Murder In The Queen's armes

FIFTEEN

They found Jack Frawley at the dig, completing some cross-sectional diagrams of the pits on a sheet of quadrille paper attached to a clipboard. He was wearing a shapeless, colorless canvas fisherman’s hat, a decrepit old windbreaker, worn cotton jeans, and old tennis shoes. His stubby, metal-stemmed pipe, unlit, was clenched in his teeth, the bowl upside down. He was, Gideon thought, working at looking like an archaeologist. What he looked like was Monsieur Hulot.

When Bagshawe had said, "We would like a word with you, Professor Frawley," his face had paled, and pale it remained. Bagshawe had led them-not by accident, Gideon was sure-to a flat, rocky area near the cliff edge: just about the spot from which Randy must have plummeted into the rock-encircled lagoon. Far below, the tide was in. It boomed and gurgled hollowly, as it must have done that day.

"Now, Professor," Bagshawe began without preface, "when I asked you yesterday if you had any idea of what

Mr. Alexander had wanted to tell Professor Oliver, you said you did not."

Frawley nodded. "I, uh, I believe I did say something to the effect that I couldn’t think of anything right offhand."

From the twitchy wobble of Frawley’s eyes, Gideon knew instantly that he was lying. And he sure was that Bagshawe knew it, and that Frawley knew they knew.

Bagshawe fixed Frawley with a steely eye. "I won’t quibble about that. I shall simply ask you whether you have, on further reflection, remembered something."

"Well, you know, actually, I might have had a word or two with Randy that morning, now that I think about it," Frawley said, and accompanied it with a weak laugh. "But it was just one of those little technical things that crop up; nothing important."

Bagshawe shifted easily into a more soothing manner. "Now, Professor," he said slowly, "if there’s anything you’re reluctant to say, I can assure you that Professor Oliver and I-"

"It’s only that it’s nothing relevant to Randy’s…to the case you’re working on."

"One never knows," Bagshawe said reassuringly. "Often, it’s the little things that provide the critical clues."

"Well…" Frawley’s soft, doggy eyes fixed on the inspector in melancholy appeal. "I’m just afraid you’ll get the wrong idea…about a certain party…"

"Well, now, Professor, why don’t you just trust me to be the judge of that?" The big teeth showed in a peaceable, bovine smile.

Gideon admired the inspector’s patience. For himself, he was ready to kick the oleaginously reluctant Frawley in the shins if this went on much longer. "For Christ’s sake, Jack," he said.

Frawley started. "Okay. All right." But still he couldn’t get himself going. He put his unlit pipe in his mouth and frowned in thought, going puh, puh, puh softly around the pipe stem with moist lips. Bagshawe smiled encouragingly at him. Gideon looked impatiently out to sea.

"I think you can already guess what he told me," Frawley said, his eyes on his shoes. "He told me that the skull Nate was so excited about was a fake; somehow he’d found out that Nate himself had stolen it from Dorchester and secretly buried it here. He wanted me to stop Nate before he actually dug it out and announced it."

"And why," Bagshawe asked, all policeman again, "didn’t you tell us this before?"

Frawley pursed his lips and made the pecking, chinthursting motion that some men make when their collars are too tight, although his own sat loosely on his neck. "In all frankness, I was afraid that you’d jump to the conclusion that Nate had killed Randy to protect himself. And I didn’t want that to happen."

Gideon cut in. "If you knew Nate had planted the skull, why didn’t you stop him before he dug it up with all that fanfare?"

The question seemed to catch Frawley by surprise. "Why? Why didn’t I stop him? Well… speaking candidly…it wasn’t my place… I’m only…and how could I be sure Randy was telling the truth? Maybe he was lying."

"Wouldn’t that be all the more reason to go to Nate, or just to check it out yourself?"

"And why, Professor," asked Bagshawe, "did you not go to the authorities?"

"Authorities?" Frawley’s eyes were beginning to take on a hunted look.

"The Horizon Foundation, the Wessex Antiquarian Society… the police?"

"Well, gosh, I hope you fellows don’t think I’m some sort of criminal." He managed a gummy little giggle. "I was just trying to do my job. There are times," he said sanctimoniously, "when fidelity outweighs adherence to scientific research. Nate is my…my superior, and I believe I owe him my support and my loyalty."

And may no one ever be that loyal to me, Gideon thought, or that supportive.

"No, Professor," Bagshawe tolled, "I don’t think that’s the way it was."

"I beg your pardon?" Frawley said.

"Shall I tell you how I think it was?"

Frawley looked mutely at him and licked his lips. His cheeks glistened unhealthily.

"I think," the inspector said at his slowest, "that when you heard that Professor Marcus planned a hoax, you were only too delighted with the news, and the last thing you wanted to do was to stop him. You wanted him to bring off this dirty great fraud of his."

Frawley made incredulous noises.

"If you had stopped him in time," Bagshawe continued, "it would have been no more than an embarrassment, with no one the wiser, except for you, him, and the young man. All in the family, you might say. But

…if he was allowed to bring it off-and was then exposed-ah, then there would be hell to pay. His career would be finished. As indeed it is-as indeed you wanted."

"Wanted? That’s ridiculous! Why would I want such a thing?"

"Jealousy. Envy."

"Me jealous of Nate? " From somewhere he summoned a sort of soggy dignity. "I don’t think I should have to stand for this."

"Jack," Gideon said, "are you the one who gave Ralph Chantry his information?"

"What?" Frawley stared at him with convincing blankness. "Who?"

Barely pausing for this uninformative exchange, Bagshawe continued in his inexorable way. "I’ve looked into things, Professor Frawley, and I know that Professor Marcus was made head of a department of which you are the senior and eldest member. I know that he, a much younger man, was made a full professor while you remained an associate. I know that you advised in faculty council against his hiring."

Shielding his eyes against the sun, Frawley looked up at the massive policeman. "What has that got to do with anything? Just who do you think you are?"

Bagshawe went on remorselessly. "Now then, I ask myself: Might there not be another reason why you haven’t told us this before? And why, when you finally did tell us, you so carefully implied that Professor Marcus might be not only a hoaxer but a murderer as well?"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Frawley practically squeaked. "Why don’t you say what you mean?"

"I’m talking about the fact," Bagshawe intoned, "that by so very indirectly accusing Professor Marcus you were hoping that we would overlook your own motive for killing Mr. Alexander." His voice was like the doomful knell of justice. In it Gideon could hear the clank of chains, the bleak, muffled kerchunk of iron dungeon doors slammed home.

Frawley heard them, too. This time he did squeak. "Me? Why would I want to kill Randy?"

"Will you deny that Mr. Alexander, who liked his little joke, played one on you? Did he not once convince a group of equally playful Indians in Missouri to tell you that they were soon to hold a once-every-hundred-years secret dance during which they would dig up a sacred vulture egg that had been buried at the last ceremony? And to solemnly inform you that you were the only anthropologist they trusted enough to be present?"

"Christ," Gideon said. "And you bought it, Jack?"

Frawley made a motion with his head that was part denial, part assent, part frustration.

"He not only bought it," Bagshawe said, "he presented a paper on it to the Eastern Missouri Anthropological Society and was thereby made-so my informants advise me- an object of some ridicule."

Gideon felt a wave of compassion for the visibly sagging Frawley. That kind of joke was every anthropologist’s nightmare, and if Randy was in the habit of playing merry little pranks like that, it was a wonder he’d lived as long as he had.

"All right, Inspector, you’re right," Frawley said, seeming to drag the words out of himself. "I was jealous of Nate. I’ve behaved like a fool-but I didn’t kill Randy! As God is my witness, I never thought in my wildest dreams that Nate… that anybody…would murder Randy." As if he didn’t already look sufficiently abject, Frawley had taken off his hat and was crushing it in both hands. "I’ll try to make amends. Please believe me when I say you’ll have my complete cooperation in any way you want."

Bagshawe sucked his teeth and studied him. "I think it goes without saying, Professor Frawley, that I’d take a very dim view of it if you attempted to leave the vicinity of Charmouth without my permission."

"Yes, of course, Inspector. I wouldn’t think of it. I want to do everything I can to help solve this terrible tragedy."

Gideon felt like going away and washing his hands somewhere, but he asked another question. "Jack, before you go-we’ve found a discrepancy in the excavation records from November one. There’s a find card on a partial human femur, but it was never entered in the field catalog."

Frawley looked uncomprehendingly at him. "What?"

"You make the entries in the field catalog, don’t you?"

"Yes, every night; sometimes the next morning. A femur, did you say? That’s impossible. We’ve never found a human bone-not until Poundbury Man. We thought we had some ribs, but you straightened us out on that."

"You’re positive?"

"Of course I’m positive. I’d know about it if we had, wouldn’t I? No, we never found one. Ask anybody."

Gideon remembered the scrawled signature in the lower right-hand corner of the card: Leon Hillyer. He would indeed ask somebody.

GIDEON and Bagshawe remained near the edge of the cliff, looking out toward the water. The sea was a flat, summery blue, and a white, picture-book passenger liner steamed eastward from Plymouth, riding the horizon toward France.

Bagshawe took out his pipe and lit it with a wooden match, using his wide body to block the breeze. Then he sat down on a chair-high boulder, first arranging the skirts of his coat like the tails of a cutaway.

"Nasty piece of goods, our man Frawley," he said cheerfully. "Do you think he told us the truth about what Alexander said to him?"

"I don’t know," Gideon said, "but I don’t see Jack Frawley as a font of veracity."

Unexpectedly, Bagshawe guffawed. "No, you’re right there. Still, if it’s true, it provides us, doesn’t it, with a plausible motive for your friend Professor Marcus-who, by the way, continues to proclaim himself innocent of both murder and fraud."

"I take it Nate’s still your prime suspect?"

"Prime suspect? Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. There’s Professor Frawley, isn’t there, and then the others as well. Five in all, and all prime."

"Five? You mean all the people on the dig?"

"Just so, Professor. A single day’s work-interviews with the lot, and a few calls across the Pond-and we’ve turned up, I’m sorry to say, credible motives for every man-jack of them, and Miss Mazur, too. And none of them took much digging. Young Barry Fusco, for instance, owed Randy some three thousand dollars, which he was having a hard time repaying. Randy, so it’s said, had been making nasty noises at Barry, threatening to go to the lad’s father when they go back home."

"His father? Why would he go to his father?"

"Well, you see, Barry borrowed it in the first place to keep his father from finding out he’d wrecked a new car that had been a present. Apparently, the father’s a stern old gent of whom Barry lives in considerable awe."

"And so Barry might have killed Randy to keep his father from finding out?"

"Exactly, Professor, but I can see you’re not taken with the idea. Well, neither am I, but there it is. Now, Sandra Mazur and Leon Hillyer each present a bit more potential; two points of a steamy little triangle, with Randy being the third." He smiled with the metaphor.

"Do you mean Sandra was having affairs with both of them?" This surprised Gideon. The brittle Sandra hardly seemed the sort of woman to stir up male instincts of violence or passion-not his at any rate.

"I know what you’re thinking," Bagshawe said, "but there’s more involved than the young lady’s charms; there’s a tidy sum of money. Miss Mazur, you see, will come into a sizable inheritance on her thirtieth birthday. Both men were in grim pursuit, and each, I gather, had been unaware he had a rival. Sufficient reason for homicide, I should say, should one of them find out."

Gideon thought it over. Leon, ambitious and bright, did seem the kind of man who wouldn’t be at all averse to marrying for money. And although it might appear that Randy, coming from a wealthy family himself, had less to gain, his position had been insecure. From what Nate had said, his father had been threatening to disinherit him. It was obvious to Gideon, knowing what he knew about Randy’s style of living, that Randy would have welcomed the advantages of a rich wife.

"You’re saying," he said, "that Leon might have found out about Randy and killed him?"

"Yes; without premeditation, I should think. Leon’s a clever young man. If he’d planned to do Randy in, he’d choose someplace removed from the dig to do it. But I don’t rule out an argument and a hot-blooded murder."

"But where’s the motive for Sandra in all that? And do you really think she could have killed Randy, even armed with a mallet? She can’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds."

Bagshawe waved dismissively. "Given the proper incentive, women have been known to kill men a great deal larger than themselves, as I’m sure you know very well. And she had an incentive. It seems she’d become disenchanted with the ways of our Randy and had, in fact, settled on the lucky Leon as her man. This, she claims, she finally told Randy, but he seems to have taken exception. He threatened to make their affair public-and a few little tidbits about certain of Miss Mazur’s, ah, unusual proclivities as well." He lowered his eyes and coughed delicately. "Well, then, Leon, you see, with his eye on a rising academic career in the Ivy League, if that’s the right term, might very well bow out and find himself a more socially acceptable wife. You see?"

"I think I do, and I guess that Sandra might have a motive, all right. But why would she tell you all this?"

"She didn’t, but a chambermaid at the Jug and Sceptre, where Randy was putting up, heard them shouting at each other early one morning, and told all to Sergeant Fryer-remarkable memory for details, that woman has-and with what Miss Mazur did tell me, it wasn’t hard to piece it all together."

He leaned over, tapped his pipe against a rock, blew through the stem, and put it in his pocket. "So you see, Professor, the investigation progresses satisfactorily, and there’s no reason at all for you not to return to your bones."

"I think I’ve just been fired," Gideon said with a grin as Bagshawe got to his feet. "And speaking of bones, I have some questions to ask Leon about still another bone that’s turned up, or rather, that hasn’t turned up."

"That’s the ticket," Bagshawe said with an amicable lack of interest.

"It’s a piece of a femur that seems to have been found and then lost again. You’re welcome to sit in if you like."

Bagshawe let his expression answer for him, and very eloquent it was.

When Gideon went to the dig, he stood for a while, watching the crew work at backfilling under Abe’s efficient direction. With newly informed eyes he took a good, long look at them, but Sandra seemed as drawn and hard-edged as ever, not his idea of a seductress-no matter how rich- and a pretty unlikely murderess, too, although she was a better bet for that. The rosy-cheeked Barry looked no less wholesome than ever, and Frawley no less ineffectual. And Leon, who was coolly lecturing Abe on some stratigraphic complexities, hardly fit the mold of Bagshawe’s hot-blooded murderer. Cold-blooded, however…that might be another thing.

But when it came down to it, there was something unsatisfying, something inescapably spurious about every one of the hypotheses Bagshawe had advanced. And what about the left-handed mallet blow? None of them, after all, were left-handed. How could he fit that inescapable fact into even the few shadowy patterns that had emerged thus far? Or was he offbase in his continuing certainty that the killer was left-handed? Bagshawe disagreed with him, and Bagshawe was a pretty fair cop.

When Abe called a halt for lunch, Gideon took him aside. "Frawley says Leon never reported finding any bone."

"Is that so?" Abe said thoughtfully. "Maybe we should have a little brown-bag talk with Leon."

Most of the staff were taking advantage of the fine weather to eat their sack lunches on the bluff, but Leon had made for the shed. He was at the table writing a postcard, a cup of coffee beside him, when Abe and Gideon came in. He looked up, smiling.

"Hi, Abe. Hiya, Gideon."

"Leon," Abe said, "you wouldn’t mind if we had a little talk? It shouldn’t take long."

"Not at all, Abe. Just let me finish this card or I’ll never get back to it."

Gideon went to the table in the corner to make coffee for himself and Abe. Above the hot plate, a small mirror was taped to the wall. In it he could see Leon bent over the postcard, writing slowly. There was something…

He put down the coffee jar and whirled around. "You’re writing left-handed!"

There was a long, frozen moment during which Leon stared speechlessly back at Gideon, and Abe stared from one to the other. At last Leon mutely lifted the hand in which he held his pen.

It was his right hand, inarguably his right hand.

"I… sorry," Gideon said lamely. "My mistake."

"You were looking in the mirror," Abe said. "You saw it backwards."

"I guess so. Sorry," he said again, feeling idiotic. "I don’t know what I was thinking of." But he knew very well; he had a case of left-handed mallet murderers on the brain.

"What’s the big deal anyway?" Leon asked.

"No big deal," Abe said. "So, let’s have some lunch, and we’ll have our little talk."

He tore open a brown paper bag, removed its waxed paper-wrapped contents, and spread it out as a make-do tablecloth. He and Leon had their meals with them, but Gideon was empty-handed; he had promised to meet Julie at the George for a late lunch. Still somewhat disconcerted, he peeked once again at Leon in the mirror- right-handed, definitely right-handed-and brought back the coffee mugs.

"Jesus Christ," Leon said. "Fish paste." He was peering into one of the two sandwiches packed for him by his landlady. He groaned and shook his head in waggish despair. "The English."

Abe smiled tolerantly. As well he could, Gideon thought. Mrs. Hinshore had provided a thick, aromatic roast-beef-and-horseradish sandwich for him.

"Wow," Leon said, watching him unwrap it. "I think I’m staying at the wrong place." He was relaxed and smiling, his elbow over the back of his chair.

"Leon," Gideon said, "do you remember coming up with a fragment of a human femur a few weeks ago?"

"Uh-uh."

"November one, it would have been. It was never entered in the field catalog."

"Maybe," Leon said absently, chewing slowly, "but I don’t think so."

"You don’t think so?" Abe looked up sharply from his sandwich. "A human bone isn’t important enough to remember?"

"Well, sure it’s important, Abe," Leon replied with some edge, "and I guess I’d remember it if I dug it up. So I guess I didn’t."

Abe put the sandwich down on the paper sack and reached inside his cardigan sweater. His hand emerged with the find card, which he extended to Leon.

Leon wiped his fingers, took the card, and frowned. "Huh," he said, " ‘human femur, left, partial.’ That’s my handwriting, all right… Boy, it’s hard to remember. You’re talking about a month ago; we’ve dug up a lot of stuff since." He shook his head at the card and handed it back. "I don’t know what to say, Abe."

He took another dreamy bite of his sandwich. "Wait a minute; maybe I do remember." He swallowed, his eyes rolled upward. Gideon was struck with the distinct impression that some quick fabrication was underway. "Yeah, that’s right-I found something I thought might be a human bone, and I wrote it on the find card. I remember, I got all excited about it." He laughed merrily at himself. "And then when Jack looked at it, he said it was just a piece of a steatite carving." Again he chuckled at himself.

"That’s hard to buy, Leon," Gideon said. "A couple of weeks ago you recognized the difference-a damn subtle one-between the ribs of a deer and those of a human being. Now you’re saying you couldn’t tell the difference between a stone carving and a femur?"

Leon hunched his shoulders and spread his hands humorously. "What can I say? I’m human too."

Abe looked at him, running a finger over his chin. "In the field catalog on November first, there is only one entry: four faience beads. No steatite carving."

Thoughtfully, Leon reached into his paper sack, ignoring a second sandwich and bringing out a roll of mints. He offered it around. "Polos. They’re like Lifesavers." Gideon and Abe declined, and Leon popped one into his mouth and dropped the roll into a shirt pocket. "Well," he said at last,

"I sure don’t know how to account for it. Maybe I got the date wrong on the card."

"That’s possible," Abe said pleasantly, "but in the whole catalog there’s no steatite carving."

Again Leon spread his hands.

"There was something else, Leon," Gideon said. "Originally, you put down the depth as twenty-one inches, then crossed it out and changed it to twelve. What was that about?"

"I did?" Leon asked for the card back from Abe and made a show of studying it intently. "Oh," he said with a smile, "I see what you mean. No big mystery. I just transposed the numbers by mistake. Do it all the time. I’d make a hell of a meter-reader, huh?" Still smiling, he handed the card back to Abe. "Boy, you guys are picky! And I thought Nate gave me a hard time."

"Was Nate giving you a hard time?" Gideon asked.

"Well, no, not exactly a hard time." Was it Gideon’s imagination or did Leon seem a little uneasy? "But we’ve been spending a couple of evenings a week over beers, having some good old-fashioned arguments about my dissertation."

"He’s chairing your committee, isn’t he?"

"Yeah, and he keeps wanting me to do the thing like a technician-which is just what he is, when you come down to it-but I just can’t do it. You know, that’s exactly what’s wrong with archaeology: The emphasis is all on data, on digging up things and recording them." He leaned forward intently. "If we spent half as much time thinking about what it all means as we do photographing and drawing and recording every crummy, dog-biscuit potsherd we dig up, maybe we’d know something."

"I think you have a point," Gideon said, as willing as ever to take up an academic argument, but not unaware that Leon had rather skillfully changed the subject, "but you have to remember that archaeology is a funny science.

Even at its best, it obliterates evidence as it discovers it. If you have poor scholarship in the field, you destroy future knowledge. Look at the nineteenth-century archaeologists. Look at Schliemann; if he had known how to properly record and catalog what he found at Troy-"

"There, that’s just what I mean. We think in terms of catalogs, lists of things. We shouldn’t be writing catalog entries; we should be writing chapters on the social history of mankind. We’re supposed to be humanists, aren’t we?- not compilers of minutiae that nobody gives a damn about, and that don’t matter a damn when it comes down to it."

Gideon was experiencing something close to deja vu. This was another installment of the discussions he had had with Nate over those beers so long ago. Only Gideon had been on Leon’s side of the fence then. Leon put his argument very well, better than Gideon had at the time, and Gideon sympathized with his impatience even if he no longer quite agreed.

"You got to remember," Abe put in, "sure, we’re humanists, but also we’re scientists, not philosophers. We got to depend on empirical data for our conclusions. If you start with lousy data, you get rotten conclusions."

Leon laughed good-naturedly. "The two of you sound like Nate. I can see where he gets his ideas. You ought to join us at the George one night; you’d enjoy it. But I still say the proper aim of archaeology is to learn about the people who came before us, not about inanimate artifacts."

" ‘You are not wood,’ " said Abe, " ‘you are not stones, but men.’ " He shrugged. "Shakespeare," he said apologetically. "Mark Antony."

Leon laughed again. "You guys are really something." He closed his paper sack. "Well, I guess I’ll get back out to the dig. I really enjoyed talking to you."

"I don’t think we’re finished yet," Abe said. "I’m still not so clear on this bone you didn’t find."

Leon looked at both of them, his youthful, trimly bearded face showing its first indication of strain. "Look, if you’re accusing me of something, how about telling me what it is?"

"Nobody’s accusing you, Leon," Gideon said. "We’ve found a pretty peculiar discrepancy, and we’re just trying-"

"Well, why the hell don’t you talk to Frawley?" Leon stood abruptly and pointed at the find card. "If I said I found something, I found it. That card was in the file, wasn’t it? Why don’t you ask Frawley why he didn’t put it in the catalog?"

"We did ask him," Gideon said. "He says he never heard about a femur, and you never turned in a card."

"Well, he’s lying."

"Hold it a minute," Abe said. "Let me get this straight. Now you’re saying you did find it and you told him about it?"

Leon made a jerky, exasperated gesture with his hand. "I’m saying I don’t remember-but if I wrote it on the card, then obviously I did. Jesus Christ, that’s why we have the cards; so if we forget something, it’s down on paper." He breathed deep, closed his eyes for a moment, and smiled at them. "I’m sorry, I guess I’m a little jumpy. Who isn’t? I think I need a walk, if it’s okay with you." He made for the door without waiting for an answer.

"Sure, why not?" Abe said, and then held up the sack Leon had left behind. "Don’t forget your fish paste."

"There’s an old story," Abe said, as Leon, clutching his paper bag, shut the door none too gently behind him. "Skolnick borrows a kettle from Mandlebaum, and when he brings it back, Mandlebaum says, ‘Look, there’s a big hole in this kettle; how am I supposed to use it anymore? You got to give me another one.’ Skolnick says no he won’t, so they argue about it, and finally they agree to go in front of the rabbi to settle it. You know this story?"

"Does a horse in a bathtub come into it?"

"No, that’s a different story. In this one, they go in front of the rabbi, and here’s what Skolnick tells him: ‘In the first place, Rabbi, it’s a lie that I borrowed a kettle from Mandlebaum. Never did I borrow anything from him. In the second place, the kettle had a hole in it already when he lent it to me. And in the third place, it was in perfect condition when I gave it back to him. So you can see I’m completely innocent. Don’t blame me.’"

Gideon laughed as he finished his coffee. He went to a sink in the corner to rinse both cups. "It sounds like Leon’s story all right: In the first place I never found a femur; in the second place, if I did, I don’t remember; and in the third place, I only thought I found it-it was really a steatite carving."

"And in the fourth place," Abe said, stretching, his hands clasped behind his neck, "it must be Frawley who made the mistake in the first place, so don’t blame me."

The find card was lying on the table. Gideon picked it up, read it once more, and waved it gently back and forth. "You know, Abe, I’m not sure what this is about, but something tells me it’s important."

"Me, too. I agree with you a hundred percent. There’s funny business, all right, only what it is I don’t know."

Gideon looked at his watch. "Almost one o’clock. I’m going to go down the hill and have lunch with Julie. And I think I ought to drop by the Cormorant and talk to Nate about this."

"Nate? I wish you luck. Twice I tried to talk to him yesterday, just to cheer him up, and he wouldn’t even come to the door." He shook his head worriedly. "All day long he sits in his room and sulks. They bring him his meals, which he doesn’t eat."

"Well, it’s easy to understand."

"Sure, but healthy it’s not. Nathan’s got a depressive side to him, you know that? Maybe even melancholic. Healthy," he repeated darkly, "it’s not."