A Passion for Killing Read Free

what had been a very brutal killing to be in order and to hand, and in İkmen’s messy office that was quite a feat.
    ‘Do you know about the body found on the ninth floor of the Hilton this morning?’
    ‘I heard something about a body in a hotel somewhere,’ İkmen replied. ‘But you know how it is, Mehmet?’ He shrugged. ‘Court in five days’ time and we need to put this acid killer away for good. What he did to his wife was, well . . . My evidence needs to be first class and, as usual, my paperwork is in a state of chaos.’
    ‘You must thank Allah for sending you Ayşe,’ Mehmet Süleyman said as he ground his cigarette out in his ashtray.
    ‘She is, as you say, a marvel,’ İkmen replied. ‘She’s almost as efficient as you were when you did the job.’
    Mehmet Süleyman smiled. It was over ten years now since he had worked as İkmen’s sergeant, but he still remembered those days with enormous affection.
    ‘But this hotel murder . . .’ İkmen began.
    ‘Ah, yes. Well, he was discovered by a member of the hotel staff at 8 a.m. Stabbed, the victim is male, middle-aged and apparently he was known to the boys in vice. Unsubstantiated involvement with drugs; heroin and cocaine it is alleged.’
    İkmen frowned. ‘Name?’
    ‘Cabbar Soylu, forty-five, from Edirnekapı . . .’
    ‘I know Cabbar Soylu,’ İkmen said with some distaste evident in his voice. ‘Nasty fat Mafioso. Clever though. Vice are right, he’s never been caught actually doing anything that could lead him to our cells. But he’s known. He likes threatening the wives of those who are in opposition to him and his “soldiers” are not to be trifled with either. So why are you involved? I thought you were still working on the peeper investigation?’
    ‘I am,’ his friend replied. ‘Soylu’s killer is almost certainly the peeper.’
    İkmen frowned. The as yet unknown criminal known as the ‘peeper’ had been terrorising, and more latterly murdering, young homosexual men in İstanbul since the autumn of the previous year. There was a definite sexual element to these crimes, the assailant was known to masturbate in front of or over his victims, who thus far had all been young and attractive. Cabbar Soylu had been neither. ‘Hardly seems to fit what we know about the peeper so far,’ İkmen said doubtfully.
    Just briefly, Mehmet Süleyman averted his eyes. ‘On the face of it, no,’ he said. ‘But it’s the peeper, all right, and so that means more work for me.’
    What he didn’t and couldn’t tell İkmen was how he knew that this murder was probably the work of the peeper. Süleyman had been assigned to the peeper investigation from the very start and, at one point, he had come very close to getting a victim to provide him with a useful description of this man. The peeper always worked from behind the protection of a mask, but on this particular occasion the victim, a young man called Abdullah Aydın, had managed to remove it and see his face. It was at this point that another agency, in the shape of a very charming but sinister man Süleyman knew only as Mürsel, had effectively taken the reins of the investigation from him. Mürsel, Süleyman’s boss Commissioner Ardıç had told him, worked for an organisation that concerned itself with national security. To Süleyman this could mean only one thing: MIT, the Turkish Secret Service. But this was, if not denied, not confirmed either, and no names of any specific agencies were ever actually used by anyone involved. But whoever they were, the man known as the peeper had at one time worked as one of their agents and was now dangerously out of control. In order to allay public fear, the police would continue to investigate the peeper’s crimes, but it was Mürsel and his people who pulled the strings and who would also eventually take charge of the offender’s ‘disposal’. It was Mürsel who had told Süleyman that Cabbar Soylu was almost certainly a peeper