Murder in the Queen's Armes (3 page)

Any teacher of even minimal perception knows the signs of lack of interest in an audience that does not wish to offend. There is an intense fixity of gaze; brows are knit with expectancy and concentration; chins are supported on hands, the better to permit leaning attentively forward. But the gazes are glassy and unwavering, the rapt expressions vaguely unfocused, the postures rigid rather than alert. So sat Julie across the table.

"As we all know," Gideon went on, "the Wessex people were the inventors of the video game. They wore polyester pantsuits and lived in four-story houses made entirely from abandoned escargot shells."

For a moment there was no slackening in her enthralled and unrelenting attention. Then she spluttered into laughter. "You rat! All right, you caught me. I’m afraid I go a little blank at words like ‘metal technology.’ But really, tell me about Nate Marcus. I’m interested, truly." She blinked her eyes severely to demonstrate.

Gideon smiled. "Okay, in a nutshell: Nathan Marcus is probably the only anthropologist who believes that some seafaring bunch of Mycenaeans set out from Greece and settled in England, where they singlehandedly started the British Bronze Age in about 1700 b.c. Now, there isn’t too much doubt that the British Bronze Age had its roots in the Aegean, but the evidence points to its spreading to England slowly, over centuries, via Europe, possibly without any migration of people at all."

"Without any migration? How could that be?"

"Well, just through cultural diffusion. The same way you find English rock music all over Russia today, or French wines in Kansas and New Mexico."

The waitress brought their steak-and-kidney pies. It was the first time Julie had tried one. She broke the crust with a fork and gingerly sniffed the pungent steam.

"It smells all right," she said doubtfully, and enlarged the hole to peer inside. "Which pieces are kidney?"

"The kidney sort of disappears in the cooking. All those chunks are beef." A white lie, but she would thank him for it.

She speared a tiny piece of meat, put it in her mouth, and chewed tentatively. "It’s not bad."

"Of course not." He scooped up a forkful of his own thick pie. The English, he felt, were somewhat maligned in the matter of their food. There were, of course, grotesqueries like baked beans on toast and those unfortunate, unavoidable breakfast sausages, but he found the cuisine generally mild and inoffensive: plaice, hake, gammon, beef, and pile upon bland pile of peas and chips.

"So is that what the argument’s about?" Julie asked. "The dispute over the Bronze Age?"

"That’s it. Nate thinks that Wessex culture—and therefore the British Bronze Age—was personally introduced by the Mycenaeans, and everybody else says it came through slow diffusion."

"It hardly seems like anything to get fighting mad about."

"Anthropologists are funny people, as I’m sure you’re coming to realize, but where Nate is concerned, there’s more to it. Since the respectable journals won’t touch his theory, he’s been out pushing it anywhere he can— magazines, newspapers, talk shows—and that doesn’t help his credibility among anthropologists."

"What about his theory? Do you think he could be right?"

"I doubt it, but I don’t know enough about it to have a legitimate opinion. To tell the truth, I can’t say I find the Bronze Age all that fascinating myself. Too recent."

"Seventeen hundred b.c. is recent?"

"Sure, to an anthropologist. Didn’t you ever hear what Agatha Christie said about being married to one?"

"I didn’t know she was."

"Yes, a famous one: Max Mallowan. She said it was wonderful—the older she got, the more interesting he found her."

"I hope it’s true," Julie said, laughing. She pushed aside her not-quite-finished pie. "That was good," she said a little uncertainly, "but I think you have to acquire a taste for it." She sipped her bitters and looked soberly at him. "Gideon, you’re not going to let yourself get involved in a theoretical argument, are you? It’s our honeymoon."

He cupped his hand over hers on her glass. "Do you really think I’d rather get into an academic fracas than spend my time with you? I love you, Julie Tendler—"

"Oliver."

"Oliver …I forget what I was going to say."

"How much you love me."

"Oh, yeah. Well, let’s see. On a scale of one to ten I’d say a, well, um, maybe a, well…"

"I’m going to hit him," she muttered into her glass.

He took her hand from the glass and brushed the backs of her fingers over his lips. Her eyes glowed suddenly in the semidarkness of the restaurant, and he felt his own moisten. How extraordinary it was to be married to this marvelous woman. For a moment he held her hand against his cheek, then replaced it on the glass, recurving her fingers around the handle.

"Never mind how much I love you," he said, "I’m not about to encourage complacency. Anyway, all I intend to do when we get to Charmouth is to pay an hour’s visit to the site and say hello to Nate. That’s it."

"And after that we’re on our own? No more bones? Just cream teas and country walks and pub lunches?"

"No bones, no stones, and, thank God, no corpses. The skeleton detective is traveling incognito and nobody knows where to find him." He put down his nearly empty mug with a thump. "And now, if you think steak-and-kidney pie is good, wait till you try treacle!"

   THE walk from Charmouth to Stonebarrow Fell was so magnificent that Gideon almost went back to the Queen’s Armes Hotel to bring Julie along, but she had been adamant. He was making a professional visit, she had pointed out, and she wasn’t going to tag along to hang around like an ignoramus while everyone else was chattering on about Mycenaean transmigration and cultural diffusion.

"Besides," she’d said, "we’ve been married six days and I have yet to perform a single wifely function."

He grinned at her, but she laughed before he had a chance to say anything. "Fun things don’t count; I mean chores. Do you know, I have yet to do the laundry? We’ve been washing our stuff in sinks, and things are getting grubby. I want to go to an honest-to-goodness Laundromat."

She seemed to mean it, and Gideon had let it go at that. After lunch he had left her to her wifely chores and walked out Lower Sea Lane, past the bright, clean bed-and-breakfast houses and private cottages of the village, to the sandy beach. There, in its grander days, the River Char had worn a soft, lush U-shaped valley down to the sea between the towering coastal cliffs. High up on those cliffs, reachable by a gentle but relentlessly ascending path, was the prettily if redundantly named Stonebarrow Fell—Stonehill Hill, in modern English.

He crossed the wooden footbridge over the now-tiny River Char and headed up the green, sweeping slope at a good, swinging pace, enjoying the crisp ocean air and the welcome sensation of muscles working. It was a cool, cloudy day, with an immense fog bank a few miles offshore, but the air was clear, and the sea was green and silvered, lit by narrow columns of sunlight that slid over its surface like spotlights. To the east, behind him, was Char-mouth in its picture-book valley, and a mile beyond it, down the curving coast, there was Lyme Regis, compact and pretty, with its famous stone breakwater—the Cobb— snaking out into the ocean. Ahead of him the green, round-shouldered hill rose to the top of the fell, and a few miles farther on, the aptly named Golden Cap loomed, solid and squarish, over the Dorset coast.

Near the top of the hill, the path swung out to the very edge of dizzyingly sheer cliffs and Gideon instinctively moved back. He was a good four hundred feet above the beach, and the land under him was obviously unstable. The rim of the path had crumbled away in places, and even while he looked, a few pebbles dropped free to start a small, slithering landslide. Still, he paused to take in the scene. These were famous cliffs to anyone who knew something about fossils. It had been here at the base of this wall of blue lias clay, about half a mile beyond Charmouth, that ten-year-old Mary Anning had chanced upon a twenty-five-foot icthyosaurus skeleton and set the scientific world of 1811 on its ear. Which was just what Nate Marcus hoped to do with his "incontrovertible evidence" of a Mycenaean landing. Well, good luck to him, but Gideon would be very surprised if he had that evidence, or if it existed.

A hundred feet from the crest of the hill, where the path cut through a dense thicket of gorse, was the last of four stiles. Here a ten-foot wire fence had been put up, and on it was a stenciled sign:
Archaeological excavation in progress. Visitors admitted only with prior authorization. Wessex Antiquarian Society.
A heavy padlock on a thick chain made good the warning.

There was no information on how to get authorized, and he was thinking about climbing the fence and taking his chances with the wrath of the Wessex Antiquarian Society when a puff of wind carried a few syllables of barely audible conversation down from above, from the far side of the summit.

"Hi!" Gideon shouted. "Anybody home?"

Within a few seconds a husky, pink-faced young man came trotting down the path and up to the other side of the fence.

"Hiya," he said. "Want in?" He was an American in his mid twenties, thick-necked and slope-shouldered, with downy cheeks and a healthy farm boy’s smile. A scant blond mustache, painstakingly groomed, but obviously never going to amount to much, glistened on his upper lip.

"Yes," Gideon said. "I’m an anthropologist; an old friend of Dr. Marcus’s."

"Sure, no problem." From the pocket of his jeans he produced a key. Once Gideon was through the gate, the young man closed and locked it again, shaking the lock to test it.

"I’m Barry Fusco," he volunteered.

"Glad to know you, Barry. You’re a student at Gelden?"

"Uh-huh, all of us are. The workers, I mean: me, and Sandra, and Leon, and Randy. Dr. Marcus and Dr. Frawley are profs, of course." He flashed his engaging smile. "Not that they don’t work. I just meant that the ones who do the real work—you know, the peon work—are the students. Not that I’m complaining…" He carried on in this affable if muzzy manner while they climbed to the crest.

Once there, Gideon saw that the summit of Stonebarrow Fell was a grassy, rounded meadow that seemed to be at the very top of a world of rolling green downs and endless sea, with cliff and hillside falling away in every direction. The dig itself was about a hundred feet from the edge of the cliff, and consisted of two wedge-shaped pits about twelve feet across at their widest points, situated like two great pieces of a pie that had been quartered.

There were three people in the shallower wedge, which had been dug down about a foot and a half: a young man and woman about Barry’s age who were on their knees scraping at the pit floor (peon work?), and an older man— not Nate Marcus—who leaned over them, watching closely.

"You just want to watch?" Barry asked.

"For a few minutes."

While Barry climbed down into the trench and got to work, Gideon walked up to the single strand of rope that protected the excavation from a listless group of nine or ten schoolchildren and a glum-faced woman. The rope restraint was hardly necessary: the onlookers could not have been less enthusiastic.

And no wonder. Archaeological digs did not very often turn up bronze masks, or cups of gold, or ancient skulls with jewels in their eye sockets. Mostly, a dig consisted of hour after slow hour of scraping gingerly away at the earth. When something was uncovered, the chances were ninety-nine out of a hundred that it was fragmentary, nondescript, and muddy-brown—a piece of a sooty cooking pot, a two-inch segment of a bone awl, a discarded flake of waste flint or granite; all unrecognizable and of no conceivable interest to the lay observer. And even then, one did not just "dig up" a piece of a pot or a bone tool. One cleared the area around it millimeter by millimeter, photographing it, drawing it, measuring and recording it as one went. The basic tools were the trowel, the hoe, and the brush, not the pick and shovel. As spectator sport, it was far from riveting.

"Mrs. Kimberly, may we please go now?" a fat boy pleaded fretfully. "I’m
awfully
hungry."

There was a round of stifled giggles, and the unhappy-looking Mrs. Kimberly lined the children up. "You’d think there’d be something to
see
after coming all this way," she grumbled querulously and marched them off. Barry ran after them to let them through the gate.

It was another minute before the older man looked up for the first time, lifting a pouchy face with eyes as mournful, moist, and droopy as a basset’s.

"Yes?" he said morosely to Gideon.

"I’m looking for Dr. Marcus. Can you tell me where to find him?"

"And you are…?"

"Gideon Oliver. An old friend."

The man sighed lugubriously and stood up. "I’ll see if he’s available." He climbed gravely from the far side of the pit, a small, soft man with little feet who seemed out of place on a field expedition, and made his way fussily around the backfill piles toward a prefabricated building of corrugated metal.

Barry had returned and was looking at Gideon with frank but somewhat puzzled awe on his open countenance. "Gee," he said, "are you
the
Gideon Oliver?"

Gideon was asked this from time to time, sometimes by a person familiar with his publications on Pleistocene hominid taxonomy, but a great deal more often by someone who’d read a lurid account of his consulting work with the police or FBI. He had never hit on a satisfactory response.

"Well," he said, smiling modestly, "I’m
a
Gideon Oliver."

Understandably, this seemed to confuse Barry, so Gideon added, "I teach anthro at Northern Cal."

The serious, friendly face cleared somewhat. "Gee, sir, I’ve sure heard of you."

From a slight vacancy in the smile, it was clear that the young man knew Gideon was
someone,
but didn’t quite know whom.

The rewards of fame, he thought. "Thanks, Barry, how about introducing me to your friends?"

The other two were absorbed, or pretending to be absorbed, in their scraping, but Barry called to them enthusiastically. "Hey, guys, this is Professor Oliver from Northern Cal." Then, indicating the woman, he said, "This is Sandra Mazur."