“Don’t look at me,” Gideon said. “I never heard of him at all until the day before yesterday.”
“All right,” Liz said. “Nobody’s heard of him since then. Has anyone heard anything about the book he was working on? Has it come out? We all keep up with the environmental literature, we’d certainly have read about it. A book like that, it would have made a splash.”
No, they allowed, they hadn’t heard news of the book. Still…
“Cheryl, let me have your BlackBerry,” Donald said to his wife.
“What for?”
“Just let me have it.”
“Jesus,” she sighed, digging it out of her purse. This was definitely not a marriage made in heaven, Gideon thought.
Donald took the device. “It should be easy enough to settle. We’ll Google him and see if he turns up.”
“Google a name like ‘Pete Williams’?” Rudy said. “You’ll get a million hits.”
Donald frowned. “That’s a point. Does anybody know where he’s from?”
“London,” said Liz. “But that’s not much help either. Does anybody remember the name of the book? No? Well, does anybody know the names of any of his other books?”
“There weren’t any other books. This was his first one,” Victor said.
“You mean he wasn’t a professional writer?” Donald asked. “I assumed-”
“He published a few magazine articles,” Victor said, putting down his ginger beer, “but he was… What was he?… An auto mechanic.”
“An auto mechanic?” Donald said, deeply aggrieved. “I gave him hours of my time!”
“Yes, he worked in a garage,” said Victor, “but he was a student at one of the colleges. He’d been working on that book of his in his spare time for years. We got to talking about it when he interviewed me. He asked me for advice on publishing, and I gave him some suggestions for-”
“ Movers and Shakers of the Earth,” Cheryl said. “That was the name of it.”
“That’s it,” Donald agreed. Using his pinky he punched it in on the tiny keyboard and waited. “Yes, it’s-no, it’s nothing. It was a chapter in a book by Alistair Cooke, that’s all. But it’s not a book title on its own.” His serious expression as he looked up at the others suggested he’d discovered something of significance. “It never came out, and it’s not scheduled to come out in the foreseeable future.”
“Is that right?” Victor said, eyes wide, head swiveling from person to person.
“Now, wait a minute,” Julie said. “A lot of books never come out. That doesn’t mean the author’s dead. And a lot of books take more than two years to write.”
“I can vouch for that,” Gideon muttered.
Liz turned to him. “Look, you said the bone was from an adult male. Why couldn’t it be him?”
“I didn’t say it couldn’t be. I don’t have any real reason to think it isn’t. But I also don’t have any real reason to think it is. You have to admit it’s an awfully long shot, based on pretty flimsy evidence-or rather nonevidence.”
“You don’t have any other hypotheses to go on,” Liz said.
“That’s true enough.”
“You could always mention it to Sergeant Mike tomorrow,” Julie suggested. “He’ll certainly know how to look into it if he wants to.”
“Very good, I’ll do that,” Gideon said, searching for another subject to move on to. “So how’d the poker game go after I left last night?”
“Awful,” said Donald at the same moment as Victor said “Great,” which effectively answered Gideon’s question.
“Will you be joining us tonight?” Donald asked.
“I don’t think so,” Gideon said with a grin. “Can’t afford it.”
TEN
The strands of fog continued to thicken and spread through the night, so that in the morning several of the interisland commercial boat operators called off nonessential operations for the day, and there was some doubt about whether it would be possible to get Hicks and his dog from St. Agnes to St. Mary’s. But Ron, the pilot of the police launch/water ambulance, was up to the task, and shortly after 10:00 A.M., Truscott Hicks and Tess the Border collie were deposited on the Hugh Town quay, where they were met by Gideon, Clapper, and Robb. At Gideon’s request, Robb had brought a couple of trowels for digging (although Gideon was privately counting on the sand’s being soft enough for bare-handed retrieval); a toothbrush and paintbrush for cleaning; some large paper bags and marking pens; and, from Islands Home Hardware, a few doors down from the police station, a three-foot length of large-gauge wire screening and a five-gallon bucket. He would use the last two items to sift the sand around and under any finds that were made, hunting for anything that might turn up.
In addition, Robb, on his own, had brought a pad of graph paper, a folding ruler and tape measure, the office digital camera, several pairs of disposable gloves, and a sleeve of plastic envelopes for incidental items that might be found.
“It’s the boy’s first likely homicide,” Clapper told Gideon, sounding like an amused parent, “and he’s determined to do it up right.” His next thought seemed to catch him by surprise. “Well, so am I, if it comes to that.”
They walked a few steps from the quay to where the Scillies’ one and only official conveyance, a white Land Rover with bold, blue-checkerboard detailing, was parked alongside the quay. The word POLICE was printed in giant block letters on a six-inch-wide horizontal band of eye-assaulting, Day-Glo chartreuse that encircled the entire van.
“Hard to miss, innit?” Clapper said approvingly. “PC Robb will drive the two of you. I’ll follow along in my own motorcar.”
Hicks, Gideon, and Tess climbed into the backseat, and Robb started the engine. Tess briefly explored those parts of Gideon that were of canine interest and went back to nestle down, close up against Hicks’s leg, her head between her paws.
They drove north, out of town and past a couple of pleasant beaches that had picnickers and strollers on them despite the fog, then past a few scattered restaurants and guesthouses, a sprawling flower farm, and the nine-hole Isles of Scilly Golf Club. The paving ran out just beyond the golf course, and they continued north, bumping along on an otherwise empty and increasingly primitive dirt road bordering a rocky coast perforated by occasional isolated sandy coves.
“Well, it’s got to be this one,” Robb said, stopping at the very limit of anything that could reasonably be called a road. “That’s Halangy Point up ahead, and there’s the Creeb right out there.” He pointed to a low, bare little island not far offshore. “And this is the only sandy stretch between them.”
“Ah,” said Gideon. If nothing else came of the day, at least he now knew what a creeb was.
Behind them, Clapper pulled up in a dusty, beat-up Vauxhall Astra. They were only a couple of miles from the center of Hugh Town, but a world away from the hurly-burly of bustling streets, souvenir shops, and day-trippers. The cove itself was a hundred-yard-wide curve of gravelly sand bordered by rocky outcroppings at either end, with more scattered rocks and a few meager patches of dune grass at the back. Not a particularly attractive beach, especially for this beach-blessed part of the world, and there were no signs of footprints, no litter. It looked as if nobody had been on it for months.
“Good place for the dog to work,” Hicks said.
Good place to bury a few sackfuls of body parts, Gideon thought.
On the far side of the road the land swept away into a region of rolling green uplands sparsely dotted with stone farmhouses and occasionally patterned by hedgerows into squares and rectangles that ran up and down the hillsides. This, Gideon knew, was also the part of the island most richly populated with the ruins of the Stone Age villages and rock-cairn burial chambers that he still meant to get to, if there was time-if, that is, no interesting hoard of bones turned up today.
“Not much beach this morning,” Clapper said more or less to himself as they got out of their vehicles at the side of the road above the sand. “Tide’s still up. Maybe thirty yards down to the water. We won’t be able to get below the high-tide line for some time.”