Unnatural Selection

TEN

The strands of fog continued to thicken and spread through the night, so that in the morning several of the interisland commercial boat operators called off nonessential operations for the day, and there was some doubt about whether it would be possible to get Hicks and his dog from St. Agnes to St. Mary’s. But Ron, the pilot of the police launch/water ambulance, was up to the task, and shortly after 10:00 A.M., Truscott Hicks and Tess the Border collie were deposited on the Hugh Town quay, where they were met by Gideon, Clapper, and Robb. At Gideon’s request, Robb had brought a couple of trowels for digging (although Gideon was privately counting on the sand’s being soft enough for bare-handed retrieval); a toothbrush and paintbrush for cleaning; some large paper bags and marking pens; and, from Islands Home Hardware, a few doors down from the police station, a three-foot length of large-gauge wire screening and a five-gallon bucket. He would use the last two items to sift the sand around and under any finds that were made, hunting for anything that might turn up.

In addition, Robb, on his own, had brought a pad of graph paper, a folding ruler and tape measure, the office digital camera, several pairs of disposable gloves, and a sleeve of plastic envelopes for incidental items that might be found.

“It’s the boy’s first likely homicide,” Clapper told Gideon, sounding like an amused parent, “and he’s determined to do it up right.” His next thought seemed to catch him by surprise. “Well, so am I, if it comes to that.”

They walked a few steps from the quay to where the Scillies’ one and only official conveyance, a white Land Rover with bold, blue-checkerboard detailing, was parked alongside the quay. The word POLICE was printed in giant block letters on a six-inch-wide horizontal band of eye-assaulting, Day-Glo chartreuse that encircled the entire van.

“Hard to miss, innit?” Clapper said approvingly. “PC Robb will drive the two of you. I’ll follow along in my own motorcar.”

Hicks, Gideon, and Tess climbed into the backseat, and Robb started the engine. Tess briefly explored those parts of Gideon that were of canine interest and went back to nestle down, close up against Hicks’s leg, her head between her paws.

They drove north, out of town and past a couple of pleasant beaches that had picnickers and strollers on them despite the fog, then past a few scattered restaurants and guesthouses, a sprawling flower farm, and the nine-hole Isles of Scilly Golf Club. The paving ran out just beyond the golf course, and they continued north, bumping along on an otherwise empty and increasingly primitive dirt road bordering a rocky coast perforated by occasional isolated sandy coves.

“Well, it’s got to be this one,” Robb said, stopping at the very limit of anything that could reasonably be called a road. “That’s Halangy Point up ahead, and there’s the Creeb right out there.” He pointed to a low, bare little island not far offshore. “And this is the only sandy stretch between them.”

“Ah,” said Gideon. If nothing else came of the day, at least he now knew what a creeb was.

Behind them, Clapper pulled up in a dusty, beat-up Vauxhall Astra. They were only a couple of miles from the center of Hugh Town, but a world away from the hurly-burly of bustling streets, souvenir shops, and day-trippers. The cove itself was a hundred-yard-wide curve of gravelly sand bordered by rocky outcroppings at either end, with more scattered rocks and a few meager patches of dune grass at the back. Not a particularly attractive beach, especially for this beach-blessed part of the world, and there were no signs of footprints, no litter. It looked as if nobody had been on it for months.

“Good place for the dog to work,” Hicks said.

Good place to bury a few sackfuls of body parts, Gideon thought.

On the far side of the road the land swept away into a region of rolling green uplands sparsely dotted with stone farmhouses and occasionally patterned by hedgerows into squares and rectangles that ran up and down the hillsides. This, Gideon knew, was also the part of the island most richly populated with the ruins of the Stone Age villages and rock-cairn burial chambers that he still meant to get to, if there was time-if, that is, no interesting hoard of bones turned up today.

“Not much beach this morning,” Clapper said more or less to himself as they got out of their vehicles at the side of the road above the sand. “Tide’s still up. Maybe thirty yards down to the water. We won’t be able to get below the high-tide line for some time.”

“Not much point in looking there anyway,” Hicks said. “Anything buried there would have been washed away in the winter storms long ago, with new sand having been deposited to replace the old.”

Gideon nodded his agreement as he held out his cardboard cup for some of the hot, sweetened tea that Robb had thoughtfully brought along in a metal carafe. With the increase in the fog, along with a stiff breeze, the temperature had dropped six or seven degrees, and he was regretting not having taken Julie’s advice to put on a fleece under his Windbreaker. Clapper’s comb-over was standing straight up in the wind, but he seemed not to notice.

While the men sipped their tea, Tess tugged impatiently at the end of her leash, her head turned up, her tongue lolling, and her strange, warm yellow eyes trained eagerly on Hicks.

He laughed as he looked down at her. “Tell me she doesn’t know she’s going to have a chance to get some work in. Tell me she doesn’t love it.”

He crumpled his cup and placed it in the litter sack in the van. “Well, let’s get started, shall we? I’ll have her begin over there, at the north end, so that she can work into the wind. More effective that way, you see.”

As the four men trudged to the other end of the cove, Gideon used the time to study the dune grass. Burials had a way of changing the vegetation that grew above them, or rather a number of ways. Most obviously, and most often, they provided nutrients that made plant growth more luxuriant. On the other hand, they sometimes slowed growth by damaging or restricting roots. So one of the important things, when hunting a burial, was to look for an area of growth that was noticeably different from the surrounding area. But in this case, the grasses were so skimpy and scattered to begin with that they gave no clue.

Hicks hopped nimbly down the rocks to the sand, followed by the others, with Tess growing more excited by the second. They were a bit more protected from the wind here, and Gideon eased open the zipper of his Windbreaker.

When Hicks bent to unhook Tess’s leash, Gideon expected her to bound immediately down the beach, but, trembling with excitement though she was, she waited without moving for her master’s command. Hicks took his time, stuffing and lighting his pipe, which took three matches in the breeze.

“All right, Tess,” he said conversationally when he’d finally gotten it lit, “search.” And off she went, trotting diagonally toward the southern end of the cove. She hadn’t gone more than twenty yards before she came to an abrupt stop. Her nose, which had been an inch or two off the sand, now went right down to it.

“Well, that didn’t take long,” Hicks observed with quiet satisfaction. “The old girl hasn’t lost her touch.”

“Do you mean she’s found something already?” asked a delighted Robb. “As quickly as that?”

“She’s located a scent pool,” Hicks said, as they moved in a group toward her, “but don’t get your hopes up just yet. In sand, because of the porosity, the pool can be enormous. Moreover, it can linger after the object is no longer there. For years, sometimes. So right now, all we can say for certain is that some body’s remains have lain some where near here… at some time, present or past.”

“Might even be no more than a few old seal bones, or what’s left of a shrew, lad,” Clapper said, trying to keep Robb from getting carried away.

“Well, no, Mike, that it wouldn’t be,” Hicks said. “Remember, Tess is trained to respond only to human remains. She’d take no notice of a shrew, or a seal, or anything else. Only a dead human being.”

“Amazing,” Gideon said on cue.

By the time they reached Tess, she was moving rapidly and seemingly randomly over the beach, back and forth, head down, snuffling away noisily, so intent and focused that she took no notice even of Hicks. Gideon had the impression that if a meteor had crashed into the beach beside her at that moment, she wouldn’t have noticed.

“Sounds like a Hoover, doesn’t she?” Robb said admiringly.

“Certainly does,” Clapper said, and then for Gideon’s benefit: “A vacuum cleaner.”

Hicks stood there, chewing on his pipe, keenly watching her. “All right, then,” he said, “seems to me she’s defined the limits of the pool. Appears to run from this rock over here, halfway down to the water, and then over to those low dunes over there.” With the stem of the pipe he had outlined an area of about twenty by thirty yards. “Time now to get specific.”

The pipe was jammed back in his mouth. “Tess!” he said, more sharply than he’d spoken to her before. Reluctantly, she surfaced, coming to a stop and raising her head a little from a clump of dune grass. “Slow down, girl, calm down.” He tapped his thigh. “Come.”

She lifted her head a little more and looked doubtfully at him, obviously beset by warring instincts, and for a second it looked as if she might disobey, but with a soft whimper she came to his side, nuzzling his hand with her sandy nose to make amends.

“Now we’ll get a bit more businesslike,” he said to the others. “We’ll search the area in a grid pattern to make sure we cover every inch, instead of this frantic to-ing and fro-ing. If there’s something here, she should be able to pinpoint it.”

“ Should be able to,” Clapper muttered.

“They’re not infallible, Mike, you know that. No more than you or I. Well, you, anyway.”

Without benefit of a leash to connect them, dog and handler began to move slowly and systematically over the defined area. When it was time to shift directions, Hicks would murmur “Turn” or “This way” and the dog would turn with him, while Clapper, Robb, and Gideon watched from the perimeter.

“Like a dance, innit?” Clapper said, getting a cigarette going.

“It’s beautiful, really,” said Robb. “The way she follows.”

After about five minutes, the dog suddenly sat down and softly whined.

“She’s located something,” Clapper told them. “That’s the alert he trains them to give. Now he’ll ask her to show the exact spot.”

“She won’t actually dig it up, will she?” an anxious Gideon asked.

“No, no, she knows better than that.”

“Good girl,” Hicks said to the dog. “Now then. Touch.”

Tess immediately jumped up, placed a graceful forefoot on the sand, and pawed gently and elegantly away, like a high-strung horse.

Hicks knelt to plant a thin metal rod with an orange flag on it. “X marks the spot,” he said, pleased and smiling. “Who wants to do the honors?”

Robb and Clapper deferred to Gideon, who knelt and began clearing sand with his hands, spreading rather than digging. It was as soft as he’d hoped, if a bit colder, and it took less than a minute to uncover a smooth, spiraling, sea snail-shaped knob of bone, as clean of flesh and ligament as a specimen from a biological supply house. “That,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, “is the distal end of a human right humerus-the elbow. Thank you, Tess, well-done.”

The dog, her face on a level with his own, grinned at him and yawned prodigiously, her bright pink tongue curling back on itself into an almost-complete circle.

Robb immediately got out his pad, his camera, and a metal tape measure, and set about industriously drawing, photographing, and writing down the circumstances of the find.

With his fingers and the paintbrush Gideon began clearing sand from the rest of the bone. “If we’re right about it being a dismemberment-”

“So now we’re back to if we’re right?” Clapper growled predictably; not with any conviction, but from mere force of habit.

“-the chances are we’ll only find three-quarters of it or so. The top few inches will probably be missing, the same way… Ah, there we are, see?”

He ran his fingers down it. “Male,” he announced. “And adult, of course. As expected.”

“How did you know that?” Clapper asked, looking down from what seemed a great height. He was wearing a voluminous, calf-length topcoat, which gave him even more of a looming quality than usual.

“Male because of the robusticity,” Gideon began, “and as for age, as you can see, the distal symphysis is-”

“No, how did you know the top part would be missing?”

“Oh, I didn’t know, I was just going with the averages. Dismemberments have a pretty typical pattern: upper arms cut from the torso just about where this one was, hands cut off above the wrist, legs severed a few inches down from the hips, head chopped off at about here-” He tapped his own neck. “Feet separated-”

It was all a little too graphic for the imaginative Robb. “A bone like this, it doesn’t look so bad, but when you think about someone actually doing it… what a horror it must be… a nightmare.” A shudder ran visibly down his back.

“It is. They do it in a bathtub when they can, to contain the gore,” Gideon said, continuing to brush sand. How did a peaceable, laughably squeamish guy like me, whose primary academic interest was early Pleistocene hominid locomotion, get to the point where I could so easily and knowledgeably discuss the methods of choice of homicidal monsters whose terrible minds and motives I couldn’t begin to comprehend? It was far from the first time he’d had such a thought, and no doubt far from the last.

“Actually, I’ve never dealt with a freshly dismembered body”- and let’s hope I never do -“but I’ve gone back to the scene of the crime a few days later-the bathroom where it was done, I mean. And gory is hardly the word for it. Blood everywhere-the walls, the ceiling…” At the memory, he couldn’t quite repress a shudder of his own.

Clapper noticed. “Grisly work,” he said sympathetically.

“Messy in the extreme. The bathtub makes it easier to clean up, but of course blood traces are almost impossible to get rid of. If we knew where this guy was sliced up into sections, there’d probably still be traces, even after all this time.”

“At Bramshill,” Robb said with a frown, “they told us dead bodies don’t bleed.”

“That’s not always the case, lad,” Clapper said.

“That’s right,” Gideon agreed. “Oh, there aren’t any great gouts of blood if you cut or stab them, because the heart’s not pumping anymore, so there’s no pressure, but they certainly can bleed if the blood’s still in them and it’s still liquid. The way a garden hose would continue to leak if you cut into it, after you turn it off.”

“Like a fresh piece of meat, you might say,” said Clapper helpfully. “Oozes, like, don’t it?”

“And when you’re cutting up a corpse, and hefting the segments, and trying to get them into sacks,” Gideon added, “you’re juggling some pretty heavy, awkward pieces of meat-a male torso weighs eighty or a hundred pounds, a single leg weighs about thirty-so you’re bound to get quite a lot of blood all over everything.”

“I see,” whispered a pallid Robb, and then, barely audibly, “thank you.”

Gideon had had enough too. “Look, why don’t we just concentrate on what we have here in front of us?” he muttered roughly, his head down, continuing to scrabble in the sand with his fingers. Nice, clean, dry bones, not a sign of gore.

“You’re expecting to find the forearm bones here with it, then?” Clapper asked. “If the body was cut up the way you said?”

“I was hoping so, assuming he deposited the entire fleshed arm here, but anything could have happened to them by now, and it’s starting to look as if-no, no, here we go.” His fingers had found something, and with a few strokes of the brush he uncovered two smaller, thinner bones. “They’ve just shifted in the sand a bit, but here they are: radius and ulna.”

“Cut off through the wrist,” said Robb, impressed, “exactly as you predicted.”

“Seen one, seen them all, I suppose,” Clapper said. “You’d think the blighters would cut through the joints, wouldn’t you? Disjoint, as you might say.”

“Disjoint!” said Hicks with a grimace. “Sounds like something you’d do to a chicken.”

Gideon laughed. “‘Disarticulate,’ we like to say.”

“Well, whatever you call it,” said Clapper, “it would be a lot easier than all this hacking and chopping and sawing of bones, and a good bit neater, too.”

“But not a lot faster,” Gideon said. “This is the quickest way. Getting through the articulations is a slow, tricky process, and, anyway, you couldn’t do it without a pretty thorough knowledge of anatomy.”

He placed the three bones in a sack that Robb provided and got to his feet, brushing off his knees. “That’s it for this cache, I think. The hands are probably elsewhere, possibly with the feet. They seem to do it that way a lot.”

“Shall we have the old girl carry on, then?” asked Hicks. “See what else she might turn up?”

“Lead away,” Clapper said. “Kyle, we’ll leave you to do the sifting here.”

“I’ll get started right away, Sarge,” Robb said, setting down the bucket, unrolling the length of screening, and producing a trowel.

“Search,” Hicks said to Tess.

Any expectation that she would repeat the lightning-quick results of her first effort was soon dashed. A cursory exploration of the beach at her own rapid pace produced no pool of scent. Nor did the first hour and a half of a slower, more methodical search with her master doing the guiding, after which Hicks, citing “olfactory fatigue,” declared she needed food, water, a play break, and a rest. By that time Robb had rejoined them: his sifting had produced nothing.

Looking at his watch-it was a well after 1:00 P.M.-Clapper suggested they could use a food and watering break themselves, but Hicks said it would be better if Tess wasn’t away from the scene for too long, and Robb said he wasn’t hungry, and if it was all right, he’d like to stay on and assist Hicks.

“That’s fine with me,” Gideon said. He was hungry, but he was more eager to get someplace where he could properly examine the bones; preferably somewhere indoors and out of the increasingly dank fog. “If anything else does turn up, I think you get the idea of how to unearth it, Kyle, so why don’t you go ahead and take care of it yourself?”

His graduate students would have been justifiably outraged to hear him say this, considering how often he reminded them of the importance of being in on the exhumation whenever possible. But in this case, with the bones dismembered and scattered, there was little to be learned from their precise placement. Besides, the natural shifting of beach sands made it even less likely that their positional relationships would have any similarity to the way they were originally buried. Besides that, in order to maintain even their present positions in the unstable sand and keep them from getting covered over again by dislodged fill, he would have had to erect a set of retaining walls, which, in the present circumstances, wasn’t worth the doing.

And besides, he was freezing.

“Really, would that be all right?” Robb was thrilled.

“Doesn’t seem as if there’s all that much to it,” Clapper rumbled. “Brush ’em off, pick ’em up, and put ’em in a bag. It’s the dog that does the work, innit?”

“If the hand or foot bones turn up, make sure you do a thorough search for the small ones,” Gideon said. “Some of the carpals and tarsals are pretty funny-looking, like irregular little stones, so pick up anything along those lines. Oh, and be sure and sift really thoroughly around any hand bones, Kyle; he might have neglected to pry off a ring, or even a watch, and it might still be around.”

“Can you handle that all right, lad?” Clapper asked.

“Oh, I think I can just about cope,” said Robb, but with so sunny a smile that Clapper couldn’t have taken offense if he’d wanted to.

“And if you have a problem,” Clapper said, “you know how to reach me.”

“I’ll do that, sir. And have no fear, Professor, I’ll document and photograph everything exactly as it lies in situ.”

“In situ,” Clapper repeated, shaking his head. “My, my.” And then with a sigh, “I’m sure you will, lad, I’m sure you will.”