— Do you say that to every detective?
— Certainly not.
— So I should just go out there and solve cases?
— It is more complicated than that, but that is your definition of job satisfaction, isn’t it? But I see that something else is bothering you.
— My problem may be the reverse. I tend to deal with crime as an abstract puzzle. I’m too isolated from the victims.
— My dear Inspector Cammon, let me suggest that the prescription is the same. No, not tranquilizers, which would only distance you further from the emotional connections you seem to crave, but the opposite.
— Namely?
— Like others in your trade, I am sure that for you solving crimes is its own reward. I know that you are good at this process, yet you plead disengagement. Well, the best natural drug is endorphins. To get to the fundamentals, Inspector, you should go where the action is. Accompany arresting officers a few times, or go along with patrols in the inner cities. And as you engage real people along the way, make your decision about what is typical and what is unique, what is normal and what is abnormal about human beings.
Not once did she mention Freud or Jung, nor did she ever address the archetypal snake. But she was right. What interested him in every case was getting inside the mind of the criminal — and that started with grappling onto what was abnormal and perverted. Unless he understood the reasoning process of the thief, the murderer, the rapist, he claimed no success. This became a workable method for him, although he began to worry that the victims too often shared many characteristics with the offenders. Criminality wasn’t an abstract puzzle, he conceded, although he held back on telling anyone, including fellow detectives, that he had sometimes approached violent crime this way. It was about evil and the human emotions behind it. Tommy Verden once said (with admiration) that Peter never hesitated to walk through a door. But Peter “solved” his crimes when he understood the criminal, and not until then. You had to walk through the door of the mind.
In the bedroom, with Joan moving silently one floor below, Peter went under. This time he had a new dream, and there wasn’t a snake in sight.
In his dream, he stood in a rocky desert in Africa. The sky blazed orange and a molten sun reddened the landscape. It was neither day nor night, the sun a science fiction orb in a garish heaven. His task in the dream world was to get to the horizon, yet he knew that he couldn’t make it without perishing of thirst. He dutifully trudged across the endless sand. His vantage point within the dreamscape shifted, like an edited film scene, and now he was flying, hovering over the desert, looking down in search of human forms. He knew within the dream that he couldn’t expect to see faces; that was a dream rule. And then he was standing on the desert floor again, a few yards from where he had started. Clouds, puffballs revolving in the sky, showed black undersides and rotated again, turning alabaster. They roiled overhead as in a black-and-white movie, very Bergman.
They shattered into feathers and disappeared, leaving a sickly green sky. Once more, he floated in the stratosphere; he watched savannah grass emerge from the sand, turn green then brown, and shrivel and die.
On the ground, no closer to the horizon, he watched a black cross glide to earth. It transmogrified into a man cloaked in black. It was the Archangel Gabriel from a typical Renaissance depiction of Mary’s Annunciation. Yet there was no Mary in the dream. Gabriel, moreover, displayed no wings or facial features, but apparently he could fly. The wingless, falling angel landed neatly in the obeisant kneeling position from the Annunciation. The obsidian cavity where his face ought to be angled up towards the orange horizon, while his thin body continued to tilt in supplication.
A flock of grey sheep — the only colour he could think of was the grey of Confederate soldier uniforms in the American Civil War — appeared, unherded and thirst-panicked, on the desert plain in front of Peter. All of them, the angel as well, began to move in a mass to a vanishing point below the distant, hovering sun. The levitating angel held out a leafy sprig in his right hand; in his left, he hoisted a thin rod, much like a conductor with a baton. Gabriel spoke only one word, but repeated it six times in a flat, deadened voice: “Chervil!”
Dreams can be foolish, was Peter’s thought as he rose to consciousness. He tried to hold onto the aftertaste of the reverie. It was semi-dark in the bedroom. He managed to summon up the main points of it. He flexed his bandaged arm; it no longer throbbed. There was no doubt that the dream had been instructional. He really ought to review all the evidence again, he thought. He would see Guinevere as soon as he reached Whittlesun and ask her about it.
But then he appreciated that what had brought him out of the dream was the phone downstairs. The upstairs phone wasn’t in its cradle in the bedroom; his mobile remained in the shed. He heard footsteps on the stairs, and Joan tapped at the door.
“Peter?” she said.
“Who? What is it?”
“It’s Father Vogans in Weymouth.”
She entered and turned on the overhead. In other circumstances she would have been more heedful, giving his eyes time to adjust. He saw the dread in her face.
“Hello. Peter Cammon.”
“Inspector, this is Nicolai Vogans. I’m here in Whittlesun.”
There could be only one reason for the priest to be in Whittlesun rather than Weymouth.
“I’m here with Father Clarke. It’s Father Salvez. He’s dead. He took his own life.”
The sadness came in as a slow wave. Ruefully, and incongruously, Peter let it close over him with the identical rhythm of the descending black angel in his dream.
And Peter knew, right then, how the priest had done himself in.
Vogans continued. “This is certainly a tragic circumstance for you and for me, Inspector, but he leaped from the cliffs onto Upper Whittlesun Beach.”
“Near the Abbey,” Peter said.
“Yes, just below. They found his body at sunrise. A woman walking her dog along the shore.”
Lying motionless in bed, Peter re-tasted the anxiety underlying his desert nightmare. Later, he was never able to account for his next question.
“What was Father Salvez wearing?”
Vogans hesitated on the line. “Why, since you ask, an old leather coat, work trousers, gardening boots. Peter, I went to the mortuary an hour ago. He was skin and bones. Skeletal.”
Peter barely remembered what they exchanged next. He pinned down the funeral home location. The ceremony was scheduled the day after next at 10:00 a.m., at St. Elegias, with Clarke doing the eulogy. He promised to be there.
It was a small coincidence that the moment Peter hung up, Tommy Verden reached him from the car in London. After Peter delivered the news, Tommy asked for Vogans’s mobile number. “Salvez was a rich character,” was all he would say, other than to arrange to pick up Peter and Joan at the cottage early the day of the funeral.
That evening, Peter and Joan sat at the dining room table with the lights off and drank brandy. He recounted the story of the palliative efforts of the three aging men to comfort Father Salvez. She had heard much of the story before from him, and the embellished version from Tommy, but she nonetheless listened intently.
“I wonder what will become of the Abbey restoration?” Joan said.
CHAPTER 29
Peter endured a dreary day getting ready for both the funeral and his trek across the Whittlesun Cliffs. He would wear his best black suit to the funeral; no matter that it was identical to all his other suits. In the afternoon, with little better to do, he set up the streaming video feed that Wendie Merwyn had promoted. It proved surprisingly simple, requiring only the downloading of a flash player and the straightforward bookmarking of the site. He hoped to trace archived material in addition to the live feed, but it turned out that old material was selectively available, and not of much use. There was some break-up of the sound feed, but Peter expected that the channel would fix itself eventually. He planned to make regular use of the site.
Impatient to get to Whittlesun but unwilling to drive down the night before the funeral, Peter killed the balance of the day by ensconcing himself in the shed with the maps and charts that Jerry had supplied. After three hours of close examination, some of it with a Holmesian magnifying glass, Peter had developed a few notions of where to look for André Lasker. At sundown, Joan knocked and came into his side of the shed. Normally she would have called from outside, but as one of the funeral party, and given her contribution to the investigation of the Lasker killing ground, it was assumed, by both of them, that she was entitled to pose questions about the expedition.
“But wouldn’t it be pretty cold holing up in any of the caves?” she said, scanning the topographical and marine charts of the coast, and noting the neat red circles. “Wouldn’t he hide out anonymously in some bed and breakfast, and just pay cash?”
“He has his reasons,” Peter replied, unintentionally sounding like a judge delivering a ruling.
After supper, Peter tuned in again to the TV-20 feed to watch the current newscast. There they were, Wendie and Parny at the desk, except that this time Moss was presenting the top news item while she played sidekick.
“Our top item tonight,” he began. “Sources in the Task Force that is investigating several assaults, disappearances and killings in Devon have told TV-20 that the serial attacker, who has been roaming the cliffs along the Jurassic Coast unimpeded, has planned his assaults at regular intervals. This is known within the Task Force as the ‘Six-Kilometre’ theory and, as the label implies, the attacker has been moving in six-kilometre intervals along the coastal terrain.”
The camera cut away to aerial shots of the cliffs. The obvious fact that this was promotional tourism footage showed how cheap the TV-20 operation was. What did impress Peter was the stage presence of Moss, who had lowered his voice to an authoritative baritone and seemed more mature. When the camera returned to the desk, Peter could tell that Wendie, despite her posed persona, was not happy. Did she resent Parny’s toothy aura as a threat to her senior position at the station? Peter appreciated her shrewdness nonetheless, and perhaps she was attempting to separate herself from the Six-K theory.
“If the Task Force calculation is correct,” Parny intoned, “the Six-K Killer will soon cross into Dorset. We will obtain a statement from Dorset Police on the impending threat to our community.”
In spite of the alliterative new label, Peter doubted that it would lodge in the public mind. “The Rover” was just too easy to say.
The next morning, Tommy arrived early enough for them to take a few minutes for coffee on the veranda. He’d had the Mercedes washed before leaving London, and it sat gleaming beside the driveway fence. The bright autumn sun belied the sad circumstances. The three of them had been friends forever, Peter reflected. They had endured nearly five decades of crime and public crises: the Yorkshire Ripper, the IRA, the Brixton riots, Vietnam and the protests, the Underground bombings by terrorist fanatics. Peter flexed his bandaged arm — it had become a habit — and for the first time wondered how the scar would look. He and Tommy, stripped naked, would have presented a kaleidoscope of scars, a muddled tablet of a half century of crime. For Peter, his latest wound told him that he was still in the game.
“It’s a sad day,” Tommy stated.
Joan, who had watched Peter from the sidelines, and waited for him, for so many years, nodded. Her assistance that day in the bloodied passageways of the Lasker home had somehow changed things. She felt that she was an insider now, at least where the alien town of Whittlesun was concerned. The idea made her more protective of Peter and Tommy than ever.
“Tommy, you took to Father Salvez, I gather.”
He was old-school gracious. He looked at her, but Peter too. “In the interests of professional disclosure,” he began, “I called Father Vogans to express my condolences. A half hour on, I got a ring from Father Clarke. Asked me if I wanted to say a few words. Thought I might.”
Tommy parked a street over from St. Elegias, since the parking strip was pretty much full, and the three walked to the crowded front entrance of the church. It had been overcast when Peter and Tommy first visited; now the midmorning sun was out, though it failed to redeem the ponderous building with its chiselled, bulbous stones. The coastal damp and Victorian chimneys of the town had stained the grout to a purply colour. No wonder Salvez preferred the Abbey ruins. At least the ironwork was formed in an authentic Gothic style. The encroaching ranks of flats made the contrasting church seem lonely. Peter wondered how large the congregation was these days.
Friends of the deceased clustered at the edge of the steps, as if reluctant to enter. They were a mixed group. Peter assessed two knots of mourners: priests from other churches and a fresher-faced contingent of men and women in their twenties. Peter assumed — hoped — that they were preservationists associated with Salvez’s Abbey campaign. He noticed several nurses, likely from the neighbourhood hospital, but there was no sign of the crotchety woman from the admin office of St. Elegias. He scanned the crowd closely from the church steps, on the lookout for Vogans, whom he spied in a ring of clerics; the priest acknowledged Peter with a we-need-to-talk-later glance. Peter was surprised to see Mrs. Ransell in the crowd, standing alone, though apparently quite content, over by the corner of the church. He pointed her out to Joan.
Reverend Clarke, a burly man with a goiterous neck, presided over the two-hour High Mass. The ceremony stayed in a minor key while he held the pulpit. Clarke delivered a tepid homily laced with platitudes about service and devotion to Christ. His baritone was steady, but Peter knew that Salvez would have preferred that the singing of the choir be in Latin, however middling the choir itself. There was something perfunctory about the effort. Only when the time came for giving witness was Father Salvez truly allowed into the church, made flesh and blood by a half century of friends. The throng was brought to tears by a young woman who had worked with the priest up at the Abbey cataloguing the remaining stones and writing an updated history of the grounds, which, “out of necessity” as she put it, she would dedicate to him. Her encomium became the Eucharistic prayer Clarke should have given, as she spoke of Salvez’s mystical blending with the sea and the cliffs.
The tributes flowed, anecdotes of Salvez’s time at the seminary, his good works in the community and his love of games and puns. Tommy Verden stepped to the rostrum and recounted their visit to the sick man’s flat. Tommy possessed hitherto buried talent as a comedian.
“I’m a policeman. Coppers and priests may seem to have little in common. Okay, we both appreciate a tidy confession. But a priest ministers to many troubled souls and I know that Father John Salvez comforted thousands in his lifetime. I only wish I could make that claim. But here’s the thing. I appreciate toughness in a man, what the Americans call a ‘stand-up guy,’ and although I met Father Salvez exactly one time, I understood immediately that he was one of the tough guys. A tough guy who
had a soft side, who loved puzzles and an old church on a hill. What more can you ask of a man?”
Local ladies served coffee and tea in the downstairs common room but the day remained mild and most of the crowd regathered on the lawns. They couldn’t hope to fit on the entrance stairs and naturally spilled over to the pocket-sized park across the way, where several benches had been placed beside the display case holding the church’s schedule. Peter wandered, or pretended to, not quite aware that Vogans was his objective. He wondered if Ron Hamm had attended. Joan walked next to him as he moved down the church steps but then she went off to give Tommy Verden a big kiss on the cheek.
A middle-aged woman, about fifty, came up to Peter and introduced herself as Salvez’s niece. Her sad look may have been entrenched, or merely a response to her uncle’s suicide.
“I’m his only niece. He mentioned you twice in the days before his death.”
Peter could only guess who had pointed him out to the woman; probably Vogans, surmising that his continuing investigation of Anna Lasker might lead him again to the Abbey ruins, and that he would be interested in what she had to report about John Salvez’s last days, however anecdotal. Peter felt tears welling up. Any visit to the Abbey would feel hollow and transgressive now. “What did he say, Mrs. . . . ?”
“Murray. He mentioned your help in the last days, you and Mr. Verden. Father Vogans called me that following morning. Thank goodness. I thought Outpatient Services had lined up the home nursing. We were able to straighten it all out, no thanks to the church. Anyway, thank you, Detective.”
“I assume you’re tasked with clearing out the flat?”
“Yes. There’s a mountain of paper about the restoration. The Preservation Trust is taking all that.”
She was close to tears herself. Peter tried to hold her attention. “Did he keep any papers, files up at the Abbey itself?”
Walking Into the Ocean Page 37