Unnatural Selection (11 page)

Robb hesitated. “Well, he began… he had… other problems too.”

“Alcohol?” said Gideon.

“Exactly. He was drinking too much.”

It was time for him to go, and various efforts, some subtle, some not, were made to retire him, either voluntarily or otherwise. But with two years left to qualify for a full pension, he wasn’t about to be “made redundant,” and there was no way to force him. After considerable dickering, an unusual compromise was reached. Clapper would be transferred from the large port city of Plymouth to the obscure, virtually crime-free outpost of St. Mary’s, where he could harmlessly serve out his time without getting into trouble or offending anyone. But for him to assume the position of the Scillies’ “neighborhood beat manager” required that he be downgraded from detective inspector to constable sergeant. This he reluctantly accepted, with the proviso that his grade for pension purposes remain that of chief inspector. To this the department agreed, and to the Scillies he came, and here he had been for the last six months, out of the mainstream and pretty much going through the motions.

“Not that much beyond going through the motions is generally required here,” Robb said with a smile. “We’re not what you might call a hotbed of crime. But you can imagine how tough it must be on the old man to be reporting to people in Exeter who don’t know the half of what he does.”

“Well, I admit,” Gideon said as their waiter came to pick up their payments, “I’m impressed. About the only thing I had right about him was that he was counting the days to retirement.”

“Which isn’t hard to understand,” Robb said. “Things haven’t been easy for him.”

“They can’t have been too easy for you either,” said Gideon. “I didn’t get the impression he was the easiest boss in the world to work for.”

“Oh, not so bad. One has to make allowances. One has to consider who he is. It’s been a privilege to work with him, really. I’ve learned a lot.”

“I admire your staying power,” Gideon said.

“Well, yes, it was a little hard at first,” Robb admitted, “but after a couple of months on the island he mellowed. He likes the idea of living at the police station, for one thing.”

“He lives at the police station?” Julie said, surprised.

“Well, above it. Above the store, as we say,” Robb said with a smile. “Upstairs, on the first floor. My wife and I do, too. There are several flats up there. It used to be a common arrangement years ago, but you don’t see it much anymore, except in out-of-the-way places like this. And then…” He hesitated. “The fact is, he’s gotten himself a lady-friend who more or less lives there too. That’s really mellowed him. For one thing, she’s gotten him off the sauce. He’s a teetotaler now, which has made all the difference in the world. He’s put his life together again. But any time he has to deal with Exeter”-he shook his head-“he’s an unhappy man.”

They got up from the table and walked to the terrace’s metal railing to look out over the water at the outer islands for a few moments. The sun was warm on their faces, the breeze cool. “That’s Samson on the left,” Robb said, slipping on his tunic, “and Tresco over there, and Bryher lies between them. Beautiful, aren’t they?”

“Lovely,” Julie agreed.

“Enjoy the view while you can. This is what we call fog season, you know, and it looks like it may be a bad one. It’s already starting to build out there. I suspect we’ll be socked in pretty soon now.” He sighed, put on his helmet, adjusted the chin strap, and tapped it into place with his palm. “Ouch.”

“But it’s so becoming on you,” Julie said.

Robb smiled his thanks. “So what do you say, sir? Will you come by the station? Anytime now would be fine. He’ll have come back from lunch.”

“Okay, I’ll be there in half an hour or so. And Kyle-I want you to know I appreciate this. I hated to just let it drop.”

“You’re welcome. Mostly, I’m doing this for the sergeant. I know that working on a real murder case again would do him a world of good. Otherwise, you know, I’d never have said… I wouldn’t have told you…”

“I understand. But listen, you’re sure he hasn’t gotten any calls from Exeter today?”

“None,” Robb said laughing. “He’s as gentle as-”

“A lamb,” Gideon finished for him.

“An old lion with most of his teeth pulled would be closer to it,” Robb said, and then, in friendly warning: “But not all of them.”

Sergeant Clapper was awaiting him at the entry to Robb’s cubicle, leaning casually against the frame of the glass partition, sipping from a chipped mug of coffee and chatting with Robb, who was seated at his desk, sorting desultorily through the mess of files on it.

“Here’s the very man,” was his indisputably genial greeting. “PC Robb was telling me you might be coming in again about that bone of yours.” He was in uniform today: open-throated, short-sleeved white shirt with blue-and-gold epaulets decorated with chevrons; dark blue trousers; and heavy, polished black shoes.

“Well, yes, I thought that maybe there was a little more to talk about,” Gideon said.

“Indeed, yes. I was thinking the same thing. I was extremely interested in what you were saying yesterday, you know, but then we were interrupted by that…” He made a growling noise deep in his throat. “… that sodding telephone call, and when I came back you’d up and left, hadn’t you?”

That’s not quite the way I remember it, Gideon thought, but it didn’t seem meanly intended, so he let it pass with no more than a murmur. If that was the way Clapper wanted to recall it, that was fine with him.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Clapper went on, motioning Gideon to follow him to his own office, “and I’ve done a bit of checking in the-oh, coffee?” he said, pointing to the coffeemaker in the unoccupied cubicle.

“I’m about coffeed out, thanks,” Gideon said.

“A wise decision,” Clapper said, grimacing and placing a hand on his belly. “Kyle, you can come along too, lad,” he called over his shoulder. “I know you’re interested.”

Walking behind him, keeping pace with his slow, billowing stride, Gideon saw that Clapper was an even bigger man than he’d realized, matching Gideon’s six-one, but probably pushing 250 pounds. Not that much overweight, really. Brawny was more like it. Basically, he was a constitutionally thickset man to begin with, with an unusually broad thorax and a wide pelvis. He’d make an interesting skeleton, Gideon couldn’t help thinking.

His office was at the end of the little hallway, just past a door that said “Interview Room.” It was no larger than Robb’s cubicle but with real walls instead of glass partitions, and a door that opened and closed. There was the usual clutter here: charts and maps on the walls, and files scattered across the desk-but not a single one of the many plaques and commendations he had received, according to Robb, no framed copies of the magazine articles that had been written about him, nothing that would indicate he had ever been anything more than the constable sergeant in St. Mary’s.

There were a few old, framed photographs on the walls-groups of smiling constables with their arms linked, but apparently they’d been left there by his predecessor, inasmuch as none of them included Clapper. Or Robb, for that matter. On his standard-issue desk, in addition to the paperwork and a pair of reading glasses, were a logoed mug (Chirgwin’s Gift Shop) holding pens and markers, and a filigree-framed photograph (his new “girl-friend”?) facing away from Gideon. Two metal visitor chairs that matched one another but not the desk were wedged into the narrow space between desk and wall. There was a single waist-high metal bookcase with a few thick manuals in it, and on the top shelf the bag in which Gideon had brought the tibial fragment, apparently still containing the bone.

“Now, then,” Clapper said when they’d sat down-Gideon and Robb having had to angle their chairs to make room for their legs-“how long did you say the bone had been there?”

“Probably under five years.”

“Because, you see, I’ve been searching back through our local records for any outstanding mispers, and while-”

“Excuse me? Whispers?”

“Mispers, missing persons,” Robb explained.

“Yes,” Clapper said, “and while we have none on file here, the national misper register at the Yard turned up two possibilities-people that might, or might not, have disappeared during visits to the Scillies.”

“You’ve been doing your homework,” Gideon said. He knew that information of that sort-“might or might not, have disappeared during visits to the Scillies”-didn’t jump out of the computer at you. You had to dig.

“Not too hard when you know the ropes. But, you see, one is from eight years ago and one goes back twelve. You’re certain it couldn’t be either one?”

He saw that Clapper really was in a better mood today. Yesterday’s questions had been challenges, confrontations. These were genuine requests for Gideon’s opinion.

“No, I’m not certain at all,” Gideon said. “Consider it an educated guess, no more. There are a whole lot of variables that make it hard to pinpoint the time. For one thing, I’m not that familiar with climatic conditions here-moisture, temperature variation-”

“So it could be as much as twelve years old?”

“Yes, it could.” He’d certainly been wrong by that much and more before. “What do you have?”

“The eight-year-old one is… let’s see…” He shuffled a file into view on his desk. “… an eighty-eight-year-old woman from London with senile dementia who wandered away from her tour group somewhere between St. Ives and… what?”

Gideon had been shaking his head. “Not her,” he said. “First, I’m pretty sure it came from a man. Second, it’s not from an eighty-eight-year-old. The texture of bone changes with age-it gets all rough and pitted as you get older.”

“Really?” an entranced Robb said. “Is that so?”

“Oh, yes, and that tibia’s too smooth. It’s a younger person’s bone-”

“A young man’s bone, is it? Well, then, what would you say to a eleven-year-old lad who disappeared from his uncle’s…” Clapper’s face fell. “No, again?”

“No, again. Not that young. Sorry.” Gideon got up, brought the tibia back to the desk, and explained about epiphyseal union while a disappointed but moderately interested Clapper lit up a Gold Bond and Robb listened as if his life depended on it. “As you can see, the proximal epiphysis is completely fused to the shaft-not a trace of a line separating them. The age range for that to happen is sixteen-fifteen at the very earliest-to twenty-two or so. This absolutely can’t be an eleven-year-old’s bone. He’s in his mid-twenties at the earliest, and probably older than that.”

“Sixteen to twenty-two,” Clapper mused, “for that particular bone. You knew that off the top of your head, so to speak?”

“Sure.”

“You know the age ranges of all these different epiphyses?”

“Well… yes, I guess I do. All the ones used in ageing, anyway.”

“And they’re all different? Even the ones on opposite ends of the same bone?”

“Pretty much.”

Clapper, studied him, nodding, his head wreathed in smoke. “Fancy,” he said.

Gideon, not knowing what to reply, replaced the bone in the bag. “So where would you say we go from here, Sergeant?”

Clapper leaned back in his chair. “Well, now, that’s the question, all right, innit?” he said slowly. “We have here a fragmentary bone, the condition of which implies dismemberment, which in turn implies homicide-”

Gideon noted that this was accepted as a given; another difference from yesterday.

“-but we know of no one it could possibly belong to.”

“That seems to be about it.”

“Yes. So what I ask myself is, I ask myself, why couldn’t it have come off a passing ship, as so many other bones found on the beach have done?”

“Maybe it did. Personally, I’d have my doubts. No marine life encrustation on it. And from what I understand it was buried a couple of feet down. Pretty unlikely for that to have happened naturally, from shifts in the sand. So I’d have to guess he was murdered, cut up, and buried right here on the island.”

“But-” Robb hesitated until Clapper nodded his permission to continue, and then barreled ahead, the words pouring out. “But isn’t that a premature conclusion? The lack of encrustation would merely mean that the bone hadn’t lain in the ocean for a considerable period of time, isn’t that right?”

“Right,” Gideon agreed.

“Well, that wouldn’t necessarily mean it hadn’t come from offshore, would it? How do we know that it’s not from a passing yacht of which we have no knowledge? That someone wasn’t murdered and dismembered on a boat, then brought ashore onto the beach and buried-at night, I should think-after which the murderer simply went back to his boat and sailed away, with no one the wiser?”

Clapper began to answer, but changed his mind and let Gideon do it.

“I kind of doubt that, Kyle,” Gideon said gently. “If you’ve already killed someone at sea, and even dismembered him, why risk coming ashore with the body to bury it? Wouldn’t the safest, easiest thing be to simply dump the remains into the ocean? If they were already dismembered, they could be dumped separately, miles apart. The probability of any of them ever being found would be infinitesimal, much, much smaller than the chances of finding remains buried on a beach.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Robb mumbled, embarrassed. “Yes, you’re quite right. The murder would have occurred here, yes.”

Gideon expected Clapper to make one of his cutting remarks about the value of university education and modern police training, but he demonstrated once again that he wasn’t the Mike Clapper of yesterday by letting the chance pass. Instead, he thought it all over. He nodded slowly to himself. He pondered. He drummed his fingers on the desk. He was without a doubt one of the most deliberate people Gideon had ever come across. “I’ll be honest with you, Professor. Dismemberments are new to me. Never worked on one. So where would you say we go from here?”

It was the question he’d been waiting for, and he’d carefully considered his answer. “Look, I know this doesn’t look like much of a case-a single bone, and not even a whole one at that-but if you have one piece of dismembered body, the rest is very likely to be nearby.”