Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  “Lovely,” Julie agreed.

  “Enjoy the view while you can. This is what we call fog season, you know, and it looks like it may be a bad one. It’s already starting to build out there. I suspect we’ll be socked in pretty soon now.” He sighed, put on his helmet, adjusted the chin strap, and tapped it into place with his palm. “Ouch.”

  “But it’s so becoming on you,” Julie said.

  Robb smiled his thanks. “So what do you say, sir? Will you come by the station? Anytime now would be fine. He’ll have come back from lunch.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there in half an hour or so. And Kyle—I want you to know I appreciate this. I hated to just let it drop.”

  “You’re welcome. Mostly, I’m doing this for the sergeant. I know that working on a real murder case again would do him a world of good. Otherwise, you know, I’d never have said… I wouldn’t have told you…”

  “I understand. But listen, you’re sure he hasn’t gotten any calls from Exeter today?”

  “None,” Robb said laughing. “He’s as gentle as—”

  “A lamb,” Gideon finished for him.

  “An old lion with most of his teeth pulled would be closer to it,” Robb said, and then, in friendly warning: “But not all of them.”

  EIGHT

  SERGEANT Clapper was awaiting him at the entry to Robb’s cubicle, leaning casually against the frame of the glass partition, sipping from a chipped mug of coffee and chatting with Robb, who was seated at his desk, sorting desultorily through the mess of files on it.

  “Here’s the very man,” was his indisputably genial greeting. “PC Robb was telling me you might be coming in again about that bone of yours.” He was in uniform today: open-throated, short-sleeved white shirt with blue-and-gold epaulets decorated with chevrons; dark blue trousers; and heavy, polished black shoes.

  “Well, yes, I thought that maybe there was a little more to talk about,” Gideon said.

  “Indeed, yes. I was thinking the same thing. I was extremely interested in what you were saying yesterday, you know, but then we were interrupted by that…” He made a growling noise deep in his throat. “… that sodding telephone call, and when I came back you’d up and left, hadn’t you?”

  That’s not quite the way I remember it, Gideon thought, but it didn’t seem meanly intended, so he let it pass with no more than a murmur. If that was the way Clapper wanted to recall it, that was fine with him.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Clapper went on, motioning Gideon to follow him to his own office, “and I’ve done a bit of checking in the—oh, coffee?” he said, pointing to the coffeemaker in the unoccupied cubicle.

  “I’m about coffeed out, thanks,” Gideon said.

  “A wise decision,” Clapper said, grimacing and placing a hand on his belly. “Kyle, you can come along too, lad,” he called over his shoulder. “I know you’re interested.”

  Walking behind him, keeping pace with his slow, billowing stride, Gideon saw that Clapper was an even bigger man than he’d realized, matching Gideon’s six-one, but probably pushing 250 pounds. Not that much overweight, really. Brawny was more like it. Basically, he was a constitutionally thickset man to begin with, with an unusually broad thorax and a wide pelvis. He’d make an interesting skeleton, Gideon couldn’t help thinking.

  His office was at the end of the little hallway, just past a door that said “Interview Room.” It was no larger than Robb’s cubicle but with real walls instead of glass partitions, and a door that opened and closed. There was the usual clutter here: charts and maps on the walls, and files scattered across the desk—but not a single one of the many plaques and commendations he had received, according to Robb, no framed copies of the magazine articles that had been written about him, nothing that would indicate he had ever been anything more than the constable sergeant in St. Mary’s.

  There were a few old, framed photographs on the walls—groups of smiling constables with their arms linked, but apparently they’d been left there by his predecessor, inasmuch as none of them included Clapper. Or Robb, for that matter. On his standard-issue desk, in addition to the paperwork and a pair of reading glasses, were a logoed mug (Chirgwin’s Gift Shop) holding pens and markers, and a filigree-framed photograph (his new “girlfriend”?) facing away from Gideon. Two metal visitor chairs that matched one another but not the desk were wedged into the narrow space between desk and wall. There was a single waist-high metal bookcase with a few thick manuals in it, and on the top shelf the bag in which Gideon had brought the tibial fragment, apparently still containing the bone.

  “Now, then,” Clapper said when they’d sat down—Gideon and Robb having had to angle their chairs to make room for their legs—“how long did you say the bone had been there?”

  “Probably under five years.”

  “Because, you see, I’ve been searching back through our local records for any outstanding mispers, and while—”

  “Excuse me? Whispers?”

  “Mispers, missing persons,” Robb explained.

  “Yes,” Clapper said, “and while we have none on file here, the national misper register at the Yard turned up two possibilities—people that might, or might not, have disappeared during visits to the Scillies.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” Gideon said. He knew that information of that sort—“might or might not, have disappeared during visits to the Scillies”—didn’t jump out of the computer at you. You had to dig.

  “Not too hard when you know the ropes. But, you see, one is from eight years ago and one goes back twelve. You’re certain it couldn’t be either one?”

  He saw that Clapper really was in a better mood today. Yesterday’s questions had been challenges, confrontations. These were genuine requests for Gideon’s opinion.

  “No, I’m not certain at all,” Gideon said. “Consider it an educated guess, no more. There are a whole lot of variables that make it hard to pinpoint the time. For one thing, I’m not that familiar with climatic conditions here—moisture, temperature variation—”

  “So it could be as much as twelve years old?”

  “Yes, it could.” He’d certainly been wrong by that much and more before. “What do you have?”

  “The eight-year-old one is… let’s see…” He shuffled a file into view on his desk. “… an eighty-eight-year-old woman from London with senile dementia who wandered away from her tour group somewhere between St. Ives and… what?”

  Gideon had been shaking his head. “Not her,” he said. “First, I’m pretty sure it came from a man. Second, it’s not from an eighty-eight-year-old. The texture of bone changes with age—it gets all rough and pitted as you get older.”

  “Really?” an entranced Robb said. “Is that so?”

  “Oh, yes, and that tibia’s too smooth. It’s a younger person’s bone—”

  “A young man’s bone, is it? Well, then, what would you say to a eleven-year-old lad who disappeared from his uncle’s…” Clapper’s face fell. “No, again?”

  “No, again. Not that young. Sorry.” Gideon got up, brought the tibia back to the desk, and explained about epiphyseal union while a disappointed but moderately interested Clapper lit up a Gold Bond and Robb listened as if his life depended on it. “As you can see, the proximal epiphysis is completely fused to the shaft—not a trace of a line separating them. The age range for that to happen is sixteen— fifteen at the very earliest—to twenty-two or so. This absolutely can’t be an eleven-year-old’s bone. He’s in his mid-twenties at the earliest, and probably older than that.”

  “Sixteen to twenty-two,” Clapper mused, “for that particular bone. You knew that off the top of your head, so to speak?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know the age ranges of all these different epiphyses?”

  “Well… yes, I guess I do. All the ones used in ageing, anyway.”

  “And they’re all different? Even the ones on opposite ends of the same bone?”

  “Pretty much.”
<
br />   Clapper, studied him, nodding, his head wreathed in smoke. “Fancy,” he said.

  Gideon, not knowing what to reply, replaced the bone in the bag. “So where would you say we go from here, Sergeant?”

  Clapper leaned back in his chair. “Well, now, that’s the question, all right, innit?” he said slowly. “We have here a fragmentary bone, the condition of which implies dismemberment, which in turn implies homicide—”

  Gideon noted that this was accepted as a given; another difference from yesterday.

  “—but we know of no one it could possibly belong to.”

  “That seems to be about it.”

  “Yes. So what I ask myself is, I ask myself, why couldn’t it have come off a passing ship, as so many other bones found on the beach have done?”

  “Maybe it did. Personally, I’d have my doubts. No marine life encrustation on it. And from what I understand it was buried a couple of feet down. Pretty unlikely for that to have happened naturally, from shifts in the sand. So I’d have to guess he was murdered, cut up, and buried right here on the island.”

  “But—” Robb hesitated until Clapper nodded his permission to continue, and then barreled ahead, the words pouring out. “But isn’t that a premature conclusion? The lack of encrustation would merely mean that the bone hadn’t lain in the ocean for a considerable period of time, isn’t that right?”

  “Right,” Gideon agreed.

  “Well, that wouldn’t necessarily mean it hadn’t come from offshore, would it? How do we know that it’s not from a passing yacht of which we have no knowledge? That someone wasn’t murdered and dismembered on a boat, then brought ashore onto the beach and buried—at night, I should think—after which the murderer simply went back to his boat and sailed away, with no one the wiser?”

  Clapper began to answer, but changed his mind and let Gideon do it.

  “I kind of doubt that, Kyle,” Gideon said gently. “If you’ve already killed someone at sea, and even dismembered him, why risk coming ashore with the body to bury it? Wouldn’t the safest, easiest thing be to simply dump the remains into the ocean? If they were already dismembered, they could be dumped separately, miles apart. The probability of any of them ever being found would be infinitesimal, much, much smaller than the chances of finding remains buried on a beach.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Robb mumbled, embarrassed. “Yes, you’re quite right. The murder would have occurred here, yes.”

  Gideon expected Clapper to make one of his cutting remarks about the value of university education and modern police training, but he demonstrated once again that he wasn’t the Mike Clapper of yesterday by letting the chance pass. Instead, he thought it all over. He nodded slowly to himself. He pondered. He drummed his fingers on the desk. He was without a doubt one of the most deliberate people Gideon had ever come across. “I’ll be honest with you, Professor. Dismemberments are new to me. Never worked on one. So where would you say we go from here?”

  It was the question he’d been waiting for, and he’d carefully considered his answer. “Look, I know this doesn’t look like much of a case—a single bone, and not even a whole one at that—but if you have one piece of dismembered body, the rest is very likely to be nearby.”

  Clapper nodded, puffing away. “That’s probably so.”

  “Right. The pieces were probably put in plastic garbage bags or something similar and stuffed into a car, then driven to the beach, almost certainly at night, dumped out of the bags, and buried.”

  “Why take them out of the bags? To make things harder for the police in the event they were ever to be discovered?”

  “Yes. The smarter ones do that. For one thing, if they’re left sealed in garbage bags, it takes much longer for them to skeletonize. Clues remain. For another, finding human body parts in a plastic bag—even skeletonized ones—is a pretty good giveaway that dirty deeds have been done. Whereas the occasional bone fragment or two can be overlooked.”

  “As this one was,” Clapper said. He pondered some more. “So there our man was, with a boot full of human remains, in a great hurry to be rid of them, and he takes the time to remove them from their bags—and wouldn’t that be a filthy, miserable job?—before burying them. Even in the middle of the night, on a quiet beach, I’d say that takes a cool customer. The road runs quite near the beach up there, don’t you see.”

  “I’d say so too. But cool or not, he would be in a hurry, and he wouldn’t want to risk driving around with what he had in his trunk any more than he had to. So the chances are good that the rest of the body is buried nearby. Would you consider doing some exploratory digging at Halangy Beach?”

  Clapper laughed. “If I had a staff, I would. But there’s only young Robb and myself—which in effect means only young Robb, because I wouldn’t be much of a hand with a shovel anymore.”

  “I’d be glad to pitch in too. There are signs to look for when you’re hunting for—”

  Clapper held up his hand. “I have a better idea, Professor. If you’re free for the next hour or two, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. I think he might be just the chap to help us.”

  “I’m free, all right.” Whatever this was about, Clapper was taking it seriously, and Gideon was pleased. And Robb had certainly been right: the big, jovial, animated man he was looking at was barely recognizable as the sarcastic, burnt-out cop of yesterday.

  Clapper stubbed out his cigarette and stood up, looking as near to positively enthusiastic as Gideon had seen him. “That’s fine. Fancy a short, bracing walk to the harbor, followed by a jaunt over the bounding main in a luxury yacht?

  “Nothing I’d like better,” Gideon said.

  “Excellent.” He was already shrugging into the tunic that he’d taken from a hanger behind the door. “Kyle,” he said pleasantly on the way out, “get hold of Trus Hicks on the blower and tell him we’ll be on his doorstep in half an hour, will you? Tell him what it’s about.” He picked up one of the hats—the soft, military kind, not a helmet. “And ring up the cox to let him know we’re on our way to the boat, there’s a good lad. Going to St. Agnes, ain’t we?”

  CLAPPER’S “luxury yacht” turned out to be a garish yellow-and-green, twin-hulled metal boat that served both as police launch and water ambulance for the islands. The cox—the pilot—was waiting for them, and as soon as they were aboard he started it up. Gideon was surprised at the 747-like roar and power of the twin jet-thrust engines. Within seconds they were out of Hugh Town Harbor and scudding south across the famously wicked currents of St. Mary’s Sound, heading for the island of St. Agnes with the boat’s prow a foot in the air.

  “Wow,” he exclaimed, hanging on to the railing for dear life.

  “We’ll have you there in three and a half minutes,” the pilot shouted with pride, leaning forward as if to coax yet a little more speed from it. “At full-tilt, we can get to just about any of the off-islands in under nine minutes.”

  The launch had a small enclosed cabin for patients needing treatment or prisoners needing restraining, to which Clapper and Gideon retreated, partly because it was quieter than the deck, and partly because the wind had a bite to it from the thready mist that was beginning to form low over the water, in line with Robb’s earlier prediction of fog. Once seated on the wooden benches that ran around its perimeter, Clapper asked: “Ever heard of Truscott Hicks?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Clapper seemed moderately surprised. “Know anything about cadaver dogs?”

  “Dogs that locate bodies? Not much. I’ve been on cases where they’ve been used, but they’ve already done their work by the time I get involved.”

  “Well,” Clapper said comfortably, popping the lid of his cigarette box and dragging one out with his lips, “you’re about to learn everything you ever wanted to know about them.” He lit up and took a drag. “And then some.”

  The pilot’s estimate of three and a half minutes was on the money, but there was a twenty-minute holdup during which the launc
h was forced to putt back and forth offshore while the short, narrow stone quay was occupied by two farm tractors with flatbeds unloading the day’s deliveries—everything from milk and bread to a sofa (not new) and a television set (likewise)—from the daily supply ferry. When the unloading was finished, the tractors had chugged off in a dusty haze, and the ferry had backed out and departed, they pulled up alongside the quay and the pilot threw a rope over a nearby stanchion.

  “We won’t be long, Ron,” Clapper said, climbing out onto stone steps worn concave by four hundred years of friendly visitors and unfriendly invaders. “Time enough for a pint at the Turk’s Head, if you don’t dawdle.”

  The pilot nodded soberly. “I shall take your sage advice, Sergeant.”

  The tide was at its highest, with a thin sheet of water sloshing over the uneven old stonework, so they had to watch their step. Gideon was again struck with Clapper’s stately man-on-the-moon walk. In an odd, elephantine way, he was extremely graceful, totally in balance. Maybe it was the low center of gravity that hippy, pear-shaped form gave him. At the foot of the quay, where they stepped onto the land of the one-square-mile island itself, there were a few metal signs tacked onto an unpainted shed. All except one were for family-run guest houses and bed-and-breakfast places (there were no hotels on St. Agnes, Clapper said); the other was an advertisement for where they were going:

  Bed-and-Biscuit Canine Boarding Establishment

  Lowertown Farm Road

  Tel 422380

  Minimum Stay One Week

  Proprietor Mr. Truscott Hicks

  “Truscott Hicks,” Clapper explained as they began walking up the path from the quay, “knows more about dogs than any man I’ve ever met. He was a famous dog trainer in the seventies. Wrote a few books, had his own show on the telly, gave courses all over the world, and so on. Well, about the time he got tired of that, his son—a copper up in Barnstaple at the time—told him about how they were starting to use dogs to detect firearms, explosives, drugs, and so on. Trus took an interest, took some courses on the Continent and on your side of the Pond, and made himself into a first-rate expert. First paid canine consultant of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, founding member of the Canine Forensics Association, and so forth and so on.”