A Noble Killing

by Barbara Nadel

  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.’

  Chapter 34

  * * *

  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.

  ‘Tomorrow is the nineteenth of July,’ he said.

  Ayşe looked at the cigarette between her fingers and said, ‘Smoking ban day.’

  ‘Finally upon us,’ İkmen said with a frown. Then he sighed. ‘Enjoy it while you can, Ayşe.’

  She watched him go, and then she smoked her cigarette right down to the butt. As she scrunched it out in İkmen’s ashtray, she found that her eyes were caught by the tiny glowing embers at its heart. One by one, they all fizzled out.

  Acknowledgement

  * * *

  I’d like to thank Fire Investigation Team Manager, Deon Webber from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service for giving me so much information about the nature of fire and firefighting. If any of the details about fire in this book are inaccurate or wrong then that is entirely down to me and me alone.

  Glossary

  * * *

  adhan – call to prayer. Performed five times a day by devout Muslims.

  Bey – Ottoman title denoting respect, still in use today following a man’s first name, as in Çetin Bey.

  inşallah – Arabic, translates as ‘As God wills’. Used by people all over the Muslim world to express the concept of divine direction. For instance, we will go to the cinema this afternoon, i
nşallah, if God wills. Christians often express the same concept by saying that they will do a certain thing only ‘if I am spared’.

  kapıcı – doorkeeper. Blocks of flats have kapıcılar, men who act as security, porters etc. for the apartment community. They are said to know all the tenants’ secrets.

  nargile – water pipe. Used for smoking plain and flavoured tobaccos.

  yali – mansion, typically wooden, usually of nineteenth-century Ottoman vintage.

  Zamzam water – from the Well of Zamzam in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The water from the Zamzam well was supposed to have been produced by God for Ishmael, the thirsty infant son of the Prophet Abraham. The heavily salinated water is said to possess miraculous properties, and although it is not supposed to be sold outside the Saudi kingdom, small amounts of Zamzam water can be obtained in vials that can be hung around the neck. One of the things that pilgrims to Mecca always do is drink water from the Zamzam well.