Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

Robb gulped. This was as vinegary and dyspeptic as he’d ever seen Clapper, and his resentment and anger were starting to get the better of the awe in which he generally held the Great Man. Well, almost. But what the hell was the ferocious old bugger’s problem this time?

“Well, there’s not really anything up there, Sarge,” he said neutrally. “See about twenty-five, thirty feet up, where the stone facing ends, and then there’s another floor, set back a little, with shingles on the outside? That’s the third floor-where all the guest rooms are, I think.”

This time Clapper really did roll his eyes, making it clear that the information he was hearing wasn’t what he wanted to know, and Robb hurried nervously on. “Well, at the top of the stone facing up there, just above the level of the windows, there’s a sort of walkway all around the outside, under the eaves. You get out onto it from the third floor by walking up five or six steps and going out this little door-”

“Aah!” Clapper said, and Robb relaxed a little. “Yes, I can see there’s a little railing there. That’s where he fell from, Kyle.”

“Certainly possible, sir.”

“No, it’s definite. Come a little closer-that’s enough, no nearer to the body than that. See that outpipe above us? If you had your wits about you, you’d have observed by now that it’s been broken. One end emerges from the building, quite awry, and the other end, also awry, drains into the retaining wall. Between them is a space of approximately eighteen inches, from which, by power of intellect, we may take for granted the existence of a missing eighteen-inch section of pipe. Now where do you suppose that missing section might be? Where would a smart, privileged, university-educated youth like yourself look?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Robb said, his face stiffening.

“I don’t know, sir,” Clapper mimicked. “Well, have you thought of looking at the body? You don’t suppose that the aforementioned missing section of pipe and the length of wonderfully similar-looking pipe that peeps ever so subtly out from under his hip could be one and the same?”

“Oh,” Robb said. “I… I didn’t see it before. He must have struck it on the way down and carried it with him.”

“From which you conclude…?”

“That he…” Robb glanced up at the wall of the building before continuing. “That since there are no windows directly in line with the body, it follows that he fell from that little walkway.”

“As the night the day,” said Clapper. “Or, more likely,” he added, “that he was pushed.”

“You’re saying that you think we have a suspicious death here, Sarge?”

“Well, think about it for a moment. Yesterday we dug up a beachful of bones belonging to a murdered man who, if we are inclined to believe Gideon-which I am-was a member of this consortium of Kozlov’s. And today-no, last night, from the looks of him- another member of said consortium suffers a violent and mysterious death. Considering the normally peaceable nature of our little part of this green and pleasant land, what would be your conclusion?”

“That there’s a relationship between the two events.”

“Exactly, Kyle,” said Clapper, who was showing signs that perhaps he’d considered that he’d harassed Robb more than he should have. “A connection. Possibly he was murdered. Possibly it was a random accident-a slip, a fall. Or possibly…”

Why are we just standing here? Robb wondered. One of the things they had taught him at Bramshill was that speed was of the essence, that sus-death clues grew cold, and often useless or irretrievable, very quickly. And yet here was Clapper, lost in his musings, letting the minutes go by.

“Sir, I left the CSI gear in the van. Shall I-”

Clapper snorted. “What, and when the ‘real’ detectives get here, have them complain that we’ve cocked the whole thing up, stomping around with our hobnailed boots? No, no, no, we’ll call this in to headquarters as ordained, and they’ll have Detective Superintendent Vossey and his supersleuth minions out from Truro inside of half an hour. We’ll leave it to them, Kyle. We don’t go a step closer.”

Robb’s spirits plummeted. His first chance at a significant crime-scene investigation, he thought bitterly, with the bloody corpse lying right there in front of them, untouched except by the doctor, and… He clamped his lips together. “Shall I at least execute the duties entailed in first-officer-on-the-scene uniform standards, sir?”

Clapper sighed. “Kyle, I don’t even know what that means. But no. All I want you to do is execute a telephone call to headquarters and tell them what’s happened. Then come find me in the kitchen.”

Robb turned and left without a word.

Now what does he have to be so mopey about? Clapper wondered, watching the younger man trudge angrily off. He took one last, long look at the body, turned, and went into the kitchen that was a mixture of sooty, sixteenth-century stone walls and twenty-first-century stainless steel kitchen equipment, where Mr. Moreton had dutifully gathered the denizens of the house, all of whom were seated around an old table, drinking coffee and looking suspicious and untrustworthy.

“Where is Dr. Gillie?” he asked. “I want to speak with him first.”

“I put him in my office,” Mr. Moreton said. “It’s more private.”

Kozlov, whom Clapper knew by sight, clarified. “By stairs. Through dining room. There.” He pointed toward the kitchen’s door to the interior.

Once in the dining room, the smell of pipe tobacco reached Clapper’s nostrils. He stopped and automatically reached for his cigarettes, lit up a Gold Bond, and continued into a cramped foyer, off of which was a tiny, cluttered alcove that looked as if it might once have been a coat-room. The doctor sat behind the desk, screwing the cap onto an old-fashioned tortoiseshell fountain pen. He looked up, smiling, a long-nosed, horse-faced man in an old tweed jacket, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth.

“All right, what have we got?” Clapper said.

“Why, hello there, Davey-lad,” Gillie said, addressing himself, “so nice to see you again. I hope you’re well.”

“Sorry, Davey, I’m not in much of a mood today.” He stood, waiting.

“No, really? All right then, I’d better mind my manners. Well, you’ve looked at the body?”

Clapper nodded.

“Then you already know what we have.” He straightened the form on which he’d been writing and read aloud: “‘Cause of death, crushing head injuries; manner of death, undetermined; contributing causes of death, none indicated. ’” He looked up with a shrug. “Been dead twelve to twenty-four hours, from the looks of him; rigor is quite pronounced and hasn’t begun to break up yet. So if what Kozlov told me is so-that he was alive and well as late as eleven o’clock last night-why then, we’d have to put the time at right around then, say somewhere between eleven and one. Body temperature, assuming that it was normal to begin with, is down fourteen degrees Celsius, so that fits nicely enough as well.”

“Other injuries?”

“Contusions and lacerations here and there, quite consistent with a fall. I would expect some internal trauma as well, when he’s undressed and examined. Oh, and he died right where he lies. No one’s moved him. The livor pattern makes that clear. I’d assume he fell from the catwalk up above.”

“And hit the pipe on the way down?”

“ Grabbed the pipe on the way down, I should say. There are rust stains and abrasions on his right palm. It would seem to have broken his fall and taken some of the force out of it. Otherwise-falling twenty-five feet directly onto stone like that-his head wouldn’t merely have cracked, it would have exploded like a watermelon.”