The Lazarus Prophecy (10 page)

‘We could still liaise with the Polish and Swedish forces and find out whether any high profile Death Metal followers are currently living in London. If they've a record for violence and they've used their passports the Poles and the Swedes will know and we can easily cross- reference with the Borders Agency.'

And that way, Jane thought, we can say that we're pursuing two separate new lines of enquiry. That way, there were two exciting developments in the Scholar case to hint at to the press.

‘I think we might be making progress,' the DC said, dismissing her from his presence with a wave and a smirk.

‘Jane?'

‘Sir?'

She'd reached his office door.

‘Don't forget to work on Charlotte Reynard. Remember what I said about exploring every avenue.'

There was a message for her when she got back to the incident room. It had been hand delivered about 40 minutes earlier. She recognized the typography on the envelope from the cheap Gideon Bible edition made recently and chillingly familiar to her. She hoped to God it wasn't a summons to another tableau of atrocity. It was only just after 5 and wouldn't be dark for another four hours. He had only alerted them to his past crimes after their completion.

The men of the Pyrenean priory were not children of the internet age. They had no high speed fibre optic broadband connection to enable internet access. They did not possess 4G capable smart phones. They had no phone connection of any description. They didn't run to an old analogue television set or even a transistor radio capable of faint music from distant commercial stations. They were beyond even the ubiquitous reach of the BBC World Service.

Their only communications link with the world outside their thick and altitude-chilled walls was an old Marconi wireless set. It enabled Morse code. The code was obsolete now and so was the set, despite the formidable ability it still possessed when fully charged to receive and send signals from all over the globe.

It was powered by a petrol generator. Providing in turn electrical power to charge the set was the generator's only function. It could have powered electric lights and heaters and a refrigerator and other domestic appliances. It was big and robust and easily had the capacity. But the mountain brotherhood had never felt the need for such fripperies. And so it powered only the Marconi set, at which Brother Philip sat late in the evening, wearing an elderly pair of Bakelite earphones, transcribing the incoming Morse signal into a message on a pad on the table in front of him.

Monsignor Dubois had sanctioned the funds to buy their wireless transmitter back when it had been his task to police the brotherhood in 1935. He had been so skeptical at first he'd almost seemed contemptuous. They had been obliged to trust him with the London account written by Daniel Barry. He had been intrigued but not wholly convinced. The brothers were
thus forced to confide in him completely. He had subsequently bought them the Marconi set. He had commissioned a devout engineer from the Fiat Factory in Milan to design and construct their generator.

They were the Most Holy Order of St. John's Gospel. They were The Sacred Keepers of the Gate. They had been established by the first pontiff only months before Peter the Fisherman was tried and crucified by the Romans. Their formation had been his direct response on first hearing the Lazarus prophecy from the mouth of Lazarus himself.

Their power had been formidable and their mission secret until a meddler from Rome in the purple of a cardinal had dispatched a papal edict eight weeks earlier. It had ordered them to stop performing rituals considered blasphemous by a revisionist Church skeptical about the reality of hell. The message Philip was decoding from Morse was, he believed, spelling out to him the consequences of that.

Philip switched off the transmitter with a sigh. He gathered his jottings from the table. He descended to the cellar and switched off the generator. The cellar was spacious with a vaulted ceiling, lit by candles feeble and guttering this late in the evening. They were not profligate, the brothers, in the burning of wax. It was almost silent down there with the thump of the generator stilled. He could hear the candle flames tear at their wicks for life, dying furiously. It was cold enough to see his breaths plume in front of his face.

There were two cellar doors. There was the plain one through which he had entered and there was another set in the opposite wall, altogether more substantial. It was eight feet high and its oak planks were iron bound and inscriptions in Latin had been carved precisely into the wood by a craftsman using a hand chisel at the time of the Great Plague that had witnessed half the world perish.

Philip sighed again. He climbed the steps wearily and walked stone corridors until he reached the room in which they had hosted an imperious priest days earlier he didn't yet know was dead. He opened the door to the spiral of stairs leading to the library. He trudged upward and opened the unlocked library door and joined Stephen and Dominic at the table at the centre of the room.

There were three chairs. They had taken two away to highlight to their recent visitor the urgency of occupying the remaining chair. The ploy hadn't worked. He had been anxious only to get away. Courtesy had not been a priority. Neither had reading the proof with which they had provided him. Philip didn't think it mattered very much anymore. There were three chairs now and he sat on his and said, ‘It is exactly as we feared.'

Stephen and Dominic crossed themselves. Dominic said, ‘Where?'

‘London,' Philip said.

‘We'll have to make sure,' Stephen said.

‘It's him,' Philip said. ‘All the hallmarks are there, the butchery, the boasting.'

‘The blasphemy,' Dominic said.

‘The elusiveness, too,' Stephen said, ‘if it's him. But we have to be certain.'

‘I'll do it,' Dominic said.

‘No, brother,' Stephen said. ‘The last time you went down he came very close to tricking you. I'll go and God deliver me from peril.'

‘Amen,' his brothers said. And his chair legs scraped on the floor as he pushed himself to his feet for the task.

He paused at the cellar door marked by the Latin inscriptions. He wore a silver crucifix and a vial of holy water from the spring at Lourdes. On a thin chain around his neck there was a glass cylinder containing a tiny sliver of wood. The provenance was assured. It was as likely an authentic relic of the True Cross as any in the world.

Brother Stephen had felt the strength of his calling at the age of eight. It had been overwhelming in its force and he had never endured a moment of doubt to weaken the conviction of his faith. But he felt as well-protected by the holy artifacts he carried as he thought he might by charms won at a fair and blessed with gypsy luck. Only the rituals could really protect them, only the strength of the vigil. And they had abandoned those on Rome's orders eight weeks earlier.

There were ten flights of stone steps leading down to his destination. They had been cut for the purpose from the rock on which their refuge stood. Everything beyond the carved door had been tunneled and shaped and smoothed from mountain granite.

Their home had been variously described down the centuries. To the ignorant it was a monastery or a keep. They themselves always referred to it as the priory. Really it was nothing more than a prison. If they were The Sacred Keepers of the Gate, it was an exalted title because they were essentially God's jailers. It would have been a humble calling, were it not for the singular nature of those prisoners their order had been established to confine.

Ten flights meant nine returns and each flight was of nine steps and the numbers were significant. The poet Dante might have smiled, flattered, Stephen thought, who though that actually Dante would have more likely screamed and fled.

Stephen began his descent. He did so with nothing more than a lit taper to illuminate his way. He had descended no more than four or five steps, had not even achieved the first flight, when dread began its crepuscular, defeating spread over his body and through his spirit. Gooseflesh erupted on his arms and back and his mouth dried as though he had swallowed brittle straw. He felt his eyeballs strain as the skin around them shrank with ungovernable fear.

The way to take the descent was incrementally. You ignored the watery weakening of your limbs. The jitter in the legs did not mean they would betray your weight, it only felt as though they might. Man was designed to walk. Walking down steps was a motor skill. Gravity assisted you. It was not difficult. Infant children mastered and accomplished it with ease.

Five flights, halfway down, ‘Jesus, give me strength,' Brother Stephen said. And he listened for something from below, for some scornful retort or stir of movement antic and alert to his approach. But there was nothing, only silence and stillness as tense in the darkness below him as the springs of a baited mantrap.

He was sweating and shivering simultaneously. The sweat was an excretion of terror, sour and simple. It chilled instantly inside his dampened habit. The brothers were inured to cold generally but the cold here was specific to the place and was extreme. A shudder cavorted through his old bones and the teeth still remaining in his skull chattered. He didn't feel at all the master of himself.

He reached the final flight. There was always the thought that it really might be final, that this visit was a provocation too far, that a single trivial act of carelessness might finally prove your undoing.

And there was the smell. The odour was subtle and all the more disturbing for its delicacy. A reek of corruption would have been more fitting, the stink of sulphur or potash, the singe of hair or smelt of hot iron on flesh. But there was none of that. This was sly and insinuating. It was old fashioned and genteel. It was but the merest hint only of camphor oil and lavender water.

He was there. The door facing him was massive. It was iron and eight feet high and six across. It sat in a wall hewn roughly from the rock, but its lintel was smooth and it fitted its frame so snugly that no chink of light or darkness from beyond the door escaped its edges. At its centre an elaborate bronze relief extended outwards.

Stephen stood and waited and listened. The only sounds he could hear were his own breathing and the faint crackle of the burning taper wick. He closed his eyes. His ears strained. He could feel the hairs erect on his arms and at the nape of his neck as the sixth sense he couldn't deny screamed dumb warnings about how dangerous a place he had chosen to come to.

He waited for several endless minutes. His taper had started long but had burned down to only about five inches. It was never silent down here. He was never silent, was he? Philip sighed. He reached for the key attached to the rope worn about his waist. He fumbled it into the lock on the second attempt and it ground through the plates of a mechanism stiff with lack of use as he babbled a wordless prayer.

The door swung inwards on balanced hinges. It moved with a gentle prod despite its enormous weight. There was darkness beyond. Stephen extended his taper and the tremor in his hand made light caper across the interior detail of the cell. The dread he felt was almost overwhelming now. He waited for the deep, mirthless chuckle that would signal the trap sprung. It didn't come.

There was a heap of clothing on the floor. He couldn't bring himself to touch it. He kicked the pile and a bowler hat skittered and wheeled across the floor. He glimpsed a buttoned boot and grey spats still spotted and streaked with old stains. There was a brocade waistcoat and a caped mackintosh of the type he remembered was called an ulster. The ulster, like the
spats, was spotted with stains. The stains appeared black in the limited light. They had endured a long time.

He could hear something inside the cell. It was insistent and naggingly familiar and quite faint. He raised the taper and noticed that something hung and glimmered from a hook on the wall. When he approached the object he saw that it was a gold pocket watch suspended from a gold fob chain. He reached out with his free hand and cradled the polished weight of the watch in his palm.

The mechanism was ticking strongly and its hands showed the correct time. The maker's name was scrolled across the lower section of the face. The words there were daintily picked out in black against white enamel. They read; Bravingtons of London. He imagined they were a once distinguished jewelers. They could not, however skilled, have crafted a watch capable of ticking on eternally. Yet he suspected this one might.

The missive from the Scholar wasn't notice of another killing for them to discover and investigate and clean up after and alert distraught nearest and dearest to. And Jane Sullivan felt quite grateful for that. Neither was it some obscure biblical reference couched in an ancient tongue for Professor Carter to translate and for Jacob Prior to subsequently puzzle over.

Jane knew what it was without the assistance of experts. It was the first verse of a once popular song from a West End musical. It dated not from the Whitechapel killer's short season of butchery, but from the 1930s. He'd sent it, though. It was the Scholar's handiwork. They hadn't shared with the press his predilection for cutting and pasting the notes he delivered them by hand.

She read it again:

Lambeth you've never seen,
The sky ain't blue, the grass ain't green,
It hasn't got the Mayfair touch,
But that don't matter very much.
We play the Lambeth Way,
Not like you but a bit more gay
And when we have a bit of fun
Oh, Boy.

He'd had his bit of fun in Lambeth with Julie Longmuir, but she didn't think that was what he meant. The Mayfair touch was of course a reference to his first two victims, the high-class call girls he'd killed there at the start, well before the notoriety newly given him by the Longmuir murder. The title of the musical from which the song was taken was ‘
Me and My Girl'.
The significance of that reference was as obvious as it was tasteless.