“I’d love to!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you dying to find out what Mike’s ‘lady-friend’ is like?”
“What his lady-friend is like? Yes, sure. I suppose so. Sure.”
“Men,” Julie grumbled.
As it turned out, however, Clapper’s choice of lady-friend surprised-and, on reflection, pleased-both of them. It was, of all people, the bangled, gabby Madeleine Goodfellow, director of the museum, and they heard her before they saw her. She and Clapper were at a table on a little, whitewashed terrace in back, looking out over a picture-postcard view of beached fishing boats resting all askew on the sand at low tide, and her jolly cackle of a laugh easily penetrated the buzz of conversation in the restaurant, the click of balls at the pool table, and the whirring of the slot machines.
“It’s Madeleine!” Julie said, delighted. “How wonderful! She’s just what he needs. She’ll be so good for him.”
“And I suspect he’ll be pretty good for her, too. He’s a pretty solid guy, Julie, underneath it all.”
Over dinners of oxtail soup, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding, Gideon explained what he and Merrill had come up with, keeping the more grisly autopsy details to himself in deference to Julie’s and Madeleine’s sensibilities. Still, the conclusion was clear enough to alclass="underline" Joey had been thrown from the catwalk (probably) and then bludgeoned (certainly) while he lay on the ground. Murdered.
Sobered, they talked about the two killings for a while, throwing around conjectures-obviously, Clapper had been keeping Madeleine abreast-but by the time dinner was finished, and the men were into their second pints (ginger beer for Clapper) and the women into their second half-pints, they livened up and conversation turned to other matters. Clapper and Madeleine were to be married in the fall and would live, not above the police station, but in a nineteenth-century house on Tresco that had been in Madeleine’s family since the 1930s and was now being restored. They would have a view over the famous old Abbey Gardens and out across the Sound toward St. Mary’s, from which they would be a mere ten minutes by boat. Gideon and Julie were enthusiastically invited to the wedding and enthusiastically accepted. They clinked glasses-Madeleine’s bangles jingled-and talked on and on, until after eleven.
All in all, it was a welcome break from the events of the last few days, and Julie and Gideon were utterly relaxed as they walked back up Garrison Hill to the castle, hand in hand.
“Well, one mystery is solved anyway,” Julie said.
“What would that be?”
“Remember when you showed up at the museum reception the other night, straight from the police station, and you were surprised that Madeleine already knew about the bones from the beach?”
Gideon nodded.
“I think I can make a pretty good guess who she heard it from.”
“You just might be on to something,” Gideon said.
When he awakened the next morning, Gideon was sorely in need of a break. The session at the morgue had taken more out of him than he’d realized, and he wondered once again at Merrill’s ability to seemingly draw strength from his gruesome work. He’d suggested to Julie that she might want to play hooky for just one morning and join him, but while she’d obviously been drawn to the idea, she felt that she owed it to Kozlov and the others to be there.
“What’s the morning’s topic?” Gideon had asked.
“Victor’s presenting his paper on…” She’d looked at her copy of the program, open on the bed. “‘… a three-tiered social-constructivist ecological paradigm derived from monistic-subjectivist epistemology, relativist ontology, and genuinely hermeneutic methodology.’ God help me.”
Gideon stared open-mouthed at her for a moment. “Oh, well, you sure wouldn’t want to miss that. Damn, sure wish I could be there.”
So he was on his own, which suited him on this particular morning. After breakfast at the Kavorna Cafe (he’d been coming long enough for the waitress to ask if he wanted “the usual,” which he did), he decided to take advantage of the pleasant weather and see some of the island’s Neolithic sites.
On a whim he’d inquired about bicycles at the Kavorna and been directed to Buccabu Bike Hire on the Strand. Once there he’d somewhat shamefacedly asked for the least-complicated, easiest-to-operate bicycle they had (it had been a while since he’d been on one).
The clerk smiled knowledgeably. “Know just what you want, mate, got it right here,” he’d said, rolling out a one-speed, heavy-bodied Hampton Cruiser with wide tires, coaster brakes, and upright handlebars.
“Will that do you, mate? Just like you had when you were a kid, eh?”
Indeed, it was closer to his old Schwinn than he’d believed possible. “Just what I wanted.”
Armed with directions from the shop, he had cycled, only a little unevenly, up Telegraph Road, stopping at the Porthmellon store to pick up a picnic lunch, and then onto a dirt road until he found Bant’s Carn and Innisidgen Graves, two well-preserved Bronze Age entrance graves-open, rectangular, half-buried chambers situated at the tops of impossibly green hills, constructed of giant granite slabs, and roofed by huge capstones. With no other visitors at either place, he enjoyed pottering around for a while, but once he’d gone in and out of the chambers, and marveled at the size of the building stones, and wondered at how they’d gotten the massive capstones up there, there wasn’t much to do. The graves were empty, of course, having long ago been excavated, and the explanatory plaques, while informative, quickly wore thin in entertainment value. (“… a substantial mound revetted by a kerb of coursed walling and a partially infilled central chamber of trapezoidal form…”)
Still, the outing renewed him, body and spirit, and it was in a relaxed and contented frame of mind that he had his lunch of Stilton cheese, hard salami, and French bread sitting atop the Bant’s Carn capstone and looking out over the moor toward the islands of Tresco and Bryher.
Half an hour later, having returned the bike, he stopped in at the police station, where he found Clapper and Robb eating sandwiches at Robb’s desk, and about to return to Star Castle to continue their poking about.
“There you are, Gideon. Sit down, just the man I wanted to see,” Clapper said genially, chewing away on an archetypal English sandwich of soft white bread (crustless and thin as a dime), cucumber, and egg salad, his feet up on the desk and his ankles crossed. “Just how sure are you that those bones in the next room are really Edgar Villarreal’s?”
Gideon shrugged. “Pretty sure. Everything points to him. Of course, I’ve been wrong before-”
“No, not since yesterday, when you were pretty sure it was Pete Williams. Let’s not have any false modesty.”
“Now wait a minute, Mike, that’s not fair. You know I-”
“Easy, easy,” Clapper said, laughing, “just having you on a bit, no harm intended. But what do you make of this?” He wiped his fingers and scrabbled unsuccessfully among the papers on the desk until Robb came up with the one he wanted. “You read it to him, lad, it’s your work, after all.” He went back to his sandwich, talking around the bites. “And very well done, too.”
Robb swallowed what he had in his mouth, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and read: “According to Skybus records, Mr. Edgar Villarreal, who had previously booked his ticket to Bristol, did indeed fly from St. Mary’s to Bristol on Flight 400, at 8:00 A.M., on 7 June 2003, the final day of the last consortium. It is uncertain how or exactly when he returned to the United States, but on 8 June, at 3:22 P.M., he paid the parking fee for his car, a four-wheel-drive Toyota SUV, at the South Terminal Long-Term Lot at Anchorage International Airport, and exited. It was understood by an estranged sister, Maria Beasley, that he was going straight to his base camp ninety miles east of Anchorage, but she did not personally speak with him. When he failed to return home to Willow, Alaska, at the beginning of August, police were notified. On 4 August, local police visiting his camp found it deserted. The vehicle was not located. Further investigation produced no-”