Aaron Elkins - Murder In The Queen's armes

"What did he say about Randy?" Julie asked.

"What about his mysterious find?" asked Gideon. "Would he tell you what it is?"

"Not a word. Only that it’s going to ‘blow my mind.’ Feh, where did he learn to talk like this?"

"Abe," Gideon said, "do you suppose it’s possible that he’s really got something-"

"To prove what?" Abe flared up peevishly. "That Agamemnon invaded Charmouth? In what, a floating wooden horse? Don’t be ridiculous. What did they teach you in archaeology?"

"All right, all right," Gideon said hastily. "I’m not an archaeologist, remember?"

"That you don’t got to tell me," Abe snapped. Then he patted the back of Gideon’s hand. "So why am I mad at you? Nathan’s the one who’s making a fool of himself." He looked at his watch. "Come on, it’s after nine. Let’s get the others and go. It’s a big hill, and my arthritis is bothering me. Nathan will meet us there. Good-bye, Julie," he said, and turned dejectedly to leave. "I wish I wasn’t here. Who asked me to come?"

Gideon raised his eyes bleakly to Julie as he began to follow Abe out the door.

She stood on tiptoe to place a quick kiss on his cheek. "Be careful. Both of you seem to keep forgetting there’s a murderer up there."

A murderer? Try five. He’d been telling himself none of them looked like killers, but now the whole crew looked guilty as hell.

Gideon and Abe, flanked by Robyn and Arbuckle, had found Nate Marcus in the shed, seated at the cleaned-off worktable with his staff. All the dig members looked up, blinking into the daylight when the door was opened, and Gideon was afforded a frozen, snapshot glance. They might have been a cast assembled by a film director and told to look as edgy and disreputable as they possibly could.

Sandra Mazur was posturing exaggeratedly as she smoked a cigarette, holding it out in front of her between two rigidly stiffened fingers and theatrically sucking in her gaunt cheeks as she pulled in great lungfuls of smoke.

Next to her, Leon Hillyer picked nervously at his golden beard and smiled an unconvincing welcome to Gideon.

Jack Frawley’s face looked like soggy, gray plaster of Paris, sunken in on itself and flabby-jowled. His basset’s eyes slid and shifted like beads of mercury, from the blank tabletop to Nate, to the newcomers, and back to the tabletop.

Even the ingenuous Barry Fusco, with all his farm-boy freshness, looked shifty, his all-American grin a nervous parody. And Nate was the most blatantly agitated of all. He was literally chewing on the knuckles of his left hand, and when the door opened, he jumped to his feet, wiping his hand on the side of his pants. His face was greenish, and his eyes were sunken, as glazed as a couple of four-minute eggs.

It was obvious that Bagshawe had indeed come and told them about the murder, and Nate’s first words confirmed it. "Sorry, meant to meet you at the gate," he said, sounding short of breath, "but the police just left, and we’ve been talking about…what they told us. It looks like they’ve found my missing student. He’s been, uh… killed."

Gideon could feel him flinch away from the word murdered, but the archaeologist recovered himself as he spoke. Brusquely brushing aside Robyn’s and Arbuckle’s startled ejaculations and Abe’s cluck of sympathy, he continued more firmly, even aggressively; Nate never went very long without taking the offensive. "The cops are down on the beach poking around, but they’re coming back, so let’s get on with it."

As Gideon trooped back out with the others into the gray morning, he found Stonebarrow Fell, which had seemed so lovely two weeks before, ugly and sinister. The hacked-out trenches with their stark, vertical sides and their dew-concealed piles of gray dirt looked raw and naked, and somehow shocking, like open graves. Far below, beyond the fell’s sharp edge, the sea was mole gray, the same color as the sky, and sullen-looking whitecaps scudded on the water’s surface. As they walked in a solemn file over the broad crown of the hill, the wind lowed forlornly around them, driving long, shuddering ripples through the dense grass.

He really was depressed. Since when did digs remind him of graves? He realized as he plodded on that it was more than the weather, more than even the murder, that was making him so gloomy and apprehensive

…something entirely different. For an idea was taking unwelcome root, an unsettling idea that he knew exactly what Nate’s "astonishing and sensational" discovery was. And he wished to hell it had popped up before this, when he might have done something about it.

They stopped at a small rectangular canvas-draped pit a hundred feet from the main trenches, in a rough area of bushes, vines, and chalky rock. Nate began at once.

"As all of you know," he said in a shrill, rapid monotone, "the Wessex culture has long been viewed as a manifestation of the pan-European trade and travel of the Bronze Age, and is believed to have arrived in Britain in slow stages from Britany-this notwithstanding the three hundred-year difference in radiocarbon dates between Breton and Wessex graves. But be that as it may…"

It was evident that Nate had prepared this speech-he didn’t talk like this naturally-and that he was hardly listening to himself. Gideon studied him; unless he was shamming-and his brash, outspoken personality didn’t lend itself to pretense-he was genuinely upset. Although he’d spoken rather harshly of Randy’s lackadaisical ways, it was apparent that the news of his death had stunned him.

"It is also well known that the Bretons were and are a race of round-heads," Nate droned on. "Of brachycephals, as Dr. Oliver would say." At the sound of his name, Gideon snapped to attention. "And for that matter, the immediate predecessors of the Wessex people, the Beakers, were also notably brachycephalic. Thus, we have always assumed the

Wessex also to be round-headed. Also so they are, in the later Wessex sites.

"But here," Nate said, and now the old, challenging electricity crackled in his speech; his eyes came up from the canvas-covered pit to engage those of the others. "Here at Stonebarrow Fell we’ve got the earliest known Wessex site-maybe the very first. What would you say if we found someone here who wasn’t brachycephalic at all, but long -headed- dolichocephalic -just like the Mycenaeans of 1700 b.c.?"

Gideon’s heart seemed to flop and plummet. Now there wasn’t any question about where Nate was leading, incredible as it seemed. The excavation crew fidgeted in subdued excitement. All, that was, except Frawley, who, with his head down and his hands clasped very much like a grave-side mourner’s, chewed somberly on his cheek. Abe and Arbuckle stood there looking stoic and patient, and Robyn’s sole reaction appeared to be the raising by one millimeter of his left eyebrow.

"What would you say," Nate went on, seemingly made more contentious by the lack of response, "if the guy buried here wasn’t just long-headed, but was so long-headed that was outside the range of every- every – known Beaker or Breton skull, but easily within the range of the Mycenaeans?"

Without waiting for a reply, he reached down, pulled up the canvas, and flung it away from him. It sailed directly into Barry, who grabbed it, snickered nervously, blushed, and stood there holding it.

"There," Nate said throatily.

Everyone’s eyes were riveted on the two-by-three-foot pit. Nate, seemingly unable to stand the momentary silence, burst into a low, agitated babble. "Would you believe that was sticking right out of the ground-part of it anyway? Huh? Abe? Gideon? Englishmen have been walking over it for a hundred years, probably, and nobody ever noticed it!" Here there was a lancing, triumphant glance at Robyn. "The ground around it was weathered away, and you could barely see it. I almost didn’t see it myself; I just stumbled onto it…"