“It is?” she said, running her fingers gently over the rough, splintery surface. She was intrigued now. “This bone that I’m holding is actually from Gibraltar Woman herself?”
“Absolutely. See here, where the end of the transverse process is broken off? That delicate, lacy, sort of filigreed-looking stuff underneath? That’s interior bone, cancellous bone; no mistaking it. You can’t get results that fine with a cast.”
“But I thought all the actual bones went to the British Museum.”
“They did.”
Her eyes widened. “This was stolen from the British Museum?”
“No, ma’am,” he said airily, “it was never in the British Museum. ”
“But if the bones all went to-” She put the bones down with an exasperated little cluck and a cautionary glance. “Gideon, if what you’re trying to do is confuse me-”
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said, laughing, “just trying to enhance the narrative tension – you know me. Look, the crux of it is – and this is what’s really special about it – Gibraltar Woman didn’t have a tenth thoracic vertebra.”
“If that’s supposed to unconfuse me-”
“The remains that were excavated at Europa Point were far from complete; you know that. They included the first, second, fourth, fifth, seventh, and ninth thoracics, and that’s about as far down as Gibraltar Woman goes, really. Below that level, there’s hardly anything left of her, just a fragmentary fifth lumbar and a bit of sacrum. Oh, and a piece of acetabular rim.”
“But no T10? Are you sure?”
“Am I sure? Julie, I ran the damn study, didn’t I? I worked over these things for three weeks. I know every nook and notch and foramen in her body. Well, in every bone in her body. Well, in every bone that was left. And this one wasn’t left.”
“Well, then, it has to be from someone else.” Her forehead puckered. “Doesn’t it?”
“No, it’s from her, all right. The ankylosing spondylitis makes that clear.”
She sighed. “I knew that at some point in this life I was going to have to learn what ankylosing spondylitis is. It might as well be now.”
“It’s not that complicated. Spondylos, vertebra; itis, inflammation; ankylose, to fuse, to grow together into one.” He picked them up to show her. “See here, where they’ve been glued together – this crack that runs between them?”
“Uh-huh. Where the two of them meet.”
“Yes, but normal vertebrae don’t really meet. They’re completely separate bones. In the living body they’re separated by a disk of pulpy soft tissue-”
“Umm… the intervertebral disk.”
“Right, and each intervertebral disk has a kind of tough, cartilaginous ring around it – the annulus fibrosus – that keeps the soft stuff in the middle from squirting out, like toothpaste squirting out of a tube, when you put pressure on the spine – which you do every time you stand up, and even more when you sit down. Well, sometimes the annulus fibrosus calcifies, turns to bone, so that the two vertebrae above and below it become fused together, and the result is-”
“Ankylosing spondylitis.” She took them from him. “Bony bridges that connect one vertebra to another, like these.”
“You got it.”
She made a slight flexing motion of the vertebrae. “You know, they – oh!” To her unmistakable consternation, they came apart with a little pop, so that she was left holding one in each hand. She practically flung them away from her, down onto the table, as if they’d burned her. “Oh, my God! I didn’t mean – I don’t know why I-” Even in the dim light, he could see that she’d paled. “Gideon, I’ve broken-”
“Shh,” he said with a smile, “you haven’t broken anything, sweetheart. Come on, relax that wrinkled brow.” He leaned forward to smooth her taut forehead with his hand. “You’ll wear out that sexy little musculus frontalis. “Look-” He picked the two pieces up to show her. “They just separated where Rosie glued them, that’s all. No harm done. See? They’d already been broken before.”
“Whew,” she said, melting back into her chair. “Is that ever a relief. I could already see the headlines: ‘Wife of Well-Known Anthropologist Destroys Priceless Scientific Relic.’ ”
“No, no,” he said laughing. “In fact, it makes the point I’m making even better than before. Look at how the edges match up. They hardly needed the glue.” His tongue between his teeth, he put the two segments gingerly together – they virtually clicked into place – and held them up for her to see. “The broken edges of the bridge make a perfect match, even without the glue, even though one is a cast and one is real bone. Which would never happen if they were from two different people.”
“Which is how you can be so sure that they’re both really from Gibraltar Woman?”
“Yes, it’s a real break. Under ordinary circumstances, if I had a T9 and a T10, I might be able to say for sure that they didn’t go together – different ages, different sizes – but I wouldn’t be able to say with certainty that they did go together. But in this case I can – and they do.”
Thoughtfully, she fingered the vertebrae again – very tentatively this time. “It must hurt.”
“Sure, and give you a hunched, miserably stiff back as well. And lung and heart problems go along with it. Eye problems too. Basically, it’s a kind of arthritis, really, very incapacitating when it’s as severe as this.”
“But she was only in her mid-twenties. I would have thought this was an old person’s disease.”
“Well, most kinds of arthritis are, but not this. In fact, her age is one of the things that pointed specifically to ankylosing spondylitis. It’s not wear and tear or anything like that, you see; there’s a strong genetic component to it, and it affects primarily young adults – mostly men, usually, but sometimes… well, as you see…”
“How awful… a young mother…”
He nodded his agreement. He was suddenly tired – depleted, depressed – and he could see that Julie was too. No wonder, it was going on midnight, and it had been a very long day; the session at the morgue, which seemed to have been a week ago, had been only this morning. In addition, their predinner drinks and dinner wine had caught up with them. Still, they soldiered on, raising the obvious questions: Where had that T10 come from? Well, from Europa Point, obviously, since that was where the rest of Gibraltar Woman had come from. But how had Sheila gotten it? Had she dug it up long after the dig was formally closed down, when she’d been prowling around the cave with a trowel? Had she found it before the dig was ever started and kept it a secret? Did she find it during the dig and surreptitiously make off with it? And for all of those questions – why? And why did she have it in her room at the conference? Did it have something to do with her murder? Well, they were pretty sure they knew the answer to that; it did. But what?
But they had run out of steam and weren’t getting anywhere, and they knew it. Besides, by now it was getting chilly out on the terrace. “It’s late,” he said. “Why don’t we leave this till morning, when we’re fresh? What do you say we call it a day?”
She nodded. “I’m for that. I’m exhausted.”
At the reception desk they had the young night clerk, who had come on when George left, put the bag back into the safe and asked for the key to room 205. She went sleepily to the wall of grinning plush monkeys on hooks, reached toward them, and stopped, hand in the air.
“It’s not here.” She turned back to them. “Are you sure you don’t have it?”
“No, I left it right here about seven o’clock, with George.”
The clerk – her name plate said “Kayla” – scanned the rows of monkeys. “I don’t see it. Are you positive you didn’t take it with you?”
“Believe me, I’d know about it if I had a monkey in my pocket.”
Kayla was still staring at the wall. “Did you actually see him hang it, or-”
“No, I didn’t see him hang it. Look, can we get another one until you find it? We’re pretty bushed.”
Once upstairs (inasmuch as the Rock Hotel used vintage metal room keys, not electronic cards, Kayla had to go up with them to let them in), Julie went yawning to the closet to get her nightie. Gideon, who had meanwhile brushed his teeth, came out of the bathroom to see her standing at the open closet door with a frown on her face.
“Lose something?” he asked.
