The Lazarus Prophecy (2 page)

‘I think it's Hebrew. He's conversant with ancient languages. He refers to the Gospels. The squad wags are calling him the Scholar. It's rather taken off.'

‘The press will love it.'

‘I saw her on television a few months ago when she won her BAFTA. Hers was a Cinderella story, wasn't it? She was the teen cigarette girl from Quaglino's who became a star of the screen after a famous director spotted her when he bought a Havana cigar.'

‘Fairy stories have happy endings, Jane.'

‘No, they don't. Some of them have tragic endings. We tend to remember only the happy ones.'

‘He took something.'

‘You mean a trophy?'

‘One of her kidneys is on the bedside table. The other has gone.'

The cloying odour seemed to have strengthened. Was it disinfectant? Had something been spilled?

She said, ‘What's that smell?'

‘I think you'll find he sprinkled it on the bed before he began his blood work,' the doctor said, ‘another of his biblical references, or possibly a blasphemous joke.'

‘A joke how?'

‘It's Frankincense, an ancient fragrance from Egypt. It was one of the three gifts delivered by the kings to Bethlehem when they arrived to celebrate the birth of Christ. Why did you keep the first three killings quiet?'

‘We've given private warnings to the vice trade on their ground in every borough. Only regular clients can be considered safe for the duration, we've told them. Most of them have listened.'

‘That doesn't really answer my question.'

‘I've thought ego a big part of it from the outset,' Jane said. ‘He craves public recognition. I thought rewarding his sense of showmanship would only encourage him further.'

‘He'll get lots of attention when this breaks in the morning,' Allenby said. ‘And if you're right about his motive, plenty of encouragement.'

Her phone rang. It was the DC.

‘Julie Longmuir is trending on Twitter,' he said. ‘It's been leaked. We'll have to call a press conference for tomorrow morning. Please wear something suitably formal.'

His destination was a remote building situated in the high Pyrenees. It had variously been described to him as a monastery, a keep and a retreat. It was a construction dating from the tumultuous time in Europe of the Black Death, when the order to which it was dedicated was already an ancient one. It was an austere and deliberately isolated place and it represented to him everything he most disliked about the Church to which he had, with complete commitment, dedicated his young and energetic life.

‘Old habits die hard,' the Cardinal had said to him, in English, laughing delightedly at his pun. And it was true. Tradition and custom were difficult obstacles in the path of reform and progress. But the Church modernized or perished on the altar of its own anachronisms. The world was changing. The pace of change had never been so great. Faith had never seemed so
challenging and paradoxical. His own had been severely and repeatedly tested. So far, it had endured. That was something. That, to him, was actually everything.

Right now, he needed endurance of the physical rather than the spiritual sort. There was a path leading to his destination. But it was goat-narrow and steep and in places the land to either side of it shrank away to sheer drops alarmingly vast in their sudden vacancy and altitude. He was above the snow-line. His breath plumed. He heard the rude cry of a mountain eagle possessive of its territory on a lonely crag through thin air somewhere above him and to his left. For a moment, he envied the great creature its wings.

It was still quite early in the morning. He had driven as far as he could in a rented Jeep before embarking on a trek that was now in truth closer to a climb. He wanted to get this business done with and get away again in a single day. It would probably have been more fitting in terms of protocol to arrive later and perhaps stay the night as their guest. But he had been loath to consider that manner of going about things. Once he knew something about them, he did not think he could comfortably endure the company of the people he was to encounter.

He did not look like a priest. This was not the time or place, he did not think, for a cassock and collar. He wore bright performance clothing, breathable fabrics that would protect him should the weather close in treacherously. His feet were expensively shod in a pair of cleated hiking boots. His eyes were protected by tinted glacier glasses. There were emergency rations along with his mobile in his rucksack. To anyone passing, with his agility and build he would have looked more like a professional athlete than a man of the cloth. He kept himself in rigorously good shape. Father James Cantrell served a demanding cause.

There was something ambiguous about where he was headed. There wasn't even any real certainty about whether the monastery occupied French or Spanish land. Over the centuries it had been back and forth between both of those long-established nations. The spot was too remote for anyone really to care on political or economic grounds. A location that generated no industry and therefore no wealth was not a coveted source of tax revenue. They were both Catholic countries after all. And this was somewhere funded by the Vatican.

‘Be tactful with them,' the Cardinal had said. ‘Treat them gently. They are old men and devout in their faith. Remember arrogance is no different than pride, James, and pride is sinful.'

He'd nodded. He would try. It was difficult. Semantics were tricky, weren't they? Tradition had to be respected until it degenerated into bigotry. Belief had to be respected until it begat superstitions with no place in the modern world. In less than an hour he would be among men who believed devoutly that hell was a real domain of fire and brimstone lorded over by the fallen angel Lucifer. They were worse than an anachronism. If the theological imperatives on which their order was based ever became public, it would be hugely embarrassing.

They had always existed in secrecy. If that had always suited them, now, ironically, it also suited their mother Church. They adhered to a faith that made medieval Christianity seem forward-looking. And they were funded from Rome, which to anyone neutral would suggest Papal approval, would it not?

The truth was both more and less complicated than that. The fact was that the organized Catholic Church was a vast organization with a massive and complex bureaucracy. The truth was that this order had been overlooked, forgotten about. They had slipped from official thought and sanction at some time in the 1930s, when the Church was concerned with the rise of Fascism and the challenge of trying to accommodate governments in Europe not only secular but actively hostile to its interests.

‘In language you would understand, with them, we rather dropped the ball,' the Cardinal said.

A Paris Jesuit, Monsignor Dubois, had been the last official liaison with the members of the order Father Cantrell was on his way to see. Dubois had been seconded to Munich in 1936 to organize an escape route for German priests persecuted by the Nazis. He had been captured and jailed in Dusseldorf in 1939 and had died during the war in a concentration camp. The retreat in the high Pyrenees, its occupants and purpose had subsequently officially been forgotten about.

It was understandable. Dubois had not been able to brief a successor in the assumption of his various responsibilities. The war had been a huge distraction. In its aftermath, in the reconstructed Europe, the Catholic Church had faced enormous challenges. There were attacks from those who said it had pandered to Mussolini and to Hitler to ensure its own survival in the Fascist era. There was the wholesale persecution of priests and nuns to have to try to combat
in the zealously anti-religious Eastern Bloc. It was not surprising that the dwindling representatives of an ancient order based in a remote location went officially neglected.

Their anomalous existence was only revealed by a recent audit, when it was discovered that funds were being sent each month to a post office in a French Pyrenean village for the purchase of food and clothing and fuel.

‘We assumed they had become extinct as an active element of the See,' the Cardinal said. ‘But each month this pittance is collected and presumably spent. They are there. They are a complication, a potential complication that needs to be addressed.'

‘They're unlikely to be publically exposed after this length of time. I would have thought the opposite was true.'

‘When I tell you of their supposed function, the task to which they dedicate their lives, you will agree that their exposure is a risk we cannot take.'

‘Who ordains them?' Father Cantrell asked, incredulous, once he'd been told.

The Cardinal shrugged. ‘They were granted the right of ordination when they were established, by the Holy Father himself. Things were rather different, James, when the Church was in its infancy.'

‘It's blasphemous nonsense. It's worse; it's heresy.'

‘I have corresponded with them. I had to do so by writing to them care of the post office to which their funds are sent. They have very little contact with the world beyond the walls of where they live their simple lives. They are three men only now, old and enfeebled by the harshness of their devotions. Try to be diplomatic with them. Better, try to be kind.'

He paused for a breather. The path really was steep and it was slippery in places with snow and ice. He thought the incline almost difficult enough to require he be roped. He glanced at the descent behind him and it occurred to him that a slip would probably be fatal. There was nothing to impede your fall. You'd just go on rolling and clattering for hundreds of feet, if you didn't careen off the route into a precipice and the void.

Their supplies were brought to them by residents of the village with the post office. They were shopped for there and then delivered by donkey once a month. It was a custom so old, this provisioning, that no one really knew its origin, the Cardinal had told him.

He shook his head. He didn't object to piety or commitment to the faith. They had their place; they were even essential. But fealty was a feudal concept which had no place in the scheme of things in the here and now. You did not exploit the basic Christian goodwill of your believers to turn them into servants carrying out slavish tasks. It was wrong in principle and demeaning in practice, to both parties.

Pausing there, it occurred to him that the order would have been very powerful once. They would have been even more powerful than the Templars, whom they comfortably pre-dated. Their mission would have been considered an absolute priority. Every stone of the refuge he was about to visit had been carried up there to enable its construction. And this was achieved at a time when chaos and loss, in the shape of the plague, had made men doubtful of every apparent certainty in their lives.

Labour would have been in short supply at a time when fields overgrew because there weren't the peasants left alive by the pestilence to cultivate them. Yet the monastery had been completed. It must have been seen not only as a duty, back then in the 14th century, but as a necessity.

You could only achieve such a feat through fear. Having heard what the Cardinal had told him, he knew what the source of that fear had been. People were credulous back then. There was no differentiation at the time between magic and rationality. That had come only centuries later. The devil was not a metaphor to them in the struggle between the abstract concepts of good and evil. He was Lucifer or he was Satan and he existed as a tangible presence in direct opposition to God. Kings held as resolutely to that idea as did the humblest serf.

The secret had been kept. It was still being kept. But it had been shared with someone powerful and influential enough to have this secret place completed in what had been the darkest period of the blackest century of the last millennium.

There were clouds, concealing the peaks around him. A blessedly light wind shifted them across the high sky. In a sudden patch of blue, he caught his first glimpse of his destination. Its geometry was fashioned not by nature but by man in the shape of a wall made of weather-pitted stone with the gloomy magnitude, above him, of a rampart.

The press conference was as turbulent and unmanageable as DCI Jane Sullivan expected it to be. She tried to orchestrate the event on no sleep, because she'd had no opportunity or inclination to try to get any. The detail of the most recent crime scene was too raw and vivid in her mind. The frankincense smell was still cloying in her nostrils. She'd taken a shower and changed her clothes, but the scent clung stubbornly to her sense memory. She'd hoped to get inside the killer's head in that first period alone at the crime scene but had failed, she knew, to do so. He was maddeningly abstract.

She was taking questions from the floor. Most of the faces in front of her had become familiar over the years. The heavyweights were out, the chief crime reporters. Smart phones bobbed and weaved in front of most of them as they filmed and recorded the event. The lights from the television cameras made the room bright and hot, shrinking it, making it seem slightly claustrophobic.

‘Don't these murders remind you of anything?'

‘You'll have to be more specific.'

‘Prostitutes killed and mutilated in London, a killer who deliberately goads the police, messages left at the scene, trophies taken.'

‘I think regarding these as copycat killings after an interval of 130 years is a stretch,' she said. ‘And he probably lives in London. Lots of people do.'

There'd been nothing on the CCTV at Julie Longmuir's apartment building. The night concierge had been adamant that no one had come or gone that evening that didn't either live there, or was a regular visitor. She had split with her boyfriend the previous January. That had been her decision. The concierge was adamant that she was much too classy a woman for one-night-stands. She had come in after a play rehearsal, alone at 9.30pm. She had chatted briefly to the people on the desk as was her charming habit.