Walking into the Ocean (35 page)

To prime his analytical juices, while fully realizing that he was mixing the two investigations, Peter undertook an artificial exercise. Looking at a case from an oblique angle sometimes helped. This little diversion almost amounted to one of Father's word games. He was aware that the women in Whittlesun could hold the key to both investigations. For one thing, they were all — and he struggled for the word — “honest”; in their various ways, each possessed the innocence of the martyr and the clarity of the seer. Whether it was Anna with her desperate understanding of André's desertion, or Molly's naked body rising to confront her murderer, the women challenged their attackers with raw truths. He took a sheet of paper and listed the women:

Anna Lasker

Selma Mitter, JayJay Evans, Anna Marie Dokes, Molly Jonas (the dead girls)

Daniella Garvena and Brenda Van Loss

Mrs. Lasker

Guinevere Ransell

Mayta

Wendie Merwyn

He looked over the list; obviously it was too broad, but that wasn't the point.
Do they have anything in common?
For one thing, he supposed, they wanted nothing
from
the Rover or Lasker (Anna excepted), whatever they were justified in seeking to do
to
their abusers. He read and reread the list. The benefit of lateral thinking, Peter knew, was that it could lead to answers you weren't even pondering. He read and reread the list. There was an odd woman out: Wendie Merwyn. She was the only one who could profit materially from the investigations. He tried to pinpoint his instinctive concern about her. During their last telephone conversation, she had stayed with Lasker and had refused to engage at any length on the Rover Task Force. But if Wendie were looking for a career-maker, the Rover case had to be it. Her decision to focus on Lasker was a professional judgment call, but he wondered about her choice.

But then he read the list again. He understood that Wendie had been told to downplay the Rover scare. For the first time, he comprehended the force that Regional officials had brought to bear. They hoped to solve the Rover problem before the story broke open. Lasker would be a welcome diversionary success if Peter could nab him. He pondered the question of how much Bartleben was complicit with the politicians.

Peter had resisted the meds; he told himself that he needed to be clear-headed for Whittlesun. But it was late afternoon, and after three hours of close work on the files, the ache of his wound had tipped him into dysfunction. He walked back to the house for a painkiller. Joan examined his arm, pronounced him okay and got the pill for him. She understood that he needed a long nap; they would share a late dinner. She ushered him up to the bedroom and made sure that he took off his shoes and jacket and prepared to sleep for a while — he was just as likely to burst out of the cottage in five minutes to examine some piece of evidence out in the shed. Lying on the master bed, he began to drift off even before she left the room. Downstairs, Joan moved through the house silently, letting her husband sleep. But she didn't go outside, beyond hearing range. She felt alienated when he got like this — relentless, irritable — and she hated this phase of a case, yet part of her annoyance was born of fear for his safety. She knew perfectly well that he had no fear of confronting violent criminals, that he was capable of killing, and had killed people. And, of course, she loved and trusted him.

No one who knew Peter would have been surprised that he precisely understood his own sleep patterns. As he sank quickly, he knew, as he crashed, that he would experience wild dreams. But he maintained, even into his subconscious, an atheistic disbelief in the symbol-heavy dreams of Freud and Jung. Hopes, and especially fears, don't vary much (he argued with himself) and anxiety can express itself in any object. Peter Cammon felt superior to psychology, in the way that many people do who have never studied it. When all the debunking challenges to Freud had emerged a few years back, Peter had read them with satisfaction. In his line of work, he cared nothing for the packaging of the id, ego and superego by, for example, zealous prosecutors, defence psychiatrists and behavioural sciences types. They showed up constantly as blithe labels in sentencing reports, but they rarely helped him glean the motivations of evil men; they were slots for cliché neuroses. For instance — and he didn't complete this thought as he sank into sleep — he had worked on the Yorkshire Ripper and Lord Lucan muddles, and inklings of their childhood fears and sexual traumas hadn't helped anyone at all in the investigations.

Some decades ago, he had seen a psychologist who regularly dealt with the problems of police officers, the Yard's people her specialty. He had been working a case in Manchester involving several arsons and accompanying murders. Peter always recalled the count: twelve victims in six separate immolations. Yet the killer's pattern seemed to be no pattern at all. Back then, the Yard liked to pair older, veteran detectives with junior officers in the field. Peter worked the first four crime scenes in Stockport with an old hand named Evans, who chronologically was only a few years older, but had many more years in. The case stalled, even as the incidents mounted, with some of the bodies left unidentified for weeks. The local command centre ordered all the victims to be held in the morgue until all were attached to names. Peter remembered viewing the charred bodies in a gruesome row. Two were children. But then, out of desperation, Evans sent him back to London to run data sets, a tedious and fruitless job.

“Peter, we lack a motive. No connections among the victims, no lunar cycle, no profit. If the arsonist-murderer lacked overt motive, other than some vicious misanthropy, what patterns can there be? How do you hunt down perversity? Just do your best.”

This was the era of Son of Sam, when an alert beat cop in New York had thought to check parking tickets in the vicinity of a lover's lane, and thereby traced the killer. By the time of the Stockport arsons, forensics labs everywhere were stacked high with all manner of spreadsheets covering parking infractions and low-grade citations and cautions, and Peter spent his days with keypunch operators and mathematicians borrowed from King's College. Modern profiling wasn't in use much in those days. Peter was stuck in London when the case broke in Manchester. An intemperate word by a laid-off machinist led to a knock on the door; the arsonist was found dead with a stomachful of lye. A day later, Peter's senior had a major heart attack and was forced to retire. During that period in London, far from the fires of Manchester — Peter never got to see the last few bodies — he experienced a recurring dream. Its central antagonist was a snake, a viper the size of an anaconda, who confronted him everywhere in the dream. As he wandered through strange houses, the snake would rear up in doorways, or wait, coiled up, in the corners of empty rooms. As in a video game, various odd weapons, hammers and scythes, were presented to him. Whenever he attacked the snake, the weapons disintegrated into dust. Always, in the repeated dream, he was trying to reach Joan. Peter, who dutifully reported his distressing dream saga up the line, was ordered to see a shrink, who in fact was Viennese, and she made him sit in a big, soft chair facing away from her. She had read his career file and the first thing she said when he described his serpent dream was:

— You're normal, perhaps the most normal police officer I have met.

— Is that supposed to be a compliment?

— Yes. [Her
s
was sibilant. Was she the snake, his dream anticipatory?] Your orderly mind stands you in good stead. Keeps you sane.

— I'm cured, then?

— Didn't say that, Mr. Cammon.

— That isn't what I expected from a psychiatrist.

— What did you expect?

— Reticence? My impression of psychology is that the restoration of order defines psychiatric success.

— Nothing wrong with that.

— But what if my dream is the new order, within my own mind? Like some kind of looping videotape? The viper coils and uncoils in front of me. He greets me everywhere I go, like Dodgson's Caterpillar.

— That seems to me a literary conceit. The snake is not real, and, no, it is not just a cheap symbol.

— He's in every dream. I try every time, in every room, to get past him.

— Your life is not a cinema story that follows one repeating plot. You cannot rely on your dream of a snake to last. Maybe that's why they call movies the “flickers.” They are evanescent.

— I see only disorder. I'm worried, Doctor. I find only unaccountable crimes and the potential for violence in my dream.

— Yes, and it is such disorder, the violence, that plagues every detective. It is to be expected that the images of close-at-hand death haunt them. But the solving of crimes ultimately braces them and they go on.

— Are you saying that the dream will get better by wearing itself out? [
With a Prozac prescription or two,
he thought.]

— Probably. Here's what I mean, Inspector. It is a difficult life in your profession. You have to decide it is for you. But I sense that it is indeed your vocation.

— 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.