Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  Note: Hereinafter, when the names Roddy and George are used with quotation marks (“Roddy” or “George”), they refer to the names by which they were then and henceforth known and which they themselves came to believe to be their birth names. When quotation marks are not employed (e.g., Roddy, George) they refer to their actual, biological birth names.

  (6) In the years that followed I became the Skinners’ family lawyer and a continuing mentor of sorts to young “George,” doing my best to guide him when the elder Skinner didn’t seem to be up to the role of father, which was regrettably often. This relationship, much like that of a fond uncle to a needful (but not always heedful) nephew, continued and somewhat intensified after his (supposed) parents’ deaths in 1959 and 1963.

  Note: The material that follows may seem improbably exact, considering the length of time that has passed since the events took place. It is, however, accurate, having been faithfully taken from my diary of the time. (I would prefer not to release the diary itself at this time, but will do so should it become useful in any civil or criminal legal proceeding.)

  Nineteen years afterward, on 11 June 1964, “George” appeared at my office and told me that he and “Roddy” had had a falling-out and that he had been dismissed from “Roddy’s” employ. In addition, as I was already aware, several suits against the two men were in preparation, alleging improper business practices, and prosecution by the Crown on the same grounds was impending. “George,” agitated to the point of tears, told me he had lost all hope of ever returning to a normal life; he was virtually penniless, with no means of settling the debts he had already incurred, let alone the burden likely to result from the suits. I assured him that I would serve as his solicitor without payment in any ensuing proceedings. I could also advance him what money he needed to live on for the present, but I was unable to offer him substantial financial aid beyond that.

  Thereupon, “George” stated that his only hope lay in flight and he intended to flee to New Zealand or South Africa as soon as it could be arranged. Naturally, I advised against this, but I could see that he was determined to go.

  It was at this point that I broke my pledge of almost twenty years: I informed him that he was in reality the son of the late Howard Carlisle and that the man he and everyone else knew as “Roddy” was actually Willie Skinner’s son, George, and that a compelling suit could be presented to the effect that he, and not the so-called “Roddy,” was therefore the rightful heir to the Carlisle estate and that the outcome was likely to be a very considerable financial settlement in “George’s” favor.

  “George’s” reactions were as explosive and volatile as might have been expected: astonishment, then disbelief, then exhilaration, then anger, particularly at me, whom he had so unquestioningly trusted, for permitting the truth to be hidden in the first place and then allowing it to remain so for so many years.

  I accepted his criticism as well deserved, told him I had regretted my part in the deception from the beginning, and said I would willingly testify in his behalf to the facts. His passions having cooled, he refused to allow me to do that, inasmuch as knowledge of my prevarications would surely discredit me as a lawyer and mean the ruin of my career. Greatly moved by his concern, I then offered to arrange and conduct a meeting between him and “Roddy” at which I would inform “Roddy” of the situation and see if things could be resolved privately, perhaps by dividing the Carlisle assets in some fair-minded way.

  “George” expressed reluctance, not liking even the implied threat of legal action that would inevitably be suggested by my presence. Their recent falling-out aside, he and “Roddy” had had a near-lifelong friendship, and “Roddy” had done him many good turns, for which “George” remained grateful. He thought it would be better if he spoke with “Roddy” on his own and tried to work out an amicable resolution between the two of them. If that failed, he promised to ask for my help. He apologized for his earlier anger, thanked me most generously for my support, and left.

  I did not see him again.

  (7) Two days later, on 13 June, I learned to my horror that “George’s” body had been found and that his death had been the result of a gunshot wound. My reaction was a mixture of grief and guilt. I had no doubt that what I had told him had led to a confrontation between the two men and to this tragic result. I knew it was my duty to go to the police, but I also knew that “George” had been right: it would be the end of my career as a solicitor, and probably of my life in Jersey. And so, in a state of helpless despair, I made the mistake of fortifying myself with copious helpings of gin, so much so that apparently I was less than coherent when I spoke with the police and made a bumbling fool of myself. I have only the haziest and most unreliable memories of that occasion.

  (8) The following day, 14 June 1964, a policeman called to pursue the matter. By then, anxiety and doubt about where my course of action might lead had gained the upper hand, and I had marshaled a good many reasons why no good purpose could be served for revealing what I knew or thought I knew. I will not list them here, except to admit that they were, to a one, self-serving rationalizations, and that I most sincerely regret them now. In any event, I provided no answers to his questions.

  (9) Some years later (I have no record of the date), upon the discovery of human remains in the Carlisle Tar Pits, I was called on by another policeman with similar questions. The results were similar as well.

  I make these admissions at this time for three reasons: first, because I know that as a member of the legal profession, I have betrayed its standards and I wish to make what amends I can; second, in the hope that my testimony may be of help in solving some very old crimes; third, in the hope that some of the old injustices that I was instrumental in perpetuating may yet be made right.

  I know that others will say there is a fourth reason, viz.: as a ninety-five-year-old man, long retired, I need not worry overmuch about what the effects on my professional career are likely to be.

  There is some truth in that too.

  Signed this day in the presence of . . .

  “So,” Gideon said, after rereading parts of it, “‘Roddy’”—he raised air quotes with the first two fingers of each hand to extend the clarifying business established in the lawyer’s letter—“killed ‘George’ to keep it from coming out? Is that what it adds up to?”

  “It would seem so,” Clapper said, “but then why did he let Jouvet live? How did he know Jouvet would keep the secret? And more important, who killed ‘Roddy’?” Clapper looked a little embarrassed to be using the air quotes, but there was nothing for it.

  There was no reply to that from anyone in the room, and when Gideon put the statement on the desk, he saw that Clapper had his eyes fixed expectantly on Rafe. Gideon joined him. Rafe, unaware of being stared at, continued to peer first at one sheet, then the other, and then back again, delicately tapping his lower lip with a forefinger. When he looked up, it was with a quizzical smile.

  “It’s rather a sobering feeling,” he said mildly, “to learn that one is not the person one thought one was. And not in the figurative sense either, but quite literally. I admit, I did enjoy being ‘Rafe Carlisle.’” Rafe’s own air quotes were wilted, despondent affairs.

  “And you still are,” Clapper said supportively. “If you’re not, who is? And who are you?”

  “Who am I . . . yes, that’s the question, isn’t it?” He was still faintly, dreamily smiling. “But whoever I am, can you seriously believe that I would be a senator if my name were ‘Skinner,’ which it rightfully should be? Senator Rafe Skinner? Ludicrous. Everything I am, everything I have, derives from being the great Howard Carlisle’s grandson. What would I be, what would I have, if I were the ‘great’ Willie Skinner’s grandson? Not the largest dairy enterprise in the Channel Islands, not the—”

  “Come off it, Rafe,” Clapper said more sharply. He had lit and smoked out a Gold Bond in the last few minutes, and now, impatiently, he ground it out in the meat-pie tin he used as an ashtray
when he was at his desk. “If what’s eating you is whether or not you still legally own Carlisle Dairies and all the rest—”

  “What? Why, no.” Rafe looked genuinely surprised. “That’s not what I was thinking about at all. I was on a somewhat higher plane, musing on the metaphysics of change and the continuity of identity, considering especially Heracleitus’s theory of . . .”

  But he couldn’t keep it up. “Although, now that you mention it . . .”

  “Well, you can stop worrying. I rang Mrs. Morrison in the Law Officers’ Department and put the question to her—hypothetically, of course—and she says that there’s nothing in the circumstances that would rouse the Crown’s interest. If you did run into trouble, it would be in the form of civil litigation from actual—that is to say, biological—descendants of Howard Carlisle who might be lurking about, but whether any such parties exist is—”

  Rafe was nodding along, his head lowered, mumbling “Right . . . right . . .” when suddenly he jerked upright. “Wait, wait—Abbott! Abbott is ‘George’s’ son—he’s Howard’s grandson. Wouldn’t—” His face sagged. “Oh, my God, I forgot for a moment. Abbott is . . . he’s . . .”

  “Yes, he is,” Clapper said. “Very.”

  Rafe sighed. “How the gods love their little jokes. For fifty years, everyone in the world—well, except for old Jouvet—accepted me as the sole grandson of Howard Carlisle. I did myself, without question. And then two days, two bloody days, before it turns out that it’s not I but he—he dies. It’s so . . . so very . . .”

  Convenient. The word popped up in Gideon’s mind as if someone had slipped it in when he wasn’t looking, and immediately he was ashamed. Of all the unbidden, unsupported, totally foundationless conclusions to jump to. This was beyond reprehensible. Aside from the simple ungraciousness of it, the idea that Rafe had murdered Abbott didn’t add up. Skinner had been killed two days ago, a day before Jouvet had revealed that the boys had been switched and then reswitched in 1945, so how would Rafe have known about it? And if you assumed that Rafe was somehow aware of it, then why in the world would he have engaged Gideon Oliver—the bone-picking, nit-picking Skeleton Detective himself—to come and poke around among these safely forgotten bones?

  Gideon was starting to think that maybe his problem was too much police work, rather than not enough; he was turning into a cop, finding reason to suspect evil and deceit and culpability wherever he looked. That wasn’t the kind of person he wanted to be, and it was a trend he needed to watch out for.

  All the same, Abbott’s getting shoved off that cliff was pretty convenient.

  “. . . poignant,” Rafe finished.

  Vickery came in with the coffee and tea—no biscuits this time—and set the platter down on Clapper’s desk. “I don’t know if you’ll want this right now, sir. Dr. MacGowan just rang. Anytime, he says.”

  “Well, Rafe,” Clapper said, standing up, “it seems the moment of truth has arrived. They’re ready for us at the mortuary.”

  “The mortuary, of course, yes,” Rafe said, “by all means.” He pushed himself up from his chair with all the joie de vivre of a death row inmate looking up and seeing the warden and the prison chaplain awaiting him at his cell door.

  CHAPTER 31

  If you are either a cop or a character on a TV show and you have to view a body, you will probably do it in the working part of the mortuary, in front of the cooling unit with its ranks of refrigerated, corpse-sized compartments. The body is slid out on its shelf, covered by a green sheet, or perhaps a white one, with the bare feet being the only parts showing, the big toe of one displaying the ever-present toe tag. Even the face is covered, so that the sheet has to be lifted to get a look at it.

  That was the way it used to be in the real world too, but mortuaries nowadays have a separate room set aside for the identification of corpses, in which, with the aim of making a disturbing experience a little less disturbing for those there to identify a friend or a family member, it’s done differently. The rooms are not so coldly scientific, the bodies are not pulled out of refrigerators like sides of beef, and the dead are arranged to look less . . . well, dead.

  Nowadays, the ones that get more business put a little distance, spatial and emotional, between the corpse and the viewer, not even allowing them in the same room. Instead, there is a viewing window between them, much like the one through which a father used to view his new baby in a hospital nursery in the old days. The Jersey mortuary did not have this arrangement (which Gideon had in the past found a little unsettling—the first view of a newly born person and the final view of a newly dead person being so much alike). Here, in the ground-floor mortuary at the back of Jersey General, the viewer is permitted to stand beside the gurney on which the deceased lies, covered by his sheet, except for the face. The big-toe tag is still there, but it’s no longer in sight.

  “Yes, that’s Abbott,” Rafe mumbled.

  Gideon expected him to turn around and run for the door, but he stood there looking mutely down at Abbott’s face while Clapper and Gideon waited. “Why, he just looks as if he’s asleep,” he said. “He looks . . . relaxed.”

  Not to Gideon, he didn’t. Not with that waxy, blue-gray pallor. He looked dead; that was all. But he’d been cleaned up, and his hair was neatly combed.

  “I’m glad I’ve seen him. I was expecting worse,” Rafe said. “But I’m ready to leave now. May we?”

  Clapper replied by gesturing toward the door, and they both turned from Abbott and went toward it, Clapper behind. Gideon hung back, drawing a curious glance from Clapper, but nothing was said.

  Quickly, Gideon lifted the edge of the sheet along Abbott’s right side, just for a second and only for a few inches.

  It was enough.

  On the walk back to police headquarters, he was unusually uncommunicative, mulling things over, fitting pieces together.

  “I’m awfully relieved that that’s over,” Rafe said as they settled back in around Clapper’s desk. “It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but still . . . I hope never to have to do that again.”

  Clapper looked over their shoulders toward the door. “Yes, Sergeant? Can it wait?”

  “I think not. It’s about Peltier, sir. There have been some new developments.” At this point the policeman at the door, in his forties but boyish, realized Clapper had visitors and stopped.

  “Peltier?” Clapper said. “Well, then, come in, these two are as interested in Peltier as we are. You already know Senator Carlisle, and the distinguished-looking gent beside him is Professor Oliver, the anthropologist who’s been assisting us. This is Sergeant Kendry.”

  Once the appropriate nods and greetings had been made, Kendry advanced to Clapper’s desk and remained standing. “He’s scarpered, sir. Probably in England by now, or beyond.”

  “Oh, no,” Rafe said quietly, with a discouraged flap of his hand.

  Clapper looked grimly at the ceiling. “Bloody hell, Warren. Was the lady involved? Miranda?”

  “Buncombe and Bayley don’t believe so. They had a nice chin-wag with her this morning.”

  A brittle laugh came from Rafe. “A nice chin-wag with Miranda? Now there’s an oxymoron for you.”

  “Apparently, he bolted in the middle of the night, taking various valuable possessions of hers with him. She was not in a forgiving mood.”

  “Well, that’s that, then,” Clapper said. “We’ll do all the usual, but our chances of finding him are nil.”

  “From what Bayley had to say,” Kendry said with the slightest of smiles, “he’ll be lucky if we do find him. If Miranda catches up with him first, he’s a goner.”

  “He killed Abbott, all right,” Rafe said. “This just about proves it.”

  “Dammit, Rafe,” Gideon muttered, scowling at the floor. The pieces had fallen into place, and the completed picture didn’t make him happy.

  The others stared at him.

  “Sorry?” Rafe said, a friendly, puzzled smile on his face.

  “I do
n’t think it was Peltier. I think it was you, Rafe. I think you killed Abbott. You pushed him off that cliff.”

  Rafe’s hand flew to his chest. “I killed—?” He started to laugh but cut it short. “If this is some kind of . . . some kind of sick—”

  “You’re also the one who stole George’s corpse before I could see it.” His eyes came up to stare directly into Rafe’s. “Aren’t you?”

  “Mike . . .” Rafe appealed to Clapper, but Clapper calmly, neutrally looked back at him.

  “This is absurd!” Rafe declared. It hadn’t taken him long to work himself up to a righteous anger. His cheeks were flushed, and Gideon could see the pulsing of the arteries in his neck. His hands were shaking as he glared back at Gideon. “If I didn’t want you to see the body, I wouldn’t have been the one to come up with the idea of an exhumation in the first place, now would I? There never would have been an exhumation but for me. I’m the one who talked Abbott into it. I paid for it. After all that, why would I want to steal the bloody—”

  “Because after you found out—”

  “Mike, are you going to sit there and let this continue?” And then, with a bitterly sarcastic tinge: “Should I be calling my solicitor?”

  “For the moment, why don’t we simply let him finish?” Clapper suggested.

  “No, thank you!” Rafe jumped, seething, to his feet. “I don’t have to sit here and take this.”

  And at that instant the last of Gideon’s doubts vanished. There is a certain look that can do that for you. He had seen it described in an early nineteenth-century British journal of criminology as “the classic look of the felon caught out,” which was true enough, but Gideon thought of it more as the classic look of the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar: obstinate, belligerent, defensive, humiliated, and guilty as hell. It was exactly the look Rafe Carlisle had on his face.

  “Sit down, Rafe,” Clapper said.

  “I will not sit down. I—”