Walking Into the Ocean

by David Whellams

  “I’m sorry,” Grahl began. “That was my chief, Mr. Maris, on the line. We’ve been called back. All of us.”

  “What does ‘called back’ mean?”

  “The weather has gotten too bad. He says we’re going to lose men if we send them out on the rocks in these conditions. We’ve been instructed to get some sleep, assemble at the station at 0600.”

  “All of you?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter wanted Grahl out of earshot before he reviewed his options with Verden. He had hoped, indeed, that the manhunt would serve exactly like a tiger hunt, to the extent of driving the killer off the main roads and out of the obvious locations where he could conceal a vehicle. What the Rover possessed was guts and stamina, and Peter wanted to turn these strengths towards recklessness and headlong misjudgment by confining his killing zone.

  There was the added problem of Grahl’s own safety. He appeared to have walked some distance to reach the cottage.

  “Where is your vehicle parked, Mr. Grahl?” Peter said.

  “Up the Fen Road a ways. Maybe a mile gone from here.”

  “Do you want Mr. Verden to accompany you?”

  “Not necessary. I know the way very well. Thank you, Chief Inspector.” In fact, there was no worry in his voice. He probably wanted to get away from these odd Scotland Yard codgers, Peter thought — these Outsiders.

  Both Peter and Tommy walked out to the front path with Grahl. The rain had let up, but the gale was a banshee. Peter had the anomalous thought that the wind was forceful enough to blow a bullet off its trajectory. Ellen Ransell had disappeared.

  Although it was difficult for Peter to be heard, he called: “Mr. Grahl! Why didn’t Maris send a second man with you?”

  Grahl leaned forward and cupped his hand over Peter’s ear. “We were pretty stretched out by the time we assigned officers this far east. I grew up only two miles from here. I’d met the Ransells before, so I volunteered.”

  Tommy smacked his hip to show Grahl that he should keep his pistol at the ready. He handed over one of his military grade torches and nodded. Grahl turned away and was swallowed up in a blink by the darkness.

  CHAPTER 36

  Mrs. Ransell had gone, but Peter, who suspected that she had come outside to drink, more than to smoke cigarettes, had no intention of looking for her. If she failed to return in the next half hour, they would do a circuit of the cottage. But Tommy took him by surprise. The moment they re-entered the building, he halted. “I’m going to take a look around, maybe track down the old woman. But if I’m gone more than eight minutes, come calling.”

  Alone in the central room, Peter felt the hollowness of the isolated cottage. Verden had placed the bag in the centre of the Persian carpet. He was right: time to unpack the guns and set out. Gwen was in the other room and Peter had the overwhelming urge to talk it all through with her. There was much he didn’t understand about the Rover. She had been his guide all along; even when he had missed their meetings, she had been in his consciousness, telling him where to go next. He understood the need to stay close to her, and he wondered how he and Tommy were going to build that challenge into their search of the grid around the cottage.

  The ringtone of his personal phone resonated in the room.

  “Hello?” Peter answered, on the edge of shouting. He was habituated to expect weak connections anywhere near the Channel.

  “It’s Stan.” Bracher’s flat Canadian voice came through distinctly. Peter was stunned into momentary silence. “Peter, it’s Stan. Where are you?”

  Cammon wasn’t about to be specific until he ascertained Stan’s location. And why was he calling at all? “I’m in the Whittlesun area. Where are you?”

  “Peter, I tried to reach you earlier but you didn’t answer. Plenty of static due to this cursed British weather. Jack McElroy says it’s the first winter storm of the season.”

  “Jack? Where are you?” he repeated. Why is Stan with Jack McElroy?

  “I’m with Jack.”

  “At the lab?” was all Peter could think to say.

  “No, no. At Jack’s place, his home. In Devon.”

  Peter began to understand. Stan’s peripatetic ways reflected a deeper nature. He liked people and made friends easily, because he had no grievances with anyone, criminals excepted. The Brits sometimes ascribed his loose friendliness to a shallow character. He was unpredictable, restless, but his wanderings obscured a strong impulse to help people. Canadians were supposed to be undemonstrative, but Stan Bracher loved the grand gesture — and the minor gesture too. Peter guessed that he had discovered something and he had gone to see McElroy with it.

  “How is Jack?”

  “He’s right here. He’s had a mild incident, but he’s on the way back. We’ve been at it for two hours straight.”

  Peter wanted to address Jack McElroy’s breakdown, to say he was sorry for not calling, but he understood that the best support he could offer would be to take their news seriously, whatever it was. “What have you fellows got?”

  “We have DNA,” Stan said. “We know who the Rover is.”

  Ever the detective, intrigued by methods as much as outcomes, Peter couldn’t help asking, “Which girl?”

  “It was the third one, Anna Marie Dokes. Semen evidence. I’ve been back and forth from Regional three times in the past week, working on the tests. I’ll never get used to driving on the left.”

  Peter heard Jack McElroy grunt in the background, trying to steer Stan back on track. “We tapped into all the databases on it, hit the jackpot on the central Youth Offenders Repository. It took us two days, but Jack here, I tell you, missed his calling as a computer wizard, a potential hacker.”

  “Aren’t Y.O. records sealed?” Peter said.

  “You tell me. But yeah, they’re protected, unless we can justify an enhanced disclosure of the full criminal record. The suspect had a sexual assault charge at the age of twenty. This adult charge served to open up his previous charge record, from when he was seventeen. A sexual assault count then, too. He was convicted as a youth on that one. Came from some small village in Northern Ireland. Even Jack’s never heard of it.”

  “Got a name?”

  Stan seemed to be reading from a file. “Paul ‘Sandy’ Lebeau. He’d be twenty-six at this point. Raised in a group home for boys. Orphan, no family.”

  “French?”

  “No reason to think so, despite the name. We’re twisting arms to get a photo.”

  “When do you expect to get one?”

  “Jack’s calling in every marker he has. Trouble is, the Belfast files aren’t digitized from back then, and the other charge was up in Manchester and it appears to be buried deeper than the Titanic. By the way, Jack thanks you for finding Molly Jonas. It puts his mind at rest.”

  There was muttering in the background, and Peter heard Stan guffaw. “Jack says they found the Titanic, too.”

  Peter checked his watch, and exactly at the eight-minute mark, Tommy came back in. He shrugged off the rain and the chill. Peter debriefed him on Stan Bracher’s shattering news. Several things bothered Peter about the tombstone data on Paul Lebeau, the first being the lengthy gap of three years between his last youth offence and his arrest in Manchester for sexual assault. Even if he had succeeded in restraining his urges, something must have triggered his homicidal outbursts over recent months. The rapes and killings along the Jurassic Coast displayed inventiveness and attention to detailed planning. No doubt the Rover had reinvented himself when he settled in Dorset or Devon, but perhaps he hadn’t come very far. He had probably killed women before.

  “I’m getting worried about Mrs. Ransell,” Tommy said. “She’s been out there a long time, and it’s bloody cold.”

  On instinct, Peter glanced towards the kitchen counter. As he had expected, she’d taken her flask outside with her, but the full bottle of Koskenkorva was also missing.

  They went to the rucksack and unloaded the matériel for their expedition. The guns, kniv
es and goggles were arrayed on the carpet much as they had been on the hotel room bed. Tommy racked the slide of the Glock and loaded half the box of ammunition into the chamber. Peter did the same with his pistol. Each watched which pocket the other carried his gun in; it was an old partners’ habit. Soon, each man was equipped with a pistol, knife and a set of goggles; Tommy would carry the remaining torch, and Peter the map.

  Peter went over to Gwen’s bedroom and eased the door wide. The covers were heaped in the centre of the bed. He walked farther in, in order to see if she had simply snuggled under the blankets.

  Gwen had disappeared.

  “She’s not in the room,” he said to Tommy, through the doorway.

  Verden was zipping up his jacket over by the front door. “She got out?”

  “I was here. She couldn’t have slipped past me. Impossible.”

  Tommy, always a beat faster on the uptake, opened the front door and stepped outside; he didn’t care how she had evaded them, but he checked to the right and left corners of the cottage. Peter ran out behind him. He was almost as quick as his partner, for now he understood what Gwen already knew, and was on her way to take care of.

  The Rover was hunting Ellen Ransell, just as she was hunting him.

  The two detectives walked out into the teeth of the night wind.

  It would have to end, the Rover concluded.

  Six sluts, so sad. It shouldn’t have taken six for them to pay attention. The Footballer had wanted to publicize early on (he had stolen the draft announcement off Finter’s desk in that interview), but the politicos had shut him down. He had attacked two more, left them alive, but they even shut down Garvena. The Media caved (there was a good pun in there somewhere) to the politicos once again. He had believed in the Media (a way for an ambitious young man to get known), but no longer. They analyzed — Freuds of the Tabloids — but concealed even the bare facts. Where was the integrity in it all?

  A Date with the State. Look what they’d done to him, beamish Borstal Boy. And now to suppress the panic. Manic Panic. Outrage Outage. The Garvena girl had been the ultimate. Not even allowing TV-20 and the wire services to disclose it. Conspire the Wire. (Just because her repressed Italian parents asked — nice to have any parents.)

  No more Six-K. Refrain from the Refrain. They were too close. There was nothing left to do but kill the Girl in the Cloak and get out. Take care of the Man in the Cloak, too, and get out.

  Start up the Game somewhere else.

  As Peter and Tommy crouched down on the shoulder of the farmer’s road, Peter thought of the Knights of St. John, who never seemed to have doubts; they were convinced that they would stand before the Son of man, but only if they walked in a forward direction, without a backward glance. How nice for them, he thought. But Ellen Ransell had been right: there were times as a police officer when you had to decide whether or not to take on the role of judge, jury or executioner. Yes, Peter thought, but then you let events sort out which role you were always destined to play.

  They were cued in to any man-made light that might appear anywhere in the kilometre zone around the Ransell cottage; the goggles would make the light seem like a starburst. But first they had to accustom themselves to the opaque night. Tommy hiked himself up onto a fence railing and scanned three hundred and sixty degrees with a pair of regular binoculars. It was an awkward manoeuvre, since it was pitch black and he expected to see absolutely nothing, aside from a faint glow from the cottage itself. They would move quickly towards any other source of light. Satisfied with these preliminaries, the two detectives put on their night goggles and adjusted the focus. Peter opened up the square of topographical map that Tommy had torn out of the larger chart, and with hand signals, pointed out the way to his partner. They moved down the farm road towards the east. The rain had ceased, but heavy crosswinds continued to buffet the path, and Peter was tempted to take his chances in the fields, where they would be less exposed. Within two hundred yards, they found a wisp of a trail, no more than a flattening of the grass, that led off towards the cliffs, and they took it. The goggles made it easy to follow the track, but they were soon on rocky terrain, where the trail faded out. The choices at first seemed infinite, since the moraine, a field of both small and gigantic stones, offered no natural pathways towards the sea; the ground became more treacherous, too, and they proceeded single file. Peter estimated that they must have crossed the route he and Gwen had taken in their stymied search for caves, but he failed to recognize any landmarks. Tommy felt the same disorientation and, as their methods dictated, they began to pause every fifty yards to reconnoitre.

  The infrared settings within the goggle lenses meant that any luminosity, other than stars or ambient radiance from the sky, would flash in the viewfinder. The eyes of an animal or a human would show as brilliant beads. The devices projected their own light forward, although only the wearer could see it, and the detectives performed slow two-hundred-seventy-degree scans ahead. Peter was looking at a sharp angle to his left when Tommy, on his right, saw the figure rush past. He later swore that the body was dressed in flat black clothing but there was an odd, bright flash about the head.

  There was to be a gathering on the heights. André sensed it.

  He had come to love the ocean. He had escaped into it, swum back from it, explored the borders of it, and now he would seek redemption at its very edge. He was the most rational of men, but the cliffs were luring, seducing everyone to a strange meeting place overlooking the sea. He now understood what Odysseus endured when the sirens sang. He had idled away hours in hiding reading a dog-eared paperback of Homer, and now he got it. The song of the sirens made you fall in love. The sea had seduced him back and made him fall in love with Anna again, and his debt to her would be repaid when he netted the killer of women.

  He was perfectly ready. He knew the shore better than the Rover. Hell, he knew all the killer’s weaknesses. He’d said just enough to panic him, convince him that he had to kill the strange girl. It wouldn’t happen. André congratulated himself. The Rover was eager, and André had seduced him with pictures of the Sacrifice. “Your best ritual yet,” he had called across the plateau of stones, speaking in the voice of a local boy — the Rover had such a smooth, contrasting timbre. Apparently the predator hadn’t quite believed he would do his part. The enticement of Detective Hamm — Hamm had been close to nabbing both of them — had been nasty and unexpected, a provocation.

  But André would certainly attend the ritual, reshaping it the way he wanted. He wondered who else would show up at the altar for the ceremony. Whatever. He was ready to preside over the ritual.

  Waiting in the cold room, he flipped the pages by the light of the torch. The tragedy for Odysseus had been that he couldn’t stay. He had lashed himself to the mast. André pondered how he himself would feel when the time came to sail away.

  Taking encouragement from Tommy’s glimpse of the Rover — if that’s who it was — they pressed ahead with some confidence, making swift but efficient judgments about which way to go. The track was filament-thin, but the goggles highlighted the bent-back grass and saved their legs from missteps into the clumps of brome and thorn. Still, there was nothing inevitable about their route, and they paused every few yards to scan the horizon. They certainly weren’t going to track anything by sound, since the wind bayed like an attacking animal. Where are the Ransells? worried Peter. There was always the possibility that they were being led into a trap, but Peter couldn’t help thinking that the players in this chase were all converging towards one significant spot on the cliffs.

  The grassy depression through which they had been rushing gave way to barren rock, with weirdly wind-carved stones looming up to block their progress. Peter ordered Tommy to stop. The next section, between their location and the rim of the cliffs, was too treacherous for any attempt at speed. Tommy looked at him; they were two green-lit monsters, out of breath and hot beneath their masks, despite the wintry air. Peter mouthed, “Dead slow,” and they t
ook shelter in the lee of a granite spire.

  The rock formations here were different from any seen on Peter’s earlier forays onto the Whittlesun Heights. The others might find the plateau equally difficult to cross, but Peter and Tommy were the only hunters with night vision capacity, and they could use it to advantage. With arm movements, Peter instructed his partner to scan the area ahead, to their left, for large, flat boulders, while he did the same for the quadrant on the right.

  Peter thought he saw something ahead, lit green and spooky in the lens. He drew his pistol; Tommy did the same.

  Peter led the way towards the irregular ring of boulders fifty yards off; strewn with pebbles, branches and other detritus, it was a poor man’s chapel of stone, but the giant rock in the rough centre of the circle was perfect as a sacrificial altar. There was every reason to wait for the Rover here. He had no concern of imminent ambush, since the area was unlit and the semi-circle of rocks blocked at least half of the lines of sight. With the night goggles, they would see him coming. Peter moved forward another ten yards.

  A movement to one side, around a vertical boulder, caused both men to swing their weapons that way. Guinevere Ransell slipped into the path; she looked remarkably composed given the fierce wind and the danger about. She signalled for them to remove their goggles, which they did. They struggled with night blindness for a full minute, and she waited for their eyes to adjust.

  “He was here,” she hissed in Peter’s ear.

  “Where is your mother?” Peter called back.

  “I don’t know. I’m looking for her. You have to come with me.”

  The landscape was rendered even darker by the displacement of the night-vision apparatus. Gwen turned on a torch and pointed it in the direction of the sea, then back at the detectives. The beam bore into Peter’s retinas and he turned to one side. What startled him even more was the risk she had chosen to take by lighting up their location, however faintly. But she pointed the light away from the chapel of stone and swept ahead on an invisible trail; he and Verden had no choice but to follow.