Joly fingered the cut again. "All right, let’s say that it was a knife or other sharp instrument-"
"A knife," Gideon said, then added: "I think." He was beginning to feel a little sorry for the inspector and a little over-pontifical.
Joly breathed in, then out. "And not an axe, for example? Didn’t you say a moment ago it would affect the bone the same way?"
"Sure, but there’s no way anything as gross as an axe could have chipped just the top of one rib; there’d be other damage."
Joly conceded. "Yes, you’re right," he said, and blew out smoke. He ran his long-fingered hand lightly across the few fine, short hairs on the top of his head. In his own way he was enjoying himself, Gideon realized, even if he hadn’t won a round so far. After a morning of evasive answers from reluctant interviewees, this string of direct and unconditional responses was probably refreshing.
"Your conclusions are quite helpful and interesting, Dr. Oliver," he said, not yet willing to throw in the towel, "but I should tell you that I still have a few reservations about them."
That makes two of us, Gideon thought, but he wasn’t quite ready to admit it yet.
Joly continued: "For example: I haven’t heard you suggest that there is anything that tells us exactly when the wound was caused."
"No, there’s no way to know, but why should that make any difference?"
"Because," Joly said mildly, "if it was made by the pick of one of the workmen who came upon it yesterday, there would be some question about its being the cause of death. No?"
"Oh, I see what you mean. Well, actually, we can say for sure-"
With a sigh the policeman interrupted him. "No, let me guess. No doubt, bones that have lain in the ground for some time become discolored, as these have done. And a cut that was made yesterday would show as fresh white against the brown. Am I correct?"
"You are," Gideon smiled, not unhappy to have Joly finally score a point, "and there’s something else too." He set the rib on the table directly in the path of the slanting light and found the little burr with his finger. Then he handed Joly the lens. "Look there."
Joly looked, his eyes narrowed against the cigarette smoke. "It appears to be an imperfection of some sort…a little curlicue…"
"A curlicue of bone; that’s just what it is. Live bone responds to a knife a lot like wood, as I said, so if you carve a thin slice off it, the slice will curl away, like a shaving."
"And dead bone is different?"
"Right. You couldn’t carve a curling slice off that rib now any more than you could off a piece of porcelain. What you’re looking at is a place where the blade scraped against the bone when it was living."
Joly straightened upand put down the lens. "But this is in a different place. What does it have to do with the other cut?"
"Oh, I think we can pretty safely assume it was also made at the time of death-there’s been no healing of either cut-and that it happened when the knife was pulled back out. The direction and angle of the slice suggest that the knife was probably twisted a little, and-"
"‘Probably’?" Joly pounced with dry elation on the word and leveled the two fingers in which he held his cigarette at Gideon. " ‘Suggest’?‘Safely assume’? Can you mean you actually admit to some uncertainty? Fallibility, even?"
Gideon laughed. "No, I just didn’t want to seem cocksure."
Joly looked at him, then emitted what was for him a full-throated laugh: a series of four staccato barks. He dropped his cigarette on the stone paving and ground it out with his heel. "There’s a restaurant you might enjoy in Dinan. What do you say to lunch?"
ELEVEN
After the hours in the dingy cellar, Dinan was a welcome change, an old, pretty town surrounded by ancient stone walls almost hidden by gnarled ivy and bright green lichens, and dominated at one end by the handsome, brooding keep of its medieval castle. The town center was straight out of the fifteenth century, all cool, clean, gray-brown stone. The streets were cobbled with it, the ramparts and the crooked, cramped old houses made from big blocks of it. No wood, no stucco, no brick; only stone. But there were enough perky little trees in planters, enough minuscule gardens, enough tiny shops and restaurants to make it all cozy and appealing in a smaller-than-lifesize way, a Disney World rendering of MiddleAgesLand.
Joly parked the car outside the walls, along the Promenade des Petits-Fosses, and they walked through the old portal, then down twisting alleys, to the Grill-Room Duguesclin just off the Place du Champ-Clos.
"You’ll like it, I think," Joly said. "Traditional Breton cooking, though it’s run by a family of Iranians, strangely enough."
The sign outside said "Grillades sur Feu de Bois," and the grill turned out to be a huge, open fireplace of stone that was the centerpiece of the plain dining room, with a lively fire throwing out a campfire aroma that had Gideon salivating before the door closed behind him. On a wide, blackened grate set over the fire, portions of meat and fish sizzled under the teeth-flashing, showy supervision of two lean, brown young men. A radio on the counter behind them softly played Simon and Garfunkel.
"No," Gideon said, mostly to himself, as they sat at a pleasingly rough and heavy wooden table, "I don’t think so."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Not Iranians. They’re dolichocephalic, all right, but only moderately so, with pretty delicate cranial morphology. And the ossa nasalia are practically flat, which should settle it."
"Why, yes," said Joly, "that should certainly settle it."
"Moroccans, maybe, or more likely Algerians."
"And to think," Joly said, "that yesterday a performance like that would have made me smile."
"You’re smiling now." Not that it was easy to tell, but by this time Gideon could recognize the slight compression of the lips combined with the barely visible upturning of their corners as a Joly smile. The cool, constantly assessing eyes hardly came into it.
"Ah," Joly said, "but it’s a different sort of smile. I must confess that even this morning my first reaction to your findings was that you were-" He shrugged. "-well, wishfully extending the implications to be made from rather scant data-a sort of artistic exuberance, quite understandable under the circumstances."
Gideon laughed. "Inspector, where did you learn your English?"
Joly bowed his head stiffly, accepting it for the compliment it was.
Over a first course of palourdes -steamed clams on the half shell, drenched with garlic butter-Gideon explained the rest of his findings. Joly poked single-mindedly away at his clams but nodded with appreciation from time to time.
"Some of it was artistic exuberance," Gideon admitted. "I think it was a kitchen knife, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it. And as for the murderer being right-handed-"
"Ah, yes. The angle of the notch on the rib, I suppose? It suggested that the thrust was delivered from in front of the victim, and since it pierced his left side…"
"Right. I mean, correct."
Joly dabbed at his lips with a napkin and sipped from a glass of Muscadet. "Well, I would consider that a fairly reasonable inference, at least until other evidence presents itself." Which was about how Gideon felt about it too, now that his earlier flush of belligerence had passed.
When the main course came, the conversation lapsed while they dug in. Joly was an enthusiastic eater, and if his grilled trout was as good as Gideon’s flame-charred fresh sardines there was reason for his enthusiasm. By the time the cheese plate was brought, Joly had had a second glass of wine and was loose to the point of actually leaning against the back of his chair. A good time, Gideon thought, to find out what had been going on upstairs while he’d been in the cellar.
"How’d your investigation go this morning?"
Joly nodded silently, as if that were an answer, and went on trying to cut his way through a rocklike wedge of Cantal.