Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  Not that he needed the lecture, but Peter had never heard such a succinct explanation of the challenge facing forensic accounting.

  Mayta had paused at the entrance to the shed, and now turned to face Peter. She walked directly back to him, looming above, and peered into his eyes, like a censorious hypnotist.

  “You look unhealthy, Inspector.”

  She moved in even closer and held up a flat palm to within an inch of his right cheek. For him, it was as if the fever in his face was extruded into her hand. She looked into her palm as if it were a mirror reflecting his shining, perspiring aura.

  “You’re running a fever, Inspector. Come with me.”

  Peter was unwilling to be led — he had a schedule to follow. But that didn’t matter, for he followed her magnetically, despite the turmoil in his head. He fought his delirium. He thought of Gwen, of Symington. He imagined a single murderer of both Anna Lasker and the four girls. He conjured up huge crows, harpies, flying out over the Whittlesun Cliffs.

  Mayta herded him into the office. As he entered, she whirled and stared into his face again, like a mesmerist anxious to get started. A filthy coffeemaker stood on a cabinet against the wall. She began to root in the cupboard underneath. This is ridiculous, Peter told himself. He leaned back on the desk, even though he dislodged a stack of papers in the process, and grimaced from the bruise on his elbow where he had fallen; his left shoulder ached too. Mayta had her back to him but somehow sensed his pain. She paused in her search for her elixir and turned to dart him a look of motherly disapproval. She returned to her search.

  Peter closed his eyes against the dizziness. How did I end up in a smelly car-hire shed with the owner’s voluptuous girlfriend preparing to pour some homemade formula down my throat? The small portents are the same as the big ones, Peter mantra-ed, and tried to relax. No-matter-where-you-go-there-you-are. He found himself hoping that there would be real magic in that elixir.

  She emptied the coffee in the sink attached to the lavatory and filled the flask with water. She poured in black tea, flipped the switch on the coffee machine and stood back to watch it boil. She joined Peter in leaning against the desk, either in some kind of covenly solidarity or to catch him if he toppled. Taking a towel from behind the desk, she wiped the sweat from his forehead and neck, at once making him her patient. He didn’t resist. He was dysfunctionally delirious. He thought of women. Guinevere. Joan. His daughter Sarah. And then he had a fevered premonition: Sarah would somehow be drawn into the investigation. The image was clear: Sarah, her shell collector’s rucksack over her shoulder, walking on the Channel strand.

  Satisfied with her necromancy, Mayta poured a cup of the chai and added sugar to it. “It’s hot, but drink it as soon as you can stand it.”

  Peter, barely confident that he wasn’t ingesting poison, downed the tea in a series of small sips. The heat and the steamy spices — he identified cardamom and cinnamon — broke through his fever like a compact tidal wave, seeming to flush the sweat right out the top of his head. Mayta rubbed his head again with the towel, like a hairdresser or a swimming coach would. His temperature dropped within seconds. His vision cleared and he found himself staring at Sam, who stood in the doorway grinning. By this time, Mayta was brushing Peter’s tweed coat. She even looked down to check the polish on his brogues.

  “You’re better,” she pronounced. And he was. He thanked her and walked out to the parked vehicles.

  “How about I drop you off at Lasker’s, then you take the car?” Sam said.

  Peter rubbed his eyes, and shook his head to clear it. “Then how will you get back?”

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry about that.” He got in the driver’s side. Peter gratefully occupied the other.

  Sam slalomed through the streets of Whittlesun, with no need for the SatNav. In five minutes they were in the neighbourhood of Lasker’s Garage, but then Sam halted in an empty lane and began tapping new coordinates into the very device. “Here, I’ll leave that for you, the Romanian church in Weymouth. An hour and a bit away.”

  Peter looked at the vacant cobblestones ahead. “Forgive me,” Sam said. “It’s probably better I don’t show my face at Lasker’s.” They got out of the Subaru and Sam tossed the keys to Peter. “Keep the car as long as you need it.” He walked away before Peter could comment. There must be some Armenian sales practices he didn’t understand, he mused.

  Lasker’s Garage lay a half street along and around one corner, on a dead end stretch. Like Sam’s, the office was a shed set back from the road, but it was also bigger than the Armenian’s operation, with a closed-in garage to one side, from which the sounds of mallets and drills reverberated. Cars were brought into the work bay area from a square portal out at the street; a typical pull-down garage door controlled access. A sign had been posted: Honk to Enter. He knew from the files that before André Lasker’s desertion, the business employed four full-time mechanics. Judging from the traffic, the garage seemed to have moved along nicely. But there was no Mayta, only an elderly bookkeeper-receptionist in the office, with copper-wire hair and glasses suited to a bored librarian. She looked up as Peter entered. He flipped open his Scotland Yard credentials, which utterly failed to impress her. A doorway led from the office into the repair zone and the banging and grinding formed a constant backdrop to conversation in the office. This was Sally.

  “The police have already questioned me,” she affirmed, implying that she had been detained in shackles, or worse.

  “I would like to see the company books,” he stated. The shop’s black-spined ledgers stood in a neat row on the shelf behind her head.

  “The books? Whatever for?”

  Peter looked around the office. There were testimonial letters from customers on the wall and a couple of gold-stamped parchments of commendation from the local business council. The most recent award was two years old.

  “Those,” he said.

  This was the moment when a witness either mentioned warrants or she did not. Sally seemed to believe that she was the Defender of the Faith, preserving an empire and a legacy even after the founder had fled.

  “Them’s only the last six months.”

  But she handed over one of them. The pages were filled in with her neat penmanship.

  “We do a cash business, eighty per cent,” Sally said. “Majority of customers with insurance settlements deposit their cheque and pay us in cash. But I record everything.”

  “Do you take the cash to the bank yourself?”

  Her tone turned even more defensive, for a number of bad reasons, Peter thought. “I do now. Mr. Lasker always did it before. Took the bag to the night deposit at the Barclays branch.”

  “Is that near his home?”

  “Might be. I’ve never been invited along, myself.”

  So André Lasker likely used the same bank to handle his family and business accounts, and that branch was closer to his home than to the garage. Why was it more convenient to use a bank near to his house? Perhaps someone at the bank was in on Lasker’s scheme.

  “That was before all that business happened,” Sally continued.

  It seemed evident that the business was continuing without let-up, as it should, he supposed. But he asked anyway.

  “Is the business still prospering?”

  “Prospering? Oh, we’re doing fine. Revenue stream’s flowing nicely, even above the usual, I might say. Are you really with Scotland Yard? Can I see your identification again?”

  “No.” He went behind the desk and took down the most recent volume. He scanned the last three months of entries, including the week of André’s flight; the pattern of cash payments appeared to remain steady in the days leading up to his disappearance. Lasker had maintained his habits to the end, at least at the office. The entries in the ledger had halted the Sunday after the incident.

  “Was Mr. Lasker well liked?”

  “Well liked? Oh, he was a reasonable boss. Everybody misses him.”

  “Did he socializ
e with the staff?” Peter understood that he was reaching his point of marginal return with Sally. He glanced at her desk and noted that a fresh volume had been started for the post–André Lasker regime, although this one was blue rather than black. He refrained from taking it; instead, he would ask Ron Hamm to impound the lot of them.

  “Socialize? No, mechanics aren’t the kind to socialize with the boss after hours. But he always bought three bottles of Bailey’s at Christmas. He was well liked, Mr. Lasker.”

  Her comments fell into the category of not speaking ill of the dead. Peter pointed to several items in the credit column of the last month’s account book.

  “These seem different. What are they?”

  “We run a car hire business on the side. Very profitable but not that big an operation, you understand.”

  “A cash operation?”

  “Fifty-fifty. Because it’s mostly business types that rent, they need receipts, and that makes them think they might as well put the hire charges on a credit card.”

  “But less than half the customers.”

  “Mr. Lasker tended to offer them a better deal for cash.” While old Sally remained wary, she was enjoying the attention, so long as she could continue to educate the ignorant policeman from London.

  He had only one more important question. He would interview the mechanics later. “Sally,” he said, with ersatz intimacy, “who’s managing the garage now?”

  “Albrecht Zoren, our chief mechanic,” she replied.

  Peter took down another ledger, merely for general comparison. He replaced the two volumes in their proper order and left the office.

  “But don’t you want to talk to the men?” Her tone was plaintive, but he didn’t turn around.

  CHAPTER 10

  “The ‘open road’?” Stan Bracher, the Saskatchewanian, had once said while they were rolling down the A5. “Try three hundred miles of nothing but grain elevators and frozen wheat stalks.” Peter had once driven the I-70 across the State of Kansas in mid-January and knew what Stan meant. The drive to Weymouth from Whittlesun hardly compared but Peter realized, as he swung the Subaru onto the dual carriageway, that he was in the mood to drive. The SatNav brought him to the front of a tall church near the centre of Weymouth. The trip took precisely an hour. The church overfilled the small backstreet square on which it stood. Its narrow footprint, and its grim steeple, recalled a rocket ship. The front steps ran right to the edge of the pavement, and exiting parishioners were expected to move immediately to the grassy quadrangle across the way.

  The neighbourhood was dead quiet at this time of day; shadows from the looming buildings turned the air damp. Peter parked the car in the sexton’s spot at the side and walked to the front of the building. He stopped at the bottom of the broad stone steps. Etched into granite above the main door were the words Saint George’s Anglican Church.

  He walked around to the common entrance, where a sign advertised:

  St. George’s Anglican Church

  Office of the Bishop Anglican Diocese

  Office of the Patriarchate Romanian Orthodox Church

  A separate hanging sign had been turned to Open.

  The door was unlocked. He entered without hesitation and descended a level. Modern churches in Britain did not have crypts; they had basements decorated with linoleum flooring. The place was as silent as a tomb, though. He explored the rooms along the musty hallway, but neither the Anglican Bishop nor the officiating priest of the Romanian contingent in Weymouth appeared to be anywhere downstairs. The door to the Administration Office had been left ajar and a desk lamp was on, but no one was home. A ceiling light provided a beacon to the winding stairway at the end of the hall, and Peter traced his way up to the main church.

  The building, in Peter’s quick, almost dismissive judgment, was like many other houses of worship built since World War II. It had a late-sixties or early-seventies feel. Holy fathers, complicit with church architects of the era, forgot that modern styles, in this case with a bias towards pastel colours and teak trim, dated quickly, leaving their inventions oddly retrograde and unimpressive three or more decades on. St. Walthram’s Abbey, even in its crumbling state, projected more warmth than this edifice.

  A man was sitting at the large pipe organ in the alcove created by the left branch of the transept. He sat high up, the keyboard in a crescent embracing his body, the pipes like a jungle of reeds facing him. Peter could imagine F.R. Symington staging The Phantom of the Opera in this space. But he had another sharp sensation, namely, that the man at the organ was waiting for him. It wasn’t true, but nonetheless he paused and waited. The priest, who wore a black suit, turned to look at his visitor, even though Peter had not made a sound. Father Vogans was in his early seventies, with a grooved face and bushy eyebrows; he had a heavy, Slavic jaw and the shoulders of a middleweight boxer.

  “Do you play?” The voice was warm, with only a hint of an Eastern European accent. It carried clearly through the cool air beneath the hollow of the cupola.

  “I’m not in the least musical,” Peter admitted. His voice carried distinctly; he was glad he hadn’t shouted.

  “Then there is no point in your coming up here. I will come down.”

  The priest descended and met Peter by the rail in front of the altar.

  “Nicolai Vogans.”

  They shook hands. Peter identified himself as a Yard chief inspector. The information didn’t faze Vogans, just as it had not surprised Father Salvez or F.R. Symington. Vogans only nodded and led the way down to the passageway and staircase that Peter had just used.

  “Have a seat,” the priest said, in the Administration Office. Immediately, Vogans began the elaborate ritual of making coffee. He had all the accoutrements — filters, ground coffee, a jug of water and a shiny, copper-piped machine. “What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?”

  “I’m here about Anna Lasker.”

  “I thought you might be.”

  “Why is that, Father?”

  Father Vogans turned, a teaspoonful of coffee poised in one hand. He peered over the top of his glasses, at the classic ironic angle. “I’m pushing seventy. So are you, I’m guessing. Let’s see what else we have in common, Inspector Cammon, as men of a certain experience, able to cut through the niceties.”

  “Okay. Was she was a member of your congregation?”

  “Yes.”

  “An active member?”

  “Let me get this coffee going before we talk. It is too important for distractions.” He finished his preparations and left the coffeemaker to bubble and steam. He took the chair behind the desk, across from Peter.

  “‘Active’ is not the right word. She lived in Whittlesun, not an easy commute every Sunday when you have no car.”

  Peter had been unaware that she couldn’t drive. Apparently, André did not see fit to drive her.

  “And we are a small parish. No, again I am not being precise. We serve the Romanian community across all of southern England, but the Weymouth contingent is not large. And this is not wholly our church. It’s owned by the Anglicans.”

  “I see that. What’s the connection?”

  Vogans got up and turned back to his machine, recalibrating a knob. “The connection of Christian to Christian, I hope. This was established first as an Anglican church, St. George’s. He’s the patron saint of our church as well. So it was appropriate that they offered us space. Moreover, the Romanian Orthodox church in London, a beautiful church, is also a joint operation with the Anglicans. It is called St. Dunstan’s. You should visit it when you are next in London.”

  “I see. Isn’t that unusual?”

  “Not at all. Have you been to St. Patrick’s in Dublin? There is a whole Protestant section within that important Catholic cathedral.”

  Peter tried to take the analogy at face value. To compare the Romanian church’s experience to that of the Huguenots was a stretch. He took a closer look at Vogans. At almost seventy the man remained physically strong, his face ha
rdened by outdoor work. Peter was not even tempted to patronize him as peasant stock; there was something of the trained athlete in his dignified strength.

  “What did you think of Anna?” Peter said.

  “A sad death. An unhappy life. But she had faith in God.”

  “Was it her marriage that made her unhappy?”

  Peter was choosing his words carefully but the priest was having none of it. “Don’t worry, Chief Inspector, I will not be disclosing confidences from the confessional. But I don’t mind telling you, she was unhappy. She still had ties to her family in Bucharest. Or Iasi, to be exact. She was bored with life in Dorset, and very frustrated.”

  Great, Peter thought. Two people who hacked each other up out of boredom. They sent me down here for this? His sudden irritation took him by surprise; perhaps his fever was returning. Condescension towards the victim was not his habit. He still ached from his near-fall up on the cliffs.

  “Was she . . . volatile? Dramatic in nature? Emotional?” he asked.

  “I would say so. Loved passionately. Hated passionately.”

  “Whom did she hate?”

  “No one, in effect. No one she told me about.”

  “Did she talk about leaving her husband?”

  “I can firmly say no to that, Chief Inspector. Anna wanted what every immigrant, and every young woman, wants.”

  “Did she try to get pregnant?”

  Father Vogans hesitated. He had poured the coffee and completed the sub-ritual of adding cream and sugar. Peter wondered about Romanian Orthodox rules on contraception. Vogans proceeded.

  “She wanted children. He did not. But I want to say, Inspector, that they loved each other. Sometimes people cannot see the way forward.” Vogans crossed himself. “What they think will be inevitable progress in their lives turns out to be the same old thing. I feel guilty about Anna. If she had lived in this city, I am sure I could have involved her in the church more than I did. It would have given her a life.”

  That was a pretty harsh summation of the woman’s failures, Peter thought, even if the priest was eager to take on her sadness. “But what did she want, Father? What did she tell you she wanted?”