Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  "Any ideas who it could be?" John asked as the car swung onto the N137 and the city buildings began to thin out. "Unclosed homicides? Missing persons?"

  "We’re making inquiries of the local prefect of police," Joly said, "but you have to remember this is an old house, built in the fifteenth century. The bones may have been there for hundreds of years. Besides, well…"

  "Besides?" Gideon prompted.

  "Well, whenever something like this turns up, there’s always the Occupation to consider. You know, there was a lot of Resistance activity in Brittany. And the village of Ploujean was the scene of a mass execution in 1942. That sort of thing—It makes for very strong emotions."

  "I’d expect so," Gideon murmured.

  "No, not just against the Germans. I mean villager against villager.‘If you and your brothers hadn’t blown up that SS motorcycle, my mother and father wouldn’t have been shot.’ That sort of thing. And—I’ll be frank—there

  were collaborationists as well as Resistance heroes. There were a lot of unsolved deaths; a lot of mysterious disappearances at that time."

  "And that’s what you think the bones are?" John asked. "A wartime murder?"

  Joly extended his lips and shrugged, looking very French. "Who knows? We haven’t even seen them. But that would be my first guess, and if it’s right, it may be that you won’t see the OPJ at its vigorous and unflagging best. I suspect we’ll resolve the matter in the quietest way possible, bury these bones again, and leave them in peace."

  John was shocked. "But it’s a murder! You don’t have a statute of limitations on murder, do you?"

  "It isn’t that, my friend," Joly said. "After the war there was a terrible time of retribution. I was no more than ten, but I remember the killings, the trials, the parading of people naked through the streets, the spitting… Ah, my God, once—"

  But that was as close to revealing his emotions, Gideon realized, as Inspector Joly was likely to come. He closed his mouth, then went on more impassively. "Well, it’s been almost fifty years now. The old wounds are closed. No one wants to open them again." He smiled thinly. "And our good German friends fill our hotels as paying guests."

  They sat in silence as the Breton coast’s wide sky and low dunes gave way to the rolling hills of the Rance estuary, and then to the somber heaths and dark little forests of the interior. At an intersection with a narrow, graveled road, a primitive wooden sign with the word "Ploujean" pointed left. Joly turned, and in two or three miles they came to a metal plaque at the entrace to a still narrower road lined with old plane trees: "Manoir de Rochebonne, XVème Siècle, 1000 m. à Droite."

  "You’re kidding!" Gideon exclaimed. "Is that where we’re going? Rochebonne?"

  "You know it?" Joly said, surprised.

  He did indeed. A couple of years before, while he was still teaching at Northern California State, he’d spent most of the summer working on an Upper Paleolithic dig in the Dordogne, near Les Eyzies. At the invitation of Ray Schaefer from the Comparative Lit Department, who was passing the summer "on the family domaine," he’d driven up to Brittany to join him for the weekend. He’d gone somewhat reluctantly (he was rarely comfortable staying at other people’s homes, and the picture Ray had drawn of his Uncle Guillaume was highly forbidding), but to his surprise it had been a relaxing and stimulating two days.

  The elegant old building, deserted except for the three of them and two servants, had been a great place to loll around in after the dusty cave site in the south. Ray had been his shy, likable self, and Guillaume du Rocher, once his aloof and frigid shell had been cracked, had turned out to be fine company.

  Unlike many shell collectors, he was a well-read student of marine biology and biology in general, and over dinner the second night he and Gideon had had a table-thumping, highly entertaining debate over whether or not the Neanderthals were entitled to a twig on the Homo branch of the hominid tree. They had parted warm friends, to Ray’s amazement, and had continued a sporadic correspondence consisting mostly of articles from scholarly journals overlaid with yellow highlighting and emphatic marginal notes.

  "Yes," Gideon said. "I know Rochebonne." He had, in fact, planned on dropping by the manoir during the weekend. "I also know Guillaume du Rocher, and I have a hunch he’s not going to be too keen on a bunch of policemen wandering around his house and digging up his cellar."

  "You were friends?" Joly asked with an odd inflection.

  "Yes, in a way." He glanced at the inspector. "Did you say‘were’?"

  "I’m sorry to tell you, Dr. Oliver …Guillaume du Rocher is dead."

  "Oh, no," Gideon murmured. He was sorry but not surprised. With his war-ruined body, it was amazing that Guillaume had lived as long as he had. "Of what?" he asked.

  "He was caught by the tide in Mont St. Michel Bay while collecting seashells. On Monday, I believe; the day the conference started. There was a report filed."

  Gideon nodded, smiling faintly. Well, there was a sort of rightness in that. Certainly Guillaume would have preferred it that way, out there on the ocean floor, rather than having his wrecked kidneys or liver give out while he was in a hospital bed buried in tubes. It was too bad, though; Gideon had been looking forward to re-opening the debate.

  They turned through the open gate of iron grillwork set between two tall stone gateposts with carved spheres on top, the only opening in a low wall of lichen-stained granite blocks. To the left, what had been a small kitchen garden was being substantially enlarged. Workmen were setting in the walls of a raised bed, and piles of lumber and black earth littered the ground.

  Otherwise, everything was the same. The manoir itself was set at the back of some 200 feet of pea-graveled courtyard, a gray stone building as starkly beautiful as he remembered, with five slender stone chimneys, and a complex jumble of smaller wings branching off behind.

  Much of the front was covered by ivy—a solid, rippling mass of green when he’d been here in the summer, but now just beginning to break out into rust-colored new leaves, so that the thick, gnarled, old vines could be seen clinging to the stone blocks. The only signs of ostentation were the early Baroque decorations carved around the window casements, all curlicues and rosettes, looking sheepish and subdued in the otherwise classical façade. An ancient, eroded stone coat of arms, possibly older than the building, had been fitted into the wall above the arched doorway.

  With a crunch of tires on gravel, Joly pulled the car to a halt directly in front of the door. John looked up at the coat of arms as he got out.

  "A poodle?" he said after a moment.

  "A lion, I think," Gideon said. Not that it didn’t look like a poodle.

  "A lion," Joly confirmed, "wearing the collar of the Order of St. Michael. A family emblem, I suppose. They hadn’t seen many real lions in those days."

  "I can see that," John said.

  The bell-pull was answered by a large woman in a vast brown housedress, who opened the thick door six inches and peered uncongenially at them.

  "Bonjour, Beatrice," Gideon said.

  She craned her head forward to see him better. "Ah," she said, her eyes brightening, "the gentleman with the good appetite!"

  Gideon laughed. "It’s nice to see you."

  "OPJ, madame," Joly said sternly, showing her his identification. "May we come in, please?"

  As soon as they walked through the vestibule and into the salon, a small man with glowing pink cheeks and a scant moustache hurried to them. "I’m the one who called the police, Inspector," he said with pride. "My name is René du Rocher." He held out his hand and Joly shook it, again with a slight, stiff-backed bow.

  Du Rocher gestured around the room, in which several people sat in clusters. "These are members of my family. My wife—"

  Joly cut him off unceremoniously. "Perhaps first you would be good enough to show us the remains, monsieur."

  "Of course, Inspector. Certainly." He led them briskly through the room. One of the men, vaguely familiar, smiled at Gideon in a particul
arly friendly way. Stoop-shouldered and slight, there was something about him that reminded Gideon of Ray Schaefer, so perhaps it was a relative he’d met when he’d visited Rochebonne before. If so, he’d forgotten completely. A little self-consciously, he returned the smile in passing.

  The big cellar was damp-smelling and gloomy, lit by four plain bulbs dangling from a wire stapled to the disquietingly sagging ceiling. Against one of the rough stone walls was an ancient, rickety worktable on which was an untidy package of what looked like rotted white butcher paper, much soiled by blood, or earth, or both. The package had been opened and spread out under a table lamp to show a jumble of brownish-yellow bones.

  At the near end of the room some of the big rectangular paving stones had been raised and tossed haphazardly into a pile, uncovering a bed of earth about twelve feet by three. Into this a two-foot-wide trench had been cut, but it had come to a halt after only a yard. A pick and two spades still lay where they had been dropped onto the mounded dirt. Around the brief trench a chalk line had been drawn.

  "A body outline for a skeleton wrapped in a package?" John said. "You guys are thorough."

  Joly looked at him for a moment, his bare upper lip growing longer than ever, but decided not to reply.

  "Good afternoon, Fleury," he said to a small, heavy-lidded man in a buttoned-up suit and a red scarf wrapped several times around his throat. "Nothing’s been disturbed?"

  "Not if you don’t count the crew from the lab," said Fleury, who gave the appearance of treating his chief with sleepy, skeptical amusement, until it became apparent that the sardonic V’s of his eyebrows were permanently set that way. "They were here for an hour."

  "And?"

  "The usual. They crawled around on their stomachs picking up invisible things with tweezers and putting them in their little plastic bags, but I don’t think they found anything. Aubin said he thought it was something from the war, maybe even before."

  Joly nodded. He went to the empty trench and squatted on his haunches, first carefully hiking up his trousers. He wore stocking suspenders, a fact that struck Gideon as being in keeping with what he surmised of the inspector’s approach to life. After a few moments of peering at the empty hole—if there was anything to see, it escaped Gideon—he got up and dusted off spotless, gray-clad knees that hadn’t come within ten inches of the soil.

  "Shall we have a look at the remains?" he said. "Perhaps we’d better establish at once that we’re not dealing with a polydactylous pig."

  "We’re not," Gideon said. "I can see that from here."

  "From thirty feet away? All I can see are some ribs." They began to walk towards the table.

  "Those are enough to show it’s what’s left of a two-footed animal." As always, Gideon slipped with ease into his teaching mode. "Four-footed animals have ribcages shaped more or less like buckets to support the internal organs. But in bipedal animals, naturally, the insides don’t weigh against the ribs; it’s the pelvis that supports them, so the ribs have wider arcs to give the organs more room."

  "Ah," Joly said. "Yes, I see."

  "Those—" Gideon nodded at the bones. "—have rounded arcs, so it has to be two-legged. And since there isn’t any other large two-footed animal—apes are basically quadrupeds and built that way—it has to be a human being."

  "How about an ostrich?" John said.

  Joly frowned at him, but Gideon laughed. "Or an ostrich," he allowed.

  At the table, John grasped a corner of the crumpled paper between two fingers. It broke off. "Pretty old, all right."

  "Mm," Joly said, "yes. It’s hard to tell if the brown on the wrapping is blood or earth. The lab will find out." Absently, he fingered a piece of decayed twine that crumbled into powder under the pressure, then scanned the bones.

  "Well, Professor, there isn’t much here. None of the criterion-bones, as I believe you called them: no skull, no pelvis, no long bones."

  "No." Gideon pulled a portable heater a little closer and studied the earth-stained bones without touching them. A ribcage, including the vertebral column and both scapulas, on its back, with the ribs now collapsed one upon the other like parallel rows of dominoes and shreds of dried brown cartilage holding some of the joints together; most of a right hand underneath it, also still tenuously articulated by withered cartilage; a scattering of additional hand and foot bones. They had been there a while, all right; there was no trace left of the distinctive candle-wax odor—the smell of the fat in the marrow—that exuded from bones for many years after the soft tissue had rotted away. And the bones had coarsened and begun to crack with the temperature changes of many summers and winters. So it had been there twenty years at least, and possibly more.

  Definitely more. There, in the fragile scapulas and clavicles, small pockets of calcium phosphate had been leached out by the acid soil. Make it thirty years at least …no, forty, and maybe more yet.

  But not too much more. There was none of the mineralization—the "petrifaction"—that fifty or a hundred years in this soil would almost certainly produce. So: more than thirty, less than fifty. Joly’s guess of wartime murder was probably right.

  "You’re right about it being old," he said. "I’d say it’s been here forty to fifty years. And you’re sure right about it being a funny kind of collection. There’s only about a third of a body here, assuming it’s all part of one body, but the bones aren’t even contiguous. Hands, feet, and torso."

  "So where’s the rest of it?" John murmured. He tapped the stone floor with one foot and answered himself. "Under here, too, you think? In another neat little package all tied up with twine?"

  Joly shook his head, frowning. "If you’re going to bury a body under the cellar floor, why bother to carve it up? Dismembering a corpse is a messy, cumbersome business."

  "So I’ve heard," John said mildly.

  Joly continued to frown. "Torso, hands, feet. It’s hard to understand the purpose."

  "It doesn’t seem so hard," John said. "They could have chopped the body up in little pieces, maybe to move it from upstairs to down here without anybody knowing— you know, a few pieces at a time—and then just wrapped the chunks into packages that’d fit under individual stones. You know; randomly."

  "Perhaps," Joly said without conviction.

  "Well, you’re going to have the rest of the floor dug up, aren’t you?"

  "Very likely."

  "Likely? I mean, Christ, you’ve got a third of a corpse here—"

  "I shall want," Joly said stiffly, "to talk first to some of the people upstairs. We’ll see where that leads." He turned to Gideon, who’d been poring over the bones. "And what can you tell us, Professor?"

  "Hard to say much just yet," Gideon said. "As you said, the most useful bones aren’t here. But it’s definitely an adult. The epiphyses are all closed, and ossification’s complete. Not elderly, though; no obvious bone buildup in the synovial joints, and not much burnishing of the articular surfaces either."

  "An adult," Joly said. "Someone from twenty to sixty, say?"

  "Twenty to fifty."

  "I see." He waited for Gideon to continue, but Gideon had nothing to add. "And that’s all it’s possible to tell?"

  Joly asked. This, his cool gaze said, was hardly the bravura performance he had been led to expect from the Skeleton Detective of America. "Are there no clues as to race? Sex, height, identifying characteristics? Cause of death…?"

  "Sorry," Gideon said with a touch of irritation. Policemen, he had learned, fell neatly into two categories in about equal measure: those who expected miracles from him, and those who expected snake oil. Joly hadn’t seemed the type to expect miracles. "Give me a couple of hours, Inspector. I need to spread these out and have a good look at them."

  "All right, two hours. Fleury, you’ll come with me. Mr. Lau, perhaps you’d find it interesting to join me? I’m sure," he added, coolly polite, "it would be most helpful."

  John shook his head. "Not with my French, it wouldn’t. I think I’ll stay down
here with the doc. Maybe I’ll learn something." He laughed suddenly, and a hundred little wrinkles folded into well-used laughter creases around his black eyes. "I might have missed a few points during the session today."

  SEVEN

  WITH his head cocked, John watched the two of them mount the steps. Then he looked at Gideon. "He doesn’t like me."

  "Oh, he likes you, all right. But you were crowding him on digging up the floor."

  "Yeah, I probably was, but, holy cow—"

  "And he probably thinks you’re a little frivolous for a cop."

  "Me?" John said with genuine surprise. "Frivolous?" He shook his head. "Nah, he just doesn’t like me. I can’t understand it."

  "I admit, it staggers the imagination," Gideon agreed, and began to lay out the bones in roughly their anatomical relationship, to see just what he had. Ribcage first. Everything was there: twelve pairs of ribs, sternum, both scapulas, both clavicles, seventeen vertebrae from the fifth cervical through the second lumbar. The highest and lowest vertebrae were scarred with crude gouges; in cutting up the body, someone had hacked his way through the obvious places—through the throat just under the jaw (that is, between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae), and through the fleshy waist just above the hip bones (between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae).

  He picked up a loose vertebra, the first lumbar, and ran his thumb over the bottom edge of it, then did the same with the second. "Ah, here’s something. Look, there’s just the start of some osteophytosis, here on the synarthrodial aspect of the centrum—"

  "Doc…!" As far as Gideon knew, there was only one circumstance that ever brought a whine to John Lau’s voice.