Chapter 28
Saffron followed Mrs. Demirel and Inspector Polat as if in a dream, uncertain how things had spiraled so quickly out of control.
Polat had ignored her information and instead listened to the crew’s malicious gossip.
He wanted to search her room. He clearly thought she was responsible for Martin’s death.
Alexander stood at the bottom of the stairs, and he looked to be arguing with Dr. Henry.
“—find someone at the embassy—” he was saying, voice low.
Dr. Henry shook his head, frowning. “Getting the embassy involved will ruin everything! Lot of stuffed-shirt diplomats will descend on us and fuss like a bunch of old hens, picking at everything we do.”
Alexander halted his rebuttal when he saw Saffron trailing Inspector Polat and Mrs. Demirel down the stairs.
Dr. Henry clapped Alexander on the back with a ringing smack. “This will be cleared up in no time, Ashton. Now, get your lads together. This has already eaten into our schedule!” He strode away.
“This way, Inspector,” Mrs. Demirel said, and they went down the hall in search of Mr. Demirel.
Saffron arrived at the bottom of the stairs just as Alexander had turned to speak to her. “I think you’re right.”
His shoulders slumped. “You heard that?”
“I’ve been hearing all sorts of things,” she said bitterly. “Including that Inspector Polat wants to search my room. Mrs. Demirel managed to head him off for now. But it’s not looking good, Alexander. I think he has serious suspicions about me.”
His hand found hers, rough from the work in the agora, and he squeezed. “We’ll work it out.”
“When the inspector opened my chemistry kit, some of the vials were damaged. It looked exactly like I’d tried to hide that I’d used some of the materials.”
“That no doubt looked bad,” Alexander said slowly. “But it’s nothing an analysis of the case can’t prove is innocent.” His gaze strayed to where the motorcars sat before the hotel, visible through the hotel’s perpetually open front doors. “We’ve got to get moving. You haven’t eaten, have you?”
They entered the dining room. Naturally, Clark and his friends were arrayed at one of the tables. He smirked at her as she passed.
She went to the caydanlik and poured herself a cup of tea into which she put a good deal of sugar. She wanted to wash the taste of Polat’s bitter offering from her mouth. She poured Alexander a glass and offered it to him.
“I wouldn’t touch that, if I were you, Ashton,” Clark called. “Dunmore, weren’t you recently telling me of a certain kind of spider found in these parts? Latrodectus tredecimguttatus. The black widow.” He paused to allow his friends to snicker. “Kills its lovers, doesn’t it?”
Dunmore sat at the table next to Clark’s, and when Alexander turned to stare at him, he flushed.
Clark grinned. “Don’t worry, we’ve plenty of witnesses here, Dunmore. She has to lure you away into a dark corner before she bites.”
Looking Clark dead in the eye, Saffron said, “I did not lure Martin anywhere, and I did not kill him.”
With a face of mocking shock, he laughed. “I didn’t say anything about poor Mr. Neill. Interesting that’s where your mind jumped so easily.”
“You are the one spreading the rumors that I was involved with his death, which have reached the inspector—”
Clark looked positively gleeful. “Oh, dear.”
“—and now he believes I had something to do with it,” Saffron finished.
He dropped his voice to a hiss. “You had an awful lot to say to the inspector. Maybe if you’d kept your mouth shut, you wouldn’t be so interesting to him.”
She might have hoped Clark all but admitting he started the rumor of her infidelity out of some sort of revenge for her telling the inspector about his actions against her would have swayed the opinions of those present, but no one else seemed perturbed by the admission.
She saw only amusement and discomfort in the faces around her.
“I am trying to help the inspector find out what happened to Martin.” She hardened her voice, forcing the spectators to meet her eyes. “And if he truly was murdered and the inspector is focused on me, that means he will not find whoever actually did it. That means everyone here is in danger.”
“We have no interest in your fearmongering, Miss Everleigh,” Clark said, turning away with a dismissive wave. “Someone might take it as a threat, you know.”
Alexander stirred at her side, and fury glinted in his eyes. She grasped his arm. It was clear that Clark had the support of these people, and any move made against him would only be a further black mark against her. No matter how badly she wanted to throttle him herself.
“Who knows,” Clark added, eying the hand she’d laid on Alexander, “poor Ashton might be the next. Then we’d know for sure, wouldn’t we?”
Something inside her cracked at the way the others tittered around them.
As if it was all a joke: Martin’s death, her suddenly perilous future, the idea that Alexander might get hurt, too.
“Why?” The word burst out of that cracked place, no longer strong or accusatory, but plaintive. “Why do you hate me so much?”
Clark’s gaze was lazy and indifferent. A cruel little smile cut his lips. “Because you’re in my way.” He flicked his wrist at her. “Go away, then.”
Though she felt uneasy leaving the hotel with Polat’s threat of searching her things hanging over her, Saffron went to the dig site.
She thought being among the bustle of the site might alleviate some of her worry or grief, but nothing could fix her attention.
Everywhere she looked held a shadow of Martin.
Not long after arriving, she took herself on a walk around the site under the pretext of sketching some of the discarded stones strewn over the field and the plants tangled around them.
She passed an hour in that way, and then another, and soon rocks and weeds could no longer distract her from the sense of impending doom.
She sat down in the shade of a neighboring building and watched the men around the pit.
Good progress had been made in digging out more of the arcade of the agora.
Clark’s discovery of the necklace had only inspired more enthusiastic effort.
Everyone wanted to be the next to find something of interest.
She opened her notebook to her page of conjectures about Martin’s death, and reviewed the words already spinning in her mind once again.
Suspects: Joseph Clark, Yusef ?a?ri, and, unfortunately, Saffron Everleigh.
Motives: Clark’s desire to keep quiet about taking credit for Martin’s artifact (unlikely, since according to the other assistants, Martin had no plans to claim it), and …
What was her motivation supposed to be for killing Martin?
They were supposedly having an affair. Why would she kill him, then?
To keep it quiet, most likely. That certainly would make her a vicious creature, to kill her lover so casually. Black widow, indeed.
In her section about Martin’s movements, she returned to the question of where Martin had gone the first night in Smyrna.
Alexander had confirmed that he had not been among the assistants at the han.
Where had he gone? Had he consumed something there that took two weeks to make its effects known?
Or had he made an enemy that night, one that found him later?
She tapped her pen against the page, eyes trained on the locals slowly climbing up from the pit, arms straining to carry buckets loaded with dirt.
They crossed to where the assistants were clustered around the sieves.
As she watched the assistants scoop the new dirt into wooden frames, Clark swaggered over.
He leaned an arm on the tripod used to suspend the largest sieve, and she imagined his oily voice asking what things the assistants had found that day.
“Pass it over here,” he’d say, “let an expert have a look. And while we’re at it, I’ll just take this over and show Dr. Balthazar.
Don’t mind me if I mention I discovered it while hard at work … ”
“What rot,” she muttered to herself, and without quite deciding on it, stowed her notebook in her satchel and got to her feet. She didn’t care if it made her an outcast, she would not let Clark get away with intimidating any more of the crew into handing over what they’d rightly found.
By the time she’d marched across the field and around the pit, the group had abandoned the sieves and were retreating into the mess tent.
She made for them, but Clark broke off and rounded the tent, disappearing from view.
Torn between wanting to confront him and wanting to warn the assistants, she stood there, staring at the gap in the tents with consternation.
Finally, she decided chasing after Clark would do her no good. She’d only waste her breath, whereas the assistants might be convinced to band together to stand up to him.
She passed by the prize table—what the crew called the artifact table when out of earshot of the Turks—and paused to search out the fragment Clark had stolen from Martin. Ceramic, they’d said, white with red patterns.
Her eyes skated over dusty bits of clay pottery, twisted pieces of rusted metal, and a number of informative but ultimately average items. There was a piece of a ceramic dish, creamy white, no longer than her finger, and marked “Balthazar, 5D, Italian, likely fifteenth century,” but that didn’t match the description.
She stared hard at the table, her intention to warn the assistants fading from her mind as she realized that Clark hadn’t turned in the fragment Martin had found.