Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  “I’m pretty sure I’ll be home in a day, two days at most,” he said, “although I’ll have to come back here sooner rather than later.”

  They lay there a while longer. She didn’t dare ask how he thought the case was going. She knew that she had helped him, yet she could feel him slipping away. But after another moment, he said precisely what she needed to hear: “I will tell you every detail of the case as soon as I can, dear.”

  Since their schedule was out of whack anyway, they napped for two more hours and then went for a walk just as the lights along the high street were coming on. There was a nip in the air, and they agreed that the weather along the coast was more changeable than they were used to, and the morning would probably be warm again. They returned to the hotel and ordered sandwiches and beer to their room. They sat on the bed, cross-legged like campers around a fire, and got crumbs on the duvet. They discussed the Rover investigation. Peter told her most of what he knew.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Anything.”

  “I’m not asking you to speculate about this Rover, but how do you think he’ll be found, ultimately?”

  Joan had observed that Peter was disturbed as much by the Rover case as by Lasker. Perhaps for the first time in their marriage, he was seeking — though in an unspoken way — her reassurance about a case. During the Yorkshire Ripper manhunt he had become depressed, but then, everybody who worked on that calamity was haunted by the serial killer. At the time, Peter’s solitary methods had ceded to the endless meetings and the team effort. He had pulled out of his funk eventually. Now, Joan worried, was he back in that zone?

  “Put it this way,” Peter replied. “We don’t know enough about the Rover. The file provided by the Task Force is general stuff, most of it public anyway. Thin on the forensics and no witnesses. The Task Force thinks it has pinned down a pattern. Four girls now. They think he’s moving in a straight line down the coast, closer to Dorset with each abduction. McElroy’s team doesn’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “There’s no pattern at all. He’s toying with them.”

  Joan stroked his cheek. “Well then, dear, you’ll have to join the Task Force.”

  In the morning, Peter stood in front of the hotel as Joan got into the taxi that would take her to the station. “Stay safe. I’ll call tonight.”

  She said to him, “watch out for the Rover.”

  A pang of loneliness hit her as her taxi pulled away but she smiled and waved. She didn’t know that he felt a similar moment of loneliness as he watched her go. The morning was bright and warm. He turned into the hotel. It was time to get back to the files and then start on his appointments. He wondered if he could put off Maris for another day. There was going to be hell to pay on that front once Willet reported back.

  Couples and families were checking out as Peter re-entered. The Delphine had a wide-open lobby that took up the entire ground level except for the reception desk and a small office behind it. There were several groupings of armchairs and settees, and a rack of daily newspapers. As he crossed to the lift, Peter turned to the bitter sound of a mother berating a child on the far side of the room; every parent knows the tone, a combination of weariness and bursting frustration. He looked just as the woman swatted the child, who was about five years old, with the back of her hand. She did it only once but the blow landed flatly on the boy’s left cheek, and he howled with indignation and pain. Peter considered intervening but, like everyone else, he held back and watched. The drama ended and the tension in the lobby dissipated as the guests went about their business. All except Peter. He continued to look at the woman, although he was no longer focused on her movements. Tumblers were slipping into place. He saw clearly. Anna Lasker had died from the fall from Upper Whittlesun Cliff. She had despaired at the shattered pieces of her marriage — of her marriage, her childlessness, her shopworn faith. She had tried to pull down her house about her. She had avenged herself on her husband with a final act.

  Anna Lasker had committed suicide.

  CHAPTER 12

  What made Peter Cammon a good detective was that he never stopped at one idea. He had read philosophy in school and knew the famous saying of Archilochus: the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Peter identified with the fox, if in fact a fox was capable of stacking one thing on top of another to reach a logical, definitive conclusion.

  He went to the desk, now cleared of documents, and took out a blank sheet of paper. At the top he wrote Anna Lasker’s name and underlined it. Below it he jotted three summary conclusions and numbered them:

  1. André Lasker is a master of deception.

  2. He is alive.

  3. To find him I may have to find the Rover first.

  He crumpled the note and threw it at the overflowing waste basket. For reasons he was unsure of, he took it out of the basket and flushed it down the loo.

  He could see how the next few days would play out, and none of it would be pleasant. He was destined, of course, to be summarily dismissed and sent home the moment Willet reported back to Maris. Although he would soon be back in Whittlesun, he would have preferred to stay on and, above all, visit Guinevere Ransell again.

  He poured the last cup of the room-service coffee and called Ron Hamm on the hotel phone. The detective’s answerphone responded. Rapid fire, before the tape could run out, Peter asked him to have all documents, indeed all paper of any kind found in the Lasker home, shipped to the Forensics Centre for him to study.

  “And Ron,” he concluded, “could you give some priority to a production order application to access Lasker’s accounts at Barclays, both business and personal? I think Maris is the one to do it, rather than the Yard.”

  There was a good chance that Lasker’s banking habits, including the way money flowed in and out of his accounts, would reveal any skimming of profits from his garage operation. A man intent on abandoning everything for his new life must accumulate a large nest egg.

  “Oh, one very last thing, Ron. The Yard will be sending someone down to photograph the entire house.”

  Peter sighed. Sometimes he couldn’t resist employing guerrilla tactics. Let Maris absorb all that.

  “I don’t need to get into the house today,” he finished off, blithely.

  As soon as Hamm heard the message, he would feel compelled to see Maris within seconds. Peter wanted to be on the phone when the young detective called the hotel. He hung up but immediately picked up the receiver and punched Bartleben’s London number. Sir Stephen answered on the second ring. Did the man ever leave the office, Peter wondered? There was a clipped impatience in Bartleben’s voice this time, as if he were late for something.

  “Good morning, Peter. What can you tell me?”

  “Stephen, you’re going to get a call from Inspector Maris in, I’d say, as soon as we hang up. He won’t be happy.”

  “You seem serene enough about it.” Sir Stephen tilted back in his chair and put his feet up on his massive Victorian desk.

  Peter ignored the ironic tone. “I’m neither serene nor sanguine about it. The call will amount to a demand for my withdrawal from his jurisdiction forthwith.”

  Bartleben exhaled, loud enough for Peter to hear. “Maris is an idiot. What progress have you made?”

  “I think Lasker is still alive, if he didn’t unintentionally drown. I’m also pretty sure that he stole a lot of money and we need to verify that.”

  “Can you be more clear on that point, Peter?”

  “We don’t have definite information on where he went, how he got away from the British Isles or his destination once he pulled this off. Getting his bank records would be a good starting point.”

  “Maris?”

  “It would be better if Maris applied for the warrant. Barclays Bank. Bull in a china shop if we show up with it.”

  “So it was all for the money?” Bartleben said.

  This was the kind of question that revealed Bartleben as
an armchair strategist. Peter wasn’t ready to draw that conclusion, nor had he implied it.

  “No, it’s more complicated than that. But knowing how much money he absconded with will give us a better picture, not to mention clues about where he may have relocated to.”

  “I still don’t see why Inspector Maris should be calling me with pietistic indignation in his voice.”

  “In part because I asked Joan to take a look at the house.”

  “Inside the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good Lord, Cammon, you don’t mean . . . ? This isn’t because I didn’t call Stan Bracher back to help you out?”

  “No, but I want him down here soon. And I want to tell Maris today that the Yard needs to retest all the blood samples and shoot the whole house under lights.”

  Bartleben took a very, very long two minutes to ponder his situation. Peter was used to these silences and waited patiently. He had no doubt that Stephen would back him up.

  “There’s something I have to update you on, Peter,” he eventually said.

  “Tell me.”

  This was worse than a public line. The operator could be listening in. Sir Stephen spoke anyway.

  “Jack McElroy has been trying to keep a low profile on this ‘Rover’ problem. For example, not using the inflammatory moniker itself. Not publicizing the Task Force, no press briefings, and so on. Well, Jack’s afraid the predator is moving into Dorset. Did you see the Olympics announcement in July?”

  “Olympics? I heard London was awarded the 2012 Summer Games.”

  “Peter, don’t underestimate it,” Bartleben chided. “This is big. Maximum publicity. The PM’s called it a ‘momentous day,’ not to mention we beat out Paris for the rights. They’re talking about an Olympic economic boom for locales that nab the various events. There are strong indications that the sailing events will be held in the south, Weymouth and Portland. If the Rover attacks inside the Dorset line, the publicity could kill their chances. There are other places they could hold the sailing.”

  “You make it sound like we were called in on Lasker to create a distraction.”

  Bartleben regretted his snap reaction before he gave it. “Only if we solved it.”

  “Christ, Stephen! Maris is incompetent, so he calls us in, but if we find Lasker, he’ll take the credit, publicize the arrest and draw attention away from the killings.”

  “More ominous than that. If we don’t find Lasker, he can publicly blame the Yard. Same impact.”

  Peter wanted Lasker, and Bartleben knew it, but Bartleben would have to take some static for his manipulations.

  “So, you’ve been under pressure from the Home Secretary to throw a line to the county administration. Isn’t that getting a bit political?” Peter said.

  “Maybe, but in fact the pressure comes from even higher up. Anyway, Peter, we’ll look good if we solve Lasker using Yard resources, over and above the other matter.”

  It was Peter’s turn to deaden the phone line. He thought it through. Bartleben had sent him down as a token resource, a tepid concession to local anxieties. This was insulting but, bottom line, Peter was hooked. He wanted Lasker. “Okay, here’s what I want,” he finally said. “I want you to get me assigned to the Task Force.”

  Bartleben groaned. “Lord, Peter, you do play it to the bone. Why the Task Force? Aren’t we trying to keep the cases separate?”

  Peter persevered. “Lasker may still be hiding somewhere along the coast. We’ll both be searching the same geography.”

  “Maris and McElroy will see it as an intrusion on their bailiwick, maybe a prelude to taking over the case, and that’s something we don’t aspire to.”

  “You’ll be meeting with Maris anyway. Tell him we want to improve coordination but we need to avoid overlap if I’m out there exploring the cliffs.”

  “And will you be out there rooting around on the cliffs?”

  It was Peter’s turn to be evasive. He planned to enlist Guinevere Ransell to help him look for André Lasker out there, but he wasn’t about to tell Bartleben. “Yes, but with no duplication of effort with McElroy’s people.”

  “All right, Peter. Come clean. What’s the plan?”

  “I can’t avoid Maris, and that will mean he’ll kick me out of his jurisdiction. I’ll have to leave temporarily.”

  “Meanwhile, I’ll call him and agree to meet.”

  “As fast as possible, please. There’s something else, Stephen. But you can’t tell Maris.”

  “What?”

  “Anna Lasker committed suicide.”

  “What? Wait a minute. Shouldn’t that make Maris happy? Case partly solved?”

  Peter let the question fade into the ether. Bartleben finally understood. “You mean you’re not planning to tell him? Jesus, Peter.”

  “Anna’s suicide doesn’t hold a lot of meaning for us without the other half of the case, namely, what happened to the husband. We won’t get any more public cooperation if we reveal there wasn’t a murder, probably less. Or think of it this way. It’ll be as difficult to explain the suicide to the press as the murder. We’ll just be forced to come up with a lot of speculative theories. And finally, if we spook Lasker too much, he’ll go to ground even more deeply than he has.”

  “So why not confide in Maris alone? He can keep a confidence, I presume.”

  “He’ll just make it public, drive Lasker to ground,” Peter said. “Why don’t we try this? Maris will call you in a few minutes. Tell him that if he ejects me from the case, he’ll carry the burden of doing the financial forensics, the photographing of the house, the new serology testing and so on. I’ll meanwhile promise him full cooperation. You can also argue that I’m a convenient liaison for the Yard on the Task Force and can mobilize HQ resources. And if we’re stepping all over each other searching the coast of England, we’ll be more at odds than if we work together.”

  At this point, Bartleben took mild offence. He hated to be told how to handle the Yard’s allocation of resources. He loved his budget — keeping it intact, that is. There wouldn’t be any Yard men, other than Peter, wandering the Channel cliffs if he had anything to say about it.

  “Peter, I can handle this end. When are you meeting Maris?”

  “I haven’t set it up, but by noon would suit me. Get it over with. I can work from the cottage for a bit, but not more than a couple of days.”

  Bartleben picked up his desk book and checked his schedule for the next two days.

  “All right then, I’ll put off answering his call until . . . 2:00 p.m. Is that okay?”

  “Yup.”

  “And Peter, leave Joan at home from now on.”

  Peter, of course, could not see Sir Stephen, back at Headquarters, smiling as he hung up.

  Peter Cammon wasn’t smiling at 11:00 a.m. when he walked into the odd building that housed the Whittlesun Police Service. He was ushered directly to the glass office in the corner. He expected this to be a hopeless effort that would lead to his banishment, whatever arguments he pitched to Inspector Maris.

  And so it proved. Any progress that he might have reported was peripheral to the two principal topics he could not report on, the conclusion that Anna had taken her own life and his scheme to launch a search of the cliffs for André. Nor could he raise Maris’s failure to accelerate the full autopsy at the Regional Lab; that was one of Bartleben’s trump cards. They talked at cross purposes for half an hour. Maris focused on the lack of progress in the investigation but he soon got around to his main grievance.

  “I understand that you invited your wife to enter the crime scene.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why the devil would you do such a thing? It makes a mockery of the investigation.”

  “It does nothing of the sort. I handled it discreetly.”

  “I have to provide the media with a briefing later this week. If they find out that your spouse has been inside the house where Lasker slaughtered his wife . . .”

  “Allegedly killed his
wife.”

  “Oh, is that what I should tell the press?”

  “You shouldn’t hold a press conference at all.”

  “Never?”

  “Give me one more week, but for now there’s no need to respond to their pressure.”

  “No, I’m sorry, Chief Inspector. I’m taking back the investigation. Detective Hamm will pick up the thread.”

  Peter had already phoned Tommy Verden early that morning to arrange for a lift home. He walked out of the police station, managing to avoid running into Willet or Hamm, and made his way back to the Delphine. Verden was waiting with the car at the same spot where he had delivered Joan a day earlier. Peter’s Gladstone and the two boxes of evidence were stowed in the boot. Peter got in the front seat and they were off.

  “Did it not go well, then?” Tommy said.

  It was only a conversational gambit on Tommy’s part. He knew that Peter didn’t categorize his investigations as going well or going badly; he simply persevered at inquiries until they broke open. Peter’s sitting in the front seat signalled that he was in the mood to talk. This was a good thing, Tommy mused: Peter had a habit of keeping his theories to himself.

  “As well as I have any right to expect,” Peter replied.

  “Lasker taking shape yet?” This was merely another way of posing the question.

  “Put it this way, Tommy. I’m about halfway there but only the easy half. Mrs. Lasker killed herself, I’m sure. But how that dovetails with the husband’s plan, or doesn’t, is unclear.”

  “Do you think he’s alive?”

  “Probably. And he’s likely long gone from England, but I’m not even sure of that. Did you get that inventory of ferry services for the south coast?”

  “I have the schedules for the whole country. All I can say is there are a lot of ways to get to the Continent. Sir Stephen is in regular touch with the French and Dutch authorities but so far nothing beyond what you saw in yesterday’s package.”