Clapper scowled at him, but he was amused. “Oh, I can see I’m going to enjoy hanging about with you.” He looked for an ashtray but didn’t find one. “Try and carry on without me for a minute, will you?” He went to his office in search of an ashtray and came back with a metal one logoed The Goat and Compass, Norwich.
“Well, now here’s something,” Gideon said as Clapper sat down, the ashtray in his lap. With his thumb, Gideon was stroking a smooth, dime-sized area on the lower margin of the right tibia, the part that connects to the ankle. “You don’t see these very often in modern skeletons, other than Asians.”
Clapper peered at the spot but obviously saw nothing. Still, he was interested. “You’re saying this bloke is from Asia? You can tell from that little spot?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all. Well, not necessarily. You see, I’m fairly sure it’s a squatting facet, though admittedly not a very distinct one. Asians have them more frequently than other people because—”
“Because squatting is more common in the East,” Clapper supplied.
“Right.” Gideon checked the other tibia. “Yes, this one has it, too. I’d feel more confident about their definitely being squatting facets if we had a talus—the ankle bone just below this one—because then we’d look for a matching facet on the medial portion of the trochlear surface, where the two bones abut. But as you see, we don’t have a talus.”
“Pity, that,” said Clapper. “But assuming that you’re correct, and that these are indeed squatting facets, what is there to be made of them?”
Gideon put the tibias down. “Well, that, at some point in his life, this guy did a lot of squatting. Squatting requires dorsiflexion of the foot—” He demonstrated with his hand, laying it flat on the table, palm-down, then raising it with a sharp bend of the wrist. “—and habitual dorsiflexion results in bone remodeling that produces squatting facets… like these.”
“I see,” Clapper said dryly, emitting twin plumes of smoke from his nostrils. “You’re telling me that we’re dealing with a habitual squatter here. A serial squatter, as it were.”
It was the kind of labored drollery that would have annoyed Gideon two days ago, coming from the newly met Sergeant Clapper, but now he knew Clapper better and he laughed. “All I can tell you is what I find. This guy had some kind of occupation, or hobby, or maybe a cultural upbringing, that involved a whole lot of squatting. If it helps identify him, great. If not, I can’t help that.”
“Couldn’t just be someone who spent a lot of time in the loo, could it?”
“Mm,” Gideon said abstractedly. He had gotten out of his chair and picked up the ulna now—the larger of the two forearm bones— and was slowly running his fingertips down it with his eyes closed. Like most anthropologists, he relied on his fingers almost as much as his eyes. It was touch, along with sight, that revealed the unobtrusive little ridges and facets and depressions that could tell the story of a lifetime—as well as the nicks and notches and cracks that might well throw light on the last few seconds of it.
In this case, it was a ridge that had captured his interest, a small, sharp ridge near the top of the ulna—the larger of the two forearm bones—that ran diagonally, front to back, for not much more than an inch, a little below the elbow joint. First his middle finger and then his thumb slid lightly over it.
“This is the supinator crest,” he said after a very long silence during which Clapper had sighed, and yawned, and finally gathered himself up in preparation to leave.
“Oh, yes?” Clapper replied politely, partway out of his chair.
“Yes,” murmured Gideon, who at this point wasn’t paying any more attention to Clapper than Clapper was paying to him. “Everyone has it. But this particular one is extremely well developed.” He was, in effect, talking to himself, something he was prone to doing when looking at bones. Julie accused him of talking to them, but it was himself he was addressing; he was firm about that.
“Now, the supinator crest,” he continued, “naturally, is the origin of the supinator muscle, or at least of the deep layer of it…”
“Naturally.”
“… which is the primary muscle involved in supination…”
“Well, I could have told you that.”
“… of the hand, especially when the arm is in an extended position. Now that is interesting.”
Clapper, who’d remained half-in, half-out of his chair, dropped down again. “Maybe you’d better run through that again. What’s interesting?”
“Well, supination—” Aware that Clapper, like most people, might be a little hazy about the term, again used his own hand to illustrate, once more placing it palm down on the table, but this time flipping it over sideways with a twist of his forearm so it rested on its back. “That’s supination of the hand.” Like turning a doorknob, he almost said, before remembering that doorknobs were few and far between in Europe, where handles were preferred. And turning a door handle—pressing it down, really—mostly involved the muscles of the upper arm and shoulder.
Clapper shook his head, puzzled. “So?”
“So whoever owned this bone did a great deal of just that movement, only with some stress associated with it. And it occurs to me— now this is just a shot in the dark, with nothing solid to go on, you understand. I’m not asserting anything, I’m not even hypothesizing, really…”
“I imagine,” Clapper mused to the walls, “that if I sit here long enough, eventually he’ll come round to telling me what it is that’s occurred to him.”
“Well, only that supination”—he turned his hand over again—“is the motion that’s involved in using a screwdriver, or to some extent in screwing on a radiator cap, or battery cap, or in—”
“Or in,” Clapper said, catching on, “all manner of tasks having to do with maintaining motor cars.” Thoughtfully, he picked a shred of tobacco from his tongue. “You really believe, then, that this might be our automobile mechanic, Pete Williams? That Villarreal actually murdered him over some silly academic dispute?”
“Well, I’m not about to go that far,” Gideon said. “For all we know he’s still happily walking around London and working on his book at night, so let’s find that out first, but right now”—he repeated what Liz had said to him at the Bishop and Wolf the previous night— “we sure don’t have any other hypotheses to go on.”
