"To another museum, you mean? Well, a museum would pay for something like that, sure-a lot of money. But Pummy wouldn’t be sellable. Any decent physical anthropologist who took a good hard look at it would know it’s Poundbury Man, and he’d know that Poundbury Man belongs in the Dorchester Museum. So even if some shady museum was willing to buy stolen materials, there’d be no point."

"Do you mean there’s only one Poundbury Man? Aren’t there others from the same… the same population, that look more or less like him?"

"No," Gideon said, pausing to watch some skinny children feed bread chunks to some fat ducks, "he’s one of a kind. He’s Homo sapiens, of course, but no one else from that time and that place has been found. And he is remarkably dolichocephalic-long-headed. Whether he was just an oddball that way, or whether all his people looked like that, no one knows, because he’s the only one we’ve got. There are even some anthropologists who want to dub him a separate subspecies-Homo sapiens poundburiensis, or some such."

"Really? They want to postulate an entire subspecific population on the basis of a single fragmentary-" She burst into sudden laughter, startling the ducks. "Good gosh, I’m starting to talk like you!"

"That’s what happens to married people."

"After five days?"

Gideon shrugged. "You must be a quick study."

"I guess I am." She reached out for his hand as they moved on over a low stone bridge. "Well, anyway, if not a museum, what about a private collector? Aren’t some fabulously rich eccentrics supposed to have their own collections of stolen Rembrandts or Vermeers, even though they can’t show them to anyone? Wouldn’t this thing be worth money to someone like that?"

"Rembrandts I can see, but a broken old piece of skull? He’d have to be pretty eccentric, all right."

"Mmm," Julie said, thinking. "Okay, could it be some kind of joke? Maybe Pummy’s just been hidden, not stolen, and the other skull was put in the case as a hoax."