Walking into the Ocean (39 page)

He promised Gwen that he would return tomorrow, and he meant it. The answers were here, he felt. But he had to try to find Hamm, to see what hell-bent course he was launched on. Also, he had to fit in a visit to the Abbey.

He didn't expect Sam to be at the garage in Whittlesun at this hour, but there was a slim possibility that he was closing up or that Mayta was working late on the books. There might be an “in emergencies” number on his machine, although Peter could only guess at Sam's definition of an emergency. Long ago, Peter's mother had described his favourite aunt as “excitable and unflappable at the same time.” That was Sam.

As it turned out, Sam was there, but Mayta answered the phone. To “Sam's Auto,” Peter offered a tentative “Hello?” He did not identify himself.

“Inspector! How are you? How is that arm? Every time we hear from you, you've done damage to yourself. Is it a curse we've put on you?”

Peter had to laugh, a release of a long day's tension. “What do you know about my wounds, Mayta?”

“I hear a drug dealer shot you.”

“That's truly amazing, Mayta. That information wasn't in the press.”

“Skype. Friends in Malta, everywhere. And you're one of our favourite hits on the Net.”

“I know it's late to be calling . . .”

“I'll put Sam on. He's in love with you. I'm pretty hot towards you myself.”

“Mayta, what are you talking about?”

But she had gone, and Sam took the receiver. “Peter, how's your arm? Do you need a car?”

“Fine, Sam, and yes. Mayta is amazing.”

“True. She has many Skype friends, chat groups. They gossip about me a lot. And try inputting
Scotland Yard shootout
. Mayta should be a police detective.”

“Your whole family should be in the business,” Peter said.

Sam's tone shifted. “Give me your SatNav coordinates. I'll pick you up.”

“It's a long way.”

“It's okay.”

“I actually don't know them,” Peter confessed.

Gwen wrested the mobile from Peter and introduced herself. She smiled as she listened, nodded often, and said: “Yes . . . Right . . . Okay.” A Gwen–Sam conversation had to be bizarre, Peter thought. She giggled. She held the mobile so that she could read the screen, pressed a series of buttons and recited the longitude and latitude coordinates for the cottage.

Peter took the phone back from her. “Sam?”

“He's already left,” Mayta said. “What are you doing putting beautiful girls in range of my Sam, Peter?”

They walked out to the road using Gwen's pencil torch. The winds had fallen off, leaving the whiff of summer's end, as if winter were holding off for a more propitious time. Peter was glad that Mrs. Ransell remained asleep, even if she knew the Rover's identity. Of course, it was Gwen who surmised that her mother knew; Ellen Ransell had made no such claims.

“It's not safe for you out here,” he said, worried for her.

“As safe as it ever was,” she said, in an even voice.

She shone the light at the path, leaving their faces in darkness. His mind was occupied by images from his dream, especially the black figure and the Day-Glo orange of the landscape. But it was the Rover who, however illogical Peter's thought patterns, sprang to his lips. “He'll never stop.”

“The Rover? No, he will never stop. But Peter, don't worry. He's close.”

He took that to mean she encouraged him. She had used similar words before. It was this message that he misinterpreted, and only later did he understand that Gwen never spoke with the intent of flattery or discouragement. She spoke objectively: he was close. But as a veteran policeman he knew he couldn't wait for the Rover or André Lasker to come to him. He had to take charge.

Sam's headlamps joggled through the swales and turns on the tiny road leading to where they stood. He parked the vehicle, an old but rugged Land Rover, catching Gwen fully in the lights.

The one who rejected the label of the Rover watched Peter and Guinevere Ransell from a secure distance. He was sure of himself, his safety guaranteed by the simple fact that he had no intention of attacking them. He could have shot them through the eyes from there. No, no attacks tonight. He was still learning the ins and outs of this new domain, much farther to the east than he had ever ventured. Better to wait.

There's an interesting point, he reflected, as he monitored the pair waiting in the pinprick glow two hundred yards off. Why not execute the men too, do them in pairs? Pairs of lovers. It made sense. His pursuers were pairing up, more and more. Abbott and Costello, Sonny and Cher. The pocket-sized detective and the exquisite girl. There was that navy man, now with some girl in hiking clothes; they put ashore from time to time, to no purpose that he could tell, and walked the sand. And the paired-up coppers fumbling all over the cliffs. No, he wouldn't kill by twosomes, though he loved new numbers. He had integrity in his methods. Besides, he wanted to meet their expectations, for now.

He wandered to changes that disturbed him more, though he was prepared to meet them head-on. The girls were no longer so innocent. There had seemed to be an endless supply at one time. The police had distorted the landscape. Where once the plump teenagers had to sneak away to meet a fellow, now they were not allowed out alone. There were a lot of horny boys getting a lot less thanks to that Task Force.

But he wanted the police to explore the cliffs in false hope. He appreciated the earnestness of these young constables. They craved experience, not a picnic, and that was admirable. If they told themselves they were only larking about, then that was no good, no good at all. A message to the young constables and to the remaining girls and their escorts: this is a killing zone, ladies and gentlemen, not a playground.

He made a mental list of his pursuers. This was fun to do, and kept the knife-edge honed. It struck him that so many of the bobbies, especially the newest ones, wandered in shells, in their carapaced uniforms. There were coppers in blue, in trenchcoats and in slickers. They reminded him of little figures in a Fisher-Price set. Then there was the young detective wrapped in his layer of fat, and the old woman moving in her cloud of booze. He himself had his rain gear, which was a very good disguise. Let them send twinned coppers out to stand on the edge and look out to sea like stunned bullocks or dull sheep. He was more protected every day. He was the Electric Man.

And this line of thought brought him, as many times before, to decisions about what to do next. He was always the one who changed without them seeing that he had changed. Fighting the previous war. He was the plastic trickster. They saw him and didn't fear him, for he was looking inland from the sea. All islands live in apprehension of the flood, yet tell themselves that the water circling them is a moat. He played the defender in order to remain the invader. You can live with anything on an island after a while: erosion, flood, corrosive wind or someone calling your young women to be taken away out to sea.

He watched the Land Rover arrive and take away the detective. It was time to get back to what he had become.

Back to the salt air's electric cackle.

Back to the Druid shores.

I am concealed because I have melted with the rocks. Just as they have grown to pinnacles of silt through layers of time, shaped by geological pressure, I have added levels to my tower. And here's the thing they don't get, yet.

I don't plan to finish the tower.

Peter was amused to see Sam, when he got out of the
SUV
, go over to Gwen, bow and kiss her hand. It did seem appropriate, her standing there wrapped in her cloak like a Greek statue. He had only ever seen her interact with her mother, and briefly with Hamm, but now she smiled with matching grace.

“Thank you, Sam,” she said.

“You are welcome, Miss.”

But there was little need for more chatter, and Sam and Peter got into the car. Peter rolled down the window. “Go back in now. I'll call you tomorrow.”

“Yes, you should,” she answered.

“Stay safe.”

She may have nodded, he wasn't sure. She faded back into the dark.

At the wheel Sam was all aggression, forcing the beat-up Land Rover back up the double track and disregarding the eroded shoulders.

“Thank you, Sam,” Peter said.

“No, no, it is for me to thank you.”

“Okay, what the devil is going on? Mayta was coy as anything on the phone.”

“My nephew is very, very excited, and he demands to thank you himself if you have the time in Whittlesun this visit. Even next week.”

“What exactly did I do?”

“You told the Scotland Yard bosses to show him around. He was up to London yesterday.”

“I told my senior, Mr. Bartleben, that Martin had been very helpful and maybe he'd like a tour of our Criminal Information System in London.”

“No, it was a man, Blaikie, showed him around the Statistics Section and the computers, Martin told us. Two hours! He has never been happier.”

In fact, Peter had made a call to Bartleben, who delegated the job to Keiran Blaikie, an old Yard man, an amiable mentor and right for this task, with a modern sensibility for number crunching and applied stats.

“You know what else?” Sam continued. “You know what else, Peter?”

“Frankly, I don't,” Peter said.

“He got a big tour of the Regional Lab out on the edge of town.” Blaikie had gone all out.

“Did London arrange that visit, do you know?”

“I assume so,” Sam said. “A Mr. Bracher?”

“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 soaked 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.