Uneasy Relations (12 page)

“Can I ’elp you, mate?” inquired a voice straight out of East London.

He turned to see a man in bib overalls, wearing a leather tool belt from the pockets of which protruded the multicolored, insulated handles of a dozen pliers, wire-strippers, and screwdrivers. Hanging on the outside were a couple of meters or testers of some kind. Even Gideon, whose knowledge of such things was laughable at best, recognized him as an electrician.

“No, just checking things out. I’m the speaker today.”

“Oh, glad to meetcher. M’name’s Derek. Going to be showing any slides, are we?”

“Nope.”

“PowerPoint?”

“Nope.”

“Just gonner talk, then?”

“That’s right. I’m pretty low-tech.”

“Right, then. You’ll be sure and finish up before two? I ’ave to set up for a concert at four.”

“No problem there. I’ll be out before one thirty.”

“Right, then.”

With twenty minutes to go until noon, Gideon went exploring on his own, wandering among the visitors through the multilevel caverns and looking at the exhibits — a replica of a Neanderthal skull embedded in stone, a Neanderthal family bloodily butchering the day’s kill around a fire, a six-foot-thick slice of stalactite taken from a toppled giant. At five to twelve he headed back to the amphitheater, running into Rowley, Audrey, Buck, and Corbin also on their way in, returning from Rowley’s “tuppence tour.” They entered from the front of the hall this time, coming in alongside the stage.

The moment they entered, Gideon stopped dead in his tracks. Julie was right. The place was now completely filled, every seat taken, with a row of standees at the back, and more coming. Up front, several of them — journalists? — had reporter’s notebooks open on their laps. Half of Gibraltar seemed to be there, buzzing with excitement. And all of them, he thought wretchedly, eager to be in on it when the Skeleton Detective set the scientific world on its ear.

“Oh, Lord,” he muttered. “How am I—”

“Say, Gideon,” Rowley said, frowning at the area where the lectern had been set up, “shouldn’t they have a mat or something for you to stand on? The floor’s wet, you might get a shock.”

“You’re right,” Buck said. “All that electrical stuff, the mike and everything — you could get a hell of a shock.”

“There
was
a mat,” Gideon said, puzzled by the undeniably bare, glistening rock floor. “Somebody took it away.”

“Some mad scientist, no doubt,” said Pru, who had just come along, “who’s determined to prevent you from revealing his dastardly scheme to the world.” This with a sinister wiggle of her eyebrows.

“It’s hardly a joke,” Rowley said in mild reproof. “You’re quite right, Gideon. I saw the mat myself, but it’s obviously not there now. You’d better find something non-conductive to stand on.”

Gideon, who knew next to nothing about electricity, knew enough to agree with that. A few moments’ poking around behind the rocky stage turned up Derek at a work table in a crowded little workroom — a work cranny, more properly — soldering something or other to something or other else.

“Derek?”

“ ‘Arf a mo’,” Derek said as a pungent wisp of smoke rose from his work. Satisfied, he put down the iron and looked at Gideon. “Yair?”

“There was a rubber mat behind the lectern,” Gideon said. “It’s not there now.”

“ ’Course it’s there.”

Gideon made a motion with his hand, palm up.
See for yourself.

Derek did and came back shaking his head. “That’s them janitors for you. Couldn’t do a job proper like to save their lives.”

The janitorial staff, it appeared, was the bane of Derek’s existence. A gaggle of creaky old duffers who should have been superannuated years ago. Careless, slipshod, lazy, apparently they’d thought that Gideon had already given his talk, so they’d begun clearing the stage, presumably to set up for the four o’clock concert. This was grumblingly explained as Derek located the mat — a rubber pad glued to a slightly raised wooden platform — in a corner of the workroom, hauled it out onto the stage, and flopped it on the stone floor behind the lectern. Then he busied himself with checking the mike, setting the angle of the goosenecked reading lamp attached to the lectern, and tinkering with the connections.

“Can’t be too careful when you’re working ’round electricity . . . now what’s this?” he said disgustedly “Will you just look at this ’ere?”

He tugged at a black electrical cord, revealing a frayed spot where the wiring joined the base of the lamp, and clucked his disapproval. “Accident waiting to ’appen. Should’ve been repaired long ago.” With a complaining sigh he unplugged the lamp and unscrewed it. “Now I’ll ’ave to go and find you another one.”

“That’s all right,” Gideon said, concerned that the audience might think they were having an argument. “I don’t need one, the ambient light’s fine. I don’t have notes to look at anyway.”

“Suit yourself. Good luck, then, mate, they’re all yours.”

Gideon faced his audience. An expectant hush replaced the buzz of conversation. He took a deep breath.

“Good afternoon and thank you all for coming. I guess I’d better tell you right now that my subject isn’t quite what this morning’s paper implied, but I, uh, hope you won’t, um . . .”

But his anxieties were needless. The talk went beautifully. No one got up and walked out upon learning that that Piltdown Man was not to be left in the dust after all. They listened with active interest, laughed in the right places, and asked intelligent questions afterward. He was pleased.

But he was also troubled. While his archaeologist friends filed upstairs to the St. Michael’s Cave Café for a snack, he sought out the technician in the workroom again. “Derek,” he said, “let me ask you a question. That lamp — if I’d touched it, what would have happened? ”

“Touched it? Nothing. You’d’ve ’ad to switch it on.”

“Okay, let’s say I switched it on.”

“Well, still nothing, probably. You’d’ve been standing on the mat, wouldn’tcher?”

“But let’s say I
wasn’t
standing on the mat — remember, the mat wasn’t there at first.”

At this Derek showed some interest. He set down the soldering iron he’d been using. “I see whatcher getting at. Well, that’d depend on the condition of the wiring in the cord, wouldn’t it? Let’s have us a look, why don’t we?”

The lamp was on a second, smaller worktable crowded with what looked like material for the junkman — broken hand tools, rusty lengths of rebar, chunks of wallboard, a battered old electric sander. Derek brought the lamp back to examine it under the better light of the larger work table.

“Blimey,” he said quietly, probing in the cord’s innards.

“What?”

“Well, just look. There’s only the ’undred-twenty-volt wire still in one piece. The other one, and the ground wire — they’re frayed clear through.”

This told Gideon nothing. “Which means what? I would have gotten a shock?”

“Well, you’d’ve
become
the switch, d’you see, and the current would’ve ’ad to pass right on through you to close the circuit. Now as long as you was standing on the mat, it would just’ve gone through your ’and, not—”

“But if I wasn’t standing on the mat?” Gideon persisted. “If there
was
no mat? Could I have been killed?”

Derek astonished Gideon by guffawing. “
Killed!
Blimey, mate, you would have been
fried
. To a crisp,” he added, in case Gideon had missed his drift.

GIDEON
was late for his lunch date with Fausto and Julie, and when he arrived he had a little trouble picking them out among the mob of diners — the
Grand Princess
was in port and the little town was jammed with two thousand day trippers — but Julie spotted him and waved him over to a green-umbrellaed table on the open square that served as a dining terrace for the Angry Friar. They were at the very edge of the square, only yards from the diminutive, pillared Supreme Court building and the two not-so-diminutive, shining bronze cannons that ceremonially guarded it (pointed, strangely enough, at the handsome eighteenth-century brick facing of the Governor’s Residence across the street).

“Hi, honey. How’s it going, Fausto? Sorry I’m late.” He had decided during the taxi ride down that the account of his narrowly missing getting fried to a crisp could wait until they’d gotten through a little small talk and some lunch.

“Oh, it’s been fascinating,” Julie said. “Fausto’s been telling me about the local crime scene. You wouldn’t like it here at all. No forensic work. They don’t have murders.”

“None?” Gideon asked, slipping into a chair. “Why, are they against the law or something?”

“It’s a fact, Gideon,” Fausto said. “Not a single homicide in the last two years. “Not one.”

Almost everything Fausto Sotomayor said came across as a declaration; sometimes a challenge. Although a native Gibraltarian, he carried the ghost of a Spanish accent, a Castilian lisp that his forbears had brought over from the mainland, but there was nothing lilting or musical about it. Besides, he spoke a brusque, slangy American English rather than British (he had lived in New York City with his UN-DIPLOMAT mother during his highly formative teenage years), and he spoke it in crackling, to-the-point sentences. On first meeting him, Gideon, whose ear for accent was usually sharp, had mistakenly taken him for a Puerto Rican New Yorker.

“Statistically, one killing every four, five years. I been here twelve years, only had three. Practically no violent crime at all. Not one case of rape in ten years, how about that? How many international cities you know can say that? There’s just, you know, the date rape thing once in a while.”

Julie wasn’t much of a feminist as feminists went, but this was too much for her. “Oh, just the date rape thing,” she said drily. “Nothing to be concerned about.”

“Come on, you know what I mean. Kids. Alcohol-related. But there aren’t any sleazeballs lurking in the alleys waiting for the sound of high heels. No stranger rape. Women can walk around anywhere, any time of night. Now admit it, that’s damn amazing, considering that thirty thousand people live here. All mixed races and cultures — jeez, we got Arabs, Jews, Catholics, we got Spanish, English, Indians, Italians . . . and we got maybe five thousand transients coming through a day. And still . . . no place safer.” He rapped his knuckles on the wooden table.

“Amazing. You must do a heck of a job of prevention,” Gideon said honestly.

Fausto jerked his chin in agreement. “You better believe it.”

Fausto Sotomayor had been a newly promoted detective sergeant when he had been sent to the eighth annual International Conference in Science and Detection some years earlier in St. Malo, France, at which Gideon had conducted the forensic anthropology sessions. One of twenty law enforcement people in the class, he had seemed to Gideon on first glance among the least likely to make it as a cop. Independently wealthy, no more than five feet five, quick-moving and quick-talking, rail-thin, with small (even for his size) hands (fingernails buffed and manicured) and feet (toenails buffed and pedicured? ), he dressed in silk shirts and trim, expensive, perfectly tailored suits, and exuded a lithe, oddly graceful cockiness — Jimmy Cagney with a Latin accent — that clearly set the teeth of his bigger, slower, less fashion-conscious colleagues on edge.

After a few days, though, his more appealing side came through, at least to Gideon. He was intelligent and straight-talking — in-your-face might be closer to it — and on knowing him a bit better, the bantam rooster cockiness seemed less a reflection of a truly bellicose personality than a matter of comportment, of style, that he’d picked up somewhere along the way. It was, after all, hardly unusual in small men, particularly among those in the “manly” occupations. But underneath it, once you got to know him, Fausto was in fact fun to be around. The trouble was, not many of his fellow attendees had gone to the trouble (and really, why should they have?) of cracking through the flashy, gangsterish style and combative façade to see what was underneath. For that reason alone, Gideon had not predicted much of a future for him in the upper ranks of law enforcement.

And yet here he was, Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor, a full-fledged DCI, so others had obviously seen something in him too.

They hadn’t ordered their lunches yet, so a couple of minutes were spent perusing the outsized, plastic-coated menus. Fausto ordered curried chicken and rice, Julie, whose appetite hadn’t fully recovered from their huge breakfast, ordered a bowl of gazpacho, and Gideon asked for a ploughman’s lunch and a half pint of ale to go along with the beers the other two already had in front of them.

“So you’ve never had a chance to use any of the forensic material from the course?” he asked when the harried, sweating young waiter had taken their orders and run back to the kitchen.

“No. Well, just once. There was this case, oh, let me see, three, four years ago. There was this girl who’d been missing for a couple of days, and we finally found her, killed in a cave-in down at the south end. It wasn’t my case — I was just an inspector then, but I was helping the DCI who was running it, so I was out there when they dug her out. A mess; all mashed up, bones broken, internal organs exploded, maggots coming out of her — sorry, Julie, hell of a thing to be talking about at lunch.”

Julie laughed. “Are you kidding? Who do you think I’m married to? Go right ahead, don’t give it a thought. Maggots, exploding organs . . . everyday mealtime conversation at the Olivers.”

Fausto shrugged. “Yeah, used to be the same way at my house. Hey, could that be why I’m divorced? Anyway, she had plenty of ID on her, and enough face left so people could identify her, so no need for forensic anthro on that score. But you know what came in handy? Remember that Finnish guy who was there? The bug expert who you couldn’t understand anything he was saying?”

“Professor Wuoronin,” Gideon supplied. “A good entomologist. Knew what he was talking about.”

“Yeah, him. Gave out a ton of material on bugs that feed on corpses, you know, the sacro . . . the scaro . . .”