Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  The priest looked at Peter. He discerned no pleading in the visiting policeman’s tone. Vogans peered into his coffee cup, watching the steam curl across the surface, and understood that he’d best give a direct answer this time. Thus far the priest had let their common generation shape his answers, but this last question was a police officer’s firm query.

  Peter noticed for the first time that the cleric’s eyes did not shine, that the irises were flat black, giving him an intimidating stare. A sermon from the pulpit by this priest would be something to experience. But his words were sincere and measured. “She wanted to bring her mother over from Bucharest.”

  “And that wasn’t possible?”

  “The mother didn’t want to come. Anna pleaded and wept, and she flew there several times, but the mother refused. My church is under the direct supervision of the Patriarch of Bucharest but my efforts were also in vain.”

  “I have to ask, Father: did she seriously think of going back to Romania herself?”

  Vogans went quiet but Peter was sure that he would answer. “Once, she talked about it. But I told her that her loyalty was to her husband, who had given her a good life in England. I’m afraid that we both pinned some hopes on her persuading him to have a family — a child, I mean.”

  Peter flashed on Anna’s blood spread across the corridor walls. He said nothing as Vogans sipped his coffee from a small cup. He noticed that the cleric’s black cassock, very similar to Salvez’s, hung on a manikin-like rack at the side of the room. Vogans saw him staring.

  “I usually wear this suit in the daytime,” he said, glad to shift the subject of conversation. “The cassock runs down to the ankle and the hem drags on the floor too much. I wear it for liturgical occasions, of course.”

  Draped over the shoulders of the cassock was a red cape, implying an elevated status. Peter recognized it as the chasuble. He wondered if Salvez owned one.

  “The cape? That’s the chasuble. Frankly, a nuisance to put on.”

  In Peter’s experience, when a priest started joking, he was trying to end the conversation. He had enough for the moment, anyway. The portrait of Anna was forming. The caffeine zinged through him; he stood and prepared to go. And then he had a revelation. He was in a church, and so why not? But it wasn’t a specific revelation resulting from prayer; it arrived more obliquely than that. It was subsurface, something to do with Anna, with the pattern of the blood. He let his eyes go out of focus and he remained still an extra minute, even though Father Vogans must have been staring at him (Peter bet that the Romanian had seen his share of mystics). Something to do with the way Anna moved. In his reverie, he saw her sweep an arm across a wall that seemed to stretch into infinity. His lightheadedness had no connection with his dizzy spell in Sam’s office, though it might have had something to do with the coffee.

  Vogans broke in. “Let me show you something upstairs before you leave.”

  He came around the desk but paused at the manikin and reflexively smoothed the front of the cassock. “Did you know that there are thirty-three buttons on the cassock, one for each year of Christ’s life?”

  Vogans led him back up the stairs to the main church. Peter was all right now. The priest turned to the wing of the transept opposite the pipe organ and gestured to a large wooden panel; Peter hadn’t noticed it earlier. It resembled a rood screen in a Protestant church. The wood was intricately carved into frames, each of which housed a painted scene from the Bible. Peter naturally looked for the Annunciation and found it near the bottom of the panel. Gabriel knelt, as always, in front of the radiant Virgin, while God, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, and various cherubs looked down on the archangel’s audience with Mary.

  “That is called the iconostasis,” Vogans whispered. “It’s an altar screen of great age and value from Romania. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself, in 1964, paid for its transport and installation. So you see, the ecumenical spirit is alive in southern England.” Peter accepted the devotion behind Vogans’s explanation, even if he sounded like a boy who had been forced to move into his rich relative’s house. Peter agreed that it was beautiful.

  “Do you know Father Salvez?” Vogans asked.

  “Yes. We have met. You know that he has cancer?”

  The priest seemed startled by the question, but there was real sympathy in his response. “I’ve been told.”

  Peter said his goodbyes and Vogans let him out the front door of the church so that he could see the stonework lining the entrance. He had the distinct feeling that Father Vogans didn’t want to talk about Father Salvez. And it was interesting that the Romanian congregation, housed within this temple to Anglicanism, was large enough to deserve its own SatNav entry.

  Paper covered every square inch of the desktop. More documents of various sizes, tagged and corner-turned, trailed across the carpet from the desk to the door and back again like some Ourobouros loop, in a sequence laid out by Chief Inspector Peter Cammon that only he understood. It was as if some bureaucratic Theseus had trickled out a path of paper in order to find his way out of the maze but hadn’t succeeded. Other reports and photographs were stacked next to his chair, or perched on the settee in the corner; he had taped folio-size maps of the coast on the wall next to the television. This was the second time he had laid out the Lasker material, but he was no happier with this configuration. He had closed the curtains, but now it was about five o’clock, and he opened them again. He would have stood on the desk and looked at the evidence that way, if that would have helped. There was still a gaping hole awaiting the detailed autopsy. In Stan Bracher’s absence, he would have to drive out to the Regional Lab and introduce himself to the presiding pathologist.

  The husband would either float to the surface near Whittlesun Beach, his body bloated and nibbled away by small fish, or he would be found with a new moustache and beard in Kathmandu. Neither scenario pleased Peter. It was becoming personal, and he wanted to be the one to make the arrest or, if it came down to it, identify the etiolated corpse.

  There was a third possibility, but Cammon couldn’t see Lasker just walking up to Inspector Maris and turning himself over to the Queen’s judgment. Maris wasn’t destined for that much luck.

  Peter needed a way to force the issue.

  There had been other disappearances into the ocean: Lord Lucan in 1974 and the Australian prime minister Harold Holt in 1967 came to mind. Lord Lucan, a minor aristocrat, had walked into the sea after killing the family nanny and attacking his wife with murderous intent. Peter had been peripherally involved in the investigation in the early part of his career, although the feckless Lucan was never found and reports of his reappearance had been rife ever since. Holt’s drowning had generated similar conspiracy theories; he had served as PM for less than three years, and he was an experienced swimmer. Peter’s favourite paranoid story was that a Chinese submarine had been waiting for him offshore.

  Peter was familiar with both files. Tragic as they might be — Holt’s vanishing was certainly an accident — these were lurid anecdotes whose features only appeared remarkable to the tabloid-credulous. Peter understood the purpose of the sea in the popular imagination — oblivion for the ingenuous, the jettisoning of identity and rebirth for the egoist. But Peter knew that the disappearing man, whatever his motive, fears the tide washing him back to his departure point. That is his definition of defeat. He shivers at the prospective scene as his bloodless corpse is loaded into the unhurried ambulance, his pale rictus photographed by police and by broadsheet stringers.

  He flipped the cap of the second bottle of ale he had commanded from room service. He sat back in the armchair and frowned at the ragged display of paper. He didn’t like hotels much, and he considered moving to a new one. Of course, that would also require him to clean up the mess. He took out his police notepad and drew up a list. He was an inveterate maker of lists. He wrote:

  1. Too much blood — why?

  2. The second beach

  3. Mechanic kills wife �
�� no weapon? no wheel wrench?

  4.

  He didn’t fill in the 4. On a second scrap torn from his notebook, he wrote and underlined: where do I want to go next with this? He crumpled the page and tossed it into the basket.

  He felt the lack of progress in his day. A confrontation with Maris was coming, probably tomorrow. He still needed local guidance, perhaps from Willet but better from Hamm, in order to efficiently explore the coastline. A search of the caves east of Whittlesun was more appealing than ever.

  He lay down on the bed, not intending to sleep, and shifted some of the papers aside. He got out his mobile and flipped it open, but then left it lying beside him. He’d see how it felt in the morning. His penultimate thought before dozing off was that Lasker would not be found in Kathmandu: it had no beaches.

  And then he asked, as he floated into the twilight: Who is the Black Man? If the Cloaked Man is Lasker, has Gwen seen him? Watched him? Tracked him? Above all, who is the Electric Man? He’d find that out tomorrow, too.

  Stephen Bartleben lay abed with the woman to whom he had been married for forty years. He loved her, he supposed, but after what he considered a geological epoch, the best he could articulate was that they were companionable. Time’s companions — endurance, habit, acceptance — overwhelmed love and you settled for the terms of the contract you made with the Church looking down on you. That was the rule, especially applicable to the privileged class. It was 5:30 a.m., and he was not in a generous mood. He struggled, unmoving next to her, to clear the mists with a happy thought. What is the best aspect of marriage? he considered. Why the hell am I looking to my marriage for a happy thought? This woman is snoring, ruining my rest! No chance of getting back to sleep. Merde! No, no; he chastened himself for using an expletive, even if unspoken. So, what is the best part of our marriage? he persisted. What romantic parallel applies? They were faithful to each other. She supported his ambition, even if only by leaving him alone to pursue it. Eloise and Abelard? Shit, didn’t they castrate him? No more expletives. He tried to drift on the pre-dawn mists, but she, a mountain next to him, kept on with her snoring. Christ, it was like sleeping next to an active volcano. He tried for a classical analogy. He settled for “faithful companion.” He was like Long John Silver, with his parrot always riding on his shoulder. Of course, at the moment she was a hippo on his shoulder. She had gained weight. He’d been losing weight. He was Deputy Commissioner, New Scotland Yard. A serious bureaucrat. Stephen determinedly gave up this train of fantasy, but suddenly Cammon visited his brain. Where did he arrive from? The conventional little man in the black suit. I love him. How many days has it been? Four? No, only three. A few days on the south coast of England, in some Brighton-wannabe town, fighting against all kinds of tides. Better him than me. Three or four days. The frustration would be building now; it always happened this way. Cammon ready to burst, rummaging around for the final pieces of the puzzle. Waiting for the breakthrough. The image comforted Bartleben and he immediately fell back to sleep. His wife, he supposed, loved him. She certainly appreciated his knighthood.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sherlock Holmes once said: “You have a grand gift of silence, Watson . . . It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”

  The phone rang at 7:30 a.m. and Joan answered before the second ring. She was sitting on the side veranda of the house, which gave a direct view down the lane, although she couldn’t see the main road. A neighbour was due to pick her up at any minute to drive her to the railway station to catch the midmorning train to Leeds. She sat in a deep wooden chair called an Adirondack; Peter had seen them in New England the time he worked on that case with the FBI, and had had one shipped home. (The idea for the snake-rail fence had come from Peter’s sojourn to Quantico, Virginia, and points south.) A satchel sat next to her. She was happy to be going to visit Michael and his girl, and she was reading the tail end of “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” the story that referred to Watson’s “grand gift.”

  She wouldn’t bring the Holmes collection with her, since this was one of Peter’s valued books, and so she wanted to finish the story before she left. Although she was absorbed in it, she kept an eye out for the pheasant in the tall grass at the end of the property. There was only one now, a male, and Joan worried that the other three had abandoned it. Pheasant pairs bonded for life. She didn’t see him and hoped he had joined the others for their migration.

  “Hello?” she answered, thinking it must be Sarah or the neighbour.

  “Hello, dear,” Peter said.

  “Hello, Peter. Is everything all right?” With Peter, it could be anything, but she wasn’t prepared for what he said next.

  “Yes, perfectly fine, but I have a big favour to ask you. Can you come down to Whittlesun?”

  In forty years, Peter had never directly involved her in an investigation. That he did so now wasn’t a sign of panic — and there was none in his voice — so much as it told her that the Lasker case had reached a significant obstacle. His request wasn’t exactly flattering; she wasn’t Sherlock, Mycroft, Irene Adler or even Watson himself. Still, he had never called for help before. She didn’t overreact. Even so, as she absorbed the surprise of her husband’s call, she rushed to figure out what he wanted. Her usual role was to be supportive of his moods and to nod at his occasional oblique musings, but they were hardly sharing the same harness. She understood the stages that he worked through and she estimated that by now Peter had formed a theory of what might have happened that tempestuous night in the Lasker home.

  And then she understood. He was telling her that he needed a special resource in order to untangle the knot. He needed the perspective of a woman.

  “If you could see your way to coming down, I’d like you to visit the Lasker home with me,” he said, rather formally. “It will only take the morning. You can stay on at the hotel, if you like. It’s very comfortable.”

  Of course she would accept; she could always visit Michael another time. She was excited but wondered about a number of things. She understood his efforts to reassure her; she had never been through a crime scene. On the other side of the coin, she thought, I’m a nurse and I’ve seen as much, if not more, blood and guts than he has, including knife and gunshot trauma. The visit probably would be strange. Her husband would be preoccupied, and stay that way even if she gave him what he wanted. He often retreated to the shed, muttering to himself for long periods; she suspected that he did the same in hotel rooms too. How far was he drawing her into his complicated world now? Nevertheless, because she had the greatest faith in her husband’s skills, she remained unruffled.

  “Okay. What’s the arrangement?” She wasn’t heading to the coastal town for a frolic, yet, although she didn’t tell him this, she thought: this is going to be thrilling. Conan Doyle had scored a convert.

  “I’m sending Verden. He’ll be there at nine o’clock, if that’s okay.”

  Joan understood that Peter had summoned Tommy Verden already, and therefore he had been confident that she would acquiesce. She didn’t bother telling him of her scheduled trip to see Michael. Instead, she said, “Okay,” in the softest, gentlest voice.

  She was no longer in the mood to finish the Conan Doyle tale. She closed up the house, made her calls to postpone her trip to Leeds and waited on the veranda.

  Joan arrived in Whittlesun well before noon. Tommy Verden drove fast, but not so fast as to alarm her. They had always liked each other, since she regarded him as her husband’s devoted protector through many an investigation. Today they travelled in silence, both aware that something unprecedented was happening. Tommy let her off in front of the Delphine. Peter was there to greet them, and Tommy handed her over safe and sound, along with a pile of reports from Bartleben. Peter couldn’t resist glancing at a few pages there in the driveway; they were missives from Interpol and the ferry authorities. Tommy offered to pick up Joan the next morning but she insisted that the train would do fine. It was all so reasonable and normal, as if Joan participa
ted in their investigations all the time.

  Tommy left and Peter conducted her to his room, now cleaned up. She placed her satchel on the bed.

  “Do you want lunch first?” he asked, deferentially.

  “No, I’m not especially hungry. Let’s eat after. Can you tell me what I’m going to see?” She smiled as she said this, not in the least apprehensive, though she was tingling. She already knew that she would be exposed to evidence of extreme brutality.

  “Let’s walk. It’s not far.”

  They followed his route through the central streets of the town and down the sloping road to the Lasker residence. He was solicitous, placing his hand against her back to make sure she didn’t trip on the cobbles. He explained about the excess of blood and the odd pattern of destruction that she would see in the house. He gave her a brief biography of Anna and the information he had gained from Father Vogans. “There’s something I’m missing,” he said. “I want your overall reaction to the scene. Unbiased by what I bring to it.”

  She had taken his hand on the last stretch before the house. Now she gave it an affectionate squeeze and smiled. Peter was not the man to lose his objectivity, no matter what she said, and this very fact, her husband’s solidity, somehow freed her to make independent judgments. This was going to be interesting.

  On his second visit, Peter had used the key under the flowerpot by the back steps. He employed it now to open the front door, from which the police tape had been removed. He hoped to avoid alerting the neighbours, but he had no doubt that curtains were shifting somewhere nearby. He asked Joan to wait in the vestibule while he turned on all the overhead lights downstairs.

  Joan entered the house gingerly. She didn’t want to brush against the walls, or step on any evidence. She stood in the hall for a minute facing the bloody wall, just as Peter had done the first day. She kept in mind Peter’s admonition that understanding would come from maintaining a healthy distance from the violence, yet the first thing that grabbed her as she caught sight of the blood trail along the hallway was the kinetic flow of this marital battle. She was instinctively attuned to Anna’s fear. Someone had run in terror down this hall, probably from the upper bedroom, trailing blood and seeking sanctuary in the back of the house.