Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“No.”

“No,” Merrill echoed. “I didn’t think so. You believe, then, that he was struck and then fell. That this is a homicide after all. A murder.”

“I believe it’s a murder, all right, but it was the other way around.”

“The other way around,” Merrill repeated, enchanted. “Whatever can that mean, I wonder.”

“First he fell,” Gideon said. “Then he was struck.”

“And you know this… how?”

“Look at the cracks,” Gideon said. “Look at the way they intersect.”

Merrill looked, then jerked his head. “What about the cracks?” he asked, but a bit testily. He’d had his fill of befuddlement, Gideon thought, and was impatient to be enlightened.

“The cracks from the injury on the right, the one with the concentric pattern, go every which way, until they peter out on their own.

“Yes, yes, as you said before.”

“But the cracks radiating from the depressed fracture…” He paused, wanting to give Merrill a chance to work it out himself, and the pathologist came through with flying colors.

“-are arrested wherever they run into a crack coming from the other fracture!” he cried. “They never continue across them. Of course! A crack can’t cross another crack; the energy is dissipated. That means that the other fracture was there first. The depressed fracture came afterward!”

Gideon nodded, as pleased as Merrill was. “Right. He fell from the catwalk-was pushed, would be a pretty good guess at this point-and whoever pushed him came down, found him still alive, or at least thought that he might be, and smashed him in the head again to make sure the job was done.”

Merrill nodded, suddenly solemn. “Do you know, I’ve always hated blunt-force homicides,” he said thoughtfully. “A gun, a knife, will kill quickly, but blows-they usually take more than one, sometimes many, many more than one, demonstrating, to me, at least, a horrible, brutal tenacity in the human psyche that I don’t like thinking about.”

“But in this case there was only the one blow.”

“Yes, only one, but imagine what it was like. Young Joey Dillard, lying on the stone, helpless, terribly injured, his head already shattered, and the killer… the killer cold-bloodedly…”

“I too hate these things,” Rajiv declared with feeling.

“I’m not too crazy about them myself,” said Gideon, doing his best to block out the picture that Merrill had conjured up for him.

Despite Merrill’s promise, he did not arrive back by teatime. It was 5:50 P.M. by the time the helicopter set him down on Holgate’s Green, and he immediately telephoned Clapper’s private number to bring him up to date on the autopsy, but it was Anna at the answering service that picked up, and she had a message waiting for him.

“Hello, love, the sergeant’s just gone out for dinner with his lady-friend, but he said if you get back by six or six-thirty, why don’t you come and join him, and bring your wife, if you like? They’ve gone to the Atlantic Inn. Do you know where it is, love, or do you require directions?”

Gideon did not require directions. He had passed it several times on his way to his morning pasties and coffee at the Kavorna Cafe: a pleasant-looking old hotel and pub on the main street, right at the foot of the pier. He put in a call to Julie, who was at the nightly cocktail hour in the castle dungeon-it had been canceled the night before on account of Joey’s death, but Kozlov had now reinstituted it-and passed along the invitation.

“I’d love to!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you dying to find out what Mike’s ‘lady-friend’ is like?”

“What his lady-friend is like? Yes, sure. I suppose so. Sure.”

“Men,” Julie grumbled.

As it turned out, however, Clapper’s choice of lady-friend surprised-and, on reflection, pleased-both of them. It was, of all people, the bangled, gabby Madeleine Goodfellow, director of the museum, and they heard her before they saw her. She and Clapper were at a table on a little, whitewashed terrace in back, looking out over a picture-postcard view of beached fishing boats resting all askew on the sand at low tide, and her jolly cackle of a laugh easily penetrated the buzz of conversation in the restaurant, the click of balls at the pool table, and the whirring of the slot machines.

“It’s Madeleine!” Julie said, delighted. “How wonderful! She’s just what he needs. She’ll be so good for him.”

“And I suspect he’ll be pretty good for her, too. He’s a pretty solid guy, Julie, underneath it all.”

Over dinners of oxtail soup, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding, Gideon explained what he and Merrill had come up with, keeping the more grisly autopsy details to himself in deference to Julie’s and Madeleine’s sensibilities. Still, the conclusion was clear enough to all: Joey had been thrown from the catwalk (probably) and then bludgeoned (certainly) while he lay on the ground. Murdered.

Sobered, they talked about the two killings for a while, throwing around conjectures-obviously, Clapper had been keeping Madeleine abreast-but by the time dinner was finished, and the men were into their second pints (ginger beer for Clapper) and the women into their second half-pints, they livened up and conversation turned to other matters. Clapper and Madeleine were to be married in the fall and would live, not above the police station, but in a nineteenth-century house on Tresco that had been in Madeleine’s family since the 1930s and was now being restored. They would have a view over the famous old Abbey Gardens and out across the Sound toward St. Mary’s, from which they would be a mere ten minutes by boat. Gideon and Julie were enthusiastically invited to the wedding and enthusiastically accepted. They clinked glasses-Madeleine’s bangles jingled-and talked on and on, until after eleven.

All in all, it was a welcome break from the events of the last few days, and Julie and Gideon were utterly relaxed as they walked back up Garrison Hill to the castle, hand in hand.

“Well, one mystery is solved anyway,” Julie said.

“What would that be?”

“Remember when you showed up at the museum reception the other night, straight from the police station, and you were surprised that Madeleine already knew about the bones from the beach?”

Gideon nodded.

“I think I can make a pretty good guess who she heard it from.”

“You just might be on to something,” Gideon said.

When he awakened the next morning, Gideon was sorely in need of a break. The session at the morgue had taken more out of him than he’d realized, and he wondered once again at Merrill’s ability to seemingly draw strength from his gruesome work. He’d suggested to Julie that she might want to play hooky for just one morning and join him, but while she’d obviously been drawn to the idea, she felt that she owed it to Kozlov and the others to be there.

“What’s the morning’s topic?” Gideon had asked.

“Victor’s presenting his paper on…” She’d looked at her copy of the program, open on the bed. “‘… a three-tiered social-constructivist ecological paradigm derived from monistic-subjectivist epistemology, relativist ontology, and genuinely hermeneutic methodology.’ God help me.”

Gideon stared open-mouthed at her for a moment. “Oh, well, you sure wouldn’t want to miss that. Damn, sure wish I could be there.”

So he was on his own, which suited him on this particular morning. After breakfast at the Kavorna Cafe (he’d been coming long enough for the waitress to ask if he wanted “the usual,” which he did), he decided to take advantage of the pleasant weather and see some of the island’s Neolithic sites.

On a whim he’d inquired about bicycles at the Kavorna and been directed to Buccabu Bike Hire on the Strand. Once there he’d somewhat shamefacedly asked for the least-complicated, easiest-to-operate bicycle they had (it had been a while since he’d been on one).