Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  A constable on the Durham force delivered a rifle to Peter at his post across the arcade; until then, he hadn’t even a service revolver on his person. The weapon was a Heckler & Koch carbine, a semi-automatic that later became standard issue for police tacticians in Britain, but Peter had never used one before. His station remained quiet, at first. He hefted the sleek rifle, double-checked the sighting and loaded a full ammunition clip. He let the crosshairs play over the side entrance to the bank and estimated the distance at one hundred and fifty yards. A sergeant with the flying squad, in full body armour and carrying a full-scale sniper rifle, entered the store where Peter had set up. At the very second that he was about to introduce himself, and as Peter was locking onto the bank doorway for practice, one of the robbers, high on heroin, came out with a hostage gripped in front of him. The robber had been mightily impressed by Dog Day Afternoon but had learned nothing from it. He waved his gun in an arc, apparently and needlessly to gain everyone’s attention, and then held the woman forward and raised his pistol to her temple.

  “Shoot!” the sergeant barked.

  Peter took the addict’s head off. The recoil set him back at least a half-yard but he fought to restabilize, moving back into the triangle posture of a sniper. When he re-sighted, he saw the body crumpled on the mall terrace, blood soaking into the pavers. The sergeant, standing, held his own rifle in a parallel line to Peter’s. The constable who had delivered the carbine came back into the store. He held a light pistol. He took up a position and used a small pair of binoculars to monitor the bank, while Peter continued to sight through the scope.

  A minute passed. “Won’t they be in retreat, at least for a bit?” the constable ventured.

  Five more thieves burst out of the bank door. Peter, always prone to one-off thoughts, wondered how they had expected to fit six armed men into one getaway car. Subsequent ballistics testing verified that Peter killed another hostage-taker before his gun jammed. It was an individual shot; the Sergeant eliminated three more with his weapon set on semi-auto. The young constable got off one shot before a bullet from across the concourse slammed into his shoulder. The phalanx of robbers hadn’t advanced more than fifty yards before disintegrating. The last of them turned from his intended escape route and rushed directly at the three officers. Peter picked up the constable’s pistol and emptied it in the general direction of the final man.

  Peter went back to work the next day. He never saw the flying squad officer or the constable again. Even at the inquest into the death of the bank guard, and the internal police investigations that followed, he was lightly questioned; he received no medals, but no reprimands either. The Durham chief had played fast and loose with the rules. Only an inspector was permitted to deploy firearms at a crime scene; while both he and Peter were technically of inspector rank, Peter wasn’t under Durham’s supervision. Despite his training, Peter was certainly not qualified as a specialist firearms officer for hostage-taking sieges, though the flying squad centurion was. Nothing was said of it, and what might have ended his career instead made his whispered reputation in the early days.

  Peter had slain six men in four decades, and five of the deaths occurred when he was young. He had learned from each tragedy, and dispassionate as it might have sounded (had he recounted his war stories to anyone, which he never did, not to Joan, not to his shrink), they stood as milestones in his career. The bloodbath in Durham, three corpses bleeding into the street, had impelled him to a watershed decision about policing, and set his compass: the cold rule was that you embraced whatever destiny hurled at you; it was the detective’s lot. After that, violence could never surprise him. As of that moment, he knew that he would stay a detective. The Moroccan, the fanatic with the blueprint, demonstrated that violence could be a form of vainglory, all-consuming of a human soul and impenetrable to reason. The distraught husband, provoking him to open fire, had exposed the sadness at the core of every death. Peter looked for that sadness in every assignment after that, even in his quest for the Rover.

  The sixth death was different.

  Greydon Wellington Kershaw, degenerate gambler, son of a minion of the Krays, untalented entrepreneur in crime, and bad shot, was asking for it that day. Kershaw ran a poker game on the fifth floor of a boxy office building in Bethnal Green. Unknown to the gatherers of police intelligence, he also offered two blackjack tables on the third floor; this was a central factor in the subsequent mayhem. He managed a few prostitutes and hijacked a lorry once in a while, but remained a dabbler, until the day that the more important hoods in the East End noticed that Kershaw’s operation was a fine little money-maker. They forced a partnership on Greydon Kershaw. They moved in a roulette wheel, expanded the poker game to five tables, and added a massage cubicle down the hall. The building known as the Cube became an anthill of vice. The silent partners allowed Kershaw to believe that he remained in control, and he continued to run the games on the fifth and third; they didn’t object when he made the dealers wear velvet vests and green eyeshades. He entreated everyone to call him by a nickname, suggesting High Roller Kershaw, Big Slick or the Dice, but nothing stuck, and he remained small-time.

  As Tommy Verden later said, “They weren’t harming anybody until the nobs complained.” He had it essentially right: neighbours are unlikely to be disturbed by tapped-out poker players and exiting massage-parlour patrons. But it only took a few calls from prurient landowners in the area before the Metropolitan organized crime unit decided that this criminal activity was sufficiently organized to investigate. It was a short step, almost inevitable, from authorized wiretaps to transcribed, persuasive and probative evidence of money-laundering. But it was still small stuff and Peter was always sure that the driving force behind the raid was Stephen Bartleben. It was widely thought that he owed his knighthood, at least in part, to his work in busting the Kray gang for gambling offences and tax evasion (Peter himself had once interviewed Reggie Kray up at Wayland Prison in Norfolk; there had been no point in questioning Ronnie Kray at Broadmoor, since paranoid schizophrenia had taken over his brain). For Bartleben, Kershaw was unfinished business.

  Peter and Tommy resisted going in the first place. A dozen London officers could handle a routine scoop, collecting Kershaw as the kingpin and any found-ins luck might drop in their net. But Bartleben insisted they be there to represent the Yard, and compromised by allowing them to hang back, and merely observe. “Leave weapons at home, if you prefer.” Thus, they entered the fiasco relatively underprepared. But, however casual Sir Stephen might be about field operations, Peter and Tommy never participated in a police raid without a gun each; Tommy brought along a SIG Sauer pistol and planned to borrow a shotgun at the scene. Peter intended to rely on a .38 carried in an armpit holster, but he threw an empty shotgun into the back seat of the car for insurance.

  Unknown to the police team, it turned out that Greydon Kershaw owned the whole Cube, and was able to shift from floor to floor as the police worked their way through the building. Kershaw knew it was the police when their unmarked vehicles were left in the Handicapped Parking spaces. The squad’s second error was to ride the elevators directly to the fifth, where they arrested five dealers and a cluster of late afternoon touts, while letting others exit by the stairwells. But there was no Kershaw to be found; at that point, he was monitoring the blackjack tables on the third floor. A dozen officers proved insufficient to explore and hold down all six levels of the Cube and to serve the fistful of search warrants. There was also confusion about whether the warrants encompassed every floor and any legitimate businesses they might confront.

  Peter and Tommy had been assigned the alley next to the Cube, and were ordered by the Commander to prevent the escape of any gamblers or staff from that side of the building. They regarded “escape” as a nebulous term, since there was no uniform worn by poker players, nor a way to tell gamblers from ordinary customers of legitimate businesses. They let a dozen pedestrians pass merely based on their banal and unconcerned appearanc
e.

  Graydon Kershaw, however, did sport a uniform. An admirer of Western movies, he required his dealers to wear glittering vests and long frock coats on the job. The drink servers at the tables were tarted up as dance-hall girls; embarrassed, they always changed clothes before going outside. And so, when Kershaw slipped into the alley, the Scotland Yard detectives recognized him right off, for he liked to emulate his staff’s outfits.

  “Management,” Verden announced.

  The alley stretched two hundred and fifty yards from where they stood. Kershaw had reflexively turned right out of the building, having seen from inside that the raid was underway and he was the likely target. He strode away from them but had forgotten that the alley led to a cul-de-sac, with the only exit lying behind the approaching detectives. He turned when he reached the blocked end of the row. The alleyway served as a junkyard, with every kind of pitiful detritus leaking out of the buildings along its fringe. Old motors, packing cases, broken furniture and mattresses were embanked against the walls. Although they had Kershaw trapped, the path down the centre line was a deadly zone for the policemen. In normal circumstances, it allowed Roma scavengers to search the junk piles for scrap metal and such, but now it offered a succession of hiding places to anyone with a gun and an inclination to shoot it out. The detectives entered the cul-de-sac expecting an ambush.

  It never played out that way. Kershaw’s devotion to Hollywood myths unfortunately extended to fantasies about Wyatt Earp. The gunfighter from Tombstone never carried an FN FAL semi-automatic with a load of thirty cartridges, but Kershaw had brought one along in anticipation of a Mexican standoff. He still might have been discouraged into surrendering, had he not seen one of his assistants coming out for a smoke at that second. The underling had aspirations in Kershaw’s little empire, and accordingly chose to wear the dealer’s flashy uniform; he also saw fit to carry a gun at all times. Kershaw waved him down his way.

  One of the things that Peter had learned was not to fear looking ridiculous in a crisis where guns were involved. The image of two demented gunfighters in shiny vests and long coats striding through mounds of baby carriages and shattered televisions might have induced caution in other policemen, but Peter and Tommy, both at the age of fifty-plus at the time, had reached a common view of these idiots. It was best described as disgust. They were tired of weak men using guns to indulge immature fantasies about tough guys. Peter had lost his romantic, literary template in the shootout in Durham City. As Kershaw and his helper approached in tandem, with Kershaw, whom Peter later learned was calling himself the Gambler, levelling his rifle to shoot from hip position, Peter and Tommy matched them stride for stride in mirror opposition. Peter was neither mocking their bravado, nor validating their posturing. It was just that it was the shortest way between two points.

  Peter had the unloaded shotgun exposed and angled towards the ground. Tommy carried his borrowed shotgun loaded and at the ready. He tossed a single cartridge to his partner, since there was no time to load more than one; Peter chambered it. By this time, Kershaw was firing in bursts, sending eruptions of garbage out the top of the junk piles to the left and right of the detectives. Peter and Tommy were soon covered in filth. The Gambler changed tactics, fanning a horizontal spray of bullets, none of which scored hits. His subaltern pulled out two pistols, one a small pocket gun and the other a .357, which he had trouble aiming. The Scotland Yard men, without changing their vector towards the shooters, waited, knowing that they needed to be closer to make their shotguns effective, as well as to put Peter’s concealed .38 in range; the SIG in Tommy’s belt would take care of the pistolero when the time came.

  Calamitously for the young fellow, his pistols were of different weights and threw off different recoils. Firing both at once torqued him to the right and sent a shot dangerously close to Peter. Dresden or Coventry must have been like this, Peter thought blithely, as the fragments of junk swirled in a cloud around them. The FN never seemed to exhaust itself, the bursts of fire thundering in the tunnel formed by the buildings on either side. The shotguns, fired in unison, changed the soundscape: Tommy’s shot obliterated the right half of the landscape ahead, and presumably Kershaw’s flunky with it. If Peter’s single round ended the rifle bursts from Kershaw, it may have been merely the shockwave effect of the blast, since the autopsy showed no pellets hitting him. Peter discarded the shotgun. The two sides were no more than ten yards apart. Kershaw, his sparkling vest bloodied and his long coat shredded, retrieved the long gun from the pavement and struggled to raise it to his eye; had he done that at the outset, the detectives would have been dead. Peter reached in a smooth motion into his holster, drew the .38 and shot Graydon Kershaw through the heart.

  The clean-up crew logged in one hundred and eighty bullets. None of them had hit Peter Cammon.

  He told Joan about this one, whereas they never discussed the other five deaths. He narrated it to her factually — it was, after all, a melodrama with a clear start and end — as a way of sorting it out. His own survival struck him as a miracle. It was a puzzle to him. Kershaw chose to die, to play out his foolish gunfighter fantasy to the end, and Peter obliged him. No blame attached to Peter; everyone said so. Yet, he knew that he had had options, that he had made decisions at every step of that confrontation. For one thing, he might have walked away, let Kershaw survive (the lad had died too). Yes, it took courage to keep walking into that hail of fire, but had it been necessary? Something else had kept him moving forward. He hadn’t flinched. He knew that he would do it again, aim straight for the heart. In sum, this one was like all the others, a test of obedience, another dimension of his commitment measured. Yet it still nagged him. Sometimes being in the right shouldn’t be enough for a killing, but for a police officer it had to be, when evil, perversity and sometimes stupidity were arrayed against him. It was against his nature to obey without question, but he did so with Greydon Kershaw. He would do the same with the Rover and with André Lasker, if it came to that.

  CHAPTER 14

  Stephen Bartleben looked forward to his jaunt down to Whittlesun, in part for the bureaucratic fun of it. Maris was predictable, and Sir Stephen had no doubt who would win the internecine argument between police agencies. He knew exactly how he would play it with the inspector, the forces he would bring to bear. He was too long in the tooth to feel guilty about this.

  But his own view of the situation had evolved since talking to Cammon, and now he wanted something more from the arrangement: a piece of the Rover investigation. The decision flowered from instinct: the serial killings were already preoccupying two counties and could soon become the Yard’s problem. He had requested a press scan from Media. There were degrees of media frenzy, and so far press sensationalism had yet to foment general panic, but his people had judged public awareness as “growing rapidly.” As such things went, localized concern was approaching a threshold where it would only take one more incident to make the Rover a national story, with the attendant distortions and recriminations for the Yard. That event, in Bartleben’s experienced view, was likely to be the taking of another young victim, at which time the serial killer would enter Sutcliffe territory. He remembered the Sutcliffe serial killings all too well, when “Yorkshire Ripper” appeared in every newspaper headline, and not just in the rags. Bartleben hoped that this madman wasn’t about to attack again soon but he wanted the Yard to be well placed if and when the Ripper struck a fifth time.

  The problem with asserting a major role on the Task Force would be Maris; hence the lunch on his home ground. J.J. McElroy would grasp the larger picture and, if not welcome a liaison person from the Yard, at least concede the advantages. Maris, on the other hand, was preoccupied with Peter’s abrasive and unorthodox methods and would do everything he could to deny Peter’s appointment. He had his orders from the local council to do whatever was necessary to advance Dorset’s bid for the Olympic sailing events by preserving the image of the Jurassic Coast as a bucolic, crime-free zone.

 
But Stephen himself saw the larger image problem, even though he had never been in Dorset. For much of the public these days, mention of coastal ports of entry called up concerns about immigration and terrorism. The Rover’s predations along the coast could easily grow to echo both issues.

  As the sleek Mercedes crossed into the county of Dorset, Sir Stephen Bartleben gazed out the window at the rolling countryside. He leaned forward and said to Tommy Verden, who was driving, “This is pretty country.”

  Tommy, who understood that the statement meant “how much longer,” replied, “Even prettier along the coast. Should be there soon.”

  Since Tommy Verden knew the way and was available, it made sense for him to drive Bartleben down to the coast. Both men were intimates of Peter Cammon, but Verden was not about to presume to discuss his old friend with the DC. But the two men fell into intense conversation about both Lasker and the Rover, and as the E-class Mercedes pulled up to their destination, Tommy concluded that he had contributed to his boss’s appreciation of what Peter was dealing with in Whittlesun.

  Sir Stephen’s secretary had reserved a private room in the restaurant at the best hotel in Whittlesun, the Carfax; it was two cuts above the hotel where Cammon had been staying. Bartleben made sure to arrive before Maris. He ordered a bottle of Chardonnay, and, glancing at the menu, he speculated on whether the haddock was locally caught.