Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [96]
“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 very long 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 Bernal was 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