whole dreary, cold, rainy miserable day. You were there most of the time too, weren’t you, Corb?”
“I was. I felt as if it was my… responsibility, as if I owed it to her somehow. I suppose I hoped, in some obscure way, that, by being there, by simply assuming they would find her, that somehow-” He finished with a shrug.
“You understand, Gideon,” Pru said, “at that point we thought – we hoped – she still might be alive.”
“Ah,” said Gideon. He had gone up to the largest hole and was fingering its weathered margins. He picked up a chunk of backfill from it and broke it easily apart with his hands. A mixture of claylike earth with a little humus and some gravelly rock fragments mixed in. Pretty ordinary soil, in other words. But something about it had started the gears of his mind turning. Something gnawed at him, just out of reach…
“But of course, she wasn’t,” Corbin said gravely. “She was buried so very deeply. In fact, they were about to go on to dig the next probe when someone spotted her outstretched fingertips just coming through the dirt, way down in the hole.”
“Me,” Pru said. “I spotted her.”
“How deep in the hole?” Gideon asked. Why he wanted to know he wasn’t sure, but there was something… something…
“Pretty deep,” Pru said, “and even then it was only her fingers we could see. The rest of her was much deeper, probably eight or ten feet down, so of course there was no chance.”
Gideon rubbed his palms together to get the dirt off them. A gritty residue remained. “Do you happen to know what the cause of death was?”
Pru looked strangely at him. “Offhand, I’d say that having had a hundred tons of dirt come down on her might have had something to do with it.”
“No, I mean the actual cause of death, the immediate cause. Asphyxiation? Brain injury? Crushing chest injuries?”
“I have no idea. Why is it important?”
“Just wondering,” he said vaguely.
It was the best he could come up with.
Back at the top, Adrian, the final speaker, had finished up and the ceremony was winding down. Pru went to join Audrey and Buck, who were climbing into Rowley’s van for the ride back. Corbin, who was driving Adrian, waited politely while his mentor accepted compliments and answered questions from a few hangers-on. Julie was waiting for Gideon, sitting on one of the rough stone walls at the edge of the cliffs, looking out over the glittering strait.
“The mountains that rise before us,” she intoned, “are part of the chain known as er-Rif, geologically speaking a component of the great cordillera that once stretched southward from the Iberian Peninsula into what is now Africa, which was not separated from the European continent by the Strait of Gibraltar until the Tertiary.”
“Good gosh,” Gideon said, “you keep listening to Adrian and maybe you can start giving me some competition at Trivial Pursuit.”
“Nobody can give you competition at Trivial Pursuit. Gideon, you got a call from Fausto on the cell phone. The lab said the wires in the lamp cord were definitely filed, not just worn down.”
He sat down beside her. “So somebody really did try to kill me.”
“Are you surprised?”
“No. But I can’t help being astonished.”
“The difference being?”
“There’s an old story, supposedly about Noah Webster, the dictionary guy, in which Webster’s wife catches him in some hankypanky with the maid. ‘Mr. Webster, I am surprised!’ she says. ‘No, my dear,’ says Webster, ‘ I am surprised. You are astonished.’ However, I’ve also seen it attributed to Samuel Johnson, and even Winston Churchill, so the provenance is dubious, to say the least.”
“See?” she said, laughing. “You’re in no danger of losing your Trivial Pursuit title belt.” She turned serious. “But I know what you mean: maybe it doesn’t surprise you, but you still find it hard to believe. ”
“Exactly.”
“Yes, me too.” She reflected for a moment and stood up with a sigh. “Anyway, Fausto wants you to come in and get fingerprinted so they can start working out whose prints are on the lamp. I told him I’d drop you off at the police station on the way back to the hotel.”
“Do you know where the police station is?”
“I saw it yesterday while I was wandering around on my own. A great old red-brick building with Gothic arches, very Victorian… easy to imagine Inspector Lestrade coming out of it on his way to meet with Sherlock Holmes.”
She waited a few seconds for him to get up as well, but he was lost in his thoughts, frowning, staring at nothing.
“Gideon? Are you there? Shall we go?”
He finally stood up. “Definitely. I wanted to talk to Fausto too. There’s something funny about that landslide.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “But something.”
SEVENTEEN
The Victorian building downtown turned out to be merely a substation with a sergeant in charge. DCI Sotomayor was to be found at police headquarters, which were situated on Rosia Road, about a mile north of town. Following the instructions they were given, Julie located Rosia Road, which angled away from Main Street and ran down toward the waterfront. “I think it’s that building over there,” she said, pulling to a stop.
“You mean the one with the all the police cars out front and that big sign over the entrance that says ‘Royal Gibraltar Police Headquarters? ’ Hmm, you just might have something there.”
“Very funny. Don’t be tedious.”
Laughing, he leaned over to kiss her. “We can’t be more than half a mile from the hotel. I’ll walk back. Think about where you want to have dinner.”
“Let’s just have it in the hotel with the others,” Julie said. “I think it would be good to know what’s going on. Also,” she added with a smile, “I’m more comfortable when we have them all in sight.”
“Okay, see you back there in an hour or less.”
Getting out of the car, he found himself in an area of old buildings, mostly housing salty-sounding businesses: ship chandleries, nautical charts, marine hardware and coatings. The rusted street sign on the wall beside him told him that the alley at whose head he was standing was called South Dockyard Approach, and it led down behind him, predictably enough, to a sprawling dry-dock operation. The two-story police headquarters building in front of him, like others nearby, was made of big, gray, rough-cut stone blocks. Above the Royal Gibraltar Police Department sign was an older one that said New Mole House, which suggested that the building had originally had something to do with the docks; possibly, he thought, it had been the customs house. He guessed it dated from the early 1800s. (Later he was to learn that he was a century off. It had been built in 1904 as an office of the Ministry of Defense.)
The front entrance had been constructed as a porte cochere, an arched opening big enough to admit a large horse-drawn vehicle. A handsome gate of metal grillwork closed off the inner courtyard, a tranquil Spanish-style patio with ornamental cactuses and palms, enclosed by four white-stuccoed, balconied walls. Within the entry-way vestibule, what had been the old gatekeeper’s stall was now a little office with a desk, behind which sat a sat a smiling, crisply dressed young policeman, his starched white shirt and blue tie immaculate, his blue tunic draped with perfect symmetry over the back of his chair.
“How may I be of service, sir?”
“My name is Gideon Oliver,” Gideon told him through the grated window. “Chief Inspector Sotomayor-”
“Oh, yes, sir, you’re to be fingerprinted and then escorted to the chief inspector’s office.” He made a brief
