Grave Consequences (26 page)

Unlike the lab in the basement, this room appeared to be used for storage, though I knew it must not be. No posters. No books that I could see, though Andrew must need them and I was really curious to see what he used for references. No paper or drafting tools, either. There was nothing that I could see besides rows of tables, stacks of more acid-free boxes, a bank of lockable storage cabinets, and a desk, with nothing on it besides a computer. No mouse pad, no pencils, no plants. Nothing. And if any room had ever needed music to soften the work done here, it was this place, and there was none. Those I know who regularly work with human remains are convinced that a certain respect, even reverence, is due to those individuals they study, but the bareness of this room seemed even to deny the humanity of those still living.

The only other piece of furniture in the room was a chair at the desk, and the only thing on that was Andrew, who was staring attentively at the screen. Seeing me he promptly turned the monitor off, so that I might not see his work.

“What do you want?” He made no pretense at all to be pleasant and more than ever, Andrew had the look of a funerary monument, cold, pale, hard-featured, and sorrowful. He also looked exhausted, and I had an unaccountable urge to stroke his head, as if some touch might thaw him, but I knew well enough that such a rude trespass would get my fingers snapped at.

“Jane’s called work for the day—”

He crossed his arms. “The rain should clear up later on.”

“Someone broke into the site last night.”

He sat up straighter. “Oh, Christ. Is Jane okay?”

“She’s upset, but I think she’ll be okay.” I looked at him. He hadn’t asked about Greg, his best friend, and he hadn’t asked about the skeletons, reputedly the object of his professional obsession. Remembering the photos of Julia in the darkroom and their close resemblance to Jane, I was stricken with a sick feeling that there was a very unpleasant, very logical reason that Andrew had been attracted to Julia. “Jane wasn’t there when it happened, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, of course not—”

I couldn’t tell whether he was agreeing with me or disputing something else.

Andrew settled back down. “What did they get into, the tool shed?”

I shook my head. “Worse than that. Whoever broke in tore up Mother Beatrice’s grave. Or what we assume was Mother Beatrice’s grave. Nothing but mud and a few phalanges left.”

He leaned forward and took several deep breaths, as though he had received a physical blow. “Oh, God. Any idea who might have done it? Why?”

“None so far. I was going to ask you the same.”

“I’ve not a clue.”

Well, so much for that. I guess I was surprised that Andrew was being this helpful.

I decided I needed to plunge into murky waters and find out exactly what was below the surface. “Before, in your room, you’d mentioned a distraction. Who was distracting you from Julia?”

He relaxed back into his chair. “None of your business.”

At least I knew it was a who and not a what. “No, it wouldn’t be if I wasn’t trying to help Jane.” I looked him in the eye. “It was Jane, wasn’t it?”

His expression told me everything. I recalled how vehemently Jane had denied meeting anyone after her row with Greg, the night of Julia’s murder. “Oh, God. You two were together the night of Julia’s—”

“No, it’s not like that!”

Andrew covered his face with his hands, then sighing, rested them in his lap as he stared at the empty desk before him. “It’s not like that at all. That night, I was out walking, waiting until I was to meet Julia back at her place. I was…trying to figure out just who it was I was in love with. It was a hellish night for me. When I saw Jane, wandering exactly the same as I was, it seemed to be some sort of sign. It was then, when she told me that she’d had yet another domestic
with Greg, that I realized, after all these years, that I didn’t love her anymore. It was like chains falling away. I could leave at last. I would never have to worry over whether I would make a fool of myself and my best friend. It was over. Jane assumed I was drunk again by the way I just stood and stared at her, and I was, but it wasn’t booze.

“I told her, just go home, sort things out with Greg. I suppose I could have been a little more understanding, but she hadn’t known, I don’t think, how’d I felt all these years, and I wasn’t about to explain that I needed to find Julia immediately and tell her how much I needed her. So Jane gave me a few choice words about my selfishness that were truer than she knew and turned on her heel. I ran back to Julia’s apartment to wait for my girl to come home.”

Andrew inhaled suddenly, making a horrible noise that was half a gasp and half a sob. He held that breath until he controlled himself again. I realized how that room dwarfed him and how the faint smell of his aftershave seemed like too futile a gesture to establish a living presence in that cold place.

I swallowed. “So you weren’t the one Julia was going to meet at the Grub and Cabbage?”

Andrew shook his head. “No, I wasn’t going to see her until much later, at her apartment. When she didn’t show, I got worried. I mean, any other girl, if she gave me a miss like that, I would have figured she got tired or was pissed off at me or something. Not Julia. Stuck with anything until the bitterest end. When she didn’t show I began to get worried. And when she didn’t stop by the next day, I knew something was definitely wrong.”

“You don’t know who she was going to see there?”

“I have no idea, but maybe her parents would do. They were the last to see her before she died, I suppose. I didn’t like her going there by herself, though. Her parents are both barking mad, and her father is downright violent. Wicked temper on him. I personally wouldn’t want to do anything to get on his bad side. God knows how his wife gets on with
him. I would have gone with Julia, but there was the small matter of how her father would react upon making the discovery that his only daughter was sleeping with a member of university staff, someone nearly twenty years her senior, and an archaeologist to boot. Any boyfriend at this juncture would have been a problem, I think, but I was definitely a nonstarter. She said she was meeting someone else after, and who that was, I didn’t know. It wasn’t like her to keep secrets, really. Keeping us a secret was troublesome to her.”

I thought about that, and then remembered the cut chain on the archaeological site.

“Did Julia have access to her father’s keys? I mean, to the construction site? I was wondering. The paper didn’t say whether the construction site had been broken into. If it hadn’t been forced, would the murderer have had his own key to the yard, or did he use hers?” The next question hung unasked between us.

“I knew she had the key.” Andrew rested his elbows on the desk now, interlacing his fingers and making a steeple out of his index fingers. “From when she worked for her dad. I don’t know who else might have known it, she wasn’t close with anyone, really. But everyone did know she’d worked for him, so…I think George Whiting is the most likely candidate, if you ask me, but I don’t even want to think about it anymore. All I can think about now is that if I hadn’t been so slow to sort things out, maybe she wouldn’t have felt compelled to see her parents. If I had realized I’d gotten over Jane long ago, if I had realized that I wasn’t just larking about with Julia as some sort of…gesture, this never would have happened.”

“You don’t know that—”

“Spare me. You don’t know anything at all.”

I was about to leave, then realized I’d better ask the other question that had been preying upon me. “What’s up with the pathology report on the modern skeleton—can I see what you’ve done? You promised I could.”

“Jesus Christ…” Andrew paused, then continued me
chanically. “You asked, and I said, I’ll see. I’ve run into a few snags. It’s going to be a while. Besides, whatever I do is only ancillary to the forensic pathologist’s work.”

I walked over to the counter, but it was completely clean of anything—there was nothing to occupy me. “Well, what about the one for Jane, then? I had a thought about the stratigraphy. About the stones on top and the dating. I think the scatter, if I remember it properly, was from the bombing that leveled the remains of one of the abbey walls, right? So if the scatter was on the surface, and we were finding stones mixed into the burial, wouldn’t that have to date it pretty close to right after the bombing? Not long enough for any later trash to get mixed in with it, though. That’s why I think that modern skeleton we were working on is war vintage.”

Andrew gave me a long look. “Interesting thought,” he said finally.

“Well? Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

“I’m not in any hurry.” He leaned back again, and I couldn’t understand why he seemed so relaxed about all this.

“And why is that?”

He watched me, sizing me up, maybe. Maybe trying to figure what would shut me up, get me out of his hair. “Because Greg has enough on his plate at the moment, and I personally don’t feel I should add any more grief to his life presently.”

My stomach did flipflops and then settled with leaden dread. “Why? Who is it? Why do you say
Greg
would—”

Andrew smiled, an unpleasant smile that was pure schadenfreude, so pleased to have someone else feel as horrible as he must. “Trust me. It will probably come out eventually, but not if I have anything to say about it, so I’m certainly not going to tell you. No one in Marchester would thank you for pushing your nose into this. I think you should leave now.”

I shot Andrew a dirty look and got out of that mausoleum of a room as quickly as I could. The rain was still pouring
down, which was fine with me. The bus came along within a few minutes, and I almost missed it, so intent was I on my thoughts. I stared at the gray streets as we rolled along, trying to put some order to my thoughts, the repeated “thank yous” of the conductor a counterpoint to the windshield wipers. An unfamiliar two-toned siren in the distance reminded me how far away from home I was.

Just then we passed Fitzwilliam Street, which I remembered from Morag’s business card. I pulled on the cord and had some luck for the first time in what felt like weeks—the bus stopped a few blocks down. I got out, put on my hat, and hurried down the road until I found number fifteen. Fitzwilliam was a busy street with a few shop fronts and restaurants at street level and what looked like professional offices on the floors above, converted from nineteenth-century row houses. The building at number fifteen was in the ubiquitous gray stone and an estate agent’s office occupied the ground floor, flanked by a Greek restaurant on one side and an Indian one on the other. A tidy address plate by the bell listed “Marchester Interactive, Web Site Design and Construction, first floor,” and, since the door was open, I hurried up a flight, curious as to what I might find.

It wasn’t decorated, as such. I suppose the room I walked into off the hallway would have been the apartment’s living room, in its former incarnation. Now it looked as though it might have started off as a reception area but gradually became additional workspace for a growing business. There was a single fabric and chrome chair next to a rubber tree plant, which was all that remained of the reception area. Crowded along each of the remaining three walls were three mismatching desks arranged so as to give the illusion of privacy, but that had long since passed away with the growth of the company. Each of the desks had a computer and a printer and a harassed-looking young employee sitting at each one typing like forty, none of whom even noticed that I’d entered
the room at first. The place was a haphazard mess, probably only negotiated and understood by its denizens. Cables snaked around the place like Christmas garlands and there was no attempt to disguise or hide them. In fact, there were some tinsel garlands draped along the cables that ran across the wall and I couldn’t decide if they were meant to be a cheery disguise for the wires or had merely been forgotten since Christmas. On each of the two side walls, there was a doorway, leading off to other rooms, presumably. One of the desk owners was on the phone, a strawberry blonde with a pointed face whose narrow build was overwhelmed by her fisherman’s sweater.

“—In the middle of a death march, no one’s slept for a week. I can’t believe we’re this close to the deadline and they’re still adding features. Well, now, you’d think this wouldn’t happen
every
single time, wouldn’t you? Yeah. Of course it’s Tim on their side of things who’s the problem; stupid wanker’s never shipped anything. He doesn’t know his arse from a hole in the wall. Mmm. What can we do, though? They keep giving us work—”

That’s when she noticed me. Blushing to the roots of her hair, she said hurriedly, “I’ve got to go—cheers, love.” She hung up quickly and turned to me, annoyed, running a hand over her hair, which did nothing to help make her look less frazzled. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Morag Traeger.”

She shuffled some papers, a bit snotty at having been interrupted. “Do you have an appointment?”

“Um, no, but I—”

Morag appeared in the doorway. She, too, must have been feeling the pressure of her project: her hair was unruly beyond artistic wildness, her eyes were reddened, and she looked as though she hadn’t had much sleep. She also looked a bit uneasy at seeing me. “What do you want?”

I could have sworn I heard the clatter of typing slow down just a bit; the woman who had been on the phone was
lucky enough to be able to see what Morag looked like without having to sneak a peek out of the corner of her eye. “Here to see you, Morag.”

“I guessed that. Well?” she asked me.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.”

She looked at me. I did my best to look harmless. She spoke to the others.

“I’ve just put the kettle on, the water will be ready in a moment. If you can wait half a minute, I’ll run down to the Greek place and get lunch.” Back to me. “Come with me. You’ve got one minute.”

I followed her to the adjacent room, which was distinguished by having a door and only one desk, which was so tidy that at first I thought the place must be unused. Then I saw that there was a nice carpet on the wooden floor, and few calming prints on the walls. The place had a residual whiff of incense, possibly from Morag herself; it certainly didn’t come from the fresh cut flowers in the vase on the mantelpiece. The desk had a computer, with a stylus and pad: That’s right, I thought. Morag was a “creative lead,” whatever that might be. Even the books that were pulled from the shelf—a couple of design books and a Pantone color chart—were neatly stacked. One on the top of the pile was
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
by Edward Tufte, and there was a Post-it note stuck to the cover, so tidily printed that it looked like a computer had printed it. Whew! Morag certainly must have something on the ball, I thought, to help found a growing company and keep up with all those eager young things in front. I had a quick glimpse at the framed photo on her desk; Morag and a short man with dark hair and a beard, both cloaked in full black robes and holding intricately carved staffs. Morag sat down.