Chapter 35 #2
Mrs. Henry equipped herself with a cigarette.
“Your arrest has pushed dear Mr. Hayrettin over the edge, I’m afraid.
There were questions about the team being permitted to continue after they learned of Mr. Neill’s death and the initial missing items, of course”—she let out a slow stream of smoke—“and now, with a member of the crew under arrest, Mr. Hayrettin has tried to put his foot down. Lawrence has done well to pick that foot back up, but it’s only a matter of time before Mr. Hayrettin’s concerns sway Mr. Assam. ”
Mrs. Demirel made a strange noise, like she might have wanted to speak but turned it into a cough.
Mrs. Henry gave her a sardonic look. “Agatha, I know that we don’t speak the language, but the conversations between Mr. Hayrettin and Mr. Assam could not be more clear. He is obviously angling to shut the dig down, and he needs Mr. Assam’s agreement to do it.”
Mrs. Demirel colored when Saffron sent her a questioning look, she nodded in a defeated manner. “Mr. Demirel might have mentioned …”
The conversation soon devolved into the same sort of chatter that, a week ago, had driven Saffron rather mad, but she now found immensely comforting.
Their visit was a short one and ended with Mrs. Henry declaring they would return on the morrow after confirming with Mr. Feldman that it would be allowed.
“We will send Mr. Ashton over when he returns this evening,” she told Saffron, pressing a brief kiss to her cheek. “Never fear, my dear. I’ve never seen a man so determined to get his wife back.” Her eyes glittered, and she let out a little laugh. “Actually, I have.”
Saffron couldn’t help but smile at the memory of Dr. Henry’s drunken wallowing when he thought Mrs. Henry was truly going to leave him.
The women left, along with Mr. Feldman, and Saffron found herself exhausted. She took to the bed gratefully, and went to sleep.
Alexander blinked against the harsh light. Nick had snapped it on without warning, and after they’d spent the last hour lurking outside in the dark, waiting for the last of the staff to disappear and to get inside themselves, his eyes hadn’t been prepared for the glare of the bare light bulb.
“When you said you would do something about the lab results, I didn’t think you meant we would be doing the tests,” Alexander muttered.
He’d agreed readily enough when Nick telephoned the hotel that afternoon to tell him they would be visiting the laboratory doing the tests on Martin Neill’s body, but now he was inside and it was clear this was not just the laboratory but the morgue, as well, he was regretting not getting clarification.
The room was cooler than any Alexander had experienced in Smyrna, due to it being underground.
It was the basement level of the laboratory, without any windows cut into its unadorned plaster walls.
There was a smell of damp mixed with stringent chemicals, the scents combining to fill Alexander with unease nearly as much as the line of white-sheet-covered bodies lying on tables about the small room.
“We’re not performing the tests,” Nick said easily, “we’re just getting samples for those who will.
The lab here isn’t getting through them quickly enough, so we’ll just send them off to Istanbul.
Bagshott can be there and back in Smyrna in two days, and the results will likely beat him back, anyway. ”
“For the record, I don’t feel comfortable with this,” Alexander said as Nick moved to the shrouded body on a table a few feet away. Alexander’s insides twisted as Nick gently lifted the cloth and pulled it back to reveal Martin Neill’s body.
“In truth,” Nick said, frowning down at the lifeless boy, “neither do I. But needs must.”
He picked up a file on the table next to Neill’s feet and his lips moved as he read.
Alexander moved next to him, waiting for Nick to sort through the Arabic characters and tell him what it said.
He felt some measure of relief that Saffron was no longer housed at the jail—she’d certainly seemed more comfortable when he’d seen her that afternoon—but now the consulate was involved and representation was on the way from Istanbul, it felt too real that his wife was close to standing trial for murder. Nick was right, needs must.
Alexander had done his best to sort through the evidence Polat had that was not based on rumors and hearsay, and he’d found nothing to point to who the real culprit was. He needed to find the truth about what had happened to Martin Neill, and the sooner, the better.
As if his eyes couldn’t stop themselves, they fell on the uncovered face of Neill. He looked like a boy, without much beard and not a wrinkle on his gray face.
His throat grew tight. This was too familiar, a dead man barely old enough to be called a man. He’d seen far too many just like Martin Neill. A youth caught up in his first adventure.
He’d been a decent person. He didn’t deserve such a miserable end. He’d been afraid, so terribly ill that he couldn’t keep anything down, terrible cramps, burning eyes …
“Does the report say anything about his eyes?” he asked. He’d complained several times, including just when he’d become really ill.
“No …” Nick murmured, flipping back a few pages in the report. “Here it just says they were clouded.” He looked up. “Did he have a condition?”
Alexander shook his head. “His paperwork said his vision was fine. He’d mentioned irritation a few times, said his sight had been a bit blurry. But he wasn’t used to being around so much smoke. It’s thick in the evenings when the crew gets together for cards.”
Nick frowned and set down the file. With a look of resignation, he gently lifted the lids on Neill’s eye. Alexander leaned over him and looked. The eye was brown, but slightly opaque.
“I suppose he could have had a condition he never brought to a doctor’s attention.
But … young men aren’t likely to complain about something like that.
He’d more likely try to hide it, especially with this lot.
They look for things to harp on,” Alexander said.
“And it would have put Dr. Henry off approving him for future expeditions. He must have been bothered by it quite a lot to have brought it up.” He looked hard at the still body laid out before him.
He didn’t want to interrupt the peace of the dead, but if he really had been murdered and there was no other way of discovering how it was done, this would be necessary.
“You said some of the possible toxins would metabolize out of his system …”
The next thirty minutes were some of the most disturbing of Alexander’s life.
Yes, he was a biologist, and yes, he’d seen his fair share of dead bodies, but treating the body of a former colleague like it was a lab sample was nothing short of agonizing.
At the end of it, they had samples of blood, tissue, and a number of fluids Alexander didn’t want to know how Nick knew how to extract, including a sample taken from the fluid of Martin Neill’s eye.
Alexander watched Nick package it all up in the laboratory’s materials. “They’ll notice you stabbed his eye with a syringe.”
“They might,” Nick said, unbothered. “But it seems they’re done with the corpse until burial.”
“What is the policy for that?” Alexander asked.
Nick sighed, closed the file he’d been pursuing, and squinted at the wall for a long moment. “I don’t know what it is now. They used to send anyone who died over here home.”
A pang went through Alexander, the same regretful, achingly guilty one he’d felt looking down at Martin Neill’s boyish face. He nodded, unable to think of anything else to say.
He helped Nick put everything back into place, and they stole out into the night, leaving behind nothing but the young man under the sheet.