thing, ever since I heard Michael Ventris speak on the radio when I was a boy.’
‘Ah Ventris!’ Orr’s eyes lit up. ‘I remember that broadcast well. I met him, you know. Yes, yes. Extraordinary, quite extraordinary.’ He saw the blank look on the others faces and added, ‘He deciphered Linear B, you see. Quite amazing. He had no right to do it. Well, it had baffled everyone else, and he was a total amateur, but he did it anyway. An architect, he was. Probably the only worthwhile thing any architect has done this century, I should say.’
Harriet Rutter gave one of the delighted chuckles that Kathy noticed she reserved for Orr’s little quips.
‘Did you ever work in Crete yourself?’ Brock asked.
‘Aye, indeed. Sir Arthur Evans was my inspiration, though I never met him, of course. I’m not quite that old. But I visited his house at Knossos not long after the end of the war. The commander of the German forces had used it as his residence, you know. Anyway, I stayed there and took part in the work for a couple of months. That was what I call real archaeology, with none of the modern methods they have these days: magnetometers and potentiometers and all their electronic gadgets, drenching the ground with their electro-magnetic rays… ha!’ His face twisted in a wild sort of grin. ‘When I began, with Thom, our favourite tool was the bayonet!’
‘Tom?’ Kathy queried politely.
‘Aye. I was with Thom on North Uist, don’t you know.’
The way he said this, it sounded like someone might say, I was with Scott in the Antarctic, or, I was with Armstrong on the moon.
‘Really?’ she said vaguely. She wanted to ask, Tom who?, but held her tongue.
‘I can see by the look on your face that you’ve never heard of the great Alexander Thom, young woman,’ he accused.
‘I’m afraid-’
‘One of the greatest archaeologists these islands have produced, no less. It was Alexander Thom who deciphered the meaning of the ancient stone circles and rings which exist across the face of this country. It was he who revealed the fact that, one thousand years before the earliest mathematicians of Ancient Greece, a civilisation flourished in these islands which made free use of Pythagorean triangles, and nurtured astronomers of such extraordinary accomplishment that they were familiar with the variations in the inclination of the moon’s orbit three and a half thousand years before Tycho Brahe rediscovered them!’
‘Is that right?’
‘Aye, it is right! I spent the summers of fifty-seven and fifty-eight with Dr Thom, as he then was, surveying the great slabs of Sornach Coir Fhinn and Leacach an Tigh Chloiche. I was at his side as he strode the heather, driving his bayonet into the deep peat to find the fallen stones hidden beneath the surface. And I shared his tent at night, drinking his usque, as he refined his calculations of the true value of the megalithic yard.’
‘The what?’ Brock asked.
‘The megalithic yard! It might surprise your young colleagues to learn that almost four thousand years ago, when they probably imagine these islands were populated by painted savages, there existed a common standard unit of measure, the megalithic yard, which was in use throughout the British Isles, from the English Channel to the Outer Hebrides, and was employed to set out the dimensions of all the stone circles throughout the land. Just think of that! Imagine how that standard length was maintained and propagated across a thousand miles of wild country without benefit of roads or writing. Eh? How did they communicate it? How did they agree upon it, to two decimal places?’
‘Yes, I see,’ Brock said. ‘Quite a mystery.’
Actually it doesn’t much surprise us, Kathy thought, for the good reason that none of us is that interested. She could see Lowry sitting unblinking, expressionless, almost as if he were asleep with his eyes open, while she had been thinking of the meal that Leon might have ready for her, and wishing that they could move on from the megalithic yard to more immediately pressing matters.
‘It’s a great mystery, indeed. A very great mystery,’ Orr continued. ‘But that is only one of many mysteries. For example, the skeletons of these people, the ones that we’ve discovered in their graves and burial mounds, are almost invariably young. It was practically a civilisation of teenagers, their life expectancy about thirty, that is all.’ He glared balefully in the direction of the mall. ‘Much the way our young people are heading today, one might think, from observing their goings-on in this place.’
‘You keep an eye on them, then, the children here?’ Brock said mildly, and Lowry immediately seemed to wake up and look carefully at Orr.
‘How could one not, Chief Inspector? They swagger along the mall looking as if they’ve inherited the earth, instead of a self-indulgent fantasy of dope and baubles.’
‘You’re aware of children taking drugs here?’
‘No, no, no. I don’t mean that, exactly. I’m just referring to the emptiness of their lives.’
‘But you keep your eyes open, all the same. It’s that I wanted to speak to you about. Your comments to Sergeant Kolla here about Bruno Verdi and the murdered girl, can you be more specific? Can you recall instances of him talking to her, for example? You’d assume they would talk, if they were related.’
‘I… I’m not sure…’ Orr looked suddenly uncomfortable, as if he’d been caught out telling tales he couldn’t substantiate. Or perhaps, Kathy thought, it might be that he could remember the distant past a lot more clearly than yesterday.
‘Well, that in itself was odd, you see!’ Harriet Rutter broke in. ‘When she referred to him as “Uncle Bruno” I thought, well, why don’t they behave like family, instead of eyeing each other that way?’
‘What way?’
‘I don’t know… warily, I suppose.’
‘What exactly do you mean, that she was afraid of him?’
She frowned doubtfully. ‘I couldn’t really say that was it. It might have been, but I couldn’t swear to it.’
‘Or could it be that they had some sort of relationship that they didn’t want to reveal to others watching, in public, like yourselves?’
‘Ha!’ Orr suddenly barked. ‘Might be that!’
‘Well, it might, I suppose. Oh dear… I don’t want to slander the man. He may be a bully…’
‘Is he?’
‘Oh yes, in meetings. He loves to talk over people, and put them down. Especially women. That’s one thing I’ll say for Bo Seager-she knows how to put him in his place when he goes too far. But getting back to the poor girl, we did see them talking, do you remember, Robbie? Not too long ago. Perhaps three or four weeks ago, we were having our pancakes when he came over from his shop and tried to attract her attention. She pretended to ignore him, but he stood there, over by one of the palm trees, and stared at her until she went to him. They talked for a few minutes, and then she gave a toss of her head, and flounced off on her roller skates. Do you remember, Robbie?’
Orr looked unsure.
‘Well, we did. I remember it quite clearly.’
Brock tried to prod their memories further, but there was little they could add, and after a while they left.
Lowry looked thoughtful. ‘All right if I talk this over with Harry Jackson, chief?’ he asked.
‘I suppose so.’ Brock nodded. ‘We did ask him about Verdi and he seemed to regard him as a pillar of the community, but if you think you can get anything else out of him, go ahead.’
‘You might find out if he warned Verdi that we were interested in him,’ Kathy said. ‘The way Verdi had everything ready for us it looked as if someone had tipped him off.’
‘Harry wouldn’t do that, Kathy,’ Lowry said dismissively. ‘What, you got your sights on Verdi as your serial killer, have you? On the strength of those two old farts’ gossip?’
The way he said it, your serial killer, as if it was a personal foible, made Kathy flush. She saw Brock react too. ‘Kathy’s suggestion certainly got Alex Nicholson’s attention,’ he said quietly.
‘Yeah, but…’ Lowry shrugged, then shook his head as if he’d decided to keep his doubts to himself.
‘Yes but what?’ Kathy insisted.
‘Well, if you ask me, it got the whole discussion off track. I mean she was more interested in that idea because that’s what she does, isn’t it? Study serial killers. Stands to reason she’d get fired up about it. But I don’t reckon that helps us nail Testor, or whoever it was took Kerri.’
