Walking into the Ocean (10 page)

“The police have already questioned me,” she affirmed, implying that she had been detained in shackles, or worse.

“I would like to see the company books,” he stated. The shop's black-spined ledgers stood in a neat row on the shelf behind her head.

“The books? Whatever for?”

Peter looked around the office. There were testimonial letters from customers on the wall and a couple of gold-stamped parchments of commendation from the local business council. The most recent award was two years old.

“Those,” he said.

This was the moment when a witness either mentioned warrants or she did not. Sally seemed to believe that she was the Defender of the Faith, preserving an empire and a legacy even after the founder had fled.

“Them's only the last six months.”

But she handed over one of them. The pages were filled in with her neat penmanship.

“We do a cash business, eighty per cent,” Sally said. “Majority of customers with insurance settlements deposit their cheque and pay us in cash. But I record everything.”

“Do you take the cash to the bank yourself?”

Her tone turned even more defensive, for a number of bad reasons, Peter thought. “I do now. Mr. Lasker always did it before. Took the bag to the night deposit at the Barclays branch.”

“Is that near his home?”

“Might be. I've never been invited along, myself.”

So André Lasker likely used the same bank to handle his family and business accounts, and that branch was closer to his home than to the garage. Why was it more convenient to use a bank near to his house? Perhaps someone at the bank was in on Lasker's scheme.

“That was before all that business happened,” Sally continued.

It seemed evident that the business was continuing without let-up, as it should, he supposed. But he asked anyway.

“Is the business still prospering?”

“Prospering? Oh, we're doing fine. Revenue stream's flowing nicely, even above the usual, I might say. Are you really with Scotland Yard? Can I see your identification again?”

“No.” He went behind the desk and took down the most recent volume. He scanned the last three months of entries, including the week of André's flight; the pattern of cash payments appeared to remain steady in the days leading up to his disappearance. Lasker had maintained his habits to the end, at least at the office. The entries in the ledger had halted the Sunday after the incident.

“Was Mr. Lasker well liked?”

“Well liked? Oh, he was a reasonable boss. Everybody misses him.”

“Did he socialize with the staff?” Peter understood that he was reaching his point of marginal return with Sally. He glanced at her desk and noted that a fresh volume had been started for the post–André Lasker regime, although this one was blue rather than black. He refrained from taking it; instead, he would ask Ron Hamm to impound the lot of them.

“Socialize? No, mechanics aren't the kind to socialize with the boss after hours. But he always bought three bottles of Bailey's at Christmas. He was well liked, Mr. Lasker.”

Her comments fell into the category of not speaking ill of the dead. Peter pointed to several items in the credit column of the last month's account book.

“These seem different. What are they?”

“We run a car hire business on the side. Very profitable but not that big an operation, you understand.”

“A cash operation?”

“Fifty-fifty. Because it's mostly business types that rent, they need receipts, and that makes them think they might as well put the hire charges on a credit card.”

“But less than half the customers.”

“Mr. Lasker tended to offer them a better deal for cash.” While old Sally remained wary, she was enjoying the attention, so long as she could continue to educate the ignorant policeman from London.

He had only one more important question. He would interview the mechanics later. “Sally,” he said, with ersatz intimacy, “who's managing the garage now?”

“Albrecht Zoren, our chief mechanic,” she replied.

Peter took down another ledger, merely for general comparison. He replaced the two volumes in their proper order and left the office.

“But don't you want to talk to the men?” Her tone was plaintive, but he didn't turn around.

“The ‘open road'?” Stan Bracher, the Saskatchewanian, had once said while they were rolling down the A5. “Try three hundred miles of nothing but grain elevators and frozen wheat stalks.” Peter had once driven the I-70 across the State of Kansas in mid-January and knew what Stan meant. The drive to Weymouth from Whittlesun hardly compared but Peter realized, as he swung the Subaru onto the dual carriageway, that he was in the mood to drive. The SatNav brought him to the front of a tall church near the centre of Weymouth. The trip took precisely an hour. The church overfilled the small backstreet square on which it stood. Its narrow footprint, and its grim steeple, recalled a rocket ship. The front steps ran right to the edge of the pavement, and exiting parishioners were expected to move immediately to the grassy quadrangle across the way.

The neighbourhood was dead quiet at this time of day; shadows from the looming buildings turned the air damp. Peter parked the car in the sexton's spot at the side and walked to the front of the building. He stopped at the bottom of the broad stone steps. Etched into granite above the main door were the words
Saint George's Anglican Church.

He walked around to the common entrance, where a sign advertised:

St. George's Anglican Church

Office of the Bishop Anglican Diocese

Office of the Patriarchate Romanian Orthodox Church

A separate hanging sign had been turned to
Open
.

The door was unlocked. He entered without hesitation and descended a level. Modern churches in Britain did not have crypts; they had basements decorated with linoleum flooring. The place was as silent as a tomb, though. He explored the rooms along the musty hallway, but neither the Anglican Bishop nor the officiating priest of the Romanian contingent in Weymouth appeared to be anywhere downstairs. The door to the Administration Office had been left ajar and a desk lamp was on, but no one was home. A ceiling light provided a beacon to the winding stairway at the end of the hall, and Peter traced his way up to the main church.

The building, in Peter's quick, almost dismissive judgment, was like many other houses of worship built since World War II. It had a late-sixties or early-seventies feel. Holy fathers, complicit with church architects of the era, forgot that modern styles, in this case with a bias towards pastel colours and teak trim, dated quickly, leaving their inventions oddly retrograde and unimpressive three or more decades on. St. Walthram's Abbey, even in its crumbling state, projected more warmth than this edifice.

A man was sitting at the large pipe organ in the alcove created by the left branch of the transept. He sat high up, the keyboard in a crescent embracing his body, the pipes like a jungle of reeds facing him. Peter could imagine F.R. Symington staging
The Phantom of the Opera
in this space. But he had another sharp sensation, namely, that the man at the organ was waiting for him. It wasn't true, but nonetheless he paused and waited. The priest, who wore a black suit, turned to look at his visitor, even though Peter had not made a sound. Father Vogans was in his early seventies, with a grooved face and bushy eyebrows; he had a heavy, Slavic jaw and the shoulders of a middleweight boxer.

“Do you play?” The voice was warm, with only a hint of an Eastern European accent. It carried clearly through the cool air beneath the hollow of the cupola.

“I'm not in the least musical,” Peter admitted. His voice carried distinctly; he was glad he hadn't shouted.

“Then there is no point in your coming up here. I will come down.”

The priest descended and met Peter by the rail in front of the altar.

“Nicolai Vogans.”

They shook hands. Peter identified himself as a Yard chief inspector. The information didn't faze Vogans, just as it had not surprised Father Salvez or F.R. Symington. Vogans only nodded and led the way down to the passageway and staircase that Peter had just used.

“Have a seat,” the priest said, in the Administration Office. Immediately, Vogans began the elaborate ritual of making coffee. He had all the accoutrements — filters, ground coffee, a jug of water and a shiny, copper-piped machine. “What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?”

“I'm here about Anna Lasker.”

“I thought you might be.”

“Why is that, Father?”

Father Vogans turned, a teaspoonful of coffee poised in one hand. He peered over the top of his glasses, at the classic ironic angle. “I'm pushing seventy. So are you, I'm guessing. Let's see what else we have in common, Inspector Cammon, as men of a certain experience, able to cut through the niceties.”

“Okay. Was she was a member of your congregation?”

“Yes.”

“An active member?”

“Let me get this coffee going before we talk. It is too important for distractions.” He finished his preparations and left the coffeemaker to bubble and steam. He took the chair behind the desk, across from Peter.

“‘Active' is not the right word. She lived in Whittlesun, not an easy commute every Sunday when you have no car.”

Peter had been unaware that she couldn't drive. Apparently, André did not see fit to drive her.

“And we are a small parish. No, again I am not being precise. We serve the Romanian community across all of southern England, but the Weymouth contingent is not large. And this is not wholly our church. It's owned by the Anglicans.”

“I see that. What's the connection?”

Vogans got up and turned back to his machine, recalibrating a knob. “The connection of Christian to Christian, I hope. This was established first as an Anglican church, St. George's. He's the patron saint of our church as well. So it was appropriate that they offered us space. Moreover, the Romanian Orthodox church in London, a beautiful church, is also a joint operation with the Anglicans. It is called St. Dunstan's. You should visit it when you are next in London.”

“I see. Isn't that unusual?”

“Not at all. Have you been to St. Patrick's in Dublin? There is a whole Protestant section within that important Catholic cathedral.”

Peter tried to take the analogy at face value. To compare the Romanian church's experience to that of the Huguenots was a stretch. He took a closer look at Vogans. At almost seventy the man remained physically strong, his face hardened by outdoor work. Peter was not even tempted to patronize him as peasant stock; there was something of the trained athlete in his dignified strength.

“What did you think of Anna?” Peter said.

“A sad death. An unhappy life. But she had faith in God.”

“Was it her marriage that made her unhappy?”

Peter was choosing his words carefully but the priest was having none of it. “Don't worry, Chief Inspector, I will not be disclosing confidences from the confessional. But I don't mind telling you, she was unhappy. She still had ties to her family in Bucharest. Or Iasi, to be exact. She was bored with life in Dorset, and very frustrated.”

Great,
Peter thought
. Two people who hacked each other up out of boredom. They sent me down here for this?
His sudden irritation took him by surprise; perhaps his fever was returning. Condescension towards the victim was not his habit. He still ached from his near-fall up on the cliffs.

“Was she . . . volatile? Dramatic in nature? Emotional?” he asked.

“I would say so. Loved passionately. Hated passionately.”

“Whom did she hate?”

“No one, in effect. No one she told me about.”

“Did she talk about leaving her husband?”

“I can firmly say no to that, Chief Inspector. Anna wanted what every immigrant, and every young woman, wants.”

“Did she try to get pregnant?”

Father Vogans hesitated. He had poured the coffee and completed the sub-ritual of adding cream and sugar. Peter wondered about Romanian Orthodox rules on contraception. Vogans proceeded.

“She wanted children. He did not. But I want to say, Inspector, that they loved each other. Sometimes people cannot see the way forward.” Vogans crossed himself. “What they think will be inevitable progress in their lives turns out to be the same old thing. I feel guilty about Anna. If she had lived in this city, I am sure I could have involved her in the church more than I did. It would have given her a life.”

That was a pretty harsh summation of the woman's failures, Peter thought, even if the priest was eager to take on her sadness. “But what did she want, Father? What did she tell you she wanted?”

The priest looked at Peter. He discerned no pleading in the visiting policeman's tone. Vogans peered into his coffee cup, watching the steam curl across the surface, and understood that he'd best give a direct answer this time. Thus far the priest had let their common generation shape his answers, but this last question was a police officer's firm query.

Peter noticed for the first time that the cleric's eyes did not shine, that the irises were flat black, giving him an intimidating stare. A sermon from the pulpit by this priest would be something to experience. But his words were sincere and measured. “She wanted to bring her mother over from Bucharest.”

“And that wasn't possible?”

“The mother didn't want to come. Anna pleaded and wept, and she flew there several times, but the mother refused. My church is under the direct supervision of the Patriarch of Bucharest but my efforts were also in vain.”

“I have to ask, Father: did she seriously think of going back to Romania herself?”

Vogans went quiet but Peter was sure that he would answer. “Once, she talked about it. But I told her that her loyalty was to her husband, who had given her a good life in England. I'm afraid that we both pinned some hopes on her persuading him to have a family — a child, I mean.”

Peter flashed on Anna's blood spread across the corridor walls. He said nothing as Vogans sipped his coffee from a small cup. He noticed that the cleric's black cassock, very similar to Salvez's, hung on a manikin-like rack at the side of the room. Vogans saw him staring.

“I usually wear this suit in the daytime,” he said, glad to shift the subject of conversation. “The cassock runs down to the ankle and the hem drags on the floor too much. I wear it for liturgical occasions, of course.”

Draped over the shoulders of the cassock was a red cape, implying an elevated status. Peter recognized it as the chasuble. He wondered if Salvez owned one.

“The cape? That's the chasuble. Frankly, a nuisance to put on.”

In Peter's experience, when a priest started joking, he was trying to end the conversation. He had enough for the moment, anyway. The portrait of Anna was forming. The caffeine zinged through him; he stood and prepared to go. And then he had a revelation. He was in a church, and so why not? But it wasn't a specific revelation resulting from prayer; it arrived more obliquely than that. It was subsurface, something to do with Anna, with the pattern of the blood. He let his eyes go out of focus and he remained still an extra minute, even though Father Vogans must have been staring at him (Peter bet that the Romanian had seen his share of mystics). Something to do with the way Anna moved. In his reverie, he saw her sweep an arm across a wall that seemed to stretch into infinity. His lightheadedness had no connection with his dizzy spell in Sam's office, though it might have had something to do with the coffee.

Vogans broke in. “Let me show you something upstairs before you leave.”

He came around the desk but paused at the manikin and reflexively smoothed the front of the cassock. “Did you know that there are thirty-three buttons on the cassock, one for each year of Christ's life?”

Vogans led him back up the stairs to the main church. Peter was all right now. The priest turned to the wing of the transept opposite the pipe organ and gestured to a large wooden panel; Peter hadn't noticed it earlier. It resembled a rood screen in a Protestant church. The wood was intricately carved into frames, each of which housed a painted scene from the Bible. Peter naturally looked for the Annunciation and found it near the bottom of the panel. Gabriel knelt, as always, in front of the radiant Virgin, while God, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, and various cherubs looked down on the archangel's audience with Mary.

“That is called the iconostasis,” Vogans whispered. “It's an altar screen of great age and value from Romania. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself, in 1964, paid for its transport and installation. So you see, the ecumenical spirit is alive in southern England.” Peter accepted the devotion behind Vogans's explanation, even if he sounded like a boy who had been forced to move into his rich relative's house. Peter agreed that it was beautiful.

“Do you know Father Salvez?” Vogans asked.

“Yes. We have met. You know that he has cancer?”

The priest seemed startled by the question, but there was real sympathy in his response. “I've been told.”

Peter said his goodbyes and Vogans let him out the front door of the church so that he could see the stonework lining the entrance. He had the distinct feeling that Father Vogans didn't want to talk about Father Salvez. And it was interesting that the Romanian congregation, housed within this temple to Anglicanism, was large enough to deserve its own SatNav entry.

Paper covered every square inch of the desktop. More documents of various sizes, tagged and corner-turned, trailed across the carpet from the desk to the door and back again like some Ourobouros loop, in a sequence laid out by Chief Inspector Peter Cammon that only he understood. It was as if some bureaucratic Theseus had trickled out a path of paper in order to find his way out of the maze but hadn't succeeded. Other reports and photographs were stacked next to his chair, or perched on the settee in the corner; he had taped folio-size maps of the coast on the wall next to the television. This was the second time he had laid out the Lasker material, but he was no happier with this configuration. He had closed the curtains, but now it was about five o'clock, and he opened them again. He would have stood on the desk and looked at the evidence that way, if that would have helped. There was still a gaping hole awaiting the detailed autopsy. In Stan Bracher's absence, he would have to drive out to the Regional Lab and introduce himself to the presiding pathologist.