“Sixteen to twenty-two,” Clapper mused, “for that particular bone. You knew that off the top of your head, so to speak?”
“Sure.”
“You know the age ranges of all these different epiphyses?”
“Well… yes, I guess I do. All the ones used in ageing, anyway.”
“And they’re all different? Even the ones on opposite ends of the same bone?”
“Pretty much.”
Clapper, studied him, nodding, his head wreathed in smoke. “Fancy,” he said.
Gideon, not knowing what to reply, replaced the bone in the bag. “So where would you say we go from here, Sergeant?”
Clapper leaned back in his chair. “Well, now, that’s the question, all right, innit?” he said slowly. “We have here a fragmentary bone, the condition of which implies dismemberment, which in turn implies homicide-”
Gideon noted that this was accepted as a given; another difference from yesterday.
“-but we know of no one it could possibly belong to.”
“That seems to be about it.”
“Yes. So what I ask myself is, I ask myself, why couldn’t it have come off a passing ship, as so many other bones found on the beach have done?”
“Maybe it did. Personally, I’d have my doubts. No marine life encrustation on it. And from what I understand it was buried a couple of feet down. Pretty unlikely for that to have happened naturally, from shifts in the sand. So I’d have to guess he was murdered, cut up, and buried right here on the island.”
“But-” Robb hesitated until Clapper nodded his permission to continue, and then barreled ahead, the words pouring out. “But isn’t that a premature conclusion? The lack of encrustation would merely mean that the bone hadn’t lain in the ocean for a considerable period of time, isn’t that right?”
“Right,” Gideon agreed.
“Well, that wouldn’t necessarily mean it hadn’t come from offshore, would it? How do we know that it’s not from a passing yacht of which we have no knowledge? That someone wasn’t murdered and dismembered on a boat, then brought ashore onto the beach and buried-at night, I should think-after which the murderer simply went back to his boat and sailed away, with no one the wiser?”
Clapper began to answer, but changed his mind and let Gideon do it.
“I kind of doubt that, Kyle,” Gideon said gently. “If you’ve already killed someone at sea, and even dismembered him, why risk coming ashore with the body to bury it? Wouldn’t the safest, easiest thing be to simply dump the remains into the ocean? If they were already dismembered, they could be dumped separately, miles apart. The probability of any of them ever being found would be infinitesimal, much, much smaller than the chances of finding remains buried on a beach.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Robb mumbled, embarrassed. “Yes, you’re quite right. The murder would have occurred here, yes.”
Gideon expected Clapper to make one of his cutting remarks about the value of university education and modern police training, but he demonstrated once again that he wasn’t the Mike Clapper of yesterday by letting the chance pass. Instead, he thought it all over. He nodded slowly to himself. He pondered. He drummed his fingers on the desk. He was without a doubt one of the most deliberate people Gideon had ever come across. “I’ll be honest with you, Professor. Dismemberments are new to me. Never worked on one. So where would you say we go from here?”
It was the question he’d been waiting for, and he’d carefully considered his answer. “Look, I know this doesn’t look like much of a case-a single bone, and not even a whole one at that-but if you have one piece of dismembered body, the rest is very likely to be nearby.”
Clapper nodded, puffing away. “That’s probably so.”
“Right. The pieces were probably put in plastic garbage bags or something similar and stuffed into a car, then driven to the beach, almost certainly at night, dumped out of the bags, and buried.”
“Why take them out of the bags? To make things harder for the police in the event they were ever to be discovered?”
“Yes. The smarter ones do that. For one thing, if they’re left sealed in garbage bags, it takes much longer for them to skeletonize. Clues remain. For another, finding human body parts in a plastic bag-even skeletonized ones-is a pretty good giveaway that dirty deeds have been done. Whereas the occasional bone fragment or two can be overlooked.”
“As this one was,” Clapper said. He pondered some more. “So there our man was, with a boot full of human remains, in a great hurry to be rid of them, and he takes the time to remove them from their bags-and wouldn’t that be a filthy, miserable job?-before burying them. Even in the middle of the night, on a quiet beach, I’d say that takes a cool customer. The road runs quite near the beach up there, don’t you see.”
“I’d say so too. But cool or not, he would be in a hurry, and he wouldn’t want to risk driving around with what he had in his trunk any more than he had to. So the chances are good that the rest of the body is buried nearby. Would you consider doing some exploratory digging at Halangy Beach?”
Clapper laughed. “If I had a staff, I would. But there’s only young Robb and myself-which in effect means only young Robb, because I wouldn’t be much of a hand with a shovel anymore.”
“I’d be glad to pitch in too. There are signs to look for when you’re hunting for-”
Clapper held up his hand. “I have a better idea, Professor. If you’re free for the next hour or two, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. I think he might be just the chap to help us.”
“I’m free, all right.” Whatever this was about, Clapper was taking it seriously, and Gideon was pleased. And Robb had certainly been right: the big, jovial, animated man he was looking at was barely recognizable as the sarcastic, burnt-out cop of yesterday.
Clapper stubbed out his cigarette and stood up, looking as near to positively enthusiastic as Gideon had seen him. “That’s fine. Fancy a short, bracing walk to the harbor, followed by a jaunt over the bounding main in a luxury yacht?
“Nothing I’d like better,” Gideon said.
“Excellent.” He was already shrugging into the tunic that he’d taken from a hanger behind the door. “Kyle,” he said pleasantly on the way out, “get hold of Trus Hicks on the blower and tell him we’ll be on his doorstep in half an hour, will you? Tell him what it’s about.” He picked up one of the hats-the soft, military kind, not a helmet. “And ring up the cox to let him know we’re on our way to the boat, there’s a good lad. Going to St. Agnes, ain’t we?”
Clapper’s “luxury yacht” turned out to be a garish yellow-and-green, twin-hulled metal boat that served both as police launch and water ambulance for the islands. The cox-the pilot-was waiting for them, and as soon as they were aboard he started it up. Gideon was surprised at the 747-like roar and power of the twin jet-thrust engines. Within seconds they were out of Hugh Town Harbor and scudding south across the famously wicked currents of St. Mary’s Sound, heading for the island of St. Agnes with the boat’s prow a foot in the air.
“Wow,” he exclaimed, hanging on to the railing for dear life.
“We’ll have you there in three and a half minutes,” the pilot shouted with pride, leaning forward as if to coax yet a little more speed from it. “At full-tilt, we can get to just about any of the off-islands in under nine minutes.”
The launch had a small enclosed cabin for patients needing treatment or prisoners needing restraining, to which Clapper and Gideon retreated, partly because it was quieter than the deck, and partly because the wind had a bite to it from the thready mist that was beginning to form low over the water, in line with Robb’s earlier prediction of fog. Once seated on the wooden benches that ran around its perimeter, Clapper asked: “Ever heard of Truscott Hicks?”