Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

A look of chagrin passed over the priest’s pallid face. “We had to close it to the public. There was a collapse, about thirty feet, at the Front Rim, we call it. About six months ago. Heavy spring rains seeped into the siltstone and clay, creating hydraulic pressure . . .”

  Peter wasn’t particularly impatient but it was a long walk back to the Lasker house and he anticipated a heavy day of it. He should pose his policeman’s queries and start back, but first he wanted to learn more about the priest.

  “May I be so bold as to ask why you come up here so early? Believe me, Father, I do have a reason for asking.”

  A benign — or was it patronizing? — look passed across Salvez’s cleric’s mask. Peter’s initial instinct was to trust him, but in his experience, the reaction of priests to unbelievers was unpredictable.

  “Come with me, please.” They left the church and went around to the green sward that ended at the cliff. “You’re a police officer, aren’t you?”

  “Good guess, Father.”

  “Oh, you look like a policeman, Mr. Cammon. You move like one. Tweed coat notwithstanding.”

  “I confess.”

  Salvez laughed. “You get to know people in my line of work. Besides, I’ve been expecting the police.”

  “The murder.”

  “Yes. Mrs. Lasker.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No. She was Eastern Orthodox. There’s a Romanian Orthodox church in Weymouth, but none in Whittlesun. I believe she was a member there. As for the husband, I didn’t know him. A terrible, terrible thing. A sin.”

  They were twenty yards from the cliff edge, and the view was panoramic. Peter noticed a curious habit of Salvez’s, almost a twitch. Whenever the priest dealt with a serious question, he paused and turned his face to the sky, as if in defiance of God or the sun deity, or whatever. No, Peter rethought, watching the man more closely; rather, Father Salvez is somehow declaring himself to the heavens. This is a serious man, he concluded, struggling with some larger force, though perhaps not a crisis of faith. Salvez was worth listening to and Peter decided not to rush his questioning. The priest held his pose for a full minute, letting the sun flood across his pale skin, then breathed the deepest of sighs.

  “I don’t suppose . . .” Peter finally said.

  “No,” Salvez said, firmly. “I wasn’t up here that night. Sometimes I do take a walk up and down the goat track at sundown, but not that night. Nor was I around the next morning. The reporters said he parked his car on the rise.”

  Peter remained unsure of Salvez’s schedule of visits to his beloved Abbey. And did Salvez ever stay overnight? Had he seen Lasker on the cliffs before?

  Salvez gestured to the precipice directly before them and pointed a bony finger along the eastern rim. “Would you care to see over the edge?”

  Peter hesitated. Approaching the rim, he grasped that the clifftop was a powerful place, captivating and breathtaking. How cold-hearted a man was André Lasker? He had followed through on his plan, had faced the blood and panic — hers, and perhaps his — without compunction. There was a strong chance that he had dragged her, still very much alive, to the lip of the promontory. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, including being observed by an insomniac priest. Yet Lasker, undeterred, had maintained his cockiness at every stage of his plan.

  They padded to the stone outcropping and the priest guided them to a solid ledge that, although windswept, was set back a few feet. It seemed safe enough, but Peter worried that the wind would send Salvez sailing over; yet the priest’s cassock was a tight sheath around his emaciated body, and Peter in his flapping coat was more at risk. He peered down and saw that the latest rockfall had accumulated on the shore directly beneath them. The tidal sea was already crashing against the stones, pebbling them and drawing them out with the ebb tide. He glanced up to the right, where the promontory that held up the parking platform, and from which Anna Lasker had fallen, projected over the waves. He had a better angle now and saw the risk the husband must have taken to ensure that she flew out from the farthest point without hanging up on a ledge or fissure. Still, it was impossible to tell whether or not Anna had plummeted straight into the water. If so, the waves would have lifted her corpse and thrown it against the rock face. He resolved to take a closer look at the autopsy report in conjunction with the tidal charts for that night.

  The limestone, which had seemed solid, gave way under the foot on which Peter was leaning. Salvez happened to be gazing the other way. Peter tried to shift all his weight backwards; better to fall on the harsh limestone than pitch forward. The ground turned to shifting layers of shale that splattered out over the edge of the cliff like cards dealt from a deck. Peter began to slide helplessly along the same vector. He prepared to land on his bum; it was going to hurt, but worse was the likelihood of his following the shards of rock outward. He placed his arms behind his torso in the hope of planting his hands on the embankment and gripping something, anything. Maybe if he turned onto his right side, though that risked torquing him backwards off the cliff. The twisting failed to halt his skid and he moved by inches to the brim.

  The priest’s narrow arms slipped under Peter’s armpits and hoisted him straight up, like a forklift would carry a pallet. He heaved Peter backwards, to the left and onto the safety of the grass. Peter reflexively rolled onto his front as if to grasp the earth. He immediately rolled back to face the sea and found Father Salvez grinning down at him. Peter’s first thought was that the priest remained remarkably strong, whatever his illness.

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “Let’s not re-enact the crime, shall we?”

  Peter was shaken but unhurt; a bruise would soon rise on his left elbow. He took two deep breaths to calm his heartbeat and lay on his back on the grass for a full minute more. Salvez bustled over to his cache of provisions and poured more tea into their cups. He called Peter over and laid out a blanket in picnic fashion. Peter moved flat-footed and flexed his arm; his tweed coat would require a patch.

  “Thank you. That was stupid of me,” he said. Salvez smiled; he wasn’t interested in using the situation to gain advantage.

  They stayed silent for several minutes, then Salvez asked, “How would you describe me, Inspector Cammon?”

  What opened doors for Peter as a detective was his equanimity with witnesses, but what won answers was his professional demeanour. Until Peter figured Salvez out, the prudent approach would be to dodge leading questions, while staying friendly; but he found it easy to relax with the humble priest.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Say, three adjectives to describe my appearance.”

  So the priest likes games, Peter thought. He considered how frank he should be. The man looked deathly. But priests, in his limited experience, were like psychiatric therapists, always turning questions around in order to reveal more about the questioner than the therapist. “Should I leave my wife, Doctor?” “Do you think you should leave your wife, Patient?”

  Peter rolled over onto his right elbow. He remained slightly dizzy. “Dignified. Ascetic. Gaunt.”

  Peter’s list came across as fatuous, he thought, like plucking adjectives from columns A, B and C. Yet, Salvez wasn’t offended, he could tell. Junior colleagues often said that Peter was a good judge of character. Bartleben, and those who worked with him most, understood that a lot was going on when he approached a suspect or a witness. He was adept at sizing up their fears, their desires, their needs. Now, at the beginning of a parlour game in the company of a black-wrapped priest who presented a melancholy smile to the sky and sea, he perceived that here was a man trapped in crisis. He was dying. He was working on his acceptance of the world and it was testing the anchor of his deepest faith. He was seeking moments of grace in a ruined church of which he was not even the prelate, and he wasn’t playing games.

  But for the moment there was a puzzle to play out. It was Peter’s companion’s turn to be silly. “Gaunt. John of Gaunt. Father of Henry VIII
. Henry, destroyer of monasteries. Monasteries, St. Walthram’s Abbey.”

  “Word games?”

  “To keep the mind alive. Flex the grey muscle,” Salvez responded.

  After all, the man had saved his life, Peter reasoned. He played his turn. “Okay. John of Gaunt. England, bound in with the triumphant sea, whose rocky shore beats back the endless siege of watery Neptune. The Neptune Water Slide at Whittlesun Beach. Whittlesun Abbey.”

  Salvez shouted, “Very good!”

  They both smiled. Peter could feel him building to something more revealing than word associations. Here was an opening to draw out the priest’s insights into the town of Whittlesun and the strange cliffs that loomed over it. He would probe a little more. He would take the time to befriend Salvez. And, he realized, he was no longer in a hurry to re-enter the death house in town.

  The priest’s echoing laugh was undercut by the rising sound of a motor in the distance. They both turned and saw a thundering motorcycle breast the hilltop parking lot and continue down the goat track towards the Abbey. They both felt a twinge of regret at the interruption. Salvez stood and brushed dry grass from his trim and pristine cassock. He helped Peter to his feet. Peter’s sore left elbow made him wince.

  “May I visit you again, Father?” Peter asked quickly as the motorcycle bore down the path.

  “By all means.” But there was doubt in his face. His smile grew more determined.

  “You’re not well,” Peter said.

  “Prostate cancer.”

  “I’m sorry. But Father, I am more sorry that we didn’t have a chance to talk about it.” The motorcycle, sputtering and chugging, was just below the church hill. Peter had to shout to be heard. “I’ll give you a call. I’m trying to understand the town better. You’ve been very helpful.” This was feeble, Peter knew, but he hoped he had started a bridge to future conversations.

  Salvez raised his face again to the sky, but only for few seconds. He turned to look Peter in the eye, favouring him with the stern concentration of a sermonizing Catholic priest. “Inspector, do you know the one thing I have missed, experience-wise?” Experience-wise? Salvez was shouting now as the motorbike approached.

  “What, Father?”

  “Worldliness.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The motorcycle’s rattling roar flared as the driver rode over the last hillock and came to a stop on the church lawn. Relieved of his helmet and goggles, the driver turned out to be Constable Willet.

  “Mr. Hamm thought you might need a lift back to town.”

  Peter found himself especially irritated. His conversation with Salvez had hardly begun. That he had been telling himself that he had to get back to town, and Willet was saving him a long hike, did not alter his mood. He stared at Willet, a buffoonish figure in his goggles, buttoned-up jacket and gauntlets. He realized that he wanted to stay the day with Father Salvez and learn about the town through him.

  Peter turned to say goodbye to Salvez but the priest had disappeared. Just as well, he thought, since Willet in his uniform and with that ruddy face was a mood destroyer. He could make another visit. He looked in amazement at the sidecar attached to the bike; his spine ached already. Willet helped him into the pod and gave him a helmet to wear.

  “He’s a mysterious one, that priest,” Willet said, unhelpfully. He started the motor.

  Peter had Willet drive to the hotel so that he could retrieve his notes and the stack of forensics reports. At the front desk at the Delphine, the manager came out from a back office and handed him a thick envelope with Detective Hamm’s stamp on it. A glance showed that the bundle contained more transcripts of interviews with neighbours and acquaintances of the Laskers. At least Hamm was on the ball this morning, he thought. Outside, he suggested that Willet let him walk to the Lasker house, and the constable responded with an indifferent nod. Peter guessed that Maris had told him to back off, for the moment. The constable lit a cigarette and Peter stood with him while he puffed.

  “Managed retreat.”

  “What?” Peter said.

  “That’s what they call it. All along the coasts, and not just the Channel coast. The landslides are increasing, taking down the cliffs farther and farther inland. Call it climate change, whatever, it’s getting worse. There’s no easy solutions, Guv. Actually, managed retreat refers to places down closer to sea level that’re vulnerable to the waves, but the principle is the same for the tall cliffs. They’ve proposed everything. Take sea walls, for example. Cost a fortune, and some argue they just shift the problem farther down the shore. The sea won’t cooperate. Merciless, it is.”

  “So, managed retreat?”

  “Managed excuse for doing nothing.”

  “So do they move houses back from the vulnerable sites?”

  “They try.”

  But not St. Walthram’s Abbey, Peter was about to say. Willet read his thought.

  “Won’t be able to move the Abbey, no. It will be a sad day when that grand bit of architecture falls into the ocean. And I’m not even Catholic. Of course, that’s what your man in black is up there all the time doing.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Worrying the problem like a terrier with a bone, as my mother used to say. I’ve seen him many times going to and fro, like that would keep the waves away from his church.”

  Neither of them bothered to repeat the obvious metaphors and ironies of God’s house returning to the primal sea.

  Peter reached the Lasker home in ten minutes. He entered quickly, hoping that the residents along the street wouldn’t spy him, and he was grateful not to be trailed by the Great War flying ace. He turned on the hall lights. The interior had taken on a musty odour, and the lower hallway exuded a sharp, metallic smell where the bloodstains were thickest. It was plain that the next owner would have to gut the downstairs.

  Peter was content to have this hermetic slaughterhouse to himself. Ignoring the blood pattern for the moment, he went down the corridor to the back room and seated himself in front of the computer. Hamm’s colleague had done his job. He found a yellow sticky note on the monitor, which told him that no password was required to access any of the system’s databases, and that there appeared to be no buried files. The CPU warmed up quickly; the logo of the Whittlesun service provider flashed onto the screen. In his first scan, Peter chose to believe the note, while recognizing that encryption was getting sneakier all the time and that he might have to ask the experts to delve deeper into the hard drive. The setup of files appeared to be routine. A second sticky note from Hamm’s I.T. fellow suggested that he examine the history listing next to the Laskers’ homepage, in order to get a feel for the kinds of sites the couple had called up recently. Smart man, Peter thought: it was notoriously difficult to get Internet service providers to cooperate in disclosing webpage records. Hamm’s computer expert had realized that the history inventory would provide the next-best footprint. Perhaps Lasker had done his exit planning here, Peter speculated, seeking out places of refuge around the world. Of course, he might just as easily have deleted all daily records of site searches.

  The files disappointed. They formed the record of two bland lives. No love notes on the email record, no orders placed to Harrods for caviar, no explorations of porn sites. So far, Peter had gained no feel at all for André Lasker’s hopes and dreams. Yet, as he scrolled through the files he sensed carefully constructed deception in the very absence of human interest inside the computer. The record was too anodyne. Lasker kept no office or personal accounts on the home machine. Peter learned a little about the marriage from Anna’s email traffic, and her participation in chat rooms, even though most of it was carried on in Romanian. There was a record of two flights to Bucharest, both pre-booked roundtrips on Ryanair, an indication that she had all the while intended to return to Britain at the end of each of her visits. Trash folders had been emptied. The screensaver showed lambs in a field; they might have been Romanian sheep for all Peter could tell.

  Elsewhere in
the electronic maze Peter found several video games: Masterplayer, Myst, Crusades, Life Construct — he would have to look into that one — and Urban War Challenge. There were surprisingly few word-processed documents, although the Laskers had the latest version of Microsoft Word. One spreadsheet file inventoried the household contents, probably to meet insurance company requirements. Peter turned on the printer and ordered two copies of the file. Then he shut everything down.

  The blood. With Willet absent, he was free to roam the house and replicate the sequence of Anna’s movements. He walked slowly upstairs, conscious of the fact that he was reversing her trail. In the lavatory, careful not to step in the blood on the tiled floor, although it had dried by now, he looked at each red blotch in turn and tried to estimate the trajectory of the blood spurt. He turned to the forensic and investigator reports, such as they were, to compare his preliminary impressions with theirs. There was nowhere to spread them out in the hallway or in the lavatory; he went into the bedroom and laid the reports out on the bedspread, and shuttled back and forth to the bathroom.

  Anna Lasker’s head had been driven into the medicine cabinet door, that was clear; shards had been found in her scalp. The preliminary autopsy estimated that the blood that had pooled in the bath came from slashes to both arms and perhaps from her mouth, given the quantity. At his first go, the coroner had been unable to distinguish injuries inflicted in the marital fight from the many wounds caused by the fall from Whittlesun Cliff and the further battering of the tide. He had also been unable to decide whether or not she had been alive when she tumbled over the edge. It was clear to Peter that he needed someone like Stan Bracher. Peter also comprehended that the Regional Lab, with three murdered girls in its cooler, was under more pressure than it could handle, and possibly had refused to rush the Anna Lasker results. As far as Peter knew, the Lasker automobile was also languishing in the garage at the lab.

  Peter thought he had the sequence of the battle straight, from lavatory to downstairs corridor, with the destruction in the kitchen a sideshow. But the varying quantities of blood stymied him. The pooling was heaviest in the bath, but he was sure that the duel between husband and wife had moved from upstairs to down. He stood in the vestibule on the main floor and pressed himself against the door, hoping to gain a new perspective on the wainscoting of blood. He padded to the kitchen doorway and repeated the process from the reverse perspective. Yes, he was sure that the bloody hand — for now it was a disembodied hand, since he wasn’t sure whether the husband or the wife had painted the walls — had moved from the bottom of the stairs to the back kitchen.