Murder in the Queen's Armes

by Aaron Elkins

  "It was your idea, Abe. The photographs that were in Randy’s camera—we wanted to see if that femur turned up in them."

  "Oh," Abe said, and Julie smiled blankly, just with her lips. Gideon couldn’t blame them for their scant interest. An inconsistency on a find card didn’t seem terribly important at the moment.

  They were large black-and-white photographs, about eight inches by twelve, and Gideon began to go slowly through them. It took him a little while to figure out what he was looking at, because the backgrounds seemed unfamiliar. But he soon realized that they were pictures not of the wedge-shaped trenches, but of the square test pit that had been dug near the shed and then abandoned. If he remembered correctly, it had been sunk near the beginning of the month, so at least the timing was right; Leon’s find card had been dated November 1.

  In the twelfth photograph he found what he was looking for. The four pictures that followed showed different perspectives of the same object, but there was no mistaking what it was: the head, neck, and a little of the greater trochanter of a human left femur, lying in situ in the pit.

  He handed it to Abe.

  "What do you know?" Abe’s interest perked up at once. "So it’s real. And a steatite carving it’s definitely not, which means Leon was lying about it."

  "It looks like it." Gideon turned in his chair. "Paul," he called, "didn’t you say you visited the site around the beginning of the month?"

  "What?" Arbuckle surfaced vaguely from his book. "Yes, that’s right; on an audit."

  "Do you remember anyone turning up a human femur?" He waved the photographs at him.

  Arbuckle shook his head. "I was only there a couple of hours."

  Gideon returned to the photographs. Something about the look of that bone was vaguely bothersome, but what? It was human, all right, and yet… what was wrong with it? It was a little too heavy, a little too—

  The thought shook him like a jolt of electricity. This was from the test pit—the test pit! Not the Bronze Age barrow but the test pit, with its Riss glacial layer sixteen inches below the surface! This bone had been found at twenty-five inches, so it was probably two hundred thousand years old or even more; from the very dawn of Homo sapiens, the obscure, Middle Pleistocene dawn over which anthropologists still quarreled—and from which nothing but some artifacts and a few scattered, fragmentary cranial remains had ever been recovered; never— until now—a leg bone.

  "Good God!" he exclaimed without meaning to.

  "What is it?" Julie said, her hand at her throat. "What’s the matter?"

  "It’s nothing," Gideon said quickly. "That is, nothing about the murders. But this bone—it’s fantastic! It’s a Second Interglacial femur!"

  "Is that important?"

  "Important?" Gideon couldn’t keep from laughing. "We hardly know anything about those people—we don’t even know if they were people, properly speaking, or the last of Homo erectus. We don’t know…"

  He turned again to Arbuckle. "Paul! Did you hear what I’ve been saying? We’ve got a Mindel-Riss femur at Stonebarrow—a new Middle Pleistocene site!"

  "That’s great, Gideon," Arbuckle said, and bent dully to his History of Dorset. He was in a very deep funk indeed, if news like this couldn’t bring him out of it.

  Hinshore had glided noiselessly up behind Gideon to look overhis shoulder at what was causing all the excitement.

  "Oh," he said, "A fossil, eh? Yes, I’ve seen that one before."

  Gideon sat perfectly still, replaying the words. Then he looked up at Hinshore. "You’ve seen this before?"

  "Why, of course. I recognize the little thingummy on the side." He indicated the bulge of the greater trochanter. Gideon stared at him, and Hinshore smiled broadly back.

  "Where did you see this?" Abe asked.

  "Well, I’m not sure. In the newspapers, I suppose, or on the telly."

  "Andy, you never saw this on television," Gideon said.

  "I didn’t?" He studied the photographs some more, but warily, evidently made uneasy by Gideon’s persistence. "Well, I guess I made a mistake then." He shrugged and moved off, but before he’d gone three steps, he snapped his fingers loudly and turned around. "I remember!" He looked at Arbuckle. "Why, that’s the fossil you had on the table, isn’t it?"

  Arbuckle appeared to have drifted away from the conversation. "Sorry?"

  "Don’t you remember? You were studying it, all absorbed, in the Tudor Room—" He faltered under Arbuckle’s vacant, ill-focused stare, then appealed to Gideon. "I was telling you about it, don’t you remember? You and Mr. Robyn. About how I’d almost put a mug down on it and Professor Arbuckle here nearly skinned me alive."

  "I’m sorry, Andy," Arbuckle said mildly. "I didn’t know what you were referring to then, and I don’t know now."

  " ’Course you do," Hinshore said exasperatedly. "It was the second night you were here—on your first trip, I mean. November first, it would have been. I remember because the month started on a Thursday, and the missus…"

  November first. For the second time in two hours everything fell sharply into place, but it was a different fit. Gideon took a long, hard look at Arbuckle, his heart thumping.

  "You killed him, didn’t you?" he said, forcing the words from a suddenly constricted throat.

  For several long seconds Arbuckle stared at him. "Randy? What are you talking about?" He laughed, then frowned abruptly. "Gideon why are you saying this?"

  "No, not Randy." Gideon said. "Leon."

  "Leon?" He glanced hurriedly around the room for support. "What are you talking about? What are you trying to do?" The room was as still and silent as a painting. Arbuckle laughed again. "Oh no, you can’t—I see what you’re doing….I want to talk to Inspector Bagshawe!" he shouted, presumably for the ears of the constable in the hallway. His forehead was suddenly oily with sweat. "Why would I give him CPR if I was trying to kill him? Tell me that." The question was thrown to the room at large.

  "I think I know the answer to that, Paul." The sitting room was, if anything, more hushed than before, and Gideon’s heart beat louder than ever in his ears. At the edge of his vision he saw Inspector Bagshawe heave noiselessly into the doorway and remain there, with the constable just behind him.

  "I think," Gideon said, "that you gave him CPR because when you’d killed him a few minutes before, you’d gotten blood on your clothes, or your hands, or maybe you’d left your fingerprints on him. By leaning all over him again after he was dead, you had a credible explanation for any of that."

  "But—that’s patently ridiculous." Arbuckle’s round glasses fogged as suddenly as if they had been sprayed, and he took them off to wipe them with a handkerchief. Without spectacles his blue eyes were washed-out and expressionless, the disturbing, ineffectual eyes of a scholar, a recluse. "I tried to save his life, and you’re making it sound as if—"

  "Come on, Paul. The bridge of his nose was rammed two inches into his cranium—it didn’t take a physical anthropologists to know he was dead. There was no possible chance he was alive, and you knew it."

  Nate had not yet moved or even opened his eyes. Now, without doing either, he spoke, seemingly to himself, in very much his normal voice. "I don’t believe it. Arbuckle? Jesus H. Christ."

  Arbuckle, stolidly ignoring this, put the wire-rimmed glasses back on his face, meticulously adjusting each earpiece, then wiped his forehead with his crumpled handkerchief. He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them, he stared stiffly at Gideon for a few more seconds. Then he sagged against the chair, seeming to grow smaller, to deflate. A History of Dorset slid from his lap and slapped against the floor.

  "I never, never meant it to happen," he said. "All I was trying to do was to get that"—he turned toward the sprawling Nate Marcus, and his timid, viscous voice quivered— "that coarse, mindless idiot off the dig!" He glared at Nate, who remained relaxed and unresponsive in his chair; then he continued more quietly: "I arranged the Poundbury thing, I admit that, but …the deaths…my God, I never
meant… it never occurred to me—"

  "And the dog?" Gideon said.

  "Dog?"

  "In the meadow."

  Arbuckle squirmed, looked more embarrassed than guilty. "Well, yes, the dog. But really, that was Leon’s idea, believe me….I just happened to know a little about hunting dogs…."

  At his point Bagshawe stepped pachydermously into the room. "Dr. Arbuckle, would you mind stepping outside with me, please, sir?"

  "Oh," Arbuckle said. "Of course."

  In the total silence he rose on rickety legs, his pudgy features somehow smudged and out of focus, like a photograph taken at too slow a speed. Gideon dropped his eyes, unable to look at him. Bagshawe stood aside to let the archaeologist out the door, then followed him.

  From the hallway the rumbling chant could be heard clearly.

  "Paul Arbuckle, I arrest you for the murder of Leon Hillyer. You will be taken to the police station in Bridport and so charged. Anything you say now or then will be taken down and may be used in evidence…"

  TWENTY-ONE

  ABE put down his cheese-and-pickle sandwich and leaned back in the chair. "Let me get this straight. It was Leon who killed Randy, and Paul who killed Leon?" He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. "Oy, I can’t believe I’m saying such things. And it was really Paul Arbuckle behind the hoax with Pummy?"

  "That’s right," Gideon said.

  "That much I can follow," Julie said, working on a ham-and-cheese sandwich. "Where I get lost is why."

  Gideon had been having a little trouble with that part too, but he had just concluded a mutually informative telephone conversation with Bagshawe, who had called at 11:30 p.m. after witnessing a confession from Arbuckle, which had been made over the objections of a solicitor obtained in his behalf. While Gideon had been downstairs talking at the desk telephone, Hinshore had delivered a midnight meal of sandwiches and beer to Abe’s room, and they had fallen on it hungrily.

  "I guess it would help if I started at the beginning," Gideon said.

  "I guess it would," said Julie.

  Gideon, who was ravenous, washed down the last of a roast-beef sandwich with a swig of lager from the bottle, and picked up a sandwich of sliced cucumber and butter. "Okay, the beginning was November first. Leon was working alone in the test pit and he turned up that femur."

  "And wrote up a find card," Abe said, "like he was supposed to."

  "Right. And Randy photographed it, not having any idea of what it was. But Arbuckle, who was wandering around on his audit, saw the thing and realized exactly what it was—not Bronze Age but Middle Pleistocene. He got Leon to give him the bone—I’m not sure whether he paid him, or just talked him into it, or what—and he took it away with him, back to the hotel. That’s when Andy saw him gloating over it."

  "I see," Abe said, putting down his own bottle of beer. "The find card just got left quietly and forgotten. Frawley never saw it, and the bone neither, so it never got put in the field catalog. About that at least he was telling the truth."

  "Well, I don’t see," Julie said. "What could he do with the bone anyway, no matter how important it is? And what does it have to do with the killings? And the hoax? And—"

  "Let’s start with Pummy," Gideon said. "First of all, you have to remember that Paul is fanatically interested in Middle Pleistocene Man—it’s his whole life. Well, here he is, marking time, moping around this Bronze Age site—"

  "Boringly recent by his standards."

  "And he can hardly wait to get back to his own Middle Pleistocene dig in Dijon. Then, out of the blue comes a two-hundred-thousand-year-old bone not even two feet below the surface—and he and Leon are the only people in the world who know they might be standing on the most important early-man site ever found. So—"

  "Let me guess," Abe said. "Paul found out that Leon had it in for Nathan because of his dissertation problems, and he convinced him that it would be very nice if it should come to pass that Nathan gets fired—in a hurry." With a finger, he pushed the final corner of his sandwich into his mouth. "So they stole Pummy from the museum, and Leon buried it and fooled Nathan—not the smartest man in the world, I’m starting to think—into proclaiming his wonderful discovery, and so on and so forth."

  "That’s it. Paul wanted the dig terminated as quickly as possible, before someone stumbled on another early-man bone or artifact. Then, in a year or two, when it had blown over, he was going to reopen the site under his own direction, and step right into the very first rank of Middle Pleistocene archaeologists."

  "So my idea about Nate being set up was right?" Julie asked.

  "Oh? Was that your idea?" said Gideon. "Really?"

  "You’re darn tootin’. I believe you thought it was unnecessarily rococo."

  "A simple question," Abe said. "What’s all this got to do with Randy getting murdered?"

  "Well, it was Randy who actually stole the skull from Dorchester. Leon was smart enough to keep his hands clean of that. He talked Randy into it for a lark, and then, later on, when Randy had second thoughts, they argued about it up on the fell. Randy told him he was going to tell me about it that night, and I guess they got into scuffling. The mallet was right there, and Leon broke his arm with it—accidentally, maybe; who knows? Then, in a panic, he grabbed him by the throat to keep him from screaming and wound up strangling him. After that he rolled him over the cliff. In the fog, nobody saw a thing." Gideon shrugged. "The whole thing’s guesswork, you realize, since the two of them are dead, but it sounds like the truth to me."

  Julie shuddered. "So Paul had nothing to do with that?"

  "Not in a direct way, no. He claims he was horrified."

  "But horrified as he was," Abe put in, "it sure didn’t keep him from killing Leon."

  "It sure didn’t. That part’s still a little confused, but from what Bagshawe could make out, Leon started to get panicky tonight—again. This was after they thought the dog had taken me out of the picture, you understand"—a sudden contraction around his heart made him reach out to squeeze Julie’s hand—"and you, too. They argued in the Tudor Room, and when Leon started going to pieces— which I can believe, because he was pretty close to it when I pinned him down this afternoon—Arbuckle panicked too and hit him with the poker."

  Abe oscillated his head grimly back and forth. "I’m sure he was horrified all over again."

  "I think he was," Gideon said. Suddenly drained, he sat heavily back against his chair. Merrill had given him some codeine earlier, but his bruises had begun to ache again, and his scrapes to burn. "Anyway, that’s the whole story."

  "No, it isn’t," Julie said. "I still have questions. Right after that business with the dog, you were sure Leon had sicced it on us. But then, in the living room, you seemed to think it was Paul. Or did I misunderstand?"

  "No, you’re right. I started thinking about the timing, and it was obvious. Whoever stole that sneaker had to have done it this afternoon, because we didn’t decide to go out Barr’s Lane until about two. Well, the hotel was locked up all afternoon because the Hinshores were in Bridport and nobody without a key could get in. That let out Leon, but it didn’t let out Paul, because he was already here."

  "But how could he get hold of your tennis shoe?" Julie said, her brows knit. "I was in the room all afternoon." She touched a finger to her lips. "Oops. Except for twenty minutes or so, when I went across the street for some stamps. I guess that’d be long enough."

  "More than long enough, what with my key hanging on a peg in the entry. I guess Leon called Paul and told him we were going to go into the woods, and the two of them hatched the idea." He began to stretch, then stopped with a wince. "Ouch. I think I’m about ready to call it a day."

  "Me, too," Julie said, putting down her half-finished sandwich. "Just one more question. Was it Paul who was giving all that information to the Times?"

  "That’s right. He figured the more pre-publicity it all got, the worse it would be for Nate when it blew up."

  "Yes, I can see that. But—not that
it matters—how in the world did he ever find out you were coming to Stonebarrow Fell?"

  "That I still haven’t figured out."

  "That’s easy," Abe said. "I told him."

  "You?" Gideon said. "But I asked you—"

  "You asked me did I tell anybody on the dig. Paul’s not on the dig; he’s an administrator from Horizon. Why shouldn’t I tell him?"

  "For Christ’s sake, Abe, maybe if you’d told me that, we’d… Hell, never mind."

  "Maybe if you would have told me why you wanted to know," Abe said, made testy by Gideon’s tone, "I could have told you."

  It was rare for them to snap at each other, and Gideon was immediately contrite. "I’m sorry, Abe. I’m obviously not at my best. There was no way for you to know it was important. I didn’t know, myself."

  "That’s all right," Abe, too, hurried to patch up the small rift. "It’s my fault. I just forgot."

  "No, my fault," Gideon said. "Boy, am I ready for bed." So ready that he couldn’t quite find the energy to gather himself up and go.

  "Oh yeah," Abe said, "something else I forgot. From back home."

  A certain familiar lilt made Gideon look up, to find Abe grinning widely, at Julie as much as at him.

  "I was talking to Michaelis at the university," he went on, "and he was telling me they’re thinking of starting a graduate anthropology department at the Port Angeles campus next year. So he says to me, do I know a good physical anthropologist who’d be interested in teaching up there, maybe with a full professorship if he’s got the right experience."

  "I appreciate it," Gideon said tersely, "but I don’t want any strings pulled for me. I can find my own jobs."

  "Strings?" Abe repeated, appealing to Julie. "Who’s pulling strings? Boy, this guy has a temper!" He leaned agilely forward with more vigor than Gideon had at the moment, and clapped him gently on the knee. "What kind of strings? You’re not a good physical anthropologist? You wouldn’t be interested in teaching on the Olympic Peninsula? Is it my fault he’s interested in you? Why wouldn’t he be interested?"