The Lazarus Prophecy (21 page)

‘Why do you think that was?'

‘Evil is not a benign state, like good. It requires the nourishment of wicked deeds. Without that, it is nothing.'

‘Deprived of deeds to perform, evil can scheme. This one is stronger,' the cardinal said, looking down, as though through the floors to where they had kept and lost him.

‘He is the ninth,' Brother Philip said, simply.

Jane Sullivan felt like getting drunk. She had endured a grisly and defeating morning at the scene of an awful death. A good woman had been degraded and destroyed and she had been helpless to prevent it happening.

She had then been obliged to deliver the news to Charlotte Reynard, who had done something selfless and brave that had, potentially, exposed her to the risk of press and public ridicule. Charlotte had acted to try to help catch a murderer. She had been inspired to do what she'd done by the example shown by the friend Jane had to tell her had become a victim of the same killer.

Between the first and the second of those confrontations, Jane had been sacked. She was still in the pay of the Metropolitan Police. She still held the exalted rank of Detective Chief Inspector. But the pay had never been the issue and the rank was nominal. Her credibility would be trashed the moment it became generally known she'd been taken off the case. The media verdict would be merciless. Her career as an investigator was effectively over. She faced a future of routine duties someone enterprising with a roster would be instructed to busy her in carrying out.

She didn't want to drink alone. Even in the 21st century, men routinely hit on women kept company only by the glass in front of them at a pub table. The only person she could think of who would be free to join her at a moment's notice was Jacob Prior. He lived just a few blocks away from her. He wouldn't be out. He would be watching something by Ibsen or possibly Busby Berkley on his overworked TV.

There was a very good reason for not calling him. She felt he had betrayed her trust. But she badly needed company of the non-professional variety and she thought that drinking alone would be even more depressing tonight than staying sober.

‘I'll be at the Prince of Wales in Cleaver Square in ten minutes.'

‘It's nine-thirty at night.'

‘Your powers of observation are phenomenal.'

‘Why are you telling me this?'

‘You're meeting me there. I'm buying.'

‘No.'

‘You're going to stand me up?'

‘No Jane, I'm not. I'm old-fashioned. I'm buying.'

‘And you can record it.'

‘Record what?'

‘Whatever it is you're watching. Top Hat? Mother Courage?'

‘I'm watching a DVD. It's Steve Collins versus Chris Eubank, the rematch?'

‘You've got hidden shallows, Jacob,' she said.

He was nice looking, there was no denying that. He was handsome in a way that wasn't bland and he was well put together, under his clothes. He'd put on a suit over a soft collared woolen sweater in an outfit she didn't think he'd been wearing ten minutes earlier to view an old prize fight.

They were seated outside the pub in the square and were halfway through their first drink when she said, ‘Why did you go and see Peter Chadwick today?'

‘I went because he knows more about The Scholar than he was letting on in the interview room.'

‘You know that for a fact?'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘How do you?'

‘I can't tell you.'

After a moment, she said, ‘I can make an educated guess.'

‘That's what he said. He asked me the same question. I couldn't tell him, either.'

‘We had you vetted, Jacob, remember?'

He nodded.

‘I know you did some consultancy work for our intelligence people. You've maintained a contact?'

Jacob didn't reply.

‘Alright, let me ask you this. Who was he talking to?'

‘I'd already found that out. He was talking to someone based at a Catholic priory in the Pyrenees. It's fair to assume they're some sort of Religious order but if they are, they're operating incognito. I've drawn a blank so far concerning them. I can't even find out what they're called.'

‘Chadwick wouldn't tell you?'

‘He still might. He might not. He discussed the Scholar with them. They seemed to be aware of who he was.'

‘I see.'

‘Will you bring Chadwick in?'

‘I might suggest doing so to whoever they put in charge of the investigation.'

‘You're joking.'

‘I'm not.'

‘Jesus, when?'

‘This morning, just before the news about Alice Cranfield broke. That's why I wanted a drink, Jacob. That's why I called you.'

‘Even though you think I went behind your back?'

‘Beggars can't be choosers. And there's no think about it, I trusted you and you did go behind my back.'

‘How did you know?'

‘We're having Chadwick watched. He might be aware of the surveillance and he might not. It might be a good thing if he is. People can be panicked into mistakes.'

‘Not him.'

‘No stone unturned, Jacob, except that so far, we've been looking under the wrong stones.'

He didn't reply. Then he said, ‘Chadwick might actually know the Scholar's identity. He's got some material connection with these people in the mountains in Spain.'

‘And they're likely to be some sect or brotherhood outside the umbrella of the Church.'

‘What makes you believe that?'

‘If they were completely kosher you'd have found out who they are.'

‘The last thing they are is kosher.'

‘You get my drift.'

‘Chadwick did share one honest insight with me today and I think he was bang on with it, Jane. He said that the Scholar would bask in the spotlight afforded him by Alice Cranfield's murder. He thinks there'll be a lull before he tries to kill again.'

‘I'd probably go along with that,' Jane said. ‘But it's not really my concern anymore. And my involvement with the investigation going forward is likely to be very peripheral. The personnel at the Yard view failure as contagious. Senior colleagues aren't exempt from that fear. You can hardly blame them.'

‘Tomorrow's papers are going to be interesting. Apparently print readership has picked up no end since they broke Julie Longmuir. Circulation's booming.' He looked at his watch. ‘The early editions will be out.'

‘I'll wait till tomorrow for that particular treat,' Jane said. ‘Drink up, Jacob. I'm ready for another. Mind if I call you Jake?'

Her mobile rang. She listened. Jacob gathered their glasses and went to the bar. When he returned with fresh drinks she had finished the call. He said, ‘More bad news?'

‘A development,' she said. ‘Not a breakthrough, though. Maybe I'll tell you on Monday. On the other hand maybe, after what you did regarding Chadwick, I won't.'

‘Call me Jake by all means,' he said. ‘I'd vastly prefer it if you did.'

She became more cheerful, after her call. They drank and chatted. The evening weather was benign. The square in which they sat was tree-lined, Victorian, a handsome middle-class refuge from the 60's brutalism of the council estates surrounding it. People were carefree, outside the pub. It was still the weekend. It was Sunday tomorrow, a day for picnics in the park and leisurely newspaper reading or maybe a trip to the seaside in an open-topped car, play and innocence, idleness and escape.

An hour and a half later, he walked her home. They paused at her doorway.

‘I should really see you in.'

‘He isn't there, Jake.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘It's a complication I don't need,' she said.

He raised his hand and stroked her hair, where it had escaped a clip securing it and fell loose, at the side of her face. The touch of him was spontaneous and tender and the tips of his fingers were warm on her skin. He leant in and kissed her and she returned the kiss. When it broke, she said, ‘Goodnight, Jake.'

‘Sweet dreams, Jane.'

The cardinal breakfasted early the following morning with the brothers. They ate sparingly, but they were pious men, their regimen harsh and their customary inclination towards fasting. He had a tricky and arduous mountain descent and an industrious day ahead of him. He ate heartily, but they showed no disapproval of this. Their demeanor was as cheerful as circumstance allowed. They were friendly and inclusive. He was their guest and their reprieve. He was a prince of the Church and they were respectful of the fact.

‘Secrecy is self-perpetuating,' he said. ‘It is also corrosive. It inspires cabals and conspiracies. It fosters rumour and suspicion.'

‘Our order never prospered in secrecy,' Brother Stephen said. ‘It was a necessary condition. Some truths are too terrible to be trusted to common knowledge. The Lazarus Prophecy was always one such truth.'

The cardinal nodded in agreement. He had pondered on this the previous night after reading the prophecy for himself. Had the peasants of less enlightened times feared the presence of demons among them disguised as men, it would have provoked a pervasive mood of terror and cost far more innocent lives than fear of witchcraft ever had. The prophecy would have given them cause.

There had been times over the centuries when Christianity had barely survived the various crises testing faith and challenging the organized structure of the established Church. Had the prophecy become widely known, it might not have done so. Hope could perish. It had almost happened at the time of the Black Death, when the building sheltering him was constructed. The tipping point had almost then been reached.

‘How quickly can you re-convene?'

‘We can be seven again by the end of the month,' Brother Philip said. ‘We were granted the power of ordination by the first Pontiff and it remains in our gift. We have willing candidates for inclusion in the brotherhood.'

The cardinal thought it impolitic to ask from where these candidates would come. Brother Philip sounded confident enough and one had to be thankful for small mercies. He said, ‘I must make contact with Peter Chadwick in London. I shall do so by less indiscreet means than radio transmission in Morse code. I assume the man possesses a mobile phone?'

‘I can provide you with the number,' Brother Philip said.

‘I shall keep the Barry account in my possession for now. Its contents have convinced me that I am likely to find a more constructive use for it beyond these walls than you will here.'

‘The secret must be kept,' Brother Stephen said.

‘There you go again,' the cardinal said. ‘The Templars too believed in secrecy for its own sake.'

‘And we all know what happened to them,' Brother Dominic said.

‘The innocent soul butchered yesterday by the creature you knew as Edmund Caul was a gifted healer. She was a saver of lives, a giver of hope, someone who repeatedly spared the loved ones of her patients the desolation of grief.'

‘You must be quite something in the pulpit, your eminence,' Brother Dominic said.

‘I speak only the truth.'

‘Those are the very reasons he chose her,' Brother Stephen said.

‘Her skill was rare and her learning accrued over decades,' the cardinal said. ‘She is a cruel loss to the world. My priority is making her the last loss he inflicts.'

He sighed with exasperation. The men he was among were virtual hermits. Their isolation prevented them from having any real empathy. They never came into personal contact with a living, breathing woman. Womanhood to them was a concept represented most intimately by Mary the Mother of Christ and the Magdalene. They had their spiritual duty. They possessed piety but emotionally they were arid men.

‘I will take the Barry account with me in the hope of finding a practical use for it,' he said.

They looked at him. Brother Philip said, ‘God help you, your eminence, if you mean to take on Edmund Caul.'

‘I have no choice,' the cardinal said. ‘It is my fault he is free. I mean at least to try.'

He had to find the time too to perform a requiem mass. There was a protégé to bury. The remains of James Cantrell still lay in a mortuary draw in San Sebastian. A firm of investigators based in Paris was still probing the specifics of his death.

The cardinal felt like a man with a mountain to climb. What he actually was, was a man with a mountain to descend. Assuming he reached the safe refuge of his car without falling, he intended first to take his laptop from the trunk and read the accounts in the English newspapers of the death of the latest victim of the killer the Police there were calling the Scholar. He believed in the old saying about knowing your enemy. This one might have crept from hell, but intuition told the cardinal that Brother Philip had been wrong about their charge in one crucial regard.

He did possess character traits. And it was those traits that made their owner behave in ways that could be predicted. If he was the devil's spawn, he would be vain and given to trickery. He would be a liar and would have an appetite for games. Apparently he had a talent for mimicry. But the music hall songs he'd crooned as they celebrated their rituals outside his cell door suggested a degree of nostalgia for his own recent past. London was significant. He had chosen to return to it. There were ways in which he might repeat himself there.

It was almost funny. He had not really believed in hell or even in the devil except as metaphors for the opposite of what was good. He had thought Lucifer's domain an abstract concept and his character an invention of poets like the great Protestant Englishman John Milton in his verse masterpiece ‘Paradise Lost'. He had thought the story of The Fall a mere parable cautioning powerful men against the sin of pride.

Now he thought of Satan as an adversary, he seemed very real indeed. He seemed cunning and plausible and entirely relentless in his quest to envelope the world in darkness. My name is Legion, he quoted to himself. And he wondered how he could ever have become so lazy or complacent to have forgotten that eternal swaggering boast and the grim warning the biblical episode describing it offered to mankind.