Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  “Excellent questions,” Gideon agreed. “To which I have not a single answer.” Thanks to his findings, all of the conventional theorizing on the case had either been turned upside down or chucked out altogether. A total rethink was required. And that, he had not even begun to try.

  “Huh,” said Julie.

  “Mmm,” John grunted.

  Gideon laughed. He’d taught more than enough classes to recognize the congealing, glassy-eyed gaze and the slowdown in speech and reaction that indicated his audience had had enough for one day. So had he.

  “I’m done for the day,” he announced. “It’s a little early for dinner, maybe, but I saw a nice-looking steak house this afternoon. ‘Fire-grilled T-bones a specialty.’ How’s that sound?”

  “Great!” said John.

  Julie was shocked. “Don’t tell me they eat those sweet little cows. Oh, no—those kind, beautiful eyes!”

  “No, the Jerseys are dairy cows, safe from us carnivores. These, according to the sign, are Aberdeen Angus; aged twenty-eight days. Not nearly as cuddly looking. You need feel no compunction.”

  “You got my vote,” John said. “But maybe you should call Rafe first? He’ll want to hear what you found.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t really want to talk it all through again right now. I’ll write the stuff up and e-mail him, and we can talk about it tomorrow. Give me twenty minutes to do that. Have a glass of wine or something.” He opened his laptop. “Or a Figaloo.”

  “Wine sounds good,” Julie said. “What about you, Gideon? Want some? Red? White?”

  “White, I think.” He began to peck away at the keyboard.

  “I think I’ll get me a beer if we have any in the fridge,” John said. “Hey, Doc, don’t forget about Clapper. You probably want to fill him in too.”

  “Good idea, I’ll copy him.”

  “Did you say ‘Clapper’?” Julie said, returning from the kitchen with an opened, cold-frosted bottle of Chablis. “You’re not talking about Mike Clapper, are you?”

  “We are, as a matter of fact,” Gideon said. “I was going to tell you. It turns out that the good sergeant is now a high panjandrum in the Jersey police force—not merely a sergeant, not merely a detective or a detective inspector, but a detective chief inspector, which I gather is a very high muckety-muck indeed around here. Kind of amazing, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll say,” she said, laughing. “Good old Mike. What’s the story on that?”

  “I’ll fill you in later, Julie. Let me get these e-mails off.”

  “Well, I’m going to get to see him, aren’t I? Good old Mike,” she said again.

  “Good old Mike,” Gideon agreed.

  Really, neither of them knew him well enough to think of him as Good Old Mike, but Clapper was the sort of hearty, jovial, bluff man that made the moniker a natural—at least if you happened to be on his good side. Whether the criminals he dealt with thought of him as Good Old Mike was doubtful.

  “Of course you’ll see him,” Gideon said. “We’ll arrange something in the next couple of days.”

  “Wonderful. Well, it’s cooling down outside. I’m going to get a jacket.”

  “Good idea, grab one for me, will you? And look, I know all this stuff is pretty complex and you two must still have some questions. The wine is already starting to mellow me, so if you want, we can talk about it some more over dinner.”

  John nodded. “Or not,” he said agreeably.

  CHAPTER 19

  On this particular Tuesday evening, the Over-the-Hill Gang was undertaking one of its more strenuous walks, along the up-and-down section of Jersey’s North Coast footpath that runs eastward along the cliffs from the old stone Priory Inn. Twenty-five minutes into it, conversation had died off, having given way to huffing and wheezing. Thus, it was no great surprise when Abbott Skinner, not one of the group’s most robust members, announced to the evening’s hike leader that he was calling it quits.

  “I’m not quite feeling myself, Nobby. I believe I’ll stop here and make use of this delightful bench. You go ahead without me.”

  “It’s a sorry state we’ve come to,” eighty-nine-year-old Granita Ponsonby-Grenville, possessor of two artificial knees and one artificial hip and a decades-long mainstay of the gang, was heard to grumble, “when a nipper like Skinner there can never make it for half an hour without collapsing.”

  “Damned right about that,” said her eighty-five-year-old husband, Gerald (one artificial knee, one double coronary bypass).

  But Nobby, wheezing a bit himself, was more sympathetic. “That’s fine, Abbott. You do that, you take it easy. We’ll come and collect you on the way back.” He gazed out over the water, looking as if he might be thinking of giving up the hike himself and sharing Abbott’s bench.

  Hurriedly, Abbott plumped himself down onto the very middle of the backless stone bench. He wasn’t in the mood for company.

  Nobby, correctly reading the message, adjusted his day pack onto his sagging shoulders and got ready to continue on. “It is a splendid spot,” he said ruefully.

  “It is, indeed.”

  It was, indeed. From the edge of this natural terrace, only a few yards from the bench, the near-vertical cliffside plummeted thrillingly down three hundred feet to a sea cove littered with shattered boulders.

  In the far distance, to the northeast, across roiled, foam-flecked waves, France could be seen, the hazy green bulk of the Cherbourg Peninsula; to the northwest, not quite as far, the isle of Guernsey. And close at hand, rolling away into the mists, was the stupendous northern coastline of Jersey itself, so different from the smooth beaches and tranquil seas of Saint Helier and the south.

  Along these cliff tops, the undulating footpath dwindled away like an example of perspective in an art primer, with the straggling Over-the-Hill Gang dwindling along with it. Here and there a startlingly bright billow of purple or buttercup-yellow heather popped impossibly out of the rock bed. Fifty feet below Abbott and twenty yards to his left, on a small ledge that jutted precipitously from the rock face, a few prehistoric-looking Manx sheep nibbled at brown, windblown tufts of grass.

  This lovely view was quickly being obscured by fast-moving billows of heavy mist washing in from the north. Already beads of moisture were forming on the near-waterproof Aran wool cardigan and the Irish tweed cap that Abbott had had the foresight to put on for the walk. He pulled the rolled collar of the cardigan all the way up so it covered his ears and jammed his hands into the pockets of his corduroy pants. The dank chill felt good; it seemed to cut down the churning of his stomach.

  The view was essentially gone now, other than in moving snapshots between the waves of fog, but Abbott hadn’t quit the walk for the view. What he’d told Nobby was true: he wasn’t feeling up to it. He’d inadvertently arrived twenty minutes early at the group’s assembly point, the Priory Inn’s car park. Finding himself at loose ends, he’d dropped in for a prehike pint of Guinness, something he almost never did, and it had been a rotten idea. The first moderately steep downhill grade, supposedly made easier by steps cut into the earth and strengthened with old wooden railroad ties, had begun to make him queasy, and then the even steeper upgrade to this viewpoint had finished the job.

  No, that wasn’t the whole truth, he admitted. (Abbott Skinner took pride in being honest with himself, even when it hurt.) Oh, the down-then-up path had made him queasy, all right, and it was the pint of stout that had surely been the immediate cause, but there was nothing inadvertent about it. He’d gotten to the inn early on purpose, so he’d have time for that pint. He’d needed it; his mind had been churning. But he would have been better off without it. His mind was still seething, and now he was nauseated on top of it.

  He knew it was ridiculous to let Miranda upset him the way she had, but there it was. She just had that . . . knack. She’d always had it. Well, it would be the last time. Any future decisions to be made on behalf of his poor mother would be made by him. Alone. Period. And there was nothing s
he could do about it. But still . . . it was upsetting. His nervous stomach was playing up in a way it hadn’t since his testimony at the Mumbai Global trials. And that had been over a year ago.

  One would think, surely, that it was impossible to become a writer, a published writer, without a certain level of sensitivity, of human understanding, of what the professors at Kent would have called bilateral interpersonal connectivity. But not Miranda. As always, she was blind to anything that wasn’t about her. As always, she was excellent at tearing down, awful at building up, and instinctively, contemptuously dismissive of anyone else’s ideas.

  She’d gotten even nastier and more immune to reason after Rafe had left that afternoon, and they had come to no agreement, let alone a consensual decision. By the time she too had left, Abbott was downright angry, thoroughly upset, and feeling the first signs of bloating. He had chewed up a handful of Bragg’s Medicinal Charcoal Tablets, which had helped enough for him to reach a decision on his own.

  On his way to the Priory Inn, without having bothered to speak to Miranda again, he had stopped at a funeral establishment to arrange for his father’s exhumation. Not her preferred Collett’s Funerals either, but Bonnard & Sons, lest she think she had any sway with him at all.

  A tiny scraping sound, a shoe on gravel, made him aware that another hiker was on the little terrace. That annoyed him. He’d stopped here to be by himself, and after all, weren’t there a hundred other equally pleasant overlooks? Besides, with this mist, what was there to see? Well, if this interloper was expecting to share the bench, which anybody could see could barely fit two children, he was in for a surprise. Abbott planted his forearm firmly on the day pack beside him, spread his elbows to indicate that neither he nor it would be moving anytime soon, and returned to his uneasy reflections.

  Arranging the exhumation on his own had been the right thing to do, and he had left Bonnard feeling righteous and decisive. But then his stomach had started rumbling again, and it was still at it, gurgling, too. Choosing Bonnard had been a childish effort to irritate Miranda, and he knew it—the sort of spiteful thing she would do. But why would he want to irritate Miranda? No conceivable good came from that. Why hadn’t he just—

  This was ridiculous; the stupid fellow was still there. Too cheeky by half, if you asked him. What was he looking at, anyway? The fog? Some foreigner, probably, who hadn’t bothered to familiarize himself with British notions of personal space, one of those vulgar, presumptuous Eastern Europeans who seemed to find the islands so attractive.

  But beneath his irritation, he felt the first small stirrings of anxiety. His neck prickled. He gathered himself together—surely he was in the right here—and began to turn. “Really, sir—uh!”

  His head snapped back as he was rocketed forward by a ferocious shove against his shoulders that swept him off the bench and sent him sprawling toward the edge of the promontory. With his hands jammed deep into his trousers pockets, he had no chance to use them to break his fall. Instead, it was his face that scraped painfully along the gravel.

  Gasping and shocked—What was happening? Was this a robber, a lunatic?—he tried to push himself up, not easy while fighting to get his hands out of the pockets. He managed to pull them free and roll to his knees before the second thrust came. This was not a shove but a blow, a clean, sharp, heavy blow—a kick?—to the small of his back that drove out of his lungs the little bit of air they still held and shot him sliding onto his face again, this time so close to the rim that his head cleared it. He found himself looking straight down at the cove so far below—the rocks, the surf . . .

  Dazed, not understanding, his mouth clogged with dirt and gravel, he tried to twist away from the terrible emptiness. “Why . . . what . . . I don’t . . . ?”

  When his ankles were grabbed and roughly lifted, he knew that this was the end of him. Utterly drained of strength and will, he could offer no resistance as he was swung bodily around to the edge. His left arm fell limply over it. What was left of his functioning mind shut down. He closed his eyes.

  And over he went.

  “Well, where is he?” Sarah Partridge queried. “Wasn’t he supposed to wait here for us?”

  “That is what we said,” someone answered. “But we did walk a bit longer than we usually do, you know. He’s probably gone back to the inn to wait for us in comfort. That’s what I would have done.”

  “That’s what I wish I had done,” Nobby answered. “I’d be well into my second Foster’s by now. And,” he added sorrowfully as they began walking again, “my feet would feel like feet again.”

  A hundred yards farther on, they came to the long, stepped incline that had brought on Abbott’s queasiness on the way out. Now, dusty, tired, and thirsty, and beginning to get out of sorts, as they usually did at this stage of their hikes, they had to climb it, all sixty-six steps. At the top, breathless and winded, most of them stopped, supposedly to look back and admire what little was left of the view. (Not the Ponsonby-Grenvilles, who continued to plod forward.)

  It was one of the younger members who spotted Abbott. “I say . . .” he began, and then pointed back the way they’d come, but to the base of the cliffs rather than the trail. “Down there, on those rocks . . . wait, wait for the fog to clear . . . wait . . . There! Isn’t that . . . my, God, is that . . . ?”

  It was. Stricken, the rest of the gang stood looking mutely down on the broken body. A few turned away.

  “I’ll ring 999,” someone said quietly.

  The Ponsonby-Grenvilles retraced their steps to rejoin the group. “What’s the holdup? What the devil is everyone staring at?” demanded Gerald. The Ponsonby-Grenvilles’ eyes were not up to the level of the rest of their parts.

  “It’s Skinner,” Nobby told him. “He’s fallen over the edge.”

  “Not dead?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “What a shame,” Granita said. “So young.”

  And then, after a moment, Gerald said, “I suppose this means we won’t be going to the inn?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Nobby said.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Good morning, Chief Inspector,” Police Constable Thomas Vickery sang out from his cubicle as Clapper came into sight down the corridor, heading toward his own office.

  “Morning, Tom,” Clapper grumbled. The boy was doing his best and trying to impress, Clapper knew, but this business of being at work this early in the morning was too much of a good thing. It smacked of sucking up. The chief inspector himself preferred to be the first one at his desk—it set an important example for his staff—but he was damned if he was going to get there before seven o’clock. Half the year it was dark before seven, for Pete’s sake. What did Vickery have to do besides arranging files that was so important it had to be accomplished before—

  But on this particular morning there was something. By the time Clapper came abreast of Vickery’s cubicle, the young man was on his feet and waiting for him in a state of excitement. “Sir, I’ve been trying to ring you.” He was waving the telephone as if to prove it. “Dr. MacGowan has called twice. He’s been in the postmortem room with Inspector Lauder for much of the night. The inspector’s gone home to get some sleep, but the doctor’s still at it. He’s very anxious to have you there, but he was reluctant to contact you until, until, well, not before you—”

  “Calm down, Tom. Take a breath. Tell me what’s happened.” Victor MacGowan was the department’s forensic medical director. Greg Lauder was their criminalist.

  “Yes, sir.” As ordered, Vickery drew a breath. “Abbott Skinner was found dead last night—”

  “Stop right there. Let’s go. You can tell me on the way.”

  The postmortem room—the autopsy room—is a wing of the police mortuary, which is located in Jersey General Hospital, one of Saint Helier’s largest buildings, a five-story structure that takes up most of a full block on the Parade. If one cuts through the Parade Grounds, which Clapper and Vickery did, it is not much more than a
five-minute walk from police headquarters, but it was time enough for Vickery to lay out what he knew.

  Abbott’s body had been discovered by his hiking group the previous evening at the foot of a ninety-meter cliff along the North Coast footpath, on their way back from a walk that he had opted out of less than an hour before, preferring to wait for their return at one of the viewpoints. This set the time of death as being between 6:10 and 7:15 p.m. To reach the body as quickly as possible, the police had hired a private helicopter from London that, by good fortune, happened to be at Jersey Airport. Lauder, MacGowan, and a couple of crime-scene specialists were sent out to the scene by Superintendent Christie—

  As I should have been, Clapper thought. But it wasn’t young Vickery’s fault, so why bring it up to him?

  —and the usual protocol had been followed. The body was then flown to the mortuary, where it had been since four that morning, with Lauder and MacGowan in attendance.

  That was the end of what Vickery knew, and it had brought them to the front of the hospital.

  “Tom, have you ever attended a preliminary forensic examination?” Clapper asked on a sudden thought.

  “Only during training, sir.”

  “Well, then come along with me. It’ll be a good experience for you.”

  “I’d like that, sir,” Vickery said and started for the front entrance.

  “No, not that way,” Clapper said. “Christ, you haven’t even ever been to our mortuary, have you? I’ll have to have a talk with Training. But come around this way. There’s a separate entrance with a separate roadway. They prefer that corpses not be carried in through the main waiting area.”

  “Or carried out through it, I suppose,” Vickery said. “Not quite the image they prefer to present.”

  Clapper was astonished. Vickery had a sense of humor.

  Abbott was lying on one of the two stainless steel autopsy tables, his head propped up with a neck block. His clothes had been cut away and piled on the other table. He was naked and lying on his back, his eyes (surprisingly) still open. He’d been dead between thirteen and fourteen hours, and he looked it, his skin a waxy blue gray, his limbs obviously stiff, and his corneas milky, but the more disturbing aspects of decomposition—the marbling, the bloating, the smells, the skin slippage, the whole ugly panoply of corruption—were still a day away from showing, or would have been if the body hadn’t been going into the cooler before the morning was done.