Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  Guinevere remained utterly calm in reaction to his new tack. He waited; he could tell that she would answer at her own pace. He wanted to talk with her all afternoon. He wanted to get rid of Hamm and exile the mother, so that he could remain alone with her.

  “The Rover. Such a stupid label. It doesn’t suit the mask he’s put on. I bet he doesn’t call himself that, either.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  Her eyes glazed over as if she were going into a trance; then she refocused.

  “I have seen someone different.”

  “Can you describe him to me?”

  Peter’s mundane query was not what triggered her epileptic seizure. She appeared calm, then for one second catatonic, then she spasmed. Her back went rigid but at first she stayed on the cushions. He saw that she was at risk of losing control of her body and tipping over. But, oddly, the seizure began as a very real trance.

  “I have seen the Black Man, the Floating Man, the Cloaked Man,” she rasped.

  “Which one is the Rover?” Peter asked, bluntly, not sure that she would be able to reply before he lost her.

  “He is the Electric Man.”

  He moved to catch her as she toppled. He called for Mrs. Ransell.

  “And who is the man who went into the sea?” he whispered, the girl tightly held in his arms to limit her convulsions.

  “He is the Cloaked Man.”

  The mother must have known something; she rushed out of her bedroom before Peter called out again. Hamm, too, heard something, for he charged in from the front step. The two officers placed her on the settee. The seizure ended in five minutes. Mrs. Ransell swabbed her child’s forehead with a wet cloth.

  When Guinevere came to, she smiled at the two police officers and said, “Do you know that epilepsy used to be called ‘mater puerorum’ ? ‘Mother of Children’?” Then she closed her eyes and slept.

  Peter had no idea why André Lasker should be the Cloaked Man, but he was sure who the Floating Man was. Despite the gender switch, the Floating Man was Anna Lasker.

  CHAPTER 8

  The ride back to Peter’s hotel was tense. The young detective deserved some comfort, some explanation from his colleague about what had happened in the cottage parlour, but Peter was slow to give it. It was understandable that Hamm might blame him for Guinevere’s epileptic fit. He dissembled when Hamm asked about the girl’s revelations; he said there was nothing useful. When Hamm grunted in doubt, Peter offered that the seizure had started before they got very far. In truth, Peter had been shaken up by the girl. She presented a reflecting surface for his own sense of where he should be going in the Lasker investigation.

  At the hotel, Peter apologized for his inattention. They agreed to cancel their late-day rendezvous at the Crown but decided to meet the next afternoon, same time. Peter knew that Hamm would have to debrief Maris. He thought of asking him to hold off but decided that this would be unfair. Peter himself would try to dodge Maris for a day or two more.

  He lay on the bed in his room for a few minutes. Chambermaids were gossiping in the hall, but otherwise the hotel was peaceful. He had planned to visit Lasker’s Garage, and there was still time before closing. The most promising angle might be the money, he reasoned. Lasker was in a perfect business to skim cash regularly from the till, and who knew where he might have stowed it. Peter had also planned to drop by the Whittlesun Community Theatre before day’s end; it was within walking distance of the Delphine. He got out the packet of reports Hamm had left at the front desk and flipped through the interview notes. The theatre’s director was a local named Symington. The perfunctory interview indicated that André had been “active” in the annual season of plays.

  Peter tried Bartleben, who, as usual, was in his office. His secretary put Peter through immediately.

  “Peter?”

  “Stephen, just a quick one. It’s going slowly, minor progress. One vague indication of a Lasker sighting in the dunes along the coast . . .”

  “Do you trust it?”

  Peter delayed his answer, knowing that whatever he said about Guinevere Ransell would sound ambiguous, evasive. “I trust the witness but I haven’t been able to confirm what she saw. I have a few more interviewees to cover. The garage. The local theatre where André volunteered.”

  “Maybe he played Jesus in the Passion play,” Sir Stephen offered.

  “Come again?”

  “Walking on water . . . ? What about the blood in the house? Still need the Canadian?” Stan Bracher, from Saskatchewan, was known as “the Canadian.”

  Peter ignored that part of the question. “The forensics are disturbing.”

  Bartleben moved on, uncertain why Peter had called. “Nothing new from Interpol or the French. Ferry authorities, coastal patrols, Border Agency — nothing.”

  Bartleben felt the hollowness at the other end of the line. He leaned back in his swivel chair and contemplated the abstract metal sculpture his wife had insisted he hang on the far wall. He had always hated that thing. He knew when Peter was absorbed by the evidence spinning around in his mind. He recognized the pattern, and he smiled to himself. Yes, something was coming with Peter. He didn’t bother asking about the state of relations with Inspector Maris.

  “Okay, I’ll be in touch,” Peter said.

  “Yes, Peter. Hang in there,” said Sir Stephen, still smiling.

  Joan was reading Sherlock Holmes when he called, but she didn’t tell him. The sun was going down and she had been thinking of moving in from the veranda. She had had a lazy day and was glad to hear from him. Her own slackness, which she would have admitted to if asked, attuned her to the preoccupation in her husband’s voice.

  “Are you making progress?” she asked. The words were deliberately vague; she wanted him to say as much or as little as he wanted.

  “It’s slow but that’s to be expected. It’s the kind of case where a bit of serendipity will solve it.” She didn’t quite believe that, but she murmured agreement.

  Touching base with her was important to him at times like these, when the mists weren’t yet clearing and, indeed, seemed to be growing denser, but he was almost falling asleep on the bed. Also, Guinevere ruled his mind for the moment and he wasn’t going to discuss her with Joan. Not yet. “What have you been up to?”

  “I talked to Sarah. She’s over at the Graveney Marshes taking samples.”

  Their daughter was a marine biologist, recently launched on a promising career. Graveney was over in Kent. A little too close to Whittlesun, he thought. Images of the Rover — the Electric Man? — flashed in Peter’s mind, but he suppressed them.

  “Lord, aren’t all the animals getting ready to hibernate about now?”

  “Peter, that’s the kind of comment that gets you in trouble with her. And I don’t think ‘hibernate’ is the right word for it.”

  Peter was in the grip of what she termed his distillation process. She wasn’t his confidante at these times. She didn’t resent his moods during an active case, and knew when to offer a supportive word and when to say nothing. When he was at home he would refer to evolving cases obliquely, and he often retreated to his study in the shed in order to think through his preliminary theories. She didn’t resent that habit either. She had looked up the Lasker reports on the Internet, as well as the tabloid details about the Rover, and she understood the basics of the crimes. She wasn’t about to get much more out of him today. The fact that she had spent much of the previous two days reading Conan Doyle made her smile at the end of the line; perhaps that was why she’d gone exploring on the computer. She would tell him all about it when she next saw him. He would be amused.

  For now, she wasn’t going to try to drag him out of his mood. Her husband could be, as she put it, “a bit of a mystic” but, like everything else, they had negotiated this part of their married life long ago.

  That was it. He said he loved her, she echoed him, and they hung up without any discussion of when he would be home.

  Peter wen
t into the hotel bathroom and brushed his teeth. He stared into the mirror without focusing on his own face, but imagined Anna’s head smashing into the medicine cabinet; he blinked the image away. Returning to the main room, he decided to postpone his visit to Lasker’s Garage, and instead spent two hours reviewing all the material on the case, laying out loose pages across the bed and the floor, until the space was coated with paper. His room overlooked an alley and a brick wall, but he peered out to verify that night had descended; as best he could tell, a storm was building. Deciding that he needed a pint, he went down to the hotel bar.

  Peter thought it paradoxical that he usually found it more useful to chat up the locals rather than travellers in the lounges of commercial hotels. This breed of drinker was naturally opinionated and willing to embrace queries about home-bred crimes-of-the-week; perhaps the locals fancied themselves defenders of parochial honour, the reverse of a welcoming committee. But entering the chiaroscuro gloom of the Delphine bar, Peter saw that his anticipations were moot. It wasn’t particularly busy on this weekday evening. Several solitary men occupied tables at the sides of the bar; these were salesmen, eating pub food and downing their second or third glass. Peter sat at the bar itself, where it was more likely that the indigenous Whittlesunites would be sitting, except that tonight there was merely one grizzled denizen who had placed himself at the extreme end of the bar; next to him, although there were plenty of other seats, sat a woman with too much rouge who refused to focus anywhere but on the bright liqueur bottles behind the bartender.

  Peter ignored them and ordered his pint from the pump. The television over the bar was tuned to a regional news channel. The volume was set low but, since there were no conversations happening in the room and the two lounge lizards at the far end were not on speaking terms with the world, he could hear parts of the newscast. The screen jumped to a blond woman with a microphone. She stood in front of the cliffs, the grey English Channel behind her. Wendie Merwyn reporting appeared at the bottom of the screen. Peter grasped right away that she wasn’t announcing another Rover attack. She spoke with intensity, using the throwaway words “take precautions” and “fear,” but there was something tepid about the report. There was nothing really new about the Rover, and Peter had the impression that the woman had been told to damp down her language. There was no reference at all to Lasker.

  The picture went staticky. The scene cut abruptly to another angle on the sea, although there was no way to tell if this was the same stretch of cliffs. It seemed to be a live report. A handsome young man fought to keep his hair in place as the winds buffeted him and the camera jiggled. The picture was so shaky that Peter could not make out his name on the screen. He and the female reporter had been created from the same bland, and blond, template. Peter couldn’t hear his spiel, although he was employing the same solemn look as the blond woman. Apparently the weather along the south coast was turning nasty. An inserted graphic showed grey clouds roiling across Dorset and Devon. The blond fellow wrapped up. The overall impression was of the intrepid weatherman braving the elements to bring ordinary citizens the latest news of nature’s wrath. The TV image blurred in pathetic fallacy. Peter wondered if the locals would take much interest in the reporter’s forewarnings of storm clouds, or the presence of a human killer.

  Peter fell asleep on the coverlet of the bed before he could review his list of tasks for the next day. As he faded, he reflected that what he really needed to do was go back to see if Guinevere had recovered. He understood the identity of the Floating Man: it was surely Anna Lasker. No, he admonished himself, he needed to see her again to talk about the Cloaked Man.

  The Whittlesun Community Theatre occupied a former abattoir. Peter found the cement building, a perfectly respectable if utilitarian structure, in an older district of the town where gentrification had only recently started. Small theatres worried a lot about real estate and if the WCT — its logo was stamped on the front door in curlicue letters — owned this spot free and clear, it was sitting pretty.

  A pencilled note on the door directed inquiries to Mr. F.R. Symington at the Middle Secondary School up the street. Peter had arisen at 7:30, late by his regimen, and had worked on the Lasker file most of the early morning, and it was now about 10:45. A separate, typed notice instructed those wanting tickets to call a local number or go to the theatre’s webpage. He wondered how many ticket buyers went in search of Symington by mistake, thinking he was the ticket agent; or perhaps he did double duty. A poster advertised an unadventurous winter season, consisting of Charlie’s Aunt, Oliver! and a Christmas Panto, billed as “an old-fashioned family delight.” He couldn’t help parsing that promise: to which word did the adjective belong?

  A short walk took him uphill to the school. He could see his breath in the fall air. A sudden flood of students exiting the building onto the cobbled street made him a fish swimming upstream. Most of the children gripped pieces of paper, probably test sheets, and they all rushed out like escapees from prison. They wore blue wool uniforms, but most had on green trainers, their only bit of sartorial protest. He reached the front door and went inside in search of the main office; in this age of child predators it wouldn’t do to wander the halls unannounced. A secretary directed him to a room on the second floor.

  Symington was eating a bagel at his teaching desk and two students, a boy and a girl, lolled at the back of the room. He looked up when Peter knocked. His expression didn’t change.

  “Mr. Symington. The name is Cammon.”

  The teacher turned to the children. “Mr. Sharf, Ms. Jaynes, you can go.”

  “Really?” the boy said, tossing a cowlick back from his forehead. He ran his fingers through his straw-gold hair and smiled at the girl; a blond Byron, he was. The boy stood and gathered his books.

  “I can’t even remember what you did,” Symington said, wearily, “but whatever it was, don’t do it again.”

  The students bustled out. Symington stood and at once waved Peter to his own chair. At least he didn’t make Peter sit at a student’s desk, where he would have been in a ludicrously inferior placement. Peter saw that Symington had already made him for a copper. Was he that obvious to all the citizens of Whittlesun?

  Symington was over sixty and underweight. His shaggy hair was equal amounts grey and yellowy-white and his face was strained by past distress; ropy veins ran across the tops of his hands. He seemed to be recovering from some disease, or possibly he was fighting alcoholism, yet the eyes were bright and the voice had been trained — in the theatre, no doubt.

  “Representing the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “The André Lasker matter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let’s walk. Fancy a snack?”

  Peter glanced at the buttered bagel on Symington’s desk. “Not on my account. Not particularly hungry, but take your bagel with you.” He had eaten a sticky bun with his two morning coffees.

  “Then let’s go over to the theatre. I’ll show you around. My next class isn’t until one.” He left the bagel where it was.

  For some reason, Symington led him out the rear exit of the school. They ambled downhill along a series of twisting streets.

  “I’m not psychic,” Symington said as they went. Peter didn’t react to this. He had met lots of people who were mildly psychic, but that wasn’t what Symington meant; he was merely breaking the ice. The teacher, angular and with his long arms hanging loose, was in no hurry. Peter instinctively liked him; he came across as a fellow who knew his mind.

  Symington continued. “I expected the local police to be around again sooner or later, since André participated in the WCT. I knew you would show up.”

  “I’m with New Scotland Yard, but yes, I am on the Lasker case.”

  “Then I can tell you a lot about André.” In fact, the police notes, which Peter had read an hour earlier, showed that Symington had disclosed very little to Ron Hamm the first time around. Peter had been looking for someone to offer a
full portrait of Lasker. He remained an indistinct figure at the emotional level — that is, his motivations and yearnings. None of the witnesses had provided real insight into the mechanic’s secret ambitions. The family home had been an advertisement for banal existence in modern England. What had made André Lasker so desperate that he befouled his old life with blood and rage? Any coherent story, whether melodrama or farce, would be refreshing.

  Symington unlocked the front door of the theatre and led Peter through the lobby. The performance space contained about three hundred seats, recently upholstered in scarlet fabric. The two men walked up to the proscenium stage and Symington took a seat on the edge of the apron, the red seats arrayed before them.

  “Here we are,” he said, a small note of pride in his voice. There was a bit of an echo in the big room.

  Peter Cammon parked his old bones beside the teacher and shared his actor’s perspective. The space was ideal for a small regional theatre. The playbill for the winter season was mundane, but he could already tell that the man worked hard to make the program a local success.

  “I like your theatre.”

  “Thank you. The WCT survives and sometimes thrives, I frequently tell people. Summer season does better than winter, due to tourists. We’ve been around since World War II. Of course, we never get too ambitious. I suppose if the town grew appreciably we would raise our game and might try Pinter or Brecht. Our city fathers have generalized notions of reviving the waterfront and creating a tourist Neverland. Doubtful.”

  Peter looked around the room and up at the grid holding the lights while Symington finished his introduction. “We get a lot of abattoir jokes and, yes, suggestions that we mount a Slaughterhouse Five production. But I think we used our subsidy well.”