conjured up for him.
TWENTY-ONE
DESPITE Merrill’s promise, he did not arrive back by teatime. It was 5:50 p.m. by the time the helicopter set him down on Holgate’s Green, and he immediately telephoned Clapper’s private number to bring him up to date on the autopsy, but it was Anna at the answering service that picked up, and she had a message waiting for him.
“Hello, love, the sergeant’s just gone out for dinner with his lady-friend, but he said if you get back by six or six-thirty, why don’t you come and join him, and bring your wife, if you like? They’ve gone to the Atlantic Inn. Do you know where it is, love, or do you require directions?”
Gideon did not require directions. He had passed it several times on his way to his morning pasties and coffee at the Kavorna Cafe; a pleasant-looking old hotel and pub on the main street, right at the foot of the pier. He put in a call to Julie, who was at the nightly cocktail hour in the castle dungeon—it had been canceled the night before on account of Joey’s death, but Kozlov had now reinstituted it—and passed along the invitation.
“I’d love to!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you dying to find out what Mike’s ‘lady-friend’ is like?”
“What his lady-friend is like? Yes, sure. I suppose so. Sure.”
“Men,” Julie grumbled.
AS it turned out, however, Clapper’s choice of lady-friend surprised—and, on reflection, pleased—both of them. It was, of all people, the bangled, gabby Madeleine Goodfellow, director of the museum, and they heard her before they saw her. She and Clapper were at a table on a little, whitewashed terrace in back, looking out over a picture- postcard view of beached fishing boats resting all askew on the sand at low tide, and her jolly cackle of a laugh easily penetrated the buzz of conversation in the restaurant, the click of balls at the pool table, and the whirring of the slot machines.
“It’s Madeleine!” Julie said, delighted. “How wonderful! She’s just what he needs. She’ll be so good for him.”
“And I suspect he’ll be pretty good for her, too. He’s a pretty solid guy, Julie, underneath it all.”
Over dinners of oxtail soup, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding, Gideon explained what he and Merrill had come up with, keeping the more grisly autopsy details to himself in deference to Julie’s and Madeleine’s sensibilities. Still, the conclusion was clear enough to all: Joey had been thrown from the catwalk (probably) and then bludgeoned (certainly) while he lay on the ground. Murdered.
Sobered, they talked about the two killings for a while, throwing around conjectures—obviously, Clapper had been keeping Madeleine abreast—but by the time dinner was finished, and the men were into their second pints (ginger beer for Clapper) and the women into their second half-pints, they livened up and conversation turned to other matters. Clapper and Madeleine were to be married in the fall and would live, not above the police station, but in a nineteenth-century house on Tresco that had been in Madeleine’s family since the 1930s and was now being restored. They would have a view over the famous old Abbey Gardens and out across the Sound toward St. Mary’s, from which they would be a mere ten minutes by boat. Gideon and Julie were enthusiastically invited to the wedding and enthusiastically accepted. They clinked glasses—Madeleine’s bangles jingled—and talked on and on, until after eleven.
All in all, it was a welcome break from the events of the last few days, and Julie and Gideon were utterly relaxed as they walked back up Garrison Hill to the castle, hand in hand.
“Well, one mystery is solved anyway,” Julie said.
“What would that be?”
“Remember when you showed up at the museum reception the other night, straight from the police station, and you were surprised that Madeleine already knew about the bones from the beach?”
Gideon nodded.
“I think I can make a pretty good guess who she heard it from.”
“You just might be on to something,” Gideon said.
WHEN he awakened the next morning, Gideon was sorely in need of a break. The session at the morgue had taken more out of him than he’d realized, and he wondered once again at Merrill’s ability to seemingly draw strength from his gruesome work. He’d suggested to Julie that she might want to play hooky for just one morning and join him, but while she’d obviously been drawn to the idea, she felt that she owed it to Kozlov and the others to be there.
“What’s the morning’s topic?” Gideon had asked.
“Victor’s presenting his paper on…” She’d looked at her copy of the program, open on the bed. “‘… a three- tiered social-constructivist ecological paradigm derived from monistic-subjectivist epistemology, relativist ontology, and genuinely hermeneutic methodology.” God help me.“
Gideon stared open-mouthed at her for a moment. “Oh, well, you sure wouldn’t want to miss that. Damn, sure wish I could be there.”
So he was on his own, which suited him on this particular morning. After breakfast at the Kavorna Cafe (he’d been coming long enough for the waitress to ask if he wanted “the usual,” which he did), he decided to take advantage of the pleasant weather and see some of the island’s Neolithic sites.
On a whim he’d inquired about bicycles at the Kavorna and been directed to Buccabu Bike Hire on the Strand. Once there he’d somewhat shamefacedly asked for the least-complicated, easiest-to-operate bicycle they had (it had been a while since he’d been on one).
The clerk smiled knowledgeably. “Know just what you want, mate, got it right here,” he’d said, rolling out a one-speed, heavy-bodied Hampton Cruiser with wide tires, coaster brakes, and upright handlebars.
“Will that do you, mate? Just like you had when you were a kid, eh?”
Indeed, it was closer to his old Schwinn than he’d believed possible. “Just what I wanted.”
Armed with directions from the shop, he had cycled, only a little unevenly, up Telegraph Road, stopping at the Porthmellon store to pick up a picnic lunch, and then onto a dirt road until he found Bant’s Carn and Innisidgen Graves, two well-preserved Bronze Age entrance graves—open, rectangular, half-buried chambers situated at the
