Uneasy Relations (18 page)

He turned. “What is there to see? It’s not there anymore.”

“Well, you know, just give him some idea of where stuff was, that kind of thing. Come on, you were the assistant director, you should be the one to give the tour.”

Corbin’s lips pursed. “What I was, was the chief deputy director.”

“Whatever. Come on already, you’ve heard this crap from Adrian a million times.”

“Adrian is a very great archaeologist,” Corbin said reprovingly. “He’s always worth listening to.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Pru. “Come on, Chief Deputy Director, let’s get a move on.”

Corbin glanced with something like amused resignation at Gideon —
What can you do with a woman like this
? — and said, “Very well,” with a put-upon but amicable sigh, and led the way.

Julie touched Gideon’s arm as he followed. “Be careful,” she whispered. “Watch your step. Pay attention when you’re climbing around. Don’t stargaze.”

“How can I? No stars.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I promise not to fall off.”

“Now where have I heard that before?”

With the path to the cave blocked by debris from the most recent landslide, getting to it required slipping under a “Danger — Do Not Cross” ribbon, clambering over some broken stone walls, and negotiating the rough earthen fill, most of which was covered with a slippery, uneven mat of ground cover. Pru, in jeans and wearing cowboy boots with heels that dug in, managed it easily, but Gideon, in Rock-port joggers, and Corbin, wearing brown oxfords, had to slip-slide their way down to the relatively level ledgelike area that was almost at the bottom. Once there, Gideon could see the cave, which had been invisible from above; a cavern perhaps fifty feet wide and, in the parts that hadn’t been obstructed by the recent landslide, about twenty feet deep.

“So this is it,” he said with the near-mystical pleasure he always felt at times like this:
Here, where I stand right now, on this rocky ledge, on this very spot, Neanderthal creatures
—
almost but not quite humans
—
once worked, and played, and went about their lives
. On the cave ceiling, toward the rear, he could make out the sooty smudges from their fires, still plainly visible after 24,000 years.

“What’s left of it,” Corbin said. “Well, let me give you the two-bit tour.” He walked them up and down the ledge, explaining the excavation strategies they’d resorted to (rock shelters were trickier than ordinary digs on open land), what kind of grid system they’d used, where they’d found various materials: a firepot over here, a couple of Mousterian tools over there.

“Where was the First Family burial?” Gideon asked. Corbin, dyed-in-the-wool archaeologist that he was, was deep in his analysis of the stone tool technology, and it looked as if it might be a while before he got around to the human remains.

“Unfortunately, you can’t see it anymore,” said Pru. “It was in a crevice about a foot off the floor of the cave, over there, under all that mess.” She pointed at an area to the right, where the overhang had come down altogether, so that it was no longer a rock shelter at all.

“We lost about half the cave in the landslide,” Corbin said. “There was another fifteen meters of it right there, but that’s where the worst of it hit. Unfortunately, it was where most of the important finds were made. What a shame to see it covered over like that; such an important site.”

“Well, I gather they’re planning to dig it out again for visitors,” Pru said.

“Good luck,” Gideon murmured, looking at the mass of earth in front of him. “That’s a lot of dirt.” It was as if one of those monstrous, three-story-tall earth-moving machines had been excavating some vast crater somewhere up above, and had dumped its huge bucket down here time after time, with the express purpose of burying the rock shelter. The enormous pile of soil, now pocked with struggling vegetation, completely plugged up any access to this part of the cave.

“What are those, do you know?” he asked, pointing at an unlikely row of a half dozen evenly spaced holes dug into the base of the pile. Five were deep but relatively small; about four feet in diameter. The fifth, the last one in the row, was big, a good ten feet in diameter and ten feet deep. All had been made some time ago, their margins no longer sharp-edged. And all had been dug with tools, not naturally formed; the piles of backfill lay all around them.

Before the question was out of his mouth, he realized what they were. “Is this where they dug Sheila Chan out?”

Pru responded with a somber nod. “Yes.”

“Interestingly,” said Corbin, “they do it the way we might do test-trenching. The smaller holes, those were a uniformly spaced series of exploratory probes. The deep one—”

“Is where they found her,” Gideon said.

“Yes,” Pru said again. “I was here. Well, not down here, but up above, with some of the others. I stayed the whole dreary, cold, rainy miserable day. You were there most of the time too, weren’t you, Corb?”

“I was. I felt as if it was my . . . responsibility, as if I owed it to her somehow. I suppose I hoped, in some obscure way, that, by being there, by simply assuming they would find her, that somehow—” He finished with a shrug.

“You understand, Gideon,” Pru said, “at that point we thought — we hoped — she still might be alive.”

“Ah,” said Gideon. He had gone up to the largest hole and was fingering its weathered margins. He picked up a chunk of backfill from it and broke it easily apart with his hands. A mixture of claylike earth with a little humus and some gravelly rock fragments mixed in. Pretty ordinary soil, in other words. But something about it had started the gears of his mind turning. Something gnawed at him, just out of reach. . . .

“But of course, she wasn’t,” Corbin said gravely. “She was buried so very deeply. In fact, they were about to go on to dig the next probe when someone spotted her outstretched fingertips just coming through the dirt, way down in the hole.”

“Me,” Pru said. “I spotted her.”

“How deep in the hole?” Gideon asked. Why he wanted to know he wasn’t sure, but there was something . . . something . . .

“Pretty deep,” Pru said, “and even then it was only her fingers we could see. The rest of her was much deeper, probably eight or ten feet down, so of course there was no chance.”

Gideon rubbed his palms together to get the dirt off them. A gritty residue remained. “Do you happen to know what the cause of death was?”

Pru looked strangely at him. “Offhand, I’d say that having had a hundred tons of dirt come down on her might have had something to do with it.”

“No, I mean the actual cause of death, the immediate cause. Asphyxiation? Brain injury? Crushing chest injuries?”

“I have no idea. Why is it important?”

“Just wondering,” he said vaguely.

It was the best he could come up with.

BACK
at the top, Adrian, the final speaker, had finished up and the ceremony was winding down. Pru went to join Audrey and Buck, who were climbing into Rowley’s van for the ride back. Corbin, who was driving Adrian, waited politely while his mentor accepted compliments and answered questions from a few hangers-on. Julie was waiting for Gideon, sitting on one of the rough stone walls at the edge of the cliffs, looking out over the glittering strait.

“The mountains that rise before us,” she intoned, “are part of the chain known as er-Rif, geologically speaking a component of the great cordillera that once stretched southward from the Iberian Peninsula into what is now Africa, which was not separated from the European continent by the Strait of Gibraltar until the Tertiary.”

“Good gosh,” Gideon said, “you keep listening to Adrian and maybe you can start giving me some competition at Trivial Pursuit.”

“Nobody can give you competition at Trivial Pursuit. Gideon, you got a call from Fausto on the cell phone. The lab said the wires in the lamp cord were definitely filed, not just worn down.”

He sat down beside her. “So somebody really did try to kill me.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No. But I can’t help being astonished.”

“The difference being?”

“There’s an old story, supposedly about Noah Webster, the dictionary guy, in which Webster’s wife catches him in some hankypanky with the maid. ‘Mr. Webster, I am surprised!’ she says. ‘No, my dear,’ says Webster, ‘
I
am surprised.
You
are astonished.’ However, I’ve also seen it attributed to Samuel Johnson, and even Winston Churchill, so the provenance is dubious, to say the least.”

“See?” she said, laughing. “You’re in no danger of losing your Trivial Pursuit title belt.” She turned serious. “But I know what you mean: maybe it doesn’t
surprise
you, but you still find it hard to believe. ”

“Exactly.”

“Yes, me too.” She reflected for a moment and stood up with a sigh. “Anyway, Fausto wants you to come in and get fingerprinted so they can start working out whose prints are on the lamp. I told him I’d drop you off at the police station on the way back to the hotel.”

“Do you know where the police station is?”

“I saw it yesterday while I was wandering around on my own. A great old red-brick building with Gothic arches, very Victorian . . . easy to imagine Inspector Lestrade coming out of it on his way to meet with Sherlock Holmes.”

She waited a few seconds for him to get up as well, but he was lost in his thoughts, frowning, staring at nothing.

“Gideon? Are you there? Shall we go?”

He finally stood up. “Definitely. I wanted to talk to Fausto too. There’s something funny about that landslide.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “But something.”

THE
Victorian building downtown turned out to be merely a substation with a sergeant in charge. DCI Sotomayor was to be found at police
headquarters
, which were situated on Rosia Road, about a mile north of town. Following the instructions they were given, Julie located Rosia Road, which angled away from Main Street and ran down toward the waterfront. “I think it’s that building over there,” she said, pulling to a stop.

“You mean the one with the all the police cars out front and that big sign over the entrance that says ‘Royal Gibraltar Police Headquarters? ’ Hmm, you just might have something there.”

“Very funny. Don’t be tedious.”

Laughing, he leaned over to kiss her. “We can’t be more than half a mile from the hotel. I’ll walk back. Think about where you want to have dinner.”

“Let’s just have it in the hotel with the others,” Julie said. “I think it would be good to know what’s going on. Also,” she added with a smile, “I’m more comfortable when we have them all in sight.”

“Okay, see you back there in an hour or less.”

Getting out of the car, he found himself in an area of old buildings, mostly housing salty-sounding businesses: ship chandleries, nautical charts, marine hardware and coatings. The rusted street sign on the wall beside him told him that the alley at whose head he was standing was called South Dockyard Approach, and it led down behind him, predictably enough, to a sprawling dry-dock operation. The two-story police headquarters building in front of him, like others nearby, was made of big, gray, rough-cut stone blocks. Above the Royal Gibraltar Police Department sign was an older one that said
New Mole House,
which suggested that the building had originally had something to do with the docks; possibly, he thought, it had been the customs house. He guessed it dated from the early 1800s. (Later he was to learn that he was a century off. It had been built in 1904 as an office of the Ministry of Defense.)

The front entrance had been constructed as a
porte cochere
, an arched opening big enough to admit a large horse-drawn vehicle. A handsome gate of metal grillwork closed off the inner courtyard, a tranquil Spanish-style patio with ornamental cactuses and palms, enclosed by four white-stuccoed, balconied walls. Within the entry-way vestibule, what had been the old gatekeeper’s stall was now a little office with a desk, behind which sat a sat a smiling, crisply dressed young policeman, his starched white shirt and blue tie immaculate, his blue tunic draped with perfect symmetry over the back of his chair.

“How may I be of service, sir?”

“My name is Gideon Oliver,” Gideon told him through the grated window. “Chief Inspector Sotomayor—”

“Oh, yes, sir, you’re to be fingerprinted and then escorted to the chief inspector’s office.” He made a brief telephone call, then produced a visitors badge, which was given to Gideon to be hung around his neck. No more than twenty seconds after he’d replaced the phone, another constable appeared at the gate, unlatched it, and took Gideon to a booking room where he had his fingerprints rolled by a female constable, also white-shirted and blue-tied, who absentmindedly hummed throughout the task. It took him a moment to recognize the tune: “It’s a Small World, After All.”

“I understand you’re some sort of scientific detective,” she said, finishing up.

“Yes, you could say that.”

“What do you detect?”

He pursed his lips, put his thumb and middle finger to his forehead, and put on a detecting expression. “Tell me, been to Walt Disney World lately?”

Her jaw dropped. “That’s amazing. Disneyland, actually. In Paris. Just last week. But how did you know?”

“Ah, we’re not permitted to divulge our techniques.”

His fingertips cleansed with a waterless cleaner, he was taken down a corridor to Fausto’s office, which was on the ground floor, overlooking the courtyard. He was expecting something expensively furnished — carpeting, framed prints and posters, modern sculpture — to go along with Fausto’s flashy, expensive taste in cars and clothes, but instead he found the Universal Cop’s Office: linoleum flooring; scarred, unmatched furniture, most of it metal; walls completely bare of decoration unless you counted charts, bulletin boards covered with overlapping notes and memos, and maps with pins stuck in them; shelves filled with codes and procedure manuals; desk neat and almost bare. And no sculpture at all, modern or otherwise.