Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  While she was speaking, she had brought out her iPad mini and was tapping something in. “One of the articles I read really got me thinking. . . . Okay, here. Listen to this:

  “‘For example, the Pitlochry Tar Pits, near the Scottish village of that name, began in 1924 as an intermittent incursion of bitumen into an old millpond. Within a year, the water in the pond had been almost totally replaced by the tar. Commercial exploitation began and continued into the 1950s, when the tar flow markedly diminished. Extraction ceased in 1954, only to start again in 1970, when the flow of bitumen reappeared in volume so great that the original pit soon overflowed its banks, threatening surrounding farmland and making extraction of the additional bitumen impossible. A channel was then dug from the original pond to a nearby mudflat, where the overflow could be contained and from which it could be extracted. Even this was not sufficient, and soon, two other low-lying areas were similarly utilized. By 1979, there were a total of four connected pits, producing more than—’

  “Well, that’s enough,” she said, flipping down the tablet’s cover. “Rafe, I’m sure you can see what I’m getting at. Could I possibly be on the right track?”

  “My dear, I’m sorry, but if you’re suggesting that our pond may have been freshwater in 1964, when my father was killed, I have to say it wasn’t the case. It may well have been freshwater at some time in the distant past—I wouldn’t know that—but by 1964 it had been a functioning tar pit for almost a hundred years. And so it remained until Mother turned it into a freshwater pond a decade later.” He offered an apologetic smile. “Sorry.”

  “Yes, I know about all that,” Julie said. She was the only one who hadn’t yet gotten to her food. She was getting a little frustrated, and Gideon would have liked to step in and give her a hand getting her point across, but he didn’t know exactly what it was, and given what Rafe had said, that it could possibly be valid. In 1964, the pond was filled with tar, and had been since the 1870s. End of argument.

  But not for Julie. “Let me try again,” she said. “Rafe, look, you remember you told us that the pond is shaped like a pair of glasses? A sort of double pond with a channel tying them together?”

  “Certainly. I don’t know that I’d call it a channel, though. More like a—”

  “But you did call it a channel,” Gideon said, and when he did, he felt a little glimmer of light break through. He still wouldn’t have been able to say exactly what Julie was getting at, but he had the sense of its being on the tip of his tongue.

  “Did I?” Rafe said. “Well, all right, ‘channel’ is good enough, although it makes it sound a little . . . industrial, like something dug by man, whereas it’s quite natural and attractive, a gently curving—”

  “But that’s my point,” Julie broke in. “I’m suggesting that maybe it was dug by man. What if . . .”

  What if, she went on, the original pitch deposit had been a tar pit—singular, not plural—in the 1870s, and that it consisted of only one of the two currently linked ponds, the larger one, say, while the other one, unconnected, was still a small freshwater pond in 1964. And what if, sometime between 1964 and 1969, when the bones were discovered, the flow in the original pit had outgrown its confines, and a curving, natural-looking channel—the “nosepiece” of the spectacles—had been dug to connect it to the smaller pond. And what if, by 1969, the water in that pond had been totally replaced by the incoming tar so—

  She stopped when she became aware of Rafe slowly, gently shaking his head.

  “Julie, it just won’t hold water. Don’t you think I would know if it had only recently become filled with tar?”

  “I’m not sure about that, Rafe. How would you know?”

  “Julie, I’ve lived there all my life. I grew up there. I live there now. I used to sail toy boats in that pond. True, I was only a small child at the time—”

  “Did your mother ever say to you that that second pond had been a tar pit all along, before she turned it into a freshwater pond?”

  “Well, no, not in so many words, not that I remember . . .”

  “Read it in the newspaper? See some kind of official land record? Hear—”

  “I don’t know. Who can remember how they came to know everything they know? One simply knows, that’s all.”

  Julie smiled. “A lot of the things that one simply knows aren’t necessarily true.”

  “That’s so, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary, one can assume . . .” He trailed off, apparently disconcerted at hearing himself use the word assume. For a few seconds he sat there, chewing his lip, and then he said, “You know, you’re right. How do I know that? Do I really know it?”

  Score one for Julie, Gideon thought. Maybe she did have something after all.

  Rafe obviously thought so too, but only for a few seconds. “No wait, even if it was a water pond at that time, there’s no way a body could have remained in it, unseen. It’s very small—perhaps twelve meters in diameter—and quite shallow. Surely, the workers would have seen it when they were digging the channel, if not before—if they dug the channel. And it’s very close to the manor as well. You almost look straight down at it from the upper floor. You couldn’t have a body in there without its being—”

  “Tom, yes,” Clapper was saying into his cell phone. “I need you to do something for me. Get hold of Andy Scate at Environment and ask to see any record they have—permissions, applications, letters—pertaining to the Carlisle Tar Pits in the years 1964 to 1969. Then e-mail them to me. Yes, all of them, as many as there are. What? No, next January. Of course now.” He put away his phone, shaking his head and muttering to himself: “Do I want it now . . .”

  Like the others, he returned to his rapidly cooling fish-and-chips. “Let’s put that on hold until we hear back,” he said.

  They were just finishing up when his cell phone pinged. He studied the screen for a few seconds and then looked up. “I’ve heard back from Tom—the boy is quick, I’ll give him that. Listen to this. It’s from a 1966 approval for a construction project granted to Inter-Island Construction by what was then the Land Use Department.

  “‘In summation, we conclude that Inter-Island’s construction of a lined, open, seven-meter channel, at no place more than one meter in depth, between the foredescribed tar pit on the Carlisle property and a sunken, marshy area from one to two meters deep and approximately ten by ten meters in size, for the purpose of transferring excess tar flow, would have no impact on the area’s environment or ecology, other than the elimination of the marsh, which was designated in 1960 and 1963 as a source of mosquito infestation. Inter-Island Construction has given us the results of a geological study that concludes that the subject marshy area and the channel itself will be sufficient to hold overflow for the foreseeable future. Approval is hereby granted.’”

  Gideon had to restrain himself from smacking the table. “Good show, Julie, you were right! That takes care of the weirdest question of all right there: Who moved those bones and why? Nobody moved them. That tar pit was where Roddy Carlisle’s body was right from the start, except that it was a marsh at the time—which was when the crabs did their job.”

  “And the reason no one saw him there,” Rafe contributed, now equally pumped up, “was that what my distressingly feeble memory reconstructed as a clear freshwater pond was in actuality a marshy bog in which you probably could have hidden a cow. Julie, you really are quite brilliant.”

  “Thank you, Rafe, but all I did—”

  Unlike Gideon, Clapper failed to restrain himself and did whack the table, but not with pleasure. He was angry. “And nowhere, dammit, nowhere in the case files, is there any mention of this. As far as the record is concerned, it had never been anything but a tar pit. Inexcusable!”

  “Oh, aren’t you being a little hard on them, Mike?” Rafe said. “The Carlisle Tar Pits’ history couldn’t have been very widely known at the time. Nobody ever heard of them until those bones were found. I’m sure the police—”

&nb
sp; “Made a total cock-up of it,” Mike barked. “Obviously, the force bollixed the entire thing from first to last.” He took a last, long drag on the cigarette he’d lit about two minutes earlier—the burning end of the paper sizzled and sparked—and let the smoke out with what was essentially a sigh. “I’m going to reactivate the case.”

  “That’s good, Mike,” Gideon said, “but you don’t look too happy about it.”

  Clapper slowly lowered his gaze to fix Gideon with a baleful glare. “My cup was already overflowing, thank you very much. Another personnel-devouring homicide case is not what I was in need of, let alone a ‘new’ one that’s as cold as cold can be.” He shook his head. “I should have known this was going to happen the minute you came through my door. I did know. After all, I went through it with you before, didn’t I? But then I always was a slow learner.”

  “Hey, I just say what I find,” Gideon said. “If you didn’t want to know the facts, you shouldn’t have asked me, Mike.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “Whatever.” Gideon laughed and sat back. Life was good.

  Five minutes later, maybe not so good. “Considering that it’s now a formal investigation,” Clapper said to Gideon, with perhaps the slightest gleam of tit for tat, “I’d better have a more thorough report from you on those bones. Something that could be used in court if it comes to that. We’ll pay whatever your usual fee is, of course. Wouldn’t want to take advantage.”

  Gideon wilted. Working on skeletal material, trying to tease information from it about the departed, was unfailingly engrossing, more like adventure than work. Writing it up to courtroom-evidence levels, on the other hand, was tedious, time-consuming, and boring. “Forget the fee, Mike. I assume you’ll want to take possession of the bone fragments themselves as well?”

  “I do, yes. Rafe, technically, they’re your property. Do you have any objections?”

  “Of course not, none whatsoever.”

  “When would you want the report, Mike?” Gideon asked.

  “Since you’ll be here only a day or two longer, I’d say the sooner the better, wouldn’t you? Tomorrow morning? And you can bring the fragments with you when you deliver it.”

  “Well, it’ll take a few hours to write up. And I’m not sure, but I might have to find some equipment somewhere: a pair of osteometric spreading calipers—”

  “I’m sure that between our laboratory and the hospital, whatever you need can be found. Just let our resourceful PC Vickery know, and he’ll get it for you.”

  A glum look passed between Julie and Gideon. There went their plans for a morning jaunt to the Durrell Wildlife Park, the famed habitat—emphatically not a “zoo”—for the world’s endangered species.

  “That’s fine, Mike. I’ll get going on it early and have it for you by the end of the morning.” He spoke with resigned good humor. He’d brought it on himself, after all.

  CHAPTER 23

  “States of Jersey Police. How may I help you?”

  “Is this where I report a robbery?”

  “One moment, please.”

  Four or five seconds of clicks and buzzes followed, and then another human voice came on: “Constable Gray speaking.”

  “I want to report a robbery.”

  “And your name, please, sir?”

  “Emil Bonnard.”

  A moment’s pause. “That would be Emil Bonnard of Bonnard and Sons?”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Yes. Well . . . what would you like to know?”

  “You said a robbery?”

  “Yes. Well, a theft, I suppose would be the correct term.”

  “And what was taken?”

  “My coffin van.”

  “Your, er . . .”

  “Coffin van, that’s right.”

  “I see. And you’re positive it’s been stolen?”

  “Positive. Less than an hour ago. My driver came in to report, and when we went out to the car park, where he’d left it, it wasn’t there. He’d left the key in it, unfortunately.”

  “And you’re certain that another of your employees didn’t—”

  “Yes, I’m certain. The vehicles are not simply there for the taking. We have procedures.”

  “I see. And the license plate?”

  “J47058.”

  “And this would be one of your blue vans, with ‘Bonnard and Sons’ on the side, and the bouquet, and so forth?”

  “Indeed not,” said Bonnard, sounding aggrieved. “Those are our funeral vans. This was our coffin van. Plain black. One wouldn’t advertise on a coffin van.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “That would be vulgar in the extreme. Offensive to people’s sensibilities.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Also the coffin that was in the van.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The coffin that was in the van at the time. That’s gone too. Well, I mean, it would be, wouldn’t it?” He uttered a one-note laugh. Policemen were so dumb.

  “I see. Yes, certainly it would, sir.” Screw you too, sir.

  “Also the body that was inside the coffin.”

  “The body that . . . So your van would have been on its way to the cemetery?”

  “No, it was coming from the cemetery.”

  “Ah . . . from the cemetery.”

  “Yes, from the cemetery. With the remains of a corpse that had been buried fifty years ago. Constable, I’ve been in business twenty years, and nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

  Or to anybody else, odds were. Gray laid down his pen. “Perhaps it would be better if you just carried on in your own words, sir.”

  Ten minutes later, after promising that someone would very shortly be out to the funeral home, he replaced the telephone in its cradle, shaking his head.

  “Teddy,” he said to the gray-haired fellow officer whose desk abutted his so that they faced one another. “I believe I just got one that even you have never run into before.”

  “Gideon, this is Rafe.”

  “Yes, Rafe. Are we still on for tonight? I know how upsetting Abbott’s death—”

  “Certainly we’re still on. I’m looking forward to it, but that isn’t what I’m ringing you about. We’ve had a bit of a problem with the exhumation.”

  “Problem?” Gideon was surprised. After lunch at Sully’s, he’d swung by the cemetery to see if they’d started yet and found the two-man crew well along and obviously proficient in their task. The excavation had already been dug, with the backhoe that had done the heavy work of getting the dirt out standing nearby, ready to turn around and put it back in with its other end. The coffin had been hauled up and now lay on a tarpaulin spread on the grass. The casket’s wood had held up well, he was glad to see. It would make things easier. After a few minutes, he had left it to the workmen and gone back to the hotel. “They were doing fine when I left, Rafe. They were about to winch it up and load it in the van.”

  “And they did winch it up. And they did load it into the van. And then they drove the van to Bonnard and Sons.”

  “I sense a punch line coming,” Gideon said.

  “Gideon, someone stole the bloody thing. Right out of Bonnard’s private car park.”

  “Are you serious? With the coffin inside?”

  “With the coffin inside. Mike just rang me to tell me about it, and he asked me to let you know.”

  “But that’s . . . Why would anyone steal a coffin?”

  “Oh, I doubt that the coffin had anything to do with it. I suspect the wrong sort of person simply happened by at the wrong moment. The key was in the ignition, opportunity presented itself, and he made off with it, probably to England, where he’ll have it modified—repainted, and so on—and then sold illegally. He certainly has a rude surprise coming when he opens it up.”

  “A van parked in a funeral home parking lot with its key still in the ignition, and some random thief just happens by and steals it with no
idea of what it is or what’s inside? Does that strike you as likely?”

  “No, not at all, but what other explanation could there be?”

  “How about this?” Gideon said after a moment’s consideration. “Maybe it was taken because somebody didn’t want me to see George’s body.”

  “You mean, to keep you from finding out . . . well, whatever it was that you would have found out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s a thought,” Rafe agreed. “After all, look at what you came up with from a few scant fragments from the tar pit. Who knows what you’d find on a whole body? On the other hand, who would be out there now who’d be worried about what might come from investigating a 1964 murder?”

  “Well—”

  “And how would they know what’s in your report?”

  “Well—”

  “And how would they know that the reason it was being exhumed was so that you could examine it? I haven’t told anyone. The only people who knew about it were you and Mike and me.”

  “No, there’s Abbott too.”

  “Why would Abbott want to take it? He’d just approved the exhumation. Besides, he was killed last night, long before the van was stolen.”

  “But we don’t know who he might have told,” Gideon said, “and then there’s the funeral director, and the guys that did the digging—”

  “Oh, I doubt very much that they knew what the purpose was,” said Rafe. “In any case, none of them could have been more than children in 1964, so they . . . Oh, my God. There is someone else.”

  “Miranda the Dreadful,” Gideon breathed into the highly pregnant silence. “Bertrand Peltier’s wife. You said she was dead set against doing the exhumation, but you didn’t know why. Well, maybe she was protecting her husband, maybe she knew he was the killer, and maybe she thought there was something there that might . . .” He stopped, sensing something coming from Rafe.

  “Not Miranda,” Rafe said dreamily. “Peltier himself. Bertrand Peltier.”