River of The Dead Read Free Page A

his passion, İkmen was finding it hard to concentrate. All he could think about was the son who had come home after nineteen long and, for his wife Fatma particularly, painful years. A difficult and at times violent child, Bekir İkmen had begun to take drugs – just cannabis to start off with – from the age of thirteen. No threats about endangering his own liberty or putting his father’s career at risk had had any effect, and Bekir had quickly tired of cannabis and gone on to cocaine, acid, amphetamines – anything he could get his hands on. By the time he ran away from home two years later, his brothers and sisters, as well as Çetin İkmen himself, were almost relieved. Living around Bekir and his drug-fuelled rages had been difficult and it was only Fatma İkmen who actually cried when it became clear that her third-born son was not coming home.
    Çetin İkmen looked out over the top of the traffic jam on the coastal road, Kennedy Street, at the shining waters of the Sea of Marmara beyond. From the front entrance of the hospital, one could see the many vast tankers that had recently passed through the Bosphorus straits. One could also see much of the city of İstanbul itself. To his left, İkmen could just make out the minarets of the Sultan Ahmet or Blue Mosque. Almost encapsulating the spirit of the city in itself, the mosque had been built in a district that for ever afterwards took on its name. Sultanahmet, the very centre of the old city of imperial mosques, Ottoman palaces and the teeming Grand Bazaar, was where the İkmen family lived. Until Bekir had somehow made his way back, it had been home to Çetin, Fatma and their four youngest children. For the past nineteen years they had been, in totality, a family of ten – eight children and two parents. Now they were eleven, as it was meant to be, as was right . Except that, for Çetin İkmen at least, it wasn’t. His son Bekir was, to all intents and purposes, a very personable man of thirty-four. By his own admission he’d spent many years battling various addictions. He had, he said, spent the time he’d been addicted to heroin in the crime-ridden district of Edirnekapı, up around the old Byzantine city walls. Walking distance, provided one was fit, from the İkmens’ apartment in Sultanahmet. Walking distance! One could feel, and his wife Fatma did feel, very guilty about being so near and yet so far from a beloved child for such a long time. Çetin İkmen, however, did not. Now clean and bright and shiny and, he said, gainfully employed in the tourist industry, Bekir was still wrong . How, İkmen didn’t know. But that he, Bekir, was now on his own in the İkmen apartment with only Fatma for company made Çetin feel uneasy. The superstitious and suspicious blood that ran in his veins, inherited from a mother known for her witchcraft, would not allow the inspector to delight in his son’s return.
    The landlord of the house where İsak Mardin had lived until a few days before was very certain that the young man had been ‘weird’ and ‘wrong’ – after he’d run off without paying his rent.
    ‘He was forever body-building, the woman who lives in the apartment below told me,’ Mr Lale told Ayşe Farsakoğlu. İkmen hadn’t yet arrived, so Sergeant Farsakoğlu, together with constables Yıldız and Orğa, had found the landlord of the house on Zeyrek Mehmet Paşa Alley and gained admittance to a now empty apartment.
    ‘Bang, bang, bang, all night long, so Miss . . . whatever her name is downstairs said,’ Mr Lale continued. He was a thin, lugubrious man of about fifty who, winter and summer, wore a thick knitted hat, as a lot of people who came originally from the countryside did. ‘Lifting weights, see,’ he said, moving his arms up and down to demonstrate, ‘and banging them down on the floor afterwards.’
    ‘Yes, Mr Lale,’ Ayşe said with a polite smile. ‘I do know what weightlifting is about.’
    In spite of the fact that more