Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  “Well, get back out there and see if this Sergeant Lavoisier is still alive, and if he is, you tell the flipping—”

  “I’ve already done that, sir. He passed away in 2004.”

  “Oh,” Clapper said. “Ahum. Well, that’s good work, Tom.”

  “Sir.” Another tentative, sort-of-kind-of-almost salute and he turned smartly and escaped.

  “Isn’t that Tony Vickery’s son?” Rafe asked.

  “Yes, there have been some doubts about his being quite cut out for the job since joining the force, and Minister Vickery asked if I wouldn’t do what I could to look after him, so I made him my adjutant, as you might call it.” He shook his head. “A nice enough lad, certainly bright, and he does try his best, but . . .” A minute shrug. “In any event, Gideon, at least we can have the report on Rafe’s father sent along to your hotel as soon as it’s done. But it looks as if Mr. Skinner’s is out of our reach.”

  Rafe put his hands on the arms of his chair and set himself to get up. “We may yet get the actual remains for you, though, Gideon. Speaking of which, we’d better get going, Mike. Many thanks for your help.”

  “You’re welcome here anytime, you lot. And it’s always a pleasure to have the Skeleton Detective on the scene.” He laughed. “It never fails to mean things are going to get exciting. One way or another.”

  Gideon reacted with a determined shake of his head. “Not if I can help it.”

  CHAPTER 13

  It was ten forty-five when they left Clapper’s office, and because none of them had eaten yet, they stopped in at the first place that offered food, the Parade Gardens Café and Takeaway. They were hoping for either sandwiches or full English breakfasts but had to settle for coffee and pastries—“Sorry, gents, no breakfast menu after ten, no lunch menu till eleven thirty.” Their meal had a slightly frantic feel to it, not only because Rafe had a meeting at the States Building within the hour and kept checking his watch, but because anytime he wasn’t chewing, he was on the telephone, first leaving a message for his dairy manager, arranging to have his father’s remains taken from the dairy to the Revere, and then trying to reach Abbott Skinner, getting through only on the third try.

  “Well,” he said, finishing with Abbott, “luck is with us. They didn’t cremate his father, after all. It seems he’s buried in Surville Cemetery at the north edge of town. But if I want to see Abbott about it today, it has to be either at one o’clock or not at all, for God’s sake. And me with a meeting with the chief minister at eleven thirty. Crikey.”

  Clearly flustered, he made another call, instructing his secretary to put together a packet of the forms required for an exhumation. And then he was on his feet, the harried government official, stuffing the last of a prune tart into his mouth and sending it on its way with a gulp of coffee. But he hesitated before leaving.

  “Gideon, I was wondering . . . would you like to come with me to speak with Abbott? You can explain things to him better than I can.”

  Gideon mulled this over. “I would like to talk with him, yes, but maybe not at this point. I’d say it’ll go better if you keep it in the family for now. But if you’d be more comfortable with me there—”

  “No, no, just a passing thought. If I find myself in rough seas and I need you to rescue me, I’ll ring you, but I don’t anticipate that. No, you two stay and enjoy the rest of the repast. Gideon, a carton from the dairy should already be waiting for you by now. I’ll check with you later about it.”

  They took his advice, ordering more coffee and working through the remaining pastries, or rather John did. Gideon had had all the sweets he wanted after a single maple syrup scone that had enough sugar on it, and in it, to furnish a dozen doughnuts.

  After finishing off the last of them, John blew out his cheeks and said, “Damn, you should never have let me have those two treacle things. I don’t even like treacle.”

  “My apologies, John.”

  “Yeah, you should apologize. If you could’ve just ate one of them, I would have just ate one too.”

  “John, what can I say? I was remiss.”

  John pushed himself up from the table. “Ah, never mind,” he said charitably. “I’m gonna walk around town a little, you know, get the feel of the place, walk off this stuff. No point in asking if you want to come along, not when you’ve got a box of bones waiting for you.”

  “Is no thought of mine safe from you?” Gideon said with a smile. “You go and have a good walk. See you later.” And off he headed to the hotel to see if his carton had been delivered yet.

  John had his number, all right. He really did love working with bones.

  The carton that awaited Gideon at the reception desk wasn’t a shoe box, but it wasn’t a whole lot bigger than one; an ordinary grocery carton, probably the original container in which the police had stored them. Its corners were softened and collapsed from its many years in Rafe’s garage, and it had been taped and retaped multiple times. On the sides were printed Patum Peperium, the Gentleman’s Relish, Delicious on Hot Toast, 12 ct.

  Not much of a final resting place for anyone, but then there wasn’t very much to rest. He carried the carton upstairs to the suite and took it into the old valet’s room. The first thing he did was to move the table over to the window, to take advantage of the slanting light from the afternoon sun. Texture and detail were going to be important, and an oblique, raking light brought them out more clearly than even the brightest direct illumination.

  After that he went to the pad of white easel paper he’d bought at a stationer’s on the way back from the café and covered the table with sheets of it to provide a better background than the dark, marred wooden tabletop.

  “So,” he murmured with the anticipation of a skilled workman contemplating the task that lay ahead. Despite the paucity of material to look at, he was stirred by what he was about to do, as he always was. In his view, forensic anthropologists had a unique and immense responsibility: they were the last representatives of the dead, their final voice, and all too often in forensic cases, their last chance at receiving justice, in this world at any rate. It was a responsibility he took seriously. He breathed in, breathed out, and peeled off the sealing tape yet one more time.

  When he had carefully extricated the contents from the time-soiled windings of cotton wool in which they were packed and laid them out on the white surface, he found that they were a kind of smutty, blotchy gray brown, a color he’d never run into before. But then he’d never before examined bones that had been submerged in pitch for five years. Altogether, as Rafe had said, there were twelve fragments.

  His usual first step would be to lay the remains out in their anatomical positions, but with this meager assemblage that part could be skipped. Instead he began with step two, which was a general scan of the material, not looking for anything specific but letting his well-honed instincts tell him what they would. Twenty minutes later he had concluded that nine of the twelve fragments, all of which from arm or leg bones, held no information other than that four of them were male, two of which were definitely adult. The other five held no information at all. There was nothing to indicate that there was more than one person represented here.

  He moved those nine fragments to the far end of the table, leaving plenty of room for the ones that had caught his attention: two roughly triangular cranial fragments, the larger one about three by four inches, the smaller one two by three, and the medial or central half of the left clavicle, the collarbone. Picking up the big, Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass he’d bought along with the easel paper, he reached for the larger of the two cranial fragments, and . . .

  . . . felt his stomach rumble.

  The single pastry he’d had with John and Rafe, all that he’d eaten that day, had achieved his sugar-tolerance level, but that was all. He was hungry, and he realized he was also feeling dull. Slow. Sluggish in mind and body. And no wonder, he’d had nothing that could pass for exercise for three days now. It had been a mistake not to have
gone on the walk with John.

  Standing there with the magnifying glass in one hand and the skull fragment in the other, he was seized by a colossal gawp of a yawn. That did it. What he needed, and right now, was a vigorous thirty-minute walk of his own around town to get his blood moving again, and then a quick sandwich somewhere. The bones had lain awaiting his attentions for half a century. They wouldn’t mind waiting another hour.

  CHAPTER 14

  As Gideon stepped out of the Revere and onto Kensington Place, Rafe Carlisle was approaching the door of Abbott Skinner’s three-room flat in one of the new multicolored but otherwise uninspired condominium blocks on Saint Helier’s harborside. His meeting with the chief minister had run longer than he’d hoped, so he was going to be late for his appointment. Which would get them off to a bad start. Abbott was a stickler for punctuality. Abbott was a stickler for everything, come to that, a trait in which he took a conspicuous and morally superior pride; he was a bit of a prig, in other words. The trait did nothing for his personal relationships but was largely responsible for his reputation for uncompromising rectitude in Jersey’s most important industry and, as Clapper had said, for his sterling assistance to the Crown in the successful prosecution of Mumbai Global Private Bank.

  “International financial services”—in the common parlance, offshore banking—had replaced agriculture as the number one driver of Channel Island economy in the 1990s and had never stepped down. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, this tiny, out-of-the-way dependency of the British Crown had become one of the world’s top tax havens, right up there with Switzerland and the Caymans. (The very term offshore banking derives from the location of the Channel Islands—offshore from the United Kingdom.) It had brought a lot of benefits to the islanders, but as with any place that becomes known as a tax haven, there was a shady side as well, and a few of Jersey’s multitude of financial institutions had been party to dubious, sometimes criminal activities. One such had been Mumbai Global’s Jersey branch, where Abbott had been an accounts representative for six years. In 2012, however, he had discovered not only that the taxable monies in numerous accounts had been underreported to the clients’ home countries but also exactly how the cheating had been executed and then covered up. Being Abbott, this brazen violation of rules and procedures had deeply offended him. Laden with his records and his calculations, he had gone to the police in high dudgeon.

  A huge investigation had followed, resulting in the criminal convictions of four Mumbai bankers. Throughout the trials, he had served as the prosecution’s most effective witness. His whistle-blowing was praised by most, but it had brought him enemies too—even a couple of death threats—but Abbott was no coward; Rafe would say that much for him. In fact, such things seemed to charge him up. What was right was right, Rafe had heard him say more than once (many times more than once), and he would do what had to be done. And so he had. Rafe respected him for that too, although it would have been nicer if he were less smug about it.

  His actions in the Mumbai case had also earned him a reputation for steadfastness and detail mindedness, two traits in newly high demand in Jersey’s shaken financial sector. Even while the trials were underway, two other banks had offered him higher-level jobs, and a year ago he had accepted the position of vice president of International Services at Jersey Bank and Trust. Knowing a little about banks himself, and their tendency to spread around impressive titles in lieu of impressive salaries, Rafe doubted that he was earning much more than he had as a bottom-feeding accounts rep. Still, as far as Rafe knew, he was highly regarded at his new bank, and so he should have been. There was, in fact, plenty to admire in Abbott.

  But that didn’t make him any less a prig.

  “It’s ten minutes past one,” was his priggish, testy greeting when he came to the door to answer Rafe’s buzz. He was a little taller than Rafe, but narrow shouldered and bent, as thin as a chopstick except for a hard little belly that looked like a cantaloupe he carried around under his shirt.

  “Sorry about that, Abbott,” was Rafe’s amicable reply, “the chief minister wanted to sound me out on a number of things, and, as you know, the chief minister gets what he wants.”

  Abbott couldn’t have been less impressed. “Yes, well, come along.”

  In the small, neat parlor, two people waited, already seated. “Well, hello, Aunt Edna. Hello, Miranda,” Rafe said. “How very nice to see you both.”

  Not strictly true, not even loosely true. He had anticipated meeting only with Abbott, and the presence of Abbott’s Alzheimer’s-stricken mother, Edna, and Edna’s younger sister, the maddening, constitutionally obstructive Miranda, was not going to make things any easier.

  He could see no legal reason for either of them to be there. As George’s widow, Rafe’s “aunt” Edna would ordinarily have been the one to say whether her husband was to be exhumed or not, but she was much diminished. Abbott, her only child, now held power of attorney in her behalf. It was up to him to decide on the exhumation. As for Miranda, she’d been given no such formal powers, but she was Edna’s sister and the only other living blood relative she had on the islands. As such, apparently Abbott felt that she too should be party to the decision making.

  And perhaps she should have been. Miranda might have no legal standing in the matter, but there was a reasonable basis for her concern with the events of 1964. As Edna’s sister, she’d been George’s sister-in-law. More important, she’d been married to Bertrand Peltier at the time of his disappearance, the twentysomething widow who, according to the police report, had run from the building five years later when confronted with a collection of bone fragments, some of which were purported to be her husband’s.

  Or, now that he thought about it, maybe none of that figured in Abbott’s reasoning. More likely, it had to do with techniques Abbott had been exposed to in a management-training workshop at the University of Kent to which Jersey Bank and Trust had sent him not long ago. Abbott had come away from it with a fervent faith in team building, especially something called Consensual Decision Making, and had eagerly begun putting their techniques into practice.

  This had astonished Rafe, because Abbott was not by nature what anyone would call a team player; he needed to get his own way too much. But after Rafe once saw him put CDM into action, he understood. For Abbott, Consensual Decision Making meant getting his “team” to go along with whatever it was that he’d already decided on, while making them think it was their idea. Even at that, he wasn’t very good, but he thought he was, and it had become a fixture in his private dealings as well as those at the bank.

  Rafe was guessing that Abbott, who didn’t get along all that well with Miranda (who did?) was eager to try out his new Svengali-like methods on both women. Edna, poor Edna, was too far gone to be aware of being manipulated (or to care) and would have little impact on how things went, but Rafe was curious to see how Miranda would deal with it. Not to Abbott’s satisfaction, he guessed.

  A peremptory nod from Abbott motioned Rafe into a chair, so that they all sat facing each other around a coffee table. The coffee table held neither coffee, nor tea, nor anything else other than a vase of silk roses, and nothing was offered now.

  “I know we all have things to do, so let’s get right to it,” Abbott said. “Rafe, suppose you lay out for us what it is that you have in mind. Give us something to chew on.” He leaned back with a sober, I’m-listening look on his face, his elbows on the arms of his chair and his hands loosely clasped on the firm little shelf of his belly. A facilitator’s posture, a moderator’s posture, much practiced, no doubt. I am not here to express my own opinions, it said, but to help clarify and resolve issues and differences so that we can reach a decision on which we all concur.

  “Right, then—” he began.

  Miranda wasted no time getting in the first blow. “Abbott, if you want to give us something to chew on, a proper luncheon would have been a nice touch, but since it doesn’t appear we’re going to get one, how about a
few bloody biscuits? Is that too much to ask? And some tea to wash them down with?” Then, to Rafe: “Whatever has happened to civility in this country?”

  When Abbott came back, Rafe waited to see if Miranda had something else to get off her chest. When she didn’t, he briefly and delicately explained who Gideon was and why it might be beneficial to all if he were permitted to examine George’s remains.

  By the time he’d concluded, Abbott had laid out the tea makings and a tray of shortbread cookies. For a few moments after Rafe finished, there was silence, and then, in a bit of a surprise, it was Edna who spoke, with a barely audible, “Well, I’m sure I don’t know.” Not directed at anybody in particular and not replied to by anyone.

  Abbott waited a couple of beats, then said, “No, well, you know, I do think it might be a good idea,” which was about par for the length of time it took him to get around to expressing the opinion he wasn’t there to express. But it was the one Rafe was hoping for. His optimism increased. It was looking to be, as his American friends might say, a done deal.

  Not quite yet. Miranda was slowly, firmly shaking her head while the last of her biscuits was on its way down. “I disagree. I don’t like it. No, I’m very sorry, but it feels wrong to me.”

  “Oh, really? Why ‘wrong’?” Abbott asked. He leaned forward, cupping his bony chin in his hand, the image of unbiased, dispassionate inquiry.

  “Because it’s revolting. Digging up a rotting corpse, having strangers root through it.” She offered a histrionic shudder. “Besides that, the man has suffered enough: murdered, cut off in the prime of his life. Isn’t that enough? I’m surprised at you, Abbott. Your own father. Leave the old blighter in his grave in peace.”

  “I see your point, Aunt Miranda, and I do respect it,” Abbott said, laying on Training Technique Forty-Seven, or maybe it was Sixty-Two, “but don’t you want to find out what really happened? Who killed him? He was your brother-in-law, after all.”