Uneasy Relations

FIFTEEN

For almost two hundred years the Alameda Botanical Gardens have been a peaceful, restorative haven where the people of Gibraltar could go to get away from the congestion, dust, and bustle of the city. Lovers – moony teenagers and shuffling old married folk – still stroll hand in hand among its lush plantings, stately civic memorials, and nineteenth-century cannons, planning their futures and recalling their pasts.

Strolling there hand in hand, Gideon told Julie about the burned body in the morgue.

“So he was murdered,” she said thoughtfully.

“I’m pretty sure.”

“And does Fausto go along with you?”

“Oh, yes. He was setting up some interviews when I left him. Rowley’s at the top of the list.”

“He suspects Rowley?”

“No, but Rowley drove Ivan home that night. He’s probably the last one who saw him alive before the killer. He probably knows Ivan better than anyone else too.”

“Does Fausto have anybody he suspects? Do you?”

“No. Do you?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m trying to imagine a reason any of these people would want to kill him, and I can’t come up with one.”

“I know. I would have thought he didn’t have an enemy in the world. I’m sorry you didn’t know him before; he was impossible to dislike. But then, we know next to nothing about his outside life. There’s more to him than archaeology. Family, acquaintances, old enemies, maybe…”

“I know. But if you add in the attacks on you, and Sheila Chan’s ‘accident,’ it just has to have something to do with Gibraltar Boy and all that – which means something to do with these people – your friends.”

“Julie, we have no compelling reason to think what happened to Sheila wasn’t an accident, and as for the supposed attacks on me, the jury’s still out, right? There’s no hard evidence anyone really attacked me.”

“Yeah, right,” Julie said, which, in reality, pretty much summed up Gideon’s sentiments too.

They walked a few more steps. “You could really tell he was murdered by comparing the cracks in his skull?” Julie asked.

“More or less.”

“That’s remarkable. Every time I think I know all your tricks you come up with another one.”

“But unlike most magicians, I always tell how I did it.”

“Whether I want to know or not.” She dug him in the ribs with her elbow. “You know I’m kidding. Tell me.”

“What do you say we sit down?”

They chose a lichened stone bench in a grove of small but ancient oaks, poplars, and spiky palms, with the clean, white facade of the Rock Hotel, and the immense Rock itself, looming above them through the foliage.

“There were two keys,” he said. The first had been the form of the fractures. One was narrow, with sharp, clean-cut margins. As Fausto had said, if there hadn’t been any warping of the surrounding temporal bone, the edges would have fit together perfectly. That was fairly typical of thermally induced fracturing.

“The skull just splits open from the heat?” Julie said.

“No, not exactly. It happens primarily because the organic content of the bone is destroyed, which delaminates it – the external table separates from the diploe and shrinks and cracks. Continue the heat, and the same thing happens to the internal table, so then you get a fracture all the way through.”

She frowned. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

He laughed. “I suppose so, yes. In any case, there’s nothing suspicious about that one. But the second crack, the anterior one, ah, that one was wide open, with margins so worn and eroded – so burned – that they no longer came close to matching each other.”

Long used to this kind of conversation, Julie was characteristically quick on the uptake. “Meaning that the second crack was exposed to the heat for a longer time, so it must have come first,” she said.

“Right. Presumably it was there before the fire started.”

“But how do you know it wasn’t just a question of the way he was lying?”

“The way he was lying?”

“Sure. He was lying on the bed, right? Which was where the fire started. Maybe that part of his head – the part that had the eroded crack – was against the mattress, so it took more of the heat for a longer time. Couldn’t that be the reason for the difference?”

“Well, it could, yes – although the two cracks were awfully close together for a differential rate of burning. But, yeah, you could be right, it’s possible. Fortunately, there was another key. And this one was the clincher.”

It was the simple fact that the fracture in question ran all the way down the temporal bone to its very bottom and disappeared into the auditory meatus, he explained.

“I don’t understand,” Julie said.

“No, of course not. Neither did Kaz, neither did Fausto. This is more new research, something we didn’t know until a few years ago. The thing is, when a skull cracks from the heat of a fire, it’s only the burned part that fractures. The crack won’t extend into undamaged bone. That’s the way it was with the second crack; it ended at the point where the sternocleidomastoideus had covered the bone and prevented it from burning. Just stopped short.”

“But the other one didn’t stop short,” Julie said, nodding. “When the doctor stripped off the muscle, there it was underneath… meaning it had to have been there before the fire started. A traumatic injury of some kind.”

“Bingo,” Gideon said for the second time in an hour. “Blunt force, from the look of it, although the actual site of the blow was gone.”

“That’s interesting, but didn’t you say that the doctor said he died of smoke inhalation? Was he wrong, then?”

“No, I don’t think he was wrong, but neither am I. I’m assuming Ivan was whacked over the head with something – probably lost consciousness; I hope so, anyway – and then the fire was set to cover it up, and Ivan, just about dead already, took in a few whiffs of smoke and that was the end of it. If whoever did it knew the place was full of glues and solvents, which he probably did, he also knew it would go up like a haystack. He figured Ivan’s body would be beyond any useful forensic analysis. And he was damn near right. I was lucky to find anything at all.”

Julie suddenly shivered. “Ivan’s body,” she echoed. “It’s funny, I forgot for a while there that we were talking about a real person, a nice old man we were chatting with just a couple of nights ago.”

“I know,” Gideon said with a sigh. “I forget too.”

They were quiet for a few seconds, watching a gecko skitter across the path and into the bushes, taking in the bird calls – warblers, wrens, blackbirds – breathing in the flowery air. The sights, sounds, and smells of life.

Gideon looked at his watch. “The groundbreaking for the Europa Point visitor center thing is at two o’clock. Want to come?”

“You mean they’re still planning to have it? Weren’t they going to present Ivan with another award?”

“Yes, they’ll do it posthumously. But you know, aside from that, this will be my first chance to see the actual cave site. They haven’t been letting anybody down there since the path to it collapsed when they had that cave-in a few years ago.”

“When Sheila Chan got killed.”

“Right. But Pru says it’s not really that hard to get to, and nobody really stops you. She’s going to show me around it. So I’m going. What about you?”

“Sure, I’d like to come.”

“Did you pick up the rental car, or will we need to get a taxi? I promised Pru a lift.”

“No, I have the car. It’s back at the hotel. A bright red Honda. But I could use some sustenance before then,” Julie said. “How about lunch?”

“Sure.”

“Any preference?”

Gideon thought for a moment. “Anything but steak,” he said.