Walking into the Ocean (11 page)

The husband would either float to the surface near Whittlesun Beach, his body bloated and nibbled away by small fish, or he would be found with a new moustache and beard in Kathmandu. Neither scenario pleased Peter. It was becoming personal, and he wanted to be the one to make the arrest or, if it came down to it, identify the etiolated corpse.

There was a third possibility, but Cammon couldn't see Lasker just walking up to Inspector Maris and turning himself over to the Queen's judgment. Maris wasn't destined for that much luck.

Peter needed a way to force the issue.

There had been other disappearances into the ocean: Lord Lucan in 1974 and the Australian prime minister Harold Holt in 1967 came to mind. Lord Lucan, a minor aristocrat, had walked into the sea after killing the family nanny and attacking his wife with murderous intent. Peter had been peripherally involved in the investigation in the early part of his career, although the feckless Lucan was never found and reports of his reappearance had been rife ever since. Holt's drowning had generated similar conspiracy theories; he had served as
PM
for less than three years, and he was an experienced swimmer. Peter's favourite paranoid story was that a Chinese submarine had been waiting for him offshore.

Peter was familiar with both files. Tragic as they might be — Holt's vanishing was certainly an accident — these were lurid anecdotes whose features only appeared remarkable to the tabloid-credulous. Peter understood the purpose of the sea in the popular imagination — oblivion for the ingenuous, the jettisoning of identity and rebirth for the egoist. But Peter knew that the disappearing man, whatever his motive, fears the tide washing him back to his departure point. That is his definition of defeat. He shivers at the prospective scene as his bloodless corpse is loaded into the unhurried ambulance, his pale rictus photographed by police and by broadsheet stringers.

He flipped the cap of the second bottle of ale he had commanded from room service. He sat back in the armchair and frowned at the ragged display of paper. He didn't like hotels much, and he considered moving to a new one. Of course, that would also require him to clean up the mess. He took out his police notepad and drew up a list. He was an inveterate maker of lists. He wrote:

1
. Too much blood — why?

2
. The second beach

3
. Mechanic kills wife — no weapon? no wheel wrench?

4
.

He didn't fill in the
4
. On a second scrap torn from his notebook, he wrote and underlined:
where do I want to go next with this?
He crumpled the page and tossed it into the basket.

He felt the lack of progress in his day. A confrontation with Maris was coming, probably tomorrow. He still needed local guidance, perhaps from Willet but better from Hamm, in order to efficiently explore the coastline. A search of the caves east of Whittlesun was more appealing than ever.

He lay down on the bed, not intending to sleep, and shifted some of the papers aside. He got out his mobile and flipped it open, but then left it lying beside him. He'd see how it felt in the morning. His penultimate thought before dozing off was that Lasker would not be found in Kathmandu: it had no beaches.

And then he asked, as he floated into the twilight:
Who is the Black Man? If the Cloaked Man is Lasker, has Gwen seen him? Watched him? Tracked him? Above all, who is the Electric Man?
He'd find that out tomorrow, too.

Stephen Bartleben lay abed with the woman to whom he had been married for forty years. He loved her, he supposed, but after what he considered a geological epoch, the best he could articulate was that they were companionable. Time's companions — endurance, habit, acceptance — overwhelmed love and you settled for the terms of the contract you made with the Church looking down on you. That was the rule, especially applicable to the privileged class. It was 5:30 a.m., and he was not in a generous mood. He struggled, unmoving next to her, to clear the mists with a happy thought.
What is the best aspect of marriage?
he considered.
Why the hell am I looking to my marriage for a happy thought? This woman is snoring, ruining my rest! No chance of getting back to sleep. Merde!
No, no;
he chastened himself for using an expletive, even if unspoken.
So, what is the best part of our marriage?
he persisted.
What romantic parallel applies?
They were faithful to each other. She supported his ambition, even if only by leaving him alone to pursue it. Eloise and Abelard?
Shit, didn't they castrate him?
No more expletives. He tried to drift on the pre-dawn mists, but she, a mountain next to him, kept on with her snoring. Christ, it was like sleeping next to an active volcano. He tried for a classical analogy. He settled for “faithful companion.” He was like Long John Silver, with his parrot always riding on his shoulder. Of course, at the moment she was a hippo on his shoulder. She had gained weight. He'd been losing weight. He was Deputy Commissioner, New Scotland Yard. A serious bureaucrat. Stephen determinedly gave up this train of fantasy, but suddenly Cammon visited his brain.
Where did he arrive from? The conventional little man in the black suit. I love him. How many days has it been? Four? No, only three. A few days on the south coast of England, in some Brighton-wannabe town, fighting against all kinds of tides. Better him than me.
Three or four days. The frustration would be building now; it always happened this way. Cammon ready to burst, rummaging around for the final pieces of the puzzle. Waiting for the breakthrough. The image comforted Bartleben and he immediately fell back to sleep. His wife, he supposed, loved him. She certainly appreciated his knighthood.

Sherlock Holmes once said: “You have a grand gift of silence, Watson . . . It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”

The phone rang at 7:30 a.m. and Joan answered before the second ring. She was sitting on the side veranda of the house, which gave a direct view down the lane, although she couldn't see the main road. A neighbour was due to pick her up at any minute to drive her to the railway station to catch the midmorning train to Leeds. She sat in a deep wooden chair called an Adirondack; Peter had seen them in New England the time he worked on that case with the
FBI
, and had had one shipped home. (The idea for the snake-rail fence had come from Peter's sojourn to Quantico, Virginia, and points south.) A satchel sat next to her. She was happy to be going to visit Michael and his girl, and she was reading the tail end of “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” the story that referred to Watson's “grand gift.”

She wouldn't bring the Holmes collection with her, since this was one of Peter's valued books, and so she wanted to finish the story before she left. Although she was absorbed in it, she kept an eye out for the pheasant in the tall grass at the end of the property. There was only one now, a male, and Joan worried that the other three had abandoned it. Pheasant pairs bonded for life. She didn't see him and hoped he had joined the others for their migration.

“Hello?” she answered, thinking it must be Sarah or the neighbour.

“Hello, dear,” Peter said.

“Hello, Peter. Is everything all right?” With Peter, it could be anything, but she wasn't prepared for what he said next.

“Yes, perfectly fine, but I have a big favour to ask you. Can you come down to Whittlesun?”

In forty years, Peter had never directly involved her in an investigation. That he did so now wasn't a sign of panic — and there was none in his voice — so much as it told her that the Lasker case had reached a significant obstacle. His request wasn't exactly flattering; she wasn't Sherlock, Mycroft, Irene Adler or even Watson himself. Still, he had never called for help before. She didn't overreact. Even so, as she absorbed the surprise of her husband's call, she rushed to figure out what he wanted. Her usual role was to be supportive of his moods and to nod at his occasional oblique musings, but they were hardly sharing the same harness. She understood the stages that he worked through and she estimated that by now Peter had formed a theory of what might have happened that tempestuous night in the Lasker home.

And then she understood. He was telling her that he needed a special resource in order to untangle the knot. He needed the perspective of a woman.

“If you could see your way to coming down, I'd like you to visit the Lasker home with me,” he said, rather formally. “It will only take the morning. You can stay on at the hotel, if you like. It's very comfortable.”

Of course she would accept; she could always visit Michael another time. She was excited but wondered about a number of things. She understood his efforts to reassure her; she had never been through a crime scene. On the other side of the coin, she thought, I'm a nurse and I've seen as much, if not more, blood and guts than he has, including knife and gunshot trauma. The visit probably would be strange. Her husband would be preoccupied, and stay that way even if she gave him what he wanted. He often retreated to the shed, muttering to himself for long periods; she suspected that he did the same in hotel rooms too. How far was he drawing her into his complicated world now? Nevertheless, because she had the greatest faith in her husband's skills, she remained unruffled.

“Okay. What's the arrangement?” She wasn't heading to the coastal town for a frolic, yet, although she didn't tell him this, she thought: this is going to be thrilling. Conan Doyle had scored a convert.

“I'm sending Verden. He'll be there at nine o'clock, if that's okay.”

Joan understood that Peter had summoned Tommy Verden already, and therefore he had been confident that she would acquiesce. She didn't bother telling him of her scheduled trip to see Michael. Instead, she said, “Okay,” in the softest, gentlest voice.

She was no longer in the mood to finish the Conan Doyle tale. She closed up the house, made her calls to postpone her trip to Leeds and waited on the veranda.

Joan arrived in Whittlesun well before noon. Tommy Verden drove fast, but not so fast as to alarm her. They had always liked each other, since she regarded him as her husband's devoted protector through many an investigation. Today they travelled in silence, both aware that something unprecedented was happening. Tommy let her off in front of the Delphine. Peter was there to greet them, and Tommy handed her over safe and sound, along with a pile of reports from Bartleben. Peter couldn't resist glancing at a few pages there in the driveway; they were missives from Interpol and the ferry authorities. Tommy offered to pick up Joan the next morning but she insisted that the train would do fine. It was all so reasonable and normal, as if Joan participated in their investigations all the time.

Tommy left and Peter conducted her to his room, now cleaned up. She placed her satchel on the bed.

“Do you want lunch first?” he asked, deferentially.

“No, I'm not especially hungry. Let's eat after. Can you tell me what I'm going to see?” She smiled as she said this, not in the least apprehensive, though she was tingling. She already knew that she would be exposed to evidence of extreme brutality.

“Let's walk. It's not far.”

They followed his route through the central streets of the town and down the sloping road to the Lasker residence. He was solicitous, placing his hand against her back to make sure she didn't trip on the cobbles. He explained about the excess of blood and the odd pattern of destruction that she would see in the house. He gave her a brief biography of Anna and the information he had gained from Father Vogans. “There's something I'm missing,” he said. “I want your overall reaction to the scene. Unbiased by what I bring to it.”

She had taken his hand on the last stretch before the house. Now she gave it an affectionate squeeze and smiled. Peter was not the man to lose his objectivity, no matter what she said, and this very fact, her husband's solidity, somehow freed her to make independent judgments. This was going to be interesting.

On his second visit, Peter had used the key under the flowerpot by the back steps. He employed it now to open the front door, from which the police tape had been removed. He hoped to avoid alerting the neighbours, but he had no doubt that curtains were shifting somewhere nearby. He asked Joan to wait in the vestibule while he turned on all the overhead lights downstairs.

Joan entered the house gingerly. She didn't want to brush against the walls, or step on any evidence. She stood in the hall for a minute facing the bloody wall, just as Peter had done the first day. She kept in mind Peter's admonition that understanding would come from maintaining a healthy distance from the violence, yet the first thing that grabbed her as she caught sight of the blood trail along the hallway was the kinetic flow of this marital battle. She was instinctively attuned to Anna's fear. Someone had run in terror down this hall, probably from the upper bedroom, trailing blood and seeking sanctuary in the back of the house.

“Let's look at the other rooms first,” Peter instructed. “We'll come back.”

She wanted her hands unencumbered. Usually she carried her purse everywhere, like the Queen, but now she left it by the front door. Peter guided her ahead of him. She entered the living room and catalogued the mayhem wreaked on the furnishings. A bloody palm print covered the light switch. A glass vase lay shattered on the carpet, and she knelt down to examine it. She surveyed the arrangement of furniture. She ran her hand over the obscene gouge in the sideboard and guessed that a kitchen cleaver had done it. To keep her composure in the midst of this sadness, she took herself back to her days as a hospital nurse; she became all business. The triptych on the sideboard interested her more than the ruined mahogany surface. The icon had been left undamaged. Peter watched as she closely examined the curtains puddled on either side of the fireplace. With a look, she indicated to him that she wanted to go on by herself to complete her first pass of the house.

Alone, she followed the track of blood back into the kitchen and immediately saw the anomaly. Yes, the two glass-fronted cupboards had been poked in, and broken crockery, pans and utensils lay all about, but the pot of tomato sauce stood upright on the back burner of the cooker, right where it belonged. It was semi-solid and cracking now. She looked from the pot to the doorway opposite. It should have been the first weapon Mrs. Lasker reached for when she fled to the kitchen. She rotated, trance-like, in the middle of the kitchen, and faced the stove once more. She sensed Peter coming up behind her.

“The pot,” she asked, “is just sitting there. Wouldn't she have hurled it at him?”

“I noticed that too. It's a tomato sauce with all kinds of spices in it. The saucepan was cold when the police arrived. There are only minor blood traces, hers, around the stove; the rest is tomato paste.”

“What's the name of the haematologist you often sing the praises of? The Canadian?”

“Stan Bracher.”

“It might be worthwhile getting him down to look for bloodstains on the stove. I can tell that Mrs. Lasker loved to cook. She was a messy one at the best of times, you can see, but does that matter? Exactly how much blood is there here, do you think?”

Peter shook his head. “I don't know. But I need him for a number of tests anyway. I'm not sure about the amount of blood.”

“Were there burn marks anywhere on Anna's body?”

“One double mark, shaped like bars, on her outer arm near the right elbow. She was right-handed.”

“I'm guessing she wasn't cooking at the stove when he attacked her,” said Joan. “But I'd like to know how recent the burns were. Could she have burned herself deliberately, either that day or in the days before? If it was self-inflicted, that might coincide with the day she found out his plan. And that would show her desperation.”

Joan heaved a deep sigh. Despite the overhead lights, the gloom in the house overwhelmed her. The rancid tomato sauce added to the closeness. Bypassing the hall stains, she went up to the lavatory. Seeing right away that there was more blood there than in any other room, she surprised Peter by abruptly turning and entering the bedroom. Like Peter, she wanted to leave the worst for last. He waited on the upper landing. She was back in less than a minute, having grasped that the fight hadn't played out in the bedroom, and there hadn't been a rape. Frowning (in puzzlement, Peter thought), she re-entered the room across the way. She took in the gauzy stockings hanging limply on the shower bar. The blood in the sink had crusted, ruining the porcelain, and had begun to crack. She peered in the bath and then leaned carefully into it, taking special interest in the wavy blood pattern around the drain. She sniffed at the blood in the tub area, and did the same at the sink. Then she squatted, making sure her coat didn't swish on the tiles, and examined the stains on the floor.

She opened the vanity doors, as if looking for a particular item.

“Can we open the medicine chest without spilling glass everywhere?”

“The room has been well photographed. With a little care . . .” Peter swung the shattered panel open to reveal the array of medicines on the narrow shelves. Joan leaned into the space and took her time checking each vial and bottle with a nurse's acumen.

“The contents have been inventoried,” he said, trying to be helpful. He was amazed by his wife's instinct for itemization and detail, a talent all good detectives need.

Joan left the room, took a final look along the walls of the upstairs landing and went down again. She sniffed at the blood in the corridor. She paid another visit to the kitchen and marked where the few bloodstains were. Back in the hall she turned to him and put her hand on his shoulder. The gesture was to reassure him that she was okay.

“How does blood spattering work?” she said.

“A slashed artery will spray like a garden hose fully open. But it's rare that a major opening of a blood vessel will involve the victim standing still. Therefore, traumatic cutting, namely an attack, will have the victim turning away from the danger and thus the fan-like effect you see in the loo in places and at the bottom of the stairs, here.” He pointed to the wall next to her.

“Often,” he continued, “you'll see thicker deposits of blood on the floor, not just from the gravity effect, but because the victim soon becomes dizzy and naturally, or unnaturally if you like, falls down. That applies to a major severing. Smaller veins or surface cuts may actually bleed a lot, and for a long time, but not with the spray impact. Don't be deceived by the quantity of blood in any one spot. There's a lot of blood in one body.”

“What about the patterns along each of the hallways?” she said.

“Ah, yes, that's more complicated. Evidently, in some spots, where you see handprints, Mrs. Lasker held herself up, perhaps to avoid fainting. But she also trailed her hand along the walls in that wavy rhythm.”

“Was it all her blood?”

“Yes. According to the first-round report.”

“Was any of the husband's blood found anywhere?”

“Not in the house. There was an old bloodstain on a carving blade in the kitchen,” he said.

“He had plenty of blades to choose from and you'd think he might nick himself at some point in the assault. For that matter,
she
could be expected to defend herself with a knife, but none of his blood was spilled, and nobody resorted to the knife rack. Strange.”

Joan went into the living room area again, crossing immediately to one of the fallen curtains. She knelt and rooted through the piles of cloth.