Walking into the Ocean (28 page)

She scowled. “The Abbey is deconsecrated. Excuse me, officer, but Father Salvez is ill. He's being treated for prostate cancer. He doesn't have formal duties here.”

Her compassion was so thin, so grudging, that Peter decided to let it go as hopeless. He stuffed the packet of messages into his jacket and left.

Peter and Tommy decided to leave their car in the church space and walk to Salvez's flat. They found it easily, a beige brick cube of identical units three streets over. The lobby index identified 524 as the priest's flat, although “Father” was not appended to the name. Verden waited for a resident to exit, smiled at her, and held open the door for Peter. The lift was broken and so they took the rear stairs to the fifth floor. Peter knocked on 524. He was just about to knock a second time when the locks began to rattle on the interior side.

The priest was thinner than before, when Peter had seen him in his long cassock, and now he looked deathly. Peter's mother, who was as anti-Catholic as a Huguenot could be, opined that priests often looked like their own undertakers, but Peter felt only a welling up of concern, mixed with alarm, at the stick-man before him. When he saw Peter in the doorway, the priest recoiled in distress, although Peter was certain that Salvez recognized him. He wasn't sure what this meant. They had been on friendly terms; Salvez had saved him at the cliff's edge, and they had left an interesting conversation unfinished, with the implicit promise of meeting again. Had he waited too long to get back to him? The priest stepped back and lost his balance. Verden swooped past Peter and caught the man neatly. He gently lowered him to the carpet.

“This is embarrassing,” Salvez wheezed.

“Why, Father? This is a nice soft carpet, isn't it?” Verden said.

The sick man gasped for breath. “It's just . . . nothing.”

“‘Take up thy bed and walk another day,' the Bible says,” Verden pronounced. Salvez tried to laugh, but only choked on his next breath.

Peter's colleague turned out to be a master of practical sympathy. Verden lifted the emaciated man in his arms and brought him to the chesterfield, which faced a small black-and-white television tuned to the news. Peter dipped under Verden's arm and plumped up the three pillows. He took a seat next to the television, so that Salvez could look directly at him. “Father Salvez,” he said, “this is Inspector Verden.”

“Your first name, Inspector?” The voice was weak.

“Tommy.”

“Thank you for the rescue, Tommy.”

“No problem. I'll make tea.” All business, he left for the kitchen.

The flat was neat, if threadbare. Newspapers and food cartons circled the old man's nesting spot on the couch.

“These are your messages,” Peter said. He handed over the sealed envelope, and Salvez tucked it under a cushion.

“Are you all right, Father?”

“Yes. I had radiation treatment yesterday. It's not the first time.”

“Has anyone been here with you since?” Peter could hear dishes rattling in the kitchen.

“A neighbour woman came by yesterday afternoon and fixed me something. Oh, and two fellows helped me up the freight lift. The main lift is broken. But mostly I've been sleeping.”

Peter hadn't understood the extent of the man's alienation from his own church. He lived in poverty, yet no one from St. Elegias had offered to tend to him. For the fourth or fifth time in two days, Peter thought of his mother: acts of charity are to be done without question. Every man Peter's age knew about prostate cancer; luckily, he had avoided it. The choices were ugly — radiation, hormone therapy, surgery. With radiation, collateral damage to the plumbing around the prostate gland was common, and disabling. Salvez should not have been left alone. But then, he might have lied to the medical staff.

“Why did you call me, Father?” Peter asked.

“Did I call you?” Peter saw that he was troubled, confused.

“Yes, at my hotel two days ago.”

“Oh, yes. I enjoyed our talk at the Abbey. I wanted to say goodbye. I figured that you would be leaving soon, and so . . .” The exertion drained him, and he lay back on the pillows.

Peter had problems with this explanation but he didn't challenge it for the moment. Instinct led him to conclude that the call, though it predated the disastrous press conference, was connected to Lasker. Or was Salvez saying his goodbyes to everyone? Did he believe he might not survive yesterday's treatment? Or was he getting ready for his own quiet, self-administered exit? Peter's thoughts slid around crazily. Had Salvez, since he left his message, heard about Anna's suicide? He doubted that the priest had been well enough to watch the television reports the night before.

“Father, can we talk frankly?”

“Confession works in the other direction, Peter.”

Peter did not smile. “I don't think so, John.”

Salvez suddenly brightened, almost in a spurt of euphoria. He arched his back and flexed his long arms. “You want to know how my health really is?”

“Yes, and what you plan to do about it. This isn't mentally or physically healthy, staying alone like this.”

“Okay.”

“Wait till Tommy comes back. I want him to join us.”

“What?” the startled priest said. “There aren't usually three at a confession.”

“This isn't three priests. It's three
men
of a certain age talking honestly. I'm sixty-seven, almost sixty-eight. I won't speak for Tommy, but he's no callow youth either.”

Father Salvez continued to look startled, but in his weak state, he let Peter take charge. Peter called Tommy, who brought the tea tray in from the kitchen. Tommy fixed a cup for Salvez and one for himself. Peter leaned forward.

“How bad is the cancer?” he said. Verden didn't bat an eyelash. The priest paused for a few seconds and replied in a strong, direct voice.

“Fatal. The radiation is doing as much harm as good. I expect I'll rebound from this dose, but the poison is spreading. It's ruining my immune system. My doctor warns me about going to the Abbey, but I plan to go a few more times. I love it up there.”
Why mention the Abbey?
Peter thought.

There was no point in hectoring the old cleric. The three men talked for two more hours. Verden launched into convoluted, and comic, stories of his travels in pursuit of criminals, stories that had nothing to do with
PSA
counts. The dying man was soon laughing, spraying spittle across his blankets and letting out deep, rasping coughs, and not caring about either.

While Tommy and Salvez continued to talk, Peter went to the kitchen and found the priest's prescription bottles. They included mild doses of morphine. He took down the phone number of the presiding physician. Salvez eventually fell asleep, and the two detectives caucused in the pantry. Peter despaired. He knew few people in Whittlesun. He didn't dare call Hamm or Willet; the explanations and cautions would take forever. He also wanted Maris to believe that he had already left Whittlesun. The most empathetic people he knew in the town of Whittlesun were Fred Callahan and his son, but he couldn't think of a premise for requesting Fred's help. Sam the Armenian would handle everything, but could hardly be called a calming presence; and he would likely have a heart attack himself climbing the stairs.

He figured it out halfway through his conversation with Joan, whom he called while Salvez dozed. When he explained the situation, she determined to drive down to Whittlesun right away and completely take over the care of the dying priest. He pointed out the impracticality of that approach. She was about to express her serious umbrage at that rejection when Peter thought of Father Vogans. He promised to call her back.

Fortunately, the Romanian cleric was in his office. He agreed to come at once. Peter stated that this was unnecessary, that he and Verden could stay around until seven or eight.

“I'll be there by six,” he said. His voice was cheerful. “Let my assistant do the christening.”

“You realize that he's not the official, established priest at St. Elegias?” Peter added.

“I like it,” Vogans said. “The Roman Catholics need my help. Delicious irony!”

The Romanian knocked on the door at 6:05. He was puffing from the long climb and he carried a basket over one arm. He smiled and introduced himself to Tommy (who later was compelled to comment to Peter that he kept awfully strange company when out on an investigation). Vogans turned grim at the sight of the dying man. The Catholic priest had awakened at the knock of the Eastern Orthodox cleric, and now struggled for awareness. He turned slowly to his guest and stared at the clerical collar.

“Are you coming to collect me?” he said.

“I'm coming to convert you, John. Do you like
ciorba
?”

Inspector Maris loved his wife in a way that wasn't entirely healthy. He had adored her from the first sight of her finely curved legs; that was in senior form trigonometry, two days after his nineteenth birthday. That day, he marked down in his mental inventory her aquiline nose and her cobalt eyes; and he never forgot those details, or anything else about her. Thereafter, he wrote her description down in his notebook over and over, like a shopping list: legs, nose, eyes, hair. And when they eventually married, it was as if he was marrying a memory turned corporeal.

From his standpoint, their engagement was a coup worthy of a band of revolutionaries. He came from the ordinary middle-class masses of Whittlesun, but his courting of her became his way of carving himself out of the pack. Right out of school he joined the police; truth be told, she first loved him for his spiffy uniform. He spent every cent of his salary on their dates. He promised to work his way out of the ranks, and he had. He found that he was good at administration and human resources, and almost as good at criminal investigation, and he moved up the organization chart. All the while, he perceived everything through the lens of his devotion to her and her beauty.

His parents had been pleased, hers less so. On their wedding day, her brother, who had something to do with debt refinancing in the City (and now in the Docklands), took him aside for an inebriated lecture. “She's a sleeper,” he had said. He had no idea what the brother-in-law meant on that day but he had never been happier.

On the morning after the press conference, Maris awoke next to his wife, and his first thought was that he wished he had understood his brother-in-law's rant at the time. In the days after the wedding, he had thought it meant that she had hidden depths, that she was a sleeping rose about to bloom. His wife had vague intentions of working in fashion or home decorating. Instead, the brother had meant it literally. She had a sleep problem. No one called it narcolepsy, but she had to get twelve hours' sleep each day, and when she slept it was deathly in its stillness. On this morning, the day after the disastrous press conference, he realized that there was no possibility of her waking up and joining him for coffee in the kitchen. He would have liked to have talked to her about his seething distaste for New Scotland Yard.

But he believed in professionalism more than anything, and he put aside his self-pity as he got out of bed, shaved, showered and dressed. He knotted his tie and felt ready for the day. In truth, his wife was a charming woman, who, when awake, offered him every sympathy for the challenges of his job. She expected greater things from him and was wholly optimistic and supportive. He told her that the Task Force was a real opportunity to show what he could do, and she nodded. It was just that she had gained weight. She was not quite the woman he had married. He was now living with a plump cheerleader who had few ambitions of her own. All things considered, he said to himself, I have a good life. He waffled like this, and it never occurred to him that he was an equivocator, and in this was different from Peter Cammon. He failed to see the ruthlessness in Peter Cammon.

The more he pendulummed between thanking his Protestant God for his blessings and ruminating over the gaps in his life, the more he became irritable. He let things niggle at him. A year or so ago, some American had come into the station to complain about his stolen passport. Maris had introduced himself as “Inspector Roger Maris,” to which the Yank had said, “Oh, like the ball player.” Maris knew nothing about baseball. Two days ago, another American had made the same connection, and then said, “Like Maris with an asterisk?” This comment was so confusing that he had felt driven to check the Internet for clarification. It turned out that the American ballplayer had broken Babe Ruth's record (Maris had heard of
him
) of sixty home runs in a season, but there was doubt about his new mark, and thus the asterisk. The inspector was none the clearer, but resolved to be standoffish with all Americans in the future.

As he reached his parking bay by the police station, he tried to think through his strategy for dealing with Cammon. He had left instructions for the chief inspector to be summoned to the police station; then he would call Sir Stephen Bartleben. He arrived in his office to find that Cammon had been unreachable. On the way to work, Maris had been enumerating and rehearsing his grievances against the Yard. Cammon had failed to give him timely reports on his investigation and the family had been hounding him to release the blood-soaked house to them; but Cammon had procrastinated, and now the building was likely unsalvageable. He had brought his wife into the home, for reasons not entirely clear; even Bartleben had agreed that this was unprofessional. Maris was tempted to demand Cammon's dismissal. And Cammon had seduced — not too strong a word — his principal man on the case, Detective Hamm, and almost got him killed on a wild goose chase along the cliffs. The announcement of Anna Lasker's suicide was the final straw.

All the while, Maris felt the threat of pre-emption behind everything these Scotland Yard types, including that Canadian pathologist Bracher, did with the Lasker and Rover fiascos. At one point with Bartleben over the phone, he had suggested that perhaps the Yard should take over the Lasker investigation. Bartleben had buttered him up with compliments about the competence of local and regional police, and Maris had secretly been relieved. Yet none of these efforts represented progress in getting rid of Cammon, and his quiver of strategies was empty.

He hated the glass office. He needed relief sometimes from the pressures of management and liked to play solitaire on his desktop computer. He would have enjoyed a stroll on the Whittlesun Heights, to walk through the heather and feel the salty breeze. But even that was rendered difficult by the constant scanning of the cliffs by the police, most of whom were his own men. But the more he thought about the cliffs, the more he determined to take that walk. He'd done it before.

The red light on his telephone blinked. He waited for his secretary, clearly visible outside the glass, to pick up. She was in his office in seconds.

“Inspector, sorry, but it's Constable Willet.”

“Where's he calling from?” She looked hapless. “The field?”

“Inspector.” Willet sounded far away. Could he possibly be ringing in from his motorcycle? “Potentially we have another victim.”

“Who? Where?”

“Brenda Van Loss. A farm girl, residence less than a kilometre from the sea.”

“Has the body been found?”

“No,” the Constable replied, seeming confused. “That is, she disappeared last night. She hasn't shown up at home.”

“So, Mr. Willet, we can't be sure there's any victim at all. All right, I'll send a squad to help with a search. Where are you?”

“A place called Kidd's Reach.”

At the same moment that Inspector Maris was lifting the receiver to talk to Constable Willet in Dorset, Peter was jolted awake by the phone ringing downstairs at the cottage. He had hoped to sleep in late. His plan, after lolling in bed for a while, was to get up, have breakfast and in his organized fashion, work through his list of calls: Bracher, Vogans, Bartleben and maybe J.J. McElroy. He would set up in the shed for the afternoon and write his interim report on Lasker. Although he knew Joan would get the phone, instinct told him that his plan for the day was shattered, and he became fully alert. Now he swung his legs over the side of the bed and gazed out the window, waiting for Joan's footfall on the stairs. The apple trees, and one or two remaining peach trees, held down the eastern side of his property; at an angle, he found the outline of the old fence on the south perimeter, braced by the pile of stones that the landscapers had discarded. On arriving home the night before, he had seen that all the flowers along the drive had died, leaving dry stalks waving in the pre-winter breeze. But he loved this place. He was glad to see that there was no frost yet on the fruit trees. Never had the cottage felt more like a bastion against interference from above, below and sideways.

Joan came in; she had the phone but had turned it off. “Oh, you're up. I took a call from Father Salvez.” Tommy had stayed for a brandy last night, and she had heard the full story of their rescue mission.

“How is he?”

“In terrible shape,” she said.

“What did he say, specifically?” Peter said.

“That he's feeling infinitely better. It won't do, Peter. He needs constant care, ideally with a heart monitor.”

“Does he have a hospital appointment today? I seem to recall . . .”

“Not good enough, Peter. He says he's fine. He's not.”

“If a priest adopts a stiff upper lip, do we call it a martyr's lip?” Peter said.

“Don't be flippant. There's something going on with your priest. Not martyrdom, something else.”

Peter regretted his callousness. He had slept perhaps too well. More significantly, he trusted Joan's instincts. Indeed, something about Salvez's attitude, his determination to avoid hospital officialdom, bothered him, and he wondered if Joan had the same insight.

She wasn't placated. “I'm going down there myself.”

“I'll call Father Vogans.”

But the phone in Joan's hand rang at that moment, and it was Vogans himself. She passed it over. “Hello. Peter, I just thought I'd report.”

Peter, with Joan hovering, was careful in his response. “What's his condition this morning?”

“I left an hour ago. He slept through most of the night. The soup helped, he said. I have a woman from my diocese going over later today to feed him and clean up a bit. I'll phone Father Clarke now and see what St. Elegias can organize.”

Peter looked at Joan. “Do you think he should be in hospital? He needs monitoring.”

“Of course,” Vogans said, mildly. “He's declining, you saw that. But he refused my offer to have a full-time caregiver. He insists he'll rebound from the radiation. He wants to go back up to that Abbey.”

Peter understood that Joan was ready to start up the car and drive straight to Whittlesun. He would have to go along with her, but he preferred to give it a day.

“I'll check this evening and let you know the latest,” Vogans stated. “My Ladies Aid person will stay the day and will report back to me.”

“Okay,” Peter said, “but he won't answer his phone, so please, you call me.”

Vogans agreed to follow up with Salvez's doctors as well. When Peter hung up, Joan had disappeared. For all Peter knew, she was packing a bag. He went downstairs and found her already out in her potting shed. He explained the details of the plan and she nodded but clearly wasn't convinced. He went next door to his study; it was somehow comforting to have Joan working on the other side of the partition. But before he could unpack his material on Lasker, his phone rang again. It was the Canadian himself.

“Just touching base, Peter. You started your report yet?”

“Interim report, at best. No, but I'll file something with Bartleben this week.”

“I called to say my report on the Lasker house, and my comments on the automobile forensics, are finished and I've deposited them with Regional. I've sent a copy to Sir Stephen, and I'll courier one to you this afternoon.”

“Where are you?”

“Just leaving the lab. Heading up to Nottingham for a consult. I was going to take a last amble up on the cliffs, but did you hear the latest?”

“Which is?”

“The Rover has struck again.”

“Oh, Christ. The victim?”

“Local farm girl. Her name is Brenda Van Loss. But he left her alive this time. Actually, she wasn't hurt that badly.”

Peter's mind raced. His onrushing thought was that he had left Whittlesun too soon. His instincts told him that something was going to be very off about this one.

“You realize, Stan, that this is the second time he's failed to execute his victim? What do you know about it?”

“Precious little. Something about the creep maybe drugging her, then leaving her on the top of the cliff. But I'm gone, Peter. Have to get to Nottingham.” Caution entered his voice. “I thought maybe one of us might want to call McElroy.”

Bracher meant that he no longer wanted to serve as liaison to the Rover Task Force, though he surely grasped that Peter was unwelcome in Dorset, and probably Devon too. It puzzled him that Stan was thinking of visiting the cliffs again. Peter was about to ring off, leaving these questions unresolved. He said, “I'll try to call McElroy. Where was the girl attacked?”

“Kidd's Reach, wherever that is.”

They hung up and Peter started to unpack his files, but then decided to try Salvez, even though the priest likely wouldn't answer. He got only the recorded voice. His next decision was whether to seek information from McElroy — whom he would have preferred to dodge — or perhaps get the local perspective on the Van Loss assault from Ron Hamm. It was a morning for coincidences. Before Peter could make a decision, Ron Hamm rang his mobile.

“Chief Inspector?” Peter realized that they hadn't talked since that day on the heights, although Peter had seen him on two occasions since.

“I've just heard about it, Ron. What can you tell me?”

“Local girl — from Devon, that is. Brenda Van Loss. Hard to know what he did to her; maybe rape, but she wasn't seriously mutilated. There are bruises to the top of her head, and abrasions on her cheekbones. Odd thing is, she was drugged, and that's different from all the others.”

“Yes,” Peter replied, “but this is the second one he's deliberately left alive. That's a mistake.” He expected the detective to ask him to expound on this theory, but Ron's tone came across as aggressive, more definite and harder.

“I agree. He's toying with us. The location she was found in, on the cliffs, was about six kilometres from the last victim, but he doesn't give shite about the ‘Six-K' pattern. And she was drugged. Analysis isn't back yet, but it was something like old-fashioned chloroform, we suspect. I'll ask them to pin it down when I go to the lab.”