The Sultan's seal

22

Kamil finds Halil cleaning his tools inside a shed at the back of the garden. By the flickering light of an oil lamp, Kamil sees a single low room. Halil looks up from the bench. His eyebrows are so dense and wiry that his eyes are almost invisible. The front of the room is stacked with neatly organized garden implements and tools.

To Kamil’s question, he answers, “Yes, bey. I found some clothes. It’s true. And I burned them.”

“Why did you do that?”

“They were women’s clothes, bey.”

“What difference does that make?”

“Who knows what went on with those clothes? In the woods. It wasn’t fit for anyone else to wear them. So I burned them.”

As an afterthought, Halil adds, “Why? Did someone complain they were missing?”

“No, but it’s possible that they belonged to someone who was killed recently.”

“Killed.” It is a statement, not a question. With his good hand, he absentmindedly strokes the stumps of his missing fingers.

Kamil wonders how much he knows about Mary Dixon’s murder. Surely the villagers all know.

“Where did you find them?”

“By the pond.”

“Show me, please.”

Without a word, Halil merges into the afternoon shadows outside the door and leads the way through the garden. The air is heavy with bees. They pass the pavilion and climb over the ruined wall into the loamy gloom of the forest. The pond lies behind a screen of rhododendrons.

“There.” He points behind a group of moss-covered boulders.

Climbing carefully over the slippery stones, Halil points to a narrow cleft. “Pushed inside.”

Kamil slips on a patch of wet moss and catches himself on a bush, swinging nearly to his knees as the branches give way under his weight and others flail at him. He hangs there for a moment, breathing heavily, before pulling himself upright.

He goes over the ground carefully, sweeping aside the leaves, but too much time has passed for there to be any sign of a struggle. Beneath a top layer of crisp brown leaves is a slick wet mulch of debris from previous years. He kneels beside the boulders and peers into the crevice. Deep inside the rock there is something light. He reaches in gingerly, but emerges only with scraped, muddy fingers. He takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeve. This time, he forces his entire arm into the cleft. His fingers touch cloth. He snags it with the tips of his fingers and carefully pulls it out. It is a woman’s blouse. He scours the area systematically and discovers inside a hole, at shoulder height in the trunk of a tree, a pair of women’s lace-up shoes. Put there by someone who knows this forest well, he thinks. If the clothing is Mary Dixon’s, it would be a concrete link between her death and Chamyeri. Another link is Mary’s pendant. It fits into Hannah’s box, and Hannah was killed here. Mary and Hannah, linked by the sultan’s seal and a scrap of verse.

The shores of the pond are preternaturally still, except for a clearly etched ripple at the far end of the metallic water where it is fed by a spring. Kamil imagines Hannah Simmons floating in the black water, her clothes billowing about her. He looks at the slippery moss and layers of dank leaves with distaste.

His arms and face scraped and his trousers covered in mud, he returns to the city with the blouse and shoes wrapped in an oilcloth.

Michel carefully cleans the mud from the shoes and places them on the shelf in Kamil’s office next to the folded blouse and the items found in the sea hamam. Kamil stands for a few moments before the neatly displayed items as before a shrine. He is reminded that most things we choose to care about are fleeting. To dispel the melancholy that had begun to settle on him, he turns to Michel and suggests, “Shall we go to the coffeehouse? I think we’ve earned a rest.”

“I have a better idea,” Michel counters. “Let me take you to a very special eating house I know. Their Albanian liver is delicious. And the owner’s daughter is too,” he adds, laughing.