A Noble Killing (36 page)

He put his head in his hands and began to sob, huge, wet, dammed-up tears. He’d been carrying that around, unable to express it. He had tried to tell his friend about it, but he’d just laughed.

‘I couldn’t bear the thought of her face! But . . . Leopold and Loeb, he was obsessed with them.’ He shook. ‘He said it could be our business,’ he whispered once he’d recovered himself sufficiently. ‘He could make a lot of money and do what he wanted and I could do the work of the righteous! We could be together!’ He looked up at İkmen and Süleyman and said, ‘But I couldn’t do it, not again. I told him, but he just laughed!’

‘And so he killed Hamid İdiz?’

‘He said that he could do it better than me,’ Murad said. ‘He said no one would ever suspect him!’

‘He was right,’ Süleyman said. ‘We didn’t.’

‘Tell us how he killed Hamid Bey,’ İkmen asked.

‘He thought I wouldn’t care because of how Hamid Bey was. My love for Ali Reza was different. Pure. We didn’t . . .’ Murad took a sip from his tea glass before continuing. ‘Hamid Bey was attracted to both of us, we knew that,’ he said. ‘But he never hurt us or did anything to us. Ali Reza went to visit him. He dressed up. Made himself look older and available. Make-up and . . . He told me that Hamid Bey was very excited. He . . . he went to the bed and he . . . Ali Reza cut his throat from behind.’

‘Ali Reza told you that?’

‘He did.’

İkmen lit a cigarette while he watched the psychologist attempt to comfort the boy. He was glad that she was doing it and not him. In spite of Murad’s youth and his lack of privilege, it was still hard to summon up any sympathy for this boy. He’d set a living girl on fire for the sake of a twisted idea of morality, a pathetic obsession and, he supposed, some money.

‘How much money did you make for burning the girl?’ he asked.

‘Ali Reza gave me a thousand lire.’

İkmen looked at Süleyman and raised his eyebrows. ‘So a nice five-thousand-lire profit for Ali Reza.’

‘The money wasn’t important.’

İkmen pulled a cynical face. ‘No.’

‘What did you do with it?’ Süleyman asked.

With an almost disinterested simplicity Murad said, ‘My parents took it. They take everything.’

‘How?’

‘I went home afterwards and they went through my pockets,’ the boy said. ‘They do that when they’re desperate for the gear.’

‘Didn’t they ask you where you’d come by such a large amount of money?’ Süleyman asked.

The boy looked at him pityingly, and in truth, Süleyman himself had been instantly ashamed of his naive question. ‘They’re junkies,’ Murad said. ‘They don’t care.’

Only now did Çetin İkmen’s pity for Murad manifest itself. Where else but to an avenging God could such a boy turn? ‘Your clothes must have smelt of petrol when you left the apartment in Beşiktaş,’ he said. ‘What happened to them?’

‘Ali Reza has an aunt in an apartment in Teşvikiye,’ he said. ‘She was away on holiday. He gave me a key. I ran there and changed my clothes.’

‘He left a new set for you in the aunt’s apartment?’

‘Yes. He went to pick my old clothes up later. He told me he burnt them. Ali Reza plans well.’ There was some admiration there, still.

‘Murad, how did a boy like you with so much talent and such a bright future become involved with
jihadist
philosophy?’ İkmen asked.

‘When your parents are junkies,’ he said, ‘you need something to believe in. You need your religion to help you make it through.’

‘Religion, yes, but . . .’

‘When you see your mother letting men bugger her for money, you want to blow up the universe!’ His face was purple with rage. ‘You ask me how I came to be involved in
jihadi
things? I went out and I found them! I found the men who sell the DVDs, the pictures, who run the websites! I wanted to be like them! Not like the way I am, the . . .’

‘What? The way you are what?’ İkmen asked.

Murad turned his head to one side and said, ‘Nothing.’

‘Gay?’ İkmen asked.

‘No!’

‘You love Ali Reza,’ İkmen said. ‘Even though he laughs at you, even though he betrays you. It’s true, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

Murad Emin turned back to look at him again, his anger obviously all burnt out, and said very simply, ‘Yes. Yes, it is true.’

‘You loved him before all the
jihadi
stuff, didn’t you?’ İkmen said.

Murad began to cry. ‘I had to do something to make up for it!’ he said. ‘Such a terrible sin! Even thinking about it!’

‘And so you lit a human blaze . . .’

‘A noble blaze, yes,’ the boy said. ‘Yes, I did. I thought it would make up for it all.’

Only then did İkmen really feel any true sympathy for the boy.

‘When you refer to something, meaning to be clever and cocky, it’s just as well if no one else is listening,’ Çetin İkmen said to Ali Reza Zafir.

‘What do you mean?’ Ali Reza said. He was so different from Murad Emin, so much more confrontational.

‘We knew that you were hiding something,’ İkmen continued, ‘because you had to have hit your mother for a reason, which could only be connected to a desire to get away. You were dressed for the street, you had your passport and clothes in your bag.’

‘I didn’t mean to kill her,’ Ali Reza said in a matter-of-fact way. He added impatiently, ‘I hit her too hard. It was an accident.’

‘Was it?’ Süleyman, across the other side of the desk, shook his head. ‘Tell me, Ali Reza, when did you develop an ambition to be a hit man?’

The boy looked at him as if he was something disgusting and filthy. ‘Don’t be stupid!’ he said. ‘Some ridiculous peasant wanted a girl killed for no good reason; I did that using another stupid peasant and I got paid money for it. There was a market!’

‘And what do you know about markets?’ İkmen asked.

‘A lot more than my father!’ the boy snapped spitefully. ‘Public service? Art?’ He pulled a face. ‘Yes, I like the piano. I’d like to be a concert pianist, but only because it pays well. Top musicians can live like footballers. But this was easier.’

‘Which you found out when you killed Hamid İdiz?’

But still the boy wouldn’t give that information up. He sat back in his chair again and smiled.

İkmen shrugged. ‘We’ll tie up the forensic evidence,’ he said. ‘You might as well tell me the truth now and save us all a lot of time later.’

Ali Reza didn’t move.

‘Oh well,’ İkmen said. ‘I’ll just have to tell you how you’ve been stupid and then you can make up your own mind. Firstly you did protest rather too much about how your friend Murad might well be a dangerous fanatic when Inspector Süleyman and Sergeant Melik went to see you at your apartment just before you killed your mother.’ İkmen waved an arm in the air casually. ‘But that’s a detail. Your main mistake was to mention two names that meant absolutely nothing to anyone when you were about to be transported over to Üsküdar.’ He walked over to the boy and bent down to look into his face. ‘Leopold and Loeb. I knew of them, even if no one else did. A crime now widely accepted to have had homoerotic overtones.’

Ali Reza appeared mesmerised by İkmen’s eyes. He looked up at him with a totally blank expression on his face.

‘When I heard that you’d used those names, I knew,’ İkmen said. ‘We were not sure at the time what your connection was with Gözde Seyhan’s murder, but I knew that you hadn’t killed your mother for no reason. You needed to get away on your own account. We were pretty sure that Murad had actually killed Gözde, but what was your connection? More to the point, what was your actual crime? You shouldn’t have tried to connect Murad Emin to Hamid İdiz’s death, not after we’d taken his DNA. It wouldn’t have shown up in the vicinity of Hamid’s bed. But yours will. You shouldn’t have tried to implicate Murad. That isn’t the way to treat someone who is besotted with you. Not that I’m sure that bothers you in the slightest. And you shouldn’t have brought out Leopold and Loeb. Why did you?’

Ali Reza Zafir glanced away for a few seconds and then looked back again at İkmen, smiling. He was a handsome, sensual boy, so different to the youngster Süleyman had first seen at his home with his parents. ‘I read about them on the internet,’ he said. ‘So cool! When Murad bitched about how he’d got so upset about the girl’s death, I had to see what would happen to me. It was just like Leopold and Loeb! Fantastic! I loved it!’

Furious, but fully in control, İkmen said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad about that. But Leopold and Loeb failed because they just couldn’t shut up about their murder. They talked and they bickered and they failed, just like you.’

‘Well then,’ the boy said cheerily, ‘I’ll know that for next time, won’t I?’

‘I don’t think so,’ İkmen said. ‘Leopold and Loeb both got life imprisonment. They would have been executed if they hadn’t been under-age. Loeb died in prison at the age of thirty because another inmate stabbed him. Rough places, jails. Guess what sentence I’m going to recommend to the prosecutor for you.’

Ali Reza leaned forward in his seat and, still smiling, said, ‘Guess how much money my father is going to spend on my defence.’

Even when summer burst out across the waters of the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, the people of İstanbul were still under a metaphorical cloud. Between them the two young boys, Murad Emin and Ali Reza Zafir, had killed three people. They had also thrown a spotlight on the particularly ugly way in which some men resolved the problem of supposedly recalcitrant female relatives. Ali Reza had done it to get money, but he’d used his pious friend and would-be lover, a boy with a terrible home life and a wholly distorted vision of his religion, to actually perform the deed.

But where had the actual idea of honour killing for money originated? The notion of getting a young person to commit a murder and thereby, if caught, receive a lighter sentence was not new. People in the east had been doing it for years. But to actually pay someone, as in a business . . . Çetin İkmen still found himself wondering about the other families he had identified who had apparently fallen on hard times in the wake of a suspected honour killing. But there was no connection between any of them and Ali Reza Zafir or Murad Emin. Maybe lots of people were doing it? The thought made him shiver, and he consoled himself with the notion that at least Ali Reza and Murad were on remand. Their trial was still months away, but the boys were off the street. That, especially in the case of Ali Reza, was a good thing. It was the boy’s father he felt sorry for. He’d had what he thought had been the perfect family. But now his wife was dead and his son was awaiting trial charged with the deaths of his own mother and his piano teacher. Cold, sociopathic killings – that of Hamid İdiz at least – designed to be part of an experiment and a challenge to the authorities.

Murad Emin was another matter. Tortured by what he had done, he’d tried to kill himself twice since he’d been on remand and the prison authorities were considering a transfer to a psychiatric facility. In his desperate bid to make a life for himself away from his family’s drug habits, he had fallen into error and become something truly monstrous: a person who could set fire to flesh. To İkmen such an act recalled the auto-da-fé, the burning of Jews and heretics that had swept Catholic Europe during the fifteenth century. Those hideous fires had driven hundreds of thousands of refugees into the Ottoman Empire, who had welcomed them. Now Turks were lighting fires of their own . . .

He hoped the young boys would go down for life, because a message needed to be sent, and if Ali Reza and Murad were to be martyrs to that cause, then so be it. Maybe in prison Murad Emin would get access to a piano and possibly play for the enjoyment of others again. He hoped so. Maybe that would take the boy’s mind off where he was and the fact that for the last month his mother had been missing. The prison authorities had advised against telling him, but his father had done so anyway. She’d gone out one day to work and just not come back. She’d probably been killed by some dissatisfied punter. That or she’d just finally died from illness and addiction. What a waste of life! Both hers and Murad’s.

But there were some good things too. Saadet and Lokman Seyhan had left Fatih and gone to a small flat in Gaziosmanpaşa. Lokman had finally managed to get a new job and İkmen hoped that the two of them could maybe begin again. Young Sabiha, the intended victim of Cem Koç, was happy at the women’s refuge where Ayşe Farsakoğlu had placed her and had decided to stay for the time being. But most importantly of all, Gonca the gypsy had survived. Against all odds she had come out of her coma and begun to heal.

Süleyman had seen her. She’d been leaning on the arm of one of her older daughters outside her house in Balat, taking some air. She had moved slowly and with difficulty and much of her hair seemed to have turned iron grey almost overnight. But she’d been alive, and although they hadn’t spoken and might never speak again, she had smiled at Süleyman when she saw him. The gypsies for their part had left him alone. He had saved her life; what more could they do? İkmen wondered what Süleyman would do now that his affair with Gonca was definitely over, but he decided that was something that was unknowable and totally beyond him. He couldn’t understand infidelity; he never had been able to. But he didn’t judge it either. There was far too much real evil in the world to bother one’s head with such apparent trifles. In a world where men burnt women to death and people were killed just for sport, adultery was very insignificant. Not that the men who did the burning would agree with him.

But now that his moustache had grown back again and his suit was crumpled, the world was not such a bad place. İkmen stood up from his office chair and put his jacket on.

‘Ayşe,’ he said as he put a cigarette into his mouth and lit up.

‘Sir.’ She stood as if to go too. İkmen offered her a cigarette, which she took with a smile.