Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  Peter bought another round, which neither needed.

  Hamm drifted off for a minute; Peter let him doze. He forced his thoughts back to Anna Lasker and pondered the case in its skeleton form. André had fled for good, Peter was certain. Interpol, Europol and the Yard were actively pursuing the international angle, the offshore investigation as it were, and with a bit of luck a customs official or an alert tourist would catch sight of him. If he had drowned himself, then he would wash up on shore somewhere along the Jurassic Coast in his own sweet time. But Peter knew that both these resolutions depended far too much on serendipity. If he was to determine where André had diverted from the plan, he had to move fast. He might still be close by; but within days he would flee England, remorse fading with his memories of his Romanian wife.

  “I’m going back into the Lasker house tomorrow,” he said, leaning close. Hamm roused himself. “Their computer is still in the house, I noticed. Has it been examined?”

  Hamm smiled and straightened in his seat. “I was the first in the door,” he declared. “Well, after Constable Willet. We have a very good computer man in the shop and I immediately had him duplicate the hard drive and the discs. It seemed to me that Lasker was pretty adept with computers.”

  “So the hard drive is intact and still in the home?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Would you mind getting the necessary passwords from your colleague?”

  Hamm paused again, but gave a firm nod. Peter didn’t know how to read this constant hesitation. He decided to barge ahead.

  “I also want to take a look at the cliffs where Anna took her fall.” Hamm arched an eyebrow at this phrasing. “Could we meet here again tomorrow afterwards?”

  “Maris wants me to go to Heffingdon in the morning. Another town official to brief. But I’ll call you once I’m through. Let’s try for the same time. Here’s my mobile.”

  They exchanged business cards. Hamm looked ready to have Peter’s card, embossed with the Yard’s crest, framed immediately. He smiled broadly.

  They stopped outside the bar. Peter was about to step into the sharp wind when Hamm called to him. “The cleaver?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you were wondering, I was the one who put it back in the kitchen. Couldn’t stand the sight of it buried in the sideboard. Just thought I’d clear that up.”

  Peter, exhausted, retreated to his hotel room, placed the Please Do Not Disturb sign on the outer knob, and locked the door. He hung up his suit and lay down on the bed in his underwear. He no longer had any wish to interact with Bartleben; he only wanted to sleep.

  Bartleben answered on the first ring. He seemed to have retained his jolly mood.

  “Peter! Yes, I’m still at the office.”

  Peter massaged his stiff neck. “Thought I’d give you a progress report.”

  “Before we get to the Lasker business,” Sir Stephen said, “what about the attacks in Devon?”

  “I understood we were to dodge that whole mess,” Peter rejoined.

  “Well, it got play in the tabloids this morning. Communications has fielded eight calls, not counting those from little old ladies, who always seem to find my number. Just thought I’d check, Peter.”

  “We’ve nothing to tell them. Who’s the Comm person on this? Markman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell her to tell everyone we’re staying out of it. Avoid calling him ‘the Rover.’ So far, it remains a local matter. That’s the line I’d choose.”

  “Peter, I can figure that much out. The question is, where’s it heading? What options should the Yard be keeping open?”

  The call had been a bad idea, Peter saw. They both had reason to be embarrassed. Peter had already indulged himself, snooping into the Task Force dossier, and evidently Bartleben wouldn’t be able to stay out of it either. All he meant to suggest was that the Yard continue to play reluctant bridegroom with the Task Force for now, knowing that McElroy would eventually be calling for help. Bartleben should let it go for tonight. The Comm people would fudge everything anyway, keeping all options open. And it would be nice if Bartleben acknowledged his primary — and only — assignment in Whittlesun.

  “I don’t know where it’s headed,” Peter finally said, “but McElroy doesn’t want our help, so let’s wait.”

  Sir Stephen was determined to stretch this out. “I’m a bit surprised at that. Three victims. The pressure must be building. Why do you think that is? Regional defensiveness?”

  Peter wouldn’t engage further, other than to snipe: “By the way, there are four girls.”

  “Is there a threshold for declaring someone a serial killer?”

  “If there is,” Peter said dismissively, “the press sets it.”

  “Okay,” Bartleben said, “now what about Mrs. Lasker? Was she killed in the house or pushed from the cliff?”

  “I’m leaning towards his knocking her unconscious and dumping her off the cliff, gruesome as that sounds. There’s a lot of blood but no sign of a major arterial spill. I don’t think she died in the house. I’ve got a few more days.”

  “Keep on with it, then.” This bland vote of confidence was code; it meant that Sir Stephen was unable to judge the degree of progress Peter was or was not making, but he wasn’t yet concerned.

  “Regarding the house, I’d like Stan Bracher to take a look,” Peter said. “And the vehicle too.”

  “Okay, but he’s in Lyon at the moment, taking a course. Or maybe giving one.”

  “Anything from the French or Interpol?”

  “No. We covered all the ferry ports on both sides of the Channel. No one fitting Lasker’s description crossed at Plymouth, Poole or Newhaven, or any of the other southern embarkation ports. Passport Services and the Border Agency had no incidents reported. How hard do you want me to push it?”

  The subtext of Bartleben’s update was that Scotland Yard was willing to assert its natural role in pursuing international inquiries about the fugitive, but that an expanded international manhunt could get expensive and could take on some diplomatic sensitivity. While the Lasker drama was fresh there would be no problem gaining full, active cooperation.

  “Very hard,” Peter replied. “I’d say it’s more than even chances he planned his escape to the last detail. That’s not to say he didn’t drown in the process. And it’s possible he’s in the neighbourhood still. One officer here suggested he might be hiding in a cave up the coast.”

  Bartleben sighed at the end of the line. Peter was falling asleep. “Okay, Peter. Call me the day after next, or earlier if you need to. One final question.”

  Peter knew what was coming. Bartleben knew that he knew.

  “Are you getting along with the locals, Peter?”

  “Maris was unhelpful but I’m cultivating other sources. It will become intolerable if and when we start stepping on each other’s toes, when we’re both tramping up and down the coast of England. I might want to look into those caves, if they exist.”

  Bartleben was satisfied for the moment. His last thought before hanging up was that Peter Cammon was the oddest detective he had ever worked with, and that he had complete faith in him.

  Peter hit the off button on his phone and lay back in the soft pillows. He immediately fell asleep, having forgotten to phone his wife.

  CHAPTER 5

  Peter had left an hour ago. Joan hadn’t seen Verden arrive, but that was normal; she and Peter were too old to worry about his schedule, about short-term goodbyes. If waiting at the end of the lane was one of his idiosyncrasies, and there were many of them, it didn’t bother her a whit.

  She positioned herself at the window of the kitchen of the cottage so that she could see to the far end of the property. They owned about an acre, not all of it groomed, and the ninety yards or so out to the property’s limit — she could barely make out the fence posts — had been left to grow wild. The grass grew to four feet at the untended property line and moss now coated the hillocks of stone and concrete the landsca
pers had discarded. The previous owner had once tried to raise flowers in this section, and red and orange gladioli continued to poke up here and there, even after three decades. But it wasn’t glads she was looking for, rather the new quartet of pheasants that had invaded last week. Two pairs were now installed in the high grass. One at a time they would pop up unexpectedly, look around and then drop out of sight again. It was like a video game.

  She expected Peter to call sometime that day. That was one of their agreed-upon courtesies, but it was only a matter of his checking in, and he might call anytime before midnight, and so she did not worry. She took the phone out of its cradle near the microwave and went outside to the front of the house. She could still see to the end of the yard.

  The long shed, the biggest by far of their four outbuildings, framed the right-hand side of her view. The pheasants were hiding somewhere in the grass just beyond, probably basking in the increasingly warm day. Eventually the regular activity in the yard would flush out the birds for good; they would turn neurotic and fly away. For now, she had work to do in the shed and she hoped to catch sight of one or more of them out back as she fussed with her plants.

  Phone in hand, she walked to the far end of the shed. The last owner had moved from flowers to chickens and had invested in this huge building as a coop. Like all his ventures, that operation never made money, but the building was solid and Joan and Peter had each had visions of ways to use it. After days of washing out the chicken droppings and repairing the cracked windows, they had sat down and negotiated. She wanted a potting shed and he wanted a hobby room and sanctuary. The shed was big enough to accommodate both. Her gardening gear now took up two-thirds of the length of the structure. His smaller domain became a sort of study-workroom, complete with teak shelving for his books, indoor-outdoor carpeting and a workbench for his projects.

  She had dubbed it Hispaniola: his portion was Haiti and hers the Dominican Republic, with the wall between serving as the border. They agreed not to cut a door through the wall; one had to go outside to get to the other’s space. She used her portion of the shed every day, but Peter, since beginning his semi-retirement three years ago, had been busier than they had expected and, in Joan’s summation, had used his part of the shed only sporadically. But Peter evolved slowly and she sensed that more and more he regarded it as an important place to ruminate on cases, old and new — a sanctum. The question in her mind was: what had happened to retirement? At first he had claimed he was bored and cynical after so many years of police work, yet he had taken multiple assignments each year since.

  She entered the potting room by its only door and went to one of the small, square windows that looked out on the unmowed section of the yard. She was pleased to see a female pheasant stick her head up and look around, retreating after only a few seconds. Joan inspected the stacks of pots and the pegboard of tools. Her gardening season was winding down. The flowers were flourishing in late summer glory but everything was overripe, almost ready to drop petals and wither, though it was too soon to cap the old blooms or dig anything up. There was work she could do but, perhaps because Peter had just left, she felt the need to take a moment and settle into her day of solitude. She paused to appreciate the absolute silence.

  She told herself she wasn’t worried about him.

  Joan left the hut and walked around to Peter’s side, entering the unlocked door. He wouldn’t mind her going in; this was not a marriage where either spouse would accuse the other of snooping. The room had burgeoned into an Englishman’s study, lacking the wood panelling but replete with dozens of books (they would have to be moved inside for the extreme part of the winter) and two green-globed reading lamps. A rocking chair added to the atmosphere and a wood-burning stove, an iron potbelly, completed it, although the stove hadn’t been lit in months. Along one wall they had installed a low table, where Peter worked on his projects.

  A tilting stack of old peach crates leaned out from the same wall; several more lay on the table. About two years ago, Peter had started making shadow boxes. Yet another scheme of the previous owner, his most misguided, had been the planting of peach trees. This was an unprecedented agricultural venture — unprecedented for a reason, the brutal cycle of English weather — and it had failed quickly. The trees had rotted out and he had left behind the stained, often rancid peach crates. At that point, Peter, still not knowing what he would do with the crates, hosed them down and set them to drying in the summer sun. He salvaged two hundred of them and by the time they were dried out, they no longer stank. It would take another twenty-five years for him to find a use for them.

  “I have no evident talent,” he had confessed to her, “but does assembling collages require much artistic flair?” He wasn’t looking to her for an answer. In forty-some years of marriage he had seldom asked a question that wasn’t rhetorical. But he took all his projects seriously. He did the necessary research on the Web and learned that the Surrealists, such as Ernst and Cornell, had often made collages and shadow boxes from found objects. Peter’s lack of training didn’t discourage him. He noticed that the Surrealists and Dadaists used collages to express dream states, and if there was one thing that Peter Cammon grasped as an operating principle in his professional method, it was the use of instinct and free association to lead him onto fresh pathways of thought. He decided to use found objects from the countryside around the cottage to assemble montages, and then see what resulted. His method was almost the reverse of Freudian dream symbolism. Rather than remember his dreams and then represent them inside a box, he randomly juxtaposed the objects, letting them tell him something about his own psychology. He was really more Dada than Surreal, more Arp than Ernst.

  Joan picked up an empty peach crate and chuckled. When Peter started making his shadow boxes, he sometimes wandered into the house, or around the side of the shed to where she was adjusting some potted flower, and held up a crate, turning it from side to side to point to the purply ink pattern left on the bottom by rotting peaches. “Here’s another miracle!” he would announce, inviting her to make out the face of Jesus in the stain. Perhaps, Joan mused, it would have been funnier had her husband been a practising Christian.

  She examined several finished boxes lined up on the shelf over the workbench. Removing her bifocals, she stuck her face almost inside one of them; she wanted to absorb all the detail he had put into the tableau. The first one had a bird theme, with cut-out pictures of doves in midair and a black angel peering out from behind yellow clouds, which were fashioned from a mouse’s nest. The clouds and birds hovered over pictures of incongruous items, including a pomegranate, a cricket bat and a chariot. These were part of what Joan had dubbed his “bird series,” although he had frowned when she said it. From the very first box he had made she had thought them beautiful.

  She had seen others before, such as the collage of glued-on watch mechanisms. But farther down the row she found peach boxes on a different theme. She saw that they were incomplete, awaiting important additions. In general the iconography was religious, with an angel in every scene and often the Virgin Mary or a male figure in robes. Joan was Church of England, and so was Peter to the extent he would admit an affiliation, but these images felt Roman Catholic in their depiction of Bible themes. She looked closer and saw that the cut-outs were all from pre-Reformation medieval art. They didn’t own any books of medieval art.

  And herein, she thought, lay the struggle that Peter was going through with his artistic efforts. He sustained jarring contrasts in these new boxes. There was a racehorse, the Millennium Bridge, a stub from the Tube, a Lucifer match and other contemporary objects in the mix. Religious imagery offers a rich vein of surrealistic references on its own, but each time a readily cubbyholed icon such as a lily or a garden or a beam of holy light popped up in a box, it begged the viewer to interpret the odder, modern items in context. Was he mocking religion or trying to shake up the viewer’s perception?

  She resisted the idea that Peter was moving towards r
eligion. But then she regarded the next four boxes and began to wonder. She now recognized the thematic thread in each of them: the Annunciation of Mary. There was the Archangel Gabriel, on his knees but nonetheless exuding great power. There was Mary, head bowed, but just as powerful a figure. Clippings of cherubs, doves and fountains inhabited some of the boxes. There were still incongruous items — a lawnmower? — yet the overall tone in every box was reverent. The Annunciation boxes invited interpretation, as Peter probably intended, but she knew they were incomplete, not ready for viewing. It also felt disrespectful invading his privacy so casually. Finally, she admitted to herself that maybe she didn’t want to imbibe the darkness in some of the assemblages: knives coming from a cloud, tears of blood and a tree on fire.

  She turned from the workbench and decided that vacuuming the room, so soon after her husband had left for the week, would be finicky and slightly impertinent. She looked around the space appreciatively. She came in once in a while to dust the books on the wide shelves, not that she harassed him on the matter; but there were a few on a special shelf that she never disturbed. They weren’t secret volumes but rather some of his favourites: a first edition of the full-scale Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a signed tome of Wordsworth poems, a history of New Scotland Yard, an out-of-date Who’s Who, and a set of Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories. They gathered dust most of the time, the exception being the Holmes collection. Peter had adored the Conan Doyle series since his teenage years. They were bound in leather and were worn at the corners of the covers. Joan was unsure whether the three-volume edition on the shelf dated back to his youth, but she had often seen him in the middle of a stressful case pick out a volume and flip to a story at random, for relaxation. She had never read the stories herself, although she felt that she knew the red-headed man and the dog who didn’t bark.