Walking into the Ocean Read Free

left extreme. He could see a ruined church on the clifftop.
    If Lasker hadn’t been washed out irretrievably, the sea would serve as its own net and cough up the body eventually. With his pointed index finger, Peter drew an arc, a decisive line across the near horizon from land point to point, penning the zone of investigation into an area about a nautical mile wide, from the promontory to the pier. What had happened out beyond this perimeter would likely remain unknown until Lasker crossed back into this zone, one way or another.
    How did it feel striding out to the vanishing point, until the salt water closed over your head? Was the urge to swim irresistible? The metaphor became literal: swim or sink. At what point did your decision become unretractable, André?
    He had spent enough time here for the moment. He had just wanted to take a look, gain an impression. He creaked to his feet but remained focused on the Channel for an extra minute. What made Peter Cammon a good detective was a kind of free-roaming patience (Bartleben’s phrase); he was willing to stare at a scene without knowing what he was looking for, until something lodged in his mind, even if only in his subconscious. Not many detectives were willing to partner with him.
    Did you plan your walk into the depths for a day like this one, André? Not likely. Verden was right: you followed a tight schedule shaped by more compelling forces than the weather.
    Just one more minute, he decided. The tide was moving in by detectable inches. The wind had come up to create distinct waves. Dickens might have had this place in mind when he described “the waves of an unwholesome sea.” Matthew Arnold had imagined “the grating roar of pebbles” in the tidal flow, although he had been talking about religion, the Sea of Faith retreating.
    He shook his head in an effort to reset his thinking. He had once regarded homicide in almost literary terms. Whether or not he was naturally inclined this way from four years at Oxford, he came to understand that most criminal acts were sordid and unimaginative. Violent, driven men followed classic patterns — not to mention that they told themselves cheap stories to justify their deeds — and his task was to follow the storyline back to the standard founderous bog of greed, envy, ambition and the breakdown of self-control. In other words, Peter Cammon was a romantic, always searching out the melodrama. His febrile mind had served him well in the early years. Young Inspector Cammon proved instrumental in solving several revenge crimes back then, including three killings by the Kray organization. The murders, and a bank robbery in Durham, had made his reputation. Rapid promotion had followed.
    But it was also his duty, he came to realize after a few years, to try to comprehend the hot anger at the core of most crimes. Some dismissed this darkness as imponderable, but he saw that the attacker’s rage and the victim’s terror clashed on a tilting plane, where pain and hope rose and fell, and that was where the uniqueness of each case would be found. The anger and the terror had to be engaged before he could parse the criminal act.
    André, did you begin that night in hot anger? Did you run from the horror into the shallow waves, fearing to meet the undertow? Did the chill sea then turn passion to panic?
    At Peter’s retirement reception, Lord Paymer, the current head of New Scotland Yard, had urged Peter, given his decades of exposure to violent offences, to assemble an encyclopaedia of crimes. This had been his unsubtle way of edging Peter towards fully leaving; the chief hated the “half measure” of semi-retirement and the cost of keeping consulting detectives on the rolls. But Peter had little interest in reducing his career experience to a list of pigeon-holed sins, and if he had undertaken such a taxonomy, “walking into the sea” would have been a sub-genre of a sub-class,