Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  There was plenty of damage, of course: broken teeth, abrasions on elbows, knees, head—all the bodily projections you’d expect to take some abuse on a ninety-meter fall down a rocky cliffside. Except for his face, from which some of the blood had been wiped, he hadn’t been cleaned up yet, so there was a lot of dried blood, and his hair was stiff with it. Clapper stole a quick look at Vickery and was pleased to see that he was showing no signs of upset; he’d been afraid the boy might be a fainter.

  Dr. MacGowan, a cadaverous, long-jawed man in a green lab coat, got right down to business. “I’m not ready to go on the record with it yet, but between us, I’ll tell you right off that we’ve got ourselves a homicide here.”

  Clapper’s eyebrows went up. Victor MacGowan was a stickler (sometimes frustratingly so) for meticulous analysis, hardly a man given to making rash judgments on the cause of death. And yet here he was, declaring homicide mere hours after Abbott had been killed and doing it without benefit of autopsy.

  “Explain,” Clapper said.

  “And not just any simple, run-of-the-mill homicide either. It presents some intriguing questions.” He pointed at a white sheet of paper on the other table. “Those little particles you see—”

  “Barely. They look like grains of salt.”

  “Actually, they’re grains of stone, and we pulled them out of his face. Five of them.”

  “Well, he tumbled ninety meters down a rock wall. What’s so intriguing about finding rock splinters in his face? Or anywhere else in him, for that matter?”

  “It’s the splinters themselves. Lauder’s already identified them. They’re limestone, Mike.”

  “Yes, and?”

  “And the North Coast cliffs are composed of granite, not limestone. Indeed, bits of granite were found embedded in his head and a few other places, but in his face—in his forehead and right temple—there were, in addition, these five limestone shards. He certainly didn’t get them during his fall. Therefore, it would seem obvious he must have scraped his face elsewhere before he came to the cliffs, you agree?”

  “Yes, obviously, get on with it.”

  “The walkers he was with—they swear to a one that his face was unscathed when they left him. Less than an hour later, when they returned, he was dead. With his face full of limestone shards.”

  “Now that is strange,” Mike said.

  “Not as strange as it gets. Your excellent Inspector Lauder looked into it further in an effort to see where the nearest limestone deposits on the island are.”

  “And?”

  “There aren’t any. None in Jersey, none in Guernsey, none in the whole of the Channel Islands.”

  Clapper scowled. “No, no, we’re missing something here, Victor.” He picked up one of the shards. He could see now that it was a pale, granular amber. “Is he sure these are limestone? They’re bloody small.”

  MacGowan shrugged and crossed his bony arms. “That’s what he says. There’s a pot of coffee on, Mike. Would you like some?”

  Clapper, who knew that until the unit’s clerk arrived at nine, the coffee in the pot would be yesterday’s, declined. MacGowan, a braver man than he, helped himself to some and gave barely a wince on his first swallow. But then, of course, he was used to it. They stood on either side of the table, looking down at Abbott, trying to make sense of things.

  There was the sound of hesitant throat clearing and then, “Sir?”

  Clapper had forgotten about Vickery, who had been standing quietly out of the way since they’d arrived.

  “Yes, Tom?” he said over his shoulder, still looking at Abbott.

  “I believe I can help in this matter of the limestone.”

  Clapper turned. “Can you, now?”

  Vickery cleared his throat again. “During the Occupation, the Germans placed half a dozen resting stops or viewpoints along the path for their soldiers; you know how they love their Volksmarches. They found appropriate sites, graded and leveled them, and put down a bed of gravel and a stone bench, or rather their wretched Russian slave laborers did. Well, those viewpoints are still there today, although hardly anyone remembers who built them.”

  “I didn’t know that myself,” MacGowan said, “and I’ve lived here my entire life. I never thought to enquire. I must have used those benches a hundred times.”

  Clapper was impressed too; it was as long a speech as he’d ever heard Vickery make, but he wasn’t seeing the relevance. “Well, that’s all very interesting, and if what you’re getting at is that the viewpoint Skinner had been sitting at was one of them, I think that’s probably so, but where’s the significance?”

  “The Germans wanted to make everything as much like the trails their homesick soldiers remembered from the Fatherland, and so they paved the viewpoints with gravel as similar as possible to the ones typically used in Germany, and that was—”

  “Limestone?” Clapper and MacGowan simultaneously exclaimed.

  “Yes, sir, limestone, and so I was thinking—may I continue, Chief Inspector?”

  Clapper laughed. “By all means, continue.”

  “I was thinking that that must mean that Mr. Skinner was injured up above, at the viewpoint itself, before he went over the edge. He must have fallen . . . or been pushed to the ground . . . and scraped his face against the gravel, which suggests even more strongly—”

  Clapper’s hand went up. He took out his phone and hit a button. “Joyce, is Sergeant Kendry in yet? Good, tell him not to go anywhere, I’m sending Vickery over with some instructions.” The phone was slipped back into his jacket pocket. “Tom, I want you to go and see Warren, tell him everything we’ve been talking about, and have him get those crime-scene people of his out to the site again, and this time I want them to bring their fine-tooth combs and look for . . . well, anything and everything. All right?”

  “I’m on my way, Chief.”

  “Wait, Tom, before you go. The limestone—where did they get it?”

  “From Occupied France, sir. They shipped it in.”

  “Constable,” Clapper said, “how is it you’ve come to know all this?”

  “I’m a bit of a history buff, sir. It does come in handy sometimes.”

  “I’ll say so.” He slowly shook his head. “We just might turn you into a real copper yet, lad. Blimey, you’re looking more like the genuine article every day.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Vickery said, unable to keep back his grin. Without even the semblance of a salute this time, and still grinning, he headed off.

  “Smart young man,” MacGowan said.

  Clapper nodded. “Victor, everything about this certainly suggests homicide, but for you to state so baldly that it is homicide requires a bit more than we know at this point, wouldn’t you say?”

  “A bit more than you know,” MacGowan said with a rare smile that revealed his uneven brown teeth. “I just haven’t gotten to it yet.”

  Going back to Abbott’s body, MacGowan used a pair of toothed forceps to trace the track that each piece of gravel had left in Abbott’s face and to point out that they grouped themselves into two sets that differed (slightly but unambiguously). While all of them were made in the same general forehead-to-chin direction, the two sets took slightly different paths into his skin. Or, to put it another way, which MacGowan did, Skinner’s face had made contact with the ground—which Tom had rightly inferred—from two slightly different directions.

  Clapper was nodding along. “He fell twice, then, not just once, before he ever went over the edge.”

  “Exactly,” MacGowan said, “but I think we can go further than that and rule out your young man’s ‘fallen’ to the ground and rule in ‘pushed to the ground.’ Twice.”

  Clapper demurred. “I can’t see where that came from, Victor. How can we say he didn’t suffer a stroke, say, a dizzy spell, an episode of vertigo, and simply fall a couple of times on his own, without any help?”

  “Because the idea that a man, even a man struck with a dizzy spell, would fall twice . . . an
d arise twice . . . within a meter or two of a frightful precipice and still be near enough to the edge to fall over it the third time, is, to put it mildly, unlikely. Wouldn’t he have gotten himself farther away from that edge after the first fall, and farther still after the second?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Wouldn’t you have?”

  Clapper allowed that he probably would have.

  “And here’s something else,” MacGowan said. “Those tracks in his face, some of them are ten centimeters long. Would the face of a person suffering a collapse of some sort scrape along the ground for ten centimeters? I think not. I think they suggest strongly that he was flung forward . . . twice.”

  “Yes, they do, but what about this? If he was flung forward, wouldn’t he have broken the falls with his hands? Shouldn’t we have found those shards in his palms too? Or was he wearing gloves?”

  “No, no gloves, unless someone removed them after he fell. But that’s unlikely. He was at the bottom of a sheer cliff. Not so easy to clamber down there. It took a helicopter for us. Perhaps he was already unconscious when he was thrown down and thus didn’t try to break his fall.”

  “Somebody threw him to the ground unconscious . . . twice?” Clapper said dubiously. “Picked him up off the ground and threw him down again?”

  “Well, all right, then, I have no answer for that. I’m sure it will come clear.”

  Or maybe it wouldn’t, Clapper thought. As he knew, knew, all but the simplest, most primitive murders, no matter how convincingly settled, left behind a loose string or two, an unresolved contradiction, a fact that didn’t fit. Good fodder for the conspiracy peddlers; they were still writing books about what or who “really” killed Lincoln, or Princess Di, or King Tut, for that matter. In all honesty, he doubted that they’d ever find out why Skinner fell onto his face and not his hands.

  “Mike,” said MacGowan, “I think we’d better get this gentleman in the cooler before any more time passes. I’ve rung London about getting a postmortem done”—States of Jersey law required that autopsies that were part of criminal investigations be performed by a Home Office pathologist—“but they can’t have one here until Friday, the day after tomorrow. I’d like to have the body reasonably fresh for him.”

  Clapper straightened up. “He’s all yours, Victor.”

  “Thank you. Interesting times, eh?”

  CHAPTER 21

  Rafe had told them earlier that among their must-sees were tiny Gorey village and its not-so-tiny castle, Mont Orgueil. And, stepping down from the bus in Gorey’s harborside parking lot, Gideon and Julie thanked him for it.

  Beside the little harbor, filled with bobbing, moored fishing boats and small pleasure craft, “downtown” Gorey itself consisted of a perfect little Victorian waterfront, a single row of small white-stuccoed buildings put up cheek by jowl: pubs, restaurants, cafés, and inns, all of them tidy, conspicuously clean, and inviting. But above this convivial and charming scene, on a rise just behind it, loomed the enormous and somber medieval castle, like a sinister, giant brown spider, hunched and brooding over the defenseless populace below.

  So said the guidebook they’d brought with them, but Julie thought otherwise. “It’s not ‘brooding’ or ‘sinister’ at all. It could hardly be prettier. I feel like we’re on a postcard.”

  “On a bright, sunshiny day like this, yes, definitely,” Gideon said, “but imagine it’s dark, okay? Ghostly clouds sailing across a pale full moon. Can’t you see swarms of scared villagers creeping up that winding path with torches and pitchforks, determined finally to slay the mad doctor and his creature?”

  Julie thought about it. “Not really, no. But let’s have some coffee before we creep up there ourselves.”

  “Sounds good.”

  They were enjoying an unexpected free morning together. Gideon had telephoned Abbott’s number at seven forty-five, as instructed, but there had been no answer, and he had left a message. Shortly after that he’d gotten a call from Rafe, who had been most obligingly amazed and warmly grateful for his work on the remains.

  “Amazing how much information you dug out of those few bones, just amazing. And what a host of intriguing possibilities it raises. My father met his death from a blow to the head. And Bertrand Peltier, the evasive Bertrand Peltier, was not, after all, accounted for; has never been accounted for; has, in fact, disappeared entirely. As has the money. One could be forgiven for assuming that these varied elements might be associated in some way.”

  “I can see how one could. I’m hoping I can fill in a few more gaps after I get a look at George Skinner.”

  “Yes, I’m eager to hear what you have to say about him. Have you gotten hold of Abbott yet?”

  “Had to leave a message. Haven’t heard back from him yet.”

  “Oh, not to worry,” Rafe said. “One thing about Abbott: when he commits to something, he does it. I’m sure he’ll be in touch shortly.”

  But when nine o’clock came and went, and Gideon had tried twice more, his calls still hadn’t been returned. “What the heck,” he said to Julie over breakfast, “looks as if I have the morning off. Let’s go do something interesting.”

  John, being sensitive to a married couple’s need to be by themselves sometimes—one more thing that made the FBI agent such an easy traveling companion—had breakfasted with them and gone off for the day to do his own thing. The Olivers had decided to give Rafe’s recommendation of the bus system a try, and that too had worked out well. A short walk to the Liberation Square station, a brief wait for the Number 23, and then a pleasant fifteen-minute ride to Gorey on a bus peopled with chatty, friendly locals.

  Apparently, they didn’t see much in the way of Americans here, at least not on the busses, because on overhearing them speak, their friendly fellow passengers got a sort of game going trying to guess where they were from. (The winner? South Africa.)

  After a couple of caffe lattes in a harbor-front tearoom, they spent an enjoyable couple of hours in the castle, wandering the largely deserted flagstone floors from room to room and taking in the various bits and pieces of architecture and furnishings from its thirteenth-century origin to its takeover by the Nazis. Only when they were leaving did they learn that a map and leaflet had been available to help them find their way around. Lacking them, they had several times wound up climbing the same long, dark stone staircase that they had been on only a few minutes before. In the mood they were in, it added to the fun. They were constantly being surprised by wherever they happened to find themselves.

  It was while they were on their way back down to the village, with lunch on their minds, that Gideon’s cell phone emitted its unassuming clunk.

  “Professor Oliver?” Gideon recognized the tentative voice of Clapper’s assistant, the timorous young officer who wasn’t cut out to be a policeman. “This is Constable Vickery at the States of Jersey Police. Detective Chief Inspector Clapper wonders if you would find it convenient to come see him at the station.”

  “You mean right now?”

  Julie, listening to his end of the conversation with her arms folded and her head down, sighed. “There goes our nice day together,” she said, then added sadly: “It was lovely while it lasted.”

  “I believe so, sir. If that’s convenient,” Vickery said. “I don’t expect it to take much of your time.”

  “Sure, I’ll be right there . . . well, maybe you’d better give me a little time. I’m out in Gorey with no car. I’ll have to find a taxi—”

  “I’ll have someone come out and collect you, sir. He’ll be there in less than ten minutes. You’re at the harbor?”

  “Yes. Thank you, I’ll meet him at the parking lot—the car park.”

  He put the phone away, a hangdog look on his face. “Dammit, Julie, I’m sorry. Look, it shouldn’t take very long, maybe we can still have lunch together. Can you hold out for an hour or so?”

  “Sure. In fact, I’ll give you an hour and a half. After that, I can’t promise.”
/>   “Good enough. I’ll call you when I get out. I guess Mike’s read the report on Roddy. I wonder what the hurry is, though.”

  “Maybe it’s something else. Maybe something’s happened.”

  Something’s happened.

  The second he walked into Clapper’s office, Gideon knew that. This wasn’t about any half-century-old case. Not only was Mike’s face set and serious, but Rafe was there too, wearing much the same expression.

  “What’s going on?” Gideon asked as he joined them around the coffee table. “Why am I here?”

  “Your meeting with Abbott Skinner is off,” Clapper said bluntly. “Skinner’s dead.”

  “Dead? How? What happened? When?”

  “He fell off a cliff, can you believe it?” Rafe said, sounding as if he didn’t believe it himself. “Last night, on a walk with his walking group. Ninety meters. Onto a beach full of rocks.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Horrible!” Rafe agreed. His usually ruddy face was wan.

  Clapper took the next twenty minutes to fill Gideon in on what had happened and the conclusions that he and Dr. MacGowan had reached that morning—with Constable Vickery’s very considerable contribution. “Any observations you’d care to make, Gideon?” he asked at the end.

  “Me? No, none at all. Do you have leads, any suspects?”

  “Oh, yes, we know that his testifying for the Crown in that banking-corruption case—”

  “Mumbai Global,” Rafe supplied.

  “—made him some enemies, and I expect we’ll begin there, although . . .” He paused to draw a second Gold Bond from its packet. “. . . my instincts tell me that the solution lies elsewhere.”