Walking into the Ocean (43 page)

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Do you see it the same way?”

“Yes, for the most part. I agree that's the danger now: he plans to stop killing. He'll disappear like fog off the Channel and reinvent himself somewhere else.”

“Except that he has one more task to complete before he goes. If someone knows his identity, he has to take care of it. Does Gwen know who the Rover is, Ellen?”

She shook her head, but it was simply frustration; Peter didn't believe she was answering one way or the other.

“If there are four of us to do this job, then each of us must play our role,” Mrs. Ransell said. She took out a metal flask — it was the flask she had been filling earlier — and had a drink. “The predator is the Electric Man. Which man are you, Inspector? And Mr. Verden, who should he be? Are you familiar with the expression ‘judge, jury and executioner'?”

“Of course.”

“Then Mr. Verden would make a pretty good executioner, don't you think? And Father Salvez, hovering like a bird above the flock of sheep, he could be the judge, don't you agree? I'll be the jury, if you like. That leaves you with . . . oops, no role to play.”

Peter had arrived at the Ransell house without much expectation of any grand revelations from the Ransell women. It was down to hard-slogging police work. If the Ransells could tell him the name of the Rover, well, they hadn't before and wouldn't now. They had their reasons. But he and Tommy were veteran policemen. It would come down to force
after
the police work of tedious tracking and the culmination of grinding, day-after-day effort that, at the time, might seem to be dumb luck, but wasn't at all. Oh, Peter believed in luck — it was what made him a romantic — but luck was always two-edged. You were unlucky when lightning struck you but lucky you survived to play another round on that golf course. As a copper, you got shot at, but with luck the bullets merely whiffed on by your head. The tenacious detective was an underrated breed when it got to the endgame of arresting criminals.

“Is Guinevere okay?”

“She had a seizure this afternoon.”

“Can I see her?”

Mrs. Ransell paused. “Yes. She'll wake up if you go in. I'm going for a smoke.”

She said this in the tone of a cryptic sibyl's prediction. She gathered her layers of shawls around her and went outside to the front landing. Peter entered Gwen's room with a silent, measured step, but the second he reached her bedside, her eyes opened and she fixed him with a stare.

“Hello, Peter. Where have you been?”

“Just in the outer parlour. In the last few days, I've been at my home. Ron Hamm is dead.”

“I know. I'll go to his funeral.” She sat up in the bed, pushing forward several blankets; there was no heating in the room, and little warmth came through the doorway. “Tell me again where you've been, where you explored this last week.”

Her voice was kind, if a bit dreamy. He understood that she meant St. Walthram's. “The Abbey. I went there and found the crypt,” he said. “Salvez used it as a kind of monk's chamber.”

She nodded. She closed her eyes, as if a headache had unexpectedly struck her. It passed and she looked at him again. Peter wasn't familiar with the aftershocks of epileptic seizures, and he proceeded carefully.

“Are you okay?”

“My mother is angry with you.”

“I see that.”

Peter heard a phone ring in the outer room. He judged from the tune that it was Grahl's.

“You keep leaving and coming back, you know that, Peter? You haven't spent a lot of time in Dorset, when you add it all up. She thinks you haven't spent enough time here.”

“Time for what?” he said, annoyed.

“Do you know who's in the Abbey crypt? Bodies, I mean.”

“Uh, no.”

“Nazis.”

“Nazis? I didn't see any.” It sounded glib.

“That's my point, Peter. There's a rumour around here that two German soldiers are buried in the crypt of St. Walthram's Abbey. They were S.S. officers who were smuggled onto the coast in 1942 as part of Operation Sea Lion. The local people saw them land and captured them right off. They killed them on the spot and hid the bodies.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes, interesting. One more bit of local colour. But maybe, my mother thinks, details like that might have helped you to understand the heights before now. Your dream was telling you that, too. The black figure floating over the desert was all-seeing. At the same time, his face was a blank — he wasn't physically able to see anything. The black figure was you, Peter.”

Her face was sallow, her lips bluish; yet her eyes focused on his with clarity and conviction.

“It has arrived at this, Peter. You waited too long. Mr. Hamm is dead, and it remains to be finished by the people who live here, who know the cliffs, who
are
the Coast itself. The policemen out there will soon retreat, leaving it to those who understand this Rover, who has outraged them with his horrible game.”

She had exhausted herself and Peter helped her lie back against the pillows. He had come here because of the threat to Guinevere Ransell, but also because he craved her inspiration. He had innate faith in her perspective on both Lasker and the serial predator. But now he knew she was wrong. The Rover wouldn't be netted by the villagers collectively surrounding him. There was no Tiger and no Beaters driving the monster to the cliff's edge. There were only Hunters, and he and Tommy were the efficient — and well-armed — pursuers.

She quieted, and seemed on the verge of sleep. He backed up towards the big oak door but her eyes opened, and she stared at him again.

“Peter?”

“What is it?”

“Sarah is safe.”

He came back to the bed. “What about Sarah? What do you know about Sarah? You've never met her, have you?”

“I met her on the beach at Solomon Cove two days ago. She was digging trilobites out of the rock face near the shore. I told her it was no longer safe that far east. She accepted my advice. She left, Peter.”

“My Sarah?”

“Yes.” Peter couldn't imagine his daughter giving in to the admonitions of a stranger on a beach on a sunny day in the south of England. But, then, this was Gwen.

He turned back to her, but she had fallen asleep.

He returned to the big room, leaving the door to her bedroom slightly ajar. He was profoundly disturbed by the thought of Sarah on the coast. He prepared to regroup with Tommy and Constable Grahl, having decided to leave Grahl behind to guard the Ransells — in spite of his promise to Ellen — while he and his partner went hunting. He understood the story of the S.S. soldiers as a cautionary tale about the lost innocence of the citizens of Whittlesun. But another kind of innocence had slipped away. The Rover was the Modern, the ruthless predator descending from the Outside World and deracinated from the parochial life of Dorset. He exploited them with some ruse they hadn't yet figured out, and he moved among them with impunity. He was different, electrifying, the Electric Man.

Peter expected to find Tommy and the young constable still strategizing over the map, but Grahl was standing by the door with a chagrined look on his ruddy face. Ellen Ransell had yet to return. Tommy had folded up the chart and it lay, apparently discarded, on the rug.

“What's going on?” Peter said.

“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.

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, knives 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 took shelter in the lee of a granite spire.