“Oh, and where’s the tibial fragment I brought over on Monday? Is it in here someplace?”
“No, it’s still in my office. I’ll bring it.”
While he was gone, Gideon sat down, opened the bags, and began arranging the bones, sorting left from right, and placing them roughly in their anatomical relationships. When Clapper returned, Gideon took the partial left tibia-the upper four-fifths of the bone-from him, and set it against the partial left tibia-the lower portion-that they’d found today. Carefully, he set cut end to cut end. As he then demonstrated, they fit together so perfectly that, kept upright, they didn’t have to be held in place.
“There you go,” he said with satisfaction. “Couldn’t be a neater fit, could it? You can even see how the breakaway spur from the one from the museum fits right into that little cleft in the new one. These are from the same person, absolutely no question about it.”
“Well, that’s a relief, innit?” Clapper lazily poured a splash of coffee into a mug that he took from a pegboard on the wall and sat down across the desk from Gideon. “I’d hate to think there was a whole series of dismembered corpses littering our pristine beaches.”
“Are you saying you definitely agree that that’s what we’re dealing with? A dismembered corpse? You’re convinced?”
Clapper stared at him. “Well, of course I am. What else would I think?”
“I just wanted to be sure. You never said so in so many words, and you sure weren’t that convinced a couple of days ago.”
“A couple of days ago, there was one measly piece of bone, species and context unverified, brought in unannounced by a man who claimed to be some sort of anthropologist. But now…” He gestured at the array on the table.
“Does this mean you’ll be turning the case over to headquarters?”
“Not bloody likely!” Clapper burst out, then collected himself. “That is to say,” he said serenely, “not at the present time. Let us first see what results ensue from the pursuit of our inquiries.”
That suited Gideon, who was getting to enjoy working with Clapper. “Fine. Let us begin pursuing them.” He glanced over the thirty-odd hand and foot bones. “No obvious age or sex differences-and no duplication,” he said. “And everything matches the original tibia in condition and general appearance. No reason to think there’s more than one person here.”
“I thought we’d just established that.”
“Yes, but it’s the kind of thing you like to establish more than once.”
With the goosenecked lamp that Clapper had brought now on the desk casting its light sidewise to accentuate textures, he turned the birdlike bones, one at a time, this way and that, for their first examination. “No obvious trauma or pathologies… well, except for a little osteoarthritis in some of the joints. That probably puts the age, oh, up in the thirties or forties, at any rate.”
Clapper, in the act of lighting a cigarette, looked up from under his eyebrows. “Thirty or forty years old, and the poor bugger already has arthritis?”
“Sure. So do I. So do you.”
“Get away! My joints are perfectly fine.” He waved his arms in circles to prove it. “I’m in my prime, couldn’t be primer.”
“Mike, I hate to tell you this, but you’re not in your prime. You never were. Your bones get stronger and healthier as they grow-say to twenty-five or so; thirty at the outside-and then, wham, it’s downhill from there right up to the end. The minute they reach maturity they turn around and start deteriorating. Osteoarthritis, atrophy, osteoporosis… there is no prime, as far as your skeleton goes, or if there is, it lasts about five minutes, and the chances are you were doing something else at the time and you missed it.”
Clapper blew out his first lungful of smoke. “Now there’s a charming thought.”
“And as for the rest of you, it doesn’t last all that much longer. You know those free radicals and antioxidants that start building up as you get older? Those are just your body’s way of trying to get rid of you. Nature doesn’t want you hanging around using up resources any longer than necessary-which means just long enough to get your DNA into the gene pool so the human race keeps going. So it does what it can to keep you healthy till then. After that, you’re on your own. If you’re not contributing any more DNA to the species, the hell with you. The sooner you’re out of the picture the better.” He laughed. “Hey, have another puff. Mother Nature will appreciate it.”
Clapper scowled at him, but he was amused. “Oh, I can see I’m going to enjoy hanging about with you.” He looked for an ashtray but didn’t find one. “Try and carry on without me for a minute, will you?” He went to his office in search of an ashtray and came back with a metal one logoed The Goat and Compass, Norwich.
“Well, now here’s something,” Gideon said as Clapper sat down, the ashtray in his lap. With his thumb, Gideon was stroking a smooth, dime-sized area on the lower margin of the right tibia, the part that connects to the ankle. “You don’t see these very often in modern skeletons, other than Asians.”
Clapper peered at the spot but obviously saw nothing. Still, he was interested. “You’re saying this bloke is from Asia? You can tell from that little spot?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all. Well, not necessarily. You see, I’m fairly sure it’s a squatting facet, though admittedly not a very distinct one. Asians have them more frequently than other people because-”
“Because squatting is more common in the East,” Clapper supplied.
“Right.” Gideon checked the other tibia. “Yes, this one has it, too. I’d feel more confident about their definitely being squatting facets if we had a talus-the ankle bone just below this one-because then we’d look for a matching facet on the medial portion of the trochlear surface, where the two bones abut. But as you see, we don’t have a talus.”
“Pity, that,” said Clapper. “But assuming that you’re correct, and that these are indeed squatting facets, what is there to be made of them?”
Gideon put the tibias down. “Well, that, at some point in his life, this guy did a lot of squatting. Squatting requires dorsiflexion of the foot-” He demonstrated with his hand, laying it flat on the table, palm-down, then raising it with a sharp bend of the wrist. “-and habitual dorsiflexion results in bone remodeling that produces squatting facets… like these.”
“I see,” Clapper said dryly, emitting twin plumes of smoke from his nostrils. “You’re telling me that we’re dealing with a habitual squatter here. A serial squatter, as it were.”
It was the kind of labored drollery that would have annoyed Gideon two days ago, coming from the newly met Sergeant Clapper, but now he knew Clapper better and he laughed. “All I can tell you is what I find. This guy had some kind of occupation, or hobby, or maybe a cultural upbringing, that involved a whole lot of squatting. If it helps identify him, great. If not, I can’t help that.”
“Couldn’t just be someone who spent a lot of time in the loo, could it?”
“Mm,” Gideon said abstractedly. He had gotten out of his chair and picked up the ulna now-the larger of the two forearm bones-and was slowly running his fingertips down it with his eyes closed. Like most anthropologists, he relied on his fingers almost as much as his eyes. It was touch, along with sight, that revealed the unobtrusive little ridges and facets and depressions that could tell the story of a lifetime-as well as the nicks and notches and cracks that might well throw light on the last few seconds of it.
In this case, it was a ridge that had captured his interest, a small, sharp ridge near the top of the ulna-the larger of the two forearm bones-that ran diagonally, front to back, for not much more than an inch, a little below the elbow joint. First his middle finger and then his thumb slid lightly over it.
“This is the supinator crest,” he said after a very long silence during which Clapper had sighed, and yawned, and finally gathered himself up in preparation to leave.