Freya took a large house plan from a table and set it before the policemen. “Sandor Musgrave, you will recall, was new to Mercury. He had never seen a Solday celebration. When the Great Gates opened and the reflected light filled this villa, my suggestion is that he was overwhelmed by fright. Lucinda heard him cry for help—perhaps he thought the house was burning down. He panicked, rushed out of the study, and blindly began to run for the patio. Unable to see the step down or the mirror, he must have pitched forward, and his left temple struck the frame a fatal blow. He crawled a few steps farther, then collapsed and died.”
Heidi stepped forward. “So Musgrave died by accident?”
“This is my theory. And it explains how it was that no one had the opportunity to kill him. In fact, no one did kill him.” She turned to the police. “I trust you will follow up on this suggestion”
“Yes,” said the one taking notes. “Death declared accidental by consulting investigator. Proceed from there.” He exchanged glances with his colleagues. “We are satisfied this explains the facts of the case.”
Heidi surveyed the silent group. “To tell you the truth, I am very relieved.” She turned to Delaurence. “Let’s open the bar. It would be morbid to celebrate an accidental death, but here we can say we are celebrating the absence of a murder.”
The others gave a small cheer of relief, and we surrounded the bartender.
A few days later Freya asked me to accompany her to North Station. “I need your assistance.”
“Very well,” I said. “Are you leaving Terminator?”
“Seeing someone off.”
When we entered the station’s big waiting room, she inspected the crowd, then cried, “Arnold!” and crossed the room to him. Arnold saw her and grimaced. “Oh, Arnold,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him on each cheek. “I’m very proud of you.”
Arnold shook his head, and greeted me mournfully. “You’re a hard woman, Freya,” he told her. “Stop behaving so cheerfully, you make me sick. You know perfectly well this is exile of the worst sort.”
“But Arnold,” Freya said, “Mercury is not the whole of civilization. In fact it could be considered culturally dead, an immense museum to the past that has no real life at all.”
“Which is why you choose to live here, I’m sure,” he said bitterly.
“Well of course it does have some pleasures. But the really vital centers of any civilization are on the frontier, Arnold, and that’s where you’re going.”
Arnold looked completely disgusted.
“But Arnold,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Pluto,” he said curtly.
“Pluto?” I exclaimed. “But whatever for? What will you do there?”
He shrugged. “Dig ditches, I suppose.”
Freya laughed. “You certainly will not.’ She addressed me: “Arnold has decided, very boldly I might add, to abandon his safe career as a dealer here on Mercury, to become a real artist on the frontier.”
“But why?”
Freya wagged a finger at Arnold. “You must write us often.”
Arnold made a strangled growl. “Damn you, Freya. I refuse. I refuse to go.”
“You don’t have that option,” Freya said. “Remember the chalk, Arnold. The chalk was your signature.”
Arnold hung his head, defeated. The city interfaced with the spaceport station. “It isn’t fair,” Arnold said. “What am I going to do out on those barbaric outworlds?”
“You’re going to live,” Freya said sternly. “You’re going to live and you’re going to paint. No more hiding. Understand?”
I, at any rate, was beginning to.
“You should be thanking me profusely,” Freya went on, “but I’ll concede you’re upset and wait for gratitude by mail.” She put a hand on Arnold’s shoulder and pushed him affectionately toward the crossing line. “Remember to write.”
“But,” Arnold said, a panicked expression on his face. “But—”
“Enough!” Freya said. “Be gone! Or else.”
Arnold sagged, and stepped across the divide between the stations. Soon the city left the spaceport station behind.
“Well,” Freya said. “That’s done.”
I stared at her, “You just helped a murderer to escape!”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Exile is a very severe punishment; in fact in my cultural tradition it was the usual punishment for murder committed in anger or self-defense.”
I waved a hand dismissively. “This isn’t the Iceland of Eric the Red. And it wasn’t seif-defense-—Sandor Musgrave was outright murdered.”
“Well,” she said, “I never liked him.”
I told you before: she has no sense of right and wrong. It is a serious defect in a detective. I could only wave my arms in incoherent outrage; and my protests have never carried much weight with Freya, who claims not even to believe them.
We left the station. “What’s that you were saying to Arnold about chalk?” I said, curiosity getting the better of me.
“That’s the clue you provided, Nathaniel—somewhat transformed. As you reminded me, Musgrave was pointing at the patio, and Heidi’s patio is made of a block of the Dover cliffs. Dover cliffs, as you know, are composed of chalk. So I returned to the painting, and cut through the back to retrieve samples of the chalk used in the underdrawing, which had been revealed to me by infrared photography.” She turned a corner and led me uptown. “Chalk, you see, has its own history of change. In Monet’s time, chalk was made from natural sources, not from synthetics. Sure enough, the chalk I took from the canvas was a natural chalk. But natural chalk, being composed of marine ooze, is littered with the fossil remains of unicellular algae called cocoliths. These cocoliths are different depending upon the source of the chalk. Monet used Rouen chalk, appropriately enough, which was filled with the cocoliths Maslovella barnesae and Cricolithus pemmatoidens. The cocoliths in our painting, however, are Neococcolithes dubius. Very dubious indeed—for this is a North American chalk, first mined in Utah in 1924.”
“So Monet couldn’t have used this chalk! And there you had your proof that the painting is a fake.”
“Exactly.”
I said doubtfully, “It seems a subtle clue for the dying Musgrave to conceive of.”
“Perhaps,” Freya said cheerfully. “Perhaps he was only pointing in the direction of the patio by the accident of his final movements. But it was sufficient that the coincidence gave me the idea. The solution of a crime often depends upon imaginary clues.”
“But how did you know Arnold was the forger?” I asked. And why, after taking the trouble to concoct all those paints, did he use the wrong chalk?”
“The two matters are related. It could be that Arnold only knew he needed a natural chalk, and used the first convenient supply without knowing there are differences between them. In that case it was a mistake—his only mistake. But it seems unlike Arnold to me, and I think rather that it was the forger’s signature. In effect, the forger said, if you take a slide of the chalk trapped underneath the paint, and magnify it five thousand times with an electron microscope, you’ll find me. This chalk never used by Monet is my sign. —For on some level every forger hopes to be discovered, if only in the distant future—to receive credit for the work.
“So I knew we had a forger on Mercury, and I was already suspicious of Arnold, since he was the dealer who brought the painting to Mercury, and since he was the only guest at Heidi’s party with the opportunity to kill Musgrave; he was missing during the crucial moments—”