Philip Kerr: Esau

Swift moved closer and Jack put his arms around her waist, squeezed her gently, and put his mouth on hers as if he wanted her to breathe life back into him.

Minutes passed. Then Swift drew back and looked closely at him as if reminding herself of what it was she liked about his face.

She hardly hesitated. She stood up, unzipped her skirt, and then dropped it to the floor to reveal, with what Jack considered an impressive lack of panties, the upturned golden divot at the nadir of her belly.

‘I thought you said you weren’t Sharon Stone,’ he said and pressed his face close to her body.

She brushed his hair with her fingers, pleased that he still found her so desirable.

He followed her into the hallway, his eyes fixed on the perfect curves of her bare behind. She mounted the stairs to the bedroom, glancing back teasingly to make sure he was coming after her. It was then she caught sight of the wooden box he had brought with him.

She stopped dead in her tracks.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘What about my present?’

Turning on the step, she sat down and let him push his head between her legs before gathering his hair in her hands and pulling him away.

‘After,’ he said, bringing a hand up between her legs.

Laughing, she mounted another step to escape his clumsy caresses. ‘Oh no. Tribute first. Then reward.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ groaned Jack.

‘What? So you can change your mind about giving it to me?’ She was delighting in her own childishness. ‘No way. Besides, you do want my full attention in bed, don’t you? I can hardly make love to you properly if my mind is on something else all the time.’

‘You don’t understand. Swift. That’s just the point. That’s exactly what I’m worried about — having your full attention.’

Swift pushed him gently back toward the hallway.

‘You’ve got a lot to learn about female psychology,’ she told him, amused by his obvious discomfiture. ‘You should have left your present in the car.’

‘Damn right,’ he said and shook his head ruefully. ‘But look here. The thing is... this is not the kind of present... it’s not like some Indian tea tray. Or a rug.’

‘That much I can see for myself.’

‘What I mean to say is that it’s something scientific and, as such, well, perhaps now is not the right time.’

‘Now you’ve really got me intrigued,’ she laughed. ‘What is it?’

‘Shit.’ Jack conceded defeat.

He retreated toward the door and collected the wooden box off the floor.

‘You have absolutely no idea how much trouble I had getting this through customs,’ he grumbled.

‘It’s a fossil, isn’t it? Oh, Jack, you’ve brought me a fossil.’

She followed him into the kitchen, where he laid the box on the table and then found a knife with which to pry off the lid. Lifting it off he removed a handful of straw to reveal what she immediately recognized as the cranium of a hominoidean skull.

Swift shivered with excitement.

‘Oh God,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It’s a skull.’

‘Go ahead,’ he urged. ‘Take it out. It won’t break. It’s really quite sturdy.’

‘Wait, wait, wait.’

She ran out of the kitchen and when she came back she was wearing her skirt again.

Jack tried not to look disappointed, and soon her excitement began to feel infectious, and he was keen to see exactly what she would make of his discovery.

Carefully, like a mother picking up her baby for the first time. Swift lifted the skull out of its packing case and stared at it. After a moment or two, she said, ‘Jack, it’s beautiful.’

‘You really think so? There’s a piece of lower jawbone in the box. I found that later. And I also brought you a sample of dirt and rock. To help you date it.’

‘How did you know about that?’ Swift’s eyes never left the skull. ‘About geochronology?’

Jack shrugged. ‘It shouldn’t surprise you. Twenty-five years crawling over rocks. I’ve picked up some geology along the way.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said absently.

He folded his arms and leaned against the plain wooden worktop, enjoying her fascination. After a protracted silence, he grinned and said, ‘You look like Hamlet.’

‘You stare at it long enough and it speaks to you,’ she murmured. ‘Just like poor Yorick.’

‘So what’s the verdict?’

‘The verdict?’

‘Is it interesting?’

‘You spend most of your fossil-hunting life straining your eyes, looking for odd-shaped fragments. You could go round-shouldered and then blind looking for small pieces of petrified bone. Shattered bits of anatomy. A jigsaw puzzle strewn on the ground. Maybe two or three jigsaw puzzles. A few zygomatics. A piece of jawbone. Half a maxilla if you’re really lucky. But this? This is fantastic. Jack. Nearly a whole skull. And virtually undamaged. It’s the sort of find that people like me dream about.’

‘You really think it might be important?’

‘Jack, I’ve never seen a find that’s in as good condition as this is.’

She shook her head as she tried to communicate her excitement, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

‘It’s fabulous. Where did you find it?’

He told her about the avalanche, how it had killed Didier Lauren, and how he had fallen into the bergschrund and found the skull on the floor of a cavern deep inside the mountain. He did not tell her that it had been on Machhapuchhare, not Annapurna, where he had found it. As far as the Nepalese authorities were concerned, the accident had taken place on Annapurna, and the fewer people who knew the truth about what had really happened, the better.

‘Just lying on the floor, you say?’

Jack nodded.

‘Just like the Neanderthal discovery,’ she breathed. ‘That was back in 1856. Quarry workers found a skull on the floor of a cave.’

‘Is this one Neanderthal too?’

‘This? Nothing Like. This is much more interesting. Tell me, how far up the mountain was this cave?’

‘ ’Bout six thousand metres,’ he said evasively. ‘I was damn near entombed there myself. Now are you going to tell me what it is, or am I going to have to wait for your paper in Nature?’

‘Paper?’ Swift’s tone was scathing. ‘I might get a whole book out of this. A whole career, maybe. You know this couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m facing a tenure review.’

She turned the skull in her hands as if it were a crystal ball, but one designed not to foretell the future but to illuminate the past.

‘To start with it’s big, like some kind of giant primate. Do you see these temporal and occipital crests on the front and rear of the cranium? They’re quite reminiscent of Paranthropus robustus — the South African australopithecines. Only this is strange. The sagittal crest is much higher than one would have expected.’

She paused, raising the skull to the strip light on the ceiling to look at its bony interior.

‘As is the cranial cavity. That might suggest a larger brain size. Larger than a gorilla’s, at any rate. But not as large as a man’s.’

She faced the front of the skull, smoothing the thin brow ridge over the eyes with her thumb like a sculptor.

‘The face is short and not at all apelike. While the teeth — again these teeth are not particularly apelike, except for the size.’

Turning the skull upside down, she examined the underside of the exposed upper jaw.

‘Also the dental arcade is parabolic and not U-shaped. Then there’s the enamel on these molars. It looks quite thick. Those two factors alone would persuade me that this is not an ape. Apart from the huge size of the teeth — honestly. Jack, I’ve never seen a specimen with teeth quite as large as these — I might have placed another tick in the box beside Paranthropus robustus . The teeth are certainly similar in shape to those of a robustus : the cheek teeth larger and flatter, while the front teeth, especially these canines, are proportionally smaller. But no robustus had teeth quite so big.’