Unnatural Selection

TWENTY-ONE

Despite Merrill’s promise, he did not arrive back by teatime. It was 5:50 P.M. by the time the helicopter set him down on Holgate’s Green, and he immediately telephoned Clapper’s private number to bring him up to date on the autopsy, but it was Anna at the answering service that picked up, and she had a message waiting for him.

“Hello, love, the sergeant’s just gone out for dinner with his lady-friend, but he said if you get back by six or six-thirty, why don’t you come and join him, and bring your wife, if you like? They’ve gone to the Atlantic Inn. Do you know where it is, love, or do you require directions?”

Gideon did not require directions. He had passed it several times on his way to his morning pasties and coffee at the Kavorna Cafe: a pleasant-looking old hotel and pub on the main street, right at the foot of the pier. He put in a call to Julie, who was at the nightly cocktail hour in the castle dungeon-it had been canceled the night before on account of Joey’s death, but Kozlov had now reinstituted it-and passed along the invitation.

“I’d love to!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you dying to find out what Mike’s ‘lady-friend’ is like?”

“What his lady-friend is like? Yes, sure. I suppose so. Sure.”

“Men,” Julie grumbled.

As it turned out, however, Clapper’s choice of lady-friend surprised-and, on reflection, pleased-both of them. It was, of all people, the bangled, gabby Madeleine Goodfellow, director of the museum, and they heard her before they saw her. She and Clapper were at a table on a little, whitewashed terrace in back, looking out over a picture-postcard view of beached fishing boats resting all askew on the sand at low tide, and her jolly cackle of a laugh easily penetrated the buzz of conversation in the restaurant, the click of balls at the pool table, and the whirring of the slot machines.

“It’s Madeleine!” Julie said, delighted. “How wonderful! She’s just what he needs. She’ll be so good for him.”

“And I suspect he’ll be pretty good for her, too. He’s a pretty solid guy, Julie, underneath it all.”

Over dinners of oxtail soup, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding, Gideon explained what he and Merrill had come up with, keeping the more grisly autopsy details to himself in deference to Julie’s and Madeleine’s sensibilities. Still, the conclusion was clear enough to all: Joey had been thrown from the catwalk (probably) and then bludgeoned (certainly) while he lay on the ground. Murdered.

Sobered, they talked about the two killings for a while, throwing around conjectures-obviously, Clapper had been keeping Madeleine abreast-but by the time dinner was finished, and the men were into their second pints (ginger beer for Clapper) and the women into their second half-pints, they livened up and conversation turned to other matters. Clapper and Madeleine were to be married in the fall and would live, not above the police station, but in a nineteenth-century house on Tresco that had been in Madeleine’s family since the 1930s and was now being restored. They would have a view over the famous old Abbey Gardens and out across the Sound toward St. Mary’s, from which they would be a mere ten minutes by boat. Gideon and Julie were enthusiastically invited to the wedding and enthusiastically accepted. They clinked glasses-Madeleine’s bangles jingled-and talked on and on, until after eleven.

All in all, it was a welcome break from the events of the last few days, and Julie and Gideon were utterly relaxed as they walked back up Garrison Hill to the castle, hand in hand.

“Well, one mystery is solved anyway,” Julie said.

“What would that be?”

“Remember when you showed up at the museum reception the other night, straight from the police station, and you were surprised that Madeleine already knew about the bones from the beach?”

Gideon nodded.

“I think I can make a pretty good guess who she heard it from.”

“You just might be on to something,” Gideon said.

When he awakened the next morning, Gideon was sorely in need of a break. The session at the morgue had taken more out of him than he’d realized, and he wondered once again at Merrill’s ability to seemingly draw strength from his gruesome work. He’d suggested to Julie that she might want to play hooky for just one morning and join him, but while she’d obviously been drawn to the idea, she felt that she owed it to Kozlov and the others to be there.

“What’s the morning’s topic?” Gideon had asked.

“Victor’s presenting his paper on…” She’d looked at her copy of the program, open on the bed. “‘… a three-tiered social-constructivist ecological paradigm derived from monistic-subjectivist epistemology, relativist ontology, and genuinely hermeneutic methodology.’ God help me.”

Gideon stared open-mouthed at her for a moment. “Oh, well, you sure wouldn’t want to miss that. Damn, sure wish I could be there.”

So he was on his own, which suited him on this particular morning. After breakfast at the Kavorna Cafe (he’d been coming long enough for the waitress to ask if he wanted “the usual,” which he did), he decided to take advantage of the pleasant weather and see some of the island’s Neolithic sites.

On a whim he’d inquired about bicycles at the Kavorna and been directed to Buccabu Bike Hire on the Strand. Once there he’d somewhat shamefacedly asked for the least-complicated, easiest-to-operate bicycle they had (it had been a while since he’d been on one).

The clerk smiled knowledgeably. “Know just what you want, mate, got it right here,” he’d said, rolling out a one-speed, heavy-bodied Hampton Cruiser with wide tires, coaster brakes, and upright handlebars.

“Will that do you, mate? Just like you had when you were a kid, eh?”

Indeed, it was closer to his old Schwinn than he’d believed possible. “Just what I wanted.”

Armed with directions from the shop, he had cycled, only a little unevenly, up Telegraph Road, stopping at the Porthmellon store to pick up a picnic lunch, and then onto a dirt road until he found Bant’s Carn and Innisidgen Graves, two well-preserved Bronze Age entrance graves-open, rectangular, half-buried chambers situated at the tops of impossibly green hills, constructed of giant granite slabs, and roofed by huge capstones. With no other visitors at either place, he enjoyed pottering around for a while, but once he’d gone in and out of the chambers, and marveled at the size of the building stones, and wondered at how they’d gotten the massive capstones up there, there wasn’t much to do. The graves were empty, of course, having long ago been excavated, and the explanatory plaques, while informative, quickly wore thin in entertainment value. (“… a substantial mound revetted by a kerb of coursed walling and a partially infilled central chamber of trapezoidal form…”)

Still, the outing renewed him, body and spirit, and it was in a relaxed and contented frame of mind that he had his lunch of Stilton cheese, hard salami, and French bread sitting atop the Bant’s Carn capstone and looking out over the moor toward the islands of Tresco and Bryher.

Half an hour later, having returned the bike, he stopped in at the police station, where he found Clapper and Robb eating sandwiches at Robb’s desk, and about to return to Star Castle to continue their poking about.

“There you are, Gideon. Sit down, just the man I wanted to see,” Clapper said genially, chewing away on an archetypal English sandwich of soft white bread (crustless and thin as a dime), cucumber, and egg salad, his feet up on the desk and his ankles crossed. “Just how sure are you that those bones in the next room are really Edgar Villarreal’s?”

Gideon shrugged. “Pretty sure. Everything points to him. Of course, I’ve been wrong before-”

“No, not since yesterday, when you were pretty sure it was Pete Williams. Let’s not have any false modesty.”

“Now wait a minute, Mike, that’s not fair. You know I-”

“Easy, easy,” Clapper said, laughing, “just having you on a bit, no harm intended. But what do you make of this?” He wiped his fingers and scrabbled unsuccessfully among the papers on the desk until Robb came up with the one he wanted. “You read it to him, lad, it’s your work, after all.” He went back to his sandwich, talking around the bites. “And very well done, too.”

Robb swallowed what he had in his mouth, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and read: “According to Skybus records, Mr. Edgar Villarreal, who had previously booked his ticket to Bristol, did indeed fly from St. Mary’s to Bristol on Flight 400, at 8:00 A.M., on 7 June 2003, the final day of the last consortium. It is uncertain how or exactly when he returned to the United States, but on 8 June, at 3:22 P.M., he paid the parking fee for his car, a four-wheel-drive Toyota SUV, at the South Terminal Long-Term Lot at Anchorage International Airport, and exited. It was understood by an estranged sister, Maria Beasley, that he was going straight to his base camp ninety miles east of Anchorage, but she did not personally speak with him. When he failed to return home to Willow, Alaska, at the beginning of August, police were notified. On 4 August, local police visiting his camp found it deserted. The vehicle was not located. Further investigation produced no-”

“All right, Constable, that’ll do. What do you think about all this, Gideon?”

“I think it doesn’t prove anything at all. Anyone could have taken that flight in Villarreal’s name, or picked up his SUV and dumped it somewhere. Why wasn’t it found at the camp? Did the bear eat that, too?”

“A good question,” Clapper said, nodding.

“But the one place where he’d had to have been who he said he was, would have been the flight from England to the States, where he’d need to show a passport. And apparently there’s no record of his having done that.”

“There isn’t,” Robb said. “I was able to computer-search the manifests of every flight from the UK to the United States from 5:00 P.M. on the seventh of June to noon on the eighth. The name of every person who was at the consortium shows up-except Villarreal’s”

Gideon spread his hands. “Well, there you go. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to build a paper trail that ‘proved’ he was alive. But the one thing he couldn’t do was to get Villarreal’s name on an international flight.” He gestured at the scatter of bones on the table in the cubicle across the hall. “So I’m still betting that’s him right there.”

Clapper finished his sandwich and stood up. “And I’m agreeing with you,” he said. “That’s the way I see it, too.”

“I’d like to do some more work on the bones this afternoon. Maybe I can come up with something else for you.”

“Very good. Kyle and I are off to the castle to irritate the residents a bit more. You can have the station to yourself if you want it.”

He did; he had plenty to do. There was a formal inventory and description of the bones to be prepared, and then a careful, bone-by-bone analysis (the tables he’d been waiting for had arrived), with the results written up into a report that Clapper could use later on. And he needed to prepare something for Merrill as well, setting out on paper his autopsy-room conclusions and a rationale to accompany them. Accepting Clapper’s invitation to use his office and computer, he first wrote and printed up his findings for Merrill, then took some coffee, prepared earlier by Robb, into the cubicle where the bones were and prepared to get to work on them.

He did so with an unaccustomed sense of guilt, one that had been nagging at him for a couple of days, but which he’d managed to keep more or less at bay. The fact was, in almost every way, his handling of the skeletal analysis so far had been far short of the professionalism he demanded of his students. He’d acted like a raw grad student himself, running off in whatever new direction grabbed his interest. First he’d rushed to find evidence of dismembering; then he’d tried to see if the bones could have been Pete Williams’s. Then he’d gotten all caught up in the fruit-picker syndrome and the admittedly thrilling identification of the remains as Villarreal’s. And then… then he’d lost interest and dropped it; the exciting part was over, and what remained was a lot of measuring, counting, and describing.

Understandable enough in a first-year student, but that just wasn’t the way it was done. This was a science, not some magic act in which you went around pulling one rabbit after another out of the hat to the amazement and stupefaction of all concerned. There was a methodology, an order to be followed, and the very first, most elementary steps-laying out all the bones, not just the interesting ones, in their anatomical position and inventorying them-had yet to be taken. He had made no record of the number of fragments he had or exactly what they were, because he didn’t yet know himself-after three days with them right there in front of him on the table. I’m getting careless, he thought gloomily. No, not careless, cavalier. Rules were for lesser people, students and such, and not for him.

Well, he’d put an end to that line of thinking right now.

Some of the bones were still in their sacks. He got them all out onto the table, and then by way of penance, started with the ones that gave him the most trouble when it came to distinguishing between them and determining right from left: the thirty-five hand and foot bones. Without a text or a comparative skeleton it wasn’t easy. There was a public library just down the street, and chances were they had an atlas of anatomy he could have used, but what kind of penance would that have been? Sorting the maddening little bones was frustrating, but because it didn’t require anything like coherent thought-it was basically a matter of comparing bone to bone, nodule to nodule, foramen to foramen-it untethered and relaxed his mind, allowing it to float off on its own.

And it was while he was in this drifting, hovering state that the repugnant thought that had been niggling away at the borders of his mind broke through his defenses and entered. Julie had suggested that Joey could have been killed because he knew who had murdered Villarreal, and the killer had silenced him before he could tell anyone. And Gideon had rejected it because Joey’s death had come when everyone still thought the remains were Pete Williams’s, and how could anyone predict that he, Gideon, would identify them as Villarreal’s the next day? But now… now he realized that there was indeed someone who might have foreseen just that.

A crime of passion, Clapper had called it, and most assuredly it was. But crimes of passion were hardly limited to sexual jealousies, let alone resentments over academic disputes or prima donna status. There were other possible causes. And while the specific cause he was thinking about now was as improbable as it was repugnant, it had to be looked into. If nothing else, it was the only thing-the only thing he’d thought of so far-that might conceivably explain Joey’s murder.

The skeletal inventorying had waited this long; it could wait a little longer. He put down the left cuneiform bone he’d been holding in one hand and the ballpoint he’d had in the other, and went to Robb’s computer but didn’t have the password to access the Internet. Instead, he locked up the station and walked a block down Garrison Lane to the little public library-the Scillies’ one and only-where he plunked down five pounds for an hour’s Internet access at one of the two computers. He brought up the ProQuest search engine, typed in “Selway-Bitterroot AND Villarreal AND grizzly OR grizzlies,” clicked to sort the results by date, and waited while seventy-five references scrolled down the page. The last one, the oldest, was the one he wanted, and he brought it up.

CANADIAN COUPLE KILLED, PARTIALLY EATEN BY GRIZZLY Bill Giles

The Associated Press

Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, MT-In a horrific incident at Lost Horse Creek campground, on the Idaho-Montana border about forty miles southwest of Missoula…

WHEN the Fellows of the Consortium of the Scillies reconvened after a late lunch, they were surprised to find Sergeant Clapper awaiting them in the Victorian lounge, seated on the piano bench, his back to the upright piano.

“I’ll take but a minute of your valuable time,” he said convivially, as they placed themselves on the red, overstuffed chairs. “I wanted to inform you that the premises of Star Castle will be examined again this afternoon. Is that all right with you, Mr. Kozlov?”

“Me? Sure. What I got to hide? Just don’t break nothing.”

“Very well, then-”

Donald Pinckney’s forefinger went up. “Do you mean you’ll be searching our rooms again, Sergeant?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Again?” Rudy Walker said. “You’ve already gone through all our things once.”

“Yes. It’s not that pleasant to have someone pawing through your personal things, you know,” Donald said. “I mean, well, my wife doesn’t appreciate having some stranger…”

Clapper’s eyebrows drew together. “I don’t expect anyone will be interfering with your wife’s personal things at this time. Or yours, either.”

“Oh, I see” Donald said, quick to show that he wasn’t objecting, not really. “It’s just a sort of general search, then. For clues and things.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right, then.”

Not with Victor Waldo. “Look, I understand this is Vasily’s house, but as his guests, don’t we have some rights to privacy? I ask as a matter of principle.”

Clapper waited to see if there were other protestations. When none came, he said: “Yes, sir, of course you have rights, and those rights have been observed.” He held out a folded sheaf of papers. “I have here a search warrant authorized by the magistrate in St. Mary’s this morning, applicable to all rooms in the house, including those occupied by guests. You’re welcome to examine it.”

“No, of course not, there’s no need for that.”

“Don’t you have to have specific cause in order to get a search warrant?” Liz Petra asked. “I know we do in the States.”

“Yes, we certainly do.”

He could see that Liz and several others were on the edge of demanding to know his cause, but no one had the nerve to ask. He waited a moment longer and then said, “I must request that no one enter his or her room again until the room has been examined.”

“Oh, brother,” Liz grumbled. “That’s really a pain.”

“It should be much quicker than yesterday’s search,” Clapper assured her. “I expect we’ll be done by dinner. Oh, and should any of you wish to be present in your room during the execution of the warrant, you may do. Anybody?”

Nobody took him up, although for a moment Liz and Victor seemed close to it.

“Very well, then-” he began again, and again he was interrupted. This time it was by Robb, who came in to tell him that the crime-scene examiner that he had requested from Exeter had arrived and would like to begin as soon as was convenient.

“Well, then,” Clapper said with evident enthusiasm, placing his hands on his thighs and pushing himself up, “shall we get on with it?” He tipped an invisible hat to the attendees. “Do enjoy your afternoon.”

The librarian at the reference desk, a disciplinarian of the old school, looked up sharply and with a pencil to her lips sternly motioned to silence the large American gentleman at the computer.

“Ah, no,” he had murmured.

Anyone seeing Gideon Oliver trudging up Garrison Hill toward Star Castle might have wondered if his feet were bothering him. Indeed, he was literally dragging them, scuffling along with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets, unhappy to know what he now knew, reluctant to do what he now knew had to be done.

As he walked under the carved “ER 1593” he heard voices and clinking-cups on saucers, forks on plates-from above. He looked at his watch: three-thirty. The members of the consortium were starting their afternoon tea on the lawn atop the ramparts. He climbed the stone steps to find them just arranging themselves in plastic lawn chairs, most of them balancing cups and saucers in their hands or on their thighs, and some managing to deal with a pastry as well. Behind them, Mr. Moreton, very proper in tie and coat, manned the bar, which was set up with tea and coffee things.

Julie lit up and waved when she saw him. “Hi, sweetheart, come on over.” She was sitting in a little group with Liz and Kozlov. Near them Victor, Rudy, and Donald formed another conversational clump, along with Mike Clapper, who was demurely sipping his tea-pinky extended-while sitting atop one of a pair of stubby, seventeenth-century cannons set out on the lawn. A little further away in a group of their own, Cheryl Pinckney, not off tooling around on her motorcycle for once, was working her feline, high-cheekboned magic on Robb and was having some success, judging from his rigid, uneasy posture and his bright pink face.

Gideon pulled up a chair beside Julie and sat down heavily.

“Not having anything?” Liz asked.

“Have some tea!” Kozlov amiably commanded.

“No, thanks, I really don’t want anything.”

Julie’s brow wrinkled. She brought her head closer to his and lowered her voice. “Is something wrong?”

“No, not wrong,” he whispered. “Not exactly. I have to talk to Mike, that’s all. There’s-”

“So, Sergeant,” Kozlov boomed, bringing the other conversations to a halt, “the searching shall have been finished?”

“Oh, yes, it’s done,” Clapper said pleasantly. “We won’t have to bother you lot any more.”

“And you find what you looking for?”

Clapper smiled. “I believe we did, yes, as a matter of fact.”

What do you know, he’s figured it out, too, Gideon thought. He hoped it was true, because it meant that it wasn’t going to be up to him, Gideon, to rat on anyone after all, a duty he was dreading. His stiff shoulders relaxed a bit. He began thinking that a cup of tea might be a good thing.

“Good, good,” Kozlov said, “you make progress.”

“Oh, yes,” Clapper boomed genially on, his voice carrying well on the soft, warm air, “we should have it all sorted out pretty soon now. I have to clear up a few minor areas of inconsistency, that’s all.”

“Inconsistency?” Donald asked after a few seconds of silence that was very definitely pregnant. “Are you referring to our interviews with you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Minor things, really, but-”

“Well, this would be a good time to resolve them, wouldn’t it?” Rudy asked. “We’re all here.”

“Oh, I don’t like to intrude on this splendid tea.”

Like hell you don’t, Gideon thought.

“Is okay, is good, is interesting,” Kozlov said. “What kind inconsistency?”

“Well, all right, then. It’s a simple matter of room assignments at the first consortium two years ago.” Hatless but otherwise in his casual summer uniform of white short-sleeved shirt and blue trousers, Clapper looked crisp and robust. He lifted the flap of his breast pocket, took out his mechanical pencil and notepad, licked the point of the pencil, and pretended to study the diagram he’d drawn earlier.

“Now let me see… Mister Waldo, you stated that you and Mrs. Waldo were in the Sir Henry Vane Room…”

Waldo colored slightly at the mention of his wife, but nodded. “That’s correct.”

“Mrs. Oliver, you were in the Sir John Wildman Room; and Ms. Petra, I believe you said you were staying in the Duke of Hamilton Room. Mr. Walker, the John Bastwick Room.”

Nod, nod, nod.

“Very good. To continue-”

“Wait a minute,” Donald said. “I’m pretty sure Cheryl and I were in the John Bastwick Room.” He frowned. “Weren’t we? Isn’t that what I told you?”

“That is what you told me,” Clapper said, pretending to scrutinize his drawing again, and then raising his head to level his gaze at Donald, “and therein lies the source of my confusion. I rather doubt that the three of you were lodged together.”

“Of course we weren’t,” Rudy said primly. “Donald, if I’m not mistaken, you two were in the John Biddle Room.”

“The hell we were,” Cheryl said, turning her attention from Robb. “We were in the John Bastwick Room. Joey was next to us in the Marianus Napper Room, and you were on the other side of him, in the John Biddle Room, down at the end of the hall.”

“That’s right,” Liz said. “I remember, too.”

“So do I,” Julie said. “Definitely.”

“Was I?” Rudy shrugged. “That’s not what I remember, but maybe I was. Too many Johns around here, I guess.”

“Actually, Mr. Walker,” Clapper said gravely, setting his tea down on the lawn and rising from the cannon, never taking his eyes from Rudy, “it’s quite a significant point, I’m afraid.”

Rudy wasn’t laughing anymore “ What’s a significant point? What the hell difference does it make which room I was in? What’s this all about? What are you trying to do?”

Clapper just kept gazing at him, as did the others now. The silence on the ramparts was profound. There was no sound but the soughing of the breeze.

“What’s going on here?” Rudy blurted, looking now at Robb, who had gotten up and was slowly approaching him. “What’s the difference? I forgot my room, that’s all. I didn’t kill anyone, you know, I just-”

“Yeah, you did,” Gideon said. He hadn’t meant to; it had just popped out. And he’d said if softly, mostly to himself, but in the silence everyone heard it.

“Yeah,” echoed Clapper with what he must have thought was an American twang, “you did.” He glanced at Robb. “Constable?”

Robb placed himself directly in front of Rudy, face to face, and stood tall. “Rudolph James Walker, you are under arrest for the murder of Edgar Villarreal. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in Court. Anything you do say…”