The Lazarus Prophecy (23 page)

The minister greeted her attired in a black trouser suit. She did so with an unexpectedly warm smile and a handshake that suggested she was a tactile woman by nature. There was a coffee percolator in the office she was using and she poured them both a cup. Then she sat in a chair opposite the one she gestured for Jane to occupy and said, ‘Bring me up to speed.'

‘We have no firm leads. His strength and agility suggest he's under the age of about 40. He's conversant with a range of ancient languages and knowledgeable about Christian theology to an extent that makes him an expert. He isn't a secretor.

‘He's an exhibitionist in both senses. The most recent crimes are deliberately sensational in terms of the victims. And the crime scenes have all been tableaus of atrocity.'

‘Are there other character traits?'

‘There's his sense of superiority. We learn about each killing from the notes he sends us. He thinks he's in control of the situation.'

‘It strikes me he's right, so far.'

‘When people think they're omnipotent they become arrogant or complacent and make mistakes.'

‘Was it him at Charlotte Reynard's address on Tuesday evening?'

‘There's no conclusive proof but I believe so, yes. She was targeted for her charity work. He wanted to make an example of someone morally good. It's why Alice Cranfield was murdered on Friday evening.'

‘No forensic evidence?'

‘Nothing so far and no pictures from security cameras either. No witness statements. We can't computer generate or photo-fit a likeness. This week we've ruled out three hardcore death metal fans guilty of past acts of violence against women and a renegade priest who may or may not have a grudge against the Catholic Church.'

‘You can't just let him go on killing with impunity.'

‘I'm painfully aware, Minister, that the first job of the police is crime prevention. Believe it or not, it's why I joined the force in the first place.'

‘That's not a concept popular with most politicians. Do you know why?'

‘It's because crime prevention can't be quantified.'

‘That's exactly right, Detective Chief Inspector. Arrests and convictions are how the public judge the police and they're what we need to justify your rather substantial budget.'

‘I've got a dozen very good officers working flat-out on this.'

‘But you haven't caught him. You haven't even named a suspect. What needs to happen?'

‘He needs to make a mistake. We need to spot something significant we've so far overlooked. We need one lucky break or a spark of inspiration. Something of that nature has to happen.'

‘And it has to happen soon. Tell me more about the religious angle.'

‘He refers in the messages he leaves at the scene to the Antichrist and the End of Days. At first he left tracts from Revelations and the Gospel of St. John. With Julie Longmuir he wrote in a manner our expert said parodied Christ.'

‘So it was blasphemy.'

‘Yes, it was. At the latest killing he still referred to the subject of the Apocalypse and the words were couched in an ancient Assyrian dialect. But he referenced something quite modern. He quoted a Yeats poem.'

‘Let me guess: “The Second Coming”?'

‘That's the one.'

‘What do your profilers think?'

‘The most plausible theory I've heard is that he genuinely believes he's the Antichrist. Unfortunately being delusional hasn't so far made him careless. He's cunning.'

‘And he's clever.'

‘Yes.'

‘Let me run a theory by you. All the victims have been Christian women of white Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. The first three were prostitutes, on whom some cultures make severe moral judgments. The fourth was an actress, which to some believers in fundamentalist faiths amounts to little more than prostitution.

‘In some Muslim countries women are not accorded the same status as men. Their lives are, fundamentally, worth less. The perpetrator of these crimes is fluent in languages from the Arab world.'

‘He's also familiar with Hebrew, Medieval Latin and Ancient Greek.'

‘What if he wants you to think he's a maniac fulfilling something foretold in the bible? What if he's not influenced by Christian belief at all? What if he's quite the opposite? Have you considered that he might be Britain's first Muslim serial killer?'

‘Where does Alice Cranfield fit into that scenario?'

‘He doesn't think a woman fit to practice medicine. She had risen far above her rightful status. She was a cultural affront.'

‘It's a ludicrous theory, Minister.'

‘Yes, it is, but a theory gaining credence nevertheless with right-wing bloggers. Have you heard of an organization called the Knights of Excalibur?'

‘They're a far-right group, ideology as the pretext for a tear-up, usually.'

‘The theory I've just aired is one they've been spreading since news of the Longmuir killing broke on Tuesday. Last night they staged a public meeting to discuss the murders in Southall.'

‘They pick their spots.'

‘They certainly do. They almost triggered a riot. They'll be peddling this hateful nonsense until the Scholar is caught and in the meantime there are plenty of people gullible enough to believe it. They've further meetings planned in Bradford and Sheffield. I don't want a religious street war on my hands and in a hot summer I don't know whether it would take all that much to trigger one.'

Jane didn't know what to say. She was thinking of Jacob Prior's description of Charlotte Reynard as a national treasure and a sort of secular saint. She was also a dancer. There were people who thought public performance of that sort shameless and provocative.

‘Nobody in the legitimate press is taking this Islamist angle seriously, are they?'

‘The line between the legitimate press and what appears on Twitter and blog sites is nowhere near as clear cut as we'd like it to be. And half an hour before you arrived I took a call from the journalist Sandra Matlock. She's threatening to air the Muslim killer theory in a national title unless she gets an exclusive interview with me after tomorrow's Commons debate.'

‘That's practically blackmail.'

‘You said something needs to happen, Detective Chief Inspector. That strikes me as a rather passive approach. I suggest instead you make it happen and make it happen soon.'

Research was what Jacob Prior did for a living and though he didn't earn much money at it, he knew what he was about. He enjoyed solving mysteries. He had every incentive to try to impress DCI Jane Sullivan. He wanted the Scholar caught before the gory sacrifice of another celebrated woman victim. He set about the task of exploring the mysterious religious bastion in the mountains methodically.

But he didn't do that before overcoming his immediate inclination, which was to travel to Finsbury Park, haul Peter Chadwick out of his hostel or the pub and beat any relevant information out of his hide.

The temptation was there, but Jacob didn't think that would be an easy thing to accomplish and he wasn't at all confident it would work. And there was still the chance that Chadwick would decide to volunteer something, an eventuality physical assault would likely jeopardize. Finally, it was a tactic unlikely to find much favour with Jane. Instead he'd use his skills, his persistence and his powers of deductive reasoning. Those and his expensive subscription search engine.

Spain and France were Catholic counties and Peter Chadwick had been a Catholic priest. He therefore thought it safe to assume that the place in the Pyrenees had some Vatican connection.

He knew the location was remote and he knew that they had a fairly powerful wireless transmitter because they'd used it for the Morse code dialogue Kath Cooper had told him about. The transmitter required electricity, which meant that they had a generator. He thought the Wireless equipment probably manufactured by Marconi. They had invented it and it was easier to buy from Italy in mainland Europe than from anywhere else.

The hardware was probably quite old. Marconi wireless kit had been used aboard the Titanic when Morse was still a novelty. The ships listening to the stricken liner's distress signals had been famously unfamiliar with it. That had been in 1912. Jacob thought the kit in the building in the Pyrenees more recent than that, from the time when its use and reliability were both better established. Religious orders were conservative by definition. They did not squander cash on technological novelties.

The Marconi Company had sold thousands of sets. He thought that he should maybe concentrate on the generator. That must have been purpose built and was therefore a one-off. It would run on petrol and he had the map co-ordinates for its eventual destination and had identified the nearest village, where the post office would deal with commercial correspondence.

He decided to narrow his search from 1920 to 1960. He thought that after 1960 voice transmission would have been favoured over Morse by all but the military. He was pretty sure the generator and wireless equipment would have been purchased at the same time.

He was looking for an invoice or a bill of lading. He was looking for a clerical customer. After three hours of searching he found a service contract addressed to the post office in the village. The addressee was a priest called Monsignor Alain Dubois. The contract had been framed by the after sales department at the Fiat factory in Milan. It had been posted in the autumn of 1935 and was in regard to 500cc petrol generator they had seen fit to guarantee for a period of 10 years.

Bingo,
Jacob said to himself.

Dubois, a Frenchman, had gone to Germany the following year. The Monsignor was sent there to secure an escape route for Catholic clergy being persecuted by the Nazi regime. Jake knew that the regime had more zealously targeted freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses. But priests who spoke out against their totalitarian policies had been dealt with brutally.

Brutality marked the future life of Monsignor Dubois, who Jacob learned had been caught and imprisoned. He had been interrogated and eventually sent to Dachau, where he died before the conclusion of the war.

But that wasn't the end of him. His name came up in the trial account of one of his guards in what by then was Poland in 1946.

The guard was a man named Paul Toller. Before the war he had been a school teacher. His subject had been history. He was a fairly enthusiastic Party member with little time or tolerance for Catholic priests of the militant variety. He had done Dubois no special favours and they had not established any kind of personal rapport. Toller had guarded the priest after Dubois had been made the subject of a medical experiment and had been fascinated by what he'd witnessed in its aftermath.

Toller told his trial that the doctors at the camp had injected Dubois with a chemical compound called Magenta 10, a code for the substance based on its colour and the dosage they routinely administered each subject.

The priest was chosen because an attack of pleurisy had left him extremely weak. He was considered fairly close to unconsciousness and death. Magenta 10 was a drug cocktail designed to be given to men afflicted in the field by chronic battle fatigue. It was intended to enable them to fight on in situations where a second-wind might mean the difference between victory and defeat.

‘Or it might enable a wounded man to make it to a dressing station or a field hospital,' Teller said in his trial transcript, warming to his theme. ‘It marshaled the body's remaining resources in a wonderful way and had virtually no side-effects.'

He was asked what ‘virtually' meant. He said that sometimes the subjects would die of heart failure under the influence of the drug. A certain physical robustness was required to survive its use.

‘It made the subjects exuberant,' he said. ‘It gave them energy and made them restless. If they were confined, if they could not express themselves physically, they talked.'

Dubois talked. He talked to Toller, who listened. He said he had encountered the Sacred Keepers of the Gate at the secret order's mountain priory. He said that the brotherhood of the Most Holy Order of the Gospel of St. John had shown him their proof.

Toller was listening, but with only half an ear. Then Dubois mentioned something that gained his full attention. He began to speak of the Whitechapel Killer. Victorian London had always been a subject of fascination for the former history teacher from Dusseldorf, who had heard the story of Jack the Ripper in tales told him as a child at nighttime by his father.

The killer was named Edmund Caul, Dubois said. He said he'd come face to face with Caul, in the dungeon of a Pyrenean keep in the late summer of 1935. He had been skeptical, he said and so the brothers had shown him their prisoner.

Toller laughed.

‘The Lazarus Prophecy is not a subject for mirth,' Dubois said.

‘You speak in riddles, priest.'

‘Do I? Hell is the devil's domain, sergeant. Its demons are real. And you are going there.'

‘What did he say after that?' the prosecutor asked.

Toller shrugged. ‘He didn't say anything further. A little later he lapsed into unconsciousness. His heart gave out. He died. He was not robust enough for the administration of the drug.'

Jacob Prior thought that Monsignor Dubois had almost certainly died with some assistance from his gaoler. Concentration camp guards at the time when Germany was still winning the war had been a law unto themselves. They were not tolerant of impertinence and the priest had made a threat. Or he'd made a promise, depending on your perspective.

Toller hadn't had long to wait to find out whether the threat would be kept. He'd been condemned and hanged. Jacob smiled to himself. The guard's neck had not been robust enough for the administration of the noose.

Dubois hadn't been just a rank and file cleric. He'd been important enough to be chosen to organize an escape route out of Hitler's Germany for priests whose lives were at stake. He'd been selected for the task because he had a track record as a fixer. Pre-war Vatican politics had brought him into contact with the mountain brotherhood where he'd had his enigmatic encounter.