by Aaron Elkins
They followed him across a short stone bridge that crossed a dry moat, then, under the “ER 1593” carved into the great lintel, and through the castle wall onto the grounds. Robb, if Clapper remembered correctly, had toured the place not long before, when it was open to the public as part of some anniversary having to do with the accession of Charles II—or was it the execution of Charles I?—but it was the first time Clapper had been inside. Yet it was Robb who looked with curiosity at the historic walls around them. Clapper didn’t go in much for history.
Once through the massive entryway they continued single file on a narrow pathway, perhaps five feet wide and paved with granite blocks, that ran between the fifteen-foot-high stone retaining wall— the inner wall of the ramparts—and the castle building itself, forming a deep, claustrophobia-inducing passageway around the building and apparently serving as a storage area for dustbins, gardening equipment, piles of stone for repairing the retaining wall and the paving, pottery shards, and similar odds and ends. A few heavy outpipes, waste pipes of one kind or another, ran from the building into the rampart’s wall, about ten feet above the passageway. Higher up, the top of the castle disappeared into the fog, making the well of the passageway seem even deeper and more tunnellike.
“You wouldn’t know the name of the unfortunate gentleman, would you?” Clapper, a step behind Moreton, asked.
“Mr. Joel Dillard, a member of the consortium. The doctor arrived about twenty minutes ago. He’s in the kitchen now, if you wish to—”
“Twenty minutes? You took your time calling the police, didn’t you?”
“Mr. Kozlov didn’t think it was a police matter. A simple fall. But Dr. Gillie said, in a case like this, where there’s been a violent death, the police must be notified. We certainly didn’t intend to violate the law. If we have, please accept—”
“All right, all right,” Clapper said gruffly. There were only three doctors on the island and all of them served both as deputy coroners and as police surgeons. Davey Gillie was one of the better ones, probably the very one Clapper himself would have called to the scene to make out the death certificate, as procedure required for any sudden death, suspicious or otherwise.
“Next time something like this happens—” Robb began, as they turned the first corner of the building. They were still in the well of the passageway.
“Next time!” Mr. Moreton cried with feeling. “Let’s hope there’s no next time!”
“Next time, call 999,” Robb went on gently. “That’s the best thing to do.”
Not necessarily, Clapper thought. In this case it was probably better that he hadn’t. Once he called this in to headquarters, there would be a crime-scene team, and very probably a couple of detectives, out from Truro within the hour to look things over, and the fewer paramedics and technicians and such that had been mucking around, stepping in the blood and all, the better.
“You found the body?” Clapper asked Mr. Moreton as they turned the second corner.
“No, our housekeeper, Mrs. Bewley.”
“Don’t let her leave. We’ll want to talk with her.”
“Yes, of course.” He slowed and stopped at the next corner. “The gentleman… the remains… are just beyond. Is it all right if I don’t—”
Clapper pointed to a nearby door. “Go in there and wait. That’s the kitchen, is it?” He’d seen Davey Gillie at a table, writing.
“Yes, sir, the kitchen,” Moreton said gratefully, scurrying for the door. “Shall I get Mr. Kozlov?”
“Get Mrs. Bewley. No, wait, get them all. Everyone in the house. Ask them to wait in the kitchen as well.”
Mr. Moreton nodded and opened the door.
“Thank you, Mr. Moreton,” Robb called, earning a sullen glare from Clapper.
The two policemen turned the corner together, but Clapper then stopped at once, putting out his arm to stop Robb as well. “Now that’s what I call a bloody mess,” Clapper said disgustedly.
“Good God,” a shaken Robb whispered.
Joey Dillard’s body lay sprawled, partly on its back, partly on its side, on the stone paving, one blackened, dulled eye open, the other one half-lidded. One foot, shoeless, was propped awkwardly against the retaining wall, the leg that went with it twisted unnaturally under him. A bent, broken pair of glasses hung pathetically from one ear.
There was a great deal of blood, matted in his hair and soaked so heavily into his sweatshirt that most of the logo on it, something about Ethical Treatment, couldn’t be read. More blood coated the paving, tarry and congealed.
“He’s been here a while, I’d say, sir,” Robb said as professionally as he could manage, despite the quaver he could hear in his own voice. “You can see one of his eyes, and the cornea’s just about opaque, so that’s two to three hours at a minimum, and the blood is well on the way to drying. I’d say eight to twelve hours.”
“My goodness,” Clapper responded meanly, “did they teach you all that hard stuff at Bramshill?” He raised his eyes toward the still invisible roof of the castle. Robb thought he was merely rolling his eyes, but no; Clapper was looking for something. “You’ve been here before. What’s up there?”
“Up there?”
“No, down here,” Clapper snapped. “If I say ‘up there,” what else can it mean but ’down here‘?“
Robb gulped. This was as vinegary and dyspeptic as he’d ever seen Clapper, and his resentment and anger were starting to get the better of the awe in which he generally held the Great Man. Well, almost. But what the hell was the ferocious old bugger’s problem this time?
“Well, there’s not really anything up there, Sarge,” he said neutrally. “See about twenty-five, thirty feet up, where the stone facing ends, and then there’s another floor, set back a little, with shingles on the outside? That’s the third floor—where all the guest rooms are, I think.”
This time Clapper really did roll his eyes, making it clear that the information he was hearing wasn’t what he wanted to know, and Robb hurried nervously on. “Well, at the top of the stone facing up there, just above the level of the windows, there’s a sort of walkway all around the outside, under the eaves. You get out onto it from the third floor by walking up five or six steps and going out this little door—”
“Aah!” Clapper said, and Robb relaxed a little. “Yes, I can see there’s a little railing there. That’s where he fell from, Kyle.”
“Certainly possible, sir.”
“No, it’s definite. Come a little closer—that’s enough, no nearer to the body than that. See that outpipe above us? If you had your wits about you, you’d have observed by now that it’s been broken. One end emerges from the building, quite awry, and the other end, also awry, drains into the retaining wall. Between them is a space of approximately eighteen inches, from which, by power of intellect, we may take for granted the existence of a missing eighteen-inch section of pipe. Now where do you suppose that missing section might be? Where would a smart, privileged, university-educated youth like yourself look?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Robb said, his face stiffening.
“I don’t know, sir,” Clapper mimicked. “Well, have you thought of looking at the body? You don’t suppose that the aforementioned missing section of pipe and the length of wonderfully similar-looking pipe that peeps ever so subtly out from under his hip could be one and the same?”
“Oh,” Robb said. “I… I didn’t see it before. He must have struck it on the way down and carried it with him.”
“From which you conclude… ?”
“That he…” Robb glanced up at the wall of the building before continuing. “That since there are no windows directly in line with the body, it follows that he fell from that little walkway.”
“As the night the day,” said Clapper. “Or, more likely,” he added, “that he was pushed.”
“You’re saying that you think we have a suspicious death here, Sarge?”
“Well, think about it for a moment. Yesterday we dug up a
beachful of bones belonging to a murdered man who, if we are inclined to believe Gideon—which I am—was a member of this consortium of Kozlov’s. And today—no, last night, from the looks of him—another member of said consortium suffers a violent and mysterious death. Considering the normally peaceable nature of our little part of this green and pleasant land, what would be your conclusion?”
“That there’s a relationship between the two events.”
“Exactly, Kyle,” said Clapper, who was showing signs that perhaps he’d considered that he’d harassed Robb more than he should have. “A connection. Possibly he was murdered. Possibly it was a random accident—a slip, a fall. Or possibly…”
Why are we just standing here? Robb wondered. One of the things they had taught him at Bramshill was that speed was of the essence, that sus-death clues grew cold, and often useless or irretrievable, very quickly. And yet here was Clapper, lost in his musings, letting the minutes go by.
“Sir, I left the CSI gear in the van. Shall I—”
Clapper snorted. “What, and when the ‘real’ detectives get here, have them complain that we’ve cocked the whole thing up, stomping around with our hobnailed boots? No, no, no, we’ll call this in to headquarters as ordained, and they’ll have Detective Superintendent Vossey and his supersleuth minions out from Truro inside of half an hour. We’ll leave it to them, Kyle. We don’t go a step closer.”
Robb’s spirits plummeted. His first chance at a significant crime-scene investigation, he thought bitterly, with the bloody corpse lying right there in front of them, untouched except by the doctor, and…
He clamped his lips together. “Shall I at least execute the duties entailed in first-officer-on-the-scene uniform standards, sir?”
Clapper sighed. “Kyle, I don’t even know what that means. But no. All I want you to do is execute a telephone call to headquarters and tell them what’s happened. Then come find me in the kitchen.”
Robb turned and left without a word.
Now what does he have to be so mopey about? Clapper wondered, watching the younger man trudge angrily off. He took one last, long look at the body, turned, and went into the kitchen that was a mixture of sooty, sixteenth-century stone walls and twenty-first-century stainless steel kitchen equipment, where Mr. Moreton had dutifully gathered the denizens of the house, all of whom were seated around an old table, drinking coffee and looking suspicious and untrustworthy.
“Where is Dr. Gillie?” he asked. “I want to speak with him first.”
“I put him in my office,” Mr. Moreton said. “It’s more private.”
Kozlov, whom Clapper knew by sight, clarified. “By stairs. Through dining room. There.” He pointed toward the kitchen’s door to the interior.
Once in the dining room, the smell of pipe tobacco reached Clapper’s nostrils. He stopped and automatically reached for his cigarettes, lit up a Gold Bond, and continued into a cramped foyer, off of which was a tiny, cluttered alcove that looked as if it might once have been a coatroom. The doctor sat behind the desk, screwing the cap onto an old-fashioned, tortoise-shell fountain pen. He looked up, smiling, a long-nosed, horse-faced man in an old tweed jacket, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth.
“All right, what have we got?” Clapper said.
“Why, hello there, Davey-lad,” Gillie said, addressing himself, “so nice to see you again. I hope you’re well.”
“Sorry, Davey, I’m not in much of a mood today.” He stood, waiting.
“No, really? All right then, I’d better mind my manners. Well, you’ve looked at the body?”
Clapper nodded.
“Then you already know what we have.” He straightened the form on which he’d been writing and read aloud: “ ‘Cause of death, crushing head injuries; manner of death, undetermined; contributing causes of death, none indicated.” “ He looked up with a shrug. ”Been dead twelve to twenty-four hours, from the looks of him; rigor is quite pronounced and hasn’t begun to break up yet. So if what Kozlov told me is so—that he was alive and well as late as eleven o’clock last night—why then, we’d have to put the time at right around then, say somewhere between eleven and one. Body temperature, assuming that it was normal to begin with, is down fourteen degrees Celsius, so that fits nicely enough as well.“
“Other injuries?”
“Contusions and lacerations here and there, quite consistent with a fall. I would expect some internal trauma as well, when he’s undressed and examined. Oh, and he died right where he lies. No one’s moved him. The livor pattern makes that clear. I’d assume he fell from the catwalk up above.”
“And hit the pipe on the way down?”
“ Grabbed the pipe on the way down, I should say. There are rust stains and abrasions on his right palm. It would seem to have broken his fall and taken some of the force out of it. Otherwise—falling twenty-five feet directly onto stone like that—his head wouldn’t merely have cracked, it would have exploded like a watermelon.”
“Yes. ”Falling,“ you said? What about ‘jumping’ or ‘being pushed’?”
Gillie took the pipe from his mouth and pressed the bit into his cheek. “It’s always possible, I suppose, but the man had been drinking heavily last night—you can still smell it on him—and that’s a pretty narrow catwalk up there, and the railing’s not even waist-high. I see nothing that suggests anything beyond an accidental fall.”
“Oh? And what would he have been doing wandering out there on that narrow catwalk in the middle of the night?”
“Smoking a cigar.”
Clapper’s cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth. “Smoking a cigar? How do you know?”
“Because I asked Mrs. Bewley. ”Mrs. Bewley,“ says I, ”what would he have been doing wandering out there on that narrow catwalk in the middle of the night?“ She told me that he smoked these nasty black cigars that everyone hated—when he had one, even in his room, you could smell it all through the place—so that he often stepped out there to have one in peace without bothering anybody or being bothered by anybody.”
“Including at night?”
“Especially at night. After dinner. Look, Mike, I’ve been here twenty-two years now, and we’ve never yet had a homicide, let alone a murder, but you obviously think this needs looking into, so if you want me to do a postmortem—assuming the budget can stand it and I still remember how to perform an autopsy—I could do one for you tomorrow, much as I hate the bloody job. Not that I expect anything to come of it, you understand.”
“There are a few background elements you’re not aware of, Davey.”
“How mysterious,” Gillie said. “And am I permitted to know?”
“Not at this point,” Clapper said curtly.
Gillie smiled. “What a charmer you can be, Mike.” He folded the report, slipped it into a jacket pocket, and stood up. “I’m done with the body. Would you like me to call Algy and have him get it to the chapel?”
Algy Rennet was the coroner’s undertaker for the Isles of Scilly, and “the chapel” was the Chapel of Rest, a small room at St. Mary’s Hospital that served the community as a mortuary.
“No, as a matter of fact. I want it left here.”
“Here? Out in the open? But—”
“I don’t want him moved. Kyle is speaking with Exeter right now. They’ll have the Truro people here by helicopter in no time, and the deceased gentleman will soon be on his way to Treliske, where the Force pathologist is probably sharpening his gruesome instruments even as we speak. He’ll do the postmortem.”
“I see,” said Gillie, showing his first sign of irritation. “Local talent not up to the job, eh? Well, I suppose they have a point. I haven’t done an autopsy in two and a half years. My bad luck to live someplace where nobody kills anybody else.”
“It’s nothing to do with you, Davey. It’s the way it works in a sus-death. Standard procedure, it’s in the book.”
Robb came into the room, with a quizzical expression on his face, as if he didn’t know how Clap
per was going to take what he had to say.
“Spit it out, Kyle. What’d they say? Who’d you talk to?”
“I talked to Detective Chief Superintendent LeVine himself, who referred me to Detective Superintendent Vossey in Truro, who said— none too kindly—‘Have you looked out the window?” “
“Have you… what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”
“The fog, Sarge. They can’t land any helicopters here from Truro or anywhere else. No planes, no boats, nothing.”
“Well, what do they expect me—”
“They expect you to handle the case yourself. You’ll have to keep them up to date with a running case log, of course, but it’s your baby, Sarge. You’re the chief investigating officer.” He chanced a smile. “And I’m your team.”
This information produced a change in Clapper that was straight out of old horror movies, where the full moon finally goes down and the misty dawn breaks at last. The hunched, misshapen figure straightened. The glowing red eyes became cool blue again, the drooling fangs sank back into their gums, the fur on the backs of his hands vanished. A normal, smiling, reasonably amicable human being reemerged.
“I see,” he said, letting it sink in for a few moments and relishing every second of it. “Well, well. Davey, go ahead and make that call to Algy. It looks as if you get to do your autopsy after all.”
“Calloo, callay,” said Gillie around his pipe.
“And you, Kyle, lad—”
I’m “lad” again, thought Robb. That’s better.
“—don’t just stand around, there’s a lot to be done. Go and get the kit—no, first get on the blower to our summer help, all three of them. Tell them to climb into uniform and get over here—Gordon will go along with the body and remain with it, and you, Martin, and Sean will assist me in a proper investigation of the scene. Never mind what they taught you at Bramshill, I’ll show you how the real coppers do it… Kyle, I may have been a bit short with you before—”
“Not that I noticed, Sarge,” Robb said, smiling. “About as mean as usual.”
