Walking into the Ocean (45 page)

“You came back. Why not turn yourself in at that point? Your crimes were limited and we knew she'd committed suicide.”

“I spent a lot of time walking that beach in Gozo, I can tell you. Part of it was that you still might charge me with murder. I wasn't sure that I had much of a defence. You know the other reason I returned, and why I couldn't surrender.”

“Because you decided to trap the Rover. As your penance?”

“If you like. Even before I heard that she had killed herself, I had decided to come home. I needed . . .” Lasker stumbled over the words, but it still sounded rehearsed. “Everyone knew I wouldn't murder my wife. I just needed to visit her grave. Even then, some son-of-a-bitch . . .”

“That son-of-a-bitch was me. I told the lab not to release her remains. Your penance was to trap the Rover?” Peter repeated.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I looked at the computer in the crypt. I couldn't imagine Salvez showing that much interest in the predator. I guessed it was your two hundred search hits.”

“It was. I sneaked into the Abbey and used it. But I figured it out before then, in Malta.”

“How did you identify him when no one else did?”

“I was watching the broadcasts from
TV
-20 on the web in Sliema. I knew it right away. The eyes. Too smooth. Too focused on the weather on the coast; he sounded obsessed. It was perfect cover, wasn't it?”

“How did you find him?”

“Simply followed him. I watched the studio where he worked. He had a flexible schedule. He wandered everywhere, believe me. If anyone challenged him out there, he would say that he was ‘broadcasting from the field.'” Lasker moved forward into the sunbeam that reflected down from the roof tiles of the outbuilding. “I met him. He tried to enlist me.”

“You're saying that you found him and tracked him alone?”

“Yes.”

Peter knew that he was lying. Lasker had launched himself on a second convoluted adventure, but he had help.

“Mr. Lasker, we don't do anything alone in this world.”

Lasker took a deep, preparatory breath and began. “Father Salvez, that's what you're talking about, isn't it? When I arrived back in England — passport number six — I came to the cliff, the car park where Anna abandoned the family sedan. It was the middle of the night. I saw a light down here. Of course, it was Salvez. When I came over — I made no effort to conceal myself — I found him out at the edge of the rocks. I thought he was going to jump right then.”

“But he didn't.”

“No. But he was very sick. He'd been living here, finishing out his last days. Anyway, I talked with him. We went over everything. I guess you'd say he heard my confession. I told him about Anna. I'm not Catholic, Inspector, but he granted me absolution for my sins. He had a room in the crypt and made space for me. Three nights ago, I woke up and he'd disappeared. Of course, I couldn't find him, but I soon realized that he had jumped over the edge. Just like Anna.”

“But you decided to keep after Moss?”

“Anna haunted me. My penance, you're right, was to find the murderer of those girls and eliminate him.”

“You were on the hill last night, weren't you?”

Peter felt Lasker turning inward. There was a solipsistic aura to him. His voice turned querulous.

“It was complicated. Trapping Moss required patience. We were supposed to rendezvous near where he planned to take his next girl, the stone chapel on the hillside. Can you believe that he wanted to collaborate? We hadn't actually met, just talked from a distance, from behind boulders. I planned to get him when he reached the big rock.”

“Wasn't he armed?”

“He had a knife, but that didn't worry me. I'm not a helpless farm girl.”

“How did you plan to subdue him?”

“A big, whacking dose of morphine.”

“Father Salvez's morphine?”

“Yes.”

When it comes to witnesses, Peter knew, small falsehoods presage major ones. Lasker was twisting the details. For one thing, he inflated his role in the taking of Parny Moss. Ellen Ransell had discovered Lasker wandering the cliffs. She listened to his penitential plan and agreed to work in collaboration with him to lure Moss to the stone chapel. She had consented to his proposal to use Gwen as bait, his final ritual. But she had every intention of killing the Rover herself. He hadn't mentioned Ellen at all. Lasker had been in the area — it was his form, with the dyed blond hair that was part of his disguise, that Tommy had caught in the beam of his torch, not Moss's — but she never trusted him; he never got any closer to the sacrificial site. In the final moment of judgment, it would be mother and daughter.

Peter looked for repentance in André Lasker's eyes, but it was the dream that instructed the detective once again. The hovering figure that emerged from the black cross had been both Salvez and Peter himself. The dream had contained its own clever code. The face of the angel had been blacked out, a void: that was Salvez, rendered incomplete, faceless, by the manner of his death. The figure had also been Peter, a man in a black suit, equally incomplete in his ignorance. In the dream and through the clues Salvez had left behind, he had been asking the detective from beyond the shadow to resolve this state of limbo, for the salvation of both of them.

Lasker told a sentimental story of the priest's last days. He implied that Salvez had climbed the hill those last few times to selflessly hide Lasker himself. Indeed, the dying man had made a final trek to the Abbey with a firm plan to end his own suffering. But Lasker's small lie again pointed to larger deceptions. Peter understood that Salvez took pride in walking up to the Abbey as often as his strength would allow; it had been a recuperative exercise. That first day, Peter recalled wondering why the priest in his black costume wasn't blown off the heights. He had concluded that Salvez was so emaciated and the robe so tight-fitting that the risk was small. But that wasn't it. A man wearing a constricting garment like the priest's cassock could not have walked that hill up to the Abbey. He wore street clothes to get there, but always changed into his black robe at the church. It was the kind of ritual that a dying man would maintain. It was a ritual that preserved his dignity by presenting him to the wide open world as God's priest, defying King Henry and Canute's tide alike. Had Salvez chosen to jump, he would have been wearing the black outfit — he was Gwen's Black Man — and for a moment would have been visible floating above the seventh wave, the thirty-three sheep and the graves of Anna Lasker and Molly Jonas. Instead, he had been found wearing his leather jacket.

Peter didn't display any urgency, although Lasker clearly comprehended that he was being arrested. “What else do you need to know, Inspector?”

“What else do you need to tell me?”

“You mean, am I ready to turn myself in?” he paused. “Yes, I am. I trapped the Rover because someone had to stop him. Maybe it's some recompense for what I did to Anna.”

“Did Salvez leave you a note, Mr. Lasker?”

“No.”

“He left me one. Do you know Latin?”

“Never studied it. Not so useful in the trades.”

“
Ars bene moriendi.
To die a good death.”

“Where have I heard that before?”

“It was taped to the side of the computer in his office. It goes with another of his favourite phrases:
to be worthy to stand before the Son of man.
Salvez would never have committed suicide.”

“Why not? He was days from death in any event.”

“Because suicide is still a sin in the Catholic Church. And in the Romanian Orthodox Church. Your wife knew that, and by committing that unforgivable sin, she implicated you, in every sense. But André, you killed Salvez, threw him over the cliff. He wasn't going to let you kill Moss, because that was a sin as well. I'm guessing that he also told you to surrender to the police.”

“He would have stopped me from eliminating a killer of young girls.” Lasker moved away from the bench. “You can't prove it.”

As a detective, and a connoisseur of these things, Peter was disappointed in André Lasker. He could have been home free. Why hadn't he ignored the priest and tracked down the Rover while Salvez lay in his morphine dreams? The mechanic hadn't killed anyone at that stage.

And Peter knew that he could prove everything.

“A colleague of mine, a Canadian, telephoned me an hour ago. He's a pathologist. Salvez's body was pretty beaten up, but the lab found a skull fracture that was not caused by the fall. André, you had a stronger reason to kill Salvez. He was going to turn you in. And your plan all along was to disappear again, once you visited your justice on Parny Moss. Were you going to swim the English Channel like your ancestor, Herman Willemse?”

Lasker stood with his back to the cliff's edge. The afternoon light caused Peter to back up and hold his hand up against the sun. In the glare, he perceived that André was heading towards the low building — but now he halted. Peter moved out onto the barren lawn and stepped out of the sun's direct angle in order to see what the mechanic was doing. The wind dropped and the flapping police ribbon quieted.

Peter spied her then. Lasker kept his gaze on him and failed to see her at first. Wendie Merwyn, her golden hair pulled back in a knot, a fashionable wool scarf wrapped around the collar of her suede jacket, was pointing a digital camera at André Lasker's face. He couldn't evade her. The reporter said nothing, but clicked picture after picture as Lasker moved backwards to the cabin. She pressed herself upon him liked a fanatic paparazzo until he started to wave at her, as if batting a cloud of wasps. He turned to face the sea and walked past the entrance to the hut.

“André!” Peter called. Lasker turned, one raised arm blocking Wendie's camera angle. “When you were in Malta, did you ever visit the cathedral?” It was the one thing Peter couldn't make sense of in all this. There was no rational link between the inscription on the Grand Master's tomb and the homily displayed at St. Elegias.

“No!” he shouted back from the rim. “I never made it to the church.”

André Lasker kept walking beyond the stone cottage. Wendie Merwyn stopped and finally lowered the camera. She failed to catch the money shot as the man stepped out into the sky above the English Channel.

He stood in supplication before the old lady; she had been waiting for him to call.

The chill seeped up through his thick black shoes to his knees, and he shifted from foot to foot to repel the November frost. The Thames hadn't frozen over in two centuries, but it seemed possible this winter.

In one's youth, he reflected, there are signal acts of determination, or mere impulse, which may set your course for life. He had never believed in the irresistible sculpting of wind and tide; he put his faith in the conscious choices of men. At the age of nineteen, Peter had taken the midmorning bus to the headquarters of New Scotland Yard, which was still in its digs at the Victoria Embankment. It was a decade before the move to the new
HQ
building, but the plans had already been revealed. The staff were divided into two camps: those who were frustrated with the old lady's decrepitude, and those who loved her traditions. But Peter had loved the mother house on sight.

The kindly officer from Admin, Mr. Cape, came down to the lobby to greet him. They talked for an hour.

“Of course,” he said, “your idol Holmes would never have joined the Metro Police Service, such a bureaucratic fate.”

Nevertheless, a brochure and a lapel pin had been enough to recruit him to the Police Service life. They required a university degree, and so he read English Literature. A month after graduation, he started at the Yard.

He was her supplicant, but he didn't wait for her to answer. Echoes were enough. He scanned the sooted pillars and the lateritious stone, and her spark began to fade for him. He would retire. He would go to his other home and embrace his smart wife and his clever children. He would endure, far from ocean waves. Or so he told himself. Anything was possible. The ice parties on the Thames were being revived, he had been told.

The grey mass of the River lay only a few feet away. Peter walked over to the thick iron railing, took Father Salvez's red-beaded rosary from his pocket and tossed it into the flow.

He would return home to the fields, the lane, the shed, his books. He would wait for the phone to ring.

I wish to thank the staff at ECW Press and in particular Jack David, Crissy Boylan, Rachel Ironstone and Simon Ware. May I also highlight the invaluable editorial advice of Emily Schultz and Peter Norman. Additional comments by Ann Ratcliffe, Anne McAllister, Diana Whellams, Laurent Lecavalier and Chris Parsley are greatly appreciated.

The first in the Cammon Mystery Series,
Walking into the Ocean
is informed by
DAVID WHELLAMS
' 30 years of writing criminal law and amending the Criminal Code in such areas as dangerous offenders and terrorism. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.