The Condemned (Echoes from the Past Book 6)

by Shapiro, Irina

  “You’re better off using the landline if you want to call home. The signal is spotty here, because of the mountains.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, you must be tired. Shall we have dinner later? This place doesn’t look like much, but the food is not half bad.”

  “Sure. Thanks, Rob.”

  “Look, Rhys, go easy. All right?” Rob said, his voice low and serious.

  “How do you mean?”

  “People here don’t respond to demands or bullying.”

  “I wasn’t planning on bullying anyone,” Rhys replied, surprised Rob would suggest such a thing.

  “What I mean is, these are poor folk who don’t have much left to lose. If you want something from them, make it worth their while.”

  “You mean bribe them for information?” Rhys asked, not entirely surprised by Rob’s sage advice.

  “Not bribe—pay. Think of it as an exchange. You would pay for goods. The information you seek is their only asset. You can’t blame them for trying to sell it for the highest price.”

  “Thanks, Rob. I understand.”

  “Good man,” Rob said, and clapped Rhys on the shoulder. “See you at seven?”

  Chapter 12

  Rhys glanced at his watch. He had several hours before he was due to meet Rob, but the first thing he had to do was take a shower. Even his eyeballs felt gritty after the drive in the open Jeep. He grabbed a towel and a change of clothes and walked down the hall to the communal facilities. The bathroom was relatively clean, but he’d seen more luxurious bathrooms in a caravan. He stripped off his clothes, then turned on the water and watched it trickle down, the water pressure barely stronger than that of a melting icicle. Oh well, when in Rome…

  After his less-than-satisfying shower, Rhys headed down to reception. It was the most natural place to start his inquiries and there was no time like the present. He asked the young man behind the desk for the hotel manager and was met with an expression of pure trepidation.

  “It’s all right, I’m not here to complain,” Rhys reassured the young man. “I need to speak to him regarding a personal matter.”

  Looking somewhat mollified, the young man picked up the phone and made the call. A few minutes later, a middle-aged man with a luxurious moustache came out of a door behind the reception desk. He wore a black suit, a tie, and a phony smile.

  “Good afternoon, sir. I’m Aasif Zahir, manager of this hotel. How may I be of help?” Rhys saw tension in the man’s face despite the smile. Mr. Zahir probably had his hands full with Westerners whose expectations couldn’t possibly be met in an establishment like this one.

  “Mr. Zahir, my name is Rhys Morgan, and I’m looking for a friend.” Rhys extracted a photograph of Jo from his shirt pocket. “She stayed at this hotel until sometime in December, I believe. Then all communication ceased.”

  Mr. Zahir tried to keep his expression bland as he looked at the photograph, but Rhys saw a spark of recognition in his dark eyes. The man raised his gaze to Rhys’s face and studied him for a moment, as if deciding whether to tell him the truth, before answering.

  “Yes, Miss Turing stayed here for some time. She went out one day in December and did not return.”

  “Do you still have her possessions?” Rhys asked.

  “I can’t show you her things, Mr. Morgan. They’re private.”

  “Mr. Zahir, I’m not here to steal her laptop or riffle through her knickers. I’m simply searching for clues as to where she might have gone so I can try to find her. Please, let me see her belongings. You can stay and observe me to make sure I don’t take anything,” Rhys added, hoping this made him sound transparent. He didn’t bother to berate the man for not calling the authorities. Mr. Zahir didn’t seem to want to involve himself in Jo’s disappearance and clearly didn’t see the whereabouts or well-being of the guests as his responsibility once they left the hotel.

  “All right,” the manager said with a sigh. “Follow me.”

  Rhys followed Mr. Zahir into a windowless room at the back of the hotel. Rows of metal shelves filled the space. Some were empty, but most held suitcases, items of clothing, books, tablets, and even laptops. There were cardboard boxes filled with mobile phones, sunglasses, and coins. Mr. Zahir led Rhys down a long row toward a shelf where he pointed to a nondescript case. The tag read “Jo Turing.”

  Rhys took down the case, set it on the floor, and opened it. Inside were Jo’s clothes, haphazardly packed by some maid who’d been ordered to clear the room, a paperback copy of A Tale of Two Cities, toiletries, and shoes. In one of the zippered compartments, Rhys found her passport and a small notepad. He took out the notepad and flipped through the pages, which were covered with scribbled words, fragments of sentences, and numbers. One of the pages read, “See Ahmad Khan.” The name was doubly underlined.

  “Do you know who this Ahmad Khan might be?” Rhys asked the manager, who looked as if he’d just swallowed a spoonful of acid.

  “He’s one of the waiters. I don’t know what she wanted with him. He’s a good boy.”

  “Is he here now?”

  Mr. Zahir shook his head. “He’ll come at six for the dinner shift. He won’t be able to help you.”

  “I only want to ask him some questions. I’m not here to lay blame, Mr. Zahir. I only want to find my friend,” Rhys reiterated. He couldn’t blame Mr. Zahir for being fearful. This wasn’t London or New York, this was Kabul, a city that had been torn apart by conflict, invaded, and plundered by various foreign armies for longer than a millennium. Mr. Zahir had to tread carefully if he wished to keep his job and support his family. Rhys briefly wondered if Mr. Zahir was in any way related to General Zahir, who’d been the chief of police until his recent resignation. Most likely not. Zahir was a name common to the region.

  “Will you be in your room at six?” the manager asked. “I’ll send Ahmad to see you. Mr. Morgan, Ahmad’s family relies on his job to survive,” he added, his tone sharp.

  “I understand, Mr. Zahir.”

  Rhys followed the manager out of the claustrophobic room and returned to his own. He sat on the bed and stared out the window. The golden glow of a winter afternoon had turned to the gentle lavender of twilight that made the previously dull-looking mountains suddenly appear picturesque. Calls to evening prayer blended with the cacophony of traffic. The room was too stuffy, and the bed too hard, but Rhys wasn’t in Kabul for a holiday. He reclined on the bed and folded his arms, lacing his fingers behind his head. He had about an hour before the waiter arrived, so he allowed his eyes to close, overcome by jetlag and a feeling of hopelessness.

  Chapter 13

  January 2015

  London, England

  Quinn pushed open the door to the mortuary and the familiar smells of carbolic, formaldehyde, and death assaulted her. Through the Plexiglas window on her right, she saw a body covered with a green hospital sheet lying on the slab, awaiting its appointment with Dr. Scott’s scalpel. Neither Colin nor his assistant Dr. Dhawan were in the lab.

  Quinn walked down the corridor until she reached Colin’s office. He was at his desk, his gaze fixed on the computer screen as he typed rapidly. His hair was gathered into a messy man-bun and a surgical mask hung around his neck, like a droopy necklace.

  He glanced up and smiled. “Quinn, come in. Lovely to see you. How’s the family?”

  “They’re well, thank you. It’s been some time since we’ve seen you and Logan.”

  “Logan’s been taking extra shifts at the hospital,” Colin replied as he finished what he was doing and turned to face Quinn.

  “Why?”

  “He wants to keep an eye on Jude.”

  “Is Jude not doing a satisfactory job?” Quinn asked. It didn’t require much skill or effort to do the job of a hospital porter, but Jude was a musician and the dull, often unpleasant job wasn’t one he aspired to keep, despite his brother’s best efforts at keeping him in line. Jude missed his music and his vagabond lifestyle, two things that inevitably
got him into trouble.

  “Once an addict, always an addict,” Colin replied matter-of-factly. “Jude has been on the straight and narrow for several months now. He’s attending his methadone program and keeping clear of his friends, who are enablers one and all, but Logan’s afraid he’ll slip up if left on his own for too long.”

  “Do you think he will?” Quinn asked.

  “I very much hope he doesn’t, but the stats are not in his favor. Most users relapse; it’s a sad fact. Jude is too talented, too artistic. He won’t last long emptying bedpans and taking out the rubbish. He longs for the adrenaline-fueled high of performing, and he misses his girlfriend. Bridget is not making things easy for him.”

  “No, I didn’t think she would. She does love him, I think,” Quinn said. She felt sad for the young couple. They were so attractive, so bright, but neither had been strong enough to turn their back on the seductive embrace of heroine for long.

  “She does, but she’s not good for him.”

  Quinn nodded. She wished she could help Jude in some way, but he didn’t want her help. Their complicated relationship was made more fragile by the fact that they hadn’t shared a childhood as Logan and Jude had done. Jude still saw Quinn as an interloper, someone who didn’t quite belong in his family, but he seemed to be coming around to the idea of having a sister.

  “Have you seen Sylvia recently? How is she?” Quinn asked. She hadn’t seen her birth mother in several weeks, but they’d exchanged a few text messages and phone calls, their conversations centering on safe subjects, such as Alex and Emma, and Quinn’s decorating ideas for the new house.

  “As well as can be expected,” Colin replied. “She’s glad Jude is back, and she has him to fuss over. She’s driving him mad, of course, but I think he secretly likes it.”

  Colin reached for the box of latex gloves on his desk and handed Quinn a pair before pulling on his own. “Shall we?” he said as he rose to his feet and led her toward the lab at the end of the corridor. “I must admit, this case has absolutely fascinated me, Quinn. I don’t often get emotional over people who died hundreds of year ago, but this poor lass has managed to break through my shield of indifference.”

  “Yes, I feel the same way.”

  The two skeletons were laid out on a metal slab, the tiny baby next to its mother. Colin flipped on a switch and fluorescent light flooded the slab, turning the bones from gray to gleaming white.

  “Good morning, Dr. Allenby,” Dr. Sarita Dhawan called out as she walked into the lab, a file folder in her hands. Despite her cheerful greeting, she looked upset and tossed down the folder with some force. “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Dr. Scott. The Hawthorne lab’s been closed down due to cross-contamination. It might take more than a week for it to reopen,” she said with obvious disgust. “I’m sorry, Dr. Allenby, but I don’t have the results for you. We’ll have to send new samples once the lab reopens, since the ones we sent already are no longer viable.”

  “It’s all right. I can wait,” Quinn replied, trying to hide her disappointment. She’d hoped to learn more about Mary and her child, since scientific information went a long way to fleshing out the narrative about the lives of the subjects of Echoes from the Past. Quinn could hardly reveal to the world that she saw Mary in her visions. She needed cold, hard facts to validate her story.

  “No matter,” Colin said as he approached the skeleton. “I can still give you something to go on.”

  Quinn looked down at the female skeleton. Dr. Dhawan had reconstructed it on the slab, so it was no longer in the position Quinn had found it in upon entering the cave. Looking at it now, she couldn’t see any trace of agony in the skeleton’s posture or skull. The bones had been cleaned, the blood washed away, and the jaw, which had been opened as if in a scream, had been closed. The skeleton of the baby now rested next to its mother’s arm rather than just below her pelvis, behind her legs.

  “So, what can you tell me about her, Colin?” Quinn asked as she reached out and gingerly touched the skeleton’s hand.

  “We performed all the usual tests, except for DNA sequencing. Since we have viable hair follicles, there’s no sense incurring additional expense unless we require more in-depth information. We’ve also been able to obtain a blood sample from the wood, which should tell us more. I’ll have those results for you once the lab is fully operational again,” Colin said, smiling apologetically. “In the meantime, I can share my own findings with you, which I stand by one hundred percent.”

  “I’ve never questioned your expertise, Colin,” Quinn said. “You’re the best in your field.”

  Colin colored with pleasure at the compliment. “Maybe not the best, but I do know my skellies, and this one has lots to tell. Carbon-14 dating shows that she lived in the 1600s. Early to mid-1600s, I think. If you look at the skull, you’ll see that the sagittal suture is not fully fused, so she was definitely under the age of thirty-five, and judging by where the ribs join the sternum, I’d put her in her early twenties.”

  “How can you tell from the sternum?” Quinn asked.

  “The sternum is not a weight-bearing bone and is unaffected by childbearing, so it’s a fairly accurate marker for age. My estimation is supported by the state of the pelvis. The pubic symphysis is not severely pitted or craggy, confirming that she was fairly young, but there are soft marks on the cartilage that suggest she had given birth. Now, whether she gave birth only to this baby or had experienced birth before is impossible to tell. Given her approximate age and the time she lived in, it’s very possible she’d had other children before this one.”

  Quinn tore her gaze away from the tiny skeleton of the baby. Every time she looked at it, she thought of Alex and how lucky she was to have a healthy baby. Had she lived in an earlier era, Alex surviving the birth or the first year of his life would not be a given. Even during the reign of Queen Victoria, which wasn’t all that long ago, only half the babies born made it to their first birthday, but that didn’t guarantee they’d survive into adulthood or even reach the tender age of five.

  Oblivious to Quinn’s melancholy, Colin went on. “Since there was no cloth to sample or any other material objects, we have to rely on other clues to tell us something of her social background,” he said, moving his hand to the skull. He ran his latex-covered finger along the skeleton’s teeth.

  “Her teeth are somewhat worn, but not enough to suggest she suffered long periods of hunger. I do believe her diet wasn’t extremely varied, which suggests that she didn’t come from the upper classes. That theory is supported by the ridges on her wrists. This woman worked with her hands. These types of ridges can be found in most women of that historical period, since everything was done by hand, from kneading dough to sewing to milking cows. Even fetching water from the well would leave its mark.”

  “So, she fell somewhere between a beggar and a lady,” Quinn concluded.

  “Exactly so. Now for the baby.” Colin sighed, betraying his own sadness. “I can’t say with any certainty if the child was alive at the time of the birth, but the mother definitely was. Given the amount of blood and her position in the coffin, I’d say this poor woman went into labor after being interred. I’ve seen coffin births where the mother died while heavily pregnant and the gasses that built up during decomposition forced out the lifeless child, but this is not one of those cases. She definitely lived through all or part of the labor. Poor soul,” Colin said. He patted her skull affectionately, as if the gesture could somehow soothe her.

  “Is there anything you can tell me about the baby?” Quinn asked.

  “I’ve compared the length of the bones to markers for the 1600s, and I believe the child was full term. I can’t determine its gender just by examining the skeleton, but I think we’ll get more information from the DNA results. Believe it or not, I was able to collect a few hairs that must have belonged to the baby. Had the coffin been buried in earth, the fine baby hair wouldn’t have survived, but because the coffin was in the cave, which had its
own microclimate, some DNA information survived. It’s fascinating, really,” Colin exclaimed as he looked down at mother and child. “I wonder why her coffin was left in that cave. Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Quinn agreed. “If someone laid her in a coffin, it stands to reason they meant to bury her. If she’d been marked as a suicide or a heretic, she would have been buried at the crossroads with a stake through her heart. It’s almost as if someone wished to hide the fact that she died.”

  “I think that might have something to do with the gaping hole in her head,” Colin said. “There are some who would view what was done to this woman as murder. Not only had someone trepanned her, but they sealed her in a coffin while she still lived, condemning mother and child to death.”

  “It’s savage,” Quinn said. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the hole in the top of the skull. “Are you sure this was done intentionally?”

  “Oh yes. The edges are too smooth to be the result of an accident or an attack. Had she been bashed over the head, her skull would be cracked, the opening jagged. This is a perfect circle, the result of using a medical tool,” Colin said, running his fingers along the edges of the hole. “This was very much intentional.”

  “Thank you, Colin. Please let me know when you have the DNA results.”

  “I’ll ring you. Quinn, would you and Gabe like to come for dinner one night?” Colin asked. He blushed prettily. “I’ve been taking French cookery lessons. To relieve stress,” he explained. “Dealing with dead people can be murder.”

  Quinn laughed. “Will you spoil us with escargot and foie gras?”

  “I’m not that advanced, but I can offer you onion soup and duck breast in a cherry glaze with rosemary roasted potatoes.”

  “I’m salivating already,” Quinn confessed.

  “Good. I’ll check with Logan to see when he has a free evening and we’ll put something on the calendar.”