The Lazarus Prophecy (12 page)

The piece name-checked the Scholar, the reason Jane supposed for its elevation to the front page. It quoted an unnamed police source as saying, ‘Vulnerable women are going to be rightly afraid until we catch this killer and any woman alone in London is vulnerable until we do. Ms. Reynard might have fallen prey to panic. She might equally have had a lucky escape.'

‘The quote in the Reynard piece sounds manufactured,' Jane said. ‘Who falls prey to panic in the 21st century? Have you ever heard anyone from our press bureau use that phrase? I haven't. The boys and girls dealing with press calls to the bureau are mostly in their 20's. It's laughable.'

‘Charlotte Reynard is here,' the DC said. ‘She isn't laughing. She's incandescent and probably on the verge of registering a formal complaint.'

She wasn't waiting in an interview room. She wasn't there to be interviewed. And the DC had rightly judged that she required delicate handling. She was waiting in one of the conference suites on the top floor equipped with VIP facilities and panoramic views through picture windows. Freshly cut flowers exuded scent in crystal vases. Expensive reproduction prints hung handsomely on the walls.

Charlotte was studying one of these. It was representation of Victorian London by the French artist Gustave Dore. It had been done in charcoal and its lack of colour emphasized the drab bleakness of its subject matter. She by contrast wore a bright yellow cashmere sweater and a blue pleated skirt. Her hair was loose and the neoprene bandage around her ankle was barely noticeable under the leg of grey tights. Her weight rested on an alloy walking stick. When she turned, she looked a lot better than she had on Tuesday evening. She looked composed and beautiful.

Jane said, ‘There's nothing in Sandra Matlock's story that couldn't have come from one of the people who helped you in the street in the moments after you turned away from your front door, when you were distressed and unguarded.'

‘Nothing other than the police quote the story concludes with.'

‘Anodyne and manufactured,' Jane said. ‘Nobody from the Met has spoken to anyone about you, on the record or otherwise.'

‘What about the rogue priest story? Did that come from you?'

‘That was leaked,' Jane said. ‘I'm fairly sure I know who's responsible and I'll deal with them as soon as I've done what I can to reassure you.'

‘You're a plain speaker.'

‘I don't like bullshit.'

‘Then you wouldn't very much care for my life.'

‘I don't know, Charlotte. You're young and beautiful and talented. You have two lovely children and you're probably financially secure. It isn't a bad package.'

Charlotte nodded at the picture she'd been studying, the Dore depiction of the London slums. ‘Can you imagine living then?'

Jane walked across. She looked at the detail of the drawing. ‘I've been thinking a lot about that period and location recently.'

‘Because of the parallels, you mean?'

‘Yes, because of those. I suspect they're deliberate, self-consciously so, maybe even a sort of homage.'

‘Can we sit down?' Charlotte said. ‘I can't put too much stress on the ankle. And there's something I want to discuss with you.'

She'd been to have ultrasound on her ankle the previous day. The appointment had been at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. The department treating her had been behind schedule and she'd had a lengthy wait before she'd been seen. Afterwards, she'd felt in dire need of coffee and had gone looking for the café built to serve outpatients.

Following signs along the corridors, she'd met someone with whom her charity foundation had sometimes brought her into contact. It was the neurological specialist Alice Cranfield. Whenever she'd met Alice at fundraisers or for meetings of the committees on which they both sat, she'd encountered a woman wearing Margaret Howell suits and Robert Clergerie shoes and Chanel number 5 and a poised gloss always of sophistication.

On this occasion it was different. Alice appeared drained. She was dressed in surgical green. There was blood on her cuffs and her face was pale and its expression set and there were smudges of fatigue under eyes which looked slightly raw. She managed a smile. She swapped a greeting and explained that she'd been in the operating theatre for nine hours solid.

‘You poor thing,' Charlotte said.

‘It's what I do.'

‘You must be exhausted.'

‘It doesn't matter. The operation was successful. Teenage girl, everything to live for, as the cliché rightly has it. You only really feel it when you fail. What happened to your ankle?'

‘I stumbled.'

‘It's only a personal view, but I'd love to see you dance again. You retired too soon.'

‘If the orthopedics are as good here as the neurosurgery, you'll get your wish.'

There their brief conversation ended. But its repercussions, for Charlotte, had only begun. She found the café and drank her coffee and thought about what it was to save a life. It was something she knew she had accomplished in an abstract way through her fund raising. But she had never done it in the concrete way that Alice Cranfield did day in and day out.

Alice had the power of life and death. She literally had it in her hands because of her medical expertise and her surgical skill. Charlotte considered that she might have it too. She owed the power to present circumstances and a gift which she'd always slightly despised herself for having.

‘Last night I decided I'd help you. I know what you want me to do. You want me to go to the apartment where Julie Longmuir was killed and see if I can sense any clue that might help you catch the Scholar.'

Jane didn't say anything in reply. She held Charlotte's gaze.

‘I was still going to help you this morning.'

‘You've changed your mind, about him changing his mind about leaving you alone?'

‘When he spoke to me, he used the Arabic word for fate. He believes events are pre-destined. That means nothing I do can really influence what he decides. My main argument with myself was that I shouldn't have my choices dictated by someone so vile. My logic was
that if I helped you catch him he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone else and that would include me.'

‘Then you saw this morning's Telegraph.'

‘I want to help if I can, Jane. But I can't risk being thought of as a crank or a freak. I have maybe two years of performing left in me if the prognosis on the ankle proves to be correct and the rest of my body holds up. I think this ability I have is weird and I've lived with it all my life. God only knows what other people would think.'

‘No one need know except me,' Jane said.

‘I just can't afford for it to become public knowledge. Imagine the repercussions for my kids.'

‘It won't. You have my word on that.'

She had already mentioned Charlotte Reynard's Pimlico premonition to Jacob Prior. But she thought it was unnecessary to admit that now, unnecessary and also counter-productive. She was confident that Jacob wasn't the source of the leak to the press. She'd have bet her next promotion on it. In a way she was doing, because she'd resolved to continue trusting and confiding in him until the case was solved.

‘When would you like me to do it?'

‘I don't think there's any time to waste.'

‘I've appointments to keep this morning.'

‘Are you back living in Pimlico?'

‘I've borrowed a friend's place in Bermondsey. He's shooting a movie on location in British Columbia. I've got it till the end of August. We're not going back to Pimlico.'

‘When would be good?'

She smiled. ‘Never,' she said.

‘Sorry,' Jane said, ‘crass choice of words. When would be convenient?'

‘I could do it early this evening, preferably before dark?'

‘I live less than ten minutes' walk away from there,' Jane said. ‘I'll give you my address and if you can be at mine by 6.30, we'll get there with hours of daylight to spare.'

Charlotte nodded and Jane felt for the second time since having met the woman a prick of sympathy for her so strong it felt as deep as a needle thrust. She almost winced with the intrusive suddenness of it.

She'd never shared the emotional bond tying this woman to motherhood. She'd never had a sister either. She realized that she had her arms folded defensively across her chest. What was she defending against? It was the Scholar's baleful shadow, the trauma his spoor or residue might cause so sensitive a soul as Charlotte to endure. She dropped her arms and then held them out and Charlotte closed and hugged her and to her own surprise, she returned the embrace with the same generous strength.

She was as good as her promise. When she returned to her own office, she delayed calling the Archbishop's people until she'd first called Geoff Toomey.

‘You've talked to the press.'

‘I have not.'

‘Specifically, you've called Sandra Matlock.'

‘I'd like to see you prove it.'

‘Your nose has been put out of joint by our theologian's priest theory. You couldn't attribute it to him directly, because that would have pointed at you. It was privileged information and the loop is tight. You went public on it because you think it crap. You want it disproven and then mocked publically.'

‘I'm not the source.'

‘This is about so much more than raining on your parade, Geoff. And you so don't get that. ‘Course you're the fucking source and your phone records will prove it should we hold you to your confidentiality agreement and decide to prosecute you.'

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

‘You're out,' Jane said. ‘You've breached the terms of a binding contract. Another word to the press and I swear to Christ, you'll do jail time.'

She called the office of the Catholic Archbishop of London and after a bout of preliminaries was put through to his private secretary.

‘We've narrowed it down to three names,' he said.

‘That's fast work.'

‘There's a long and not always honourable tradition of turbulent priests,' he said. ‘We do what we can to contain and protect them. We have a duty of care.'

‘And I'm sure you do your utmost to fulfill it.'

‘One of the three died by his own hand just over a week ago,' he said.

‘That rules him out.'

‘I saw your press conference on Tuesday. I read the papers. Forgive me, but are you absolutely sure the same man responsible for the prostitute murders killed Julie Longmuir?'

‘Why do you ask that?'

‘The defrocked priest who took his life last week regularly paid prostitutes for sex. His attitude to doing so was somewhat perverse. He blamed them for putting him in the way of temptation. He derived gratification while nursing a grudge that grew with every transaction.'

‘We're sure it's the same killer, which means we're down to two.'

‘Two suspects?'

‘One line of inquiry, two leads. Whether we're talking suspects depends on what you tell me next.'

‘One of the two we traced last night to some sort of new age mission in Central America. He's been there since the spring.'

‘So we're down to a single name.'

‘Peter Chadwick.'

Jane wrote down the name on her desk pad and underlined it twice. ‘What criteria did you use to compile your list?'

‘We looked for someone fitting the profile provided you by Jacob Prior. It's a bit delicate because some of the information regarding these people is privileged. Where there has been psychiatric assistance, ethics are involved. There's the right to patient confidentiality.'

‘So you can't tell me anything specific about Peter Chadwick?'

‘I can give you the address of the hostel in England at which he is staying. I can tell you that he's 38 years old. I can tell you that he was a serving soldier before he took Holy Orders in
1999. And I can tell you that he left the priesthood two years ago after a conflict with his superiors it would be unethical to discuss.'

‘You really think he might be our man?'

‘I never met him, personally. The Archbishop thinks it might be worth your while to interview him.'

They could play verbal tag for the rest of the morning and Jane knew she wouldn't get any more hard information over the phone. They would have to ask Peter Chadwick to submit to questioning voluntarily, unless they could find something quick to tie him materially into their investigation.

‘Do you have a recent photograph of Chadwick?'

‘I'll email you one as soon as we finish this conversation. He's not terribly inconspicuous. He's 6'2″ tall, athletically built and, by general consensus, rather a handsome man.'

‘Are you telling me celibacy was a problem for this particular priest?'

‘I'm telling you absolutely nothing of the sort.'

‘Do you know what he did in the military?'

‘He was a Captain in the Parachute Regiment. He had combat experience in Bosnia and in Iraq.'

Jane took down the address of the hostel. She switched on her computer and opened the newly received email and printed off a copy of the photo she'd been sent. Chadwick was dark haired and dimple-chinned with rather chiseled features and blue eyes that looked secretly amused. It didn't look like the face of a murderer, but they rarely did, except in movies.

She went to the incident room and called an impromptu conference. She dispatched two plainclothes officers in an unmarked car to the Finsbury Park address at which their solitary human lead was living. Their orders were to monitor rather than to approach without further specific instructions.

They'd been monitoring the CCTV footage from each of the murder locations since the first had been carried out eight weeks earlier. Killers sometimes re-visited the scenes of their crimes. Sometimes they were curious to see if anything had changed. Sometimes they did it to
gloat secretly, or because it made them feel omnipotent. Jane had thought from the start that the Scholar was a killer of the omnipotent persuasion.