The Fossil Murder

by Evelyn James

  Annie did not look convinced. She peeled a potato and threw it so hard into the pan of water that droplets splashed onto the table.

  “Since when did you begin seducing women to assist on Clara’s cases?” She demanded.

  “Since she asked me if I would like to work with her,” Tommy insisted. “Look, Annie, have I ever given you reason to doubt me?”

  “No,” Annie admitted, mellowing a fraction.

  “Then trust me now. Anyway, I’m not going anywhere near Miss Holbein again. She scares the living daylights out of me. And not in a good way like you do,” Tommy moved forward and squeezed Annie’s shoulder. “The only future I want is one with you. You know that, old girl.”

  “Do I?” Annie asked petulantly.

  “Of course you do,” Tommy kissed the top of her head. “You’re the only one who would put up with an old crock like me. I’m not letting you go.”

  A slow smile crept onto Annie’s lips.

  “Ok Tommy, you are forgiven.”

  “Thank goodness,” Tommy put his arms around her and hugged her. “Because Clara would kill me if I upset you.”

  Annie elbowed him playfully.

  “Go away, I have potatoes to peel.”

  ~~~*~~~

  Inspector Park-Coombs arrived at Clara’s door just after eight o’clock. He still looked tired and bleary-eyed from his headache.

  “Feeling any better?” Clara asked him.

  “I managed to take a nap after my supper, which helped a little,” Park-Coombs shrugged. “I could do with this case being over, however. I have a hunch I shall be forced to put in a lot of extra hours by my superiors. All over a bloody stone.”

  “Language, Inspector,” Annie said lightly, coming to the door with a slice of cake on a plate.

  “Annie’s headache cure,” Clara explained.

  “Madeira cake soaked in sherry and a couple of aspirin,” Annie winked.

  “Well, I am now off duty,” the inspector took the plate and began to eat while Clara fetched her coat.

  “I hope this gentleman turns up,” Clara said over her shoulder as she prepared. “Otherwise it is going to be a long job getting to the bottom of all this.”

  Inspector Park-Coombs said nothing, he was munching appreciatively on Annie’s cake.

  “Still, there is always some way to solve a puzzle,” Clara appeared back at the door dressed in her coat and hat. “Ready Inspector?”

  Park-Coombs handed the now empty plate back to Annie.

  “I feel fully restored Annie, thank you,” he told her.

  Annie looked pleased with herself. She was always satisfied when someone appreciated her cooking.

  “Inspector?”

  “Ready, Clara,” the inspector returned his hat to his head. “Now, for the purposes of this evening, you best call me Arthur. You call me ‘Inspector’ in that pub and everyone is going to run a mile.”

  Clara laughed.

  “All right Arthur,” she tested out the name. “What would your wife say?”

  “Oh, she is fully aware of what I am up to!” Park-Coombs chuckled. “I told her, I am going out to the pub with young Clara. She said ‘fine, as long as you remember to take your key’.”

  Clara shook her head, amused. They walked off into the night. Inspector Park-Coombs offered Clara his arm.

  “Well, Inspector!” Clara said in surprise.

  “Arthur,” he reminded her. “But if you are too independently minded to accept a gentleman’s offer…”

  Clara smirked and slipped her arm through his.

  “What must we look like!” She said aloud.

  “I hope, when we get to the pub, we look ordinary and not like a police inspector and a private detective.”

  “Good point,” Clara agreed.

  They arrived at the Hole in the Wall just before nine. It was busier than it had been in the afternoon, the tables packed with the sort of people you might watch carefully around your wallet. Clara and Park-Coombs entered and found a space at the end of the bar. From there it was possible to look across the room and spot anyone entering. Park-Coombs ordered them drinks from the landlord, who glanced at Clara with a look of suspicion. She assumed he recognised her from earlier and hoped it would not cause a problem.

  “Those three men playing draughts at that corner table were John’s friends,” Clara whispered in the inspector’s ear.

  He looked over discreetly and then nodded to Clara.

  “Noted,” he said. “Any chance they knew more than they were telling you?”

  “Who can say? They seemed shocked John was dead, at least.”

  The pub was growing busier. Men were pushing in through the door and trying to find a space to stand, there was certainly no place to sit. Clara and Park-Coombs relinquished their spot at the bar and retreated to a corner near the window, where they could watch the front door unobtrusively. Clara was uncomfortably aware of how close she was standing to a table of drinkers, the men casting lecherous glances in her direction from time to time. She hoped their suspect arrived soon.

  Abruptly, a commotion broke out at the far side of the room. Someone swung a punch at someone else, though it was not plain what sparked the fight. There was a brief scuffle and several people surged to the scene, some to cheer, some to break it up. By the time it was over, and the culprits were being thrown out the door, a new man had arrived at the pub. Clara had been distracted by the fight and had taken her eyes from the door. The new arrival had slipped in unseen. He paused for a second just inside, looking around the room for someone. When he failed to see them, he started to turn away. It was at that moment that Clara spotted him.

  The man was wearing a nice suit and light summer overcoat. He had a bowler on his head that had been recently brushed and was certainly not an old cast-off as so many of the drinkers in the pub were wearing. As he looked around him, his thin, pencil moustache was noticeable on his otherwise clean-shaven face. Clara also noticed the glint of a gold pin on his lapel.

  She nudged Park-Coombs.

  “That’s him!”

  Park-Coombs glanced up. The man was leaving again, pushing past men who were then entering.

  “Come on!” Clara hissed and she started to thread her way through the crowd.

  It seemed to take forever to extract themselves from the pub, and the man was already outside and walking up the road as they exited. Clara pointed him out and she and the inspector hurried behind him.

  “Excuse me!” Clara called out.

  The gentleman turned around. He looked surprised at being accosted by a smartly dressed woman. He frowned.

  “May I help?” His words were spoken with an obvious accent. Clara was not certain if it was South African, but it was definitely not Scottish or Irish.

  “I think it is more a case of us helping you,” Clara stopped before him. “You are looking for John Morley?”

  The man hesitated and glanced between the pair.

  “What is this?” He said.

  “We hoped we could talk with you.” Clara explained. “It’s about John.”

  The man frowned.

  “Where is he?”

  “Well, that’s where the problem lies,” Clara held the man’s gaze. “John Morley is dead.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The man was clearly surprised by this news and for a moment looked as though he was going to bolt. Maybe it was because he wanted to know what had happened to Morley, or maybe it was Park-Coombs’ presence, but he held his ground and finally agreed to talk with them. There was nowhere really to go, except back to the pub, and none of them fancied that. What they had to discuss was private and not to be shouted about over the din of a public house. They settled on going to a nearby park which was still open at that hour. Clara was playing her cards close to her chest. She wanted information, and she didn’t want to put the man off from talking by intimating that she knew he had paid John Morley to commit a crime. Park-Coombs was also being very restrained, letting Clara
do the talking while he just listened.

  They acted as if they were concerned friends of John Morley, though whether the man bought this pretence was debatable. They didn’t look like the sort of people John Morley would be friends with. However, the man was curious and that prevented him from thinking too hard about who Clara and Park-Coombs really were.

  “What happened to John?” The man asked after they had walked into the park.

  They were stood on the bank of the duck pond, the ducks splashing about nearby and looking hopeful for bread.

  “We are not entirely sure, but it appears someone attacked him.” Clara explained. “It happened last night while he was at the town hall.”

  The man stopped and stared out across the water of the pond. His silence made Clara wonder if she had said too much. She was just going to say something more when she caught a glimpse of the pin on his lapel. She stared at it in surprise.

  “A gold Archaeopteryx!” She declared.

  The man suddenly looked at her and then touched the pin.

  “But…” Clara frowned. “I thought you paid John to destroy the fossil?”

  “Destroy it? No! Nothing could be further from my mind!” The man looked appalled at the suggestion.

  “Then why did you pay John Morley to go to the town hall with a hammer?” Clara asked him.

  “You don’t understand,” the man shook his head. “I belong to the Golden Archaeopteryx Society. We are devoted to the study of these unique specimens and ensuring they obtain their proper place in science. We believe that the Archaeopteryx is not a dinosaur turning into a bird. It is already a bird, an ancestor of modern birds. The Archaeopteryx developed separately from the dinosaurs, possibly, at some point, they shared a common ancestor, but after that they split apart. To state that the Archaeopteryx is a dinosaur is to diminish its obvious importance as a primitive bird. We have experts who can prove that these fossils are birds with lizard-like features, but not lizards becoming birds.”

  Park-Coombs scratched his head.

  “That sounds pretty much the same to me.”

  “It’s not!” The man said, a little fiercer. “If we believe dinosaurs became birds, then we are suggesting that birds did not have their own unique evolutionary path. We are effectively saying birds are dinosaurs. My Society disagrees with that. Birds developed on their own, they did not start out as dinosaurs.”

  “Whatever your interpretation of the fossil, that does not explain why you hired John Morley to go to the town hall last night and break in,” Clara interjected.

  The man became uneasy, he took a pace away from them.

  “That was due to stupidity on my part,” he said. “The Society was not party to my plan.”

  “What was your plan?” Park-Coombs discreetly moved around the man, blocking his escape.

  “Look, this fossil is precious, we all agree with that. And to have it carted about the country is pure recklessness. Anything could happen. We don’t want that,” the man clasped his hands together. “The society wrote letters protesting, saying the fossil is too valuable to science to risk it being damaged or stolen. No one would listen. I grew frustrated. When I saw the fossil was coming to Brighton, the place I lived, I made a decision. I would do something that would force the Natural History Museum to remove the Archaeopteryx from display.

  “I paid John Morley to break in and smash the case. To make it look as if someone was going to damage or steal the fossil. I knew Dr Browning was sleeping in the town hall and would wake up at once. John was to escape the old man, leaving him worried that someone had attacked the Archaeopteryx. I hoped that would be enough to get the Natural History Museum to insist it came back to them.”

  “Well, you have nearly achieved that,” Park-Coombs said grimly. “The future of this exhibition is now questionable.”

  “I had to do something to wake people up,” the man insisted. “There had been threats against the exhibition and you saw those protestors, utterly insane the lot of them. You just don’t know what such people will do. I only wanted to make it plain how vulnerable the fossil was. No one was supposed to get hurt.”

  Clara frowned.

  “Who are you, anyway?” She asked him.

  “Sam Gutenberg,” the man answered her. “My parents were South African. I still run the family mines over there. I had the money to pay John Morley handsomely. I understood he was taking a big risk. He could have been arrested.”

  “Instead he was killed,” Clara sighed. “Did you hire anyone else to go with him?”

  “No, just John,” Sam assured them.

  “How did you meet him?”

  Sam Gutenberg shrugged his shoulders.

  “I had been asking around for a while. For a man willing to do a job that was slightly illegal. Someone pointed out John to me. We first met down on the pier. I explained what I was after and he said he would think about it. We agreed to meet at the pub the following night. I would bring half the money I intended to pay John for the work with me,” Sam patted his pocket. “I promised he would have the rest after the work was done. That’s why I came tonight. I saw the police at the town hall. I thought John had been successful.”

  “So, there were a few people who knew you had hired John to do this?” Park-Coombs asked.

  “I guess,” Sam looked downcast. “No one was meant to get hurt. I specifically told John that Dr Browning was not to be harmed. I never thought John would be the one to end up…”

  He froze, contemplating what he had said.

  “Are you going to tell the police?” He asked.

  Clara glanced at Park-Coombs. He said nothing.

  “My role is to discover who was making threats against the exhibition,” Clara told him. “Dr Browning has hired me to investigate the matter.”

  “That’s easy, look to those protestors outside the town hall!” Sam snorted. “They belong to a group called The League for Christians Against Evolution. They refuse to believe in evolution. To them it is the work of the Devil to even speak of it.”

  “You’ve met them?” Clara asked.

  “Bumped into them once or twice,” Sam concurred. “They have members all across the country and everywhere the exhibition goes they have organised protests. Their leader has been following the Archaeopteryx and has caused trouble at each stop of the tour. His name is Reverend Parker. He has Austrian ancestry, which makes him doubly suspicious to me.”

  Sam Gutenberg touched his pin again.

  “The Archaeopteryx is not safe with that man around and I intend to protect it. I am very sorry about John Morley. I really don’t know what happened to him.”

  “I think you best give us your address, Mr Gutenberg,” Inspector Park-Coombs said sternly. “We may need to speak with you again. Your intentions might have been noble, but you conspired to commit a crime and now a man is dead.”

  “I didn’t kill John!” Sam looked stunned at the suggestion.

  “No, I don’t think you did,” Park-Coombs admitted. “But I will need to keep track of you. We may have further questions.”

  Sam looked miserable, then he told them his address.

  “I was only trying to save the Archaeopteryx,” he insisted. “I wanted people to see the danger. That was not wrong, was it?”

  Park-Coombs did not offer him a reply, but he did move out of the way so Sam could leave. Mr Gutenberg looked very relieved to get away from them.

  “If I am not completely baffled,” Park-Coombs groaned as soon as Sam was out of the way. “Now there are people who think this bird-lizard is a dinosaur growing feathers, and others who think it is a bird with lizard-like features and then there is this Anti-Darwin lot who say it is… what? A hoax?”

  “It is certainly complicated,” Clara agreed with him. “I wish I could say I understood it all myself. Honestly, as soon as I think I know and comprehend all the various arguments surrounding the Archaeopteryx, something new crops up that throws me again.”

  Park-Coombs glanced up as
the park keeper wandered around the edge of the pond, ushering the last of the visitors out before he locked the gates.

  “What remains a mystery is whether there was a third person in the town hall that night John Morley was killed,” Clara said as she walked with the inspector out of the park. “There is no evidence for them.”

  “Yet, no real evidence Dr Browning committed the crime,” Park-Coombs concurred. “Though, if things carry on this way, I am afraid I will have to arrest him. He was the only other person we know to have been there when Morley died. He would have had motive, considering he was protective of the bird-lizard and he was not to know that Morley was only pretending to try to damage it.”

  “Surely no jury would convict a man on so little?” Clara countered.

  “You tell me Clara. Two men are in a room together. One dies by means that were not natural and could not have been self-inflicted, what is the obvious assumption?”

  “Yes, but as you say, it is an assumption,” Clara held her finger up as she made her point. “It would be a terrible thing to hang a man on so little. There is no murder weapon, and Dr Browning summoned the police.”

  “A good prosecutor would argue he threw away the weapon as he went to find a policeman. That he acted panicked and scared to cast suspicion from him. We come back to that same point; there is no evidence of a third man.”

  Clara sighed. She could not deny anything the inspector had said. To a jury who had not been on the scene and seen Dr Browning’s obvious confusion and shock, it would seem entirely plausible that he had killed Morley. In fact, it would seem preposterous that someone else was there and had vanished before Dr Browning saw them.

  “I don’t like the way this is all going,” Clara admitted. “I have this nasty feeling that an innocent man is going to take the blame for a very serious crime.”

  “It would not be the first time,” Inspector Park-Coombs said darkly. “Look, I don’t want to arrest Dr Browning. I agree with you, he does not strike me as the killer, but if I can find no alternative, I shall be forced to. My superiors don’t much like hunches, especially in murder cases. They want a suspect arrested sooner rather than later. Not to mention the pressure we are being put under from the authorities at the Natural History Museum, and some of the other sponsors of his exhibition. I believe there is an earl among them, and he is itching for a conclusion to this drama.”