The Lazarus Prophecy (11 page)

Jane lived in Lambeth. She lived in Brooke Drive, off Kennington Road and neighbouring at its southern end the grounds of the Imperial War Museum. He was telling her he knew this. The claim that she'd never seen Lambeth was a puzzle, but she took that to mean that she had never seen it in the particular way he had. This was certainly true. The Scholar's perspective was very different from that of the average person. He interpreted things quite uniquely.

It was a threat. But it was a playful threat. He hadn't made it in anger and he wouldn't attempt to act upon it, she didn't think, for a while, at least. She'd been recently instrumental in publicizing his accomplishments. That was how he'd become aware of her. And if he wouldn't be grateful for her part in making him famous, he'd certainly see the value in allowing her to continue to do so.

She thought that was true at least for the present. The situation could change. But for now he probably had other more high profile targets to concentrate on. She just wished she had some way to predict them. Jane was painfully aware that in a city of 9 million people, a killer as clever and careful as the Scholar was proving to be was horribly spoiled for choice. And there was his enthusiasm to take into account, the gleeful way he went about his business. He hadn't come close to completing the task he'd set himself. He'd told them in so many biblical phrases that his work had only just begun.

And when we have a bit of fun,
Oh, Boy.

‘There will be a note,' Brother Philip said. ‘It would be uncharacteristic for him to have left without leaving us something to remember him by.'

‘He could have killed us,' Stephen said.

‘It's inexplicable that he didn't,' Dominic said.

‘He will have explained his motives for having left us alive in the note,' Philip said. ‘He likes always to have the last word.'

‘He's won,' Dominic said.

‘He's escaped us, for now,' Philip said. ‘He has won nothing of significance yet.'

‘We're but three elderly men,' Stephen said.

‘With allies,' Philip said, who was thinking of the vain priest whose cardinal had denuded them of power. ‘We have acolytes. We have influence. We have agents in the most important cities in the world. God's soldiers serve us with loyalty and discretion in those places. London is no exception.'

Dominic said, ‘What did the London agent tell you?'

‘Beyond the fact of the killings there, he told me that a mountain guide was found dead just over seven weeks ago in our locality. He'd been mapping a route for his high summer holiday clients. He left a wife and four young children. He was discovered naked and eviscerated.'

‘Our charge left here naked,' Stephen said.

Philip said, ‘And he wasted no time, apparently, in finding some practical clothing in which to attire himself.'

‘I shall go back down and look for his note,' Stephen said.

‘I will save you the journey, brother,' Dominic said.

‘If it's there, not seeing it was remiss of me,' Stephen said. ‘Retrieving it is my task to fulfill.'

‘We should have defied the cardinal,' Philip said. ‘We could have lied to his priest. Flattery would have blinded such a vain man to our deception.'

‘If we'd defied the edict we'd have paid with our souls,' Dominic said.

‘A small price,' Philip said, ‘compared to what our obedience is likely to cost.'

He found it in the hat band of the bowler in the strong flame of a fresh taper that no longer trembled when he held it out before him. Fear had blinded him to it on his earlier visit. It was a piece of shirting folded over and a name had been written neatly on the cloth face of it. Calligraphy had been one of their prisoner's skills. They had not provided him with the encouragement of ink. The writing had been done in saliva and grime or perhaps in blood which had congealed blackly. Stephen did not know which of those was the more distasteful. The name on the shirting was his.

He heard the thump of their generator as he took the ninth return and ascended the final flight of granite steps. He knew that Philip would be communicating with their London brother, Peter, once again.

He regained the library and placed the fold of shirting on the table top and sat with Dominic for the tense twenty minutes it took for the leader of their pitifully depleted order to return to them for the task of a further inventory of their failure.

‘Father Cantrell is dead,' Philip said, when he came palely into the room. ‘Brother Peter saw an obituary this morning. Rome has lavished praise on a rising star. The cardinal is said to be distraught at the loss of his protégé.'

‘He was a human peacock,' Stephen said. ‘A spell in purgatory will give his display of feathers the singeing they deserve.'

‘He should be hell-bound, for what he's helped undo,' Dominic said.

‘We should blame only ourselves,' Philip said. ‘We should despise our cowardice and do all we can to make recompense.'

He reached for the fold of shirt cloth on the table. Stephen reached out and stayed his hand. ‘It's addressed directly to me,' he said. ‘I shall read its contents aloud.' He cleared his throat. Until eight weeks earlier, his part in the vigil had given his voice the daily exercise of spoken prayer. It had weakened since with neglect. He was still breathless from his double ordeal in the empty cell and the twice endured exertion of the climb back from it. But he would find the strength within him for this recital.

Stephen picked up the fabric note and shook it out. He saw that the words written on one side of it were in Church Latin. It was a language in which the three of them were fluent. It was too a final blasphemous slight from their departed guest.

‘Pernicious lies,' Stephen said, dropping the fabric back onto the table top, where it lay displaying its message, where the finesse with which the words had been written appeared both a taunt and a rebuke.

‘No sin is secret before God,' Philip said, his head bowed to conceal his shame. ‘I apologize to both of you for my weakness.'

‘And I apologize to both of you for my stupidity,' Dominic said. ‘It must daily try your patience, now we are so few.'

Stephen said, ‘Is it likely that the cardinal will read Daniel Barry's account?'

‘He might,' Philip said. ‘What is unlikely is that he will act upon it. Just over 80 years ago the skeptic Monsignor Dubois was shown by our predecessors in the priory here our order's final proof. His glimpse of Edmund Caul convinced him and we had our last reprieve.'

‘We mustn't be defeatist,' Dominic said.

But the contents of the note seemed to have leached all hope and defiance out of their leader. His own stain had been exposed. ‘Edmund Caul is gone forever,' Philip said. ‘We are left only with hearsay and faith.'

It was Jane Sullivan's habit to walk to work. She walked along Brooke Drive to Kennington Road, left down Lambeth Bridge Road to the river and once over the bridge, along Horseferry Road until it met Victoria Street and her destination on Broadway. She regarded it, despite the traffic, as a pleasant walk. The view from Lambeth Bridge was spectacular regardless of the weather and was a reminder to her daily of how far she'd come in life from her upbringing in a suburban street on the outskirts of Hull. There was no triumphalism in this. It offered consolation in a sometimes very stressful occupation.

On this particular morning, she paused just after turning right out of her own road and studied the façade of the Imperial War Museum. And she thought of the Scholar's choice of lyric in the song he had pasted together for her and delivered late the previous afternoon:

Lambeth you've never seen,
The sky ain't blue, the grass ain't green.

As late as the 1930s, when the song was written, the building occupying the War Museum had been used for a very different function. It was the madhouse, Bedlam, notorious home to lunatics.

There were many who thought that the Whitechapel killer had been an inmate. Either the homicidal madman had been freed from his shackles there to begin his spree, or he had been incarcerated there in its aftermath, with the staff unaware of the achievements in East
London of their patient. The favourite theory ran that police had been unable to nail the Ripper because he'd been given sanctuary in the asylum long before they stopped looking for him.

Was it fanciful to think that the Scholar was referencing the Whitechapel murders again in the song? Bedlam was certainly a part of Lambeth Jane had never and never would see. And the second line about the sky and the grass could be said to hint at incarceration. Someone manacled to a bed or trussed up in a straightjacket in a padded cell might hanker for a view of the natural world.

But the reference only worked if the Scholar knew for certain that his bloody predecessor had been locked up there. And he couldn't know that because nobody living had anything approaching proof concerning the Ripper's real identity.

Unless, that was, the Scholar had discovered something unknown to history or criminology and had identified the man responsible as a consequence. When she caught him, she thought that she might ask him. She considered his crimes repulsive acts of animal savagery. She thought preening vanity a defining element of his flawed character. She also thought he would be an intriguing individual to question in the relative safety of an interview room.

She wanted to begin the day by examining what the Catholic Diocese of London had collated on the subject of delinquent priests. She didn't yet think there would be a list and when it was compiled assumed it would be short. But she was anxious to see what progress their administrative people had made. The Archbishop had sounded sincere in his offer of their full cooperation.

But Jane was forced to delay that bit of catching up. There was an urgent request on her desk to join the DC in his office at her earliest opportunity. She'd only just taken her coat off and felt a bit wind-blown. She brushed up in the loo across the corridor from her office door before taking the lift and ascending the two floors to his.

He was standing by the window, facing the view of Dacre Street with his hands clasped behind his back. It was a gloomy view in the summer, Jane thought. The trees in full leaf to either side of the road cast it in permanent shade. There was a copy of the Daily Telegraph on
his desk. Without turning to face her he said, ‘Someone is leaking information to the press. Did you vet Jacob Prior?'

‘Yes. Belatedly, but we did. He checks out in every relevant way. He also gave me his personal assurance that he wouldn't gossip to anyone.'

It was 9.15 on Thursday morning. Julie Longmuir had been murdered at about 11pm on the previous Monday. Jane had been the first person other than whoever was responsible to visit the murder scene, in the early hours of Tuesday. The press conference had been staged at 11am that morning when the media had first been informed that the police were looking for a killer they were calling the Scholar, suspected of four murders in seven weeks. Charlotte Reynard had endured her ordeal of premonition and panic on Tuesday evening. Jacob Prior had suggested they might be looking for a renegade priest on Wednesday, the day the national papers led with the story and the day when Jane had shared Geoff Toomey's speculations on the killer or killers with her chief.

It was fair to assume that today's papers would be following up. She expected file pictures of Julie Longmuir at her most glamorous and seductive. She expected heartfelt tributes from her many famous industry friends. Show-business didn't stint when it came to sentiment. She thought there would be touching recollections of an incandescent talent from someone who had first spotted her at drama school.

There were three stories connected to the case on the Telegraph's front page. Two of them were by-lined. They had both been written by a journalist called Sandra Matlock. The more prominent ran across two columns under the headline:
Is Scholar Rogue Priest?
It pretty much echoed her discussion of the previous day in this very office, though it cited ‘sources close to the investigation,' rather than naming their consultant theologian as the theory's originator. There were a couple of paragraphs briefly exploring the Death Metal angle at the story's conclusion.

The second Matlock story was a single column headlined:
Dancer in Domestic Drama
. This read to Jane like a diary piece at best. It was short on facts and long on speculation, implying that Charlotte Reynard had arrived home the worse for wear after an exhausting day
at the rehearsal studio. She had assumed for reasons still obscure that an intruder was lurking in what was inaccurately described as her ‘luxury riverside apartment.'