Walking into the Ocean (44 page)

The rock formations here were different from any seen on Peter's earlier forays onto the Whittlesun Heights. The others might find the plateau equally difficult to cross, but Peter and Tommy were the only hunters with night vision capacity, and they could use it to advantage. With arm movements, Peter instructed his partner to scan the area ahead, to their left, for large, flat boulders, while he did the same for the quadrant on the right.

Peter thought he saw something ahead, lit green and spooky in the lens. He drew his pistol; Tommy did the same.

Peter led the way towards the irregular ring of boulders fifty yards off; strewn with pebbles, branches and other detritus, it was a poor man's chapel of stone, but the giant rock in the rough centre of the circle was perfect as a sacrificial altar. There was every reason to wait for the Rover here. He had no concern of imminent ambush, since the area was unlit and the semi-circle of rocks blocked at least half of the lines of sight. With the night goggles, they would see him coming. Peter moved forward another ten yards.

A movement to one side, around a vertical boulder, caused both men to swing their weapons that way. Guinevere Ransell slipped into the path; she looked remarkably composed given the fierce wind and the danger about. She signalled for them to remove their goggles, which they did. They struggled with night blindness for a full minute, and she waited for their eyes to adjust.

“He was here,” she hissed in Peter's ear.

“Where is your mother?” Peter called back.

“I don't know. I'm looking for her. You have to come with me.”

The landscape was rendered even darker by the displacement of the night-vision apparatus. Gwen turned on a torch and pointed it in the direction of the sea, then back at the detectives. The beam bore into Peter's retinas and he turned to one side. What startled him even more was the risk she had chosen to take by lighting up their location, however faintly. But she pointed the light away from the chapel of stone and swept ahead on an invisible trail; he and Verden had no choice but to follow.

In daylight, the plateau would offer a panoramic view, but now the rim of the cliff was invisible. He guessed that they were on an old smuggler's path that eventually would take them down to the shore. They edged downwards through crumbling rocks left by cataclysmic upheavals thousands of years ago. Peter could hear the surf now, but the rush was muffled. There was a smear of light from the sky off in the direction of the French coast, and he could see that a collapsing rock face to their left had become a heather-coated hill pointing to the Channel. He doubted that this was a useful direction in which to head, but he deferred to Gwen's local knowledge. They stumbled on for ten minutes until they were on another bare escarpment exposed on three sides; there was nothing but the sea ahead, and only one route back. He had no inkling of what she expected to find here.

Peter's instincts told him that the girl had led them astray. He turned his gaze back towards the rock chapel and thought he saw a light wavering along at an upward angle. When he turned around to confront Gwen, she was gone.

The light moving up the hill seemed far away, but Peter knew this was a trick of the darkness and that she could not be far ahead of him. Tommy hadn't noticed; he appeared to be struggling with his goggles. Peter put on his own goggles again and a burst of light up on the hill flared in the lens, as if an explosion had been set off. He recoiled but quickly recovered and began to move. He started to run along the flattened path through the soaking grass. His gun was out again.

He tripped twice on the trail but kept going. Tommy was somewhere behind him. Peter could not face the bonfire's glow directly through the lens of his goggles, and so he focused on the path. But it was the night-vision apparatus that saved him, for by the time he reached the heights, his eyes had adjusted to the fire, and yet he could still see into the blackness surrounding it. He knew that the Rover's cunning would keep him in darkness until the last minute. The Rover was a night creature.

Peter circled to the upward slope, all the time on alert for Gwen. He must be close behind her, he calculated. From a vantage point slightly uphill from the stone chapel, he scanned the area beyond the big stones. Mrs. Ransell, vodka bottle in hand, stood in the centre of the killing ground and waved the fire upward, though in fact it was dying down now, threatening to extinguish itself. Peter waited a minute longer. Mrs. Ransell continued to wave her arms in an incantation.

After less than a minute, Peter spied the Rover at the far edge of the fire's glow. His left arm held Gwen Ransell around the neck and he held a weapon in his right hand; Peter guessed that it was a box cutter or knife of some kind, but he had little doubt that the killer had come armed with a gun as well. Ellen Ransell failed to see him.

Peter circled to his right until he was less than thirty feet from the killer, who had moved a few more steps towards the fire. His blond hair gleamed in the firelight. Mrs. Ransell turned and realized her mistake in one horrified look; her trap had failed. Waiting, Peter hoped that the darkness concealed him, but a flare-up from the bonfire must have revealed his location, for Parny Moss turned his way. Peter saw that a .38 had materialized in his right hand.
Where did that come from?
Still, the light from the goggles gave Peter the advantage, allowing him to see the entwined figures clearly. Moss took a step to his right, away from Gwen but still clenching her collar in his left hand. The bright fire flashed into Peter's lens and he was tempted to remove the goggles. He aimed the Smith & Wesson, its grip and its weight so familiar.

Moss fired first, a single shot that went wide. Peter waited, alert to the reasoning of the gunman. Peter wanted to take his time, but any movement by Moss towards Gwen, any turning of the pistol, would force him to shoot. As it turned out, the men fired at the same moment. Perhaps Moss was a little faster, for he got off three shots before Peter fired his one. Peter's bullet slammed into Moss's left shoulder. Despite the surreal green landscape inside the viewing lens, Peter's shot landed precisely on target, slamming the killer backwards and releasing his grip on the girl.

Peter was accurate, but Moss was lucky. One of the bullets from the .38 raked the left shoulder pad of the detective's coat and spun him back, so that he fell, losing the goggles in the grass. His head cracked against a boulder.

Tommy later told him that he was out for only five minutes. Tommy had encountered his own problems on the trail, spraining his leg and arriving at the sacrificial site too late to do anything but limp over to Peter and administer first aid. By this time, Ellen Ransell had jumped onto Moss, clubbing his gun away with the vodka bottle.

Peter awoke to see the bonfire flaring again.

He couldn't immediately discern what was burning in the centre of the pyre, but it appeared that the flat rock itself was ablaze. Peter and Tommy limped together to the edge of the flames. The heat drove them back. Peter began to see the outline of a human body, lying supine and motionless. He moved forward, ignoring the heat, in hopes of making out the facial features: he was a cop, he had to be sure. All he could smell was burning hair, and maybe alcohol. The orange and red flames illuminated the charring outlines of a face.

The inferno hypnotized him and undermined his judgment. He moved even closer. From behind, Gwen grasped him by the upper arm, and then let go. He turned, tears on his blackened face. But it wasn't Gwen. Ellen Ransell stood behind him, calmly sipping straight from the forty-ounce bottle of Finnish vodka.

“Where's Gwen?” he shouted.

“Back about a hundred yards, watching from the dark. Safer there. My daughter does what her mother tells her.”

“Can we save him?”

“He's dead, but let's make sure, shall we?”

Ellen Ransell screwed the cap back on the bottle; there were only a few ounces left. She hefted it like a Molotov cocktail, which it surely was, and lofted it onto the blaze. It exploded in a cloud of fire.

“When did you know? When did you know it was Moss?” he cried.

“Don't kid me, Inspector. You knew who it was, too. I saw it in your eyes in the parlour.”

“Who the hell is Moss?” Tommy said.

Mrs. Ransell watched happily. “Why, he's the Electric Man.”

“Press conference at 2:00 p.m.,” J.J. McElroy said. “Who wants to be there?”

Stan Bracher and Tommy Verden, lounging against one wall of the suite in the Sunset Arms, shook their heads and groaned. Peter Cammon reacted with a frustrated murmur. Despite the solemn reason for their meeting, they were giddy.

“Wasn't I booted off the Task Force?” Peter said.

Stan laughed. “It's happened so many times, I can't remember if he's on or he's off.”

“Come on, gentlemen,” McElroy continued. “I've already made one media statement this morning. Least you can do is offer me some back-up at the two o'clock. You were there.”

Peter stood up and flexed his shoulders. His whole body ached, including the persistent wound on his forearm; a first-degree burn, looking worse than it was, covered the left half of his face.

The three Scotland Yard detectives had no intention of participating in the press event. At the best of times, on principle, none of the veteran police officers was forthcoming to the media, Stan excepted, and he had not been on the cliffs. McElroy's man Finter was scrambling to come up with a plausible narrative to explain the Rover's personal history and how he ended up raging through Dorset and Devon Counties. It was going to be a hard sell. Nothing could adequately account for a young man, with no roots in the south coast community, descending like a hawk on six innocent local girls and doing it with impunity for so long.

“Not to gild the lily, Jack,” Tommy said, “but maybe you could fill
us
in on Moss.”

McElroy picked up a thin dossier from the coffee table, but he didn't open it. He paused, gathering his thoughts, rehearsing for the media session.

“Partnell ‘Parny' Moss had at hand the best bag of tricks a serial rapist could ask for. He had access professionally to every kind of map of the whole Jurassic Coast. Weather forecasting has changed. It's all done through computer models and digitally constructed mapping. In the guise of being extra keen at his job at
TV
-20, he downloaded every aerial, topographic and thermographic map of the coastline. He was able to pick out every nook and cranny along the entire rim of the Channel.”

McElroy opened the folder and took out several professional head-shots of an over-groomed young man with gleaming yellow hair. Peter was surprised that the file appeared to contain no candid photos. He knew that Task Force investigators had been at the television station most of the night. He expected at least a mug shot or two.

“He had no criminal record as an adult, no fingerprints on file. He grew up in an orphanage in Belfast, then a series of group homes and foster placements. The records are best characterized as minimal. Maybe the best we can say is that the only places he could call home were the town radio stations who hired him over the years. There were three of these, all six- or seven-month stints at most, and he was still using his birth name. Then he disappeared, right after the assault charges in Birmingham were dropped. The next thing we know, he has the job with
TV
-20, starting a year ago.”

“He reinvented himself,” Stan added, “starting with dyeing his hair.”

“Any incidents of sexual harassment in the radio jobs?” Peter queried.

“No. We interviewed Wendie Merwyn at length at
TV
-20 last night. There's an embarrassed woman — forever linked to the other Blond Twin. She didn't like him, thought he might be gay, though that was just competitive snarkiness. He wasn't known to date anyone at the station, or in Whittlesun. If anything, the station manager was chagrined that he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary with our boy.”

“Didn't he notice that he checked out the station's weather van a little bit often?” Tommy said.

Collectively, the four detectives had little sympathy for the management of
TV
-20. They had shown a lack of due diligence in checking out Moss's credentials. The station had groomed Merwyn and Moss as a brace of fine young role models, and “a vital part of your community,” whatever that meant.

“The Parny Moss we saw on exhibition was a package invented by the station manager,” McElroy continued. “You're right, he always volunteered to go out on location; you know, those remote broadcasts at shopping-mall openings and used car lots.”

It seemed a good point to take a break, and they gathered round the tray of coffee Jack had ordered up. McElroy turned to Peter, although he didn't mind if the others heard.

“Ellen Ransell's role in all this is strange. She says she saw Moss on television, and she knew. It would have helped if she had actually told someone. She calls him the Electric Man, because of all the computer graphics he used in his weather forecasts. Those little, jagged lightning icons they use for storms. She's a drinker. But she said she was pretty sure right away, whatever that means.”

Peter sipped his coffee. “I think the daughter knew, too. Gwen Ransell saw Moss driving around the country lanes in the
TV
-20 Weather Cruiser. That's what the manager calls it, anyway.”

“They should have notified the Task Force. The easiest thing. Of course, if you're planning on killing the killer, all bets are off. Reminds me of those Buddhist priests who set themselves on fire in the middle of intersections in Saigon.”

“Are you charging her?”

“With what? We may. What the hell. The evidence is in ashes. She hit him over the head with her vodka bottle. Then she dragged him out to that stone, laid him out like a dead Viking, or a Knight Templar, poured vodka over him and fired up a ritual sacrifice. Wait till that comes out.”

The
TV
-20 vehicle was discovered in a public lot four miles away. McElroy hadn't mentioned that although Parny Moss had delivered over thirty remote forecasts over the past year, no one from the Task Force had thought to question him.

McElroy's voice hit a lower register. “You know, Peter, we would have had a hard time convicting him. He was meticulous. No prints, no victim connections, just that one mistake with the
DNA
, and that was open to challenge in court, Stan tells me. He reinvented himself, and the Ransells were the only ones to see through it.”

And to see what had to be done, Peter might have added. Never trust a man who adopts too many identities, he thought. Lord Lucan. Greydon Kershaw. Parny Moss. André Lasker and his multiple passports. You soon forget who you are.

Peter drove the Land Rover up to the Abbey a few minutes after 1:00 p.m. He went alone. If challenged, he would say that he had unfinished business, and that would have been the truth. But he told no one where he was going, and his excursion coincided with missing the press conference at the Whittlesun station.

It seemed appropriate to travel light. For one thing, he had thrown his bowler hat in the bin for good; he felt silly wearing it. He had also left his pistol with Tommy.

He parked at the now familiar concrete pad on the hilltop and walked at a slow pace down the swale, swampy from the rain, and mounted the thousand-year-old steps to the grassy border of the Abbey. He wondered again how the Preservation Society would maintain the church. The Jurassic Coast having been declared a World Heritage Site, St. Walthram's Abbey could not be demolished, and so it might have to be rebuilt, he reasoned. Perhaps the bottomless pockets of the Olympics Committee would fund the reconstruction.

He circumnavigated the ruin, and for once the breeze off the Channel was light. On the western flank, he noticed for the first time that an archaeological dig had been underway a hundred yards from the main structure, and he took this as a hopeful sign. He completed his formal circle at the big oak door and took a seat on the steps overlooking the sea. He set his mobile phone to the off position.

Peter knew little about Catholic church architecture. Off in the scrubby weeds to the west stood a stone hut that resembled an outdoor privy, but he supposed that this couldn't be its function; whatever it was, the door was obviously sealed. Ahead and to the east of the front steps, the monks of the Abbey had erected a small, rectangular outbuilding, a crude cloister perhaps, that had been refurbished in recent years. It was windowless and slightly recessed into the ground. Again, he was puzzled by its purpose. Sunken into the rock, which the builders must have excavated with great effort, the hut could have served as a root cellar or gloomy quarters for servants.

Peter waited patiently for ten minutes, as he knew he must. The door to the hut opened and André Lasker stepped out and mounted the two slate steps to the lawn.

He was thinner than Peter had expected, but Peter could have easily picked him out of a crowd, or from an identity parade at the Whittlesun station. His chin showed three days' growth of blond beard, and his hair was ratty. He squinted at Peter, trying to sort out who he might be. Peter's face had appeared on
TV
-20 only once, and never in relation to the Task Force. There was no recognition in his eyes. Yet perhaps he understood who Peter could be.

“Am I under arrest?” His voice was tired, and it croaked a bit from lack of use, but he was neither fearful nor belligerent.

Even if Lasker didn't yet understand, this was already an arrest-in-progress, and Peter was unperturbed. He knew how it should go. He wasn't about to let the initiative shift, and so he stated: “I'm Chief Inspector Cammon of Scotland Yard.”

Lasker considered this information for a full minute. “You're the one who found me in Malta. Very clever.”

That was it. Peter recalled Mayta telling him that his name had appeared on an Internet site based in Valletta. “Your accomplice, Kamatta, is dead. He went over a cliff outside Marsalforn.”

Lasker offered a wan smile. “I heard that. Sad. Did he do that?”

He gestured to the bandage that peeked out from the policeman's coat. Peter had reopened the wound during the search last night and had replaced the dressing, with Tommy's help. “A hazard of the job.”

They stood there for another minute; the wind picked up from the sea.

“Do you want to talk?” Peter said.

He had no intention of entering the church. He recalled the dangers of the crypt. But he grasped that Lasker, like most fugitives who have spent too much time alone, needed to talk. The only question in Peter's mind was whether he would seek expiation or justification; Peter didn't anticipate anger or violence.

Lasker looked back at the hut, and gave the reply Peter hoped for. “We can talk out here.”

Lasker re-entered the hut and brought out two rough-hewn benches, which he set on the lee side of the building, but still in the afternoon sun. Peter did his best to appear relaxed.

“Mr. Lasker, you know that you'll be charged with the offence of fraud in relation to exporting automobiles.”

“I'm willing to face up to my responsibility.”
I suppose you would, if that's the total of it,
Peter thought.

“Do you want to tell me about your original plan?” Peter said. “I'm curious.”

“My wife and I lived in a marriage that was based on mutual contempt. I'd reached my limit. She had reached hers. She wanted children, I didn't. Those damn trips to Romania. Her mother.”

Lasker shook his head, mostly in sadness, but there was a residual resentment in his voice. He hadn't explained anything. Again, Peter recognized the tone of a man who had too much time to replay his sins. Lasker had started out believing that his journey was an epic one, and in unintended ways it had been; walking out to sea, with no turning back, must have been terrifying. He had fled, shedding his accumulated identities in layers until he reached a fishing village on tiny Gozo. Had he awakened one morning to the canary yellow sun and the blue Mediterranean and checked his passport in order to see who he was that day?

“How did you get out of the country?” Peter asked.

“I had a boat offshore. It wasn't all that hard. Swimming naked into the cold sea is challenging, but it was more weird than anything else.”

“You rowed to France?”

“Like I say, it wasn't that difficult. With Kamatta's passports — he did seven of them for me — and a bundle of Euros, and a set of clothes, I became a new man.”

“But Anna guessed that you were leaving.”

Lasker grasped his implication: the new man had carried the old life with him. Her suicide had made sure of that. The monkey on his back. “I made it to the French coast by early morning. The sea was calm all the way.” Peter felt the echo of “Dover Beach,” but said nothing. “From there, the train to Paris, and a quick flight to Malta.”

“What was Symington's part in all this?”

Lasker stood and paced behind the bench. He kept his hands in his pockets. “Inspector, I tried to do this alone. I didn't aspire to be unique or rich or something that I'm not. It was just me. I tried to do this solo. Symington and I became friends. He thought my plan was romantic, swashbuckling, I don't know. It wasn't romantic at all, as it turned out. He helped me out with makeup and disguises.”

“And he helped you find cast and crew with passports,” Peter said. Lasker had easily identified the addresses of male volunteers in the theatre and had broken into their homes. He chose men of the same age and general features. It was easy, and Symington had made it easier. “How did you hear about your wife?”

“Jesus! I went on the Internet one day, in Malta, to check on the news about myself. The local television station here in Whittlesun had recently expanded its website to include streaming video of its newscasts. I'd been in Malta for a few days by then. First, they reported that I was wanted for murder. Then, sometime after, they said that she had killed herself. I couldn't believe it. I told her that all I wanted to do was disappear. I said it wasn't her fault. I didn't imagine that she would do that.”