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After the poisoning and death of Doctor Ilias, the authorities arrested the eight soldiers and the captain who worked in the garrison kitchens, and had their feet whipped, and when all the blows delivered, the pain caused, and the blood spilled failed to yield any results, some more foot whipping was swiftly arranged, directed this time at the five soldiers who had laid out the table for the Quarantine Regiment’s swearing-in ceremony, as well as the garrison’s Cretian provisions master and his two fair-haired assistants.

While Doctor Nuri was busy going around pharmacies and herbalists’ shop inquiring about ratsbane sales and any other suspicious activity in such precise and exhaustive detail that Sherlock Holmes himself would have been proud, the state’s investigators and their bastinado team had just begun, at the Chief Scrutineer’s insistence, to spatter blood everywhere with a second round of foot whipping that targeted the same suspects in the same order as before, when suddenly, just before it was his turn again, the most innocent and naïve-looking of the first group of eight soldiers from the kitchens burst into tears and admitted his guilt, prompted by his terror of more foot whipping to confess to everything he had done, and in order to convince the white-bearded prosecutor and his mustachioed clerks that he was telling the truth and had poisoned the biscuits himself, he had shown them how, while everyone was out praying on the Friday before the swearing-in ceremony, he had snuck into the kitchens with a bag of poison and mixed it into the baking flour. The other kitchen workers, whose feet were sometimes dipped into buckets of brine to stem the flow of blood and stop it from staining the floor, and who would probably have passed out from the agony or be left permanently injured if the scarcely healed wounds on their soles had burst open again under a renewed bout of torture, were delighted by the news of their colleague’s confession, for it meant their feet would not be tied up and beaten again after all.

The Chief Scrutineer and Governor Sami Pasha were understandably gratified by the green-eyed, cherubic sixteen-year-old’s confession. But until they found out who had given the soft and friendly faced young man his bag of arsenic, and why they had done so, quarantine doctors would continue to be killed. Yet every time the interrogator who was known to swing his stick the hardest would ask the young man this question, holding a candle to his face in the dark, the repentant youth would either just start crying again, or fix his eyes on the flame and make no sound at all.

The Chief Scrutineer was seasoned enough to know that if they subjected him to another round of bastinado in order to find the answer to the second and more vital question of who had given him the rat poison or which pharmacy or herbalist he had bought it from, the baby-faced young man might lie, or be maimed, or even die from his injuries, so he instructed the interrogators to put their efforts on hold until he had reviewed the situation with Sami Pasha. Together they decided that before they started interrogating the young man again and tortured him into revealing how and where he’d obtained the poison, they would wait for the lacerations on his feet to heal completely. In the meantime they would track down every single member of the traitorous fool’s family, find out who his friends were, and give them all a foot whipping too if need be.

Having closely read Sami Pasha’s report, Princess Pakize could understand what state of mind the Governor Pasha must have been in, and delighted in discussing this topic with her husband: “Sami Pasha must have been so elated to have discovered poor Doctor Ilias’s killer before you did, and to have done it in his own way,” she began.

“If only they hadn’t waited to get that boy’s second confession, perhaps this gang of unrepentant assassins would have been rounded up before they got the chance to kill Majid!” said Doctor Nuri.

“But Sami Pasha was not in a hurry, and neither was my uncle. The Pasha knew you were visiting all the pharmacists and the herbalists, assumed you would not be able to reach any definitive conclusion, and thought he would take the opportunity to teach you a lesson. He wanted to show both you and my uncle, who is sadly in thrall to all those murder mysteries his servants read out to him at night, that the Sherlock Holmes method stands no chance in the Orient or anywhere in the Ottoman Empire. I expect my uncle would not have taken kindly to a governor like Sami Pasha forcing him to recognize his mistakes.”

“You also believe that Sami Pasha is absolutely loyal to your uncle.”

“I have no doubt about that,” said Princess Pakize. “That is why I have never felt truly safe here with him living but four rooms away. Don’t forget, the biscuits that killed Doctor Ilias were also meant for you.”

“But those biscuits were offered to Governor Sami Pasha too.”

“Yet he did not eat a single one,” said Princess Pakize, staring intently into her husband’s eyes.

By this point, the couple were deriving the same pleasure from their perusal of Sami Pasha’s file as Abdul Hamid did from his crime novels, and as they applied Sherlock Holmes’s logic to the evidence that the Chief Scrutineer’s men had collected through bastinado and other similar methods, they could feel that they were edging closer and closer to the truth.

While husband and wife were debating these matters between them, Sami Pasha was hiding in Ali Talip’s farm near the village of Dumanlı. Princess Pakize and the Prince Consort were worried about the former governor, and talked about him often. Why had Sami Pasha chosen to come into their room just as he was fleeing Arkaz for his life—and therefore with little time to spare—and hand them this file full of sensitive information on suspects, witness statements, and interrogation reports?

“Because Sami Pasha thinks we are spying for my uncle. He wants us to go back to Abdul Hamid and tell him, ‘Your governor Sami Pasha is very capable indeed; he has done a splendid job of uncovering this gang of murderers and catching them all in one fell swoop, just as you ordered!’ He thinks my uncle might still forgive him.”

“He is the Sultan’s faithful servant. All he wants is for the Sultan to know about the investigation he has brought to such a successful conclusion,” said Doctor Nuri.

“Do you believe that by identifying all these killers, the Governor Pasha has succeeded in his task?”

“I do,” the Prince Consort admitted. “The information I have seen in this file, and the reports drawn up for the Pasha’s review, have done enough to persuade me.”

“Me, too …”

They were quiet for a time.

“Unfortunately this means the Sherlock Holmes method has not succeeded,” said Doctor Nuri.

“Perhaps my uncle was not sufficiently serious about this Sherlock Holmes question, just as he never was about the political reforms he introduced at Europe’s insistence. If a sultan wishes to embrace and imitate European ways, his people must be equally enthusiastic and willing to accept whatever it is their sultan is doing. I would therefore suggest that you do not trouble yourself further with regard to this matter.”

“I would insist—with your permission—that your uncle is completely serious about the philosophy of Sherlock Holmes. He has intuited that the choice here is between the individual and the community. Every big hospital Abdul Hamid builds, every new school, courtroom, military base, train station, and square, is an attempt to sever individuals from their communities so that he can reach out to them directly, and so that they can learn to fear the state and its courts. Not their neighbors down the road.”

“Or maybe my uncle just really loves Sherlock Holmes,” said Princess Pakize with an impish smile.

A significant portion of the file Sami Pasha had given them was devoted to the investigating judge’s remarks on the inquiry. But the lengthiest sections were those containing the statements given by the tortured suspects. (“Governor Sami Pasha couldn’t possibly have read them all!” thought the Princess and Prince Consort, but there were detailed notes in the Pasha’s hand penciled in the margins.) An official who was ranked somewhere between the investigating judge and the Chief Scrutineer had also provided the Governor with a daily report on how the interrogations—with their beatings and foot whippings—were progressing. These reports provided a clear indication of who was genuinely guilty, and who had only been labeled as such for political reasons.

As they waited for the soles of the well-meaning kitchen boy’s feet to heal, the Chief Scrutineer’s men began investigating his family and friends. They discovered that the young man lived with his family in one of those ramshackle houses that had been built over the last three years—and with Sami Pasha’s tacit blessing—on unclaimed land in the hills behind the incineration pit. His circle included a number of Cretian migrants, as well as plenty of fanatical youths, unemployed idlers, and devoted mosque-goers. He was also friends with the rebellious, combative young men who lived in the Taşçılar neighborhood, and his father, who had assumed his son must have been taken to the Castle’s isolation facility after catching the plague in the garrison kitchens, and therefore suspected nothing, told the investigators that he had always tried to keep his son away from his good-for-nothing friends down at the docks, then proceeded to list the names of all the ones who had ever come up the hill to visit.

Many among this group of friends were promptly rounded up and arrested in the days of the outbreak that preceded the revolution. Some were innocent and had their feet whipped for no reason, but others were confirmed to be collaborating with Ramiz’s entourage and with those who had come down to Arkaz from Nebiler village to keep the resistance against quarantine measures going. It had taken more than a month for all of this evidence to be gathered. During this time, the Chief Scrutineer was able to extract various confessions under torture and gather letters, telegrams, and handwritten notes from raids on several households, which together demonstrated the incontrovertible links between the village of Nebiler and the angry mob which had become involved in the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny and proved that Ramiz had been the movement’s undeclared leader. Governor Sami Pasha and Mazhar Effendi had approached every aspect of this matter, from the principal issues down to the tiniest details, as if they expected their efforts to be shown to students one day as a perfect example of “how to conduct an investigation” and had perhaps regarded this file of documents as their means of proving to Abdul Hamid and the palace just how accomplished a pair of bureaucrats they were.

Once his informants had ascertained the names of each and every one of the angry, pious youths and zealots in Ramiz’s entourage, and of the members of the righteous mob who had sworn to take revenge for the Pilgrim Ship Affair, the Chief Scrutineer had arranged for his spies to follow them around, but stopped short of arresting the whole gang. (This oversight would later cost Majid his life.) Sami Pasha, who was still governor at the time, must have balked at the thought of all the anger against quarantine measures that would result from putting so many sect devotees in prison.

What the documents in Sami Pasha’s folder also clearly showed was that, as our readers may have already surmised, there had been a significant element of chance in the circumstances surrounding the abduction and murder of Bonkowski Pasha. That is not to say that there weren’t plenty of people in Arkaz in those days who would have gladly slaughtered any Christian trying to impose quarantine measures upon the island, as well as the Governor Pasha himself. The assassins’ original plan had been to use the poisoned biscuits to kill Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant Ilias simultaneously. But when a devotee of the Terkapçılar lodge in the village of Nebiler who had survived the mutiny aboard the pilgrim ship three years ago, and now lived in Arkaz, had unexpectedly encountered Bonkowski Pasha on the street, he had recognized the famed Royal Chemist from his bearing and appearance, and having come up, in a moment of inspiration, with the lie that he had a sick patient at home, he had used this excuse to lead the Pasha straight to his associates. The Chief Scrutineer’s clerks and spies had managed to identify every single one of the men who had tortured and tormented Bonkowski Pasha during his last hours, coldly and ruthlessly strangled him to death, and disposed of his corpse in Hrisopolitissa Square.

“But Mazhar Effendi decided not to arrest them yet because some of them were involved in Ramiz’s plot to attack the meeting at the State Hall and put the new governor in charge. The Chief Scrutineer had been supervising the progress and outcome of that operation on Sami Pasha’s behalf, so that they could set the trap that would allow them to catch Ramiz and his men red-handed and sentence them immediately. You will recall the Governor had initially thought he would be able to quietly arrest the raiders as they filed out of the back door of the Outbreak Room …”

“How clever you are, my lady,” said the Doctor and Prince Consort, concurring with his wife’s assessment. “Verily, your uncle should have appointed you, not me, as his Sherlock Holmes–style detective.”

“But that is exactly what he did!” quick-witted Princess Pakize proudly replied. “Finally we understand why my uncle put me on the Aziziye and sent me to Mingheria with you: he knew that you would only be able to solve this mystery with the help of someone who has read the kinds of novels my father reads—someone like me.”

“It seems you do appreciate the Sultan’s brilliance after all …”

“But you mustn’t forget that my uncle himself is behind all of these murders you have been trying to solve.”

“Do you really believe that?” said Doctor Nuri. “If you are truly convinced that your uncle is as wicked as you suggest, then you must have also concluded that there is no hope of us ever returning to Istanbul.”

Sometimes, when the subject of Istanbul came up, they would walk up to the window and peer at the horizon as if they had spotted a ferry from the capital. The Mediterranean Sea seemed livelier than usual, but Arkaz was as quiet and still as a graveyard.

CHAPTER 69

If your uncle had really wanted Bonkowski Pasha assassinated, it would have been much easier for him to arrange it while the Pasha was still in Istanbul. Instead he sent him away to deal with the plague in this distant, isolated land where events could have spun out of control at any moment.”

“As indeed they did!” said Princess Pakize. “But that is precisely what my uncle wants. Whenever my uncle wishes to arrange an assassination, he will have it take place in some remote location he does not have full control over, so that nobody will notice his hand in it. After that most accomplished and European-minded of Ottoman viziers, Mithat Pasha, was sentenced to death by the Yıldız Palace Court for his leading role in the political conspiracy and coup that removed and killed Abdul Hamid’s uncle Sultan Abdülaziz, my uncle could have simply signed his execution order and had him hanged in Istanbul. But as usual, the sly and ‘tenderhearted’ Abdul Hamid pretended to be moved by humane considerations and commuted Mithat Pasha’s sentence to life imprisonment, sending him away to the prison fortress of Ta’if. They say that place is even worse than the dungeons here in Mingheria. Soon after that, he had Mithat Pasha assassinated in Ta’if, but under such mysterious circumstances that most people didn’t even realize it had been Abdul Hamid’s idea all along. This is exactly what my uncle has done with Bonkowski Pasha.”