The Link

By Doug Elliott

Who has committed the greatest scientific hoax in history?
What secrets lie behind this sinister fraud?
Who is prepared to kill to keep them hidden?

Piltdown Man: fossil bones unearthed in southern England appear to be the remains of the earliest Englishman, the missing link between apes and man. In London, the British Museum is planning what may be the biggest announcement in its history.

But now one of the few men who has held the fossils in his hands has disappeared. The Museum dispatches an odd pair of investigators to find him: Stephen McKay, a young Museum worker, drawn into the affair against his better judgement, and Augustus Parker, an enigmatic former Scotland Yard detective with a reputation for unorthodox methods. Parker examines the fossils and immediately declares they are fakes. As McKay and Parker track the missing man in London and the English countryside, struggling to pierce the fog surrounding the Piltdown fraud, they stumble upon a horrendous double murder. They are attacked, their lives threatened. A mysterious woman dogs their steps.

How do a local amateur archaeologist, a reclusive landowner, a British Museum director, a famous author, and a bone collector figure in the deepening mystery? Which them has perpetrated the fraud? Which one has killed to keep his dark secret hidden? Between fakery and murder what is ... the link?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Doug Elliott
• Release date: Feb 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9780987457516

Doug Elliott

Doug Elliott is the author of Woodslore and Wildwoods Wisdom and lives in Union Mills, North Carolina.

Book preview

Prologue

At last they’ve made the announcement. Now the hunt for the guilty begins. I’ve phoned around to the few contacts I still have at the Museum, firing questions at them. Nobody has much to say; the whole building stands tainted by the revelation, and there is an embarrassed reticence to their answers. Dawson’s name is the one that comes up most often, of course, but there are others hovering in the shadows, too.

I read the piece in the Times over and over yesterday and spent a sleepless night debating with myself whether I should tell my story. They’re all dead now so you might argue – and I did – what does it matter? Yet it does: reputations still hang in the balance.

As my sister Claire is wont to remind me, I’m not getting any younger. And as I am wont to remind myself as the relentless years consume me, I’m running out of time to make my contribution to the public record of the affair.

Before yesterday it made no sense to speak out. Nobody would have believed me, a lone voice claiming that the great English discovery was a complete fraud. Even fewer would have believed that I brushed shoulders with the original discovery back in 1912 and that I knew it was a fraud even then.

But yesterday’s announcement changes everything. Today the world knows that someone, forty years ago, selected, filed, stained and planted an assemblage of otherwise inconsequential bones, crafting them to resemble the remains of the earliest English human. Someone painstakingly plotted and engineered the discovery that fundamentally altered the way we looked at human evolution. Today no one doubts that the thing was a sham, the greatest scientific hoax in history. Today I have at least a fighting chance of being believed.

I cannot simply lay out the conclusions, though, without telling it all. They will ask, If you knew the truth in 1912, in God’s name, why didn’t you say something? So I will lay out the whole story. I will explain how I was first drawn into the affair, what Augustus Parker and I discovered in Sussex in November 1912, how lives were changed and lost, and how I learned that there are worse crimes than fraud.

London, 22 November 1953

Chapter 1

London, November 1912

For a moment he couldn’t move. He stood frozen in the street and stared. The crowd broke and flowed around him like a river around a rock. It can’t be her. All these months and years of searching and I practically trip over her. Here in Stepney, of all places.

He had wakened that morning, his day off, with a general feeling of restlessness. After breakfast, with nothing much compelling to do, he had set out on a long aimless walk which had tended eastward from his lodgings in Marylebone, past St Paul’s, past The Tower, on along Whitechapel High Street into the teeming heart of the east end.

As he wandered further east the city became increasingly foreign to him. The streets became grimier, the buildings more decrepit, their stone and brick smudged with soot. The lowering sky only emphasized a palette in which grey and brown predominated. Motor traffic largely shunned these rough streets, replaced by rattling horse-carts and goods wagons. The street sweepers were less scrupulous here: horse droppings tended to accumulate in the gutters, their odour permeating the air already foul with coal fumes, pungent sewage vapours, the miasma of the Thames at low tide and the stink of ill-washed humanity. People bearing expressions of weary resignation shambled about their mid-week business clad in over-worn, much-patched clothing.. His own clothes, which no one in the City would call flash, became increasingly out of place and began to attract faintly hostile looks.

He had only just decided to retrace his steps toward more familiar, less unsettling surroundings when he had caught a glimpse of that face in the morning crowd and the memories had flooded over him.

Suddenly aware he was obstructing the footpath, he edged over to the doorway of a tired brick storefront and watched. The woman bent her head over the greengrocer’s display as she tested the apples, her movements practised, deliberate. Four or five failed to come up to the mark before she finally found one, turned it over in her hand one more time and slipped it into her shopping basket. Then back to the pile of fruit for another.

It was her. Her long hazel hair was bound up into a severe arrangement that accented the angular beauty of her face. She wore a plain, heavy dress the colour of rusted iron, an unadorned short grey jacket buttoned up against the late autumn gusts, and sturdy black mud-spattered shoes. He guessed that she had lost weight. She lifted each new apple, examined, squeezed and smelled it with the same quick movements that were burned into his memory from hours of watching her in years past. No mistaking her now. Yet she was somehow harder than he remembered her, more purposeful and business-like.

Events came flooding back to him. His plan of retreat long forgotten, he fell into the vision of her and his memories, paralysed by the uncertainty of the moment. Should he approach her? Hello. Remember me? We were to be married once. You disappeared. What would she say?

She paid for her fruit and set off briskly towards the east. He followed.

For fifteen minutes or more, she strode through the mid-day crowds. She knew exactly where she was going, not looking around her. To avoid notice he slipped farther back, making it ever harder to keep her bobbing head in view. Where do all these people come from? She continued up Mile End Road and crossed over into Jubilee Street at the same pace.

As he crossed the road to follow her, a large heavy-set man lurched into him from the side.

Watch where yer goin’, the man snarled, expelling a cloying reek of fried onions, sausage and cheap gin.

The intruder halted in indecision for a moment, swaying on unstable legs, and then laid a massive palm against his chest, pushing him almost off his feet. He had no chance against this giant: drunk or not, he was a good head taller and a slab beefier. Er, sorry, he mumbled.

Bah. The drunk dismissed him with a vague wave and stumbled off to vanish in the crowd.

Free of the threat, he dragged his attention back to his covert pursuit. Ahead, the woman turned down a side street and he lost sight of her. He broke into a run, charging around the corner she had turned seconds before.

The street seethed with people. She was gone.

Chapter 2

Four days later: Monday

It was physiologically impossible for Martin Hinton to work without talking. As the only other person in the room I was his natural victim, though I doubted that being alone would have hampered him greatly. Sitting at adjacent work tables, it was natural that we would fall into some amount of desultory conversation. But what Hinton was doing could by no stretch be called conversation. It was a monologue of Shakespearean proportions, though its content was vastly broader and shallower than anything achieved by the Bard. He recounted what he had bought at the markets the previous day and isn’t the price of potatoes astronomical. He commended to my attention the new secretary in Insectivora and wasn’t she a treat. He told feeble jokes about Irishmen walking home at night from the pub. He lauded Webster’s recent paper on the migratory patterns of Mastodon averensis. He wondered out loud – without pausing for an answer – if Woodward would get a nod from the Palace this year.

As I was not expected to contribute in any way to his rambling discourse, I bent my attention to the fragments of extinct voles piled on the table in front of me: was this one a metacarpal or a metatarsal? Mimomys or Arvicola? Hinton’s high-pitched droning soon became part of the barely-noted background, like the room’s pervasive tang of formaldehyde or the clatter of traffic out on Cromwell Road. It was only Monday morning, the beginning of what I feared would be a very long week.

I was an accountant by trade but science was my passion, anthropology in particular, and so Saturdays and some weekdays I came here to the great Victorian pile of the British Museum (Natural History) as a volunteer. A basic knowledge of anatomy qualified me for simple jobs in cataloguing rather than — the bane of the volunteer’s life — directing visitors at the main entrance. And even though miniature mammals were not my specialty, I had cheerfully accepted the assignment – sorting piles of tiny fossil animal bones into their anatomical categories for cataloguing, – in the faint hope that I might catch the eye of a senior scientist, someone observant enough to identify potential in my deft hands and eager young face and arrange a full-time position for me at the Museum.

But today I was compelled to share a work room with Martin Hinton, a volunteer himself and a man with little influence over the Museum’s hiring practices. Resigned to taking the bad with the good, I hunched over the table and squinted again at another minuscule calciferous chip.

I do not know how long I continued working in this manner, but I suddenly became aware that the room had fallen silent. Hinton had stopped talking. This suggested that I was expected to respond to something he had just said. I struggled to recall his latest words. Failed.

Er, sorry, what was that, Hinton?

That friend of yours, McKay, the former police chappie, Palmer, Piker, ... He waved a free hand to indicate that the name had flown out of his head and escaped into the stratosphere. Is he looking for work these days? Missing persons, murders, that kind of thing? Hinton spoke a bit too quickly, his tone transparently casual as he applied his looking-glass to yet another ancient lemming skull. It occurred to me that his apparently random ramblings of the past hour may have in fact been built upon a plan of some kind and that this was where his tortuous trail led. I sensed its outcome could not be good for me, so I determined to make it as difficult as possible for the devious bastard to reel me in like the trout I undoubtedly was.

You murdered someone, Hinton? I asked innocently.

Alas, wishing does not make it so, he replied, a dreamy look in his eyes. But we do have a case of disappearance here at the Museum.

I feigned disinterest, pretended to be completely fascinated by the pelvic girdle of some long-dead mammal, to be singularly bent on determining to which precise species of Microtus it actually belonged. In truth, I hadn’t the slightest curiosity. For all I cared it was just a rat.

Hinton carried on anyway, blind to my studied indifference, like a rhinoceros who has forgotten the target of his charge but carries on charging anyway because it seems the simplest thing to do for the moment. You know Percy Ferguson, works for Old Thomas in Zoology?

Again I failed to answer, or even to acknowledge the question. Again he continued, his voice lowered almost to a whisper. Chap’s gone missing.

It was a tasty bit of Museum gossip that even I could not resist, and I lifted my head to stare at him. Hinton broke into a broad grin at my raised eyebrows, basking in the knowledge that he had snared me.

Martin Hinton took great pride in knowing everything that secretly transpired within the labyrinths of that venerable institution. If a power play was unwinding in Reptilia or a romance flowering in Botany, Hinton could be relied upon to know about it and spread the word with devastating efficiency and just a soupçon of dramatic embellishment. His idea of keeping a secret was not revealing where he’d heard it.

I remember him, I said. Truth was, I remembered envying Ferguson’s position. Oldfield Thomas was a senior manager at the Museum, just the sort of influential supervisor I had hoped to encounter in my volunteer capacity. Instead, Ferguson had landed Thomas and I had landed Martin Hinton.

Where did he disappear? I immediately realised it was an idiotic question, but Hinton, a famous jokester about the place, chose not to rise to the obvious bait.

He was last seen leaving for Victoria Station to take the train to Lewes three days ago. He pronounced it in two syllables: Lew-es.

Lewes, down in Sussex? Why there?

Local amateur, chap named Dawson, found some bits of human skull in a gravel bed a few miles from there. Woodward seems to think they’re early Pleistocene. Hinton’s grin expanded to impossible proportions, unusual even for him.

Now he did have my attention. Older than Heidelberg? In 1907 primitive human remains unearthed near that German city had become a sensation, one of the few fossils of a precursor of Homo sapiens.

Hinton nodded slowly.

I was intrigued, drawn in in spite of my general dislike of Hinton. The first remains of ancient man found in Britain, then, I said. "That is impressive. And it had the attention of no less exalted a figure than Arthur Smith Woodward, the Museum’s Keeper of Geology. What do you make of the find, Hinton?"

His face darkened. I have no opinion, old man. Nothing to do with me. Anyway, Woodward has an iron grip on the pieces. He’s only shown them and the preliminary casts to a few luminaries, certainly not to a lowly volunteer. But if the discovery is what he believes it is, it’s impressive, unique, important, ground-breaking. All those things, indeed. Noteworthy papers will be penned. Careers will be launched and lifetime reputations will be made out of those bits of bone.

I leaned back in my chair, my work now forgotten. How does this relate to Ferguson?

Hinton leaned on his elbows, his palms on the table and bent toward me. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial hush, though there was no one within a mile who could have heard him. The thing is, a couple of bits of the skull never arrived here from Sussex. Woodward is pretty eager to have them so Barlow can finish work on the reconstruction, so he sent Ferguson down to Lewes to retrieve them from that Dawson fellow. But Ferguson never came back and we’ve lost touch with him. The we suggested that Hinton himself had been part of the process, an essential cog in the great ponderous Museum machine. It was one of his usual ploys to pump up his own importance.

And you want Augustus Parker to find him.

"McKay, I don’t want anything. As I said, the blasted affair has nothing to do with me. But word has it that Woodward is frantic with apprehension."

Missing person? Seems like a police matter to me.

Apparently Woodward has tried that. But if a man goes missing for two days, especially a young man, it’s probable that he wants to be missing. Police won’t lift a finger unless there is some evidence of foul play. Hinton fixed me with an evil grin.

Suddenly the truth dawned. Hinton, what kind of trouble have you got me into? Have you offered me up to be part of this nonsense?

His face went red. Look, word has spread round the building about this little problem, and the latest is that Woodward is about to send another volunteer down to Sussex after Ferguson. I could feel the searchlight beam from his office focusing in on me. The last thing I want is to be dispatched into the provinces on some hopeless hunt that has nothing to do with science and little chance of advancing my career. Then I remembered all the tall tales you’ve bored us with of your man Parker’s ability to solve just about anything.

As my anger bloomed, I could feel my own face reddening. I gritted my teeth and spoke slowly. So what did you do?

Well, I sort of dropped a note to Woodward suggesting that he consider engaging the detective friend of that young, keen, terribly talented Museum volunteer, Stephen McKay.

And did you get a reply?

Woodward wants to interview him today.

I was stunned. Hinton, how in blazes can you presume that Parker will take the minutest interest in Woodward’s problem? Even if I could find the man. Yet you’ve set up an interview for him with the Keeper of Geology? What colossal cheek!

He leaned forward and opened his palms in my direction. He spoke calmly, seemingly oblivious to my explosion. Perhaps I did overstep a little, McKay, but it would be a tremendous favour if you can divert Woodward’s attention away from me on this matter. I’d be forever grateful.

You cad! You’ve dropped me right in the soup. And if I fail to arrange this meeting ...? I was too angry to continue. I slumped back in my chair, folded my arms and fell into a sullen silence.

Hinton let the air hang heavily between us for a few moments, then cheerfully tried again. So will you speak to this Parker fellow?

I was trapped. If I agreed, I couldn’t possibly persuade Parker to participate, even if I could track him down at such short notice. If I refused, my name would be blackened permanently with the senior Museum men for not helping the head of a department.

I’ll have a word with him, I snapped and headed for the telephone.

Chapter 3

As I sprinted from the Westminster Underground station to the main entrance of the massive square edifice on Victoria Embankment that was the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, a glance at my pocket watch told me I was probably too late. My telephone conversation with Parker at his home had been brief. He had been on his way out. If it was truly monumentally important, I would find him in the public foyer of Scotland Yard in twenty minutes.

I’d waited an agonising lifetime for the train at South Kensington and the journey east had taken forever. I raced up the stairs and burst into the foyer, brightening when I spotted Parker standing by the sergeant’s desk.

Augustus Parker was the kind of man you could not help but notice. Over six feet tall, he was broad and bulky, not fat but apparently charting a course in that direction. He typically wore loose-fitting clothes and affected a slow, rolling gait, giving the impression that he was a soft, lumbering hulk. His round face with its small, widely spaced brown eyes was capped with a shock of dark hair that he habitually brushed from his forehead. His nose may once have been aquiline but was now a twisted multiply-broken chaos. The overall effect was of a middle-aged boxer gone to seed, a sluggish has-been no longer able to cause much damage.

I learned early in my acquaintance with him that such an impression was all wrong. He was capable of startling agility and prodigious speed and his skill in any number of martial disciplines made him a formidable opponent in a physical encounter. I had seen him subdue a knife-wielding Whitechapel rough in five seconds with little more than an umbrella and a pocket handkerchief.

Adding to the collection of surprises that was Augustus Parker, his voice did not match his appearance. He spoke with a soft baritone rumble bearing a precise Oxbridge accent. He had a habit of pausing before speaking, as if selecting his words and assembling them into sentences with great care. When he finally did speak, his words carried a quiet authority.

Parker favoured me with a brief smile. This is important, then?

It’s important to me, I said. Yes it was. My career in the balance.

Very well. I have some small business here with a Detective Inspector. If you don’t mind waiting, we can chat when I’m done. He consulted his watch. On second thought, come down to the cells with me. I could use the company

Before I had a chance to respond, a tall, skeletal man in a rumpled beige suit entered from a door at the rear and strode directly toward us. He nodded to Parker and flashed a glance in my direction that wavered between quizzical and annoyed.

Parker caught the look. This is my sometime colleague, Stephen McKay. McKay, let me introduce Detective Inspector Arthur Wells.

Wells was about forty years old and notably bald, with a slab-cheeked florid face and a thin moustache. He looked doubtful. See here, Parker, it’s unusual enough for me to be escorting one amateur down there, but I’m not at all sure about bringing him along.

Parker took his usual pause, contemplating the situation at leisure, then replied quietly but firmly. He’s with me.

The two stared each other down for a few minutes before Wells shrugged and turned toward the door he’d come through, motioning Parker to follow. Not knowing what else to do, I set off behind him.

We passed quickly though a corridor lined with offices, turned left and we descended a narrow staircase.

Parker, what’s this about? I whispered, trying to keep up with him.

Bit of an impasse with a couple of old lags in the cells. The detectives are pretty sure that Sean O’Meara and his brother made off with a handful of Lady Underhill’s jewels last night. But they’ve been unable to extract a confession out of them, and they will have to release the pair shortly if nothing more definite emerges. I know these fellows and I believe I can solve the Yard’s little problem.

Though his five years with the detective branch of London’s Metropolitan Police had fed his hungry and fertile brain with the tortuous puzzles it demanded, the period had not been a happy one. Parker had been born with a fully-developed appreciation of his own talents, a remarkable lack of tact in his dealings with people, and a naive inability to understand that this combination of traits can be extremely annoying. At first he had hoped to teach his employers something of the science of investigative procedures. On the contrary they believed that he, a junior member of the force, should be learning from them. In spite of making several important arrests early in his career, or perhaps because of that, he had earned the resentment of a number of his fellow detectives and the powers who ruled them. His methods were unorthodox enough to have necessitated apologies by senior police officials to more than one leader of industry and government, on one occasion a lord of the realm. When at last they concluded that a rogue detective, successful or not, could no longer be tolerated, Scotland Yard quietly sent him on his way. The more insightful of them soon learned that Parker’s position outside the force allowed him to go places and do things denied to official investigators, so they surreptitiously engaged him as a free agent from time to time in particularly obtuse cases. He became, in his banishment, one of the Yard’s greatest and most secret weapons.

We passed along rows of cells, through a heavily barred door and turned into a short corridor, stopping outside a small interview room. Its door stood open, revealing a simple wooden table and a few chairs.

You hang about here and I’ll bring them, Wells said.

Parker raised a palm. Just Abe alone.

Wells frowned, then nodded and turned on his heel and strode off.

Abe? I asked.

The two boys were the product of the marriage of an Irish street sweeper and a Jewish laundress. The father chose the name of the first child, and the mother the second. With the father tangled up in drink more often than not, the children learned to tolerate frequent beatings and with the mother only vaguely concerned with their well-being, they received their primary education on the streets. Twenty years later, Sean and Abraham O’Meara became the bane of the Metropolitan Police robbery squad.

A heavy door clacked open somewhere and the rhythmic rattle of chains sounded along the corridor. Wells returned with a uniformed constable and a shuffling man in prison garb, heavily shackled.

Abe O’Meara was a fellow designed for speed. Short and lean, with a thin, pinched face and a shock of straight black hair, he moved with quick, nervous jerks like a pigeon on a ledge. In another life, one in which he chose an honest profession, he might have been a jockey. His dark eyes flicked across the room, widening slightly as he spotted Parker. The constable guided him to a chair across the table from us and retired to stand by the door.

Parker stared pointedly at Wells, who took the hint, leading the constable from the room and closing the door behind them. I did not doubt that he would be listening to us closely through the barred window.

We sat down at the table opposite the prisoner. O’Meara leaned back in his chair, affecting to appear in charge of the situation, a difficult task with his noisy handcuffs and leg irons. He fixed Parker with an insolent glare and his upper lip curled in distain. I know you.

Parker leaned forward and clasped his hands, meeting the man’s stare directly. Yes, and I know you.

O’Meara slumped a bit. The Yarders dragged you in ta do their dirty work, did they? A high-pitched voice with as pure a Cockney accent as I’d ever heard.

Parker smiled. They knew that you and I are old friends, Abe. Back to the Park Lane job in ’97.

The prisoner sniffed and turned a baleful gaze in my direction. Parker flashed a friendly grin. My friend, Stephen McKay. You can talk freely with him here.

I’ll be the judge a that, now, won’t I? O’Meara closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair, which creaked loudly in protest. So what ya want wiv me, then?

I thought you two lads promised not to stray after we collared you the last time. I was certain that a stretch away from polite society would teach you well. Now I hear about you and Sean lifting some ice in Kensington yesterday.

O’Meara’s insolence never wavered. Don’t know nuffink abaht that, mate. Can’t prove I do.

Oh, I don’t need to prove anything, Abe, Parker said. Your brother has already admitted to it all.

A flash of doubt crossed O’Meara’s face before it resumed its expression of cynical derision. Nice try, mate. Sean’d never rat on me. And ‘specially not on himself. The inspector trotted out that old trick this morning. What, you fink I’m fresh off the boat?

Parker appeared undismayed by the failure of his ploy. It is an old trick, he admitted, and we knew it would never get past you. So we had a few more words with your brother. The Detective Inspector offered him a sweet little deal that would leave him free as a bird after six months and you rotting in Pentonville for ten years. It really is a shame how little blood matters when one’s freedom is at stake.

O’Meara was having difficulty retaining his composure. His eyes flickered down to his manacled wrists, then back up to Parker’s face. After a few seconds his mouth twisted into a tight smile. You need ta do better than that, Mr Parker. You got no proof a anyfink. We was both down the pub last night, right, down Southwark, nowhere near Kensington. You gotta let us go. For emphasis he raised and dropped his forearms, banging the manacles on the table.

Parker was undaunted. We don’t, in fact, need any proof when we have a confession. You see, Sean and I are old friends and he really did talk to us. All about your acrobatics on the second floor of that house and how the swag is resting quietly in the dark in your mother’s potting shed. He pulled out his pocket watch. There’s a Detective Sergeant knocking on your old mum’s door right about now with a search warrant. I thought you should know.

Abruptly Parker pushed back his chair, stood up and rapped on the door. Wells stepped into the room. The interview was plainly over.

What do ya want from me, then? O’Meara’s eyes were wide with terror.

Parker spread his hands wide. I want nothing at all. I’m merely here to inform you that you can say goodbye to your old mum for a good many years. Inspector Wells thought you’d rather hear it from an old friend.

The prisoner jumped to his feet. The bloody laggard! he shouted. He’s got no more nerve than a sewer rat. He planned the whole thing, he did. He’s as much in it as I am. I’m not seein’ him struttin’ around the streets while I’m bidin’ me time in the nick. Whatever he told you is a bleedin’ lie. I’ll tell you how it really happened. But you have to give me brovver all what’s coming to him. He was breathing heavily, wild-eyed. Spittle flecked his lips.

Wells and Parker exchanged a glance. The constable pulled out a notebook and sat down opposite O’Meara.

All right, son, Wells said quietly, why don’t you start from the beginning.

Chapter 4

Really, McKay, this is a far cry from my usual line of work. A simple missing person case, as you tell it. For once I am of one mind with the police. Augustus Parker’s mouth assumed a peculiar twisted shape as he said the final word. The young man has undoubtedly fallen afoul of drink, or a woman, or a family situation or an opportunity for advancement, and will surely return to the fold in a few days, sheepish but unharmed. Even his missing package reeks of the ordinary. A pocketful of old bones, for goodness sake.

We were walking briskly along the Embankment. A pall of heavy cloud had settled in, just skimming the roofs of the buildings it seemed, and icy gusts of late autumn wind slapped our faces. Parker was bound for his flat in Mayfair and I was desperately trying to redirect his steps towards the Natural History Museum.

But such a pocketful as has not yet been seen in England, I countered. Parker, the remains of ancient man, recognizably different from us, have been unearthed in Belgium, Germany and France. No examples have ever been found on this island, not until this latest discovery in Sussex. The material suggests that an ancient relative of ours occupied Britain as long ago as the early Pleistocene.

Parker arched a questioning eyebrow.

Sorry, I said. That would have been toward the beginning of the last ice age period, when glaciers . . .

Covered the North Sea and all but the southernmost bits of Britain, he interrupted, and when England was connected by dry land to the continent. Beginning perhaps a million years ago. I am not completely ignorant of our prehistory. I merely have trouble sorting out all the various ‘cenes’.

I well knew my advantage over Parker in questions of palaeontology – the study of ancient life: I had studied the subject at Cambridge and had even contributed a few bits of fossil bone to the collections of the British Museum. Yet somehow he carried the air of a man who was an expert at everything.

Parker waved away my argument. In any case, your missing bones are no doubt dry, antiseptic and yawn-inducing, while my own professional anatomical subjects are generally dripping with gore and redolent of recent agony. As I have told you, this is not my field.

In the periods between his investigations for the Yard, Parker occasionally took on private work. As the years passed, he began to choose those assignments more carefully, rejecting matters of purely material importance in favour of those in which life — and usually death