Above all, he would find Gwen Ransell and be guided by her.
At noon on the second day back in Britain, he retreated to the shed with a plan to sort through the entire Lasker dossier again. Yard Headquarters had failed to identify the airport through which the mechanic, in disguise, had entered Britain; none of the Kamatta aliases showed up in any of the scans of the gate checks or the airline manifests. But Sir Stephen had assigned the tracing probe to an assistant deputy, name of Masters, whom Peter knew quite well, who was known to have the habit of blaming his shortcomings on poor-quality input from his colleagues. Peter called him in London and immediately got back a whining response: “We don’t have a decent photo as a reference point. Lasker’s driver’s permit photo is so blurry there are virtually no useful points or comparison. His old passport picture is so old it makes him look prepubescent. In any case, the scanners don’t work that well. One little moustache will throw them off.”
Would Peter come up to London, Masters asked. Instead, Peter asked to be passed on to the officer doing the actual work on the file (an old trick with Masters), who turned out to be an enthusiastic career officer named John Fitzgerald Carpenter.
The young man knew Peter only by reputation, but that sufficed. His voice indicated Cambridge. He suggested that Peter call him Fitz. “I know you must be busy, Chief Inspector. How can I help?”
The flattery was subtle. Carpenter had to know that Peter was semi-retired, and perhaps not so busy. Peter smiled to himself. “Call me Peter.”
“Sir, we’ve checked every Passport Services record involving a landing in the U.K. on the day in question, and crossed them with known, or possible, aliases of Lasker.”
“With what result?”
“No result, sir. No matches. Even on date of birth.”
“Why did you work entirely through Border Control, instead of contacting each airline?”
There was an embarrassed silence. There were thousands of passengers, hundreds of flights. “Because it was easier,” Carpenter admitted. “There’s no central registry of airline manifests.”
“Tell me what you did find.”
“I believe, based on discussions with Malta Intelligence and Mr. Albanoni at Malta Police Services, that Lasker took off on a ticket using the name Watson. But he never landed, if you know what I mean.”
“How is that possible?” His abrupt questions implied impatience, but that wasn’t Peter’s intention.
“A Mr. Thomas Q. Watson, one of the stolen identities found in Malta, made a booking from Barcelona to Dublin and then on to Manchester. Two different Ryanair flights. But he appears not to have landed in Manchester.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Well, it took me a while to figure it out. I worked at customs for two years before joining the Yard and, in fact, it’s why they hired me for this job. I saw this once before. A passenger uses one passport when he leaves the launch country, then switches to the second forged passport when he passes through the gate in Britain. Not that hard if all your passports are EU-issued. By the time Manchester might have noticed a mismatch with the passenger list, he was home and dry.”
“Do you have the name, the one that didn’t line up?”
Carpenter sighed. “Not yet. You see, Manchester never bothered to compare the lists. And there’s been a delay getting the manifest from Ryanair. May take another day.”
“Okay,” Peter said. “You know what would be extremely helpful?”
“You would like the video from the Border Agency? So would I. I ordered them up, should have them by end of day.”
Peter sympathized with Carpenter, who faced a long, bureaucratic slog through miles of grainy footage. “Mr. Carpenter, anything visual would help. Then we can . . .”
“Sorry to interrupt, Chief Inspector, but I’ve just been handed the passenger list for the Manchester leg. If you’ll just hold on a quick sec.”
“You’ll check it against the passport entry list?”
“Yes,” Carpenter replied, distantly. There was a pause as paper was shuffled. Peter got up and took the phone to the window of the shed. He watched Joan topping the expired flowers in the garden bed by the corner of the driveway. Carpenter came back on the line.
“That was quick,” Peter said, to offer encouragement.
“Got lucky. Triangulated the Ryanair manifests and the arriving passengers in Manchester. The man we want is Quentin Calvert. He’s the odd man out.”
“So, he had yet another forged passport we didn’t know about.”
“He was well prepared,” Carpenter offered.
“Exactly.”
Carpenter promised to scan the Manchester tapes when they arrived. Peter gave him Bahti’s cell number in Valletta so that he could check directly with one of the few people to have ever seen Lasker in disguise. He hung up. The call made him think idly about Sarah, something to do with the fact that ‘Fitz’ and his daughter were aligned in age. He didn’t think beyond that spark, though he resolved to give Sarah a ring.
Instead, he called Ron Hamm. He waited through four rings. The shifting temperatures in the shed as the day aged alternately warmed and chilled him. He flexed his bandaged arm, and longed to unwrap it.
“Peter!” Hamm said.
“I’ll start by apologizing, Ron,” Peter said. “I owe you a call.”
“No apology needed. But it would be good to have you here.”
“Congratulations on the passport angle. Excellent job of digging. We just found out that Lasker used one of the names from the theatre people to re-enter at Manchester.”
“Bastard. I funnelled all the records to the Yard’s London office. By the by, what was the name on the passport?”
“Quentin Calvert.”
“Ah, yes. Bloke about Lasker’s age. Different hair, I recall. His statement’s part of the file.”
“Listen, Ron, are you in the office right now?”
“No. I’m following up a lead at Lasker’s Garage. Haven’t finished talking with the staff, Albrecht Zoren in particular.”
“You know the receptionist there, Sally, died last week?”
“Yes.” But Hamm seemed surprised. “You were there in the last few days?”
“Went to look at the ledgers of auto exports before I flew off to Malta.” He switched to the issue at hand, the confrontation with Symington.
“He quoted Shakespeare to me,” Hamm said. “‘Thy tender-hefted nature shall not give thee o’er to harshness.’ Jesus, Peter.”
Peter recognized Lear. All men over sixty-five avoid Lear. Talking about which daughter? Regan? In context, was Symington referring to Anna Lasker? To Brenda? To Hamm himself? And then Peter knew: the teacher was referring to himself. But he let Hamm go on.
“Condescending bastard. I had him red-handed about the passports. He gave me grief. I pressed him if he had seen Anna’s fractured body. He said he hadn’t, had no opportunity to. Had no reason to want to. He made it clear he didn’t care.”
Why, Peter thought — because he saw the world as a Shakespearean plotline?
“Ron, how much did he give over about Lasker’s plans? I understand he provided makeup, supplies.”
“Yeah, he told me that. But then he clammed up. Told me nothing else. That’s when I said what I said. That’s when I . . .” His voice quavered with revived anger.
Peter let the silence go on for a minute, but he was ready to hang up once Hamm got the self-pity out of his system. The only thing for both of them to do, he knew, was to reach the Whittlesun Heights, to explore them together once again. “Can you perhaps join us when we get down there?”
“Sure.” But his response was half-hearted. “He’s out there, isn’t he?”
In his mood, Peter didn’t care which wanted man Hamm was referring to.
Peter went back to his files on the Rover case, laying out the manila folders in which he had slotted police reports, news clippings, sporadic forensics analyses and a few photos. The puzzle was irresistible. He shuffle
d the categories until he had about twenty folders. He had to set aside the Lasker material and push back several shadow boxes-in-progress to make room on the trestle table. Nothing was timelined; the material formed no linear plot or Cartesian framework. The order was in his own mind, sensible to no one else. From the reports and statements of fifty witnesses, he mined for small truths and the false notes that seemed tiny but wouldn’t be made to fit, no matter how he reordered or rationalized them. He pondered, for example, the problem of transportation: the predator appeared without warning, the witnesses stated, yet how did he traverse the rocky heights without being seen? At the same time, neither Daniella Garvena nor Brenda Van Loss could remember the man’s face before he struck them down. Peter realized as he fought through the murky evidence gathered by the Task Force that he was having trouble concentrating; the Rover remained his secondary focus. It had never been his case, and he could tell himself that he was brought in for Lasker only, and so his focus was in the right place. Peter imagined what Stan Bracher would say to this. “Bullshit,” he would say. Peter understood, with all his instincts applied, that this Rover was asking to be caught. It would take a professional to catch him and Peter was, above all, a professional.
To prime his analytical juices, while fully realizing that he was mixing the two investigations, Peter undertook an artificial exercise. Looking at a case from an oblique angle sometimes helped. This little diversion almost amounted to one of Father’s word games. He was aware that the women in Whittlesun could hold the key to both investigations. For one thing, they were all — and he struggled for the word — “honest”; in their various ways, each possessed the innocence of the martyr and the clarity of the seer. Whether it was Anna with her desperate understanding of André’s desertion, or Molly’s naked body rising to confront her murderer, the women challenged their attackers with raw truths. He took a sheet of paper and listed the women:
Anna Lasker
Selma Mitter, JayJay Evans, Anna Marie Dokes, Molly Jonas (the dead girls)
Daniella Garvena and Brenda Van Loss
Mrs. Lasker
Guinevere Ransell
Mayta
Wendie Merwyn
He looked over the list; obviously it was too broad, but that wasn’t the point. Do they have anything in common? For one thing, he supposed, they wanted nothing from the Rover or Lasker (Anna excepted), whatever they were justified in seeking to do to their abusers. He read and reread the list. The benefit of lateral thinking, Peter knew, was that it could lead to answers you weren’t even pondering. He read and reread the list. There was an odd woman out: Wendie Merwyn. She was the only one who could profit materially from the investigations. He tried to pinpoint his instinctive concern about her. During their last telephone conversation, she had stayed with Lasker and had refused to engage at any length on the Rover Task Force. But if Wendie were looking for a career-maker, the Rover case had to be it. Her decision to focus on Lasker was a professional judgment call, but he wondered about her choice.
But then he read the list again. He understood that Wendie had been told to downplay the Rover scare. For the first time, he comprehended the force that Regional officials had brought to bear. They hoped to solve the Rover problem before the story broke open. Lasker would be a welcome diversionary success if Peter could nab him. He pondered the question of how much Bartleben was complicit with the politicians.
Peter had resisted the meds; he told himself that he needed to be clear-headed for Whittlesun. But it was late afternoon, and after three hours of close work on the files, the ache of his wound had tipped him into dysfunction. He walked back to the house for a painkiller. Joan examined his arm, pronounced him okay and got the pill for him. She understood that he needed a long nap; they would share a late dinner. She ushered him up to the bedroom and made sure that he took off his shoes and jacket and prepared to sleep for a while — he was just as likely to burst out of the cottage in five minutes to examine some piece of evidence out in the shed. Lying on the master bed, he began to drift off even before she left the room. Downstairs, Joan moved through the house silently, letting her husband sleep. But she didn’t go outside, beyond hearing range. She felt alienated when he got like this — relentless, irritable — and she hated this phase of a case, yet part of her annoyance was born of fear for his safety. She knew perfectly well that he had no fear of confronting violent criminals, that he was capable of killing, and had killed people. And, of course, she loved and trusted him.
No one who knew Peter would have been surprised that he precisely understood his own sleep patterns. As he sank quickly, he knew, as he crashed, that he would experience wild dreams. But he maintained, even into his subconscious, an atheistic disbelief in the symbol-heavy dreams of Freud and Jung. Hopes, and especially fears, don’t vary much (he argued with himself) and anxiety can express itself in any object. Peter Cammon felt superior to psychology, in the way that many people do who have never studied it. When all the debunking challenges to Freud had emerged a few years back, Peter had read them with satisfaction. In his line of work, he cared nothing for the packaging of the id, ego and superego by, for example, zealous prosecutors, defence psychiatrists and behavioural sciences types. They showed up constantly as blithe labels in sentencing reports, but they rarely helped him glean the motivations of evil men; they were slots for cliché neuroses. For instance — and he didn’t complete this thought as he sank into sleep — he had worked on the Yorkshire Ripper and Lord Lucan muddles, and inklings of their childhood fears and sexual traumas hadn’t helped anyone at all in the investigations.
Some decades ago, he had seen a psychologist who regularly dealt with the problems of police officers, the Yard’s people her specialty. He had been working a case in Manchester involving several arsons and accompanying murders. Peter always recalled the count: twelve victims in six separate immolations. Yet the killer’s pattern seemed to be no pattern at all. Back then, the Yard liked to pair older, veteran detectives with junior officers in the field. Peter worked the first four crime scenes in Stockport with an old hand named Evans, who chronologically was only a few years older, but had many more years in. The case stalled, even as the incidents mounted, with some of the bodies left unidentified for weeks. The local command centre ordered all the victims to be held in the morgue until all were attached to names. Peter remembered viewing the charred bodies in a gruesome row. Two were children. But then, out of desperation, Evans sent him back to London to run data sets, a tedious and fruitless job.
“Peter, we lack a motive. No connections among the victims, no lunar cycle, no profit. If the arsonist-murderer lacked overt motive, other than some vicious misanthropy, what patterns can there be? How do you hunt down perversity? Just do your best.”
This was the era of Son of Sam, when an alert beat cop in New York had thought to check parking tickets in the vicinity of a lover’s lane, and thereby traced the killer. By the time of the Stockport arsons, forensics labs everywhere were stacked high with all manner of spreadsheets covering parking infractions and low-grade citations and cautions, and Peter spent his days with keypunch operators and mathematicians borrowed from King’s College. Modern profiling wasn’t in use much in those days. Peter was stuck in London when the case broke in Manchester. An intemperate word by a laid-off machinist led to a knock on the door; the arsonist was found dead with a stomachful of lye. A day later, Peter’s senior had a major heart attack and was forced to retire. During that period in London, far from the fires of Manchester — Peter never got to see the last few bodies — he experienced a recurring dream. Its central antagonist was a snake, a viper the size of an anaconda, who confronted him everywhere in the dream. As he wandered through strange houses, the snake would rear up in doorways, or wait, coiled up, in the corners of empty rooms. As in a video game, various odd weapons, hammers and scythes, were presented to him. Whenever he attacked the snake, the weapons disintegrated into dust. Always, in the repeated dream, he was trying to reach Joan.
Peter, who dutifully reported his distressing dream saga up the line, was ordered to see a shrink, who in fact was Viennese, and she made him sit in a big, soft chair facing away from her. She had read his career file and the first thing she said when he described his serpent dream was:
— You’re normal, perhaps the most normal police officer I have met.
— Is that supposed to be a compliment?
— Yes. [Her s was sibilant. Was she the snake, his dream anticipatory?] Your orderly mind stands you in good stead. Keeps you sane.
— I’m cured, then?
— Didn’t say that, Mr. Cammon.
— That isn’t what I expected from a psychiatrist.
— What did you expect?
— Reticence? My impression of psychology is that the restoration of order defines psychiatric success.
— Nothing wrong with that.
— But what if my dream is the new order, within my own mind? Like some kind of looping videotape? The viper coils and uncoils in front of me. He greets me everywhere I go, like Dodgson’s Caterpillar.
— That seems to me a literary conceit. The snake is not real, and, no, it is not just a cheap symbol.
— He’s in every dream. I try every time, in every room, to get past him.
— Your life is not a cinema story that follows one repeating plot. You cannot rely on your dream of a snake to last. Maybe that’s why they call movies the “flickers.” They are evanescent.
— I see only disorder. I’m worried, Doctor. I find only unaccountable crimes and the potential for violence in my dream.
— Yes, and it is such disorder, the violence, that plagues every detective. It is to be expected that the images of close-at-hand death haunt them. But the solving of crimes ultimately braces them and they go on.
— Are you saying that the dream will get better by wearing itself out? [With a Prozac prescription or two, he thought.]
— Probably. Here’s what I mean, Inspector. It is a difficult life in your profession. You have to decide it is for you. But I sense that it is indeed your vocation.
Walking Into the Ocean Page 36
