Unnatural Selection (22 page)

“That there’s a relationship between the two events.”

“Exactly, Kyle,” said Clapper, who was showing signs that perhaps he’d considered that he’d harassed Robb more than he should have. “A connection. Possibly he was murdered. Possibly it was a random accident-a slip, a fall. Or possibly…”

Why are we just standing here? Robb wondered. One of the things they had taught him at Bramshill was that speed was of the essence, that sus-death clues grew cold, and often useless or irretrievable, very quickly. And yet here was Clapper, lost in his musings, letting the minutes go by.

“Sir, I left the CSI gear in the van. Shall I-”

Clapper snorted. “What, and when the ‘real’ detectives get here, have them complain that we’ve cocked the whole thing up, stomping around with our hobnailed boots? No, no, no, we’ll call this in to headquarters as ordained, and they’ll have Detective Superintendent Vossey and his supersleuth minions out from Truro inside of half an hour. We’ll leave it to them, Kyle. We don’t go a step closer.”

Robb’s spirits plummeted. His first chance at a significant crime-scene investigation, he thought bitterly, with the bloody corpse lying right there in front of them, untouched except by the doctor, and… He clamped his lips together. “Shall I at least execute the duties entailed in first-officer-on-the-scene uniform standards, sir?”

Clapper sighed. “Kyle, I don’t even know what that means. But no. All I want you to do is execute a telephone call to headquarters and tell them what’s happened. Then come find me in the kitchen.”

Robb turned and left without a word.

Now what does he have to be so mopey about? Clapper wondered, watching the younger man trudge angrily off. He took one last, long look at the body, turned, and went into the kitchen that was a mixture of sooty, sixteenth-century stone walls and twenty-first-century stainless steel kitchen equipment, where Mr. Moreton had dutifully gathered the denizens of the house, all of whom were seated around an old table, drinking coffee and looking suspicious and untrustworthy.

“Where is Dr. Gillie?” he asked. “I want to speak with him first.”

“I put him in my office,” Mr. Moreton said. “It’s more private.”

Kozlov, whom Clapper knew by sight, clarified. “By stairs. Through dining room. There.” He pointed toward the kitchen’s door to the interior.

Once in the dining room, the smell of pipe tobacco reached Clapper’s nostrils. He stopped and automatically reached for his cigarettes, lit up a Gold Bond, and continued into a cramped foyer, off of which was a tiny, cluttered alcove that looked as if it might once have been a coat-room. The doctor sat behind the desk, screwing the cap onto an old-fashioned tortoiseshell fountain pen. He looked up, smiling, a long-nosed, horse-faced man in an old tweed jacket, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth.

“All right, what have we got?” Clapper said.

“Why, hello there, Davey-lad,” Gillie said, addressing himself, “so nice to see you again. I hope you’re well.”

“Sorry, Davey, I’m not in much of a mood today.” He stood, waiting.

“No, really? All right then, I’d better mind my manners. Well, you’ve looked at the body?”

Clapper nodded.

“Then you already know what we have.” He straightened the form on which he’d been writing and read aloud: “‘Cause of death, crushing head injuries; manner of death, undetermined; contributing causes of death, none indicated. ’” He looked up with a shrug. “Been dead twelve to twenty-four hours, from the looks of him; rigor is quite pronounced and hasn’t begun to break up yet. So if what Kozlov told me is so-that he was alive and well as late as eleven o’clock last night-why then, we’d have to put the time at right around then, say somewhere between eleven and one. Body temperature, assuming that it was normal to begin with, is down fourteen degrees Celsius, so that fits nicely enough as well.”

“Other injuries?”

“Contusions and lacerations here and there, quite consistent with a fall. I would expect some internal trauma as well, when he’s undressed and examined. Oh, and he died right where he lies. No one’s moved him. The livor pattern makes that clear. I’d assume he fell from the catwalk up above.”

“And hit the pipe on the way down?”

“ Grabbed the pipe on the way down, I should say. There are rust stains and abrasions on his right palm. It would seem to have broken his fall and taken some of the force out of it. Otherwise-falling twenty-five feet directly onto stone like that-his head wouldn’t merely have cracked, it would have exploded like a watermelon.”

“Yes. ‘Falling,’ you said? What about ‘jumping’ or ‘being pushed’?”

Gillie took the pipe from his mouth and pressed the bit into his cheek. “It’s always possible, I suppose, but the man had been drinking heavily last night-you can still smell it on him-and that’s a pretty narrow catwalk up there, and the railing’s not even waist-high. I see nothing that suggests anything beyond an accidental fall.”

“Oh? And what would he have been doing wandering out there on that narrow catwalk in the middle of the night?”

“Smoking a cigar.”

Clapper’s cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth. “Smoking a cigar? How do you know?”

“Because I asked Mrs. Bewley. ‘Mrs. Bewley,’ says I, ‘what would he have been doing wandering out there on that narrow catwalk in the middle of the night?’ She told me that he smoked these nasty black cigars that everyone hated-when he had one, even in his room, you could smell it all through the place-so that he often stepped out there to have one in peace without bothering anybody or being bothered by anybody.”

“Including at night?”

“Especially at night. After dinner. Look, Mike, I’ve been here twenty-two years now, and we’ve never yet had a homicide, let alone a murder, but you obviously think this needs looking into, so if you want me to do a postmortem-assuming the budget can stand it and I still remember how to perform an autopsy-I could do one for you tomorrow, much as I hate the bloody job. Not that I expect anything to come of it, you understand.”

“There are a few background elements you’re not aware of, Davey.”

“How mysterious,” Gillie said. “And am I permitted to know?”

“Not at this point,” Clapper said curtly.

Gillie smiled. “What a charmer you can be, Mike.” He folded the report, slipped it into a jacket pocket, and stood up. “I’m done with the body. Would you like me to call Algy and have him get it to the chapel?”

Algy Rennet was the coroner’s undertaker for the Isles of Scilly, and “the chapel” was the Chapel of Rest, a small room at St. Mary’s Hospital that served the community as a mortuary.

“No, as a matter of fact. I want it left here.”

“ Here? Out in the open? But-”

“I don’t want him moved. Kyle is speaking with Exeter right now. They’ll have the Truro people here by helicopter in no time, and the deceased gentleman will soon be on his way to Treliske, where the Force pathologist is probably sharpening his gruesome instruments even as we speak. He’ll do the postmortem.”

“I see,” said Gillie, showing his first sign of irritation. “Local talent not up to the job, eh? Well, I suppose they have a point. I haven’t done an autopsy in two and a half years. My bad luck to live someplace where nobody kills anybody else.”

“It’s nothing to do with you, Davey. It’s the way it works in a sus-death. Standard procedure, it’s in the book.”

Robb came into the room, with a quizzical expression on his face, as if he didn’t know how Clapper was going to take what he had to say.

“Spit it out, Kyle. What’d they say? Who’d you talk to?”

“I talked to Detective Chief Superintendent LeVine himself, who referred me to Detective Superintendent Vossey in Truro, who said-none too kindly-‘Have you looked out the window?’”

“Have you… what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”

“The fog, Sarge. They can’t land any helicopters here from Truro or anywhere else. No planes, no boats, nothing.”

“Well, what do they expect me-”

“They expect you to handle the case yourself. You’ll have to keep them up to date with a running case log, of course, but it’s your baby, Sarge. You’re the chief investigating officer.” He chanced a smile. “And I’m your team.”

This information produced a change in Clapper that was straight out of old horror movies, where the full moon finally goes down and the misty dawn breaks at last. The hunched, misshapen figure straightened. The glowing red eyes became cool blue again, the drooling fangs sank back into their gums, the fur on the backs of his hands vanished. A normal, smiling, reasonably amicable human being reemerged.

“I see,” he said, letting it sink in for a few moments and relishing every second of it. “Well, well. Davey, go ahead and make that call to Algy. It looks as if you get to do your autopsy after all.”

“Calloo, callay,” said Gillie around his pipe.

“And you, Kyle, lad-”

I’m “lad” again, thought Robb. That’s better.

“-don’t just stand around, there’s a lot to be done. Go and get the kit-no, first get on the blower to our summer help, all three of them. Tell them to climb into uniform and get over here-Gordon will go along with the body and remain with it, and you, Martin, and Sean will assist me in a proper investigation of the scene. Never mind what they taught you at Bramshill, I’ll show you how the real coppers do it… . Kyle, I may have been a bit short with you before-”

“Not that I noticed, Sarge,” Robb said, smiling. “About as mean as usual.”

“Good, I suppose I’m imagining it. Now, before anything else, get the camera and get some pictures-no, first better run up to the catwalk and do a preliminary; see if there’s anything like a cigar stub, or ash therefrom, before the wind blows it away. Wait, don’t run off yet. I’ll want everybody in the house kept available for interviews, starting with the housekeeper. Oh, but first seal the door to the catwalk and the passageway and have one of the boys make sure no one violates it. Oh, wait, before you do anything else…”

Left alone with the bones, Gideon found his enthusiasm lagging. There was still plenty to be done-formally inventorying and describing them; looking for signs of injury, pathology, and cause of death; and, when the partial long-bone formulas came-whenever the fog let up enough to allow the ferry to bring the mail, that is-calculating a stature range. By now, of course he was virtually certain that it would match whatever Villarreal’s height had been.

The work-after the earlier excitement of finding the knife cuts, and then of pulling Edgar Villarreal out of the hat, so to speak-seemed pedestrian, even a little boring, so he was glad to take a break and run over to the museum a few blocks away to get the calipers. When he returned, the rumbling coming from his stomach prompted him to look at his watch. He was astonished to see that it was after one. Past time to go and meet Julie for lunch.

He yawned, stretched, and rotated his head to work the kinks out of his neck. Then he tidied the table, cleaned up in the tiny restroom, slipped into his jacket, and went out into the fog. He had gone half a block along Upper Garrison Lane when he stopped, turned on his heel, and retraced his steps back to the front of the police station.

With painstaking care, he made sure the effing door was good and shut.

The first indication that something was wrong was the pack of vehicles in front of the castle entrance. The clunkers that Kozlov and Mr. Moreton used to get around town, along with the motorbike that Cheryl Pinckney had rented for the photographic expeditions on which she supposedly disappeared during the day, were stowed in a small lot at the back, usually leaving an open, vacant field of gravel in front. But today there were automobiles all over the place, parked every which way in the fog. Three of them Gideon didn’t recognize, but the fourth was the unmistakable, chartreuse-striped police van. And now, on looking up at the castle, he saw a young, uniformed policeman-not Robb-looking impassively at him from the top of the stone steps that led onto the entrance bridge. Something was very wrong, something serious.

Gideon walked toward the constable. This is where the term “heart-sinking sensation” comes from, he thought, as something seemed to unplug in his chest, letting the contents spill down into his legs.

“What’s going on, Constable?” he asked from the bottom of the steps.

“Oh, just police business, sir. Routine,” the cop said. He was no more than twenty, with a long face pocked with acne. On his head was the ceremonial bucket helmet, not the more comfortable cap, and he looked extremely uneasy, or perhaps even distressed.

Gideon, more worried by the second, started to climb the steps toward him.

The policeman held up a hand. “Sorry, sir, no one’s permitted in.”

Gideon stopped halfway up. “But I live here. That is, I’m staying here. For the week.”

The officer frowned. “Are you? I thought everyone was-” He undid a flap on his tunic and took out a sheet of paper. “Your name, sir?”

“Gideon Oliver.”

He scanned the sheet. “Sorry, sir, you’re not-”

“You’re looking at a list of consortium Fellows. I’m not a Fellow. I’m a… I’m a spouse.”

The officer shook his head. “I’m afraid-”

“Look,” Gideon said, “Julie… Julene Oliver, who is on your list, is my wife. Can you at least tell me if she’s all right?”

“I’m fine, Gideon!” Julie called, emerging under the “ER 1593” from the entry passage. “I thought I heard your voice.”

“Julie, what’s going on?”

“Let’s take a walk. I’ll tell you about it.”

But to this the young cop objected as well. No one was permitted to leave the premises. Julie told him that she had already been interrogated and had Sergeant Clapper’s authorization to go. This the officer checked by means of the two-way radio attached to his collar, after which permission to leave was granted and scrupulously recorded in his notebook.