Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“I’m glad to see you, Dr. Oliver,” he said after he’d been introduced to Julie. “I was hoping to have a chance to speak with you. I’m in for a quick sandwich. All right if I join you?”

“Sure, pull up a chair.”

“I’ll just order inside. Faster that way. Back in a tick.”

“He seems as nice as you said,” Julie remarked as he disappeared inside.

“Oh, a good kid, very nice. It’s Clapper that’s the hard case. I’m telling you, I’d have slugged the guy if he’d treated me the way he treated Robb.”

“Yeah, right,” Julie said, and they both laughed.

When Robb returned with a ham sandwich and a can of English lemonade, the first thing he did was strip off his coat and helmet and lay them neatly on an unused chair.

“Ah, that’s better.” Glaring at the helmet, he massaged his temples. “That thing is like wearing a pail on your head.”

“You can’t wear the soft cap?” Gideon asked. “I saw a couple in your office.”

“Oh, generally, we do, when we wear a cap at all. But I’ve only just come up from quay duty-seeing in the ferry-and the tourists, you know, they like to see them. Well-” He smiled and shrugged. “‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’”

“‘Taking one consideration with another,’” Julie recited, which pleased him, and together they sang a few more lines of patter from Pirates of Penzance.

While he ate they engaged in small talk. What did Julie do? (She was a park ranger. “How interesting!”) Where was Robb from? (Bournemouth, on his last three months of a two-year assignment to St. Mary’s.) What was life like in the Scillies? (Quiet.) But Gideon could feel him edging closer to whatever it was he was anxious to talk about, and finally he got there.

“I hope you’ll come by and see the sergeant about that bone again,” he said as he finished the first half of the sandwich and used a napkin to pluck a crumb from the corner of his mouth. “I’m sure you could be a great deal of help on the case.”

“What case?” Gideon asked. “He didn’t seem very interested in opening one yesterday.”

“I grant you, his manner can be a bit, er, unfortunate at times. Sometimes I have to step in and smooth the waters a bit.”

“As you’re doing now?” Julie asked.

“As I’m doing now. But underneath his rough exterior, you see-”

“There lies a heart of gold,” Gideon said.

Robb laughed with patently real amusement. “Well, no, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but four out of five days he’s quite approachable, quite genial, even.”

“Obviously, then, I hit him on day five.”

“In a way, yes. Exeter had been nagging him all morning. That always puts him in a foul mood.”

“I see. It wasn’t my personality that set him off, it was just my rotten timing.”

“Very much so,” Robb said, nodding eagerly. “His attitude is entirely different today, entirely. You’d hardly know he was the same man. He’s had me open a case log on the matter, and he’s been hard at the computer, searching for possible leads on that bone ever since.”

Gideon was astonished. “He has? What brought about this change?”

“Well, you see, he telephoned headquarters about it, as required in possible homicide cases. The usual procedure would be for them to send a detective constable from St. Ives to determine if foul play is really a possibility. If so, a detective inspector or perhaps a chief inspector, from Truro or possibly from Plymouth, would be assigned as SIO-that is, as senior investigative officer-”

Gideon hadn’t remembered that Robb was so talky. “I’m afraid I don’t see-”

“Well, the thing is, I gather they pretty much laughed at him-‘ One piece of bone from who knows where, with a few marks on it?’ and so on-and implied that the detective force had better things to do, and he was entirely free to pursue it on his own. So that put a different light on it, do you see? It’s his case now, not theirs.”

Gideon pondered. “Look, Constable, did he tell you to ask me to come in again?”

“No, I can’t say that he did, but-”

“Then I don’t see the point. I’m not going to go barging in where I’m not wanted.” He realized as he said it how pompous it sounded and tacked on a gentler addendum. “Of course, if he does ask me, I’d be happy to.”

“I’m sure he will ask you, but, knowing him, it’ll take a few days for him to get around to it. And inasmuch as you said you’d only be here a few days, I was afraid it might be too late by then. Thought I should strike while the iron’s hot.”

Their waiter came by with Robb’s check and more coffee for Julie and Gideon. Gideon sipped and considered. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I just don’t feel comfortable-”

“Oh, go ahead,” Julie said. “You know you want to. If someone’s really been murdered, you’re not going to be happy walking away from it when you probably could be of some help.”

Gideon shook his head. “Nope, I don’t think so.” Being pressed from both sides was making him more stubborn than he might have been otherwise.

“Dr. Oliver,” Robb said.

“Gideon.”

“And I’m Kyle,” Robb said with his sweet smile. “Look, may I tell you a little about the sergeant? Do you have a few minutes?”

“Sure,” Gideon said, curious in spite of himself. Julie, always interested in what promised to be a human interest story, nodded as well, although it was likely to make her late for the consortium’s afternoon session.

Robb pushed aside the last quarter of his sandwich, drained his lemonade, and collected his thoughts.

“Well, you have to understand…” But he decided he needed another beginning and started again. “This is hardly the sort of thing I’d ordinarily tell anyone, you see, let alone a relative stranger, but…” Another false start. He thought for a moment more before hitting on the opening he wanted.

“Sergeant Clapper,” he said, “is not what he seems.”

That was putting it mildly.

Harry Michael Clapper had had quite a life before becoming a policeman. The son of a London liquor wholesaler, he had joined the army at an underage seventeen, spending over twenty years in the service. He had been wounded and twice decorated for bravery during the Falklands War and had retired in 1988 as regimental sergeant-major, about as high as a non-commissioned officer could go. He had knocked around for a while after that, and then, in 1990, at the advanced age of 40, he had submitted an application to the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary to become a police officer. To his own surprise he was accepted. He breezed through the local training program in Exeter, came in first in his class at the fifteen-week residential course at the National Police Training Centre in Bramshill, and was assigned to Torquay as a traffic constable.

While still in his two-year probationary period, he had gotten a rare chief constable commendation-the first one that had ever been given to a probationer-for actions over and above the requirements of the service. Off-duty, out of uniform, alone, and weaponless, he had broken up an armed robbery, subduing the two perpetrators and sitting on them (literally) until a couple of police cars, summoned by the Australian victim, could arrive.

On completion of his probation he was transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department and posted to Plymouth as a detective constable. There, he not only completed university but compiled an extraordinary record of cases successfully closed that made him the only person in the department’s long history to earn Officer of the Year honors three times. He was the subject of several Sunday magazine articles and was part of a BBC television special (“The New Sherlock Holmeses: England’s Greatest Detectives”). By 2000, he had advanced to detective chief inspector-