Murder in the Queen's Armes (16 page)

"Does he really?" Gideon said, eyeing Bowser, who was quivering and twitching with convincing blood lust.

Again the colonel laughed. "I’m sure you’ve noticed. Don’t worry, though. There isn’t any way he can get through." He shook the gate in the fence, jangling a sturdy padlock on a heavy chain. "I take extreme precautions. It’s perfectly safe. Enjoy your walk, and don’t pay any attention to him on your way back. He gets accustomed to you after a time or two."

As they twisted their way through the stile to enter the open country, Bowser thundered again, deprived of his rightful prey, but Colonel Conley tugged on his collar and said, "Bad show, Bowser," and the dog sat down, mumbling and drooling. Julie and Gideon walked a few hundred yards into the meadow, out of sight and sound of the dog, and then Julie sat suddenly on a log and started thumbing through
Scenic Dorset Walks.

"Are we lost already?" Gideon asked.

"No, I’m looking for an alternate way back."

"And disappoint Bowser?"

"You better believe it." She chewed the corner of her lip and wrinkled her nose. Strange. Gideon had always thought nose-wrinkling ridiculous and unsightly; on Julie it devastated him.

"No," she said, "we have to come back through Barr’s Lane unless we want to go way out of our way and walk along A-35." She closed the booklet. "Uh-uh. What kind of country walk would that be?"

"Right. Besides, don’t worry about Bowser. I had him in the palm of my hand." He sat down next to her on the log. "Hey, just look at where we are. Can the world be all bad if there are still places like this?"

"This is Dyne Meadow, according to the book. It
is
nice, isn’t it?"

They were in a green and gently undulating grassy field bordered on one side by a dark copse of pines, and on another by a sparkling, tree-lined stream. To the west they could see a ruined stone barn around which grazed a few placid cattle; and to the north, half a mile off, a farmer plowed his field near a stark, whitewashed farmhouse. The noise of his tractor was like the far-off, lazy buzzing of a bee. It might have been 1940 or 1920. If not for the tractor, it could have been 1720.

"How lovely," Julie sighed. "Let’s just stay here forever."

They stayed, in fact, half an hour, just drinking in the peace, and then, pacified themselves, proceeded hand in hand.

As Gideon had predicted, it was extremely muddy, especially near the stiles, where the ground had been churned into glue by cattle hooves. But it was Dorset mud, of which the locals were justly proud. Gray and gloopy as it looked and felt, it was solid enough so that it hardly wet their feet, yet liquid enough to slide from their shoes without caking. The lowering sky, while it threatened to burst with rain at any moment, held off, and the moisture-heavy air was fragrant with Dorset’s grassy smell.

Rights of way in rural England are not quite what Americans imagine them to be. They are unlikely to be posted, and they frequently do not consist of paths visible to the naked eye. Following a guidebook, one simply skirts the western flank of this coppice of larches, bears slightly right, and walks through the northern end of that beech spinney, then crosses the gravel road, bearing north-northeast at a spot one hundred yards west of the signposts to Knickers-on-Tyne, just beyond a lightning-shattered pine tree. Even with a map, one is likely to spend a lot of time lost and trespassing. After a while Julie and Gideon settled for following the instructions in
Scenic Dorset Walks
in only the most approximate fashion, taking care to give plenty of room to the bulls they occasionally saw, and to avoid walking over worked fields that weren’t supposed to be there.

They never managed to find Wootton Fitzpaine, but they walked through quiet woods and over grassy hills from which there were misty views of rolling, impossibly green countryside quilted into squares and trapezoids by trim, winter-brown hedgerows, and dotted by scattered groups of two or three thatch-roofed old buildings. They climbed over wooden stiles and walked through little white picket gates (who kept them all so spruce and freshly painted?) with gateposts set neatly in the middles of hedges, and they crossed little burbling brooks on footbridges consisting of a single plank. And always there was the fragrance of rain-wet grass. They saw no other people except farmers, and those at great distances, but there were cows and sheep and great black birds that squawked overhead.

"Are those crows?" Gideon asked. "Or ravens?" His voice startled them both; they had been walking in easy, companionable silence for almost an hour.

"Let me know if one lands on a ruler, and I’ll tell you."

"Come again?"

"The crows are a few inches smaller. Otherwise I can’t tell; at least not from here. There’s something about the tails, I think."

"Some park ranger you are. I thought you knew all about birds."

"But I’m not a park ranger anymore. I got married, remember? And, being a good, old-fashioned wife, I left my lovely job in lovely Olympic National Park to go where my husband went."

"Yea," Gideon said, "even unto San Mateo, California." He said it lightly, but it was something that worried them both. When they had met, she had been senior ranger at the park in Washington and he’d been teaching at Northern California University, where he’d been made full professor the year before. They ran into trouble at once. There had been no ranger jobs for Julie anywhere near San Francisco Bay, and the newly opened Port Angeles campus of the University of Washington—the first university on the Olympic Peninsula—did not yet have a graduate anthropology department to which Gideon might apply. Somebody’s career had to be interrupted for a while.

There had been a lot of discussions, but no arguments. To both of them, the idea of Gideon doing anything but teaching anthropology was absurd, so Julie had resigned her position—or rather, taken a leave of absence, just to be on the safe side. They had justified the decision on the grounds that Gideon’s salary was the greater of the two, but Gideon suspected that underneath, she really was an old-fashioned wife for whom the husband’s career came first. And underneath, Gideon knew very well that he liked it that way, closet chauvinist that he was. At any rate, when they got back from Europe, Julie would face the unenviable prospect of job-hunting; she wasn’t old-fashioned enough to want to stay home and take care of him.

That he liked, too, so maybe there was hope for him. On the other hand, what was there he
didn’t
like about her?

"I’m glad I quit," she said a little timidly. "Being with you is everything to me. You know that, don’t you?"

"Yes. I know." He squeezed her hand, trying to put everything into it.

"Good." She squeezed back. "Now tell me what that telephone call to the
Times
was about. And about what happened at Stonebarrow Fell this morning."

While they walked with loosely linked fingers in a dimly lit wood of mixed beech and pine, he told her.

"That’s crazy," she said. "Why would a reputable archaeologist like Nate Marcus do something as stupid as that? You said he’s a little odd, but you never said anything to suggest he wasn’t ethical."

"I think he is ethical, even if his judgment is off sometimes and his mouth is a couple of sizes too big. To tell the truth, I don’t think he did plant the thing. But Robyn thinks so; I could see it in his face, and I can’t blame him. Paul probably thinks so too, but who can tell with him?"

"Gideon," she said, "can I ask you something? If your friend Nate is a good archaeologist, the way you keep saying he is in spite of everything, how could he have been fooled? You recognized Poundbury Man right away. Why didn’t he?"

"Good question, but you have to remember that I’m a physical anthropologist and he’s an archaeologist. He’d heard of Pummy, sure, but he wouldn’t know it from any other skull you put in front of him—just the way I might not recognize some famous piece of pottery that he’d spot from a hundred yards away. It’s worse for him, really, because all skulls look pretty much alike if they’re not your business."

"But why didn’t he recognize the other things—the compaction of the earth, those things…."

"That’s harder to explain away. I guess he was so intent on proving his theory, so overjoyed at what he thought was evidence, that he ignored all the signs—refused to let himself see them. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened."

"I suppose so," she said doubtfully. It was a while before she spoke again. "But I’m still mixed up. If Nate didn’t put it there, who did?"

That was the question, all right. If not Nate, who? Frawley? What could he possibly gain from it? It was Nate’s dig, not his, and Frawley didn’t go along with the Mycenaean theory anyway. One of the students? For what possible reason? No, the only person who could conceivably benefit from the bogus find was Nate. And Nate, as wacky as he could be sometimes, would never try to pull off something like this. No matter how much he might have changed. Or would be?

They emerged from the trees near the crown of a long green hill that sloped gently away below them, idyllic and inviting, toward another holly-green copse at its base. A soft, cold mist had begun to drift around them—under the trees, they had failed to notice it—and they slipped into their hooded ponchos before continuing.

"You know what I keep wondering?" Gideon asked. "Where the heck is the
Times
getting its information? They knew about the inquiry, they knew about the skull—"

"Obviously from someone on the dig."

"No, not so obviously. How could anyone on the dig know I was going to visit the site? Except for you, Abe was the only one who had any idea I was coming, and he certainly didn’t call the
Times
from Sequim, Washington."

"Are you sure? Have you asked him about it?"

"Of course not." Then he smiled. "Never mind ‘of

course not.’ With Abe, you never know, do you? I’ll ask him, but how could he? And why?"

They had gone a third of the way down the hill when the mist congealed into a pelting, freezing downpour as abruptly as if someone had turned on an ice-cold, needle-spray shower.

"Time to go back," Gideon said unnecessarily. He could hardly hear himself with the hammering of the rain on his hood.

Julie nodded, her face running with water. "Maybe Bowser will be off sleeping in his doghouse in weather like this, and we can sneak by."

"Doghouse?" Gideon shouted over the rain. "He probably lives in a cave strewn with bloody bones."

   WHEREVER Bowser had been, his gigantic nose told him when they’d reached the foot of Barr’s Lane, and he came charging viciously through the rain, throwing his heavy body against the wire fence again and again. Gideon had been expecting it this time, but even so, the hairs on the back of his neck went up, and he and Julie moved by the monstrous animal with all due speed.

Chilled through, and with their feet soaked, they had hoped for a hot lunch at the Queen’s Armes. Too late they remembered that Hinshore and his wife went to Bridport on Thursdays to do their weekly shopping, so the hotel was deserted.

They had, however, noticed an old, attractive pub, the George, across the street. More in need of hot food than warm footwear, they went there without changing from their wet clothes. Inside, happily, the George was a rustic pub at its best—a small, barely modernized seventeenth-century coaching inn with oaken beams and flagged floors, smelling of beer and fried fish. Half of one wall was a fireplace so capacious that there were two small tables with benches within it, one at each end. Between them, in the old fireplace’s center, was a small wood stove with a metal hood and chimney, in which burned a cozy little blaze of scrap lumber. Although the pub was crowded and full of cheerful noise, one of the tables inside the fireplace was vacant, and Gideon and Julie made for it, gratefully basking in the dry warmth.

They sat with the steam rising from their wet shoes until the blood seemed to move through their bodies again and they were able to take off their ponchos and think about ordering. On the bar was a placard listing the luncheon menu: Ploughman’s lunch, £1.20; shepherd’s pie, £1.20; haddock and chips, 90p; steak-and-kidney pie (with peas and chips), £1.20.

"Steak-and-kidney pie for me," Julie said, not surprisingly. In a few brief weeks she had developed a near-addiction to the pungent stew. "And a gallon of hot tea."

"And I’ll have the shepherd’s pie." He worked his way through a crowd at the little bar to order from a barmaid, as harassed as English barmaids always seemed to be, and as friendly, then came back to the table carrying two brandies. "To help us thaw out."

Gideon swirled his brandy, sniffed it, took a good-sized swallow. "Ah," he sighed, "that’s better. Hey, that trudge through the rain was fun. I speak retrospectively, of course."

"It
was
fun, and you know it." She watched him take a second, thoughtful sip from the snifter. "You’re wondering what happened at the hearing, aren’t you?"

Gideon smiled. Pretty soon they wouldn’t have to use words at all. "Yes—"

From across the room a high voice cut through the noise. "What’s the matter, you can’t even say hello?"

"Abe!" Gideon cried. "We didn’t know you were here. Come join us!"

At the far end of the bar, Abe disengaged himself from the group of English men and women he had been conversing with. There were hearty, teasing good-byes, and someone even clapped him on the shoulder. A young woman offered to carry his plate and glass for him, an offer Abe declined. Holding a nearly empty half pint of beer in one hand and a plate of fish and chips in the other, he threaded his way toward them.

Gideon marveled at him, not for the first time. How could anyone be more out of place in an English country pub? And how could anyone seem more at home? As tenaciously as Abe had clung to his old speech and mannerisms, he was at the same time the most adaptable of men, fitting himself to local custom—whether in a university faculty club, a Bantu kraal, or a Dorset pub—with a willing ease that was unmistakably genuine and enthusiastically reciprocated.