Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  “Let’s look at the other rooms first,” Peter instructed. “We’ll come back.”

  She wanted her hands unencumbered. Usually she carried her purse everywhere, like the Queen, but now she left it by the front door. Peter guided her ahead of him. She entered the living room and catalogued the mayhem wreaked on the furnishings. A bloody palm print covered the light switch. A glass vase lay shattered on the carpet, and she knelt down to examine it. She surveyed the arrangement of furniture. She ran her hand over the obscene gouge in the sideboard and guessed that a kitchen cleaver had done it. To keep her composure in the midst of this sadness, she took herself back to her days as a hospital nurse; she became all business. The triptych on the sideboard interested her more than the ruined mahogany surface. The icon had been left undamaged. Peter watched as she closely examined the curtains puddled on either side of the fireplace. With a look, she indicated to him that she wanted to go on by herself to complete her first pass of the house.

  Alone, she followed the track of blood back into the kitchen and immediately saw the anomaly. Yes, the two glass-fronted cupboards had been poked in, and broken crockery, pans and utensils lay all about, but the pot of tomato sauce stood upright on the back burner of the cooker, right where it belonged. It was semi-solid and cracking now. She looked from the pot to the doorway opposite. It should have been the first weapon Mrs. Lasker reached for when she fled to the kitchen. She rotated, trance-like, in the middle of the kitchen, and faced the stove once more. She sensed Peter coming up behind her.

  “The pot,” she asked, “is just sitting there. Wouldn’t she have hurled it at him?”

  “I noticed that too. It’s a tomato sauce with all kinds of spices in it. The saucepan was cold when the police arrived. There are only minor blood traces, hers, around the stove; the rest is tomato paste.”

  “What’s the name of the haematologist you often sing the praises of? The Canadian?”

  “Stan Bracher.”

  “It might be worthwhile getting him down to look for bloodstains on the stove. I can tell that Mrs. Lasker loved to cook. She was a messy one at the best of times, you can see, but does that matter? Exactly how much blood is there here, do you think?”

  Peter shook his head. “I don’t know. But I need him for a number of tests anyway. I’m not sure about the amount of blood.”

  “Were there burn marks anywhere on Anna’s body?”

  “One double mark, shaped like bars, on her outer arm near the right elbow. She was right-handed.”

  “I’m guessing she wasn’t cooking at the stove when he attacked her,” said Joan. “But I’d like to know how recent the burns were. Could she have burned herself deliberately, either that day or in the days before? If it was self-inflicted, that might coincide with the day she found out his plan. And that would show her desperation.”

  Joan heaved a deep sigh. Despite the overhead lights, the gloom in the house overwhelmed her. The rancid tomato sauce added to the closeness. Bypassing the hall stains, she went up to the lavatory. Seeing right away that there was more blood there than in any other room, she surprised Peter by abruptly turning and entering the bedroom. Like Peter, she wanted to leave the worst for last. He waited on the upper landing. She was back in less than a minute, having grasped that the fight hadn’t played out in the bedroom, and there hadn’t been a rape. Frowning (in puzzlement, Peter thought), she re-entered the room across the way. She took in the gauzy stockings hanging limply on the shower bar. The blood in the sink had crusted, ruining the porcelain, and had begun to crack. She peered in the bath and then leaned carefully into it, taking special interest in the wavy blood pattern around the drain. She sniffed at the blood in the tub area, and did the same at the sink. Then she squatted, making sure her coat didn’t swish on the tiles, and examined the stains on the floor.

  She opened the vanity doors, as if looking for a particular item.

  “Can we open the medicine chest without spilling glass everywhere?”

  “The room has been well photographed. With a little care . . .” Peter swung the shattered panel open to reveal the array of medicines on the narrow shelves. Joan leaned into the space and took her time checking each vial and bottle with a nurse’s acumen.

  “The contents have been inventoried,” he said, trying to be helpful. He was amazed by his wife’s instinct for itemization and detail, a talent all good detectives need.

  Joan left the room, took a final look along the walls of the upstairs landing and went down again. She sniffed at the blood in the corridor. She paid another visit to the kitchen and marked where the few bloodstains were. Back in the hall she turned to him and put her hand on his shoulder. The gesture was to reassure him that she was okay.

  “How does blood spattering work?” she said.

  “A slashed artery will spray like a garden hose fully open. But it’s rare that a major opening of a blood vessel will involve the victim standing still. Therefore, traumatic cutting, namely an attack, will have the victim turning away from the danger and thus the fan-like effect you see in the loo in places and at the bottom of the stairs, here.” He pointed to the wall next to her.

  “Often,” he continued, “you’ll see thicker deposits of blood on the floor, not just from the gravity effect, but because the victim soon becomes dizzy and naturally, or unnaturally if you like, falls down. That applies to a major severing. Smaller veins or surface cuts may actually bleed a lot, and for a long time, but not with the spray impact. Don’t be deceived by the quantity of blood in any one spot. There’s a lot of blood in one body.”

  “What about the patterns along each of the hallways?” she said.

  “Ah, yes, that’s more complicated. Evidently, in some spots, where you see handprints, Mrs. Lasker held herself up, perhaps to avoid fainting. But she also trailed her hand along the walls in that wavy rhythm.”

  “Was it all her blood?”

  “Yes. According to the first-round report.”

  “Was any of the husband’s blood found anywhere?”

  “Not in the house. There was an old bloodstain on a carving blade in the kitchen,” he said.

  “He had plenty of blades to choose from and you’d think he might nick himself at some point in the assault. For that matter, she could be expected to defend herself with a knife, but none of his blood was spilled, and nobody resorted to the knife rack. Strange.”

  Joan went into the living room area again, crossing immediately to one of the fallen curtains. She knelt and rooted through the piles of cloth.

  “Tell me about her again.”

  “Born in Romania, a city called Iasi. She was close to her mother, also called Anna, and flew back occasionally to see her. Father Vogans, her priest, said she was discouraged by her inability to persuade the mother to emigrate.”

  Joan judged that she had seen enough for a first go and needed time to retrench. She wasn’t sure why. Even if she decided to tour the house again, she wanted to digest what she had just seen. She now appreciated what her husband went through on an average murder case. She paused in the hall again.

  “Was she very religious?”

  “I think religion helped keep the connection with Romania real for her. But when she visited St. George’s, the Romanian church, it wasn’t so much for Sunday services as to see the priest.”

  They went out to the back steps for a break, both glad of some fresh air. She could tell that he was waiting for her to gather her thoughts. She leaned against the wall and turned to him.

  “Three comments, Peter. First, assuming they were both after each other in the fight, that they were taking the battle to each other, they were oddly selective in what they trashed. Wouldn’t you have flung that pot of sauce at him, or vice versa? She’s running through the rooms, eventually into the kitchen, and she sees the pot? Irresistible. Then the living room: someone pulls down the curtains. You’re the one with experience of these domestic fights, but why would they yank down the curtains yet leave the pictures on the
walls, undamaged?”

  “That bothered me too. The good vase was shattered. I thought at first that he was out to hurt her by destroying her prized objects, but there were other things left untouched. The icon, for example.”

  “That’s my point. Here’s what I think.” She held up a hand, trying to hold onto the logic and keep everything straight, in effect telling him to bear with her while she explained her theory of the fight. “The drapes were pulled down but not otherwise harmed. The broken vase was nearby, and one of them could have taken a piece of glass and slashed the curtains. They didn’t. The same with the icon. Why didn’t he break it, and really batter her feelings? It was a link for her to the old country, a link that I bet irked him. The same with the bedroom and the kitchen. Why not trash everything? And frankly, angry spouses like to throw pots and pans.”

  She paused and they looked at the dismal back garden. He wanted to keep her in her zone.

  “Tell me your thinking, Joan. Where does all this lead you?”

  “Horrible as it is to even think it, I think she was responsible for almost all of the destruction. I think she pulled down the curtains but valued them enough not to cut them up. The glass vase? That was a wedding present, I’m confident, and I bet it came from the ‘other’ side of the marriage, depending which one of them broke it.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “The second thing somehow connects to the first thing. If this was truly a room-to-room, back-and-forth war, it’s incredible to me that there wasn’t a drop of the husband’s blood. Glass was flying. Blades cutting. I don’t have an explanation.”

  Joan looked out at the shabby back garden, overgrown with weeds.

  “I wonder how it worked for him,” Peter said. “If she hurt him, physically, she still didn’t manage to stop him from going. If he wasn’t hurt, he remained a cold-hearted bastard, unmoved by her panic and her wounds.” He paused, letting her get to her final point at her own pace.

  “The officers who went through the house, were they all men?”

  “Yes, as far as I know.”

  “The medical people, the person who signed the death certificate, the coroner I suppose, men too?”

  “I believe so,” he replied.

  “Peter, I agree with your feeling that something is very wrong with this house. It gives me the shivers.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. The woman was desperate for something. And the husband obviously was desperate to leave her.”

  Joan was surprised at how exhausted she was. She heard a clock chime one o’clock in the distance. Focusing on the back of the property, she thought it odd (as Constable Willet had) that, given André Lasker’s profession, there was no work shed, and no car parts anywhere in the garden.

  “The most blood was in the lavatory,” she finally stated, as if confirming the most salient fact about the killing ground.

  “That’s right. In the sink and the bath.”

  “Were the cuts on her arms deep?”

  “Yes. The worst were two slashes across her left forearm, and a third lengthwise. There were other cuts on her left shoulder and her right wrist, but not as deep. Some of the blood in the sink and around it came from the head wound, when she was slammed into the mirror.”

  “On TV they talk about defensive wounds. Was the cut on her arm a defensive wound?”

  Peter smiled. For a moment there her speech rhythms sounded like his. “If they were fighting at close quarters, then anything could have happened in a messy situation like that. The gashes were to the inside of the arm. Maybe defensive, but I kind of doubt it. And they weren’t caused by the fall from the cliff.”

  “Peter,” Joan said, looking directly at him, “you know the blood on the upstairs walls and in the bath?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was menstrual blood.”

  They heard a sound from the front part of the house. Peter silently motioned for her to stay put. He went back into the kitchen. For the next couple of minutes, Joan made out only a few sounds, but then heard voices from the kitchen.

  Peter emerged onto the back porch followed by a constable. Joan didn’t flinch at the sight of the police officer but knew that this was trouble. Still, she smiled as if all were normal.

  “Joan,” Peter said, “I’d like to introduce Constable Willet. He’s been very helpful to me in Whittlesun.”

  “Madam,” Willet said, barely making eye contact. It was somewhat farcical, Joan thought, the three of them crowded onto the back porch of a dead stranger’s home, Willet’s stomach threatening to bump someone down the stairs.

  “Shouldn’t be here,” Willet said, bluntly. “Neighbour called in an alert. That’s why I’m come out.”

  “Yes, well,” Peter said. “I had to do a final check on the computer files. Something I forgot to do yesterday. My wife’s in town so we stopped by on our way back to the hotel.”

  Willet must know, Joan thought, that they had no vehicle and therefore their visit was deliberate. Still, she sensed that Willet was too much the deferential gentleman to raise the point. She avoided looking at her husband; otherwise she would have giggled. For his part, Willet didn’t know what to say. There would be a report back to Maris forthwith, they all knew. Peter decided to go in for a pound and raised the door key.

  “I got this under the flower pot back here. I was just putting it back.”

  This lie allowed Willet to save face. They traipsed into the house and right out the front door. Willet went first but paused to make sure that Peter and Joan locked everything up. Peter could think of nothing to say in the face of this mother-hen treatment, and so they all exchanged a perfunctory “goodbye.”

  Willet walked down the wet cobbles to his motorcycle, which he charged up with a great roar that must have jolted all the neighbours.

  Peter and Joan headed with no particular haste back along the street. They didn’t speak at first. The tragedy they had just viewed outweighed the farce with Constable Willet. These were common enough sights in a crime zone, Joan knew, but domestic violence brought its special, targeted forms of hurt.

  As they turned off the cobbled streets into the commercial district, she turned to Peter. “Do you think he had everything planned?”

  Peter hesitated. Joan could see that he was gathering his thoughts in order to be precise. “Most of it, yes, but not all. I think he set the exact night that he would disappear. He worked out the details, like abandoning his clothes in a neat pile on the beach. This was the night, yes. You don’t alter such a plan easily.”

  Joan knew that it was so much worse. This form of desertion, without a word of warning or a scintilla of caring, was the nastiest thing André could have done. She was uncertain still about one thing.

  “Did he plan all along to kill Anna?”

  Peter paused again, but eventually let out his theory. “No. That wasn’t his plan. I think she somehow found out and confronted him, just when he was almost away and clear.” He squeezed her hand.

  And then Joan realized that there were some facts that her husband wasn’t going to disclose — not now and maybe not later. It wasn’t to save her from the ugly truth — he had just exposed her to the saddest realities imaginable. It wasn’t because professional codes prohibited disclosure of the bottom-line truth — he had opened a secret door to her that, she knew, he could not close completely. No, she had helped him, but Peter was already moving on to the next stage of the case. Her mind might be full of horrid images of broken mirrors, blood-drenched sinks and a dying woman’s handprints, but his head contained whole floating universes where she held no domain. She grasped ruefully that she would not likely be present when the planets aligned.

  They found a comfortable pub along the route. A couple of lagers lightened their mood. All things considered, she was happy.

  “Thank you again, dear,” he said, leaning across the table to give her a kiss.

  She laughed. “Stop, Peter! That’s the fi
fth time you’ve thanked me. You’re welcome. But I have a confession to make.”

  Peter noted her wry smile. Sensing that she had the advantage, he simply said, “I’m listening.”

  “I’ve been sneaking into your Conan Doyle out in your side of the shed.” She saw that he was amused, but waiting for her to continue.

  “Okay.”

  Joan recalled that the Holmes set had been layered with dust, a sign that Peter hadn’t been reading any of the stories lately.

  “I know your Complete Sherlock is one of your prized books.”

  Peter laughed out loud, something he didn’t do often. “That’s your confession? Which stories do you like best?”

  “I love them all. I read A Study in Scarlet first but then, for some reason, I’ve been reading the stories in reverse order, back to front. Holmes and Watson are getting younger.”

  Peter laughed again. Joan was content. For the next two hours, they were both detectives, equal, as they discussed their favourite stories. By the time they returned to the hotel, they were both tipsy.

  Hotel sex is as good at sixty-seven as it is at twenty-seven. Afterwards, still in the waning daylight hours, they lay side-by-side, she feeling very much appreciated. She turned to him and said, “Do you think he told her about the details of his plan before he killed her?”

  He continued to watch the shadows on the ceiling above the bed. For some reason he glanced at the door, knowing quite well that the chain was on. He rolled towards her on the mattress. “Yes, Anna Lasker knew before she died that he was planning to leave. Forever.”

  They talked for a few more minutes about the children. She didn’t mention that he had called her a few minutes before her scheduled departure to see Michael, but now she told him that she would take the train in the morning from Whittlesun Station to London to shop for the day, and would go on to Leeds for a quick visit.