The Lazarus Prophecy

F. G. Cottam

For Miranda Law,
With love and admiration

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

A Note on the Author

The call came from the Deputy Commissioner. He'd presumably been woken and, in turn, was waking her. He said, ‘It seems there's been another one. I'm afraid it's him again.'

‘Jesus,' she said.

‘I doubt he's in the frame. And we can probably rule out the apostles, too.'

‘I'm sorry, Sir.'

‘No, I'm sorry, inappropriate joke,' she heard him clear his throat, ‘inappropriate to joke, in the circumstances.'

‘We all do it,' she said. They all did. It was a coping mechanism.

‘The location he's given us is an apartment building, overlooking the river, south side of Lambeth Bridge. I've just texted you the address.'

She picked her iPhone up from her bedside table and read the text and nodded. She knew the location. She passed it every day. It was only a ten minute walk from where she lived. ‘Luxury apartments,' she said.

‘And that means security cameras and a concierge.'

‘Was she a working girl?'

‘No. He's named his victim this time. She's an actress. Julie Longmuir?'

‘I've heard of her.'

‘You and me and a lot of other people too.'

‘Which means, he's about to go public.'

‘He's an ambitious boy,' the DC said. ‘Let's hope he's overreached himself.'

‘If it is him and if he's telling the truth.'

‘How do you want to play this, Jane?'

‘I'll check it out personally. Let's take it from there, Sir.'

She'd spent the evening the way she spent most of them. Her shift had finished at 6pm and she'd gone straight from the Incident Room to the gym. She'd worked out for an hour and then eaten dinner in the café there. She'd gone back to her flat, changed into jeans and a T-shirt
and channel surfed distractedly in front of the TV for an hour. She'd avoided the temptation to open a bottle of wine because the person responsible for the killing spree she was currently investigating always worked at night.

She was there fifteen minutes later. Her warrant card got her a pass key from the reception desk, after they'd undergone the formality of calling their tenant and getting no reply. Julie Longmuir's apartment was on the sixth floor. She rang the bell as a courtesy before using the key.

She smelled the coppery odour of fresh blood as soon as she was inside. It was almost masked by a sweetish smell she couldn't readily identify. But it was there, in quantity. Their perpetrator was anything but squeamish about what he accomplished with a body.

The lights were switched off. They'd been that way at the scenes of the three previous killings. They'd theorized that he familiarized himself with the absence of light while he waited for his victims to return to their homes. He took them before they got the time to flick on a wall switch. He was strong and agile and he was fast. And he did what he did to them subsequently in darkness.

There was enough light from the city below for Jane to see by. The apartment faced the panoramic vista of the river. Lamplight from Embankment and Lambeth Bridge reflected off the ceilings through wall-length windows with their blinds still pulled. She wanted to experience the crime-scene in exactly the way he had. She wanted to try to gain some sense of him before she summoned the SOCOs and the doctor and the flash of photography and the industry of a forensics team made that intimate connection impossible.

There was nothing of significance in the sitting room. She saw the gleam of an award on a shelf in a refracted headlight beam. She'd seen her win that in a televised ceremony the previous year. The acceptance speech had been self-deprecating and punctuated by perfectly timed one-liners and Julie Longmuir had been beautiful and elegant with the world at her feet.

There were lots of framed photographs on the walls and shelves. They were mostly black and white and commemorated opening nights and receptions. Their subjects looked slightly spectral in the formality of their evening wear. In the uncertain light, they flickered under glass like snap-shots of ghosts.

The apartment was silent. There wasn't the tick of a wall-clock or the hum of a boiler. Central heating pipes didn't gurgle in properties built to this specification. The windows were double-glazed, inuring residents to any hint of traffic noise. This dwelling possessed a degree of quiet and stillness she thought almost physically ominous.

Jane followed the strengthening smell of blood into the bedroom. The victim lay on her back at the centre of the bed. It was king-size. She was naked. Her feet were crossed at the ankles and her arms were spread wide to either side of where she lay. She was cold and rigid and emphatically dead. She had been cut from vagina to sternum and then eviscerated. The knife had evidently pierced her bowel. This close, Jane could smell the stench of excrement mingling with the other odours.

The murder palate was muted in the diminished light. Some of the victim's organs had been removed and they lay as though deliberately displayed there on her bedside table. Her liver glistened blackly. He had cut off her breasts, which were pale and pink-nippled and looked surreally perfect.

She turned to the message, written on the wall above the bed-head. She thought the language on this occasion probably Judaic or Hebrew. Its characters reminded her of writing she'd seen on notice boards outside synagogues. The first one had been in Ancient Greek. The second had been Latin and the third Arabic. It was after the third killing that their perpetrator had become generally known among the murder squad as the Scholar. Jane disliked the appellation. Humour demeaned the women he killed and to her it only stressed how little they had learned about him.

She used her phone to photograph what he had inscribed in Julie Longmuir's blood. He'd had a lot of it, but had used this resource really quite sparingly. The calligraphy was neat and the strokes bold and confident. He wasn't a man who smudged, was he? The Scholar wasn't a second-draft sort of person at all. She would format the message as a word document and then find a translation. She assumed it would be another passage describing Biblical events.

She heard a noise, then, coming from the kitchen. It was somewhere between a clatter and a creak. Kitchens were equipped with all kinds of implements. Many were lethally sharp. This one might also house a strong, quick and experienced killer. It would be a departure from
his usual M.O. for him to have waited, lurking. But she didn't think he'd have any interest in debating the inconsistency.

It couldn't be him. The notes giving the names of his victims and locations of his crimes were hand-delivered to the Yard. The words were assembled from letters cut from a cheap mass-produced edition of the Gideon Bible and then pasted onto a sheet of A4. They'd analyzed the font and paper type and in so doing, identified the source.

She heard the noise again. It was definitely a kitchen noise. It was sudden and reverberated sharply off the hard surfaces surrounding whatever made it. Someone or something was in there. Maybe an accomplice delivered the notes. Maybe he'd lingered for longer that he should have over this victim, more celebrated than her predecessors and therefore worthy of greater attention from him.

If she'd caught him red-handed, Jane thought it would be a short-lived triumph with a bleakly unhappy outcome. She didn't even have a can of pepper spray in her bag. It was 4am. Above and below her, to left and to right, affluent residents slept peacefully. She was surrounded by bankers and lawyers and high ranking politicians and media heavy-weights still oblivious to the awful fate of their celebrated neighbour. With only a corpse for company, she faced this predicament alone.

She still had her phone in her hand. Her alternatives were summoning help using that or trying to make the apartment's front door without being heard. That meant getting closer to the closed kitchen door than she was now in the bedroom. But she knew she'd feel infinitely safer summoning assistance from outside the dead woman's home, preferably back on the ground floor with the concierge for company in the building's well-lit vestibule.

She heard another kitchen noise and relief flooded through her because this one wasn't human. It was the unhappy screech of a cat enduring feline confinement. He had locked her pet in the kitchen in the wait for Julie Longmuir to come home.

There'd been a practical reason for that. He didn't want his performance spoiled. A cat scavenging the organs on the bedside table would add an element of absurdity to the event. The Scholar was serious about his accomplishments. In his way, he was something of a perfectionist. He enjoyed drama, but had no appetite for farce.

These were hunches, her suppositions. She'd Google-searched the victim on the way there and so knew in life she'd owned a black and white tabby. It was surely this trapped animal now, responsible now for the commotion in the kitchen. The Scholar had departed before the blood had congealed. He'd stayed faithful to his pattern.

Jane went into the kitchen. The cat stared at her indignantly from the sink. The plug had been looped from its chain under her collar and then wound once to secure her there. The earlier noise had been a knife and fork she'd pawed from the draining board presumably in protest at her confinement. Her plight was worse than she knew, now ownerless. She glowered and meowed.

He'd have killed a dog. Jane was certain of that. He'd have torn a dog limb from limb in a gleeful show of strength. Its territoriality would have affronted him. Its loyalty to its owner would have been an unendurable reproof. Again, this was only a copper's hunch. But she was a good copper. She'd risen to the rank of DCI during a ten year police career. She trusted her hunches.

What was that sweet smell, rising from the bed? She chose and thumbed a number and got the connection to start to call her people in.

The duty doctor was Allenby. He winked at her on arrival 15 minutes later and she felt glad it was him and not one of the medics who seemed to feel obliged to compensate for what was essentially atrocious with a forced show of jocularity. There had been no dignity in the victim's death. Jane thought she deserved at least a measure of restraint and decorum in its aftermath.

‘Richard,' she said. The SOCOS had arrived just before him. They were a depressing sight. To Jane, in the after-the-fact of their white paper overalls, they only ever signified another failure on the part of the police to protect.

Allenby went into the bedroom. He wasn't in there very long. Jane waited for him in the hallway. She was well used to crime scenes, but immune neither to horror nor to human tragedy.

‘She's been dead for about five hours. The mutilation was carried out after the single knife wound that opened her up and killed her. I suppose we have to be thankful for small mercies.'

‘Same MO as the others,' Jane said.

‘I didn't attend the others,' Allenby said.

‘This is the fourth. The other three were working girls.'

‘Which is why I haven't read about it?'

‘You'll be reading about this. He started at the beginning of June.'

‘That's four in slightly less than seven weeks.'

‘The others suggested a degree of medical knowledge. It seems safe to say this one does too.'

Allenby frowned. ‘I'd say anatomical rather than medical knowledge. He knew where to look for what he wanted. He's tremendously physically strong and very sure procedurally. Does he always leave a message? What language is that?'