Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  Peter smiled. “Thanks for all this.” He left the glass enclosure. He would report back to Maris when he was good and ready.

  Rather than immediately searching out Constable Willet, Peter explored the open zone of cubicles until he found Ronald Hamm. The detective ruled over a partitioned space that was smaller than a penitentiary cell. He seemed glad to see the older policeman, and again pumped his hand. Peter glanced back and reckoned that Maris couldn’t quite eyeball them though his office wall.

  “You’re a veteran of the Yard, then, sir?”

  Peter leaned forward to bring his head below the top of the partition. “Many years, Detective Hamm.”

  “No problem. Town treating you right?”

  “Thanks. I wonder if you could do me a favour. Is there a standard package of public material, even if only press material already in the can, on the recent assaults on the Devon cliffs?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s available.” Hamm showed no surprise at the request. Had Maris not been clear with his staff about Peter’s narrow duties? “By the way, the papers up in Devon have dubbed him ‘the Rover.’” Hamm turned sombre and lowered his voice. “Tough case.”

  “Having a tough time with it?” It wasn’t exactly a question. He was feeling mischievous. He hoped Hamm would expound further.

  “They call him the Rover because he works up and down the coast. UNESCO has designated the Jurassic Coast a World Heritage Site. Some people figure that the Rover will stop once he reaches the end of it.”

  Even Hamm seemed to realize the silliness of this speculation, which was born of the need of every investigator to put some kind of frame around a rampaging killer. Peter guessed that the Task Force hadn’t made a lot of progress. As far as he knew, there had been three killings that appeared to be linked. Already the media had slapped a misleading label on the perp. J.J. McElroy would hate it and would forbid his officers using it, but Peter guessed that the name would stick. Throughout his career Peter had avoided the press, and he still saw no virtue in courting them. That was one advantage in letting Maris run both shows, he supposed.

  “Would that material be available now?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure! I’ll need to have Services photocopy a package. I have to go up to the Kingsway, that’s a suburb north of town, to pin down a sighting reported by an old man. If you’re free about five, we could meet for a drink. Which hotel are you at?”

  “The Delphine.”

  “There’s a pub, the Crown, up the street from you. Let’s meet there at 5:00 p.m.”

  Peter nodded. He convinced himself that his end run around Maris was, at worst, a venial sin. If he had time later, he would find a Net feed and Google “The Rover.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Peter left Hamm and tracked down Constable Willet in a cubicle by the south wall of the sprawling station. Willet was just finishing his lunch and preparing to head out on his afternoon beat. His massive proportions made it likely that it had been a large lunch. Unfortunately, his surplus fat tended to settle around his belly and across his shoulders, so that when he stood he loomed over Peter like an iceberg. He was just over fifty but in some ways seemed older than Peter. Management indulged him, allowing him to grow his yellow-grey hair to the collar and sport a thick, Teutonic moustache. Willet would die of a heart attack on the upward slope of a cobblestone Whittlesun street somewhere along his beat, and Maris would deliver a eulogy praising another workhorse Peeler who had died in harness.

  Peter understood why Maris had partnered Willet with him. He was the local constable, the man known and trusted in the neighbourhoods. Every police force had these characters. Willet could introduce Peter to the residents along the street where the Laskers had lived, and he would know the driving and walking routes to the Whittlesun beach fronts. And he would report every detail back to Maris.

  “Good morning, Guv’nor,” Willet said, even though it was after twelve. “I’m the one in charge of the Lasker house.”

  Ah, Peter thought, that’s the other reason I’m being hooked up with the constable. The Lasker residence was in his patrol area. He had taken the first call and he considered the crime scene his personal domain.

  Overweight though he was, Constable Willet raised no objection when Peter suggested they walk. The house keys jangled in Willet’s pocket as they made their way down the cobbled road one street over from the high street. Peter was thankful that he didn’t lead them up any of the streets that climbed farther inland; he knew CPR but had no desire to apply it. The Laskers’ street curved around the hill away from the main commercial area, but still within the boundaries of the town centre. Willet stopped before a narrow house, much like every other in the row except for the glaring police tape and Keep Out notice stuck to the door. That would have to go, Peter decided. While Willet sorted through his ring of keys, Peter took a moment to check the front view. If you craned your neck from the top floor, he estimated, you might find the sea. The former council houses along the row were identical, only the colour of the heavy front doors varying. Ever since various cities in the British Isles began flogging posters of the “doors of pick-your-city,” homeowners had been painting their entrances bright crayon colours. On this strip there were doors done in shiny orange, blue, red and pink. The Lasker door was Lincoln green.

  “Typical two up, two down,” Willet volunteered.

  The house appeared to be well maintained, and Peter knew from the file that the Laskers had owned it mortgage-free. Willet jiggled the supplementary lock, which resembled the lock boxes used by estate agents. You had to open the box in order to get the key that let you into the house. The police notice read: No Entry, by Order of the Police. Leave no mail or flyers. The phone number of the Whittlesun station completed the notice.

  Bartleben would have insisted on the call with Maris that his people preserve the killing ground as found, without any further disturbance except for the taking of blood samples and the impounding of documents found in the rooms. The Yard hated nothing more than arriving, as consulting experts, at a crime scene that had been trampled by eager policemen. Peter had seen Yard detectives pulled out of crime sites before they even started. He was sure that the demand had offended Maris, since Bartleben was, in effect, challenging his competence, and further implying that Maris shouldn’t have waited three days before calling in London, by which time some of the forensic evidence would have mouldered.

  They stepped inside. A storm might have come up from the sea and blown through the house. The complete disarray and the immediacy of the frozen drama in the home sent a sickening thrill through Peter Cammon, even though he had probed hundreds of crime scenes. A light had been left on in the vestibule and he could see blood on the right side of the corridor. He flipped the nearby switch and another ceiling light went on at the end of the hallway. A third overhead had been smashed. He moved gingerly into the space. Passion, fear and spite were stamped in blood along the hall and the entry to the back kitchen. Red smears, at hip level, ran along the corridor like some demented wainscoting.

  A plastic runner had been laid on the bloodied carpet. Peter asked Willet to turn on every light on the ground floor. He took a pair of pigskin gloves from his pocket and put them on; he had meant to leave them behind in his hotel room with his hat and umbrella. They would serve his purposes now.

  “Constable, could you search in the kitchen for a lightbulb and install it here?”

  “Right you are, Guv,” Willet replied. The use of “Guv” was only marginally tolerable within police protocol but Peter didn’t care about ceremony. Willet disappeared. Peter stood stock still in the corridor, trying to gain an initial impression of the Laskers. The outside of their house was well kept, up to the standard of the street, and the entranceway was recently painted too. Even before examining the living room, he understood that the Laskers were solid middle class.

  Willet returned with the bulb; he was tall enough to screw it into the socket without using a stepladder. Now Peter had a full view o
f the through-line from the front door to the kitchen. The fight had flowed from front to back. Still near the vestibule, he knelt down on the plastic and leaned close to the corner where the plaster met the baseboard. He stood again and peered up at the junction of the wall and the ceiling. No dust had accumulated at the lower corner; no cobwebs at the top of the wall. He sighted along the surface halfway up and, aside from the blood spatter and several traumatic gouges, the wall was smooth.

  The wavy bar of blood down the corridor had been made by someone trailing their hand along the wall. The track faded out halfway down as the blood ran out; the gruesome painter had dipped his hand — the right hand, he could tell — in a pool of blood again and begun a new line, which ended at the kitchen door jamb.

  Peter left the hallway and explored the living room. The lighting remained subdued even though Willet had turned on the table lamps and a floor lamp behind the television. Peter at once noted differences in the blood patterning. There was plenty of it on the chesterfield and the stuffed chair, and even the ottoman, but it was thinly spread, and nowhere pooled. Anna hadn’t made her last stand here. It appeared that she, or perhaps the husband, had sat in the blood on the footstool. Did she retreat there and wait, sobbing and fearful? Would it be too much to ask the forensics wizards to test the carpet for salty tears? The damage in the living room, aside from the blood, was oddly selective. On either side of the gas fireplace, the brocade curtains were bunched on the floor below their broken tracks. Someone had used an axe or cleaver to drive a ruinous gouge into the top of the mahogany sideboard, but neither the victim nor the attacker had upended chairs or the chesterfield.

  “Constable,” he called, “is there anything in the police inventory about an axe or a hatchet?”

  Willet’s form filled the entrance to the hall. “Not in the drawing room, sir, there wasn’t. There’s a cleaver in the rack in the kitchen, I can show you, but there was surprisingly little in the way of tools or blunt objects, given that Lasker was a car mechanic. We were looking out for a murder weapon.”

  “Has anything been moved from its original position?”

  “No, sir, I can guarantee that. You see, sir, I was the one took the call. It was on my beat.” Willet seemed bewildered; he remained wary of any challenge from Peter. “Kept it as it was, sir. Inspector Maris assigned me the key, as it were. No one has gone in and out without me.”

  “Thank you, Constable Willet.” Indeed, the battlefield had been well preserved. Willet had not even rekiltered the furniture. But someone had moved the cleaver back to its slot in the kitchen, he was almost certain.

  Willet was trying to be helpful but it was time to get rid of him. Peter Cammon’s solitary habits were entrenched and, at the outset, always impressionistic. Here in the family home, emotions still hung in the air, and he hoped to latch on to their echoes. He didn’t need the constable sucking the oxygen out of the rooms. But he reminded himself to be diplomatic.

  “Constable, could you give me a half hour alone here? I want to get a feel for the movements of the wife.”

  Willet was offended, and he wasn’t stupid. Peter’s request was disdainful, if only because the Scotland Yard man wasn’t taking him into his confidence.

  “But I want to show you the kitchen,” Willet said. “It’s significant.”

  “Good. Give me a few minutes on my own, then we’ll rendezvous in the kitchen.”

  Willet nodded and slouched outside, making sure to leave the front door unlatched.

  Peter stood there for an additional minute, letting Willet’s aura fade. The pace of his explorations was important. He wasn’t reaching for some psychic resonance, and it was nothing so hackneyed as waiting for the dead to speak to him; he had known investigators who claimed to do that. It was more about order and disorder. Where had the fight started, and how had it progressed through the house? He saw that it had been a rampaging fight, leaving blood in every room. But where had it climaxed?

  A wavering, finger-painted line of blood beckoned him up the stairs. It deteriorated to thick blotches at the top landing. The lavatory was right there and he almost stepped in a red stream that, trickling from over by the bathtub, had coagulated by the entry, where the tile transitioned to carpet. He took another step, trying not to slip in the blood, even though much of it had dried to an embedded crust. He scanned the room. The thickest concentration coated the rim of the tub. Peter thought it odd that nylons, at least ten pair (and not pantyhose), still hung from the shower bar, like Spanish moss.

  In the sink, dried rivulets of blood, topped with fragments from the shattered medicine chest mirror above it, stained the porcelain. He would check the coroner’s preliminary report to verify that Mrs. Lasker’s head lacerations were consistent with having been rammed into the mirror. He bent over the sink. Even though the drain was open, there was an excessive amount of red liquid left, thickly marring the surface. Blood had jetted from a wound, leaving a feathered stain on the wall next to the cabinet. Experience told Peter that a gash would have to be deep, perhaps arterial, in order to account for such a spray pattern.

  The lavatory deserved more investigation, but Peter decided to complete his tour of the upstairs. He walked straight across the landing to the bedroom. The fight hadn’t started here. The shade was down and the curtains, of heavy velvet, remained drawn. Willet had turned on the two bedside lamps. There was no blood here, and no destruction. He turned off the lamps. He left the bedroom but immediately turned back and flicked the switch for the overhead. He stood at the foot of the king-size bed. Her side was on the left, from which a spicy perfume rose. A single earring lay on the bedside table. The rumpled sheets showed the turmoil of bad dreams. The husband’s side, on the right, hadn’t been slept in; the hospital corners were in place.

  Peter started back downstairs but he stopped in mid-step, realizing two fresh truths about the crime scene. First, looking down the angle of the staircase, he understood that the blood trail had begun at the top of the steps, not the reverse line he had followed. It was clear that the violence hadn’t begun in the bedroom. But who begins to assault his spouse in the lavatory? Also, in spite of the shambles, he discerned that in normal times the Laskers had valued order and conventionality; they had maintained a presentable house. The devastation was more than the by-product of anger: it stood out as a deliberate desecration of their pride of ownership.

  He performed another loop, including the undamaged areas. He let the gloom, the hollowness, envelop him. If Tolstoy was right that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, then he could believe that every domestic quarrel was unique too. The blood pattern indicated desperation like he had seldom seen, yet André Lasker’s escape had been reasoned out in every detail, he was becoming sure.

  Peter decided to view the kitchen before calling Willet back in, but when he entered the back room, there was the constable on the porch peering in. He went directly to the door to let him in, as if he had intended to all along, but Willet saw the sham.

  The damage in the kitchen was dramatic but limited. The two cupboards that had glass fronts had been poked in and the pieces had spilled onto the counter. A wooden knife rack stood next to the fridge; each slot was full, and the cleaver had been re-inserted into its leather pouch. Peter removed each blade in turn, finding no blood on any of them. The cleaver, about eight inches long and capable of making the gouge in the sideboard, was bloodless too.

  “What do you think, Inspector?” Willet said.

  “Hand me that torch on your belt, Constable.”

  Willet unhooked the torch and handed it over. Peter pulled the leather side pouch apart and illuminated the bottom of the opening. The fragments inside could have been merely dust, or possibly wood fragments.

  “What do you think, Guv?” Willet said. Peter ignored him.

  The out-of-synch item in the kitchen was the cooker, which was stained beyond redemption with tomato sauce and charred scraps of food. Spice smells mixed with carbon. A pot of clotting
red liquid sat on a rear burner.

  “Goulash,” Willet said proudly. “I was here when the detectives first went through the place. They farted around with the pot there on the hob, started talking about was it blood, was it tomato sauce.”

  Peter sensed that Willet had more he wanted to tell him.

  “Back and forth they went,” Willet continued. “They weren’t getting anywhere, so I leaned in, dipped my finger in the pot and settled it. Found out afterwards it was a Dutch stew, goulash tomaat, the kind wives leave on the back of the stove cooking for weeks.”

  “How did you find out what it was called?”

  “Research. Obviously it was an ethnic recipe, by the taste. Thought at first it was Romanian, given the wife was from Bucharest. Then I jumped to the idea it maybe was Dutch stew, from his side of the family. I checked the Internet and found the ingredients.”

  Willet smiled broadly beneath his overflowing moustache. Peter was willing to grant the constable small victories, particularly when they were doomed to disappoint each other on other fronts. Peter glanced around the kitchen and let out his breath. He might as well get the next problem over with.

  “Good work, Constable. I’m done for now but I want to come back tomorrow.”

  “Nobody’ll be touching it as long as you need it, but . . .” Peter knew what he would say next. The constable mimicked the North Wind as he heaved a massive sigh and exhaled. “Gonna be a devil to clean. That blood is drying in and it’ll all start to smell pretty soon. This kitchen . . .”

  Peter wasn’t concerned about the rehabilitation of the house. There were firms who did that kind of thing. What he needed was his own key. And so he did what he had to do to intimidate Willet: he invoked the Yard.