Walking into the Ocean (30 page)

“You're calling late, Miss Merwyn. You must have wrapped for the evening, so I'm guessing you have something you want to run by me? Off the record, I'll assume.”

She surprised him again. “Inspector, do you see any overlap between the Lasker and Rover cases? Because I won't raise it in our feature if you say no. But they both involve criminals operating along the coastal territory around here. Both offenders are unknown, mysterious characters. There's a feeling of evil about both of them. It's like the cliffs are an image that is attracting death.”

She was rehearsing her on-air spiel but the tenor she was adopting was excessive, near hysterical, and they both knew it. He shouldn't be judgmental, he reminded himself. After all, he had at one point concluded that he might have to resolve one case in order to wrap up the other — he had never been sure how he would pull this off, but there could be some link there, if he could find it. She was a complex woman, Wendie Merwyn, evidently troubled by the deaths of all these women, but Anna Lasker in particular.

“No,” he replied. “There is no link between the two cases. Lasker will be sighted sooner or later. It will probably be luck that catches him. He's certainly not the Rover, if that was what you were implying.”

“Not exactly,” she said. He wasn't sure that she believed him. “By the way, I interviewed Detective Hamm today, and he's promised a forensics report and a blood analysis on the Lasker home, although I haven't received either yet.”

This was spin on her part, merely a teaser to see if Peter would disclose more information. It was likely that Hamm hadn't promised that much. But the young detective had exceeded his authority in promising any autopsy or other forensics. It was bothersome, an amateur's mistake made out of impulse. As for Wendie, it felt odd to him that she was pressing so hard on Lasker, and less on the wraith who had killed four girls and bruised two more. Most reporters would home in the bigger story. He liked Wendie, with her mix of ambition and smarts. And, for a moment, he felt an irrational fear for her safety.

“I'll tell you, Miss Merwyn, I believe that André Lasker is alive. If we arrest him, I promise to talk to you before anyone else.”

“Thank you, Chief Inspector.”

The cottage was silent. It was too cold for crickets, too quiet to rouse any chained dogs. Peter and Joan talked at the dining room table. He made a deliberate effort to tell her everything in detail. He began with Merwyn's speculative call, recounting the conversation verbatim. He branched out to his theories of Lasker's plan, and by midnight finally connected the thread back to the day Joan had visited the house near the high street — in effect, he told the whole Lasker tragedy in reverse order. They sat under the antique chandelier, while the rest of the cottage remained dark. He thought of trying Salvez again but decided it was too late. Although it had only been a day, he felt at a huge distance, in time and in psychic space, from the places of death in Dorset and Devon. Neither had been his case, yet he had to take on some of the responsibility for several tragedies. But thus far, had he contributed any more than second-guessing? He'd been called in to do what he could to straighten out the Lasker mystery, an assignment at least consistent with the role of a part-time consulting detective. But it was never in Peter's nature to keep a non-accountable, prophylactic aloofness from the worst, outrageous dimensions of a crime, or to let other policemen dip their hands in real blood while he developed theories in the background. He expected to return to Whittlesun very soon. He owed that much to Anna Lasker and Molly Jonas.

He wondered if André really was alive. The mechanic had embarked on a romantic escape from his old life. He had left his wedding ring behind, in the dead centre of his abandoned clothes. Naked, he walked into the ocean to find his rebirth. If André could sustain his original romantic vision of the sea, he might survive, but it was also the sea that might lure him back.

The telephone rang at midnight. He and Joan looked at it. They let it ring three times, trying to guess who it could be. Peter was startled to hear Bartleben.

“Peter, you owe me a call. I mean, now that you're finished stomping through the tulips in Dorset.” No mention of the report. Peter waited. He looked over at Joan; she was smiling benignly, and he was tempted to put her on the other phone line.

“Peter, are you sitting down?” Bartleben said, in a flat tone.

“Yeah.”

“Peter, André Lasker has reappeared.”

“Where?”

“Malta.”

On November 7, 1974, the seventh Earl of Lucan beat the family nanny to death in his wife's London house, imagining her in the darkness to be his estranged spouse. Then, showing no imagination at all, he beat his wife in similar fashion and fled in several directions, eventually disappearing into the Channel.

The Lucan case had happened at the beginning of Peter's career as a tenured Scotland Yard detective. Now, seated in the air raid shelter at the back of the cottage garden, he flipped through the yellow foolscap pages of the file and realized that the Lucan melodrama might have been the case that had convinced him to look at crime through a literary lens. The archetypes in this instance were not feisty lasses from Hardy or haunted seekers from a Thomas Mann novel. The template here was the domestic children's tale from late-Victorian and Edwardian times, but made topsy-turvy.

The Lucan narrative was replete with nannies and devoted mommies, doting grandmothers, white Belgravia houses with many secret rooms, and party-giving friends who always answered the door when Mummy or Daddy Lucan knocked. The father in such stories is usually a hapless, one-off figure, a bit foolish, seen yielding to the children's requests and laying his benign tolerance on thick. Except that on this occasion the drinking-gambling-philandering father slaughtered the nanny, bludgeoned the wife and left the children upstairs in the bedroom to fend with their dreams.

Although they laid claim to a patrician provenance, there wasn't much to like in the Lucans. When they met and married, he had already dedicated himself to the gambler's vocation. He reportedly worked at a poker school for a while, and perhaps she found this romantic. The files noted that the earl soon abandoned poker for
chemin de fer
and blackjack, which he pursued at private clubs in Mayfair. These games involved low skill and quick gratification, unlike the more complex, paced games of five-card draw and stud. It could be argued that when Lucan lost his poker acumen, he began to lose his wife.

They had three children, George, Frances and Camilla. In keeping with the children's-story motif, Peter would have told the tale from Camilla's viewpoint. George, who stood to gain the title of eighth Earl, was too seriously status-committed to tell it in a balanced fashion, and Frances, as it turned out, became an important witness to her parents' exceedingly bloody brawl and was thus open to endless challenges to her depiction. Only Camilla, haunted by the irony of having slept through the whole fracas, could have been trusted to maintain some objectivity, and possibly return, deeply haunted, to the family tragedy with a memoir later in life.

As it turned out, it was the countess herself who first put an account on the record. Peter cut back and forth between his old files and her subsequent website version. From a legal point of view, and even aside from the inculpatory bloodstains, the evidence of premeditation likely would have doomed the husband in court. He was chronically in debt and hated his wife, to whom he had by then lost custody of the children. He had moved to a flat, while she retained the family mansion in Belgravia. At several dinners he was heard to say that he would be better off with her dead. In the confusion of that fatal night, his pop-up appearances at the Clermont Club and other hangouts smacked of alibi shopping.

Is character destiny? Peter believed that Lucan was undone by the shallowness of his plan. He couldn't even get the victim right. Mistaking the young nanny for his wife in the darkened basement landing — it served him right, since he had unscrewed the bulb (a metaphor for stupidity if ever there was one) — he struck her down with a lead pipe wrapped in tape. The homicide began to resemble the board game Clue. By the time Lady Lucan came down to look for the nanny, he had her stuffed in a canvas sack. He then struck his wife using the same weapon, but she was not easy prey. She grabbed him by the testicles and forced him to back away. There followed a truly bizarre standoff, during which they lurched from the basement to their lavatory and paused, in a pseudo-conciliatory way, in the bedroom to review their options. Somehow, she managed to escape, running out through the white-pillared portal of the house on Belgrave Street.

Much bloodied but still alive, Lady Lucan tottered efficiently down the road to the nearest pub, the working class Plumber's Arms. (In the margin of his original notes, Peter had written: “Who would call their pub that? Shouldn't it have been ‘The Plumber's Elbow'?”) She burst through the door and articulated: “Help me! I've just escaped being murdered. He's in the house. He's murdered my nanny!”

As his notes reminded him, Peter had doubted the wife's precision at the time. If you are gushing blood in the sudden glare of an indifferent tavern, do you announce yourself in perfect sentences? The Countess had been under siege from the press and conspiracy sceptics for decades since.

As for Lucan, any premeditation collapsed into improvisation. Failing to prevent his wife from escaping, he began an evasive odyssey across southern England. First, he telephoned his mother to ask if she would mind picking up the children. No one knew what he really planned to do next, but his luck now failed him. He attempted to contact old friends, perhaps more for solace than for what they could do for him. Lucan sustained an ingenuous regard for the friendship of his circle, a coterie of hyphenated aristocrats whose main assistance in the long run was to give vague and grudging testimony to the police regarding Lucan's last hours. Some observers hypothesized later that his reluctant friends had helped him out of the country using an expensive speedboat, but there was little sign that any of them knew how to turn an ignition key.

Whichever the case, all these peripatetic roads led to the sea. Lucan parked his borrowed Ford Corsair near the beach at Newhaven and was never seen again.

Over the years, the reports of sightings of Lucan became egregious. He was typically found living in the back of a van or holding down a bar stool in an African village. All identifications proved bogus. The Yard tracked a dozen sightings every year. André Lasker could have read about the case, but there was no way to be sure.

Peter had played a minor part in the investigation in the mid-seventies. Even then, the reports poured in of Lucan surfacing in South Africa, Goa and other classic havens for men desperate to avoid Interpol. Cammon himself, who had just started along his career path when the Yard mobilized to track down Lucan, was sent to Cherbourg to investigate a sighting at a popular resort hotel. An Englishman fitting Lucan's callow profile had stayed there two summers in a row, and was known to take the train to Deauville, famous for its upscale casinos.

Peter interviewed the Cherbourg hotel manager, who was sure that the man wasn't Lucan. Several British tourists had dutifully called the nearest British Consul to swear that they had found the fugitive on the Continent, at the hotel or in the town, but Peter noticed that few identifications were reported by the French residents in the area. Perhaps they liked the tradition of welcoming those who were unacceptable to their home governments. Peter had recently read Somerset Maugham's
The Moon and Sixpence
, in which the Englishman Charles Strickland deserts wife and children to live a bohemian existence in Paris; Peter noted that Maugham regarded the neighbourhoods of Paris as more accommodating hiding places than the provinces.

The hotel guest in Cherbourg was certainly not the murderer. For one thing, he liked to have his picture taken, and there was even a snapshot of the man on the veranda. He was fifty pounds heavier than Lucan and had a large strawberry mark on his cheek. Lucan was known to eat lamb chops several times a week; the suspect never chose them from the hotel menu. It was the off-season, and Peter remembered that the hotelier tried to persuade him to stay an extra couple of days. Peter, as a junior officer, worried about abusing the Yard's expense schedule, and so refused; but he found out that he couldn't get a train to the French coast until the next morning. The manager treated him to dinner that evening on the closed-in veranda.

Across the table, swirling his wine in the wide bowl of his glass (Peter stayed with a fine Bière de Garde), the manager related the following joke, which he said Parisians liked to tell on themselves.

An Englishman moves to the City of Light with a firm determination to become a great lover, in the French model. (“Beware the man or woman fanatical to live out a cliché,” the hotel manager interjected in his own story.) He courts women like a Scaramouche, wines and dines them relentlessly from the moment he arrives. He remains mysterious and nameless, except for the adopted
prénom
Jacques, and is all the more romantic a figure for it. One night, he suggests to one of his amours that they go for a walk along the quay that edges the Seine. He kisses her in the moonlight as the
Bateaux Mouches
sail by. Sweeping her into his arms, he slips on the wet cobbles and she falls into the fast-flowing Seine. He is consumed by remorse. But not quite consumed . . . Within days, his desires overcome his guilt and he seeks out another lover. Again he risks the
bord du fleuve,
and the second girl falls to her watery death. But his ardour — only temporarily dampened, so to speak — wins out, and our Englishman finds yet a third lover and, wouldn't you know it, she drowns as well. There is nothing for it: the man writes a final letter, an ode to Paris and lost loves, and jumps into the river from the Pont Neuf. The body is never found. Thus, he gains an immortal reputation as a romantic, more Parisian than the locals.

The hotel manager leaned across the linen tablecloth towards Peter to deliver the punch line: “Who would have guessed that the man also enjoyed the kill?”

Peter had no doubt that Lord Lucan would have emerged soon after his escape, had he survived. He had planned his crime poorly and mismanaged it from the beginning. The dissolute seventh Earl was descended from the notorious third Earl, who had sent the Light Brigade down that deadly valley in the Crimea, a fact that led Peter's colleagues at the Yard to speak of “generations of screw-ups.” Lucan was a hapless mastermind at best: he would have returned to gambling almost immediately. As a titled man, he could never have withstood a life of anonymous penury. As dawn approached, his plan disintegrating, he must have seen the ocean as his only resolution.

Peter knew not to overdo the analogies to André Lasker's disappearance as he read through the musty dossier, but they had one thing in common, and that was the challenge of identity. Lucan didn't know, had likely never known, who he was: in
Brett's
he was listed as the seventh Earl and in the birth records he was Richard John Bingham; to Lady Lucan he was simply John, and to the kids he was Dada; at the Clermont Club his self-chosen moniker was Lucky, although near the end he called himself Blue Lucan. Was he content to depart knowing that his son, George, would inevitably inherit the title of eighth Earl, and an empty bank account?

André Lasker may have been an ordinary man in a provincial town, but he dreamed of a new identity. He had put his affairs in order. He would find his true self in an exotic hideaway on the other side of the world. But the world is a circle, and Anna's self-destruction had put the lie to that dream, and that was why André Lasker would come home.

As Michael had told his father, it was the monkey that she had left him to carry.