“Oh, yes?” Clapper replied politely, partway out of his chair.
“Yes,” murmured Gideon, who at this point wasn’t paying any more attention to Clapper than Clapper was paying to him. “Everyone has it. But this particular one is extremely well developed.” He was, in effect, talking to himself, something he was prone to doing when looking at bones. Julie accused him of talking to them, but it was himself he was addressing; he was firm about that.
“Now, the supinator crest,” he continued, “naturally, is the origin of the supinator muscle, or at least of the deep layer of it. ..”
“Naturally.”
“… which is the primary muscle involved in supination…”
“Well, I could have told you that.”
“… of the hand, especially when the arm is in an extended position. Now that is interesting.”
Clapper, who’d remained half-in, half-out of his chair, dropped down again. “Maybe you’d better run through that again. What’s interesting?”
“Well, supination-” Aware that Clapper, like most people, might be a little hazy about the term, again used his own hand to illustrate, once more placing it palm down on the table, but this time flipping it over sideways with a twist of his forearm so it rested on its back. “That’s supination of the hand.” Like turning a doorknob, he almost said, before remembering that doorknobs were few and far between in Europe, where handles were preferred. And turning a door handle-pressing it down, really-mostly involved the muscles of the upper arm and shoulder.
Clapper shook his head, puzzled. “So?”
“So whoever owned this bone did a great deal of just that movement, only with some stress associated with it. And it occurs to me-now this is just a shot in the dark, with nothing solid to go on, you understand. I’m not asserting anything, I’m not even hypothesizing, really…”
“I imagine,” Clapper mused to the walls, “that if I sit here long enough, eventually he’ll come round to telling me what it is that’s occurred to him.”
“Well, only that supination”-he turned his hand over again-“is the motion that’s involved in using a screwdriver, or to some extent in screwing on a radiator cap, or battery cap, or in-”
“Or in,” Clapper said, catching on, “all manner of tasks having to do with maintaining motor cars.” Thoughtfully, he picked a shred of tobacco from his tongue. “You really believe, then, that this might be our automobile mechanic, Pete Williams? That Villarreal actually murdered him over some silly academic dispute?”
“Well, I’m not about to go that far,” Gideon said. “For all we know he’s still happily walking around London and working on his book at night, so let’s find that out first, but right now”-he repeated what Liz had said to him at the Bishop and Wolf the previous night-“we sure don’t have any other hypotheses to go on.”
Clapper pondered this, taking a last drag on his cigarette, grinding it out, and then nodding while smoke poured from mouth and nostrils. “But where would the squatting facets come in?”
Gideon shrugged. “Auto mechanics spend a lot of time hunkering down to look at the undersides of cars, and at the wheels and things, don’t they?”
“I really wouldn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t either. Either way, though, they could come from something completely unrelated to what he did for a living.”
“Mm,” said Clapper. “Well, it’s something to look into. I’ll see what can be found out about Mr. Williams’s current existence or lack thereof. And what about this Edgar Villarreal? Where would we be likely to find him?”
“Not in this world, it seems,” Gideon said, and explained.
“Eaten by a bear!” Clapper said with a grimace, but at that point they were interrupted by the laughing entrance of Kyle Robb, who burst in triumphantly cradling two large paper sacks in the crooks of his arms. “Mr. Hicks was much revived by lunch, as was Tess, and they decided to finish up that last quadrant today after all, and look what the good little doggie has turned up!”
“ Two more caches?” Gideon asked. “I wasn’t really expecting any-not from there.”
“Only one,” Robb said, placing the bags on the desk, “but it’s a big one, couldn’t fit in one sack.” He stepped back. “Have a look, why don’t you?”
Gideon tore the sacks down their sides and gently spread out their contents. “These are the bones of the thorax, the upper body. And a lot of it is here, Kyle. Scapulas, clavicles, vertebrae, ribs… the top parts of the humeri, too. There’s plenty to work with. This ought to tell us a lot.”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” Robb said, as proud of himself as if he’d personally nosed them out. “I’ve cleaned them up a bit for you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll pick up, lad,” Clapper said when the telephone rang, and went into Robb’s cubicle to do it.
Presented with all these unexpected bones, Gideon felt like Silas Marner viewing his hoard; he practically wanted to rub his hands together. “First,” he told an observant Robb, “we’ll want to-”
“It’s for you,” Clapper called, holding out the receiver.
Mumbling something, Gideon wandered abstractedly into the other cubicle and took the phone.
Julie was on the other end. “Hi, it’s me.”
“Umm… hi, sweetheart.”
She laughed. “I see the expedition was successful. You found some bones, didn’t you?”
“What? Yes, how did you know?”
“Well, partly because you’re there in the police station, and you said that’s where you’d be if you found something to work on, but mostly because you sound like your mind’s about a million miles away, and that’s the way you sound when you’re deep in bones.”
“Yes, well, as a matter of fact-”
“Gideon, you didn’t forget about the picnic, did you?”
“Uh… picnic?”
He heard a small sigh. “Madeleine Goodfellow invited us all to a picnic-reception and dinner on Holgate’s Green. You do remember that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” said Gideon affrontedly. “Jeez, Julie, I’m not that absentminded.” Indeed, he did seem to have a vague memory to that effect.
“Yes,” she said dryly, and he knew that she was smiling, “of course you do. Only it’s not on the green; it’s too foggy. It’s indoors, at the museum. That’s where I’m calling from. It started half an hour ago. You are coming, aren’t you?”
“Well, sure, I am. The time just got a little away from me, that’s all.” He cast a last, long, lingering look at the bones in the cubicle opposite. “See you in fifteen minutes.”
As Clapper had predicted, the fog had continued to thicken, swirling in tendrils of graveyard gray, like mist on a stage set. Walking from the police station to the museum, he could actually see it part in front of him, like water before the prow of a ship, and then close again behind him. “Haven’t seen muck like this in donkey’s years,” he heard one dimly seen passerby complain to another. It was only a little after six, three hours until dark, but the store windows were already lit and the street lights were on, although they did little but contribute an occasional sickly, sulfurous, yellow nimbus to the all-enveloping gray goop. Even the footsteps of others and the occasional whispered snatches of conversation he heard were dulled and muffled by the atmosphere. “This is cool! It really creeps you out,” the distorted voice of an invisible child exulted.
With only six feet or so of visibility, it was easy to imagine oneself back a hundred years, on some gloomy, fog-swirling London street, with cutpurses and body snatchers lurking in the alleys and street girls and fishmongers hawking their goods on the sidewalks. At the thought, he laughed aloud, no doubt startling anyone within range. The thing was, there was surely only one person you could reasonably call a body snatcher in Hugh Town at this moment, and his name was Gideon Oliver. As for fishmongers, there actually was one, or rather a fish-and-chips van, customerless and forlorn, parked near the town hall, barely visible in the blurry glow of its single lightbulb.
As he left the town center, the lights grew fewer and the illusion of Victorian times more pervasive, so much so that when the van, now a block behind him, gave up for the day and banged its shutters closed, he took the noise at first for the clop of horses’ hooves. He pulled his jacket closer around him. Although his collar was turned up, his neck was wet with moisture that ran down from his hair. Absently, he touched the facade of one of the seventeenth-century buildings-he had the unconscious habit of grazing his fingers along ancient buildings as he went by them on old streets; for the anthropologist in him, it was a small, nurturing point of contact with the past-but this time he jerked his hand back. The rough-cut stone blocks were as slimy as eels. He shivered.