Aaron Elkins: Murder In The Queen's armes

"I think," Gideon said, "that you gave him CPR because when you’d killed him a few minutes before, you’d gotten blood on your clothes, or your hands, or maybe you’d left your fingerprints on him. By leaning all over him again after he was dead, you had a credible explanation for any of that."

"But-that’s patently ridiculous." Arbuckle’s round glasses fogged as suddenly as if they had been sprayed, and he took them off to wipe them with a handkerchief. Without spectacles his blue eyes were washed-out and expressionless, the disturbing, ineffectual eyes of a scholar, a recluse. "I tried to save his life, and you’re making it sound as if-"

"Come on, Paul. The bridge of his nose was rammed two inches into his cranium-it didn’t take a physical anthropologists to know he was dead. There was no possible chance he was alive, and you knew it."

Nate had not yet moved or even opened his eyes. Now, without doing either, he spoke, seemingly to himself, in very much his normal voice. "I don’t believe it. Arbuckle? Jesus H. Christ."

Arbuckle, stolidly ignoring this, put the wire-rimmed glasses back on his face, meticulously adjusting each earpiece, then wiped his forehead with his crumpled handkerchief. He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them, he stared stiffly at Gideon for a few more seconds. Then he sagged against the chair, seeming to grow smaller, to deflate. A History of Dorset slid from his lap and slapped against the floor.

"I never, never meant it to happen," he said. "All I was trying to do was to get that"-he turned toward the sprawling Nate Marcus, and his timid, viscous voice quivered- "that coarse, mindless idiot off the dig!" He glared at Nate, who remained relaxed and unresponsive in his chair; then he continued more quietly: "I arranged the Poundbury thing, I admit that, but…the deaths…my God, I never meant… it never occurred to me-"

"And the dog?" Gideon said.

"Dog?"

"In the meadow."

Arbuckle squirmed, looked more embarrassed than guilty. "Well, yes, the dog. But really, that was Leon’s idea, believe me… I just happened to know a little about hunting dogs…"

At his point Bagshawe stepped pachydermously into the room. "Dr. Arbuckle, would you mind stepping outside with me, please, sir?"

"Oh," Arbuckle said. "Of course."

In the total silence he rose on rickety legs, his pudgy features somehow smudged and out of focus, like a photograph taken at too slow a speed. Gideon dropped his eyes, unable to look at him. Bagshawe stood aside to let the archaeologist out the door, then followed him.

From the hallway the rumbling chant could be heard clearly.

"Paul Arbuckle, I arrest you for the murder of Leon Hillyer. You will be taken to the police station in Bridport and so charged. Anything you say now or then will be taken down and may be used in evidence…"

Abe put down his cheese-and-pickle sandwich and leaned back in the chair. "Let me get this straight. It was Leon who killed Randy, and Paul who killed Leon?" He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. " Oy, I can’t believe I’m saying such things. And it was really Paul Arbuckle behind the hoax with Pummy?"

"That’s right," Gideon said.

"That much I can follow," Julie said, working on a ham-and-cheese sandwich. "Where I get lost is why. "

Gideon had been having a little trouble with that part too, but he had just concluded a mutually informative telephone conversation with Bagshawe, who had called at 11:30 p.m. after witnessing a confession from Arbuckle, which had been made over the objections of a solicitor obtained in his behalf. While Gideon had been downstairs talking at the desk telephone, Hinshore had delivered a midnight meal of sandwiches and beer to Abe’s room, and they had fallen on it hungrily.

"I guess it would help if I started at the beginning," Gideon said.

"I guess it would," said Julie.

Gideon, who was ravenous, washed down the last of a roast-beef sandwich with a swig of lager from the bottle, and picked up a sandwich of sliced cucumber and butter. "Okay, the beginning was November first. Leon was working alone in the test pit and he turned up that femur."

"And wrote up a find card," Abe said, "like he was supposed to."

"Right. And Randy photographed it, not having any idea of what it was. But Arbuckle, who was wandering around on his audit, saw the thing and realized exactly what it was-not Bronze Age but Middle Pleistocene. He got Leon to give him the bone-I’m not sure whether he paid him, or just talked him into it, or what-and he took it away with him, back to the hotel. That’s when Andy saw him gloating over it."

"I see," Abe said, putting down his own bottle of beer. "The find card just got left quietly and forgotten. Frawley never saw it, and the bone neither, so it never got put in the field catalog. About that at least he was telling the truth."

"Well, I don’t see," Julie said. "What could he do with the bone anyway, no matter how important it is? And what does it have to do with the killings? And the hoax? And-"

"Let’s start with Pummy," Gideon said. "First of all, you have to remember that Paul is fanatically interested in Middle Pleistocene Man-it’s his whole life. Well, here he is, marking time, moping around this Bronze Age site-"

"Boringly recent by his standards."

"And he can hardly wait to get back to his own Middle Pleistocene dig in Dijon. Then, out of the blue comes a two-hundred-thousand-year-old bone not even two feet below the surface-and he and Leon are the only people in the world who know they might be standing on the most important early-man site ever found. So-"

"Let me guess," Abe said. "Paul found out that Leon had it in for Nathan because of his dissertation problems, and he convinced him that it would be very nice if it should come to pass that Nathan gets fired-in a hurry." With a finger, he pushed the final corner of his sandwich into his mouth. "So they stole Pummy from the museum, and Leon buried it and fooled Nathan-not the smartest man in the world, I’m starting to think-into proclaiming his wonderful discovery, and so on and so forth."

"That’s it. Paul wanted the dig terminated as quickly as possible, before someone stumbled on another early-man bone or artifact. Then, in a year or two, when it had blown over, he was going to reopen the site under his own direction, and step right into the very first rank of Middle Pleistocene archaeologists."

"So my idea about Nate being set up was right?" Julie asked.

"Oh? Was that your idea?" said Gideon. "Really?"

"You’re darn tootin’. I believe you thought it was unnecessarily rococo."

"A simple question," Abe said. "What’s all this got to do with Randy getting murdered?"

"Well, it was Randy who actually stole the skull from Dorchester. Leon was smart enough to keep his hands clean of that. He talked Randy into it for a lark, and then, later on, when Randy had second thoughts, they argued about it up on the fell. Randy told him he was going to tell me about it that night, and I guess they got into scuffling. The mallet was right there, and Leon broke his arm with it-accidentally, maybe; who knows? Then, in a panic, he grabbed him by the throat to keep him from screaming and wound up strangling him. After that he rolled him over the cliff. In the fog, nobody saw a thing." Gideon shrugged. "The whole thing’s guesswork, you realize, since the two of them are dead, but it sounds like the truth to me."

Julie shuddered. "So Paul had nothing to do with that?"

"Not in a direct way, no. He claims he was horrified."

"But horrified as he was," Abe put in, "it sure didn’t keep him from killing Leon."

"It sure didn’t. That part’s still a little confused, but from what Bagshawe could make out, Leon started to get panicky tonight-again. This was after they thought the dog had taken me out of the picture, you understand"-a sudden contraction around his heart made him reach out to squeeze Julie’s hand-"and you, too. They argued in the Tudor Room, and when Leon started going to pieces- which I can believe, because he was pretty close to it when I pinned him down this afternoon-Arbuckle panicked too and hit him with the poker."