"That I don’t understand. What are you saying, that everybody who’s got a sternal foramen is related to everyone else who’s got one?"
"No, of course not, but congenital features like that tend to run in families. Do you have any idea what the frequency of sternal foramina is?"
"No, what?"
"Well, I don’t know exactly-"
This earned a grunt and a sidewise glance.
"-but it’s rare; from what I’ve seen, maybe once in a hundred people. So what kind of likelihood is there that two once-in-a-hundred possibilities would show up in the same house just by chance, one on Guillaume and one on the body in the cellar?"
John thought it over as they continued walking. "I don’t know. What?" he finally said.
Gideon made a grumpy noise. John had a way of picking peculiar times to be literal-minded. "Guess," he said.
"Once in two hundred?"
"Once in ten thousand."
"No kidding," John said, most of it carried off in a sudden gust.
"Yes. You multiply the probabilities. John, what do you say we get down off these damn ramparts and go someplace we can talk without yelling at each other?"
"Fine, what are you getting mad about? You’re the one who wanted to come up here."
True enough. A breezy walk around the top of the famous fortified ramparts of St. Malo had seemed just what was needed to think through what they’d heard in Dr. Loti’s office. But the offshore breeze had become nasty and the sky had darkened, so that the sea to the west was now iron-gray and ominous. And the views of the stately, slate-roofed town within the walls, so lovingly rebuilt after the war, lost their charm and turned gloomy and flat. And it was going to rain any minute; a cold, dismal March rain blowing in from the Channel Islands.
At the Bastion St. Louis they took the stone stairway down and went in search of a restaurant, the post-breakfast hollow having made its growly appearance some time before.
"How about here?" Gideon suggested.
John looked doubtfully at the signboard set up on the sidewalk. "Degustation de crepes," he read slowly. "Really sounds appetizing."
"It’s just a pancake house."
"Yeah, but who wants pancakes? Don’t you want some real food for a change?"
"John, I know it’s tough to accept, but you’re just not going to find a Burger King in St. Malo."
"Well, what about-"
"And I’m not going into another pizza place for at least two days. Besides, Brittany’s famous for pancakes. Everybody eats them here. They’re unbeatable. Trust me."
So he’d read in the guidebooks, and so it turned out to be, fortunately for his credibility. At a counter in the dining room a slickly self-assured cook poured dipper after dipper of batter onto a round griddle over a gas ring, smoothed out the buttery liquid with two casual but precise swipes of a push-stick, and flipped out thin, tender, perfect pancakes at the rate of two or three a minute. These were topped with fillings by an assistant, folded deftly into omelet-like rectangles, and delivered steaming to the customers almost as fast as they came off the griddle. John and Gideon had their galettes-dark, pungent buckwheat pancakes filled with creamy white cheese, ham, and tomatoes-less than a minute after sitting down.
They wolfed them happily down and ordered more before leaning comfortably back to take upwhere they’d left off.
"Not too bad," John admitted. "Okay, so those sternal foramens prove Guillaume and that skeleton were related?"
"Yes." Gideon washed down the last of his galette with a mouthful of hot chocolate. "Well, maybe not exactly prove. It’s a matter of probabilities-"
John’s eyes rolled up. "Oh, boy."
"Look, John, there’s no way to prove anything like this from bones and X-rays. But when you run into something that can happen by chance only once in ten thousand times, you have to assume something other than chance is operating. And in this case the only reasonable possibility is a genetic relationship between Guillaume and the skeleton in the cellar."
"What about coincidence? If it could happen by chance one out of ten thousand times, why couldn’t this be the one time?"
"It could, but the chances of your being wrong are nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine out of ten thousand. Not a great bet. Anyway, do you really believe in coincidence? I don’t mean abstractly; I mean as a factor in a murder case."
John poured himself a little more beer from his bottle of Kronenbourg, sipped, and considered. "No," he said. "I don’t. I don’t know any cops who do."
"Okay, that’s settled. Now all I have to do is convince Joly."
The fresh pancakes had arrived; a cheese-filled galette for Gideon, and a sweet dessert crepe stuffed with cream and sugar for John.
"Why should Joly be hard to convince?" John asked after a test-bite that apparently met his standards. "The guy’s peculiar, but he’s not dumb."
"Well, for one thing, there’s the little matter of the SS paraphernalia that was buried in the cellar. For another thing…Well, I can’t think of another thing, but Joly will."
"The SS stuff." John put down his fork. "I forgot all about it. How do you figure that, anyway? You think one of the du Rochers joined the SS? The Germans had Nazi police units made up of local nationals in the occupied countries, didn’t they? And Guillaume was in the Resistance, right? Maybe he killed this guy because-"
"Uh-uh. You’re talking about the Milice, I think. They had second-rate uniforms, nothing like the flashy German SS. Denis did some checking; this stuff was definitely bona-fide Allgemeine SS, straight from Berlin, and the rank insignia were Obersturmbannfuhrer. Helmut Kassel’s rank."
"So then what do you think…"
"I don’t know what I think. At this point it’d be nothing but speculative inference anyway."
John’s hand went to his heart. "Speculative inference! Jesus, Doc, far be it from me to suggest that a man such as yourself would stoop to engage in speculative inference."
"All right," Gideon said, laughing, "maybe I’ve done it from time to time in certain rare circumstances, but in this case I just don’t have any data to go on. But I don’t care what else they find down there. Those bones belong to a du Rocher."
John nodded slowly. "So the question is: Who?"
"Oh, I think I know who."
John’s eyebrows lifted.
"Alain du Rocher," Gideon said.
John’s eyebrows remained suspended for some seconds. A forkload of crepe and creme Chantilly also paused inquiringly. "The guy the Nazis killed? The one Claude didn’t warn?"
Gideon nodded.
"That’s crazy."
"John, it all fits. He was living right there in the manoir during the war, and those bones got buried down there right about the time he was killed. And it just happens to turn out that nobody seems to know where his body is."
"Yeah, but-"
"And those bones look like du Rocher bones; the same proportions and conformations as Guillaume’s, and some of the same features; I could see it in the X-rays. And remember when I said the bones made me think of Ray? It’s a look that runs in the family."
"What about Rene? He’s built like a doorknob. So’s Jules."
"Well, sure. You can’t expect everyone in a family to look alike, but where you can see it, it’s distinctive."
"Yeah, but I still don’t see why it’s got to be Alain. Why not somebody else in the family?"
"How many du Rochers do you think disappeared without a trace in 1942?"
The fork finally finished its journey and John chewed thoughtfully. "Okay, I agree with you: We’re not talking proof here, but it makes a lot of sense. Hey, wait a minute. If Alain got killed by the Nazis, what’s he doing in Guillaume’s cellar?"