Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  Clapper’s sigh was monumental. He got up to grind out his cigarette in the metal ashtray on Robb’s desk, then went to the window behind the desk and looked out at the garage of the house next door, a bored and restless man.

  “And there’s another way you can tell too,” Gideon went on, partly for Robb’s continuing edification, but mostly for the hell of it. He took the bone back from the young constable, who had been holding it while he followed Gideon’s remarks, and touched his finger to a thin, quarter-inch spike extending from the cut end. “This is the breakaway spur that you get with saw cuts. The bone snaps off from its own weight just before the saw blade gets all the way through.”

  “Yes, the same thing happens when one saws a piece of wood, doesn’t it?” Robb said. “Unless, of course, one turns it over and finishes sawing through from the other side.”

  “Right, but when you’re dismembering a corpse, as the sergeant correctly suggested, you’re probably going to be a lot more interested in speed than in neatness.”

  Clapper turned from the window and perched his bulk somewhat precariously on the sill. “Where did you say this was found? On the beach? Up near Halangy Point?”

  “Yes, a little north of the creeb,” Gideon said, to show him he was dealing with someone who knew the lay of the land, not merely some know-nothing outlander. What the bell is a creeb? he wondered.

  “Buried,” Clapper said. A statement, not a question.

  “Yes.”

  Clapper lit up another Gold Bond. “ ‘Buried’ as in the active voice or in the passive?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Are you saying ‘Someone buried the bone in the sand’? Or simply ‘The bone was buried in the sand,” as, for example, if it had washed ashore from who knows what distant land, and then been covered over during a storm?“

  Gideon revised his estimate of Clapper’s educational level. “I don’t have any way of knowing.”

  “Ah.”

  When the telephone trilled again, Robb listened a moment and reported. “It’s for you again, Sarge. He made a sympathetic face. ”Exeter again.“ His voice went to a respectful whisper. ”It’s Chief Superintendent Dibbs himself this time.“

  Clapper rolled his eyes. “And does Chief Superintendent Dibbs himself strike you as being in a fun-loving frame of mind?”

  “Not really, sir.”

  The sergeant rose heavily from the window sill and clumped back toward his office, muttering. He was a slow-moving man with a stately, surging stride, like an astronaut moving through a zero-gravity environment. “Exeter is where headquarters is, Dr. Oliver; the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary main office,” Robb explained when the door had closed behind the sergeant. “They’ve been giving Sergeant Clapper a bit of a difficult time.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I suspect he’ll be in there a while.”

  “Shall I leave the bone with you, then?”

  “I think that would be best. Can we reach you at the castle if need be?”

  “Any time. I’ll be here till the end of the week.”

  The two men stood and shook hands. “Thank you very much for taking the time and trouble to come in, sir, we appreciate it.” He grinned. “And thanks for the osteology lesson. We’ll be in touch now, sir.”

  Heading back down Upper Garrison, a grumpy Gideon doubted it.

  He knew Clapper’s type all too well. A cynical, disillusioned cop nearing sixty, who disguised his cynicism with a leaden-footed jocularity, who was more interested in keeping a low profile and not making any waves than he was in solving old, anonymous murders. He wasn’t going to take the chance of stepping into anything that might seriously complicate his life. The easiest, least risky path for him at this point would be to simply let the matter slide, to not even open a case file— it was only a single bone, after all—and that was the path he was going to take.

  SEVEN

  BUT Gideon was dead wrong. He’d never run into a cop like Mike Clapper before, a fact that was made clear to him the following day.

  With Julie, he was having lunch at Tregarthen’s Hotel, another establishment, like Star Castle, with proud historical associations, but of a literary sort: plaques on the walls proclaimed that both George Eliot and Alfred Lord Tennyson had spent time there.

  They ate in the airy, Danish Modern bar, its cool blues and golds a nice contrast to the brooding, dark-wood ambience of Star Castle. After a light meal of steamed clams and a couple of glasses of Skinner’s Cornish Blonde beer—citrusy and wheaty, and the waiter’s excellent suggestion to accompany the clams—they took their coffee outside to the one of the umbrellaed tables on the terrace overlooking the Old Quay and the outer islands. Julie had considerately failed to mention his promise of the day before to pay for lunch out of his poker winnings, for which he was grateful. They watched the Scillonian ferry disembark its first passenger-load of the day and were on their second cups, silently enjoying the wisps of cloud, the sun-dappled water, and the faint tinge of white mist on the horizon, when Gideon spotted Police Constable Robb going in the hotel’s front door, quite handsome in full uniform; blue tunic, bucket helmet, dark tie and all. Robb saw him at the same time and came over for a friendly hello.

  “I’m glad to see you, Dr. Oliver,” he said after he’d been introduced to Julie. “I was hoping to have a chance to speak with you. I’m in for a quick sandwich. All right if I join you?”

  “Sure, pull up a chair.”

  “I’ll just order inside. Faster that way. Back in a tick.”

  “He seems as nice as you said,” Julie remarked as he disappeared inside.

  “Oh, a good kid, very nice. It’s Clapper that’s the hard case. I’m telling you, I’d have slugged the guy if he’d treated me the way he treated Robb.”

  “Yeah, right,” Julie said, and they both laughed.

  When Robb returned with a ham sandwich and a can of English lemonade, the first thing he did was strip off his coat and helmet and lay them neatly on an unused chair.

  “Ah, that’s better.” Glaring at the helmet, he massaged his temples. “That thing is like wearing a pail on your head.”

  “You can’t wear the soft cap?” Gideon asked. “I saw a couple in your office.”

  “Oh, generally, we do, when we wear a cap at all. But I’ve only just come up from quay duty—seeing in the ferry—and the tourists, you know, they like to see them. Well—” He smiled and shrugged. “ ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.” “

  “ ‘Taking one consideration with another,” “ Julie recited, which pleased him, and together they sang a few more lines of patter from Pirates of Penzance.

  While he ate they engaged in small talk. What did Julie do? (She was a park ranger. “How interesting!”) Where was Robb from? (Bournemouth, on his last three months of a two-year assignment to St. Mary’s.) What was life like in the Scillies? (Quiet.) But Gideon could feel him edging closer to whatever it was he was anxious to talk about, and finally he got there.

  “I hope you’ll come by and see the sergeant about that bone again,” he said as he finished the first half of the sandwich and used a napkin to pluck a crumb from the corner of his mouth. “I’m sure you could be a great deal of help on the case.”

  “What case?” Gideon asked. “He didn’t seem very interested in opening one yesterday.”

  “I grant you, his manner can be a bit, er, unfortunate at times. Sometimes I have to step in and smooth the waters a bit.”

  “As you’re doing now?” Julie asked.

  “As I’m doing now. But underneath his rough exterior, you see—”

  “There lies a heart of gold,” Gideon said.

  Robb laughed with patently real amusement. “Well, no, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but four out of five days he’s quite approachable, quite genial, even.”

  “Obviously, then, I hit him on day five.”

  “In a way, yes. Exeter had been nagging him all morning. That always puts him in a fo
ul mood.”

  “I see. It wasn’t my personality that set him off, it was just my rotten timing.”

  “Very much so,” Robb said, nodding eagerly. “His attitude is entirely different today, entirely. You’d hardly know he was the same man. He’s had me open a case log on the matter, and he’s been hard at the computer, searching for possible leads on that bone ever since.”

  Gideon was astonished. “He has? What brought about this change?”

  “Well, you see, he telephoned headquarters about it, as required in possible homicide cases. The usual procedure would be for them to send a detective constable from St. Ives to determine if foul play is really a possibility. If so, a detective inspector or perhaps a chief inspector, from Truro or possibly from Plymouth, would be assigned as SIO—that is, as senior investigative officer—”

  Gideon hadn’t remembered that Robb was so talky. “I’m afraid I don’t see—”

  “Well, the thing is, I gather they pretty much laughed at him— ‘One piece of bone from who knows where, with a few marks on it?” and so on—and implied that the detective force had better things to do, and he was entirely free to pursue it on his own. So that put a different light on it, do you see? It’s his case now, not theirs.“

  Gideon pondered. “Look, Constable, did he tell you to ask me to come in again?”

  “No, I can’t say that he did, but—”

  “Then I don’t see the point. I’m not going to go barging in where I’m not wanted.” He realized as he said it how pompous it sounded and tacked on a gentler addendum. “Of course, if he does ask me, I’d be happy to.”

  “I’m sure he will ask you, but, knowing him, it’ll take a few days for him to get around to it. And inasmuch as you said you’d only be here a few days, I was afraid it might be too late by then. Thought I should strike while the iron’s hot.”

  Their waiter came by with Robb’s check and more coffee for Julie and Gideon. Gideon sipped and considered. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I just don’t feel comfortable—”

  “Oh, go ahead,” Julie said. “You know you want to. If someone’s really been murdered, you’re not going to be happy walking away from it when you probably could be of some help.”

  Gideon shook his head. “Nope, I don’t think so.” Being pressed from both sides was making him more stubborn than he might have been otherwise.

  “Dr. Oliver,” Robb said.

  “Gideon.”

  “And I’m Kyle,” Robb said with his sweet smile. “Look, may I tell you a little about the sergeant? Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” Gideon said, curious in spite of himself. Julie, always interested in what promised to be a human interest story, nodded as well, although it was likely to make her late for the consortium’s afternoon session.

  Robb pushed aside the last quarter of his sandwich, drained his lemonade, and collected his thoughts.

  “Well, you have to understand…” But he decided he needed another beginning and started again. “This is hardly the sort of thing I’d ordinarily tell anyone, you see, let alone a relative stranger, but…” Another false start. He thought for a moment more before hitting on the opening he wanted.

  “Sergeant Clapper,” he said, “is not what he seems.”

  THAT was putting it mildly.

  Harry Michael Clapper had had quite a life before becoming a policeman. The son of a London liquor wholesaler, he had joined the army at an underage seventeen, spending over twenty years in the service. He had been wounded and twice decorated for bravery during the Falklands War and had retired in 1988 as regimental sergeant-major, about as high as a non-commissioned officer could go. He had knocked around for a while after that, and then, in 1990, at the advanced age of 40, he had submitted an application to the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary to become a police officer. To his own surprise he was accepted. He breezed through the local training program in Exeter, came in first in his class at the fifteen-week residential course at the National Police Training Centre in Bramshill, and was assigned to Torquay as a traffic constable.

  While still in his two-year probationary period, he had gotten a rare chief constable commendation—the first one that had ever been given to a probationer—for actions over and above the requirements of the service. Off-duty, out of uniform, alone, and weaponless, he had broken up an armed robbery, subduing the two perpetrators and sitting on them (literally) until a couple of police cars, summoned by the Australian victim, could arrive.

  On completion of his probation he was transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department and posted to Plymouth as a detective constable. There, he not only completed university but compiled an extraordinary record of cases successfully closed that made him the only person in the department’s long history to earn Officer of the Year honors three times. He was the subject of several Sunday magazine articles and was part of a BBC television special (“The New Sherlock Holmeses: England’s Greatest Detectives”). By 2000, he had advanced to detective chief inspector—

  “Wait a minute,” Gideon said. He was shaking his head incredulously. “Hold on, Kyle. Are we really talking about the same Mike Clapper? He was a famous detective? He was a chief inspector?

  What’s he doing as a constable sergeant out in the Scillies? What happened to him? Was he demoted?“

  “Not exactly,” Robb said. “But just when he was at the top of the heap, a lot of things began going wrong for him. His life pretty much came apart.”

  First, and probably most important, his wife of nearly thirty years died after a long, exhausting battle with cancer. Then, only a few weeks after her funeral, he received word that the position of detective superintendent, for which he’d applied months earlier, had gone to a much younger man with little more than half his experience and nowhere near his record of medals, commendations, and successes. What he did have was training in community relations and three years’ experience as departmental ombudsman—two areas that, as far as Clapper was concerned, had nothing to do with real police work, the meat of which was persistence, legwork, and the dogged, life-encompassing determination to put the bad guys away.

  After that it was all downhill. Clapper turned bitter and became increasingly solitary. Once the pride of the department, he became perceived by his higher-ups as an anachronism: a stubbornly old-fashioned copper who had stayed beyond his time and whose hard-nosed approach to the job was outmoded and discredited. His positions on what policing was all about—and especially what it wasn’t about— had brought a string of in-house complaints from the chief of Community Relations, the representative of the Gay Police Association, and the head of the Diversity Enhancement Task Force. More than that, his increasingly negative attitude was becoming a bad influence on the younger members of the force. And on top of that—

  Robb hesitated. “Well, he began… he had… other problems too.”

  “Alcohol?” said Gideon.

  “Exactly. He was drinking too much.”

  It was time for him to go, and various efforts, some subtle, some not, were made to retire him, either voluntarily or otherwise. But with two years left to qualify for a full pension, he wasn’t about to be “made redundant,” and there was no way to force him. After considerable dickering, an unusual compromise was reached. Clapper would be transferred from the large port city of Plymouth to the obscure, virtually crime-free outpost of St. Mary’s, where he could harmlessly serve out his time without getting into trouble or offending anyone. But for him to assume the position of the Scillies’ “neighborhood beat manager” required that he be downgraded from detective inspector to constable sergeant. This he reluctantly accepted, with the proviso that his grade for pension purposes remain that of chief inspector. To this the department agreed, and to the Scillies he came, and here he had been for the last six months, out of the mainstream and pretty much going through the motions.

  “Not that much beyond going through the motions is generally required here,” Robb said with a smile. �
�We’re not what you might call a hotbed of crime. But you can imagine how tough it must be on the old man to be reporting to people in Exeter who don’t know the half of what he does.”

  “Well, I admit,” Gideon said as their waiter came to pick up their payments, “I’m impressed. About the only thing I had right about him was that he was counting the days to retirement.”

  “Which isn’t hard to understand,” Robb said. “Things haven’t been easy for him.”

  “They can’t have been too easy for you either,” said Gideon. “I didn’t get the impression he was the easiest boss in the world to work for.”

  “Oh, not so bad. One has to make allowances. One has to consider who he is. It’s been a privilege to work with him, really. I’ve learned a lot.”

  “I admire your staying power,” Gideon said.

  “Well, yes, it was a little hard at first,” Robb admitted, “but after a couple of months on the island he mellowed. He likes the idea of living at the police station, for one thing.”

  “He lives at the police station?” Julie said, surprised.

  “Well, above it. Above the store, as we say,” Robb said with a smile. “Upstairs, on the first floor. My wife and I do, too. There are several flats up there. It used to be a common arrangement years ago, but you don’t see it much anymore, except in out-of-the-way places like this. And then…” He hesitated. “The fact is, he’s gotten himself a lady-friend who more or less lives there too. That’s really mellowed him. For one thing, she’s gotten him off the sauce. He’s a teetotaler now, which has made all the difference in the world. He’s put his life together again. But any time he has to deal with Exeter”—he shook his head—“he’s an unhappy man.”

  They got up from the table and walked to the terrace’s metal railing to look out over the water at the outer islands for a few moments. The sun was warm on their faces, the breeze cool. “That’s Samson on the left,” Robb said, slipping on his tunic, “and Tresco over there, and Bryher lies between them. Beautiful, aren’t they?”