The Lazarus Prophecy (9 page)

He couldn't do it. He thought that someone from then would have a better chance of living with modern London than someone from the present going back. To someone from then, the everyday horrors, the soot-grimed staining of every building, the broken-backed sprawl of the slums, would be nothing worse than matter-of-fact realities.

The stink of the river would be intrinsic to its character. Streets full of mud and horseshit, suffocating blankets of smog, darkness feebly pinpricked by gas-lamps would all be perfectly normal.

People drank beer to quench their thirst because the risk of cholera was too great from the water then available. They died by the mortuary load in their infancy of typhus and diphtheria. If they survived childhood they were hobbled by rickets and polio left them lame and they lived prey to tuberculosis and malnutrition and they seethed with fleas and lice.

Not everyone, of course. The middle-class was growing. But around 80 per cent of people lived in poverty. And poverty then was dire. The majority lived without soap or literacy or hope of any betterment in their situation. And they stayed where they were, didn't they? You could live and die in London back then if you were poor without travelling beyond the same four or five streets around the place where you'd been born.

Gin palaces, back-street abortions, baby farms and the noose; 80,000 prostitutes plying their dismal trade in the East End alone; drunkenness and venereal disease afflicting the population in epidemic proportions. The police had thought genuine the letter sent them and signed by the Ripper at the end of which he'd added, ‘From Hell.' It was hard to argue that his mental state put him in that domain. It was not difficult to argue though that Victorian London, with its inescapable squalor and institutional cruelty, had been its own kind of hell.

If Jane Sullivan was right, the Scholar had referenced the Whitechapel killer's spree with the murder of Julie Longmuir. He had tried to do so again soon after with Charlotte Reynard. There were other parallels in his baiting of the police and his taking of trophies and the style of the mutilations he carried out. What was difficult to see was what point he was seeking to make in doing it. Jane was right to dismiss the idea it might be coincidence in the cases of the actress and the dancer. Something was being said, or demonstrated. It was just impossible yet to determine what.

They might never find out. The Scholar had so far claimed four victims. The near encounter with Charlotte Reynard may have proven to him he wasn't infallible and cost him his nerve. Jacob doubted that simply because Jane did, who was a seasoned expert at detection and thought it would only encourage him further.

But what if he did stop, after claiming six or seven victims as the original Ripper had? They had never caught the Whitechapel Killer; he had instead abruptly stopped. It was in a way as though he'd vanished from the face of the earth. The same enigmatic option seemed just as open to the Scholar, without a proper lead for the murder squad to follow.

Jacob had earlier provided them with what he believed was called a line of enquiry. He hoped it would take the investigation somewhere. He'd already passed half a dozen news hoardings teasing hysterical details about the Longmuir slaying by the time he reached the Holborn underground entrance on Kingsway.

His phone rang. He didn't recognize the number. He couldn't hear the person who'd called him through the persistent rumble and roar of traffic noise from the road to his left and approaching junction. He backtracked and took a left down Gate Street and staring at his reflection in the darkened window of the Polish Bar, said, ‘Who is this?'

‘Sandra Matlock, Daily Telegraph.'

‘How did you get this number?'

‘Professor Carter provided it. I've just spoken to him about the Scholar investigation. He said you're assisting with the theological angle?'

‘I've no comment to make.'

‘That's rather disappointing.'

‘But it's the truth, Ms. Matlock. I've nothing at all to say.' He terminated the call and switched off his phone. Then he switched it back on again because Jane Sullivan had told him to be available whenever she tried to reach him. He retrieved the most recent number to call his and blocked it.

Dom Carter was a clever man and an eminent linguist but he wasn't the most streetwise of people. Anyway what could he tell the press? He could confirm that the Scholar was familiar with some of the predominant languages of the ancient world. It was hardly the stuff of banner headlines.

He, by contrast, would point the finger of suspicion at a former priest. It was a sensationalist claim. It would insult the Church if the suspicion was false and if true could
easily warn the killer that they were, potentially, on to him. There were very good reasons for avoiding saying anything on record.

He resumed his journey to the gym. He wondered how different London would look to someone from the 1880s. They had lived in a sense then in a mechanized world. They'd had steamships and locomotives. The underground had already been a familiar fact of urban life for two decades. They'd had electric trams. London had been cluttered and noisy with the street hawkers' and costermongers' cries and the shouts of the boy sellers of penny news-sheets. Carts had rumbled and horses had whinnied and snorted pulling carriages and hansom cabs and omnibuses in their harnesses.

No one from then had needed to dodge cars or motorbike couriers crossing a road, though. The skies had been innocent of aircraft. Modern London was an assault on the senses and it was pretty much relentlessly so. Its once quiet interludes – the Square mile after seven in the evening, the West End on a Sunday – were no more now than nostalgic memories. London in the 21
^st
century provided no escape from itself anymore. It might drive a Victorian mad.

The clothes alone would probably do that. He watched a teenage girl clump across the pavement on front of him in platform boots and a Spandex micro-skirt bearing the legend FUCK YOU printed in black across the chest of her canary yellow T-shirt. She was snapping gum between her teeth and made oblivious to ambient sound by the white buds worn in her ears and the soundtrack mapping her progress through the streets on her iPod.

It occurred to Jacob that a Victorian, looking at the scene in front of him, might reasonably conclude that Bedlam had escaped its walls and madness spread across the once familiar city like a contagion.

It was 4 o'clock in the afternoon before the Deputy Commissioner called her into his office. He was the sort of cautious career police officer who had developed tried and tested techniques for keeping emotion out of the relationships he maintained with subordinates. She thought that if the summons had come at 10 am, he would have been too enraged to avoid personal criticism. She thought that she deserved to be singled out for a dose of that. Her investigation was getting nowhere. The newspapers, spread across his considerable desk, bore testimony to the fact.

He rubbed his face with both hands and lowered them and blinked at her and said, ‘Please tell me we've something we can tell them.'

‘We can't tell them anything, Sir.'

'41 hours have elapsed since Julie Longmuir was butchered. Slightly more than seven weeks have passed since this killer first struck. Four women are dead.'

‘I'm aware of the salient facts, Sir.'

‘The only salient fact, Detective Chief Inspector, is that you have no leads.'

‘We have a fresh line of inquiry, Sir.'

‘Elucidate.'

‘You'll remember Professor Carter, from Oxford, has been assisting with the translation of the tracts left at the murder scenes?'

‘Yes.'

‘He recommended a theologian named Jacob Prior he said could analyze the content of those messages, specifically the most recent. Last night I asked Mr. Prior to construct a profile of the killer based on the Scholar's areas of academic expertise. He came back to me late this morning. He's concluded our perpetrator is possibly a renegade priest. He thinks a defrocked Jesuit most likely to fit the profile. I've spoken to the Archbishop of the Diocese of London. We've been promised full cooperation. They're going through their records as we speak.'

‘But we can't share this development with the press because to do so, if Prior is right, would be to warn the Scholar that we're closing in.'

The politician in him had elevated a longshot into a development. To Jane the latter term suggested some sort of breakthrough. She didn't think it wise, though, to contradict her boss just at that moment.

‘My problem with this investigation is that I'm constantly dealing in negatives, Jane. We have a non-secretor who is invisible to CCTV and leaves no fingerprints. He's an intruder, but he never breaks a window or damages a lock. He doesn't trigger alarms. No witnesses in the general area at the times he strikes seem capable of noticing him and subsequently providing a description.'

‘He's been clever and lucky, Sir.'

Her chief gestured at the black spread of banner headlines fanned out in front of him. ‘I want to be able to take the steam out of this. They're within their rights to make their Ripper comparisons and demonize the killer. They're trying to sell papers in the internet age. It's a tough call. This is a gift to them but it makes us look incompetent.'

‘He doesn't wear a topper and a cloak and spats. He doesn't carry a swordstick and travel in a hansom cab. Neither, for that matter, does he travel through time. He wears surgical gloves is all and he's methodical and cautious.'

‘He carries a scalpel-sharp carving knife and he uses it to butcher women at night, so far with impunity.'

‘He's flesh and blood and we'll catch him.'

‘Tell me about this business with Charlotte Reynard. It sounds curious, at the least. You think it was him?'

‘I do.'

‘If he'd succeeded, Jane, I'd be thinking very seriously now about taking you off the case.'

Jane told him about the Reynard ordeal. She told him about the interview she'd conducted with the dancer in its aftermath. He listened without making eye contact, concentrating intently on what was being said to him as he focused on some neutral spot on the wall behind where she sat.

‘Try to coax her into visiting Julie Longmuir's apartment. I take it that's still sealed off?'

‘I didn't know you believed in that sort of thing, Sir.'

‘We're desperate, Jane. You're desperate. I believe in exploring every possible avenue available to us. It's unconventional but it's far from unprecedented.'

‘She won't do it.'

‘Use your powers of persuasion.'

‘I'll try, Sir. I'll do my best.'

‘What's this Jacob Prior like as a character?'

‘He's clever, cogent and honest. He might be wrong about this, but he wouldn't have aired a theory in which he had no faith.'

‘We'll tell the press we're pursuing a fresh line of inquiry. They'll assume we've got something physical, a forensic breakthrough from the Longmuir crime scene.'

‘Is it wise to tell them anything?'

‘It's wiser than telling them nothing.'

‘It'll raise expectations.'

‘As it surely should do, Jane; I've got raised expectations myself. Please don't disappoint them.'

Jane rose to leave.

‘Sit down; I haven't finished yet. What does Geoff Toomey have to say about the killer's profile? I'd guess we're paying him a big enough retainer. He should have come up with something.'

Geoff Toomey was a behavioral psychologist employed on a freelance basis by the Met to assemble profiles of those responsible for violent and serious crimes when no obvious suspect presented themselves. He'd had his successes, but Jane regarded his overall record as patchy and his methodology prone to stereotyping.

‘He thinks the perpetrator is more than likely to be a Death Metal fan. Bands like Slayer and Possessed pioneered a sound with a good deal of satanic subject matter back in the 1990s. The scene's become huge since then. Almost all of the current bands explore satanic themes in their lyrics and iconography. They're hardly strangers to the notion of the Antichrist.'

The D.C. groaned. ‘So we've narrowed it down to Polish bikers with tattoos of Lucifer etched across their backs.'

‘Not just Poland; the Death Metal scene's equally big in Sweden and parts of the States. There are sub-genres, such as Deathcore and Death/Doom.'

‘It doesn't really fly. Someone as deliberately picturesque as a Death Metal fan would surely have attracted attention. The first two victims were both Mayfair-based, weren't they? That's an awfully long way from the mosh pit, miles out of his comfort zone.'

‘Plus, where has he acquired his fluency in ancient languages?'

‘How much are we paying Toomey?'

‘He has a second theory.'

‘Go on.'

‘He thinks it might be a gang.'

‘You mean a Charles Manson scenario?'

‘That's what he means.'

‘A Death Metal-inspired gang?'

‘Satanic cultists is more his line of thought. His reasoning is that there's a sacrificial element to the murders. Each of the victims has been found on her back with her ankles crossed and her arms spread out to either side of her. He thinks it's a deliberate parody of the crucifixion.'

‘He could be right about that, but he's wrong about more than one person being responsible,' the DC said. ‘Serial killing isn't a team sport. More than one perpetrator and they start to make mistakes. And they're conspicuous. Agreed?'

‘We're looking for a single individual,' Jane said, ‘I'm certain of it. There's too much ego involved for this to be a collective effort.'

‘Have you any other gut feelings?'

‘His taste in music is as just as likely to be of the choral or chamber variety as it is anything else.' It was a life of surprises. She wouldn't for a moment have thought her chief an authority on mosh pits.