Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

“Stan Bracher?” What was the Canadian doing in Whittlesun? He thought he had fled to somewhere in the North; it was a sign of Peter’s fatigue that he couldn’t remember Stan’s itinerary. Perhaps he had merely set up Martin’s tour from London, or some other distant port of call.

  At the hotel, Sam tossed the keys to Peter, gave a quick wave and disappeared into the bare nighttime streets.

  The chief inspector propped himself up against the pillows and wrote out his list of calls. The lounge had been shuttered when he collected his room key but he had cadged a pint by slipping a pound to the night porter. Willet stood at the top of his list, but he had to wait for the constable to reach him. He owed Joan an update on the day’s events and some reassurance of his safe return from Whittlesun Heights. What really puzzled him was Stan Bracher’s intervention, probably well intentioned, to help Martin, and he drew an arrow from the Canadian’s name to near the apex of the list, just below Keiran Blaikie. As usual, he was left with a pile of impossible priorities.

  This fussing with his little catalogue clearly showed his level of exhaustion and, in the end, he called Joan, and let all the others slip away until morning. She started by apologizing for interrupting his expedition to the Ransells’. “I really felt bad calling you there. It’s just that it was such a coincidence, with the Knights and Father Salvez quoting the same scripture. What do you think it might mean, Peter?”

  “What do you think it might mean?” Peter said, sounding like one of the psychiatrists he liked to dismiss.

  “Probably nothing, is my thinking,” she said. “They’re not exactly the same words. I looked up a Latin Bible on the Internet, and the phrase from Luke is close to the Grand Master’s inscription, maybe off by a word or two.”

  “There’s no way I can think of that Salvez would know anything about Malta, and neither of us told anyone about the tombstone. Did Mrs. Ransell have any other theories?” he asked, betting she did.

  “Oh, we had a good chat,” Joan said. “She’s a strange bird, but very bright. Very intuitive between the drinking.” Peter hadn’t noticed many interstices between her drinking bouts. Joan had become part of the investigation again, and Salvez’s little game had brought them together. Peter was patient with her. He was now doubtful that the priest had anything at all to do with choosing the quotation for the display case.

  But then he knew.

  “Peter, are you still there?” she said.

  “Do you have a Bible nearby?” he said.

  “You have one in the bedside right next to you,” Joan said. “Look up Luke 21:36.”

  Each heard the other riffling pages. He read: “‘Watch ye, therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.’”

  “So what?” she said.

  “It could be a warning,” he said. “That first part of the quote.”

  “Of what?” she said. Peter worked it through. Joan grew impatient. “Do you think he’s warning you about the Rover?”

  Peter was inherently cautious; decades of policing had made him that way. “I’m not sure.”

  “Maybe he suspected the identity of the Rover,” she said. “The reference to ‘escape’ could mean the manhunt for the killer. Yes, I think he knew who the Rover is.”

  “No, Joan, he was sending me a message, but it was about André Lasker. That’s what Ellen Ransell was telling us to do. To figure out what Salvez was saying — whether in Greek, Latin or English. Salvez loved to play games, but he wouldn’t mislead me.”

  “So, dear, what is the message?”

  “I’m willing to wager that he encountered André somewhere near the Abbey,” he said.

  “Yes, but for crying out loud, what does the message mean?”

  “That’s the game John Salvez was playing, is playing, from beyond the grave. The message — ‘pray always that you may be accounted worthy to escape’ — was meant for all three of us, André, me and Salvez himself. Something about Lasker escaping.”

  “Listen, Peter, how about I ring up Father Clarke and ask him whether John wanted the whole verse on display?”

  “Wait until tomorrow afternoon. I’m going up to the Abbey in the morning. If I find what I’m looking for, I’ll call right away. I’ll call anyway. We need some closure on Father Salvez, on a number of things.”

  “Is Tommy going with you to the Abbey?”

  “No,” he responded. “It won’t be dangerous. But I’m asking him to come down the day after tomorrow.” This, of course, came out all wrong (the extra irony being that the job he wanted Tommy Verden for would very likely prove dangerous).

  She was about to ring off when she remembered: “Oh, news on the home front. Sarah called. I have the feeling she is more or less dating Jerry Plaskow.”

  Peter had learned from decades of marriage that one of the worst mistakes a husband can make is to hold back information about a child’s significant other. His daughter had surprised him several times in the past week, but her choice of Jerry wasn’t one of them.

  “Oh?”

  “They’ve been going out on his boat, or one of his boats. Apparently he’s been taking her to sites for her marine research.”

  Peter shifted to the obvious issue. “I want her staying away from the shoreline for at least the next three or four days.”

  “She may not.”

  “It’s a reasonable request. Only four days.”

  “There’s your likely mistake — telling her what to do.”

  “I’ll call Plaskow.”

  Joan understood the depths of Peter’s exhaustion. She also knew that the pressure was rising, and that it would play itself out on those very cliffs. He wasn’t off base. “No, it’s okay. I’ll make the call — to Sarah.”

  They agreed to talk about it tomorrow. Finally, as the call ended, Joan said, “Father Salvez might have warned you more explicitly.”

  “I think I know his reasons,” Peter said.

  “I’m a detective, like you,” Sarah had said to him in the hospital, or maybe it was on the way to the Callahans’, but it wasn’t true. She was a wanderer, yes — restless, a seeker — but not like him. She had realized this during the dinner at the hotel with Jerry. She kept wondering why the two of them talked so obliquely about death — the naked girl, Dad’s fall from the cave and Detective Hamm, whose concussion was only a few heartbeats from death. They dodged the subject, not out of fear and certainly not bravado, nor cynicism. If anything, her father had a right to his weary resignation after forty years of confronting the violence perpetrated by angry men, and Jerry was starting to get those squinty furrows around the eyes that showed him heading the same way. The distance they kept from mortality, from the mortal remains on the slab, was finely measured, learned from experience. It was also necessary. They did a disservice to the dead women if they lost it in public; giving in to rage in private would be even worse, she supposed. She liked her dad even more for his calm that night at dinner in the hotel. She mostly kept quiet and listened. She had faith that her father would gather the evidence with relentless purpose: he would serve the needs of the battered wife and the slain teenagers.

  She looked up at the cliffs now, not all that many miles from the Abbey. Sarah believed in serendipity, even Jung’s synchronicity; it was why she liked fossil hunting, leaving all of the evolution debate to one side. She finally understood her dad’s vocation: a detective prepared his case, then prepared some more, so that when the unusual, the mutation and the unique perversity of evil popped up above the horizon, the detective would be ready. He often said that luck would catch André Lasker, but it wouldn’t be luck at all. Grinding work would produce serendipity. Sarah imagined her dad right now on the clifftop, fussing in the ruins of the ancient Abbey for who knew what. Just as she was doing down below.

  With the tide out and the waves in abeyance, she picked her way through the creatures they had left on the wide strand, which was like a field of so
aked potter’s clay. She liked Jerry because he was dashing and a man committed to life on the sea, who understood the roll of the Channel and the ebb and flow of the tides. He was a good detective too; Dad had confirmed it. But he wasn’t her dad, not the man whose passion for justice underpinned every breath. Might be easier to live with, though, she thought. She pondered her relationship with Jerry a while longer as she moved up the beach, keeping an eye on the tide. She had met Jerry’s Mr. Smith once, on the big motor launch, and had watched them work together in oiled unison, communicating mostly by eye contact. She had known right off that he was SAS; she saw them from time to time training along one coast or another. It occurred to her now that maybe Mr. Smith was the other twenty-five percent of Jerry, the ruthless and relentless part that her dad embodied in one black-suited, bowler-hatted soul.

  It was time to retreat from the tide. She had almost reached the end of the accessible beach anyway. Looking up the strip of sand into the sun, she saw a silhouetted figure approaching. In the quivering mirage of rising heat she made out a cloaked person, who seemed to glide across the shore towards her. The figure raised an arm and slowly moved it back and forth in greeting.

  CHAPTER 33

  Peter got up by six and skipped breakfast in order to reach Whittlesun Abbey as quickly as he could. He departed the hotel without making any of the numerous calls on his list. Just as he unlocked Sam’s old Land Rover, his mobile chimed. He checked the screen. The one person he really needed to reach was Willet.

  “Good morning. Did you contact Mr. Hamm, Constable?”

  “Left a message again, and your number, sir. But I did take a gander at Mr. Hamm’s desk, like you asked.”

  “And?”

  “Tried not to disturb his papers, mind. Did find a volume of Shakespeare. Thought it odd for a detective’s desk. He’s put verses down on various bits of paper.”

  “Handwritten?”

  “No. Typed.”

  “Printouts?”

  “Yes, I suppose. Some of them. The thing is, they were all about murder.”

  “All from Shakespeare?”

  “I suppose so. But they all contain the word ‘murder.’ Here’s the longest one.”

  He read:

  Thou shalt do no murder, and wilt thou then,

  Spurn at his edict and fulfil man’s?

  Take heed, for he holds vengeance in his hands,

  To hurl upon the heads that break the law.

  “Did you keep the others?”

  “No, sir. There were only four short ones. Recognized one from Macbeth.”

  Peter rubbed his palm against his eyes. Richard III, he recalled. What was Hamm doing Googling Richard III? He wasn’t. He was simply pairing words in a search, and they were “murder” and “vengeance.” Hamm was passing the time, obsessing, gearing up. What for?

  Necessity is the mother of the parking space, and Peter had no option but to leave the Land Rover on the cement pad where Anna Lasker had met her end. There wasn’t a human being in any compass direction; still, he was uncomfortable about advertising his arrival like this. He locked the vehicle, pushing his service revolver, the old-tech Smith & Wesson, under the tyre in the wheel well in the boot; Tommy Verden, he knew, carried a newer Glock 17, favoured by bodyguards. He might have nursed the SUV along the path closer to the Abbey, but he also might have broken an axle, and he was content to hike down the slope. It took only ten minutes. The trail fed into the notch between the two hills inland from the Abbey and emerged by the crumbling steps where he had first met Father Salvez.

  He started by trying the massive oak doors that gave onto the cliffs at the front of the church. Local police had added a fresh cordon of yellow tape without removing the tatters of the old tape, which flapped in the morning inshore breeze like streamers at a fair. They framed the section where the old priest must have jumped to his death; they served no security purpose. As he had expected, the doors were locked. Any safe access point would do. He soon found a useable path back along the spine of the Abbey, on the eastern flank. He knelt down to examine shoeprints in the fetid muck, and concluded only that they were recent and they were made by an old pair of boots. The path led to a hinged door cut from fibreboard and jammed shut with a block of granite. He was quickly inside and found himself in a covered section of the nave about halfway down the concourse.

  For all his preparations at the hotel, he had forgotten his torch, and now he stood in the Gothic gloom adjusting his vision to the shattered interior of St. Walthram’s. Towards the front, a column of eerie light arrowed down from the fractured roof, but only served to shield the transept with its contrasting shadows. He had a clear notion of where to search for the crypt. The tourist brochures hadn’t mentioned the existence of a crypt, but he was sure there was one, even if stove in and obstructed over time. Salvez was the kind of man who loved hiding places, secret rooms and their mysteries. He also needed a place to sleep on the nights he lingered at the Abbey. Peter hadn’t found any of his possessions lying about; they had to be stored somewhere.

  He picked his way through the ruins around the transept. Small, shadowed chapels fell away into the dimness on either side of the nave. The front section did have a roof, though it was punctured and offered limited protection against the weather. The haphazard roofing had the dual effect of preserving two of the chapel bays almost intact, while accentuating the Catholic melancholy of the altars within. He examined the chapel on his left and found no succeeding chambers or niches that might hide a door to a crypt. The room to his right, however, presented an array of masked alcoves, arches and hollows emptied of their icons. Normally, a crypt would include a readily seen staircase, wide enough for embalmed bodies and their caskets. The stairs might have been sealed off for safety reasons.

  He found it in the darkest recesses of the right-hand chapel, behind an archway that, at first, seemed to lead nowhere. An oak door, ordinary and plainly painted, opened smoothly when he pulled it back by the edge. He sincerely regretted leaving his torch behind. Without much hope, he felt for a light switch along the inner wall of the entrance to the crypt, and encountered his first miracle. A string of small bulbs, strung the length of the staircase, lit up with a sepulchral glow. To be safe, Peter stepped back and noticed for the first time that there was a dusty light switch on the outside wall that would have served just as well. Perhaps, after all, the old priest had used a little of the Preservation Trust’s funding for his own comfort.

  If so, he hadn’t overspent. The lights traced a route downwards to a small room off the base of the narrow steps. It was the kind of space where an ascetic cleric or a custodian of the Abbey might mark time. He pulled the string on another light bulb, and the small room was half-illuminated; it was unheated but fairly dry, a rough sanctum, almost an oubliette, though perhaps not conducive to meditation. The chamber was furnished with a cot covered by a blanket; two more blankets lay folded and stacked at the foot of the bed. A crucifix hung above the pillow. A small desk and chair filled out the tiny cube, and the computer on top of the desk felt oversized in the confined space. He noted that two cables ran from the computer into the granite wall behind it. A tunnel appeared to flow farther back into the church, but there was no way to tell how far without a strong torch.

  The ledge behind the desk, partly occluded by the computer, served as a bookshelf; it held a dozen religious texts. The front panel of the desk unfolded forward to create a writing tablet, and the drawer behind it revealed a series of slots containing pencils, a rosary and several small notebooks, which turned out to hold accounts of expenditures on the Abbey. The only colour in the space, aside from the ruby glow from the rosary beads, was a sign printed in orange ink on ragged-edged parchment, which Salvez had taped to the side of the monitor: ars bene moriendi. Peter turned on the CPU and was amazed when it fired up; the monitor soon lit up with its blue face, and immediately displayed the homepage of the Abbey. Worried that the power might brown out, or be cut off entirely by the weather,
Peter found the icon for the priest’s email and clicked it. Automatically updating itself, the system listed a half dozen new messages, but all were routine missives from other church groups, so to speak, post mortem.

  Out of curiosity, and no particular purpose, Peter checked the history of Google and Yahoo searches. Nothing showed for the last four days, but the listing for the previous week, which the computer helpfully archived, charted what could only be termed a massive search for references to the Rover. Peter counted two hundred news sites that addressed the four murders and two assaults, as well as the Task Force’s official page (accessed ten times) and various speculative sites, the kind that always spring up with major crimes; Peter’s own adventure on the cliffs was also catalogued. Salvez’s interest, nearly a fetish, regarding the Rover disturbed Peter, because he saw no point in it; it correlated neither to the priest’s character nor to his professed interests.

  More distressing was the complete omission of any sites covering the Lasker tragedy, which at minimum was relevant to the Abbey by the proximity of Anna’s death. Also, Peter was now certain that the message from the Book of Luke dealt with Lasker.

  Peter shut down the computer and turned his attention to the three words on the casing of the monitor. He had naively hoped that Father Salvez had left behind a personal message for him, but “ars bene moriendi” didn’t resonate with him. He thumbed through each of the books on the slim shelf. Salvez owned a King James, a New Standard and an elegant New Testament by William Tyndale, which Peter had studied in his English Literature years. Tyndale, if he recalled accurately, had died at the stake during the same campaign of persecution that had sent Henry’s railers to pillage sanctuaries like this one. He took down the King James and turned to Luke 21:36, reading aloud to the Abbey stones: “Watch ye, therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.”

  Salvez had underlined the passage.