AND then in rare instances there was the unusual crime in the city. A young woman comes to Lahore to make it big in showbiz. Here she runs into an older woman who is looking for a pawn to settle scores with her former husband. The climax comes when the young dreamer’s body is recovered from a suitcase at an intra-city bus terminal. There is security camera footage. It gives away the carrier of the suitcase.

In its explanation of the motive, this is a classic crime story — in a Lahore that is abreast with more modern reasons for murder and less complicated means of disposing of unwanted baggage. In any given week, there are the usual stories about murder, suicide, abduction….

In recent days, a young lad had his life brutally extinguished after he made the fatal mistake of trying to separate quarrelling parties. A young woman bowed out early and violently after she sought the help of a man said to be a lawyer. Not long ago, there was a blast right at the entrance of the police lines, claiming many precious lives and there are the usual stories of people — men and women, young, middle-aged but occasionally the old — taking their own lives, often after they have first exterminated their dependents.

Why, amid all these crimes, did this particular murder story get so much attention and time?

Then there are honour- and religion-based murders, stories of police brutality, ending invariably in protesters placing a body outside the fortified abode of someone big and demanding action more than notice. So why, amid all these crimes, did this murder story get so much attention and time?

There was obviously the victim. A young woman symbolically succumbed to the glitzy world she wanted — apparently desperately — to be part of. That solving her life’s mystery needed footage from security cameras installed at a bus terminal provides plenty of irony for onlookers to sigh, curse the modern afflictions and utter their repentance to God.

For many, she had written her ending herself, “blinded by ambition”. Already the word is out to warn the unassuming and vulnerable against predators in the garb of talent scouts. The ‘beware’ signs have long been flashed about the filth that the modern preoccupation with fame has produced.

These ingredients make a story destined for wide public consumption and discussion. And yet there is more here to ensure a captive audience for days. It is the resort to the classical, subtler methods (that are said to have been employed by the accused, that causes the surprise and makes it so unusual for the times.

The story, as it has reached us through police investigators goes like this. A girl is born, unwanted by her family that was all prepared and ready to greet a boy in her place. She grows up and following the ups and downs of her relationship with a man, she ends up marrying him.

However, her troubles continue post-marriage. There is this mention of the unfortunate death of one of her daughters in the investigation so far: she is said to have died, according to her mother’s account, because of a lack of medical treatment. The details about that period are not known, just as the statement by her ex-husband has yet to become part of the record.

All we have so far is the statement of the accused in which she says she wanted to avenge her — their — daughter’s death by going for her husband’s throat. She was somehow thwarted here, but stands accused of killing two people.

The eye-catching 20-year-old girl who aspired for a career in modelling was allegedly eliminated for refusing a part in a ‘scheme’ to punish the husband of the accused. As the details of the case came to light, many weeks after the discovery of her body from a suitcase in mid-January, it was learned that this was not the first murder tied to the same husband and wife dispute and blamed on the same accused. The mystery of the death of a photojournalist whose body was found in a popular park in the city a few months ago was also claimed to have been solved.

According to police investigation, the photographer, who worked with a Lahore-based television channel, was killed for his mistake of providing material — photographs — to the husband of the accused to form the basis of the divorce.

If that almost ‘filmy’ revelation was vindication for all those wild murder stories that have been doing the rounds inside the park since, it is no less remarkable how quickly all the pieces in the puzzle were connected by the police. Actually, they had little to do once they had found the accused, with the aid of the security cameras, and got a confession out of her.

Quickly after that, the police located her — alleged — accomplice, who was there to extend more than a helping hand. Soon enough, everyone recalled the empty juice packets that were found lying by the body of the photographer inside the park that tense winter morning. At the time, there were rumours that the man had been bitten by a snake — and many of the regular joggers in the park would now be relieved that this was not the case.

Cyanide, arsenic, cites the police report, were easily procured from a hakim who in other stories is undeservingly reduced to producing his magic remedies to treat inflated bellies and falling potency and his magical cures against whatever sundry diseases that may be in vogue at a particular time.

Here he was, the hakim, at hand to provide cyanide at Rs20,000 only, to revive — or to remind about the continued employment of — a crime tradition that has been overtaken by newer violent methods. The moral here is not to just express grief and mourn the existence of temptations and means old and new. It is indeed worth pondering over the facility with which the material used in this murder, and in other killings, is secured.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2015

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