Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“We don’t much go in for murder and dismemberment in my little corner of the world either,” Gideon said curtly, “but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.” Without waiting for Clapper to reply, he picked up where he’d left off. “The cut that severed the bone was made by a saw. So was this groove right next to the cut-it’s a hesitation cut, the kind of thing you get when you’re having a little trouble placing the saw at first. But these grooves here”-he pointed to two shallow cut-marks at a slight angle to the hesitation cut-“were made with a knife.”

“A knife and a saw?” Clapper said with a skeptical lift of his eyebrows.

“Yes, and that’s what makes me think this guy was almost certainly dismembered. An old bone with saw marks on it-or some knife scratchings-who knows, that might be nothing more than something that was found and then whittled or sawed for… well, for some innocent reason, not that anything comes to mind. But a knife and a saw, that’s different.”

Robb shook his head, puzzled. “But why-”

“You’d want a knife to cut down through the soft tissue, then a saw to get through the bone.”

“Ah,” an engrossed Robb said, but Clapper looked as restless and dubious as ever.

Gideon plowed ahead anyway. “You can see the difference between the two kinds of cuts by-”

“The knife marks are narrower than the saw marks?” Robb asked with a wary glance at Clapper, who continued to say nothing. “Is that the difference?”

“More or less. The teeth on a saw are ‘set’; that is, they’re at a slight outward angle to the blade on each side, so the groove that a saw leaves is going to be very slightly wider than the actual blade. On the other hand, a knife has no set, so its groove is going to be a better indication of its actual width. More than that, a knife blade is V-shaped in cross-section, so it leaves a V-shaped groove, whereas a saw-”

“Leaves a square, flat-bottomed one,” Robb finished for him, peering at the various notches and nodding vigorously.

“Well, U-shaped would probably be more accurate, if you look closely.”

“Yes, I see.”

“Besides that, a V-shaped groove in fresh bone is more likely to close up a little afterward, whereas a wider, U-shaped one won’t, which means that not only do saw cuts give an over-impression of blade width, but knife cuts tend to give a slight under-impression.”

“What about a serrated knife?” Clapper put in. “That has teeth.”

“Not set at an angle to the blade,” Gideon said. “It leaves a slightly different mark than a non-serrated one, but it’s still V-shaped.”

“And why, if you don’t mind my asking, are you so sure the big cut, the one that cut it in two, is from a saw?” Clapper asked in the spirit of a defense attorney who found himself short of serious ammunition but had every intention of obstructing anyway. “Why not an ax? That’d be my choice. Speed things up a bit, wouldn’t it?”

“No, this is a clean cut. There would have been some crushing, some splintering, with an ax, and probably more than one blow to get through the bone. And only a saw would have left these parallel striations in the cut end. They show the direction of the saw cut, by the way, which was from back to front. And-”

Clapper’s sigh was monumental. He got up to grind out his cigarette in the metal ashtray on Robb’s desk, then went to the window behind the desk and looked out at the garage of the house next door, a bored and restless man.

“And there’s another way you can tell too,” Gideon went on, partly for Robb’s continuing edification, but mostly for the hell of it. He took the bone back from the young constable, who had been holding it while he followed Gideon’s remarks, and touched his finger to a thin, quarter-inch spike extending from the cut end. “This is the breakaway spur that you get with saw cuts. The bone snaps off from its own weight just before the saw blade gets all the way through.”

“Yes, the same thing happens when one saws a piece of wood, doesn’t it?” Robb said. “Unless, of course, one turns it over and finishes sawing through from the other side.”

“Right, but when you’re dismembering a corpse, as the sergeant correctly suggested, you’re probably going to be a lot more interested in speed than in neatness.”

Clapper turned from the window and perched his bulk somewhat precariously on the sill. “Where did you say this was found? On the beach? Up near Halangy Point?”

“Yes, a little north of the creeb,” Gideon said, to show him he was dealing with someone who knew the lay of the land, not merely some know-nothing outlander. What the hell is a creeb? he wondered.

“Buried,” Clapper said. A statement, not a question.

“Yes.”

Clapper lit up another Gold Bond. “ ‘Buried’ as in the active voice or in the passive?”

“Pardon me?”

“Are you saying ‘Someone buried the bone in the sand’? Or simply ‘The bone was buried in the sand,’ as, for example, if it had washed ashore from who knows what distant land, and then been covered over during a storm?”

Gideon revised his estimate of Clapper’s educational level. “I don’t have any way of knowing.”

“Ah.”

When the telephone trilled again, Robb listened a moment and reported. “It’s for you again, Sarge.” He made a sympathetic face. “Exeter again.” His voice went to a respectful whisper. “It’s Chief Superintendent Dibbs himself this time.”

Clapper rolled his eyes. “And does Chief Superintendent Dibbs himself strike you as being in a fun-loving frame of mind?”

“Not really, sir.”

The sergeant rose heavily from the window sill and clumped back toward his office, muttering. He was a slow-moving man with a stately, surging stride, like an astronaut moving through a zero-gravity environment. “Exeter is where headquarters is, Dr. Oliver; the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary main office,” Robb explained when the door had closed behind the sergeant. “They’ve been giving Sergeant Clapper a bit of a difficult time.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I suspect he’ll be in there a while.”

“Shall I leave the bone with you, then?”

“I think that would be best. Can we reach you at the castle if need be?”

“Any time. I’ll be here till the end of the week.”

The two men stood and shook hands. “Thank you very much for taking the time and trouble to come in, sir, we appreciate it.” He grinned. “And thanks for the osteology lesson. We’ll be in touch now, sir.”

Heading back down Upper Garrison, a grumpy Gideon doubted it. He knew Clapper’s type all too well. A cynical, disillusioned cop nearing sixty, who disguised his cynicism with a leaden-footed jocularity, who was more interested in keeping a low profile and not making any waves than he was in solving old, anonymous murders. He wasn’t going to take the chance of stepping into anything that might seriously complicate his life. The easiest, least risky path for him at this point would be to simply let the matter slide, to not even open a case file-it was only a single bone, after all-and that was the path he was going to take.

But Gideon was dead wrong. He’d never run into a cop like Mike Clapper before, a fact that was made clear to him the following day.

With Julie, he was having lunch at Tregarthen’s Hotel, another establishment, like Star Castle, with proud historical associations, but of a literary sort: plaques on the walls proclaimed that both George Eliot and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, had spent time there.

They ate in the airy, Danish Modern bar, its cool blues and golds a nice contrast to the brooding, dark-wood ambience of Star Castle. After a light meal of steamed clams and a couple of glasses of Skinner’s Cornish Blonde beer-citrusy and wheaty, and the waiter’s excellent suggestion to accompany the clams-they took their coffee outside to the one of the umbrellaed tables on the terrace overlooking the Old Quay and the outer islands. Julie had considerately failed to mention his promise of the day before to pay for lunch out of his poker winnings, for which he was grateful. They watched the Scillonian ferry disembark its first passenger-load of the day and were on their second cups, silently enjoying the wisps of cloud, the sun-dappled water, and the faint tinge of white mist on the horizon, when Gideon spotted Police Constable Robb going in the hotel’s front door, quite handsome in full uniform; blue tunic, bucket helmet, dark tie and all. Robb saw him at the same time and came over for a friendly hello.