Aaron Elkins - Murder In The Queen's armes

"Yes. Things are pretty messy."

"Messy? What messy?"

"Well, it’s not just the inquiry. One of the students has been murdered-"

" Murdered? God in heaven, you’re telling me that-" Abe’s voice was drowned in a squeal of telephonic pip-pip-pips. "Gideon, I got no more coins for this telephone. They make you crazy the way they eat up the money in front of your eyes. I’ll see you at five-fifty-eight. Give my love to Julie-"

The line pipped again, gave one imperious, terminal cluck, and went dead.

Gideon and Julie had the afternoon to themselves, and they spent it walking east over the deserted, rocky beach from Charmouth toward Golden Cap, along the base of the blue lias cliffs. It was the kind of time they had dreamed of when they planned the trip: mesmerized into a tranquil stupor by the sound of the surf, they wandered aimlessly along the shore in the thin November sunlight, talking now of one subject, now of another-all of it desultory and haphazard, and lost as soon as the next thundering wave washed their minds clean. Now and then they kissed gently or simply embraced without a word. They held hands most of the time and paused frequently to look at the sea, or so that one of them could show the other some small, perfect spiral of a petrified sea creature embedded in the rocks at their feet.

"Gideon, is that Stonebarrow Fell up there?" Julie said suddenly.

"Where?"

"Up there, where you’ve been staring for the last five minutes."

"Have I? Yes, I guess Stonebarrow would be up there, just about straight above us."

She squeezed his hand. "Don’t think unpleasant thoughts; it’s too lovely here." She moved closer to him and made a little motion with her shoulders. He was barely conscious of it, and couldn’t have described it, but he knew what it meant: Hug me.

He put his arm around her and squeezed. "I’m not thinking unpleasant thoughts."

"Yes, you are. You’re worried about poor Nate Marcus and what’s going to happen to him tomorrow."

He smiled. "Yes, you’re right. Pretty close, anyway. Okay, no more unpleasant thoughts." He squeezed her once more, and they began to walk again, with his arm over her shoulder and his fingers resting lightly on the cool nape of her neck.

Pretty close, but not quite on the mark. What he was thinking about was Randy Alexander. If-just if- Alexander had been flung from the top of Stonebarrow Fell, he would have landed immediately in front of where they were. And immediately in front of them was a semicircular basin of cloudy, stagnant-looking sea water, about two hundred feet in diameter, formed by a great, curving reef that spread seaward from the base of the cliff. In it was a lot of algae and some floating debris. As Gideon watched, the tide, which had been flooding for some hours, began to retreat, flowing out of the lagoon and taking with it a large, rotten log, presumably to be carried out to sea.

As he walked, he looked more closely at the basin. It seemed to be fifteen or twenty feet deep at its center. More than deep enough. Kneeling, he touched his fingers to the water. Warm, far warmer than the ocean, as was to be expected.

He flicked the water from his fingers and stood up. He had solved Merrill’s little mystery. Assuming that Alexander’s body had fallen from Stonebarrow Fell, it would have landed smack in the middle of this stagnant, warm pond, in which decomposition would have proceeded far more quickly than in the colder open sea. The body might easily have lain there in the lagoon for two weeks before being floated-just like the log, already fifty feet offshore-out into the Atlantic, to be beached by the current at Seaton… looking just like one of Merrill’s typical four-weekers.

Immigrant pushcart peddler metamorphosed into world-renowned anthropologist was the way one of television’s more literate interviewers had once introduced Professor Abraham Irving Goldstein, and the phrase, literally true, was as good a nutshell description of Abe as Gideon knew. In 1924, a seventeen-year-old freshly arrived from Russia, speaking nothing but Yiddish, he was hawking thread and ribbons from a pushcart on Brooklyn’s Pitkin Avenue. A decade later he had his Ph. D. from Columbia and was embarking on a career that would make him one of the world’s foremost cultural anthropologists, first at Columbia, then at the University of Wisconsin-where he’d been Gideon’s professor, and Nate Marcus’s as well-and finally at the University of Washington.

Through it all he’d managed to keep his immigrant pushcart peddler’s speech patterns. Whether these still came naturally sixty years later, or were part of his "delightful panoply of studied eccentricities" (as the same interviewer had called them) was a moot question. Abe himself professed innocence. ("Accent? What kind accent?")

Gideon hadn’t seen him for a few months now, and he watched with a trace of anxiety as the deep-blue train from London drew smoothly to the platform at Axminster. His old friend and mentor, now long-retired, was getting along in years, to the point at which one always wondered whether even a short space of time might not produce some sad and irreversible change, some awful omen of approaching decrepitude.

He needn’t have worried. In the lit interior of the car that stopped directly in front of him he saw Abe get to his feet, sprightly and cheerful, ruffle the hair of a patently enchanted five-year-old boy in the seat opposite, and deliver a courtly bow to a blond, pretty woman, obviously the boy’s mother. When he shuffled down the aisle with his bag, Gideon could see that his eyes had all their usual sparkle, or maybe just a little more than usual; that would be the pretty young mother.

Abe was a thin, active man-Gideon had once made the mistake of calling him "spry" within his hearing-whose nervous energy and shock of frizzy white hair gave him a distinct resemblance to Artur Rubinstein. Years ago, when Gideon had been walking with him during an anthropological conference in Boston, they had been approached by a teenager who shyly asked for Abe’s autograph. Abe, who had been the subject of magazine articles and television programs, complied with a flourish, and the boy watched him with adulation in his eyes. But when he looked at the signature, his face fell; he had thought, he stammered, that Abe was the great pianist. Abe had responded in character: He had put his arm around the boy’s shoulder, drawn his head close, and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, "Ah, but Abraham Irving Goldstein is my real name."

When he clambered down to the Axminster platform, he did it with painful slowness-he was increasingly troubled with arthritis-and when Gideon embraced him, he was keenly aware of just how frail the old man’s body was.

"Abe, you are all right, aren’t you?" he asked, then suddenly laughed.

"So what’s so funny?"

"I’m laughing because I know exactly what you’re going to say."

"What am I going to say?"

"You’re going to say, ‘So why shouldn’t I be all right?’ "

Abe smiled. "So why shouldn’t I say it?"

They talked of other things on the short drive to Char-mouth, and it was not until they joined Julie that Gideon told him about his visit to Stonebarrow Fell, about the murder of Randy Alexander, about his lagoon hypothesis, and, in passing, about the disappearance of the Poundbury calvarium.

He had talked through a round of predinner sherries in front of the fire in the Tudor Room, and then a second round, to which Andy Hinshore contributed an accompaniment of pate and bread.

When they thanked him, he grinned. "It does my heart good to see people enjoying themselves in this room. Just think, people have been sitting before this fireplace in comradeship and warmth-this very fireplace-for five hundred years. Five centuries ago, someone stood here, sheltered from the night, just as I stand here, with his hand on this stone, just as mine is. It’s almost as if…as if I’m communicating with him, like."