The Lazarus Prophecy (19 page)

‘How quickly did you spot me?'

‘Probably about five minutes after you took up position outside the hostel, I'd say.'

‘I walked past, casually.'

‘You were up and down the road like a sentry. I got bored watching you. It's why I led you here. What the fuck do you want?'

‘I want to know what you know about the man butchering women all over London for the last eight weeks. You know something, don't you, Mr. Chadwick?'

Chadwick sat back on his stool and raised a finger and grinned. ‘It was you behind the mirror in that interview room. It was you, wasn't it?'

‘I can't discuss my involvement with the investigation.'

‘Share and share alike, I say, Pilgrim, unless we've both promised to keep shtum, which might prove to be the case.'

‘I know about your conversation with that place in the Pyrenees after the press conference that followed the Longmuir killing.'

Chadwick sipped beer. ‘But you haven't told the pretty policewoman who questioned me, because you're not a copper, are you?'

‘I could tell her.'

‘And I could drag you outside and give you a hiding.'

‘You might not find that totally straightforward.'

‘You've got a bit of scar tissue under those eyebrows. I reckon you've done a bit of boxing. Probably you were good at it and you obviously keep in shape. You'd be no match for me on the pavement, Pilgrim. It's a grown-up world out there.'

‘Funny, you don't sound like a priest.'

‘I was something else before I was a priest and now I'm not a priest anymore; I'm something else again.'

‘I've got no interest at all in macho bullshit,' Jacob said, ‘and I don't want to piss away a summer afternoon in a pub. I just want to know what you know about The Scholar.'

‘He's a very bad individual.'

‘Get away.'

‘Theology is my guess,' Chadwick said. ‘You're helping out with those messages he's leaving at the scenes. You must have impressed the pretty DCI for her to have put you behind the two-way mirror if all you are is technical assistance.'

‘Who is he? You know, don't you? You think he came here from that place in the Pyrenees. You think he killed a mountain guide and took his clothes. Who is he, Chadwick? Why the fuck won't you help?'

‘You know more about him than I do,' Chadwick said. ‘If you've seen the messages he leaves, you know about his character and intentions.'

‘You can give me more.'

‘If I did, you'd think me a lunatic. The name won't help. The Scholar's as good as any name for him.'

‘He could kill again soon. He could take someone's life tonight. You could help stop him.'

Chadwick sipped beer. ‘He won't,' he said. ‘He's not about the woman he kills. He's about the collateral damage. Have you not listened to today's news? Too busy being Sherlock Holmes?'

‘I've never thought it was personal.'

‘The Home Secretary's asked for a briefing. There'll be questions in the House of Commons on Monday morning. If there's a parliamentary debate, it'll amount to a vote of no confidence in the Met's senior officers. Tomorrow's papers are going to be full of screaming headlines and outrage and general hysteria. He'll sit back and enjoy it all.'

‘And then he'll kill again.'

‘Yes, he will. And it won't be a working girl. They gave him easy access, but the police were able to keep them quiet. Everything changed on Monday, when he killed Julie Longmuir.'

‘It was why he killed her.'

‘He'll bask for a while in Alice Cranfield's spotlight. The next one will be an even bigger name.'

‘Can you think of any likely candidates?'

‘That's a game people will be playing all over London at tonight's dinner parties.'

‘He sent a personal message to Jane Sullivan.'

‘She's a bigger draw left alive. No glamour, dead.'

‘Sandra Matlock?'

‘That would cause a stir. But the public wouldn't do much hand-wringing over a dead journalist. She should fit decent locks anyway, not that they'd stop him.'

‘Help us catch him, Chadwick. Tell me what you know.'

‘How does a theology buff eavesdrop on a wireless transmission made from a private address?'

‘A hostel isn't a private address.'

‘Answer the question.'

‘I can't tell you.'

‘I can make an educated guess. Equally, there are things I can't tell you. I want the killer stopped as much as you do. Give me a couple of days. Give me a contact number. Either way, I'll be in touch.'

‘What do you mean by either way?'

‘Whether I can tell you anything or I can't, Pilgrim.'

‘She could haul you back in, charge you with obstruction.'

‘She'd be wasting her time, clutching at straws.'

‘She's already doing that,' Jacob said.

They had kissed the ring. They had prepared a meal and made something of a formality of their greeting despite the abrupt suddenness of his arrival unannounced at the door of their mountain keep. They were devout men. There was no mistaking that. He had loved James Cantrell but had known there was something of the Rottweiler in the young priests' character. In some ways he had been the cardinal's attack dog. The cardinal was ashamed now that he had ever thought James an appropriate emissary. He felt remorseful and guilty and more fallible than he could remember having felt since his ordination.

‘We were in Rome until the second century, your eminence,' Brother Philip said. ‘The need for secrecy forced our order from the Holy See during the advent of the Dark Ages.'

‘Where did the brotherhood go?'

‘First we went to France, where a monastery was established in the Auvergne. It was necessary to go to remoter places as the centuries wore on, but they needed to be locations where our refuge would not be ransacked by warring tribes and our secrecy breached or our members simply slain as the Goths and later the Vikings were apt to slay servants of Christ.'

‘So, in time, you moved from the Auvergne.'

‘We were in the West of Ireland for a peaceful interlude of 400 years. Then the brotherhood occupied a priory in Northumberland on the North Sea coast of England. When the raiders came over the sea from Norway in their long ships, our predecessors were forced to leave there and re-establish a home in Silesia. After that it was an old fortress built originally by the Moors in the hills outside Madrid.'

‘Finally, you came here.'

‘This place was built for us at the time of the Black Death.'

‘That was a tumultuous period.'

‘So the historians say. Humanity came close to reaching the tipping point.'

‘Despite that, this place was built for the brothers of the Most Holy Order of St. John's Gospel. The effort and cost must have been colossal.'

‘Yet it was met, your eminence.'

The cardinal nodded. The implication of Brother Philip's words was plain. The cost had been met because the need had been considered both urgent and important. Influential men, perhaps kings, had been told the secret and had not only acted upon it but kept it faithfully.

‘You have a written copy of the prophecy?'

‘We do. The original is in Hebrew, chiseled into stone. The tablets are here but they are very fragile now and kept in a chamber where it is both cool and dark so they incur no further damage. Are they the proof you demand?'

‘I require no proof. Most of my doubt was dispelled by what a good man with a sharp memory told me last night about Monsignor Dubois' visit here in 1935. After that, into the small hours, I read the Barry account.'

Brother Philip smiled slightly. ‘Monsignor Dubois' visit was considerably before my own time,' he said.

‘But you know about it?'

‘I do. I can show you a translation of the prophecy, if you are capable of reading Medieval Latin?'

‘I am, Brother Philip. And I am aware of the weight of responsibility you assume in sharing the secret with an outsider.'

‘You are a servant of God,' Brother Philip said.

And there's no point locking the stable door once the horse has bolted
, the cardinal thought, remembering the English proverb because what was happening was happening there, in London. He said, ‘I would like to read the prophecy with my own eyes. But there is something else I would like to do first.'

Brother Philip held out his arms, the willing supplicant.

‘You are the Sacred Keepers of the Gate, are you not?'

‘More accurate to say we were, until eight weeks ago, your eminence.'

The cardinal smiled. The rebuke was thoroughly deserved. He said. ‘Before I read the prophecy, I would like to see the gate.'

London changed and it remained the same, Charlotte thought. She winced at a spasm from her ankle. She had not exaggerated in telling Jane Sullivan that it was painful. She was used to pain. It had been a nagging characteristic of her professional life throughout her entire career. But she had tried to rush her rehabilitation, doing more than the physiotherapist had recommended. The pain she felt now was a rebuke. Nobody in her 30's healed like she took for granted doing when a decade younger.

She was on Old Paradise Street, where a man named Edmund Caul had taken lodgings in June of 1888. It was just after 5 o'clock in the afternoon. It was bright and sunny. The street
ran roughly south to the point just after it bisected Lambeth Walk and became Lollard Street. She had walked up and down it twice, without feeling any intuition concerning its history. She stood now at its northern extremity, where it dead-ended into Lambeth High Street.

She stood only a few hundred yards from the apartment building in which Julie Longmuir had been killed less than a week earlier. There were no real clues at this spot as to the proximity of the river or the panoramic bustle of the traffic on its banks. Lambeth High Street was quiet and deserted, short and unprepossessing. It was anomalous in name, not really a high street at all anymore, not a single shop to help merit the distinction.

But there was a pub. She could see that. It was only a couple of hundred yards away from the mouth of Old Paradise Street and it looked Victorian. Charlotte thought that bomb damage during the Blitz had probably determined the schizoid nature of the area she was in; the juxtaposition of old and quaint with characterless and modern. But the pub had survived the bombs by the look of things. It was quite possible that Edmund Caul had entertained himself within.

Jane had told her about the death of Alice Cranfield. She had spared her by around an hour the shock of learning about it from the radio or via the internet. She'd been touched by the policewoman's thoughtfulness. It was a punctilious and kindly gesture probably typical of someone she was coming to admire as well as like.

She had been shocked but not surprised. The Scholar had come very close to taking her on Tuesday evening. Taking someone close to her was a reminder of how narrow had been her escape. It might be coincidental and it might not. She thought probably not.

She suspected there was an element of game playing in the way in which the Scholar went about his business. He left clues and contrived symbols. Jane had confirmed as much. Killing Alice deprived medicine and the wider world of someone fundamentally good and valuable. Was it vain to think that the choice of victim also admonished her? She didn't think so.

The Scholar knew more than he reasonably could. He had known she was outside her door in Pimlico awash with dread at the knowledge he was inside awaiting her return home. He had witnessed not just her escape but also somehow the reason for it. And he had
communicated with her in a way that had required no audible words. He'd seemed gleeful at the manifestation of her gift. She didn't know why. She did know, though, that she was about to try to use it again.

Edmund Caul, the only plausible Edmund Caul Jane Sullivan's people had found, had been a man who took lodgings in Lambeth in the year of the Whitechapel killings. Jane had told her he had briefly been a suspect in the Ripper hunt. His name had been crossed off a list of possible culprits. She postulated that the Scholar could know more than was in the public domain about Caul, could somehow have discovered he was guilty of the original crimes and could be copying him.

She thought it wise to leave the theorizing to someone trained and paid to do it. Jane's reasoning was systematic and her thinking clear. She possessed a strong and proven intuition. Catching killers was what she did. All Charlotte knew for certain was that when the name had come to her, in Julie Longmuir's apartment around the corner from where she stood, it had arrived in her mind with shocking force.

There were memories in the masonry and iron street railings hereabouts, in lampposts oddly left like curious, spindly relics. London was a city peopled like no other by its ghosts. But Edmund Caul had not been a shade or spectre. The reality of him had hit her with an impact that sent her reeling. She'd blacked out in the dead woman's apartment. A sinister sense memory had not done that to her. It had been the potent, urgent strength of him with his restless force and his keening, bloody will.

It was why she had gone there. She could make no chronological sense of Edmund Caul taking lodgings in Lambeth 130 years ago. But she trusted her gift and she was sure of the name. She would grope and scour like someone divining for water. She would see what her mind allowed her to. She might get nothing. She might provoke a nocturnal visitation. She was indignant and angry and curious and the news Jane had broken at her borrowed refuge in Bermondsey had left her unable to do nothing.

The pub was called the Windmill. Charlotte's architectural expertise was pretty much based on a guest appearance on a property show popular on daytime television. She'd been invited to bid for houses in an effort to judge their real value at auction. She'd scored badly and
come last, placed well behind the celebrity nutritionist and premiership footballer also guesting. The appearance fee hadn't covered the cost of the outfit she'd bought to wear for the show. She'd have guessed the Windmill dated from about the 1860s.
But I wouldn't bet my life on it
, she thought.