turned to her guidebook for suggestions. Given the mood they were in after the half hour they’d spent in the cemetery, the Lord Nelson Brasserie and Bar seemed appropriate. “Located in the eighteenth-century Casemates Barracks building,” according to Julie’s guidebook, “and fitted out like the deck of a ship, with beams wrapped in sails, ceiling lights concealed in crow’s nests, a painted blue sky, and historic paintings of the Battle of Trafalgar on the two-meter-thick stone walls, it is one of Gibraltar’s most atmospheric dining places.”
And so it was, but the boat-shaped bar and every table in the house were loaded with cruise passengers downing a last ale or stout before returning to their ships, so they sat outside on the pleasant terrace, situated at one end of the immense Grand Casemates Square (“the scene of Gibraltar’s last public hanging,” explained the ever-helpful guidebook).
Over smooth, soothing pints of bitter, their resolve to drop the subject of Gideon’s near-death experiences melted away. “If we’re right about it being one of your cohorts,” Julie said, “then we’re down to four people.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Audrey, Adrian, Corbin, and Pru. No, make that five, with Buck. But Pru-” She jerked her head. “There’s no way it could be Pru. I mean…”
“You’re right, it’s not Pru,” Gideon said. “Definitely not.”
“Definitely?”
“Definitely. It was Pru who hauled me up off the mountainside. If she’d pushed me over in the first place, she’d hardly have done that, would she. So, no, it’s not Pru.”
“Yes, you’re right. That makes me feel better. So – wait a minute, we’re forgetting about Rowley.”
“Oh, I don’t see how-”
“No, I know he hardly seems like a killer, but think for a minute. Didn’t you tell me he’d gone up earlier to make sure things were set up for your lecture? He’d have had the perfect opportunity to get rid of the mat and all. And, and ” – she was warming to her subject – “he would have been a familiar figure around there. No one would have been surprised to see him up on stage. He could easily have… no?” she said in response to the shaking of his head.
“Well, yes, he could probably have gotten away with it better than the others, but he’s the one who pointed out the problem, who told me the mat was gone. He’s the only reason I didn’t get fried.” To a crisp , his mutinous mind insisted on adding.
“Oh, you didn’t tell me that,” she said, a bit let down. “So that lets the two of them out. Pru and Rowley. So we’re left with – who? Adrian, Corbin, Audrey, and Buck. I don’t know – can you really see any of them as would-be murderers?”
“Mmm… well, Audrey, maybe.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Audrey? Are you-”
“I’m kidding,” he assured her. “Come on.”
She smiled. “Well, I’m glad you’re able to joke about it.”
Gideon ordered a steak-and-ale pie for dinner. Julie, whose appetite had returned with a vengeance, ordered what she always did when she was truly, deeply hungry: the biggest hamburger they had, with everything on it. In the Lord Nelson’s case, the HMS Victory Burger was a truly monstrous concoction topped with representatives from every known food group: mushrooms, bacon, egg, cheese, onions, sausage, lettuce, and tomato. It took a knife and fork to get at it, but Julie demolished every morsel, along with the French fries that came alongside.
While they ate, they continued a generally unsatisfactory and wholly unproductive discussion of who and why, but they managed to end on a positive note.
“Okay,” Julie said, “are you ready for the good news?”
“There’s good news?”
“Yes, I just thought of it. If what’s been happening is really related to those articles in the papers, then at least you can stop worrying. You’ve already given the speech and everybody now knows there was no big revelation. You can stop looking over your shoulder. That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“Very. I hadn’t thought of it myself.”
“Still, I imagine you’d probably like to know what it was all about.”
“Know who’s been trying to kill me? Oh, well, yeah, I suppose I have a certain mild interest in the matter.”
THIRTEEN
Breakfast in the hotel dining room the next morning was somewhat strained, at least from Gideon’s perspective. It’s hard to relax and enjoy your kippers and eggs when you keep sneaking looks around the table wondering just which one of your merry companions has been trying to cut your life short. And – just in case it wasn’t your now-completed and demonstrably harmless lecture that had elicited the attempts – whether he (or she) would be giving it another shot today.
The day before, while he and Julie had breakfasted on their balcony, everyone else had gone down to the dining room, pulled a couple of tables together, and eaten as a group. Apparently, this was to be the pattern for the rest of their stay, inasmuch as the pulled-together tables were waiting for them this morning, covered with tablecloths, with menus and place settings laid out, and everyone there.
If anyone noticed that Julie’s and Gideon’s moods were subdued, it wasn’t apparent. The conversation around them mostly concerned a controversial paper presented at the conference the day before, in which the author asserted, by means of a complicated mathematical model, that, had the Neanderthals been vegetarians instead of meat-eaters, their ecological niche would have been more bountiful, and they would have survived, possibly out- competing the invading Homo sapiens and causing their extinction. Audrey and Pru thought it made sense; Adrian and Corbin asserted it was poppycock. The discussion was spirited, peppery, and somewhat dogmatic, in the usual manner of academics quarreling over the arcane details of their discipline. Julie and Gideon were allowed to eat quietly without participating.
Midway through the meal, Rowley Boyd came in, slipped without saying anything into the vacant chair next to Adrian, and shook his head when the waiter asked if he wanted breakfast. Although the subject matter was something he’d ordinarily have jumped right in on, he sat, silent and grave, his chin in his hand, his forefinger slowly, meditatively tapping his lower lip, his downcast eyes on the table. His trusty pipe peeped unused from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. Eventually, Adrian, apparently thrown off his rhythm by the mushroom cloud of gloom that had settled in beside him, asked with an impatient sigh if something was wrong.
“Yes,” said Rowley, looking somberly up. His normally affable face was startlingly haggard and pinched.
The arguing came to an abrupt halt. A chill washed over the table like a surge of cold sea water.
“Wh… what is it?” Corbin said after a moment.
“Ivan’s dead.”
“Ivan Gunderson?” Corbin asked stupidly.
“No, Ivan the Terrible, for Christ’s sake,” muttered Pru out of the side of her mouth.
“But he was just here the other night! We were all talking to him!”
It struck Gideon, not for the first time, how often people responded like that to news of a death. “But I had dinner with him yesterday! ” “But I just saw her this morning!” As if it was impossible for someone to be alive one minute and dead the next, although that was precisely the way it was. And yet he felt some of the same dull, hopeless denial. Gunderson dead? Impossible! He was here just the other day, wasn’t he?
“How did it happen, Rowley?” Audrey asked tonelessly.
Rowley was searching the room for their waiter. “I, ah, believe I should like a cup of coffee after all.”
“Take mine,” Gideon said, sliding over his cup and saucer.
The cup was full, but Rowley drained it without setting it down, in two long gulps. “Thank you.” He placed the cup on the table and breathed slowly in and out. His exhausted eyes were now focused on his hands, lying clasped on the table. “It happened the night before last, or rather very early yesterday morning, only a little while after I drove him home from the dinner. I learned of it only last night. I couldn’t believe it. He’d been fine when I left him – well, perhaps a little disoriented, as you know, but-”
“Rowley,” Gideon said. “What happened?”
“Sorry. He was smoking in bed. He did that, you know. He smoked a pipe too; he had a rack of Meerschaums,
