Walking into the Ocean (8 page)

Panting, Ronald Hamm led the way down a fieldstone path to the front door. Befitting a cottage for dwarfs or hobbits, the main door was made of oak and was held by black iron hinges; Peter would have sworn the same craftsman who had replaced the portals he had just seen at St. Walthram's had made this one too.

Ellen Ransell answered the door before they could knock. A smell of lime and sour alcohol wafted from her, and from the house itself. She appeared careworn and partly drunk. Her white hair, streaked with sickly yellow, as if stained with nicotine, was uncombed, and the deep lines in her face were vertical and sad, reminding Peter of the eroded fissures in the coastal rocks. On her face, the defensiveness of the recluse fought with the rare stimulus of having visitors who might draw her out of her boredom. She opened the door wide. The hinges creaked crazily, just like in a fairy tale.

“Welcome, Officers. You can come into the parlour.” The voice was confident, only slightly defensive. She likely wasn't a witch, Peter mused, but a crystal ball would fit the scene.

Hamm and Cammon entered and found themselves in the one main room, which served as the kitchen and parlour. The two bedrooms off the back of the cottage had solid oak doors like the one at the entrance; that is, they were outside doors used as inside ones. Both were closed. The ceilings in the main room were low, and Hamm had to tilt his head slightly; after ninety minutes in a similar contorted position in the car, his neck would soon be creaking like the door hinges, Peter thought. The woman held a glass of clear liquid in her left hand; she did not offer them a drink. Peter noted the tall bottle of Koskenkorva vodka on the kitchen counter; the more popular Finnish vodka, he knew, was Finlandia. He didn't care to estimate her daily intake, before she passed out.

“I don't remember your name.”

“It's Hamm, and this is Chief Inspector Cammon from Scotland Yard.”

She looked at Peter. “I phoned it in, you see. My daughter saw the Rover. Maybe she did. She has special abilities. Comes from an expensive education combined with good genes. Her father was Finnish, you know. A strong people, they are.”

Peter understood witnesses like these: lonely, pent-up people who, when finally given an audience, cram so much into one outburst that it's hard to pare down to the truth.

“Mrs. Ransell,” Peter began gently. They were still standing near the door. “I imagine that you and your daughter know this region well. It would be valuable to talk to her about what she may have seen out on the heights.”

He struggled for an opening to mention André Lasker's name. Mrs. Ransell shrugged, turning the burden towards the detectives, as if Peter, not she, had fixed on the daughter's roaming habits. “She wanders, you know. Leaves at first light, comes back after sunset. But she always stays safe.” Peter and Hamm exchanged looks; the woman was apprehensive about something. “She knows the terrain, the cliffs, the caves, the dunes. Now this Rover fiend, making it unsafe for every woman in Britain.”

“Could we have a word with her, Mrs. Ransell?” Peter persisted. The old woman would eventually let them speak with the daughter, Peter understood, but something was bothering her.

“She's strong and tough, stronger than me, Inspector, but she's unwell.” She leaned close and whispered, through rancid breaths. “Astatic seizures.”

Hamm looked over at Peter.

“Epilepsy,” Peter said. He turned to Mrs. Ransell. “We'll be very careful. She can tell us in her own fashion. We won't take long.” Peter spoke in earnest; the interrogation wouldn't be a long one. In his experience, there were some witnesses who would simply refuse to open up at the first conversation and had to be seen several times, and coaxed through a succession of short interviews. Unfortunately, this was likely to be one of them.

“Her name is Guinevere. G-w-e-n-e-v-e-e-r. She has reached the age of twenty-five,” she declared.

The old lady went to one of the bedrooms and tapped on the oak door. Within half a minute it opened and Miss Ransell came into the main room.

Peter was standing on the far edge of the room when she entered, but the girl's aura electrified the entire space. Her radiance stunned Peter and caused Hamm to wilt and step back a pace. Her manner and presence begged comparison with the great icons of beauty and idealized female grace. She was the Gothic paragon wandering the heath, but with a worldly understanding beyond the self-absorbed heroines of the Brontës. She was the Pre-Raphaelite ideal, but without the whiff of consumptive weakness. She had the alabaster head of a Greek maiden, but was a girl for modern times. He could tell all this before she spoke.

Her long hair was brick red, parted in the middle; it sprayed out in thick waves, naturally kinked and voluptuous. Her skin was flawless and there was a Scandinavian strength to her facial bones. She stood taller than Cammon and held herself like an artist's model, although there was nothing arch or artificial in her positioning. She smiled, though it was not a particularly welcoming look; it didn't seem right to offer to shake her hand.

She positioned herself at the end of the chesterfield, and this movement seemed to signal to the two men that they should sit too. She wore a long, layered dress that almost touched the floor and that now spread out across the cushions. A blue sash, firmly tied around her waist, showed her leanness. The gaping cuffs of her dress and suede vest gave her a renaissance-fair look. She was entirely comfortable in herself. She neither stared nor recoiled from the presence of the two dowdy policemen, who sat down on the two-seater across from her. Their visit could have been the most natural occurrence in the world.

“Hello. My name is Guinevere, spelt like the
Morte d'Arthur
, despite what my mother says. Call me Gwen.”

Hamm croaked out: “I'm Detective Ronald Hamm and this is Chief Inspector Peter Cammon of Scotland Yard.”

Guinevere suddenly looked concerned, as if something were misplaced in the room. Had she heard a disturbance outside? She gazed into the middle distance, but then turned full-face to Peter.

“Do you care to speak to me, Inspector?”

Her eyes were entirely upon him at that moment; Hamm might well have disappeared. Peter felt it urgent to establish a trust between them, and to do that he had to be alone with her. He couldn't hope to discover her secrets by treating her as just another witness. She would tell him what she knew, but only in her own time, on her own terms. He looked around the cottage. A fire blazed in the stone hearth.

“Is this your favourite place in the world, Miss Ransell?”

Her eyes flickered. She gave no response, as if waiting. Old Mrs. Ransell was already fading towards the other bedroom; Peter noticed that she had the vodka bottle in her hand. Even she was intimidated by her daughter's penumbra. She slipped into the second bedroom and closed the door.

Guinevere Ransell was keyed into different rhythms of thought and logic than most humans, Peter understood. He rarely encountered this sort of mind, and he cherished it when he did (as long as the conversation didn't veer into craziness, which he was sure it wouldn't). People like Guinevere tended to place themselves at a distance, befitting an oracle, and Guinevere did so now, moving to the farthest end of the chesterfield and crouching with her knees to her chin. This was the natural conversational distance for the two of them. He sensed her sizing him up.

The girl smiled at Peter's question. She turned to Detective Hamm. “Mr. Hamm, would you leave Mr. Cammon and me for a few minutes. Please?”

Hamm looked to Cammon for support and found none. He heaved himself up. “Well, maybe I'll take up smoking again. I'll be outside.” He buttoned up his coat and prepared to leave. Just then Mrs. Ransell came out of her bedroom and palmed him a pack of Benson & Hedges. She retreated and Hamm went outside.

Peter waited for the girl to speak. She straightened her legs and paused for another full minute. “Have you always had a moustache?” she said.

“I grew it when I was thirty.”

“To make yourself look older?”

“The phrase I used was ‘more mature.'”

“You're older now. Why don't you shave it off?”

“Habit. My wife likes it.”

“She says it makes you look distinguished.”

“Yes, that's right.”

“What's the worst thing anyone ever said to you about your moustache?”

“That it made me look like Hitler.”

“Do you know why I want to talk about this?”

This was parry and thrust, but of the most benign kind. It was also her way of sliding into the conversation that she wanted to have. Honesty and directness were the only workable responses.

“You're interested in the way people present themselves to the world,” he said.

“Yes. The phrase I would use is: I want you to know that I notice the appearance of things. Do you believe in appearances?”

“You mean the outward appearance of things?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. It's often the way policemen uncover crimes, working from observation.”

“The way people present themselves to the world is important,” she agreed in a dreamy voice. “They create an impression that is different than the one they intend. Maybe that's why Dracula couldn't abide mirrors. Do you know why I gave up my studies?”

“I didn't know that you had. At university?”

“I was reading English literature and psychology. At Leeds.”

“I majored in English lit too.”

Peter, not being much of a risk-taker himself, was fascinated by people with a heightened awareness of the decisions in their lives and of the risks that they entailed. Her biggest risk, he imagined, was retreating to the edge of civilization with an alcoholic mother.

“I took an extra course in Freudian psychology. Freudian symbolism is a crock. If I dream of a ship in full sail, does that represent a fertile woman, as Freud says it does?”

“I never studied psychology,” Peter said, “but I confess that after a while literature raised the same issue for me. Literary symbolism seemed too pat; it got in the way of seeing the real world. And there began to be an inverse correlation between my love of romantic literature and my exposure to the foibles of human beings. As a police officer.”

Suddenly melancholy, she shifted to his end of the chesterfield and placed a comforting hand on his arm. It wasn't necessary, or even appropriate, but he didn't mind. He tried to appear relaxed, less the formal interrogator. For a brief moment, the atmosphere in the room was confessional. He was almost desperate to sustain that mood, to persuade her to open up to him.

“You're saying that we should get beyond easy symbols?” Peter babbled. He tried to convince himself that he would get back to his interrogation soon.

She sat back. “Yes. My point is that people are always putting on masks. They take on personae quite consciously. They're yearning to do it, but if they adopt a mask without controlling it, then they're in trouble.”

He might have said the same to Guinevere herself, and she to him, though his would always be the policeman's mask.

“Yes. If I decided to put on a deerstalker and sport a meerschaum, that would be a personal crisis,” he said.

She laughed. A line of perspiration had formed along her brow. It served to turn Peter more serious. He could talk to her all day about everything and nothing, but her circumlocution had to get to the point — her apparent sighting of the Rover — sooner rather than later. And so he said: “I have to ask you about the people you've seen along the cliffs. Do they wear masks? Have you seen strange people on the shore?”

Guinevere remained utterly calm in reaction to his new tack. He waited; he could tell that she would answer at her own pace. He wanted to talk with her all afternoon. He wanted to get rid of Hamm and exile the mother, so that he could remain alone with her.

“The Rover. Such a stupid label. It doesn't suit the mask he's put on. I bet he doesn't call himself that, either.”

“Have you seen him?”

Her eyes glazed over as if she were going into a trance; then she refocused.

“I have seen someone different.”

“Can you describe him to me?”

Peter's mundane query was not what triggered her epileptic seizure. She appeared calm, then for one second catatonic, then she spasmed. Her back went rigid but at first she stayed on the cushions. He saw that she was at risk of losing control of her body and tipping over. But, oddly, the seizure began as a very real trance.

“I have seen the Black Man, the Floating Man, the Cloaked Man,” she rasped.

“Which one is the Rover?” Peter asked, bluntly, not sure that she would be able to reply before he lost her.

“He is the Electric Man.”

He moved to catch her as she toppled. He called for Mrs. Ransell.

“And who is the man who went into the sea?” he whispered, the girl tightly held in his arms to limit her convulsions.

“He is the Cloaked Man.”

The mother must have known something; she rushed out of her bedroom before Peter called out again. Hamm, too, heard something, for he charged in from the front step. The two officers placed her on the settee. The seizure ended in five minutes. Mrs. Ransell swabbed her child's forehead with a wet cloth.

When Guinevere came to, she smiled at the two police officers and said, “Do you know that epilepsy used to be called
‘mater puerorum'
? ‘Mother of Children'?” Then she closed her eyes and slept.

Peter had no idea why André Lasker should be the Cloaked Man, but he was sure who the Floating Man was. Despite the gender switch, the Floating Man was Anna Lasker.

The ride back to Peter's hotel was tense. The young detective deserved some comfort, some explanation from his colleague about what had happened in the cottage parlour, but Peter was slow to give it. It was understandable that Hamm might blame him for Guinevere's epileptic fit. He dissembled when Hamm asked about the girl's revelations; he said there was nothing useful. When Hamm grunted in doubt, Peter offered that the seizure had started before they got very far. In truth, Peter had been shaken up by the girl. She presented a reflecting surface for his own sense of where he should be going in the Lasker investigation.

At the hotel, Peter apologized for his inattention. They agreed to cancel their late-day rendezvous at the Crown but decided to meet the next afternoon, same time. Peter knew that Hamm would have to debrief Maris. He thought of asking him to hold off but decided that this would be unfair. Peter himself would try to dodge Maris for a day or two more.

He lay on the bed in his room for a few minutes. Chambermaids were gossiping in the hall, but otherwise the hotel was peaceful. He had planned to visit Lasker's Garage, and there was still time before closing. The most promising angle might be the money, he reasoned. Lasker was in a perfect business to skim cash regularly from the till, and who knew where he might have stowed it. Peter had also planned to drop by the Whittlesun Community Theatre before day's end; it was within walking distance of the Delphine. He got out the packet of reports Hamm had left at the front desk and flipped through the interview notes. The theatre's director was a local named Symington. The perfunctory interview indicated that André had been “active” in the annual season of plays.

Peter tried Bartleben, who, as usual, was in his office. His secretary put Peter through immediately.

“Peter?”

“Stephen, just a quick one. It's going slowly, minor progress. One vague indication of a Lasker sighting in the dunes along the coast . . .”

“Do you trust it?”

Peter delayed his answer, knowing that whatever he said about Guinevere Ransell would sound ambiguous, evasive. “I trust the witness but I haven't been able to confirm what she saw. I have a few more interviewees to cover. The garage. The local theatre where André volunteered.”

“Maybe he played Jesus in the Passion play,” Sir Stephen offered.

“Come again?”

“Walking on water . . . ? What about the blood in the house? Still need the Canadian?” Stan Bracher, from Saskatchewan, was known as “the Canadian.”

Peter ignored that part of the question. “The forensics are disturbing.”

Bartleben moved on, uncertain why Peter had called. “Nothing new from Interpol or the French. Ferry authorities, coastal patrols, Border Agency — nothing.”

Bartleben felt the hollowness at the other end of the line. He leaned back in his swivel chair and contemplated the abstract metal sculpture his wife had insisted he hang on the far wall. He had always hated that thing. He knew when Peter was absorbed by the evidence spinning around in his mind. He recognized the pattern, and he smiled to himself. Yes, something was coming with Peter. He didn't bother asking about the state of relations with Inspector Maris.

“Okay, I'll be in touch,” Peter said.

“Yes, Peter. Hang in there,” said Sir Stephen, still smiling.

Joan was reading Sherlock Holmes when he called, but she didn't tell him. The sun was going down and she had been thinking of moving in from the veranda. She had had a lazy day and was glad to hear from him. Her own slackness, which she would have admitted to if asked, attuned her to the preoccupation in her husband's voice.

“Are you making progress?” she asked. The words were deliberately vague; she wanted him to say as much or as little as he wanted.

“It's slow but that's to be expected. It's the kind of case where a bit of serendipity will solve it.” She didn't quite believe that, but she murmured agreement.

Touching base with her was important to him at times like these, when the mists weren't yet clearing and, indeed, seemed to be growing denser, but he was almost falling asleep on the bed. Also, Guinevere ruled his mind for the moment and he wasn't going to discuss her with Joan. Not yet. “What have you been up to?”

“I talked to Sarah. She's over at the Graveney Marshes taking samples.”

Their daughter was a marine biologist, recently launched on a promising career. Graveney was over in Kent. A little too close to Whittlesun, he thought. Images of the Rover — the Electric Man? — flashed in Peter's mind, but he suppressed them.

“Lord, aren't all the animals getting ready to hibernate about now?”

“Peter, that's the kind of comment that gets you in trouble with her. And I don't think ‘hibernate' is the right word for it.”

Peter was in the grip of what she termed his distillation process. She wasn't his confidante at these times. She didn't resent his moods during an active case, and knew when to offer a supportive word and when to say nothing. When he was at home he would refer to evolving cases obliquely, and he often retreated to his study in the shed in order to think through his preliminary theories. She didn't resent that habit either. She had looked up the Lasker reports on the Internet, as well as the tabloid details about the Rover, and she understood the basics of the crimes. She wasn't about to get much more out of him today. The fact that she had spent much of the previous two days reading Conan Doyle made her smile at the end of the line; perhaps that was why she'd gone exploring on the computer. She would tell him all about it when she next saw him. He would be amused.

For now, she wasn't going to try to drag him out of his mood. Her husband could be, as she put it, “a bit of a mystic” but, like everything else, they had negotiated this part of their married life long ago.

That was it. He said he loved her, she echoed him, and they hung up without any discussion of when he would be home.

Peter went into the hotel bathroom and brushed his teeth. He stared into the mirror without focusing on his own face, but imagined Anna's head smashing into the medicine cabinet; he blinked the image away. Returning to the main room, he decided to postpone his visit to Lasker's Garage, and instead spent two hours reviewing all the material on the case, laying out loose pages across the bed and the floor, until the space was coated with paper. His room overlooked an alley and a brick wall, but he peered out to verify that night had descended; as best he could tell, a storm was building. Deciding that he needed a pint, he went down to the hotel bar.

Peter thought it paradoxical that he usually found it more useful to chat up the locals rather than travellers in the lounges of commercial hotels. This breed of drinker was naturally opinionated and willing to embrace queries about home-bred crimes-of-the-week; perhaps the locals fancied themselves defenders of parochial honour, the reverse of a welcoming committee. But entering the chiaroscuro gloom of the Delphine bar, Peter saw that his anticipations were moot. It wasn't particularly busy on this weekday evening. Several solitary men occupied tables at the sides of the bar; these were salesmen, eating pub food and downing their second or third glass. Peter sat at the bar itself, where it was more likely that the indigenous Whittlesunites would be sitting, except that tonight there was merely one grizzled denizen who had placed himself at the extreme end of the bar; next to him, although there were plenty of other seats, sat a woman with too much rouge who refused to focus anywhere but on the bright liqueur bottles behind the bartender.

Peter ignored them and ordered his pint from the pump. The television over the bar was tuned to a regional news channel. The volume was set low but, since there were no conversations happening in the room and the two lounge lizards at the far end were not on speaking terms with the world, he could hear parts of the newscast. The screen jumped to a blond woman with a microphone. She stood in front of the cliffs, the grey English Channel behind her.
Wendie Merwyn reporting
appeared at the bottom of the screen. Peter grasped right away that she wasn't announcing another Rover attack. She spoke with intensity, using the throwaway words “take precautions” and “fear,” but there was something tepid about the report. There was nothing really new about the Rover, and Peter had the impression that the woman had been told to damp down her language. There was no reference at all to Lasker.

The picture went staticky. The scene cut abruptly to another angle on the sea, although there was no way to tell if this was the same stretch of cliffs. It seemed to be a live report. A handsome young man fought to keep his hair in place as the winds buffeted him and the camera jiggled. The picture was so shaky that Peter could not make out his name on the screen. He and the female reporter had been created from the same bland, and blond, template. Peter couldn't hear his spiel, although he was employing the same solemn look as the blond woman. Apparently the weather along the south coast was turning nasty. An inserted graphic showed grey clouds roiling across Dorset and Devon. The blond fellow wrapped up. The overall impression was of the intrepid weatherman braving the elements to bring ordinary citizens the latest news of nature's wrath. The
TV
image blurred in pathetic fallacy. Peter wondered if the locals would take much interest in the reporter's forewarnings of storm clouds, or the presence of a human killer.

Peter fell asleep on the coverlet of the bed before he could review his list of tasks for the next day. As he faded, he reflected that what he really needed to do was go back to see if Guinevere had recovered. He understood the identity of the Floating Man: it was surely Anna Lasker. No, he admonished himself, he needed to see her again to talk about the Cloaked Man.

The Whittlesun Community Theatre occupied a former abattoir. Peter found the cement building, a perfectly respectable if utilitarian structure, in an older district of the town where gentrification had only recently started. Small theatres worried a lot about real estate and if the
WCT
— its logo was stamped on the front door in curlicue letters — owned this spot free and clear, it was sitting pretty.

A pencilled note on the door directed inquiries to Mr. F.R. Symington at the Middle Secondary School up the street. Peter had arisen at 7:30, late by his regimen, and had worked on the Lasker file most of the early morning, and it was now about 10:45. A separate, typed notice instructed those wanting tickets to call a local number or go to the theatre's webpage. He wondered how many ticket buyers went in search of Symington by mistake, thinking he was the ticket agent; or perhaps he did double duty. A poster advertised an unadventurous winter season, consisting of
Charlie's Aunt
,
Oliver!
and a
Christmas Panto
, billed as “an old-fashioned family delight.” He couldn't help parsing that promise: to which word did the adjective belong?

A short walk took him uphill to the school. He could see his breath in the fall air. A sudden flood of students exiting the building onto the cobbled street made him a fish swimming upstream. Most of the children gripped pieces of paper, probably test sheets, and they all rushed out like escapees from prison. They wore blue wool uniforms, but most had on green trainers, their only bit of sartorial protest. He reached the front door and went inside in search of the main office; in this age of child predators it wouldn't do to wander the halls unannounced. A secretary directed him to a room on the second floor.

Symington was eating a bagel at his teaching desk and two students, a boy and a girl, lolled at the back of the room. He looked up when Peter knocked. His expression didn't change.

“Mr. Symington. The name is Cammon.”

The teacher turned to the children. “Mr. Sharf, Ms. Jaynes, you can go.”

“Really?” the boy said, tossing a cowlick back from his forehead. He ran his fingers through his straw-gold hair and smiled at the girl; a blond Byron, he was. The boy stood and gathered his books.

“I can't even remember what you did,” Symington said, wearily, “but whatever it was, don't do it again.”

The students bustled out. Symington stood and at once waved Peter to his own chair. At least he didn't make Peter sit at a student's desk, where he would have been in a ludicrously inferior placement. Peter saw that Symington had already made him for a copper. Was he that obvious to all the citizens of Whittlesun?

Symington was over sixty and underweight. His shaggy hair was equal amounts grey and yellowy-white and his face was strained by past distress; ropy veins ran across the tops of his hands. He seemed to be recovering from some disease, or possibly he was fighting alcoholism, yet the eyes were bright and the voice had been trained — in the theatre, no doubt.

“Representing the police?”

“Yes.”

“The André Lasker matter?”

“That's right.”

“Let's walk. Fancy a snack?”

Peter glanced at the buttered bagel on Symington's desk. “Not on my account. Not particularly hungry, but take your bagel with you.” He had eaten a sticky bun with his two morning coffees.

“Then let's go over to the theatre. I'll show you around. My next class isn't until one.” He left the bagel where it was.

For some reason, Symington led him out the rear exit of the school. They ambled downhill along a series of twisting streets.

“I'm not psychic,” Symington said as they went. Peter didn't react to this. He had met lots of people who were mildly psychic, but that wasn't what Symington meant; he was merely breaking the ice. The teacher, angular and with his long arms hanging loose, was in no hurry. Peter instinctively liked him; he came across as a fellow who knew his mind.

Symington continued. “I expected the local police to be around again sooner or later, since André participated in the
WCT
. I knew you would show up.”