Fausto looked at Gideon. “Gideon?”
“No, not this minute,” Gideon said. “If you bring it in with you tomorrow, I’ll come by at some point and have a look at it.”
“So how come they decompose?” Fausto asked as they walked back to his office.
“What?”
“How come they decompose?” Fausto asked again. “Bodies that get buried where the flies can’t lay their eggs on them? Why don’t they just shrivel up or something? What, the worms get into them? Is that what does it?”
“As a matter of fact, no. That’s a bum rap that worms have had to live with for centuries. When people first saw maggots wriggling away on corpses they thought they were worms, and it seems to have stuck. But worms don’t eat dead bodies.”
“But bodies still decompose, no matter how deep they’re buried. What makes that happen? What’s the cause, technically? Why don’t they just turn into mummies? Is it the moisture, or…?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. No, you already have all the enzymes and bacteria needed to do the job crawling around inside you – well, enzymes don’t crawl – right now. When you’re alive they help you digest and assimilate foreign substances – food, primarily. When you’re dead they help digest and assimilate you.”
“Sort of like recycling.”
“Exactly like recycling,” Gideon agreed after a moment’s thought.
NINETEEN
“You know,” Gideon said, with his feet up on the railing of the balcony, his hands comfortably clasped at his belt buckle, and a tumbler of Scotch and water on the table beside him, “this interconnected monkey business thing – well, the term is meant to be funny, of course, but it’s not as obvious or as simple – as simplistic – as it sounds. When Abe would get to talking about it, he very quickly got over my head in mathematics, but basically, what he was describing, as much as I could understand of it, was an application of set theory. The sets of people involved in the events, or the events themselves, or the places they happen, or the circumstances they happen in, are all subsets – A, B, C, and so on, of a larger set of people, or events, or whatever: S. And what you’re searching for when you’re trying to make sense of what’s going on is whatever it is that the particular subsets involved have in common; that is, the intersection that they all share; that is, the set of all things that are members of A, B, and C. At the same time, of course, you want to exclude intersections that…”
He frowned, paused, and sighed. “Julie, I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. I got lost about two sentences ago. Is this making any sense at all?”
“Well, let’s just say I still understood it pretty well ten minutes ago, but the more you talk, the fuzzier it gets.”
“Ah, well, math never was my strong point, was it?”
“Don’t feel bad about it. It makes you more human. If you were perfect, you’d really be hell to live with.”
He raised a lazy eyebrow in her direction. “I don’t know that I appreciate the emphasis on that really.”
It was a little before dusk. They were on the balcony of their room at the Rock, looking down on the green palm fronds and winding paths of the Alameda Gardens just below, and farther out, across the Bay of Gibraltar, at the hazy, amber-tinted coast of Spain. Another glorious sunset over Algeciras was on the way. As before, the preprandial miniature twin decanters of sherry and Scotch had been waiting for them when they’d come in, golden and beckoning in the slanting, late afternoon light, along with a pair of stemmed glasses and another of small highball glasses. Although they’d passed on them the previous two days, today they flung open the French doors and took them out onto the balcony to unwind before dinner.
There was plenty of unwinding to be done, what with the latest twists and turns in the matter of Sheila Chan’s demise. They had split the contents of the decanters, each starting with a small glass of sherry and then moving on to the Scotch, and Gideon was halfway through his Scotch by the time he’d finished telling Julie what had developed.
“Anyway,” she said now, “if what we’re looking for is what all these bizarre things have in common – Sheila’s murder, Ivan’s murder, the attacks on you – it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? The Europa Point dig – Gibraltar Boy, the First Family, and all that.”
“Yes, that’s true enough, but everything that’s happening here right now has that in common. Every archaeologist in town – and there must be a hundred of them – is here for the meetings, and the meetings are in commemoration of Europa Point. So it doesn’t tell us anything. See, you want to exclude those intersections that every subset shares simply by virtue of being part of the larger set, S-”
She gave him a warning look.
“What we’re looking for,” he said, “is something that applies more specifically to Sheila, Ivan, and me.”
She sipped her Scotch and gazed across the bay. “I can’t think what that would be.”
“I can. I was talking to Fausto about it. We were all just about to make speeches, presentations.”
“Speeches? Mmm…” She thought it over. “Sounds pretty tenuous to me, frankly. Aren’t there lots of people here for the Society meetings who are giving speeches?” She shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know, Gideon…”
“It was your idea, Julie. You were the one who suggested someone was trying to stop me from making a speech. I just applied it more generally.”
“My idea? Oh, well, then, on sober reconsideration, I have to say I think it has a lot going for it.”
“So do I, and the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense. Sheila’s notes had been taken, and Ivan’s, if he had any, would have been burned up in the fire, if they weren’t also taken. Someone must have been afraid of what they might contain.”
“One problem – nobody stole your notes.”
“Nobody could. I didn’t have any. And consider my case a little further. In the twenty-four hours before my speech, somebody tried to kill me twice. An average of once every twelve hours. Now it’s been given, and I don’t have another one to make, and, heck, nobody’s been trying to kill me for days. Well, almost days.”
“Knock on wood,” she said, searching for something wooden to knock on but having to settle for the glass-topped table. “But yes, I think you must be right. I hope you’re right.” She reached over to graze the back of his hand with her fingers. “It would mean you’re not in danger now.”
“The crucial question is,” Gideon mused, “what could any of us have possibly said – what did the killer think we might have been going to say – that was so earth-shaking it was worth murder?”
“No, the crucial question is, just who thought it was worth murder? ”
Gideon sipped his drink and slowly nodded. “Got a point there, pardner.”
Julie took a stab at her own question. “Well, for starters, as far-fetched as it may seem, we know it has to be one of the people staying here at the Rock; one of our own group. Except, of course, for Rowley and Pru.”
“Why are we excluding them?”
She turned to look at him. “We talked about this before, don’t you remember? It was Pru and Rowley who kept you from getting killed.”
“Me, yes. But that doesn’t mean – not that I believe it, you understand – that they had nothing to do with Sheila and with Ivan.”
She stared at him. “Hold on a minute. What happened to all those interconnected subsets? The law of interconnected monkey business-”
“Is not infallible. It’s not a law, it’s a model, a guide. Everything doesn’t always connect that neatly.”
“But surely you don’t-”
“I’m just saying it’s possible, Julie, not probable. Fausto’s going to be running the investigation. I wouldn’t want to see him rule out anybody at this stage. If you remember, Pru had some pretty harsh things to say about Sheila at the testimonial dinner.”
“But that hardly means-”
“No, of course it doesn’t. But it’s not something that I feel I can keep from him. He has to know.”