“We’re not doing this just because you need somebody to talk to, are we?” he said, when that became clear to him. “You really do need my help to figure out the significance of what you’ve found.”
“Yes,” said Solari, his terseness now owing to shortness of breath rather than any disinclination to show his hand to possible suspects.
“Why?” Matthew persisted.
“Because you knew the man,” Solari said, laboriously. “You’re far better able to guess what he might have been up to than I am.”
“Up to?” Matthew queried—but Solari didn’t want to put in the effort of compiling an elaborate explanation when he had evidence waiting that would speak more eloquently for itself.
When they finally reached the spot where Bernal had been killed there was nothing to indicate where the body had been found. Matthew had not been expecting a bloodstain, let alone a silhouette in white chalk, but he had been expecting something, and it seemed somehow insulting that there was nothing at all. Any vegetation that had been crushed had recovered its former vigor. The place was screened from everything further uphill by a very solid and intimidating wall some ten or twelve meters to the north of the place where the body had been found. It met another, equally high and solid, twenty meters to the left. There was a ledge set in the angle, but it was too high up to be a shelf and it was angled downward. It looked like a place where laborers a long way from home might huddle together and shelter from the rain.
“What was he doing way out here?” Matthew wondered, aloud.
“The same question occurred to me,” Solari said. “According to the bubble’s log, he’d been spending a lot of time out here during the weeks before his death, even though his preparatory analysis of the local ecosystem was supposedly done and dusted. He must have been caught in the rain more than once, maybe for long enough for his idle hands to get restless.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Matthew said.
Solari took him to the angle of where the walls met: to the gloomy covert under the down-slanting ledge.
The wall seemed solid enough to a cursory glance, but when Solari reached up to remove a stone set slightly above waist height it came out neatly enough. There was a space behind it: a lacuna in what otherwise seemed to be a solid wall. Matthew recalled that the artifacts Dulcie Gherardesca had recovered had been found in cavities in the walls, where they had enjoyed a measure of protection from the forces of decay.
“It’s a hidey-hole,” Solari said. “Built for that purpose a verylong time ago. Still serviceable, though.”
The policeman removed several objects from the hole, one by one. Most of them were were blackly vitreous. Three looked like knives, or perhaps spearheads. Three more were similar in design but much smaller—perhaps arrowheads. The nonvitreous items were stone: two appeared to be crude chipping-stones of a kind that might well have been used by a Stone Age craftsman for working flint. One was some kind of scraper. There were numerous pieces of raw “glass,” of a convenient size for working into useful objects.
“There aren’t any shafts for spears or arrows,” Solari said. “He hadn’t gotten around to that. He was still practicing.”
“He?” Matthew echoed, with an implicit query.
“Delgado.”
Matthew thought about that for a couple of minutes. Then he said: “Are you sure that Bernalwas making the spearheads and arrowheads? Maybe he found someone else making them. Maybe he was killed because he found out that someone else was making imitation alien artifacts.”
“I can’t be absolutely sure,” Solari said, scrupulously. “The surface-suits are too thick and too resilient to permit easy DNA-analysis of their excreta, and the murder weapon itself had been handled by too many people before I got to it, but the fact that the only contaminants on these are Delgado’s makes it highly unlikely that someone else had put the necessary hours into making them. Unless someone’s gone to enormous trouble to erect an evidential smokescreen, Delgado was the one who faked the artifact with which he was killed. He had already faked others, and he was in the process of faking more. Maybe it began while he was whiling away the time waiting for a shower to pass, but it must have become purposive soon enough. He made time for the work; he must have had a plan for the results. Whoever killed him found out about it. Maybe they knew about the hidey-hole and maybe they didn’t. If they did, they probably took the trouble to tidy up a little after he was dead—but if they expected that I wouldn’t be able to find the evidence, they were wildly optimistic. Anyone could have found it, if they’d bothered to look. Delgado’s friends—the murderer’s friends—didn’t bother to look.”
This speech seemed to exhaust Solari’s strength, and he had to lean against the wall, but he seemed relieved that he’d made his point.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Matthew said, after a pause.
“That won’t wash, Matt,” Solari replied. “It has to make sense. You say that you knew him as well as anyone—maybe better than anyone here, even though their acquaintance was more recent. So tell me. Why would he be faking alien artifacts?”
“He wouldn’t. He was a scientist.”
“But he was.”
“No. Fakingis your word, your interpretation. He was makingartifacts of the same kinds as those found elsewhere in the ruins, but it doesn’t mean that he had any intention of trying to pass them off as the real thing. Maybe someone else leapt to the same conclusion you did, but it has to be wrong. He was just experimenting with local manufacturing techniques. He couldn’thave intended to attempt to fool anyone into believing that the blades and arrowheads had been made by aliens.”
“Not even if he had a powerful motive for persuading people that the aliens aren’t extinct?” It was obvious from Solari’s tone that he didn’t believe Matthew’s version of events. The policeman had found what seemed to him to be a plausible motive: that Bernal had been determined to prove that the aliens were still around, and that somebody else had been determined to stop him.
“Whatever he was doing,” Matthew said, stubbornly, “I can’t see that it would provide a motive for his murder. If someone wereplanning to run that kind of fraud, and got caught red-handed, hemight be tempted to do something to prevent the story coming out, but why would the person who caught him want to silence the person he’d caught? It doesn’t make sense—and it certainly doesn’t get you any closer to identifying the murderer.”
“Somehow,” Solari persisted, doggedly, “it hasto make sense. You say that Delgado wouldn’t do a thing like this—but he did. I know he was your friend, but you must see that this stuff about experimenting with alien manufacturing techniques is too feeble for words. He wouldn’t have gone to this much trouble without a much better reason than that. How obvious the fakes would have been if they’d been found in less compromising circumstances I can’t tell—but that might not matter. Maybe he knew that they’d be tagged as fakes sooner or later, but maybe he was prepared to settle for later, given that the colonists’ big argument was about to come to a head.”
“You think he was doing this to influence a vote that probably doesn’t have any meaning whichever way it goes?” Matthew said, skeptically. “I don’t think so. That’s even more feeble than my story.”
“So think of a better one. I mean it, Matt. I have to put a case together.”
“Against Lynn Gwyer?”
Solari was suitably taken aback by that, but he was too good at his job to let his reaction give anything away. “Have you some reason for thinking that Gwyer might be guilty?” he asked, swiftly.
“Quite the contrary,” Matthew said. “But she seems to think that you have her in the frame.”