Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  “Plaskow asked me to make a delivery,” the SAS man said.

  Peter stood back to let him in. He would have been happy to shake his rescuer’s hand, but somehow it didn’t seem the right thing to do. Mr. Smith entered and nodded to Tommy.

  “Tommy Verden, Scotland Yard.”

  “Falklands too?” Mr. Smith said, finally smiling (or his mouth smiled; his eyes didn’t).

  “Something like that,” Tommy said.

  “Brought you what you wanted.” Smith moved to the bed, and Verden swept away the cover, revealing the weapons. Smith scanned the equipment and nodded. “Good,” he said. “Leave the Taser and the stun guns at home, that’s wise. But these should help your odds.”

  He spilled the contents of the bag onto the bed. The goggles tumbled out like two small squid made of rubber.

  “Got night-vision goggles here. ATN Thermal Imaging System, intensifier multiple up in the forty thousand range.” Like Tommy, Smith often dropped the subjects out of his sentences. “Spot movement at a hundred yards, read a map in total darkness.”

  “I like it,” Tommy said, trying on a pair. “Glad they’re bino. Don’t like the single lens version much.”

  “I agree. Only workable if you’re in a fixed position. These’re better for walking around. You can strap them to your head, if so inclined. I don’t recommend it. Tendency to bump right into terrorists. Mr. Cammon.”

  “Yes?”

  “They cost three thousand pounds a unit, so try not to drop them in the drink.”

  They invited Mr. Smith to stay. Peter laid out the plan for searching the coast. The SAS man appreciated the need to move fast, but he advised that rapid movement across the cliffs in the dark was asking for accidents. A question hung in the air, and Smith answered it. “I’d love to join you lads, but we aren’t authorized for a civilian mission like this. Good luck.”

  They agreed to take Sam’s old Land Rover after Peter suggested that the starting point for their explorations should be the rugged terrain around the Ransell cottage. Peter understood very well that it was long overdue that he lay out his thinking for his partner, and he did so now, but, as was often the case with the veteran chief inspector, he took a roundabout path to the core of his plan.

  “Tommy, it was my underestimating of the Rover that got Ron Hamm killed. I zigged and he zagged. If I had seen where he was heading . . .”

  “Meaning?”

  “Hamm became fixated with Anna Lasker, once he finally got around to viewing her remains.”

  “Yeah, I remember your being surprised he hadn’t seen the body before.”

  “He’d been involved from the first day. He and Willet handled the call. So, I thought, why wouldn’t he have seen the body? Well, these things happen. Maybe he was waiting for the final autopsy, which, you recall, was slow. But I should have seen the problem.”

  Tommy peered into the pelting rain. He told Peter to slow down as they reached the higher elevation beyond the Abbey. Peter continued. “One way or another, her body was kept on ice longer than usual. One day he drove out to the lab and viewed the corpse. The organs would have been out, the flesh turning blue.”

  “Now, there’s a question,” Tommy said. “Can you just drop by the Regional Lab and expect to be welcomed into the mortuary to examine a body?”

  “Well, he was the investigator of record on Lasker, at least until the Symington fiasco.” But Peter wasn’t so sure. He debated, based on no evidence whatsoever, whether Stan Bracher might have been Ron Hamm’s interlocutor with the staff at the lab.

  He continued. “At first, Hamm wasn’t thinking about the Rover at all. Our mishap on the cliff upset him, but he hadn’t seen Molly Jonas, like I had. The abuse of Anna set him on a beeline to find the husband. His success with the stolen passports and his exposure of Symington’s key role in the whole scheme encouraged him to believe that he was close to André, very much alive. And then he found a reason to believe that Albrecht Zoren was the Rover.”

  “Which was?”

  “The Rover suggested it. He called Ron Hamm.”

  Peter had to slow down as they entered the grassy hills around the Ransell cottage.

  “If he wasn’t yet onto the Rover, why would the killer bother to make the call?” Tommy said.

  “The obvious answer is that the Rover wants us to believe that Zoren was him. Hamm called me up at the Abbey to say he was going after Zoren because the mechanic knew who the Rover was. This was false. For whatever reason, Hamm misled me. Until the killer made the call, Hamm wasn’t sure at that point. Zoren, of course, had no idea of the Rover’s identity. The killer telephoned Hamm, anonymously of course, to plant the idea. By that time Zoren was dead.”

  “I still don’t see why Hamm wouldn’t have told you his theory that Zoren was our man.”

  “Because, even with the call, he wasn’t sure. He was prepared to beat the truth out of Zoren.”

  “Peter,” Tommy began, “isn’t it possible that André Lasker did all this? That the Rover wasn’t involved? Lasker called Hamm to lure him to his old garage. Zoren knew where Lasker was hiding, and Hamm was getting close. He created the opportunity to kill both of them.”

  “Zoren committed suicide, or maybe just OD’d. He didn’t know where Lasker was. That’s a tragic irony. Lasker hadn’t been in touch since fleeing Malta — in fact, since leaving England. When I saw Zoren last week, he was bitter that his old boss had abandoned him and the business. He’d been promised a piece of the company. Oh, Zoren may have helped with some of the phoney paperwork on the cars, but I don’t think it was too much more than that. Hamm was in a state of agitation when he called me that went beyond mere vengeance. He thought he had a chance to nab the Rover, but in the back of his mind was finding Lasker as well. I confess, he’s not the only one to have trouble keeping them separate.”

  “There’s one additional question.”

  “Yes, there is,” Peter said.

  “Why did the Rover bother setting this up if Zoren knew nada about his identity?”

  Peter kept silent and waited for Tommy to turn off the motor. They were on the back road just short of the Ransell house. He had worked it out while sitting alone outside Lasker’s Garage, waiting for Maris, and now he had to tell someone. If he couldn’t tell Tommy, who could he trust?

  “Because he wanted to send a message to André Lasker that he was smarter. By killing Hamm he proved he was the master. It’s a game between the two of them. You see, Tommy, André Lasker is on the hunt for the Rover.”

  From the Ransells, Peter encountered something he hadn’t expected: open hostility. Leaving the Land Rover as close as possible to the front lane, he and Tommy struggled the last fifty yards through daunting rain squalls. He was alarmed to be greeted at the door by a carrot-topped, freckled policeman, no older than twenty.

  From behind Peter, barely sheltered by the overhang, Tommy said, “Who the hell is this?”

  The youth wore a sidearm but the flap on his holster was buttoned. Still, he looked ready to resist intruders, and didn’t immediately give way to his saturated visitors.

  “Constable Grahl. Who might you be?”

  Peter fished out his identification and offered the boy only a cursory look at it, but it was enough to make him take a step backward. Tommy flashed his ID for good measure. The detectives came inside; the constable continued to eye Tommy’s rucksack, which gave off heavy metallic sounds as he hefted it onto the mat. Grahl retreated another step, but maintained his protective stance. Verden found it tiresome and strode to the centre of the room.

  Peter, too, was eager to settle in, and stepped around the constable. The cottage would serve as their headquarters, a staging ground for their search of the zone; it was, foremost in Peter’s mind, also a defensive perimeter around Gwen.

  From the start, it was evident that Ellen Ransell viewed the crisis differently. She stood in the kitchen with her back to the three policemen, and shot a sidelong sneer their way as she fiddled with s
omething in the sink. A fresh bottle of vodka stood on the counter. A half dozen paraffin lamps lit the space; a fierce fire kept the room warm.

  The boyish constable whispered to Peter, although the old woman could hear him. “They say they’re just fine. The electricity is out, and so is the land line. My mobile is functioning, so you might want to test.”

  “Mrs. Ransell,” Peter said, across the constable. She turned, but remained leaning against the sink by the refrigerator. “Is Guinevere here?”

  “This isn’t Paddington Station, Chief Inspector, despite appearances. I want young Mr. Grahl to leave. We won’t be needing your protection either.”

  “I understand,” Peter replied. The door to Gwen’s room stood open a few inches. The awkwardness continued as Mrs. Ransell, refusing to respond, remained motionless by the fridge. Neither man had been invited to take off his wet coat. Verden looked impatiently for a spot to unfold the map. He succeeded by laying it flat on the Persian carpet. He took off his coat and waved Grahl to his side, and they knelt down to examine the welter of red spots on the chart.

  Peter went over to Ellen Ransell and said quietly: “You need to be careful outside.”

  “You’re presuming to warn me against the evil out there? I’ve lived here thirty years. I can handle it.”

  “We have a supply of weapons.”

  “Not all the weapons are in that bag.” Somehow she didn’t seem drunk. “Tell me, Inspector, why conduct your search tonight? Why did Maris go along with it? You’ll never find him in this weather.” She stared at him. “You want to drive him this way, like beaters flushing a tiger?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Tell me, Inspector, what are you out there — the Tiger, the Beater, the Hunter, what?”

  “I don’t play those roles.”

  “How nice for you.”

  In his own defence, Peter struggled to declare himself. “The constable will leave. I’ll send him back to town. Verden and I will stay.”

  “Say what you mean to say.”

  “All right. It will come down to the four of us against the Rover. That’s what I have prepared for, and you as well, I think. He can’t be redeemed or cured, or deterred from killing again. There’s a chance of stopping him tonight.”

  “You know the irony in that statement, don’t you?” They were embarked on a tense debate.

  “Yes. The Rover plans to stop killing. His habits in the last fortnight show what he’s about. He followed a geographical pattern for the first four girls. He quite deliberately held back on Garvena and Van Loss, not because he stopped craving the kill, but simply to throw the police off. He likes the game. The Six-K theory was another tease, and no more than that. Can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Do you see it the same way?”

  “Yes, for the most part. I agree that’s the danger now: he plans to stop killing. He’ll disappear like fog off the Channel and reinvent himself somewhere else.”

  “Except that he has one more task to complete before he goes. If someone knows his identity, he has to take care of it. Does Gwen know who the Rover is, Ellen?”

  She shook her head, but it was simply frustration; Peter didn’t believe she was answering one way or the other.

  “If there are four of us to do this job, then each of us must play our role,” Mrs. Ransell said. She took out a metal flask — it was the flask she had been filling earlier — and had a drink. “The predator is the Electric Man. Which man are you, Inspector? And Mr. Verden, who should he be? Are you familiar with the expression ‘judge, jury and executioner’?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then Mr. Verden would make a pretty good executioner, don’t you think? And Father Salvez, hovering like a bird above the flock of sheep, he could be the judge, don’t you agree? I’ll be the jury, if you like. That leaves you with . . . oops, no role to play.”

  Peter had arrived at the Ransell house without much expectation of any grand revelations from the Ransell women. It was down to hard-slogging police work. If the Ransells could tell him the name of the Rover, well, they hadn’t before and wouldn’t now. They had their reasons. But he and Tommy were veteran policemen. It would come down to force after the police work of tedious tracking and the culmination of grinding, day-after-day effort that, at the time, might seem to be dumb luck, but wasn’t at all. Oh, Peter believed in luck — it was what made him a romantic — but luck was always two-edged. You were unlucky when lightning struck you but lucky you survived to play another round on that golf course. As a copper, you got shot at, but with luck the bullets merely whiffed on by your head. The tenacious detective was an underrated breed when it got to the endgame of arresting criminals.

  “Is Guinevere okay?”

  “She had a seizure this afternoon.”

  “Can I see her?”

  Mrs. Ransell paused. “Yes. She’ll wake up if you go in. I’m going for a smoke.”

  She said this in the tone of a cryptic sibyl’s prediction. She gathered her layers of shawls around her and went outside to the front landing. Peter entered Gwen’s room with a silent, measured step, but the second he reached her bedside, her eyes opened and she fixed him with a stare.

  “Hello, Peter. Where have you been?”

  “Just in the outer parlour. In the last few days, I’ve been at my home. Ron Hamm is dead.”

  “I know. I’ll go to his funeral.” She sat up in the bed, pushing forward several blankets; there was no heating in the room, and little warmth came through the doorway. “Tell me again where you’ve been, where you explored this last week.”

  Her voice was kind, if a bit dreamy. He understood that she meant St. Walthram’s. “The Abbey. I went there and found the crypt,” he said. “Salvez used it as a kind of monk’s chamber.”

  She nodded. She closed her eyes, as if a headache had unexpectedly struck her. It passed and she looked at him again. Peter wasn’t familiar with the aftershocks of epileptic seizures, and he proceeded carefully.

  “Are you okay?”

  “My mother is angry with you.”

  “I see that.”

  Peter heard a phone ring in the outer room. He judged from the tune that it was Grahl’s.

  “You keep leaving and coming back, you know that, Peter? You haven’t spent a lot of time in Dorset, when you add it all up. She thinks you haven’t spent enough time here.”

  “Time for what?” he said, annoyed.

  “Do you know who’s in the Abbey crypt? Bodies, I mean.”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Nazis.”

  “Nazis? I didn’t see any.” It sounded glib.

  “That’s my point, Peter. There’s a rumour around here that two German soldiers are buried in the crypt of St. Walthram’s Abbey. They were S.S. officers who were smuggled onto the coast in 1942 as part of Operation Sea Lion. The local people saw them land and captured them right off. They killed them on the spot and hid the bodies.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, interesting. One more bit of local colour. But maybe, my mother thinks, details like that might have helped you to understand the heights before now. Your dream was telling you that, too. The black figure floating over the desert was all-seeing. At the same time, his face was a blank — he wasn’t physically able to see anything. The black figure was you, Peter.”

  Her face was sallow, her lips bluish; yet her eyes focused on his with clarity and conviction.

  “It has arrived at this, Peter. You waited too long. Mr. Hamm is dead, and it remains to be finished by the people who live here, who know the cliffs, who are the Coast itself. The policemen out there will soon retreat, leaving it to those who understand this Rover, who has outraged them with his horrible game.”

  She had exhausted herself and Peter helped her lie back against the pillows. He had come here because of the threat to Guinevere Ransell, but also because he craved her inspiration. He had innate faith in her perspective on both Lasker
and the serial predator. But now he knew she was wrong. The Rover wouldn’t be netted by the villagers collectively surrounding him. There was no Tiger and no Beaters driving the monster to the cliff’s edge. There were only Hunters, and he and Tommy were the efficient — and well-armed — pursuers.

  She quieted, and seemed on the verge of sleep. He backed up towards the big oak door but her eyes opened, and she stared at him again.

  “Peter?”

  “What is it?”

  “Sarah is safe.”

  He came back to the bed. “What about Sarah? What do you know about Sarah? You’ve never met her, have you?”

  “I met her on the beach at Solomon Cove two days ago. She was digging trilobites out of the rock face near the shore. I told her it was no longer safe that far east. She accepted my advice. She left, Peter.”

  “My Sarah?”

  “Yes.” Peter couldn’t imagine his daughter giving in to the admonitions of a stranger on a beach on a sunny day in the south of England. But, then, this was Gwen.

  He turned back to her, but she had fallen asleep.

  He returned to the big room, leaving the door to her bedroom slightly ajar. He was profoundly disturbed by the thought of Sarah on the coast. He prepared to regroup with Tommy and Constable Grahl, having decided to leave Grahl behind to guard the Ransells — in spite of his promise to Ellen — while he and his partner went hunting. He understood the story of the S.S. soldiers as a cautionary tale about the lost innocence of the citizens of Whittlesun. But another kind of innocence had slipped away. The Rover was the Modern, the ruthless predator descending from the Outside World and deracinated from the parochial life of Dorset. He exploited them with some ruse they hadn’t yet figured out, and he moved among them with impunity. He was different, electrifying, the Electric Man.

  Peter expected to find Tommy and the young constable still strategizing over the map, but Grahl was standing by the door with a chagrined look on his ruddy face. Ellen Ransell had yet to return. Tommy had folded up the chart and it lay, apparently discarded, on the rug.

  “What’s going on?” Peter said.