everything and nothing.’

‘Yes. But what he told me was interesting,’ Kerim said. ‘Did you know that this house is called the Teufel Haus?’

‘The Devil’s House?’

‘In German, yes,’ Kerim said.

‘Mmm.’ The dead woman had a part-Turkish, part-Germanic surname. But why call your house the Devil’s House? Was it some sort of joke?

‘Anyway, there’s coffee if you want it, sir.’

İkmen patted him on the shoulder. ‘Thank you. Stay with the cleaner, I’m going to talk to Dr Sarkissian.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The old woman’s bedroom was pure French-inspired Ottoman: ornate, stuffy and, in this case, filthy. Either Selin İnce was forbidden from cleaning it, or the task was too big for her.

The pathologist, an overweight, slightly owlish Armenian, looked up. ‘Ah, Çetin.’

‘Arto.’

Çetin İkmen and Arto Sarkissian had been friends since childhood, and so they very rarely used formal titles even in front of others.

‘So, a stabbing,’ İkmen said.

‘Yes, straight through the heart,’ the doctor replied. ‘One blow. No sign of a struggle. With any luck the victim was asleep when it happened. She’d certainly taken enough drugs to make that possible.’

İkmen had seen a tray with numerous bottles of pills beside the bed when he’d first looked at the crime scene.

‘What sort of drugs?’

‘I’ve not made a full inventory yet,’ the doctor said. ‘But so far I’ve spotted warfarin, various blood-pressure medications, sleeping tablets, an antidepressant, tranquillisers . . .’

‘The diseases of old age,’ İkmen said. ‘We have this to come.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Arto said. ‘Some of us are already there.’

Both men were of a certain age, İkmen coming up for sixty and the doctor one year older.

‘Could her meds have killed her before she was stabbed?’

‘Oh no, there’s far too much blood. No, she was alive when she was attacked, heart pumping away . . .’

İkmen walked over to the old woman’s bed and looked at her. Tall and thin, Fatima Rudolfoğlu, even in death, had a strong jawline for a woman the cleaner reckoned had to be in her nineties. She also had a thick head of steel-grey hair.

‘Well, I suppose I should go and break the bad news to her brothers,’ he said.

‘Where do they live?’

‘In the three apartments below this one,’ İkmen replied. ‘Apparently they never spoke.’

Arto frowned.

Only the oldest traders in the İç Bedesten, at the very centre of the Grand Bazaar, were calm about the closure. Mainly antique dealers, they’d seen it all before and knew that to rail against policemen like Sergeant Ömer Mungun was pointless.

‘He’s only doing his job,’ a white-haired Armenian said to the Muslim owner of the shop next to his.

‘Ah, young people!’ the Muslim said. ‘So impatient! Events happen when God wills. There is nothing mortals can do.’

But other traders were not of the same mind.

‘When can we reopen?’ A young Kurdish man thrust his face into Ömer’s. ‘Eh?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ömer said.

Ali Baykal’s blood was still on the ground, and every gate into the Grand Bazaar was being closed on what should have been one of the busiest days of the summer tourist season. But that wasn’t Ömer’s problem. What mattered to him was that a twenty-year-old man was fighting for his life after being stabbed in the side of the chest. Also, although surrounded by uniformed officers, Ömer was without the guidance and gravitas of his superior, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman, who was supervising the closure of the gates into one of İstanbul’s oldest structures.

‘That boy didn’t work here,’ the elderly Armenian said.

‘I know,’ Ömer said. The young victim worked at a carpet shop on Sahaflar Caddesi. According to his traumatised employer, Ali didn’t have an enemy in the world.

‘He was carrying kilims on his head,’ the Armenian’s neighbour said.

‘Yes.’

Ali Baykal had been taking the small flat rugs over to an antique shop owned by his employer’s brother just outside the İç Bedesten. He’d needed them to cover up a patch of damp that had appeared on his floor. This wasn’t unusual in a building that had been in continual use since the fifteenth century. Sometimes parts of it just gave out.

Ah, here you are! Ömer said to himself as he watched a tall, elegant man move through the crowds of confused shoppers and traders who were now effectively trapped inside the bazaar.

‘Ömer.’

Inspector Mehmet Süleyman’s voice was as deep and dark as his fine head of thick black hair. The scion of an old Ottoman family related to the imperial rulers of what was then the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet Süleyman was spectacularly handsome and he knew it. He was also, at forty-five, at the height of both his physical and intellectual strength.

‘Sir.’

‘Do we have any CCTV of the incident?’ Süleyman asked.

‘Mr . . .’

‘Gevorgyan.’ The Armenian antique dealer pushed in front of Ömer and shook Süleyman’s hand. ‘My cameras may have caught something. Mind you, they are pointed at the front of my shop . . .’

‘One of mine is positioned towards the street,’ said Mr Gevorgyan’s neighbour. He bowed to Süleyman. ‘I am Devlet Türkoğlu. I specialise in antique jewellery with a particular interest in art deco . . .’

‘Do you.’

Süleyman had a way of putting people down without actually saying anything offensive. It was the tone of voice he used, which was, to say the least, dismissive.

He said to the traders, ‘Well let’s see your CCTV records.’ He looked at Ömer. ‘Any news on the victim?’

‘No, sir.’

A man pushed his way to the front of a large knot of shoppers. ‘When are we going to be allowed out of here?’

His face was red and he was clearly very agitated.

Süleyman turned what Ömer had come to recognise as his coldest gaze upon him. ‘When you have been questioned and processed by my officers.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Unless you want to spend some time in my cells, then you will shut up and wait,’ Süleyman said. ‘A young man has been assaulted. I want to know who did that, as I’m sure you do.’

He turned away from the man and followed Mr Türkoğlu into his shop. Ömer looked at the crowd in front of him and then glanced away. They were hot, confined and having a bad time. Things could very easily turn ugly – especially with Süleyman in one of his not infrequent imperious moods.

‘They’re all out,’ Kerim Gürsel said.

‘All of them?’

‘Yes. Can’t get an answer from any of their apartments.’

İkmen turned to the cleaner, Selin İnce. ‘Do Fatima Hanım’s brothers go out a lot?’ he asked.

‘No, never,’ she said. ‘They’re all even older than Fatima Hanım. Mr Yücel has a man, Osman, as I told you; I see him on the stairs from time to time. I don’t know what Mr Kanat and Mr Kemal do. I’ve only ever seen them through their windows.’

‘Do you know where this Osman lives?’ İkmen asked.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Do you know his surname?’

‘No.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But I do know he usually comes on a Monday morning. The old people need help after the weekend.’

‘So he may yet arrive?’ İkmen said.

‘Yes.’

‘Any idea what time?’

‘No. I think he comes when he can,’ she said. ‘I’ve known him to be just arriving as I’m leaving.’

‘Which is when, usually?’

‘One p.m.’

İkmen looked at his watch. It was 11.30 a.m.

‘What about telephones?’ he said.

‘What, them?’ she said. ‘No. They never had telephones. Fatima Hanım wrote letters.’

‘Letters? To whom?’ İkmen said.

‘I don’t know,’ the cleaner replied. ‘I just posted them.’

Gonca Şekeroğlu didn’t usually leave her large house and family in the old Jewish quarter of Balat. Everything she needed was there – her children and grandchildren, her father, her work, and sometimes her lover.

At one time, gypsies like Gonca had only lived in specific parts of the city, like Sulukule, now demolished, and Hasköy, which was gentrifying at an alarming rate. Now the Roma people could be found almost anywhere, including, in the case of Gonca’s cousin Barış, just outside the Grand Bazaar.

A copper-beater by trade, Barış, whose shop was opposite the Beyazıt Gate, was a man who missed little. As soon as he’d seen Inspector Mehmet Süleyman supervising the sealing of the bazaar’s gates, he’d called his cousin.

‘Mehmet Efendi is closing the bazaar,’ he had said, using Süleyman’s princely title. ‘Such power that man has!’

Gonca had been compelled to see that. Standing in the middle of a huddle of pious black-clad women, she looked like a multicoloured statue of Venus, with her ankle-length hair and low-cut summer dress in many shades of red, green and orange. The women looked at her with suspicion, especially when Barış, a tiny stick of a man, ran up and kissed her.

‘Do you know what’s going on?’ she asked.

Barış led her away from the women and into his shop.

‘Word is that a boy has been stabbed,’ he said.

‘Where? In the bazaar?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was there a fight? Was it carpet men?’

‘According to my friend Sarkis Bey, the boy works in a carpet shop, yes,’ Barış said. ‘But there was no fight. The stabbing happened right outside Sarkis Bey’s shop. So far, the boy lives.’

‘Do the police have the person who did this?’

‘Not as far as I know. It’s why they’ve shut the bazaar.’

After taking tea with her cousin, Gonca went outside and once again found herself in amongst the covered women. They talked about how unsafe the city was becoming and complained about the police.

‘They just swagger about looking down their noses at people,’ one woman said.

Another shook her head. ‘My husband works in the bazaar. Who knows what this will do to his business? Who was that man closing all the gates? Was he a policeman?’

Gonca smiled. She wanted to say, Yes, he is a policeman and he’s all mine! but she didn’t. The covered women wouldn’t be impressed – or rather they wouldn’t show that they were impressed. Had they seen her Mehmet, even they, surely, would feel some sort of sexual stirring. Gonca knew that she did. She sent her lover a text to let him know that when his day finished, she would be waiting for him.

And because she was beautiful, and because she had bewitched him, Gonca knew that Mehmet Süleyman would already be hot with desire for her.

Some of the younger constables were itching to use the battering ram. İkmen let them.

‘Oh, to be young and full of machismo,’ he said as the team waited for the order to break down the door.

Osman Babacan, Yücel Rudolfoğlu’s casual carer, had turned up at 1 p.m. and opened the door to the old man’s apartment. İkmen had found Yücel in the same position as his sister, face upwards on his bed with a stab wound to his chest. Stone dead.

Now they were preparing to break into Kanat Rudolfoğlu’s second-floor apartment.

Commissioner Hürrem Teker, who had arrived after the discovery of the second body, said, ‘Break it down.’

The door was a fine example of Ottoman hardwood carpentry, but it didn’t stand a chance against four young lads with the kind of muscles a skinny middle-aged man like İkmen could only dream about.

Once the team had broken through, İkmen turned to Arto Sarkissian. ‘A tiny wager on cause of death,’ he said. ‘How about it?’

The doctor shared his friend’s graveyard sense of humour. ‘If he’s been stabbed through the heart, you owe me a bottle of rakı.’

İkmen scowled. ‘I was going to say that.’

They walked towards the shattered door.

‘Ah, but I got in first,’ the doctor said. ‘Are you on?’

The two men shook hands.

Teker was first into the apartment. What had started out as a single suspicious death was developing into something far more sinister.

Kanat Rudolfoğlu’s apartment was ghastly. Filthy and unkempt, it smelt of urine and damp, and there were faeces on the floor of what had once been an elegant entrance hall. Commissioner Teker said, ‘This is an outrage. How can anyone live like this?’

‘From what we can gather locally, this family has been all but forgotten,’ İkmen said. ‘The old woman’s cleaner told us that no one has visited for years.’

‘And yet Fatima Rudolfoğlu had a pile of prescription drugs by her bed, so she must have seen a doctor at some point.’

‘Maybe they were just repeat prescriptions,’ the doctor said. ‘Didn’t the cleaner say she used to pick them up for the old woman?’

‘Yes,’ İkmen said.

The door into Kanat Rudolfoğlu’s bedroom was open; as expected, he was lying on his back. Arto Sarkissian approached the bed first and declared that the old man had, on the face of it, died in exactly the same way as his siblings.

As İkmen left to go and organise the breaking-down of Kemal Rudolfoğlu’s front door, the doctor said to him, ‘You owe me.’

‘I know.’

Once they’d found the body of the final Rudolfoğlu sibling, Commissioner Teker said to İkmen, ‘And so what began as a simple murder turns into something even darker.’

‘Oh yes,’ İkmen said as he walked around one of the most extraordinary bedrooms he had ever seen. ‘And I think that Mr Kemal, at least, had some very unusual interests.’

A cross between a laboratory – complete with retorts, bell jars, titration tubes – and a museum of curiosities, Kemal Rudolfoğlu’s bedroom was an unnerving place.

‘What was he?’ Teker asked. ‘Some sort of scientist?’

İkmen looked into the empty eye sockets of a human skull and said, ‘Not exactly.’

The beautiful, chaotic, treasure-filled Grand Bazaar of İstanbul is over five hundred years old and contains five thousand shops. In the summer months it can attract upwards of two hundred and fifty thousand visitors a day. Add to that the number of traders and artisans who work in the bazaar, and one gets what is in effect a small city. It was a small city that Mehmet Süleyman had closed off from the world.

An owlish technician called Turgut Zana had come out from police headquarters to look at CCTV footage of Ali Baykal’s progress through the bazaar that morning. A jeweller called Moris Taranto had been the first person to realise that the victim was bleeding, but he hadn’t witnessed how that might have happened. No one had, and so far, narrowing down the masses trapped inside the bazaar to a few possible suspects was proving difficult. Footage from outside Sarkis Gevorgyan’s shop, where the boy had collapsed, was unilluminating.

‘Turgut Bey . . .’

‘Sssh! Go away!’

Zana was looking at footage from the camera outside a shop specialising in Christian Orthodox ikons. The owner, a perfectly round Turkish woman in her sixties, was shocked at the way the man who had stomped into her shop like a storm-trooper took this rebuttal.

Süleyman noticed the look on her face. ‘My fault,’ he said. ‘I disturbed him.’

Officer Zana had never been an easy man. A Kurd, originally from Diyarbakır, he’d come to policing via a range of technical jobs, including film-making and Internet security. His working-class parents had noticed when he was very small that their boy was ‘different’, and had spent every penny they had on his education. It was said that Turgut Zana had never dropped a grade. He was also one of the few people who could tell Mehmet Süleyman to shut up.

Ömer Mungun arrived. ‘How’s it going?’ he whispered to Süleyman.

‘I’ve no idea.’

Ömer looked over at the Kurd. ‘Mmm.’

‘What’s happening outside?’

‘A lot of unhappy people,’ Ömer said.

‘Reinforcements?’

‘On their way, but the commissioner’s left for a situation over in Moda. Serious, I’m told.’

‘As serious as a random stabbing in the Grand Bazaar?’

Ömer Mungun took Süleyman’s arm and led him away from the Kurd and the woman. ‘Four suspicious deaths, all the same family,’ he said. ‘Inspector İkmen—’

‘A person in a black tracksuit.’

They both walked across to where the Kurd was hunched over a monitor.

‘Passes on the right side of the victim.’ Turgut Zana pointed at the screen. ‘Raises one arm, slightly . . . there.’

He pointed at the screen.

Süleyman, peering over Zana’s shoulder, could feel the Kurd’s discomfort – he didn’t do proximity.

‘Can you make the image any clearer?’ he said.

‘If I could, I would have done so before I showed you,’ Zana said.

Süleyman would have bawled anyone else out for speaking to him in such a manner, but he knew it was pointless. Turgut Zana wouldn’t understand.

‘Is it a man or a woman?’ Ömer asked.

‘Impossible to tell,’ the Kurd said. ‘A man or a very slim woman.’

‘Probably a man . . .’

‘You can’t make that assumption. We don’t know. Accept it.’

Süleyman saw Ömer’s face redden, so he moved him to one side.

‘Turgut Bey,’ he said. ‘Describe this figure factually to me in your own words, please.’

The owner of the shop whispered to Ömer, ‘He’s not right, is he?’

Ömer said, ‘No, hanım, but he is very clever.’

‘He’s very rude . . .’

Turgut Zana said, ‘Medium height, very slim. Wearing a black tracksuit – I’d say Ralph Lauren or maybe Lacoste. There’s a small logo on the left breast but it’s not possible to make it out. Shoes are trainers, but shabby. I’d say he or she was fashionable, that he or she had money, if it wasn’t for the trainers. People who care about labels have to assemble the entire look. This is either someone poor who has stolen or borrowed an expensive tracksuit, or a wealthy person in disguise.’

‘Just using shoes?’

‘Why not?’ He peered at the screen again. ‘Anything is possible in an infinite universe.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Do you want my professional opinion or don’t you, Inspector Süleyman?’

‘Of course, I—’

‘Then listen,’ he said. ‘I’d estimate the age at anywhere between sixteen and thirty. If we say this is a man, then I should add that middle-aged men do wear tracksuits, as we know, but they move differently. This person moves with the fluidity of youth. He’s carrying nothing, so he either lives in the city, where he can get access to his possessions easily, or he is too poor to actually have anything. Sadly, apart from his footwear, he is really rather nondescript.’ . . .