Clapper turned from the window and perched his bulk somewhat precariously on the sill. “Where did you say this was found? On the beach? Up near Halangy Point?”
“Yes, a little north of the creeb,” Gideon said, to show him he was dealing with someone who knew the lay of the land, not merely some know-nothing outlander. What the hell is a creeb? he wondered.
“Buried,” Clapper said. A statement, not a question.
“Yes.”
Clapper lit up another Gold Bond. “ ‘Buried’ as in the active voice or in the passive?”
“Pardon me?”
“Are you saying ‘Someone buried the bone in the sand’? Or simply ‘The bone was buried in the sand,’ as, for example, if it had washed ashore from who knows what distant land, and then been covered over during a storm?”
Gideon revised his estimate of Clapper’s educational level. “I don’t have any way of knowing.”
“Ah.”
When the telephone trilled again, Robb listened a moment and reported. “It’s for you again, Sarge.” He made a sympathetic face. “Exeter again.” His voice went to a respectful whisper. “It’s Chief Superintendent Dibbs himself this time.”
Clapper rolled his eyes. “And does Chief Superintendent Dibbs himself strike you as being in a fun-loving frame of mind?”
“Not really, sir.”
The sergeant rose heavily from the window sill and clumped back toward his office, muttering. He was a slow-moving man with a stately, surging stride, like an astronaut moving through a zero-gravity environment. “Exeter is where headquarters is, Dr. Oliver; the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary main office,” Robb explained when the door had closed behind the sergeant. “They’ve been giving Sergeant Clapper a bit of a difficult time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I suspect he’ll be in there a while.”
“Shall I leave the bone with you, then?”
“I think that would be best. Can we reach you at the castle if need be?”
“Any time. I’ll be here till the end of the week.”
The two men stood and shook hands. “Thank you very much for taking the time and trouble to come in, sir, we appreciate it.” He grinned. “And thanks for the osteology lesson. We’ll be in touch now, sir.”
Heading back down Upper Garrison, a grumpy Gideon doubted it. He knew Clapper’s type all too well. A cynical, disillusioned cop nearing sixty, who disguised his cynicism with a leaden-footed jocularity, who was more interested in keeping a low profile and not making any waves than he was in solving old, anonymous murders. He wasn’t going to take the chance of stepping into anything that might seriously complicate his life. The easiest, least risky path for him at this point would be to simply let the matter slide, to not even open a case file-it was only a single bone, after all-and that was the path he was going to take.
SEVEN
But Gideon was dead wrong. He’d never run into a cop like Mike Clapper before, a fact that was made clear to him the following day.
With Julie, he was having lunch at Tregarthen’s Hotel, another establishment, like Star Castle, with proud historical associations, but of a literary sort: plaques on the walls proclaimed that both George Eliot and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, had spent time there.
They ate in the airy, Danish Modern bar, its cool blues and golds a nice contrast to the brooding, dark-wood ambience of Star Castle. After a light meal of steamed clams and a couple of glasses of Skinner’s Cornish Blonde beer-citrusy and wheaty, and the waiter’s excellent suggestion to accompany the clams-they took their coffee outside to the one of the umbrellaed tables on the terrace overlooking the Old Quay and the outer islands. Julie had considerately failed to mention his promise of the day before to pay for lunch out of his poker winnings, for which he was grateful. They watched the Scillonian ferry disembark its first passenger-load of the day and were on their second cups, silently enjoying the wisps of cloud, the sun-dappled water, and the faint tinge of white mist on the horizon, when Gideon spotted Police Constable Robb going in the hotel’s front door, quite handsome in full uniform; blue tunic, bucket helmet, dark tie and all. Robb saw him at the same time and came over for a friendly hello.
“I’m glad to see you, Dr. Oliver,” he said after he’d been introduced to Julie. “I was hoping to have a chance to speak with you. I’m in for a quick sandwich. All right if I join you?”
“Sure, pull up a chair.”
“I’ll just order inside. Faster that way. Back in a tick.”
“He seems as nice as you said,” Julie remarked as he disappeared inside.
“Oh, a good kid, very nice. It’s Clapper that’s the hard case. I’m telling you, I’d have slugged the guy if he’d treated me the way he treated Robb.”
“Yeah, right,” Julie said, and they both laughed.
When Robb returned with a ham sandwich and a can of English lemonade, the first thing he did was strip off his coat and helmet and lay them neatly on an unused chair.
“Ah, that’s better.” Glaring at the helmet, he massaged his temples. “That thing is like wearing a pail on your head.”
“You can’t wear the soft cap?” Gideon asked. “I saw a couple in your office.”
“Oh, generally, we do, when we wear a cap at all. But I’ve only just come up from quay duty-seeing in the ferry-and the tourists, you know, they like to see them. Well-” He smiled and shrugged. “‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’”
“‘Taking one consideration with another,’” Julie recited, which pleased him, and together they sang a few more lines of patter from Pirates of Penzance.
While he ate they engaged in small talk. What did Julie do? (She was a park ranger. “How interesting!”) Where was Robb from? (Bournemouth, on his last three months of a two-year assignment to St. Mary’s.) What was life like in the Scillies? (Quiet.) But Gideon could feel him edging closer to whatever it was he was anxious to talk about, and finally he got there.
“I hope you’ll come by and see the sergeant about that bone again,” he said as he finished the first half of the sandwich and used a napkin to pluck a crumb from the corner of his mouth. “I’m sure you could be a great deal of help on the case.”
“What case?” Gideon asked. “He didn’t seem very interested in opening one yesterday.”
“I grant you, his manner can be a bit, er, unfortunate at times. Sometimes I have to step in and smooth the waters a bit.”
“As you’re doing now?” Julie asked.
“As I’m doing now. But underneath his rough exterior, you see-”
“There lies a heart of gold,” Gideon said.
Robb laughed with patently real amusement. “Well, no, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but four out of five days he’s quite approachable, quite genial, even.”
“Obviously, then, I hit him on day five.”
“In a way, yes. Exeter had been nagging him all morning. That always puts him in a foul mood.”
“I see. It wasn’t my personality that set him off, it was just my rotten timing.”
“Very much so,” Robb said, nodding eagerly. “His attitude is entirely different today, entirely. You’d hardly know he was the same man. He’s had me open a case log on the matter, and he’s been hard at the computer, searching for possible leads on that bone ever since.”
Gideon was astonished. “He has? What brought about this change?”
“Well, you see, he telephoned headquarters about it, as required in possible homicide cases. The usual procedure would be for them to send a detective constable from St. Ives to determine if foul play is really a possibility. If so, a detective inspector or perhaps a chief inspector, from Truro or possibly from Plymouth, would be assigned as SIO-that is, as senior investigative officer-”
Gideon hadn’t remembered that Robb was so talky. “I’m afraid I don’t see-”
“Well, the thing is, I gather they pretty much laughed at him-‘ One piece of bone from who knows where, with a few marks on it?’ and so on-and implied that the detective force had better things to do, and he was entirely free to pursue it on his own. So that put a different light on it, do you see? It’s his case now, not theirs.”