Walking into the Ocean Read Free Page A

at best. And from the literary perspective, were there any precedents? Didn’t someone in
Far from the Madding Crowd
choose that way out? It seemed a cowardly form of suicide, and if a deception, a contrived one. The catalogue entry would note the conventions in exiting via the ocean (whether intending to stay under or planning one’s resurfacing to a new life). Clothes are to be stacked in a squared pile above the high-tide line, so that they will be found. A note is superfluous. Civilization’s deserter, overwhelmed by a need to leave his old life behind, walks steadily into the water at a precise right angle to the horizon. It should be a neat, formal departure. Almost a British thing.
    André Lasker had followed all these rules, but Peter suspected that he had over-planned his exit. That was why Chief Inspector Peter Cammon gave fifty-fifty odds that Lasker was still alive.
    He counted to the seventh wave and turned back to the town.

CHAPTER 2
    The sea road climbed by a series of hairpin bends to the centre of Whittlesun, but it was faster to walk straight up the pedestrian steps that crossed the road at a right angle, like the straight lines on an American dollar sign. Rain threatened, but it would hold off for an hour or two, he guessed, although he was having trouble judging this coastal weather. At the top of the stone stairway, he took off his suit jacket and paused to look back at his first vista of the harbour off to the west. There was a boldness, a defiant confidence in the way the town engaged the sea. Whittlesun had been a significant Channel port for four centuries. His briefing stated that the port still offered moorings for fishermen and a marina for boaters, but larger ships no longer used the silted harbour. And if Lasker had jumped a ferry, it wasn’t out of Whittlesun; the nearest boat left from up the eastern coast.
    The upper road became the high street and led him right into the town. He reached the Delphine without a wrong turn, and found his bag and the Lasker dossier waiting in his room. He hadn’t bothered with his laptop, since apparently none of the hotels in Whittlesun offered wi-fi service or any other mode of in-room Internet. He wasn’t sure about using the computer facilities at the local station. As he unpacked, he noticed a card on the faux refectory desk that, indeed, offered a connection for a token fee. He thought about asking Tommy Verden to retrieve his computer from the cottage. He hung his spare clothes in the closet.
    Leaving his umbrella and hat in the room, he took the lift to the lobby and asked directions to the central police station. It turned out that the main, and only, police offices for Whittlesun were located farther up the hillside, but within walking distance.
    Against all logic and topography, the upper reaches of Whittlesun had been laid out on a right-angle grid. Major streets that would have flowed better if contoured around the foothills instead ran straight uphill at steep, stubborn angles. The hotel concierge told him to expect a serious climb no matter which route he took; there used to be a funicular tram running to the cliff plateau but it had “rusted out,” as he put it.
    Daubney Lane, the main commercial street in central Whittlesun, was bustling with traffic at this hour, and the town seemed prosperous enough to Peter. There was nothing startling or unfamiliar in the Whittlesun core; the renovators and the modernizers could only do so much with a traditional high street in a moderate-sized English town. If anything, the town was evolving into a tourist village, where quaintness becomes the touchstone and the imposed Dickensian veneer risks parody. Peter supposed that Whittlesun might have revived its maritime tradition, but instead it had opted for standard Victorian street lights and adding an Old English
e
to just about every shoppe name. It takes money to make the old new again, he thought. He sensed the struggle