Torquay traffic.”
“Amazing,” Gideon murmured again.
“No, our expert tomorrow will be Tess.” He pointed at the midsized brown-and-white Border collie, which continued politely mock-nipping at their heels, presumably to keep them from wandering off and getting lost and thereby getting her in trouble. “Tess is a tried-and-true cadaver dog—pardon me, a human remains detection dog— inasmuch as she’s trained to find skeletons, and even single bones, as well as decomposing corpses. But she couldn’t track a lost hiker—a lost live hiker—to save her soul. Not her fault, of course; it’s the way she’s been schooled. She’s been taught to alert to nothing but human remains. She’ll even ignore animal remains.”
Gideon only barely caught himself before saying “Amazing” again. “Huh,” he said, “and I thought they were all just general-purpose tracking dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, with some specific training tacked on.”
“Good heavens, no,” Hicks exclaimed. “They’re not tracking dogs at all, never were. Tracking dogs require tracks, don’t you see. Either literal tracks or some specific scent article belonging to the person. And they generally require some specific starting point. But these”—he used the stem of his pipe to jab at the animals—“are air-scent canines. They don’t look for an individual person or object but for a specific type of smell. They can start from anywhere, they don’t need scent articles, they—” His rosy cheeks turned a little redder. “Gentlemen, I beg your pardon. I’m boring you, I’m sure. It’s only that I don’t get a chance to talk about it very much anymore.”
“Ah, well, we’re bearing up,” Clapper said stoically.
“It’s extremely interesting,” Gideon said. “There’s a lot more to it than I thought.”
“Oh, that’s only the start,” Hicks said, recognizing Gideon as the curious scientist he was. “There’s a remarkable field of knowledge here. Come into the house for another cup of tea, or something stronger, if you like, and I will astound and edify you.”
“We’re for it now,” Clapper muttered crossly on the way back in.
NINE
HICKS began simply enough. What a dog had that a person didn’t was not only the ability to discriminate between extremely similar scents, but to locate the source of smells much more precisely than any human being could possibly hope to. It came naturally. What the dog was doing when he located a buried human bone was no different than what he did when he dug up a beef bone that he’d buried in the backyard months before. He doesn’t “know” where he buried it, he simply picks up the scent of a decaying bone on the air. Other animals, such as cats, actually have more scent receptors than dogs—was Gideon aware of that?—but of course the dog’s emotional and behavioral characteristics made it infinitely more amenable to training and working in the field.
Interesting enough, and so far so good, but when Hicks got into the chemistry of putrefactive olfaction (chemistry had never been Gideon’s strong suit) he rapidly left Gideon behind. (“Some say that the dog responds to the outgassing of volatile fatty acids and ionic compounds, but I maintain—have always maintained—that it is at the level of the major histocompatability complex, where unique protein markers form, that differentiation between these markers results in recognition.”)
“Ah,” said Gideon dully, while Clapper dozed peacefully, “amazing.”
ONCE Hicks had a full head of steam going, he was unstoppable, so it wasn’t until five-fifteen that Clapper and Gideon, dazed with canine lore, were let loose, and five forty-five by the time Gideon climbed Garrison Hill in the gathering mist and got back to Star Castle. In his room, on the table by the casement window, was a note from Julie:
Hi, Prof,
Hope your session with the sergeant-major went better than yesterday’s. Having put in a hard day’s work furthering human knowledge, a few of us have headed for the Bishop and Wolf for a relaxing pre-dinner pint or two.
Dinner’s not till seven, so come join us!
XXX, J
The Bishop and Wolf had been the consortium’s pub of choice during its first convening two years earlier, and Julie had pointed it out on their walk through Hugh Town when they’d arrived; the oldest building in the village, an attractive, mid-seventeenth-century stone inn with pansy-filled window boxes that added a whimsical and unlikely Bavarian air to the facade, and a hanging sign that showed a gigantic, slavering wolf crouching over a bishop’s mitre-topped lighthouse (the pub had been named for the Bishop and the Wolf, two of St. Mary’s earliest lighthouses). Situated in the center of the village, on the little square where the Strand and the Parade angled together, it was only a five-minute walk from Garrison Hill, so that it was a few minutes before six when Gideon pulled open the door and entered an old English pub, traditional in the extreme: cozy and plain, with nets, glass globes, and odds and ends on the walls; dark, old wooden tables; and a fitting, not-really-unpleasant fug of beer, wine, and cigarette smoke in the air.
They were at two pulled-together square tables near the back wall: Julie, Liz Petra, Rudy Walker, Victor Waldo, Donald Pinckney, and Donald’s man-eating wife, Cheryl, who looked bored, bony, and exotic in a flared white pantsuit that appeared to have come from the cleaners’ five minutes before. The barmaid was in the act of taking orders, probably for their second round. Only Joey and Kozlov weren’t there.
“Hi, all.” Gideon asked the barmaid for a pint of best bitter and pulled up a chair between Julie and Victor, well out of Cheryl’s range.
“Oh, Gideon, hi, sweetheart,” Julie said. “How did it go today? I was just telling everybody about the bone.”
“A human bone, I understand?” Donald said. “A tibia?” He was wearing another button on his shirt: I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables.
“Partial tibia of an adult male,” Gideon said, “with signs of dismembering at the distal end.”
“Signs of dismembering?” Victor echoed. “What would be the ‘signs’ of dismembering?”
And so he had to go through it again. His explanation was met with more interest than he might have expected, except from Cheryl, who, still nursing her earlier drink—a straight-up martini—was exchanging lingering, supposedly covert glances with a husky bodybuilder-type in a muscle shirt a couple of tables away. An olive on a toothpick slipped suggestively between her lips and out again.
“And do they have any idea to whom it might belong?” asked Donald, resolutely avoiding taking notice of his
