Aaron Elkins: Murder In The Queen's armes

Bagshawe accepted his withdrawal with his usual equanimity, and Gideon went into the sitting room with the manila envelope of photographs. This rectangular room had been tacked onto the original structure a few centuries earlier, first to serve as a Methodist school, then as an antique shop, and finally as a second lounge for hotel guests. It was a pleasant, intimate place, much like the living room of a private home, with couches and armchairs, a television set, and cases of books.

The atmosphere was anything but intimate when he entered. Frawley was sitting in one of the armchairs, chewing his lip and looking wretched. Barry sat in the chair next to him, with an open magazine on his lap, staring nervously into space, no doubt anticipating his turn in the dining room. Arbuckle was in a third chair, near the silent television set, occasionally and inattentively turning a page of a large picture book in his lap: A History of Dorset. Near him Nate sprawled, propped upright against the back of a couch like a board, his skinny legs out straight before him and his hands thrust into his pockets. He looked less intoxicated but more ill than when Gideon had seen him last, and Gideon suspected he’d been happier before the administration of the guggle-muggle.

On the other couch, Abe and Julie sat together, talking quietly. On the fringes of the room, Andy Hinshore was bustling nervously about, straightening things, brushing off spotless tabletops, and generally fussing. A tray of tea things and several bottles of beer were on one of the tables, untouched. Gideon pulled a chair up to Julie and Abe, sat down, and opened the manila envelope.

"These are Randy’s photographs," he explained.

They both looked uncomprehendingly at him.

"It was your idea, Abe. The photographs that were in Randy’s camera-we wanted to see if that femur turned up in them."

"Oh," Abe said, and Julie smiled blankly, just with her lips. Gideon couldn’t blame them for their scant interest. An inconsistency on a find card didn’t seem terribly important at the moment.

They were large black-and-white photographs, about eight inches by twelve, and Gideon began to go slowly through them. It took him a little while to figure out what he was looking at, because the backgrounds seemed unfamiliar. But he soon realized that they were pictures not of the wedge-shaped trenches, but of the square test pit that had been dug near the shed and then abandoned. If he remembered correctly, it had been sunk near the beginning of the month, so at least the timing was right; Leon’s find card had been dated November 1.

In the twelfth photograph he found what he was looking for. The four pictures that followed showed different perspectives of the same object, but there was no mistaking what it was: the head, neck, and a little of the greater trochanter of a human left femur, lying in situ in the pit.

He handed it to Abe.

"What do you know?" Abe’s interest perked up at once. "So it’s real. And a steatite carving it’s definitely not, which means Leon was lying about it."

"It looks like it." Gideon turned in his chair. "Paul," he called, "didn’t you say you visited the site around the beginning of the month?"

"What?" Arbuckle surfaced vaguely from his book. "Yes, that’s right; on an audit."

"Do you remember anyone turning up a human femur?" He waved the photographs at him.

Arbuckle shook his head. "I was only there a couple of hours."

Gideon returned to the photographs. Something about the look of that bone was vaguely bothersome, but what? It was human, all right, and yet… what was wrong with it? It was a little too heavy, a little too-

The thought shook him like a jolt of electricity. This was from the test pit- the test pit! Not the Bronze Age barrow but the test pit, with its Riss glacial layer sixteen inches below the surface! This bone had been found at twenty-five inches, so it was probably two hundred thousand years old or even more; from the very dawn of Homo sapiens, the obscure, Middle Pleistocene dawn over which anthropologists still quarreled-and from which nothing but some artifacts and a few scattered, fragmentary cranial remains had ever been recovered; never- until now-a leg bone.

"Good God!" he exclaimed without meaning to.

"What is it?" Julie said, her hand at her throat. "What’s the matter?"

"It’s nothing," Gideon said quickly. "That is, nothing about the murders. But this bone-it’s fantastic! It’s a Second Interglacial femur!"

"Is that important?"

"Important?" Gideon couldn’t keep from laughing. "We hardly know anything about those people-we don’t even know if they were people, properly speaking, or the last of Homo erectus. We don’t know…"

He turned again to Arbuckle. "Paul! Did you hear what I’ve been saying? We’ve got a Mindel-Riss femur at Stonebarrow-a new Middle Pleistocene site!"

"That’s great, Gideon," Arbuckle said, and bent dully to his History of Dorset. He was in a very deep funk indeed, if news like this couldn’t bring him out of it.

Hinshore had glided noiselessly up behind Gideon to look overhis shoulder at what was causing all the excitement.

"Oh," he said, "A fossil, eh? Yes, I’ve seen that one before."

Gideon sat perfectly still, replaying the words. Then he looked up at Hinshore. "You’ve seen this before?"

"Why, of course. I recognize the little thingummy on the side." He indicated the bulge of the greater trochanter. Gideon stared at him, and Hinshore smiled broadly back.

"Where did you see this?" Abe asked.

"Well, I’m not sure. In the newspapers, I suppose, or on the telly."

"Andy, you never saw this on television," Gideon said.

"I didn’t?" He studied the photographs some more, but warily, evidently made uneasy by Gideon’s persistence. "Well, I guess I made a mistake then." He shrugged and moved off, but before he’d gone three steps, he snapped his fingers loudly and turned around. " I remember!" He looked at Arbuckle. "Why, that’s the fossil you had on the table, isn’t it?"

Arbuckle appeared to have drifted away from the conversation. "Sorry?"

"Don’t you remember? You were studying it, all absorbed, in the Tudor Room-" He faltered under Arbuckle’s vacant, ill-focused stare, then appealed to Gideon. "I was telling you about it, don’t you remember? You and Mr. Robyn. About how I’d almost put a mug down on it and Professor Arbuckle here nearly skinned me alive."

"I’m sorry, Andy," Arbuckle said mildly. "I didn’t know what you were referring to then, and I don’t know now."

" ’Course you do," Hinshore said exasperatedly. "It was the second night you were here-on your first trip, I mean. November first, it would have been. I remember because the month started on a Thursday, and the missus…"

November first. For the second time in two hours everything fell sharply into place, but it was a different fit. Gideon took a long, hard look at Arbuckle, his heart thumping.

"You killed him, didn’t you?" he said, forcing the words from a suddenly constricted throat.

For several long seconds Arbuckle stared at him. "Randy? What are you talking about?" He laughed, then frowned abruptly. "Gideon why are you saying this?"

"No, not Randy." Gideon said. "Leon."

" Leon? " He glanced hurriedly around the room for support. "What are you talking about? What are you trying to do?" The room was as still and silent as a painting. Arbuckle laughed again. "Oh no, you can’t-I see what you’re doing… I want to talk to Inspector Bagshawe!" he shouted, presumably for the ears of the constable in the hallway. His forehead was suddenly oily with sweat. "Why would I give him CPR if I was trying to kill him? Tell me that." The question was thrown to the room at large.

"I think I know the answer to that, Paul." The sitting room was, if anything, more hushed than before, and Gideon’s heart beat louder than ever in his ears. At the edge of his vision he saw Inspector Bagshawe heave noiselessly into the doorway and remain there, with the constable just behind him.