Unnatural Selection (8 page)

“And here…” With a flourish, she removed the lid from the larger carton. “… lies our fallen hero.”

Inside the heavy cardboard box were some of the long bones lying loose, all of them brown and exfoliating, and only a few of them whole. When he picked up the left humerus, bits of bone flaked off and floated to the bottom of the carton.

“Madeleine, you’ll want to stabilize these if you exhibit them. Or even if you don’t. Otherwise they’ll just continue to degrade. Whoever cleaned them did it without preserving them, which didn’t help. Look at all the flakes and crumbs in the bottom.”

“It does look pretty bad,” she said, concerned. “I should have done something before this. What does one use for human bones? Alvar and acetone?”

“Sure, something like that. Whatever you’re used to using on pottery would work.” He looked down for a few seconds at the dry, dun-brown remnants that had once given form and strength to arms and legs. “Madeleine, I’m afraid your doctor may pretty much have said it all. He was human and he was male. As for going beyond that, ageing’s going to be difficult because the ends of most of the bones have been gnawed off…”

She waited for more, and when he didn’t go on, but simply stood gazing at the bones with his hands clasped behind him, she said a bit plaintively: “And that’s all you can tell me?”

But he was plunged in thought, looking at each bone, registering details, and oddities and anomalies, and visually moving on to the next, so that it took a few seconds for the question to penetrate.

“Maybe a little more,” he said at last. “For instance, I can tell you he wasn’t a particularly beefy guy. The bones are relatively slender, with no heavy muscle markings.

“Oh, yes?” she said politely. She’d been hoping for more.

“I can also tell you that he had a rough life.” Gideon picked up the partial left femur, the thigh bone, and showed it to her. The upper third was gone, and the lower, or distal, end had been chewed off by rodent scavengers, but the shaft itself was distinguished by an unnatural bend in the middle, with an ugly, uneven excrescence of bone at the site of the bend.

Madeleine looked at it and drew back a little, the corners of her mouth turned down. “It’s as if… as if it got broken, then somebody stuck it together again-not all that carefully, either-and then stuck all this…” She gestured at the roughened area. “… all this gunk on it to keep it from coming apart again.”

Gideon nodded, smiling. “That’s a pretty good description of what happened, Madeleine. The femur was broken, all right, and then it healed on its own. This ‘gunk’ is the protective callus that forms around a break after a couple of months. If the ends of the pieces don’t quite match up, as they don’t here, it temporarily builds up even more to add strength. This is probably what your doctor thought was a sign of disease.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Bone. Lamellar bone, stronger than the original.” He fingered it. “I don’t think it happened too long before he died. The callus is still pretty big. Very little resorption. A year, maybe less.”

Tentatively following his example, she touched it too and was surprised. “It’s jagged. It’s sharp. Wouldn’t that have been painful?”

“Oh, no doubt about it. The musculature around it would have been inflamed and probably infected. He’d have been in constant pain, and he’d surely have had difficulty walking. This leg would have been a couple of inches shorter than the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on crutches.”

“And yet here he was off in the Scillies, far from home, wherever home was. A soldier. Marching.” She shook her head. “The poor man.”

“He had other problems. Look at this.” He proffered another bone.

She complied. “How interesting. Er, what exactly am I looking at?”

“This is a right forearm bone, the radius.” He laid his finger on a point halfway down the shaft. “Now look at this.”

“Oh, I see,” she said, peering at the spot near which he’d laid his finger. “That’s another callus, isn’t it? A smaller one, though. This is a healed fracture too, although it’s not as bad as the other.”

“The callus isn’t as big, no, but the injury is worse. See how the bone below it has this sort of swollen look? That’s not normal.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Okay, see this hole?” He inserted the tip of a ballpoint pen into a small, smoothly rounded opening just below the callus.

“Isn’t that a natural foramen of some kind? It doesn’t look like a puncture.”

“No, it’s not, but it’s not exactly natural, either; that is, he wasn’t born with it. It’s a reaction to infection, to serious infection; an opening to let the pus drain from inside it. In other words, the fracture healed fine, yes, but the bone got infected-and stayed infected. I imagine this poor old guy was just one mass of infection and pain. That might well be what killed him.”

She shivered. “I’m beginning to be sorry I asked you to do this.”

“Well, you know, war isn’t-” Whatever homily had been on his tongue stopped in mid-sentence. “Oh, Lordy,” he said.

Madeleine cringed. “What now, or don’t I want to know?”

He had shifted his attention to the proximal end of the bone, the one near the elbow, and now, using the magnifying glass and holding bone and lens close to his face, he slowly rotated it beneath the magnifying glass.

“The end of this one hasn’t been completely gnawed off,” he told her. “And it’s not completely ossified.”

Madeleine frowned. “You’re talking about the, what is it, the epiphery, the diastysis…”

“The epiphysis.”

Long bones-arms, legs, ribs, clavicles-grew by depositing material at their ends: the epiphyses. At first this material was cartilaginous, but with time it ossified and fused permanently to the shaft of the bone, which was then done growing. And when the last epiphysis had fused to the last shaft, somewhere in the person’s mid-twenties-a bit later for the clavicle-the person was also done growing. The amount of time the process took, researchers had learned long ago, varied from bone to bone, but was highly predictable for each individual bone. So at least for the first quarter-century of life or so, one could fairly reliably estimate age from the skeleton by how much fusion had taken place on the various bones. If they were all completely fused, the person had been, physiologically, at least, an adult; if not, he or she hadn’t yet been fully grown.

And this particular epiphysis on this particular person was not. A cleft, thin but plainly visible, still ran halfway around the base of the coinlike disk of bone that formed the top of the ulna; fusion had been incomplete at the time of death.

“So how old was he?” Madeleine asked when he’d pointed this out.

He shrugged. “For white males, it usually closes up anywhere from fourteen to eighteen. There’s some variability, of course, but-”

“You mean he’s… he’s not even eighteen years old?”

“Fifteen or sixteen would be my guess.”

The grizzled, scarred old veteran that they’d been imagining had suddenly become a teenaged boy, a youth who had hardly lived, who had died wretchedly, in pain and misery, far away from home, probably weeping for his mother or his girl.

He laid the bone back in the box with more tenderness than he’d picked it up. “Just a kid,” he said softly.

“Now I’m depressed,” Madeleine said. “I could use some coffee. How about you?”

“Same here. Thanks.”

“Be back in a minute.”

There wasn’t much more to be learned from the bones, and there were no pieces to be glued together, not that gluing would have been a good idea anyway until the bones had been stabilized. If he’d had some standardized tables with him, he could have come up with a formal stature estimate from measurements of the long bones, but he didn’t. He did, however, have a pretty good feel for such things, and from eyeing and hefting the bones, he was able to arrive at an estimate that he’d hardly stake his reputation on, but in which he had confidence all the same. His estimate was five feet to five-feet-four inches, even shorter than he’d thought from the costume display.

So it was not only a kid, it was a runty, probably ill-fed one at that. Gideon sighed as he fitted the lid back onto the carton.

Now I’m depressed.

He pulled up a stool and opened the other carton, the one that had once been home to two dozen jars of Prince’s Tuna and Mayo Paste. It now contained five small white paper bags, each crisply folded over precisely three times, and one larger sack from Porthmellon Store (Groceries, Fruit and Vegetables, Beers and Wines). There was place-and-date information printed on each one with a marking pen: Town Beach, nr Holgate’s Grn, 21 May 2002; Rat Island, nr quay, 4 Nov 2003; Woolpack Pt, 15 Jan 2004…

Each bag contained a single bone or bony fragment, which he laid out on its own bag. He saw at once that his promise to Madeleine-“There’s always something to be learned”-was a bit exaggerated. The two smallest weren’t human; flattened and streamlined, like miniature paddles, they were probably metapodials, the fingerlike bones from seal flippers. The other four, while human, had little to offer. Two fragments of femur, one near-complete tibia, and half of an ulna. Not even enough to make respectable guesses as to age and sex. The two humeral fragments and the ulna were old, maybe as old as the kid in the other box. And they’d probably been in the sea for a long time, given the nematode encrustations. For them, Madeleine’s guess of old shipwreck remains was as good as any.

The tibia-the shin bone-was newer: not brown and fragmenting like the others, but ivory-colored and dense. The proximal epiphysis-the one at the knee-was fused, so he knew at least that it had come from an adult. The distal end of the bone, the one near the ankle, had been snapped cleanly off. He lifted the broken end to his nostrils and sniffed. There was a faint, greasy smell of candle wax; the odor from the fat in the bone, which was always strong at first, then gradually faded with time and eventually disappeared. The fact that it was there at all told him the bone was in all probability no more than ten years old; the facts that it was relatively weak, and that the bone was completely devoid of soft tissue told him it was older than, say, a year, given the relatively warm (and thus decomposition-inducing) climate of the Scillies. Two or three years was his guess.

And now that he’d had it in his hands and felt the roughened muscle insertion points and the general robusticity, he could take a reasonable stab at the sex too: male. His interest increasing as he became more “acquainted” with it, he glanced at the bag that it had come in, in hopes that there might be more data, but there was only the usual cryptic information: Beach below Halangy Point, just north of the Creeb, 20 January 2005.

“Coffee,” Madeleine announced, placing two lidded sixteen-ounce cardboard containers on the table. “Inasmuch as you’re from Seattle, I went to enormous trouble and expense to get you a double-shot latte, so that you feel entirely at home.”

“You’re wonderful.”

“You see, we’re reasonably civilized here, at least in some ways.” She removed the lids from both cups.

“Clearly, in the ways that count,” Gideon said appreciatively, inhaling the opulent aroma. A lot nicer than bone fat, he thought.

“Anything new?” she asked, drawing up a stool of her own and delicately balancing her bulk on it.

It was at the very moment that she asked, while he was placing the tibia back on the table, that his sensitive fingers “saw” what his eyes should have seen in the first place.

“Damn,” he whispered.

“What now?” she whispered, alarmed.

When he peered hard at the bone, it took him only an instant to confirm what his fingers had told him. “Madeleine, this bone didn’t break. It was cut-cut, and sawed too.”

“Yes? I don’t-”

“I think we might be looking at a dismemberment. From not that long ago.”

“A dis-” Her lips curled with disgust. She got off her stool and moved a couple of feet away, never taking her eyes off the bone, as if it might come after her. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I’m serious, all right. Can you tell me anything about this, other than what it says on the bag?”

Her glasses which hung on their lanyard around her neck, were raised to her eyes-indeed, like a lorgnette-so she could read the lettering. “Oh, yes, I remember. The little beach near Halangy Point. That’s at the north end of the island, about two miles from Hugh Town, at the very end of the road. It’s an out-of-the-way place; not many visitors find it.”

“No, I mean how it happened to be found, who found it, was it buried-”

“Yes, it was buried in the sand. A visitor brought it in when her dog dug it up. We didn’t keep her name, we usually don’t. If I recall correctly, she said it was about a foot down. That’s all I know. I.. . I didn’t think there was any reason… Gideon, are you certain?”

“No, I’m not certain-we only have the one bone-but that’s what it looks like to me. You see, when fresh bone is sawed-”

Hurriedly, she raised her hand, palm out, bangles jingling their way down to her elbow. “Stop. Desist. I’ve had all the forensic anthropology I want for one morning, thank you. I’m afraid it’s far too gruesome for me. What are you going to do?”

“Go see the police. What else? Do you mind if I take this with me?”

She turned her head to the side to avoid looking at it, like a baby resisting its mashed carrot. “Take it. Please.”

As he was putting it back in the sack, she said, “Ask for Sergeant Clapper; he’s in charge. The police station is on Upper Garrison Lane, on the way back toward the castle. You can’t miss it.”

He could and did, walking the two-block length of Upper Garrison Lane twice before he realized that the modest two-story house, tucked into the elbow of an uphill curve in the street and half-hidden behind lush shrubbery and a low stone wall, was what he was looking for. No sign out front, no parking area, not a police car in sight. But behind a rolling bank of pink and white narcissus, slightly below the level of the street and overhung by a shabby, glassed-in balcony, he finally spotted a nondescript storefront window that might have been the entrance to a dry cleaner’s or a hearing aid center. But a closer look showed POLICE in stick-on letters on the window, and an inconspicuous gray plaque on the stuccoed wall beside it: