I am not lonely [Mystrade]

CHAPTER 173 : Ridiculous claim

The armed special agent following him like his shadow was nothing  Mycroft could get use to. As time was going by, the politician was  always hoping that he could get rid of him and resume his normal life  but every time he was to do so, Scotland Yard discovered something new  about the Russian dissident case. But what he missed the most wasn't his  freedom or his security, it was the possibility to come back every  night to his family.

Alden and Aelane had been sent out to Mr and  Mrs Lestrade's good care, partly to unsure their own security and  partly because their fathers being so busy, it was more convenient for  everyone to have them with their grandparents. The detective was also  away from the house most evenings, too preoccupied by his case, and  would only return home to crash into his bed in the late hours of night.

The  elder Holmes had proposed to have a private office setted up for him in  one of the Mansion's room but, unlike the official, the policeman had a  team to work with, forcing him to be present at the Yard's building  from early in the morning to late at night. At least the fact of having  him locked up in a police station for 18 hours a day was somehow  reassuring news to an ever too anxious Mycroft. As long as he was in the  forces' premises, the chances of him being shot down or poisoned were  quite low.

Despite being pretty demanding and coercing, the  investigation had progressed rather a lot since the poison had been  identified as polonium 210. After the inescapable death of Nevsky only  hours after the diagnosis, a post-mortem had been carried out by a team  of six pathologists from across the country, led by no one else  than Molly Hooper. Polonium had been found in quantities that outcome  any of the prognostic that the scientists could have made. The inside of  the dissident had been compared by the pathologists as 'the human  equivalent to the heart of a nuclear reactor', showing signs that the  man might have swallowed up to 20mg of polonium 210, something that was  believed to be more than four hundred times the lethal dose in case of  ingestion. To know how he had survived three weeks with such a dose of  poison in his body was a question that was still unanswered and that  would probably stay so.

Thanks to the CCTV footages that the  police had collected, the detectives had been able to rebuild the man's  journey throughout the day and to test all the places he had visited for  the presence of radiation. The teacup he had used at Fortnum and Mason  during the meeting he had was presenting such a high level of radiation  that the dishwasher and the other pieces of china that had been in  contact with it had to be disposed of in a nuclear waste facility.

As  the officers followed on his steps throughout the day, it became clear  to them that the poisoning had happened during the meeting Nevsky had  with the two other Russian men. Indeed, the detectives discovered that  none of the places he had been solely before the meeting and nothing he  had touched was contaminated when, on the other hand, everything he had  had his hands on after the four PM encounter seemed to be beaming in  radiations. The people with whom Dmitri Nevsky had interacted had to be  all tested, some of them proving to be lightly contaminated and having  to be treated.

None, however were found to be affected in an  amount serious enough to be admitted to hospital except Dora, Nevsky's  wife, and two of the nurses that had treated him when he was admitted in  A&E. All of them had now recovered and it seemed like no other casualty than the one intended had been caused by this poisoning.

Nevertheless,  the CCTV had proven that Anatoly Sokolov and Nikolay Vasiliev had been  more than remiss during their mission. The custom's records had informed  the police that they had visited London already twice before the date  of the believed assassination of the dissident. A quick check in  Nevsky's diary had shown that, each time, they had met with him in  coffees, making Greg believe that they may have needed several attempts  to finally get the poison inside him.