Murder in the Queen's Armes

'Do you mean there's only one Poundbury Man? Aren't there others from the same... the same population, that look more or less like him?'

'No,” Gideon said, pausing to watch some skinny children feed bread chunks to some fat ducks, “he's one of a kind. He's Homo sapiens, of course, but no one else from that time and that place has been found. And he is remarkably dolichocephalic—long-headed. Whether he was just an oddball that way, or whether all his people looked like that, no one knows, because he's the only one we've got. There are even some anthropologists who want to dub him a separate subspecies—Homo sapiens poundburiensis, or some such.'

'Really? They want to postulate an entire subspecific population on the basis of a single fragmentary—” She burst into sudden laughter, startling the ducks. “Good gosh, I'm starting to talk like you!'

'That's what happens to married people.'

'After five days?'

Gideon shrugged. “You must be a quick study.'

'I guess I am.” She reached out for his hand as they moved on over a low stone bridge. “Well, anyway, if not a museum, what about a private collector? Aren't some fabulously rich eccentrics supposed to have their own collections of stolen Rembrandts or Vermeers, even though they can't show them to anyone? Wouldn't this thing be worth money to someone like that?'

'Rembrandts I can see, but a broken old piece of skull? He'd have to be pretty eccentric, all right.'

'Mmm,” Julie said, thinking. “Okay, could it be some kind of joke? Maybe Pummy's just been hidden, not stolen, and the other skull was put in the case as a hoax.'

'The same thing's occurred to me. But what for?'

'To make Professor Hall-Waddington look silly? Maybe you weren't supposed to find it and tell him in your nice way. Maybe there was supposed to be a big scandal.'

'Possibly... This is all pretty conjectural, isn't it?'

'Yes, but it's fascinating.'

They crossed a final footbridge and found themselves with surprising suddenness out of the dappled shade and back on the High Street, a few blocks from where they'd started.

Gideon looked at his watch. “Feel like walking some more?'

'Uh-uh.'

'Want to drop into a pub?'

'They don't open for another hour.'

'That's right. Well, let's see, what can we do?'

She cocked her head at him. “Here you are on your honeymoon, with your beautiful young bride at your side, and your hotel less than two blocks away...and you can't think of anything to do?'

'Nope,” he said blandly, “not a thing. But why don't we go up to our room, take off our clothes, and lie down? Maybe something will occur to me.'

* * * *

IT was two hours before they arrived for dinner at the Judge Jeffreys on the High Street, an ancient inn with a grim past, having been the lodging of Baron George Jeffreys, the presiding judge at the Bloody Assize of 1685, when seventy-four of Cromwell's royalist opponents had been executed. Nevertheless, the dining room was cozy and country-pubbish, a centuries-old room with rough-beamed ceiling and stone-mullioned, multipaned windows of wavy, leaded glass.

'What would you think,” Gideon said as they settled into a black, gleaming wooden booth, “of spending the next day or two in Charmouth? Since we're in the area anyway, I'd like to drop in on a dig near there—Stonebarrow Fell. I thought maybe I'd better stop in and see how Nate Marcus is doing.'

'Here we are then,” said their hurried waitress, and laid the pints of bitter they'd ordered on the table. Julie and Gideon clinked the heavy glass mugs in a wordless toast.

'Why ‘better stop in'?” Julie asked. “And who's Nate Marcus? An old friend of yours?'

Gideon nodded. “I haven't seen him a few years, but we were both graduate students at Wisconsin, under Abe Goldstein. He's head of the anthro department at some place called Gelden College in Missouri. When Abe heard you and I were thinking of coming this way, he suggested I stop by and see if I couldn't keep him out of trouble.'

'What kind of trouble?'

Gideon sipped the cool, soothing bitter. “The same as always,” he said. “Nate rubs a lot of people the wrong way. He can be pretty...well, abrasive.'

'Abrasive? You mean rude?'

'Yes, rude. And flip and sarcastic, and aggressive and thin-skinned. Know-it-all...arrogant...'

'This is one of your old friends? I'd love to hear you describe an enemy.'

Gideon laughed. “To tell the truth, I do like him—most of the time anyway—even if I'm not exactly sure why. He and I sat up a lot of nights, over a lot of pitchers of beer, at the old Student Union in Madison, arguing anthropological trivia until four in the morning. Those are good memories.'

'Well, he still sounds awful. What's he doing in charge of a dig?'

'For one thing, his excavating technique is impeccable. For another, the Stonebarrow Fell site is his personal