The Lazarus Prophecy (38 page)

He looked along the runway. It was pitted in places by weather erosion but these small planes landed slowly enough to ride a few gouges and bumps. They were a hell of a lot more resilient than they looked. There were no significant obstacles to endanger the landing. There'd been a burst and shredded tyre and a few blown-down tree branches when he'd arrived, but he'd cleared them away.

He was related by marriage to the man he was there to meet. His maternal grandmother had married a Spaniard. The Spaniard had a twin brother. The brother had not married. He had followed a clandestine family tradition and made his religious vocation and been ordained a priest and dedicated his life to a sacred duty at a remote location in the Pyrenees.

Chadwick waited for Brother Philip, who led the Most Holy Order of the Gospel of St. John, a society founded by the fisherman apostle and first Pontiff on hearing from the man returned to life from hell itself of the terrible threat to mankind posed by the Lazarus Prophecy.

The aircraft touched down and bounced on its wheels twice before settling and slowing on the runway. It taxied and then its engine was cut and the passenger door opened and an elderly man in an equally elderly suit climbed carefully out of it. Chadwick walked across and the two men embraced warmly. And the younger man felt the strength of the older surprising and defiant in the firm grip of his arms.

‘Your grace,' Chadwick said. He bowed his head in deference.

‘You call me that to my face, Peter. I know you always think of me as Uncle Philip.'

‘Not today. Today I think we should honour you with the dignity and decorum you've earned over decades of sacrifice.'

‘Why the formality and pomp when all we have done is failed?'

‘Because it isn't your failure, Uncle, and because I've now seen some of what you've spent an unselfish life preventing.'

‘Don't be downhearted, Peter. Don't be defeatist either. It isn't in your character. Take me to the cardinal. We must use what little time is left to us to maximum effect.'

They got into the Land Rover. Brother Philip had only a small valise as luggage which he clutched across his bony knees as though its contents were priceless. He said, ‘The cardinal is a clever politician. He might be the cleverest Rome can boast and now he is convinced completely. Does he have a strategy?'

‘You mean does he have a champion.'

‘It has happened before.'

‘Daniel Barry was an exceptional man.'

‘Exceptional men are born from time to time. The Lord sees to it.'

‘His preferred candidate has doubts.'

‘Only a fool is entirely free of doubt. I met such a fool recently. His name was James Cantrell and he died ridiculously.'

Chadwick, at the wheel, had to stifle a snort of mirth. His uncle was not the sort who thought priests should attire themselves in Lycra to ride mountain bikes. He said, ‘I have doubts about this candidate myself.'

‘Will he help us? Will he willingly enter the fray?'

‘I don't know. He finished the deposition in awe of Daniel Barry.'

‘That's encouraging.'

‘Why?

‘Because it means he believes, Peter.'

‘I don't think he'd do it for money.'

‘Daniel Barry didn't do it for money. If he had, he'd have failed.'

‘You're worldly, for a man's spent a lifetime in isolation.'

‘A lifetime's isolation with our recently departed guest is a rare education, Nephew. And I've had the luxury of time throughout my isolated life to ruminate.'

‘She was a woman of courage and vision. She had a nobility of spirit and purpose rare in successful people. She was marked for greatness, wore her sublime beauty unselfconsciously and was quite touchingly modest. But there were brains behind that lovely face and I sensed a steely will.

‘I make no apology in paraphrasing Tony Blair and saying that Joan Fairchild was the people's politician. Except that the description doesn't quite do her justice, because there's no doubt in my mind that she was better than that. She wasn't just a politician. She was a stateswoman in the making.

‘Mark my words when I say that her brutal passing is more than a personal tragedy. It is a profound loss to the future of a rudderless nation she could and no doubt would have steered safely into calmer waters.'

Jacob switched off the radio. Sandra Matlock was one of those pundits with the knack of talking up themselves by praising other people. And after a morning of it, he was sick of hearing the quote.

He walked to the gym. It was noon and an hour earlier the smog had returned. It was as thick and bitter in the throat and the lungs as before. He remembered Peter Chadwick had called it diabolical. He thought that probably true. He didn't think that Edmund Caul had delivered it, not deliberately or specifically, anyway. But Caul had brought about the mood that made it come. The smog had answered Caul's welcoming invitation.

There was a police cordon on Blackfriars Bridge, as he assumed there was now on all the Thames bridges. The prosperity of recent decades had made the river less of a dividing line than it had been once. But progress could be arrested, couldn't it? It could recede as well as advance, as the people of London were learning. The section of the city to the south of the river was now a hazardous place. Showing his I.D, answering routine questions, passing eventually through it, Jacob wondered at what stage a cordon gained the status of a border.

His conversation of the morning with Jane Sullivan had left him feeling depressed. He had believed since finishing the Barry account that there would be nine killings. He thought the damage done, the train set in motion by the deaths already accomplished. But nine was a significant number to their perpetrator. And he was now convinced that Jane would be one of the nine. And he didn't see how a predator as elusive and relentless as this one was could practically be stopped.

Things were breaking down. Sections of the country were close to anarchy. It was like that Yeats poem, ‘The Second Coming', the Scholar had quoted in her blood at the scene of Alice Cranfield's murder when he'd still been just a serial killer with demonic delusions. Now they weren't delusions at all. He really was demonic. He'd brought a taste of hell with him to the world.

Smog-crippled traffic inched along Blackfriars Road. To the east of where he walked, he heard glass smash and an alarm erupt and human screaming. The screaming stopped. Sirens wailed, the sound weaving between buildings through thickened air from some blanketed act of violence or theft or just pointless destruction.

He got to the gym, still open, half of its lights failing, virtually empty of clientele and strangely silent in the absence of the house or hip-hop music usually cranked loudly through its hidden speakers.

Jacob worked out brutally. He skipped, he hit the heavy bag and speedball, he did his floor-work, toiling for two arduous hours, thinking all the while about Jane and their single shared kiss on her Lambeth doorstep and the tantalizing prospect of something more between them she'd promised when their killer was caught and this business was finished.

An image intruded into his mind and squatted there. It was Jane on the bed in her home, naked and butchered, some archaic boast scrawled in a dead language in her blood on the wall above the little her killer had left intact of her corpse.

He showered, scrubbing and soaping hard under scalding water, quite unable to wash away the gory picture staining his mind. He dried himself and dressed and went outside, back into the roiling gloom and dabbed headlamps of Holborn Circus, and he called Peter Chadwick.

‘He's driving.'

‘Who is this?'

‘My name is Philip.'

‘You're sitting beside him?'

‘Yes.'

‘My name is Jacob Prior, Philip. Please tell him I'll do it. Ask him to tell the cardinal. Tell him I need to meet with them as soon as possible.'

He met them at four in the afternoon at the cardinal's suite at the Dorchester. The cardinal said, ‘What I know of his nature, like you, Jacob, I learned from the Barry account. He's acquired wisdom since then but his principle characteristics seem to be vanity and pride.'

‘He seems to think he's the devil himself,' Jacob said. ‘That's the claim made in the messages he leaves.'

‘But they're quotes taken from Revelations and St. John's Gospel. They could be viewed as generic claims, couldn't they? He isn't actually claiming to be Lucifer.'

‘He's the ninth,' Brother Philip said.

‘I remember you said that outside his cell door at the priory,' the cardinal said. ‘I didn't know what you meant by it then and I still don't.'

‘I think he is the heir,' Brother Philip said. ‘I think that Satan sent his own spawn to fulfill the prophecy.'

‘Tell us about him, Brother Philip,' Jacob said. ‘You studied him for years. What's he like?'

‘He's as he appears in the Bible. He's nowhere near so noble a figure as the English Protestant poet John Milton chose to romanticize in Paradise Lost.'

‘You can do better than that,' the cardinal said.

‘He's vain and proud, as you have just said, your eminence, and as Daniel Barry was able to exploit. He's endlessly boastful. He likes music. Puerile humour delights him. Every joke must have its victim. He cannot resist a wager or the last word. He's clever. He's not without the ability to judge character. He is the master of every language ever spoken. He delights in nothing more than dispatching a good soul to hell. He'll want to do that with you, Jacob.'

‘My soul isn't particularly good.'

‘You love God.'

‘I think God sometimes cruel and capricious.'

Brother Philip frowned. ‘I thought you were doing this for love.'

‘There's more than one sort of love,' Chadwick said. ‘Please continue, Uncle.'

‘He is in most respects exactly like a man. It is vital that people generally think his mischief human, so he has most of the human frailties. He eats and sleeps and breathes. But he is unnaturally physically strong and of course he doesn't age as we do. And now that there is a likeness of him circulating generally, he will have changed his appearance. The change will be quite subtle, but some of his distinguishing features will have altered.

‘He has no fingerprints because he doesn't secrete. It's a mystery to me how the police here managed to get a likeness. He absorbs rather than reflects light, so he has no mirror image and cannot be photographed.'

‘They used a psychic,' Jacob said. ‘She's someone with a genuine gift. She saw him as he was when he was the Whitechapel Killer, which caused a bit of confusion. But it was him she saw. Two police officers recognized him last night. They attempted to subdue and arrest him, strapping lads the pair of them apparently, both now in hospital.'

‘They're extremely lucky to be alive,' Brother Philip said. ‘He is by definition merciless.'

‘Barry subdued him with opium. What if they'd successfully Tasered him and got him into a cell?'

‘The cell hasn't been built that can hold him,' Brother Philip said. ‘Not without performing and sustaining the necessary rituals.' He glanced at the cardinal, who stared intently at the plush shag-pile carpeting his suite.

Jacob said, ‘He can pick locks?'

Chadwick said, ‘There were those who thought Houdini's escapades the work of the devil. A priest once accused him of Satanism during a performance. Demons aren't traditionally discouraged by locks. A theologian should know that.'

‘I've never been strong on demonology.'

‘Welcome to the crash course,' Chadwick said.

‘His eminence called it telekinesis,' Brother Philip said.

‘I was more naïve a man when I said that. Events have humbled me. It was a necessary lesson and I pray not the last I'm given the opportunity to learn.'

Spoken like a politician, Jacob thought.

Brother Philip said, ‘He mentioned this psychic in the final boast scrawled on the wall of his cell. It was cryptically put, but he said he wouldn't know her until he found her.
“I will save her to the end which will be the end only of the beginning.”'

Jacob knew, hearing these words, that his gloomy intuition about Charlotte Reynard had been correct. The Scholar was coming back for her. He took no pleasure whatsoever in this vindication. Susan Lassiter was difficult to get to. It meant to his mind that Jane Sullivan was probably next. He said, ‘So what do we have to do?'

The cardinal said, ‘We have to first find him. We have to challenge him to a bet that he cannot walk away from. He's a skilled gambler and if he possibly can he will cheat. We have to be vigilant to that and to negate the consequences if it happens. Then, brothers, we need to win the bet.'

‘Daniel Barry risked damnation,' Jacob said.

Nobody replied to that. No one needed to.

Jacob had gone home and changed into a suit for the meeting. Now he was glad he had because he would get served without trouble or disdain in the Dorchester bar. It was only just after 5 o'clock so more afternoon in summer than evening because it wouldn't get dark until almost ten. In the persistent false twilight of the smog, however, that was immaterial. And regardless of what time it was, bars were places a person could think.

He called Jane. He said, ‘I think you should ask Charlotte Reynard to visit the apartment Dan Luce lived in when he dated Julie Longmuir.'

‘I already have.'

‘Is anyone living there now?'

‘No, it's still vacant. I've had a forensics team go over it but the only traces they found belonged to contract cleaners. We're planning to visit there early this evening. It was going to be this afternoon but I've been slowed up by the weather. She finds this sort of thing a really brutal ordeal, but she's brave and quite selfless.'