The Lazarus Prophecy (15 page)

The alias was no longer what it had been when Jane had joined the force a decade earlier. Computer software linked perpetrators to their crimes on methodology and geography and chronology and forensics. Graphics were printed off daisy-chaining criminals to their suspected aliases in diagrams that looked similar to family trees and were just as easy to follow.

She sipped coffee from a paper cup on a bench in the sunshine while the pigeons gathered around her feet in search of crumbs. She thought about the previous evening at Julie Longmuir's apartment. She thought about the fact that the last witchcraft trial in England had taken place as recently as 1944. Charlotte Reynard wasn't a witch. But Jane thought her psychic ability genuine. She hadn't exactly been showboating, had she last night? She had evoked a place memory so potent it had knocked her cold.

Rum, it had been bloody rum because that had been what the last man to briefly share her home and life had drunk. The relationship had been a disaster, but last night he had finally and unwittingly contributed something practical in helping Jane get Charlotte over the shock of what she'd endured. He'd been gone a year. He'd left the rum behind. His exit had been hasty. The rum was, apparently, still drinkable. Charlotte hadn't enjoyed it, but it hadn't poisoned her either.

There was no famous fictional Edmund Caul. It wasn't a name Charlotte had dragged up from her subconscious, having read it in a novel or seen a character called that in a drama on the screen. They'd checked.

Her coffee cup was empty. She screwed it up and tossed it accurately into a nearby bin. She wondered if a combination of wishful thinking and gullibility hadn't got to her the previous evening. The visit to the Longmuir crime scene had followed on from the interview with Peter Chadwick. She'd been hopeful about that and had seen her hopes founder on the former priest's rock solid alibi. He was still, in the hackneyed phrase, of interest to the police. But he wasn't Edmund Caul and he certainly wasn't the Scholar.

They were still pursuing the Death Metal angle. There were three seriously hardcore followers of satanic bands they wanted to talk to. All three had police records in which violence featured prominently. One was a Swede, one a Pole and the third was from Lithuania. The Pole and the Swede had been physically abusive in relationships with women. The Lithuanian had restricted his fights to rival gang members usually outside bars. The Swede and the Pole both lived in Greater London and the Lithuanian in Sussex, within easy distance of the murder scenes astride his Harley Davidson.

She'd read their files. They were unsavoury men. They listened to music with apocalyptic imagery. It was gruesome, misogynistic and sometimes sinister. But a nasty domestic was a hell of a long way from eviscerating strangers just on the basis of gender. Plus, they were bikers who styled themselves, judging from the pictures, as a cross between a Hell's Angel and the kind of barbarian warrior who'd helped bring down the Roman Empire. They were deliberately conspicuous.

Two details made Jane pessimistic about nailing these crimes on a death metal fan, even if you ignored the absence of a clear motive. They were the lack of forensic clues and the linguistic and theological knowledge responsible in the first place for the killer's nickname. The Pole and Lithuanian had, surprisingly, both graduated from university. But their subjects, respectively, were physics and land economy.

She'd joked over the phone with Jacob Prior after their first meeting that he was in the frame. And it had been a joke. But he had at least some of the required attributes. So did Peter Chadwick. Their death metal candidates didn't. They'd haul them in and speak to them and do the necessary checks. But Jane knew in her heart and mind it was a perfunctory, procedural investigative formality.

She thought it probably time for a case review. She thought that there must be something they were missing a fresh pair of eyes might find blindingly obvious. She had some good people working on this case but eight weeks after the first killing they were tired and stale and morale had slipped below the level she considered acceptable. She led as much as she could by example but without the breakthrough they all desperately wanted, a fresh look was probably a good idea.

Today's newspaper story by Sandra Matlock had still clung stubbornly to the Scholar theme. Deprived of Geoff Toomey's insights and with no one else close to the investigation leaking facts, she'd penned an opinion piece.

Her contention was that the death of Julie Longmuir, the manner of it, said something significant about the vulnerability of career women who chose to live alone. Success made them targets. Their achievements nurtured resentment. Wealth, paradoxically, isolated them from the safety most people enjoyed. Technology, for all its sophistication, could neither protect them nor aid effectively in the detection of those who preyed upon them.

It was a cleverly argued article. It managed to portray the dead actress as a sort of martyr to her own lifestyle. It conveniently ignored the fact that serial killing was statistically extremely rare and that its practitioners in modern times were almost always apprehended. It castigated the police for their failure generally to protect the public but identified a malaise in a society in which someone as bright and beautiful as Julie Longmuir could be singled out for so awful a fate.

It ran alongside a shorter piece topped by a long lens photo of Jane exiting the rear of a car-pool Jaguar showing rather a lot of leg. This profile of the ‘murder hunt supremo' stressed that career detective DCI Sullivan was a high-flier who had spurned marriage and motherhood to strive for the pinnacle of her profession and, naturally, lived alone. She owned a sumptuous bachelorette townhouse. Gleeful reference was made to her salary and there was speculation about her pension package. The article called her a woman with the steely ambition needed to compete in what was still a man's world. Sandra Matlock was an effective writer, but apparently devoid of a sense of irony.

Jane's phone rang. It was Livermore, the computer technician who'd put Chadwick at the scene of the murders on the afternoon of her mid-morning press conference on Tuesday. He said, ‘Would you like to hear an interesting bit of trivia concerning Edmund Caul?'

‘I'm not really in the mood for trivia,' she said. She struggled for his first name, ‘thanks anyway, Dave.'

But Dave Livermore persisted. He said, ‘It's more in the way of a coincidence, actually. Trivia is the wrong word, ma'am. Sorry.'

‘Go on.'

‘You'll remember Chief Inspector Donald Swanson was in overall charge of the original investigation into the Whitechapel Killer?'

‘Why would I remember that, Dave?'

‘Because you were the last person logged as accessing the file I'm reading now. I guess you were looking for copycat similarities, Ma'am.'

‘Curiosity led me there, after a remark made at the conference by one of the crime reporters present. Why are you reading the file?'

‘I was led to it by Edmund Caul. The name appears on a list of suspects Swanson compiled in a memo to the Home Office in the late summer of 1888.'

‘I didn't see that.'

‘Some of the names are crossed out. His is one of them. They must have discussed the memo in a meeting and eliminated some of the suspects. There's enhancement software that reveals what's written under the crossing-outs. It's his name, alright, originally seventh on the list. It's a hell of a coincidence.'

‘There's no such thing,' Jane said.

‘There must be, Ma'am, with respect,' Livermore said. ‘The alternative is belief in ghosts.'

It was a fair assumption. Dave Livermore didn't know why Edmund Caul had suddenly become a line of enquiry in their investigation. Nobody did except for the DC and Charlotte Reynard, from whom the name had come.

Jane considered what she'd just been told the first solid evidence that the Scholar was copying the Whitechapel Killer. Jacob Prior had suggested their perpetrator was delusional and thought himself someone much more important than Jack the Ripper. But Charlotte hadn't plucked the name out of the ether, had she? It had been cited in a police memo discussed in Whitehall 130 years before she'd uttered it.

It suggested the intriguing possibility that the Scholar knew more about the identity of the Ripper than was in the public domain, or even the Met files on the Whitechapel investigation. How could he? It was a mystery she looked forward to solving personally when she made her arrest and interrogated him.

‘I want to know everything you can uncover about the Edmund Caul in Swanson's memo, Dave. I know that's a tough ask after all this time, but it could be important. Anything you can find out about his character, occupation, age, appearance, where he originally came from and what happened to him after they crossed him off their list. Are you up for that?'

‘Research is what I do,' Livermore said.

‘Anything you do find out is for my ears only. Is that clear?'

‘As daylight,' he said. ‘I'm on it, ma'am.'

They played tennis for an hour from 7 o'clock in the evening. Archbishop's Park was one of Jacob's favourite London locations. There were two courts and they were lined by high rows of trees at either end. The foliage of the trees didn't seem to affect the ambient light on court, though you could lose a ball against leaf dapple if it was hit high enough.

The western boundary wall of the park bordered Lambeth Palace Gardens. Lambeth Palace itself, parts of it, were a thousand years old. West of the palace, just across the roundabout on the south side of Lambeth Bridge, was the apartment building where Julie Longmuir had lived until Monday night, when she'd died there. Jacob imagined that her home boasted a view encompassing the palace. The actress had perished only a five minute walk from the courts. He wondered: had she ever used them?

He didn't think Kath's mind was really on the points they played. He'd taken a set off her several times but never beaten her in a match. She was athletic around the court, didn't
make unforced errors and was a tough competitor. But tonight her shot selection was poorer than was typical with her. She seemed half a yard slow anticipating the ball. He took the first set 7-5 and the second pretty much at a canter, 6-2.

They shook hands. Their hour was played out. Kath had flushed cheeks from the exertion and a smile more complex than Jacob remembered having seen on her generally cheerful face before. The heat of the day had diminished, it was a cool June evening now, but there was still well over an hour of light left in the sky before dusk began its stealthy encroachment.

‘You've time for a drink?'

‘Gagging,' she said.

She zipped her racquet into its case and put that into the woven basket mounted on the handlebars of her bike. She'd tied her abundant black hair back for the match and now slipped off the tie and shook it out. They walked without speaking out of the park entrance nearest the courts, Kath wheeling her bike, under the railway arches to Hercules Road and the pub.

He didn't think it would do to rush this. He thought her preoccupation on the court likely caused as much by doubts over whether to tell him what she'd discovered as by the discovery itself. He'd paid for the court and so she insisted on buying their drinks. She'd taken a couple of gulps of her pint of lager shandy at their table outside before she said anything. And before she spoke, he saw her eyes switch swiftly from left to right to ensure no one was seated close enough to eavesdrop on them.

‘There's nothing of note on our boy. He had an exemplary service record. He was a fine combat soldier with strong religious convictions.'

‘They used to call it Muscular Christianity.'

‘That's a Victorian concept.'

‘I know. Somehow, he brings it to mind.'

‘He was an exceptional soldier, Jacob, brave and disciplined. His service record suggests he's an exceptional man.'

‘And that's it?'

‘Obviously it's not.' She smiled. ‘I blew out George Clooney to be here. I wouldn't have done that just to gift you a win at tennis.'

‘I'm all ears.'

‘So are we. We do a lot of listening. And GCHQ do a lot of listening on our behalf. We listen and the big mainframe computers analyze the traffic we pick up.' She looked around again, took a sip of her drink. ‘We don't hear Morse code much anymore. Radio hams still use it for their call signals. It's pretty much obsolete otherwise as a method of communication. But we picked up a Morse dialogue this week. And the instigator was at the Finsbury Park address you gave me for Peter Chadwick.'

‘Who was he talking to?'

‘It was someone in the Pyrenees, on the French-Spanish border. I can give you location coordinates, but no more information than that. This came across my desk, which is your good fortune. I've no justification for probing it further.'

‘Can you tell me what they were talking about?'

‘Chadwick described the Scholar killings. He talked about the time frame. He said a guide had been killed and his clothes taken near the location he was speaking to in the days before the first murder. The victim was male, but he'd been eviscerated.'

‘Jesus.'

‘His name didn't come up, Jacob. But there was a faith element to the conversation.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Chadwick didn't sound de-frocked. He sounded actively involved.'

‘Involved how?'

‘There was a second, briefer dialogue later the same evening. Chadwick mentioned the death of a priest in a road accident on the coast road outside San Sebastian. He didn't sound like someone finished with the Church.'

‘What do you think?'

Kath shrugged. ‘I don't know and it isn't for me to speculate. I've told you as much as I do know and more than I should have. You didn't hear it from me and I'd better go.'