Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 13 - Unnatural Selection

by Unnatural Selection

  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.”

  They were passing the Turk’s Head Pub that he’d mentioned to their pilot (Turk’s Head being a common name for pubs, deriving either from a type of seafarer’s knot or, with more grim connotations, from the Crusades, depending on whom you asked) and a couple of men, sitting at an outdoor table over their pints, waved.

  “See who’s here, Alf. What brings you to our fair part of the world, Constable Sergeant? A bank robbery? A triple murder? An anarchist plot to blow up the parsonage?”

  “Just out and about enjoying the fresh air, lads,” Clapper said pleasantly. “Lovely day, innit?”

  At the Turk’s Head they turned left off the road onto a footpath that skirted the low bluffs above the beach. “Shorter this way,” the sergeant said. “Now where was I? Well, I myself first met Trus, oh, about five years ago. I called him in on a case when I was . . .” He faltered. “Well, you see, this was—”

  “When you were a detective chief inspector in Plymouth?” He was getting along well with Clapper, and he thought this might clear the air even more.

  Clapper tucked in his chin but didn’t break stride. “Someone’s been talking out of school,” he muttered. “PC Robb, would that be?”

  “He’s proud of you, and proud to be working with you, Sergeant. And I understand why. You’ve had a hell of a career.”

  “And did he tell you why I’m spending the remainder of this illustrious career as a sergeant in the most remote outpost of England?”

  “He implied there’d been, uh, differences with administration.”

  Clapper laughed, not disagreeably. “I’d say that describes it.”

  Gideon responded in kind with one or two humorous accounts of his own struggles with administration in the groves of academe, and by the time they arrived at another modest “Bed-and-Biscuit Canine Boarding Establishment” sign at the head of a curving lane, they had slipped without noticing into first names.

  The lane curved down toward the water and ended at the front steps of a green-roofed, white farmhouse on a gorse-and heather-covered bluff, below which was a small, white beach strewn with driftwood and edged by grassy dunes. The small sign on the front door said, “Please ring and enter. Be sure to close door behind you.”

  They did as instructed, finding themselves in a small foyer at the foot of a half-flight of stairs, and bringing instantly down on themselves a pandemonium of frenzied barking, yapping, and yipping—moderated by a single wise, resonant whooof—that seemed to come from every corner of the house. There followed the patter of many feet on wood flooring, and a pack of eight or ten small dogs—terriers, pugs, toy spaniels—threw themselves in what seemed like pure, noisy, gleeful ecstasy against the baby gate at the top of the stairs, barking away. A second later a huge Great Dane padded up behind them—the whoofer—and towered over them, adding his own deep voice to the chorus.

  From down the hall came a soft, neutral voice: “Quiet.” Nothing authoritative or threatening, not really a command at all, just a courteous request, but the barking stopped the way a switched-off radio stops. “Sit.” And with an audible thump, as abruptly as if their back legs had been swept out from under them, every one of them went down on its haunches (the Dane accidentally sat on a Yorkie, which caused a brief commotion) and stayed there, heads smartly turned to the left, from whence the voice had come, as if posed for a cute doggie calendar photo.

  A moment later, a mild-looking man of seventy appeared behind the dogs, preceded by the sweet, cloying odor of pipe tobacco from the ancient briar that was held loosely between his teeth. Gideon’s immediate impression was that he was looking at someone who was about as contented as a human being could get. With his gray, thinning hair, his polished-apple cheeks, his schoolish spectacles, and his not-so-expertly hand-knitted vest, in the neck of which the knot of a plain blue tie was visible, he might have been a retired Oxford don. From the way he smiled down at his charges, it couldn’t have been more clear that he was living his sunset years exactly as he wished to, surrounded by the companions of his choice.

  He plucked the pipe from his mouth and smiled kindly down at them. “Mike Clapper! Sergeant Mike, the very man, as I live and sneeze. Come all this way just to cheer up his poor old mate, struck down by the cruel and remorseless hand of age.”

  “Come on business, Trus,” Clapper said briskly.

  Hicks rubbed his hands together. “Well, then!”

  “Not that there’s any money in it for you, you understand.”

  “The story of my life,” Hicks said with a sigh. “And this young fellow must be the renowned Professor Oliver, whose monograph on exhuming skeletal remains has been my bible on the subject for many years.”

  “Thank you,” said a flattered Gideon. “Actually, it was more Walter Birkby’s monograph than mine. I was the junior author on that one.”

  “Modest too. Very becoming. Come in, gentlemen.”

  He unclicked the baby gate—the dogs stirred, but didn’t dash for the opening—and let the two of them in, and men and dogs followed him in a line down a hallway to a comfortable but undistinguished linoleum-floored living room with a matched set of 1960’s-style department store furniture. Hicks sat Gideon and Clapper on the sofa and, without asking, went to get them tea, while the dogs, each apparently with its preferred place, clambered into the seats or onto the arms of the chairs. Some curled themselves like cats over the chair backs. The Great Dane laid himself down, Sphinxlike, in front of the fireplace.

  When Hicks had returned with the tea things on a tray and had squeezed himself into an armchair between three look-alike black spaniels, two of which clambered into his lap, Clapper briefly laid out the facts.

  “One of those little cove beaches up north, eh?” Hicks said. “Those would be, what, a hundred, a hundred-and-fifty yards wide?”

  “Something like that,” Clapper said. “No wider, anyway. Want to have a go?”

  Hicks dug the bit of his pipe against his cheek. “Well, sand isn’t the easiest medium in the world, you know. It’s too porous, you see, too many ways for the scent to escape. You get a huge scent pool, and the dog has to work extremely hard to pinpoint. And then, of course, sand is notorious for shifting, so there’s the added problem of . . . mm . . .” The pipe bit went back in his mouth. Absently, he stroked the ears of one of the spaniels on his lap.

  “You don’t think it can be done?” Clapper asked, his disap
pointment showing. Gideon imagined his own was showing too.

  Out came the pipe. “Body’s been there a good five years, you say?”

  “Probably less,” Gideon said. “More than one, though.”

  Hicks pondered. “Well, that might be stretching things a bit, but yes, why not? We can certainly have a look-see. The dog will enjoy a run on the beach, in any case. What say we do it tomorrow morning?”

  Gideon and Clapper readily agreed.

  “Good-o.” Hicks thrust the pipe back into his mouth and got to his feet, spilling dogs onto the floor. “These you see are all guests and house pets. My old working dogs prefer living outside. Come and meet them.”

  “Do you still have Heidi the Wonder Dog?” Clapper asked, getting out of his chair.

  “Why, Mike, what a thing to say. Of course I still have her. I’d never give up Heidi. I’d never give up any of them.”

  “Well, yes, I only wondered if—that is, I thought perhaps—”

  “She’s alive and well,” Hicks said, “and no doubt eager to see you.”

  When they left the room, the dogs started to scramble after them, but Hicks murmured, “Down. Stay,” over his shoulder, and down they went and down they stayed, after practically screeching to a halt.

  “I just thought of something, Trus,” Clapper said. “The fog’s supposed to be worse tomorrow. Fog season, you know. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Dear me, no. For you and me, perhaps, but not for a dog. It’s smell they depend on, not sight. It might even make it easier, because moist conditions enhance scent. And then the dogs are happier when it’s cool.”

  The three men walked through the kitchen and out the back door of the house, into an acre of grassy moorland that included an inviting pond and a couple of shady clumps of small elm and sycamore trees, all safely enclosed by a wire fence. Valhalla for dog heroes, Gideon thought.

  There were four of them: a Doberman pinscher, two German shepherds, and a Border collie, and all of them came bounding over gracefully when Hicks made a clucking sound with his tongue. These were not like the yappers and yippers indoors, who had clamored for the attention of strangers. Three of the four had eyes only for Hicks. With their shapely heads turned adoringly up to him, they weren’t begging for food or even pleading for attention. All they wanted was the joy of his presence. The fourth, the Border collie, pranced around them, snapping gently at their feet to herd them together, as its genes demanded.

  “This one’s Heidi, am I right?” Clapper said, bending to rub the ears of one of the German shepherds, which permitted the attention with the abstracted air of a pasha tolerating the devotion of a supplicant. “Hello, there, love,” Clapper said affectionately, and to Gideon: “It’s Heidi here that put an end to the biggest arson racket that Plymouth ever saw. What a nose on this old girl.”

  “She did that, all right,” Hicks agreed. “It was Heidi that put us onto the lean-to where they’d stored their petrol—for setting their fires, you see, even though there’d been no petrol there for more than five months and it was completely open to the elements. Did it entirely on what vestiges of scent remained.”

  “Amazing,” Gideon said. “Will we be using her tomorrow?”

  Hicks stared at him. “What an idea. No, Heidi is an accelerant-detecting canine. No, no, we need a cadaver dog, or as we prefer to call it in these politically correct times, a human remains detection dog.”

  “I didn’t realize they specialized to that extent.”

  “Well, of course they specialize. How could a—” He was obviously shocked at Gideon’s ignorance, but polite-ness stopped him from expressing it. “For example, Kaiser here”—he kneaded the scruff of the other shepherd’s neck—“is strictly a water search dog. Keenest nose in existence for locating a body at the bottom of a pond, but wouldn’t know a cadaver in the open if he stumbled over it. And Trixie there—” At the mention of her name the Doberman shivered with pleasure and pushed her sleek muzzle into Hicks’s hand. “—well, this beauty has been known to hunt down an automobile with explosives in its boot after it had driven two miles through dense Torquay traffic.”

  “Amazing,” Gideon murmured again.

  “No, our expert tomorrow will be Tess.” He pointed at the midsized brown-and-white Border collie, which continued politely mock-nipping at their heels, presumably to keep them from wandering off and getting lost and thereby getting her in trouble. “Tess is a tried-and-true cadaver dog—pardon me, a human remains detection dog—inasmuch as she’s trained to find skeletons, and even single bones, as well as decomposing corpses. But she couldn’t track a lost hiker—a lost live hiker—to save her soul. Not her fault, of course; it’s the way she’s been schooled. She’s been taught to alert to nothing but human remains. She’ll even ignore animal remains.”

  Gideon only barely caught himself before saying “Amazing” again. “Huh,” he said, “and I thought they were all just general-purpose tracking dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, with some specific training tacked on.”

  “Good heavens, no,” Hicks exclaimed. “They’re not tracking dogs at all, never were. Tracking dogs require tracks, don’t you see. Either literal tracks or some specific scent article belonging to the person. And they generally require some specific starting point. But these”—he used the stem of his pipe to jab at the animals—“are air-scent canines. They don’t look for an individual person or object but for a specific type of smell. They can start from anywhere, they don’t need scent articles, they—” His rosy cheeks turned a little redder. “Gentlemen, I beg your pardon. I’m boring you, I’m sure. It’s only that I don’t get a chance to talk about it very much anymore.”

  “Ah, well, we’re bearing up,” Clapper said stoically.

  “It’s extremely interesting,” Gideon said. “There’s a lot more to it than I thought.”

  “Oh, that’s only the start,” Hicks said, recognizing Gideon as the curious scientist he was. “There’s a remarkable field of knowledge here. Come into the house for another cup of tea, or something stronger, if you like, and I will astound and edify you.”

  “We’re for it now,” Clapper muttered crossly on the way back in.

  NINE

  HICKS began simply enough. What a dog had that a person didn’t was not only the ability to discriminate between extremely similar scents, but to locate the source of smells much more precisely than any human being could possibly hope to. It came naturally. What the dog was doing when he located a buried human bone was no different than what he did when he dug up a beef bone that he’d buried in the backyard months before. He doesn’t “know” where he buried it, he simply picks up the scent of a decaying bone on the air. Other animals, such as cats, actually have more scent receptors than dogs—was Gideon aware of that?—but of course the dog’s emotional and behavioral characteristics made it infinitely more amenable to training and working in the field.

  Interesting enough, and so far so good, but when Hicks got into the chemistry of putrefactive olfaction (chemistry had never been Gideon’s strong suit) he rapidly left Gideon behind. (“Some say that the dog responds to the outgassing of volatile fatty acids and ionic compounds, but I maintain— have always maintained—that it is at the level of the major histocompatability complex, where unique protein markers form, that differentiation between these markers results in recognition.”)

  “Ah,” said Gideon dully, while Clapper dozed peacefully, “amazing.”

  ONCE Hicks had a full head of steam going, he was unstoppable, so it wasn’t until five-fifteen that Clapper and Gideon, dazed with canine lore, were let loose, and five forty-five by the time Gideon climbed Garrison Hill in the gathering mist and got back to Star Castle. In his room, on the table by the casement window, was a note from Julie:

  Hi, Prof,

  Hope your session with the sergeant-major went better than yesterday’s. Having put in a hard day’s work furthering human knowledge, a few of us have headed for the Bishop and Wolf for a relaxing pre
-dinner pint or two.

  Dinner’s not till seven, so come join us!

  XXX, J

  The Bishop and Wolf had been the consortium’s pub of choice during its first convening two years earlier, and Julie had pointed it out on their walk through Hugh Town when they’d arrived. The oldest building in the village, an attractive, mid-seventeenth-century stone inn with pansy-filled window boxes that added a whimsical and unlikely Bavarian air to the façade, and a hanging sign that showed a gigantic, slavering wolf crouching over a bishop’s mitre-topped light-house (the pub had been named for the Bishop and the Wolf, two of St. Mary’s earliest lighthouses). Situated in the center of the village, on the little square where the Strand and the Parade angled together, it was only a five-minute walk from Garrison Hill, so that it was a few minutes before six when Gideon pulled open the door and entered an old English pub, traditional in the extreme: cozy and plain, with nets, glass globes, and odds and ends on the walls; dark, old wooden tables; and a fitting, not-really-unpleasant fug of beer, wine, and cigarette smoke in the air.

  They were at two pulled-together square tables near the back wall: Julie, Liz Petra, Rudy Walker, Victor Waldo, Donald Pinckney, and Donald’s man-eating wife, Cheryl, who looked bored, bony, and exotic in a flared white pantsuit that appeared to have come from the cleaners’ five minutes before. The barmaid was in the act of taking orders, probably for their second round. Only Joey and Kozlov weren’t there.

  “Hi, all.” Gideon asked the barmaid for a pint of best bitter and pulled up a chair between Julie and Victor, well out of Cheryl’s range.

  “Oh, Gideon, hi, sweetheart,” Julie said. “How did it go today? I was just telling everybody about the bone.”

  “A human bone, I understand?” Donald said. “A tibia?” He was wearing another button on his shirt: I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables.