Gideon looked at the card he still held in his hand. "Isn’t it possible that when Frawley had a look at it he concluded that it wasn’t really a bone? That Leon had misidentified it? It happens all the time. That’s one reason a worker doesn’t enter it directly into the catalog himself, isn’t it?"
Abe looked at him quizzically. "It happens all the time that you find four faience beads and you think they’re a leg bone?"
Gideon laughed. "Maybe you’re onto something, Abe- although I’m not sure what. I don’t see how this can have anything to do with the Poundbury skull-"
"Poundbury? Of course not. This was a month ago. Besides, this one is a femur. Pummy is… what was it?"
"Left parieto-occipital; hard to confuse the two, even for an archaeologist. It’ll be interesting to hear what Jack Frawley has to say."
"That I’m very interested in myself." He put the card into a file box and closed it. "Well, Inspector Bagshawe will be here in a few minutes, so why don’t we go outside and get to work?"
"Bagshawe’s coming here?"
"He was here yesterday, too, interviewing everyone, picking up tools, looking under potsherds. It makes everybody nervous, but I guess it’s got to be done."
"Good, there’s something I wanted to mention to him."
" Good morning, gentleman!" Detective Inspector Bagshawe’s booming, peaceful voice reverberated in the shed. He closed the door behind him, hung his vast checked overcoat on a peg, and ambulated majestically to the table, where he sank confidently down onto a metal folding chair that looked alarmingly flimsy for the job. "I shouldn’t be very long today, and I’ll try my best not to get in the way of your scientific pursuits."
"It’s no trouble, Inspector," Abe said. "I’m just going. Make yourself at home. Have some coffee. Gideon, when you’re finished talking, you’ll come join us at the dig?"
When Abe had left, Bagshawe looked at Gideon across the table with placid expectation, his big, curving cherry-wood pipe between his teeth, and his huge hands clasped loosely on the table.
"Well, I don’t think I really have anything important," Gideon said, suddenly diffident, "but I wanted to mention that the day Randy was killed there may have been some outsiders at Stonebarrow Fell after all. It’s just possible that Frederick Robyn or Paul Arbuckle might have been here. They had their own keys, and Barry wouldn’t be likely to consider them ‘visitors.’ Anyway, if it’s okay with you, I thought I could discreetly check around-"
Bagshawe grinned. "In this case, lad, the CID, ever alert, are far ahead of you. Dr. Arbuckle was here before, all right, on an audit, but that was weeks ago, when Mr. Alexander was demonstrably alive and well. As for the afternoon of November thirteen, when he presumably ceased being either, Dr. Arbuckle was provably in Dijon, and Mr. Robyn in London. Of course, either of them might have nipped away for a few hours and slipped into Stonebarrow Fell-seen by no one-but in all honesty I don’t think so. And as for your prowling about, why, if I were you I wouldn’t do anything about it. Why not leave that sort of thing to us?"
A fragment of remembered conversation leaped into Gideon’s mind. His eyes widened. "What did you say?"
"I said, ‘Why not leave that sort of thing to us?’ And what’s wrong with that?"
"No, the sentence before that."
Bagshawe took the pipe out of his mouth and looked oddly at Gideon. "The sentence before that? I said I wouldn’t do anything about it if I were you. Merely a turn of phrase, Professor, nothing more."
"Inspector, when Randy tried to tell me whatever it was, and I suggested he tell Frawley instead, he said, quote: ‘He wouldn’t do anything about it.’ "
Bagshawe stuck the pipe back between his teeth. "He wouldn’t do anything about it," he repeated, frowning, and sat a moment longer. "So?"
"What would that mean to you?"
"That even if he told Frawley, Frawley wouldn’t do anything about it, that’s what it would mean." The inspector’s patience was wearing a little thin.
"Sure, that’s what I thought at the time. But let’s say Randy already had told Frawley-before he ever talked to me-and Frawley just refused to do anything about it. What would Randy have said to me in that case?"
"He would have said…why, he might have said the very same thing: ‘He wouldn’t do anything about it.’ " He lowered his chin to his chest and looked at Gideon with dawning appreciation. "Professor Frawley just might know what the young man was trying to tell you, mightn’t he? Well, now, that’s worth exploring. Do you know, I’ve already asked him-as I’ve asked everyone-if he had any idea what it might be."
"And he said he didn’t?"
"As did they all. But with Professor Frawley-ah, I had my suspicions. There was a sort of hitch, a holding back, a sidling away of the eyes, if you know what I mean."
Gideon nodded. He knew very well.
"Well then," Bagshawe said, "let’s try again. Why don’t we just go and chat Mr. Frawley up right now?"
"We?"
Bagshawe looked squarely at Gideon, not unkindly. "Professor, since it’s all too apparent that you’re going to be sniffing and poking about up here in any event, why, I’d be a great deal more comfortable having you doing it where I can see you. I’ve got enough trouble here already, and it wouldn’t do to have Gideon Oliver done in under my very nose while pursuing inquiries of his own." He huffed on the bowl of his pipe and rubbed it on his sleeve. "Think of the paperwork."
FIFTEEN
They found Jack Frawley at the dig, completing some cross-sectional diagrams of the pits on a sheet of quadrille paper attached to a clipboard. He was wearing a shapeless, colorless canvas fisherman’s hat, a decrepit old windbreaker, worn cotton jeans, and old tennis shoes. His stubby, metal-stemmed pipe, unlit, was clenched in his teeth, the bowl upside down. He was, Gideon thought, working at looking like an archaeologist. What he looked like was Monsieur Hulot.
When Bagshawe had said, "We would like a word with you, Professor Frawley," his face had paled, and pale it remained. Bagshawe had led them-not by accident, Gideon was sure-to a flat, rocky area near the cliff edge: just about the spot from which Randy must have plummeted into the rock-encircled lagoon. Far below, the tide was in. It boomed and gurgled hollowly, as it must have done that day.
"Now, Professor," Bagshawe began without preface, "when I asked you yesterday if you had any idea of what
Mr. Alexander had wanted to tell Professor Oliver, you said you did not."
Frawley nodded. "I, uh, I believe I did say something to the effect that I couldn’t think of anything right offhand."
From the twitchy wobble of Frawley’s eyes, Gideon knew instantly that he was lying. And he sure was that Bagshawe knew it, and that Frawley knew they knew.
Bagshawe fixed Frawley with a steely eye. "I won’t quibble about that. I shall simply ask you whether you have, on further reflection, remembered something."
"Well, you know, actually, I might have had a word or two with Randy that morning, now that I think about it," Frawley said, and accompanied it with a weak laugh. "But it was just one of those little technical things that crop up; nothing important."
Bagshawe shifted easily into a more soothing manner. "Now, Professor," he said slowly, "if there’s anything you’re reluctant to say, I can assure you that Professor Oliver and I-"
"It’s only that it’s nothing relevant to Randy’s…to the case you’re working on."
"One never knows," Bagshawe said reassuringly. "Often, it’s the little things that provide the critical clues."
"Well…" Frawley’s soft, doggy eyes fixed on the inspector in melancholy appeal. "I’m just afraid you’ll get the wrong idea…about a certain party…"
"Well, now, Professor, why don’t you just trust me to be the judge of that?" The big teeth showed in a peaceable, bovine smile.