Walking into the Ocean (34 page)

“What are you not telling me?” Peter asked.

“Hamm struck the man. The theatre director's filed a complaint of police brutality. This all comes from Hamm himself over the phone.”

“Very unlike the Ronald Hamm I know.”

“He told me it was just after he viewed the corpse of Anna Lasker.”

Bartleben moved off a pace, towards the wide door. The conversation wasn't so much ending as fading out. It had been short, almost abrupt. Stephen had come a long way to offer comfort, and Peter felt a need to offer something back. Unfortunately, Peter's wrap-up comment came out as a seer's prediction. “He'll head back to the cliffs.”

Peter regretted having to confront his doctors, who were merely doing their professional best. After all, their Hippocratic tradition stretched back to the knights themselves, the Hospitallers, who had established the most humane clinics in Europe for their time. The young resident in charge of his case wanted him to remain for observation — echoes of Whittlesun General — but Peter resolved to go. The doctor was intimidated by Joan's nursing qualifications, and by his patient's promise to see his own physician as soon as he reached England. The head of surgery — the whole staff knew that a Scotland Yard detective was under their care — argued that Peter needed skin grafts on his forearm, but, at age sixty-seven, Peter wasn't concerned about cosmetic repairs, and Joan, having forced the staff to unwrap his bandage, expressed optimism that the wound would heal without their monitoring.

But it was Detective Bahti who finally pulled off their exodus. He showed up an hour after Bartleben left for Luga Airport; he had actually shaved for the visit. He appeared nervous to Peter but claimed to be at the hospital merely to check on his nephew. He lightened up as he recounted the events in Marsalforn after Peter passed out, the rush to the helicopter and the flight to the Valletta hospital. To Peter's amusement, he and Joan hit it off. Since she had been reading Conan Doyle, Joan had acquired a taste for skulduggery and international intrigue. Bahti reminded Peter of Tommy, in his easy way of embellishing stories of criminal mayhem. Crowded around the hospital bed, the three of them spoke in hushed tones, although there was no reason for it. Bahti eventually suggested that he take on the role of chaperone to the two Brits for their remaining day in the capital. Peter perceived that the detective might be angling for a job in the U.K. — he mentioned the Metropolitan Police three times — but as the impossibility of this became self-evident, Bahti had the discretion to drop it. He went to see Peter's young doctor (to whom he claimed blood links) and recommended that he guide the couple to the cathedral, as a test of Peter's stamina. The detective guaranteed that Peter would return for a final examination at the clinic. Only then would the decision be made to let him fly home.

As it turned out, their visit to the church of the knights wasn't quite the lark their little cabal planned.

At first, the doctors resisted Bahti's test: the cathedral would be extremely crowded in the early afternoon; it would be better to rest for a day more. But, as the trio escaped into the Mediterranean sun, Joan and Bahti watching Peter for signs of enervation, the fresh air and the opportunity to leave behind the banality of the clinic to engage in a “tourist experience” revived Peter, and they maintained their happy, conspiratorial mood.

Bahti led them through the side streets of old Valletta, up from the seaside hospital, until they emerged onto Republic Street and found themselves facing the pillared entrance to the Co-Cathedral of St. John. It was referred to as the “Co-Cathedral” since it shared primacy on the island with the church in Mdina, the old capital. The mass of tourists, as had supplicants for centuries before them, waited in an obedient line that trailed down the dusty front steps. Peter again noted the Arab influence in Malta; much as the Knights of St. John might have resisted the Ottoman assault in the Great Siege, the East had everywhere shaped the look of the island. The detective ignored the line of visitors and led them past the crowd into the cool antechamber, the air and shadows anticipatory of the sacred rooms beyond. Bahti approached the nearest custodian. His whisperings led the docent to shake his head in sympathetic sadness, and he looked over at Peter with concern. Bahti led them around the ticket booth, picking up audio guides on the way. He paused before they could gain the interior of the church and reached for Peter's hand.

“I promise to pick up two British Airways tickets out of Luga for the morning. I will call you on your mobile to set a rendezvous time. If Albanoni will let me, we will meet again at the airport.”

Peter shook his hand and Joan kissed him on the cheek. Left alone, they stopped to get their bearings, always a wise approach in a cathedral cavern as vast as this one. He had experienced Chartres and Toledo and other great churches, and he had felt a competitive tone to most of them, an impulse towards excess in decoration and dimension, designed to outdo other monuments to God. He at once felt the difference here. Yes, every corner was filled with carving and embellishment, each side chapel lavishly honouring a suborder of knights, but this house of God, entirely baroque in its formal style, displayed another sensibility: defiance. This, it was immediately evident, was a warrior's church, not so much built to glorify the deity as to exalt His soldier servants and commend, unapologetically, their armoured souls to heaven.

Although he had visited hundreds of churches, Peter never knew where to begin in exploring the many-mansioned maze of a Catholic cathedral. In this church, erected by the knights to memorialize themselves, the altar down the long nave to the left seemed to both him and Joan a good place to start. Alone in a church, Peter often experienced a kind of gestalt, a claustrophobic reaction to the hermetic chapels and tombs:
how did I get here, at the exotic end of the world?
But this time, with Joan accompanying him, the sensation was different. They were on an adventure together, and this new, absolute and self-contained universe suited their mood. He felt good, the drugs suppressing the pain in his arm but leaving him fully awake. As they wandered up to the altar beneath the great vaulted ceiling, cherubs by the hundreds vying with full-feathered seraphim on every gilded pilaster, Joan whispered, “I never remember the difference between rococo and baroque.”

“I don't know either,” Peter whispered back. “Why don't we just count the angels?”

There were no depictions of the Annunciation on the walls over the altar, but he did discover a fine painting of Mary's visit to her sister Elizabeth, at which she announces her miraculous conception. Peter pointed to it, but Joan had already stepped well back from the altar and was examining the amazing inlaid floor that ran the length of the nave. The knights had commemorated all their comrades who had perished in the Great Siege of 1565, and then made room in the cathedral floor for the gravestone panels of successive Grand Masters. The stones set into the floor, one after another, were elaborately decorated with pieces of white, black and orange marble; most pictured skeletons holding scythes or weapons, resulting in a Grand Guignol, Halloween impression. But the displays, replete with escutcheons and banners, helmets and pikes, honoured noble dying as the precondition to eternal living. Each tomb was annotated with prayers of intercession and encomiums to the heroic deeds of these Soldiers of God. The defiant Knights of St. John knew all the angles on Death.

Back a few more metres into the nave, Joan's eye was caught by a panel that depicted a smiling skeleton jauntily poking a bony finger at the shield of one of the Grand Masters, a Knight of Provence, who had died in 1601 and was now interred in a direct line from the main altar. She read the inscription:
In mortis starabo ante Filium hominis
.

“In death I will stand before the Son of man,” she translated. Peter had by now wandered off to a side chapel in search of Annunciation scenes, but the acoustics allowed him to hear her clearly. He went back to the nave, avoiding stepping on the inlaid tombstones, and stood beside her. She repeated the inscription.

“I bet he'll stand before Him as an equal,” Peter said.

They passed two hours in the cathedral, entered all the chapels and read every inscription. They were eventually drawn to a separate chamber that held the Caravaggios, huge paintings depicting the
Beheading of John the Baptist
and
Saint Jerome Writing
, the latter showing the saint contemplating a skull. The former scene depicted the seconds before John's bloody execution. On a floor panel placed equidistant between the masterpieces, a rictus-grinning skeleton was shown climbing out of a long coffin. The cathedral provided a full education in the notions of death and eternity, of great deeds and salvation. They left chastened and quiet, and not quite prepared for the afternoon sun.

They went only as far as the terrace outside the cathedral, where they ordered lemonades. Peter checked his messages and found that Bahti had succeeded in getting them a midday flight the next day.

Freed for the balance of the day, he and Joan wandered to a café on nearby Theatre Street and ate a leisurely meal. Peter ordered a Cisk beer, and a second. His arm had begun to throb from about the moment they entered the chapel with the Caravaggios, but he didn't tell her. They toasted one another. It was time to get back to England, to begin the final act of the tragedy of Anna and André Lasker.

The coppers had come up short. Had doomed themselves with their hackneyed Big Story. Had begun to believe it themselves. The Rover despised them. They told everyone they were scribing the arc of a chronicle across the cliffs, and all they had to do was wait. They would soon preside over his dying fall into a screaming sea; it was inevitable, they said. But his fate — neither biblical, nor mythical, nor tabloid lurid — wasn't in their hands.

Not until they saw through their own disgraceful, slack assumptions. They took solace in their bureaucracy. How dare they consign their faith into mere
watching
to get the job done? You have to
deserve
to win. They kept a vigil and patrolled and scanned the serrated shoreline, the saw blade that slashed back at the sea, that was now giving in by measures to the massed tides.

In this killing zone, where was there room for the rational, the settled? They imagined the shore to be linear, like their thinking, but how could that be correct when the rocks fell in sections each day and reshaped themselves each night into images no more fixed than figures in the clouds? Viewed from space, the land shifted no less than the hurricane whirls around its eye, day after day fragmenting the hunters' best maps into useless fractals.

No wonder they couldn't find him. He'd baited them with spurious clues. “Six kilometres” was a false, nonbinding mark on a sextant; he could kill from any distance, and planned to do so very soon. He had looked up “6.” It was the day of Man's creation, a lucky number on the die and the mark of Pythagorean luck. And there were six senses. There were seven senses if you counted prescience. Maybe tomorrow he would switch to “7.” Or seven could signify sex, the strongest sense.

He would never be caught by the policeman's linear arithmetic but only, maybe, by the mystic's algorithm. He preferred to kill in sanctified places within sight of the ocean waves, but he wasn't wedded to them; he could kill under an oak tree for all it mattered to him. He liked the ritual, but there are many rituals. That's what makes a horse race, or a religion. God, he felt good. He might perform his rituals in another county, another country, or on another shore. Scotland might be nice.

As the saying goes, he wasn't looking for trouble, but he was looking out for trouble. There were hunters with tiny pieces of the puzzle. That detective in black, who asked some of the right questions but failed to read between the lines of the answers. The others had shunned him. There was the girl in the cloak — why did she dress in a cloak? That bothered him — who showed up like a wraith in unexpected places along the coast. There was the reporter and her competitive drive to confirm every one of the trite morality tales peddled by the Task Force. She might venture out on the rocks once too often. First, he would reward her: one more girl should blow the story national and give her the scoop she craved. The story would be irresistible; it sure was overdue. They couldn't suppress it any longer. For the endgame, he would change his “pattern” and go after the damsel in the cloak.

Let the games begin!

Finally, there were an irritating number of policemen doing just about everything but look for him. What the devil did they think they were doing out there on the cliffs? It was getting so crowded. It was probably a good time to move on.

Oh, and there was one other, a new one. Looked like a hermit, dressed in that cloak. Was it possible that he was a kindred spirit?

They wouldn't find him, because not one of them could integrate the pieces. There was no tried-and-true, no plodding towards the truth. Only a mutation could catch him. Only a mutation could catch a mutation.

But first he would snare the cloaked girl, the one with the red hair.

The ache in Peter's arm refused to fade away. It was all the more irksome, since he needed to be in fighting trim for his descent to Whittlesun. He had taken the train up to London to St. George's, the hospital that served the Yard, but his doctor would prescribe only time and low-level painkillers for his wound. It had been three days; the gash had stayed clean, thanks to Joan. The doctor, a man older than Peter by several years, promised that it would heal with an “ugly but not angry” scar. He thought that Peter, almost Frankensteinian already with scars, might like the imagery. As a novice policeman, Peter had been horrified by his first cicatrix, a slash wound from a Liverpool brawler, but now, like much else in his profession, superficial wounds were exactly that, nothing more. He was indifferent to the surgeon's joking. “Your corpse will be easy to identify,” the doctor added, making Peter think of Bartleben; it was his kind of bureaucrat's joke.

At the cottage, Peter assembled hiking gear, heavy boots and gloves, along with a squall jacket; he also dredged up a set of Royal Marine–grade binoculars. He called Tommy Verden and they compared lists of equipment. Tommy would pick him up two days forward. In normal circumstances, he would have notified Maris and Jack McElroy, but the hassle was too much. If they met Task Force operatives on the heights, he would explain their presence as best he could. Peter wouldn't be alone. As well as Tommy, he would mobilize Bartleben to reinforce his expedition from London. Jerry Plaskow, with his tabulations and his knowledge of the coast, would be invaluable in their search for Lasker. Finally, he would enlist Ron Hamm in the cause.

Above all, he would find Gwen Ransell and be guided by her.

At noon on the second day back in Britain, he retreated to the shed with a plan to sort through the entire Lasker dossier again. Yard Headquarters had failed to identify the airport through which the mechanic, in disguise, had entered Britain; none of the Kamatta aliases showed up in any of the scans of the gate checks or the airline manifests. But Sir Stephen had assigned the tracing probe to an assistant deputy, name of Masters, whom Peter knew quite well, who was known to have the habit of blaming his shortcomings on poor-quality input from his colleagues. Peter called him in London and immediately got back a whining response: “We don't have a decent photo as a reference point. Lasker's driver's permit photo is so blurry there are virtually no useful points or comparison. His old passport picture is so old it makes him look prepubescent. In any case, the scanners don't work that well. One little moustache will throw them off.”

Would Peter come up to London, Masters asked. Instead, Peter asked to be passed on to the officer doing the actual work on the file (an old trick with Masters), who turned out to be an enthusiastic career officer named John Fitzgerald Carpenter.

The young man knew Peter only by reputation, but that sufficed. His voice indicated Cambridge. He suggested that Peter call him Fitz. “I know you must be busy, Chief Inspector. How can I help?”

The flattery was subtle. Carpenter had to know that Peter was semi-retired, and perhaps not so busy. Peter smiled to himself. “Call me Peter.”

“Sir, we've checked every Passport Services record involving a landing in the U.K. on the day in question, and crossed them with known, or possible, aliases of Lasker.”

“With what result?”

“No result, sir. No matches. Even on date of birth.”

“Why did you work entirely through Border Control, instead of contacting each airline?”

There was an embarrassed silence. There were thousands of passengers, hundreds of flights. “Because it was easier,” Carpenter admitted. “There's no central registry of airline manifests.”

“Tell me what you did find.”

“I believe, based on discussions with Malta Intelligence and Mr. Albanoni at Malta Police Services, that Lasker took off on a ticket using the name Watson. But he never landed, if you know what I mean.”

“How is that possible?” His abrupt questions implied impatience, but that wasn't Peter's intention.

“A Mr. Thomas Q. Watson, one of the stolen identities found in Malta, made a booking from Barcelona to Dublin and then on to Manchester. Two different Ryanair flights. But he appears not to have landed in Manchester.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Well, it took me a while to figure it out. I worked at customs for two years before joining the Yard and, in fact, it's why they hired me for this job. I saw this once before. A passenger uses one passport when he leaves the launch country, then switches to the second forged passport when he passes through the gate in Britain. Not that hard if all your passports are
EU
-issued. By the time Manchester might have noticed a mismatch with the passenger list, he was home and dry.”

“Do you have the name, the one that didn't line up?”

Carpenter sighed. “Not yet. You see, Manchester never bothered to compare the lists. And there's been a delay getting the manifest from Ryanair. May take another day.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “You know what would be extremely helpful?”

“You would like the video from the Border Agency? So would I. I ordered them up, should have them by end of day.”

Peter sympathized with Carpenter, who faced a long, bureaucratic slog through miles of grainy footage. “Mr. Carpenter, anything
visual
would help. Then we can . . .”

“Sorry to interrupt, Chief Inspector, but I've just been handed the passenger list for the Manchester leg. If you'll just hold on a quick sec.”

“You'll check it against the passport entry list?”

“Yes,” Carpenter replied, distantly. There was a pause as paper was shuffled. Peter got up and took the phone to the window of the shed. He watched Joan topping the expired flowers in the garden bed by the corner of the driveway. Carpenter came back on the line.

“That was quick,” Peter said, to offer encouragement.

“Got lucky. Triangulated the Ryanair manifests and the arriving passengers in Manchester. The man we want is Quentin Calvert. He's the odd man out.”

“So, he had yet another forged passport we didn't know about.”

“He was well prepared,” Carpenter offered.

“Exactly.”

Carpenter promised to scan the Manchester tapes when they arrived. Peter gave him Bahti's cell number in Valletta so that he could check directly with one of the few people to have ever seen Lasker in disguise. He hung up. The call made him think idly about Sarah, something to do with the fact that ‘Fitz' and his daughter were aligned in age. He didn't think beyond that spark, though he resolved to give Sarah a ring.

Instead, he called Ron Hamm. He waited through four rings. The shifting temperatures in the shed as the day aged alternately warmed and chilled him. He flexed his bandaged arm, and longed to unwrap it.

“Peter!” Hamm said.

“I'll start by apologizing, Ron,” Peter said. “I owe you a call.”

“No apology needed. But it would be good to have you here.”

“Congratulations on the passport angle. Excellent job of digging. We just found out that Lasker used one of the names from the theatre people to re-enter at Manchester.”

“Bastard. I funnelled all the records to the Yard's London office. By the by, what was the name on the passport?”

“Quentin Calvert.”

“Ah, yes. Bloke about Lasker's age. Different hair, I recall. His statement's part of the file.”

“Listen, Ron, are you in the office right now?”

“No. I'm following up a lead at Lasker's Garage. Haven't finished talking with the staff, Albrecht Zoren in particular.”

“You know the receptionist there, Sally, died last week?”

“Yes.” But Hamm seemed surprised. “You were there in the last few days?”

“Went to look at the ledgers of auto exports before I flew off to Malta.” He switched to the issue at hand, the confrontation with Symington.

“He quoted Shakespeare to me,” Hamm said. “‘Thy tender-hefted nature shall not give thee o'er to harshness.' Jesus, Peter.”

Peter recognized
Lear
. All men over sixty-five avoid
Lear
.
Talking
about which daughter? Regan? In context, was Symington referring to Anna Lasker? To Brenda? To Hamm himself?
And then Peter knew: the teacher was referring to himself. But he let Hamm go on.

“Condescending bastard. I had him red-handed about the passports. He gave me grief. I pressed him if he had seen Anna's fractured body. He said he hadn't, had no opportunity to. Had no reason to want to. He made it clear he didn't care.”

Why, Peter thought — because he saw the world as a Shakespearean plotline?

“Ron, how much did he give over about Lasker's plans? I understand he provided makeup, supplies.”

“Yeah, he told me that. But then he clammed up. Told me nothing else. That's when I said what I said. That's when I . . .” His voice quavered with revived anger.

Peter let the silence go on for a minute, but he was ready to hang up once Hamm got the self-pity out of his system. The only thing for both of them to do, he knew, was to reach the Whittlesun Heights, to explore them together once again. “Can you perhaps join us when we get down there?”

“Sure.” But his response was half-hearted. “He's out there, isn't he?”

In his mood, Peter didn't care which wanted man Hamm was referring to.

Peter went back to his files on the Rover case, laying out the manila folders in which he had slotted police reports, news clippings, sporadic forensics analyses and a few photos. The puzzle was irresistible. He shuffled the categories until he had about twenty folders. He had to set aside the Lasker material and push back several shadow boxes-in-progress to make room on the trestle table. Nothing was timelined; the material formed no linear plot or Cartesian framework. The order was in his own mind, sensible to no one else. From the reports and statements of fifty witnesses, he mined for small truths and the false notes that seemed tiny but wouldn't be made to fit, no matter how he reordered or rationalized them. He pondered, for example, the problem of transportation: the predator appeared without warning, the witnesses stated, yet how did he traverse the rocky heights without being seen? At the same time, neither Daniella Garvena nor Brenda Van Loss could remember the man's face before he struck them down. Peter realized as he fought through the murky evidence gathered by the Task Force that he was having trouble concentrating; the Rover remained his secondary focus. It had never been his case, and he could tell himself that he was brought in for Lasker only, and so his focus was in the right place. Peter imagined what Stan Bracher would say to this. “Bullshit,” he would say. Peter understood, with all his instincts applied, that this Rover was asking to be caught. It would take a professional to catch him and Peter was, above all, a professional.