The Lazarus Prophecy (24 page)

His decline and fall had been terrible. He'd died drugged and babbling, a human guinea pig in the striped uniform of a concentration camp inmate, sardonically watched by an educated thug as something with a similar effect to Benzedrine or Crystal Meth robbed him of the discretion that had probably distinguished his character.

Jacob did a search for the Lazarus Prophecy. Then he did one for the Sacred Keepers of the Gate. Then he searched for The Most Holy Order of the Gospel of St. John. None of these efforts came up with anything remotely relevant or meaningful.

The Edmund Caul business was intriguing. 1935 was 47 years after the Ripper's brief season of atrocity in London. If the Whitechapel Killer had been, say, 28 at the time of his crimes, at the time Dubois said he was incarcerated in a mountain dungeon, he would have been 75. It was certainly possible. There just wasn't very much likelihood.

He thought about the Morse code conversation between Chadwick and what Dubois had called the priory, enabled by the venerable hardware the priest had purchased for them, presumably with Vatican funds. The Chadwick dialogue had hinted the Scholar could be
someone who had escaped from there seven weeks earlier. Jacob's only certainty was that it couldn't be Edmund Caul. It couldn't, because no one human could possibly go on living that long.

‘Do you believe in reincarnation?'

‘You don't look good, Charlotte. Not by your standards, you don't. In fact you look like you're really going through it.'

‘Can you answer the question?'

‘I don't know. I keep an open mind on spiritual matters. Sometimes I'm inclined to believe, most of the time I'm not. The things I'm obliged to see and hear make me doubtful on matters of doctrine and faith. Do you believe in it?'

‘I didn't. I was obliged to witness something yesterday that made me change my mind. It's him, Jane. It's the person with the name that came to me in Julie Longmuir's bedroom.'

‘It's the Whitechapel Killer?'

‘I know. It's impossible. But it's him. I saw him yesterday in Lambeth. He's exactly the same now as he was then. He's identical.'

‘You saw him in Lambeth?'

‘I saw him as he was then, around the corner from where he took his lodgings. He smiled and winked at me. He had a swordstick, black Malacca with a silver boss, a disguised weapon but I knew what it was and there was fresh blood congealing on the blade of it.'

‘You saw a hallucination.'

‘No, I didn't.'

‘That's what you're describing.'

‘It's him. He's back. He's doing what he did the last time only he's much cleverer now and clearer about things. That makes him powerful. That was why I blacked out at the Longmuir place. I was overpowered by the strength of him, it was overwhelming, just how potently the sense of him remained. He's returned Jane, and he's very confident of himself.'

Jane sat back in her chair. It was difficult to know what to say. She had entertained several possibilities about the nature and motivation of the Scholar and the notion that he was copying the Whitechapel Killer was, increasingly, one of them. The idea that he was the Ripper somehow reborn was a stretch, though.

She had encouraged Charlotte Reynard to use her psychic gift when perhaps, she now realized, she shouldn't have. Charlotte had gone to the Longmuir apartment too soon after the shock of her own narrow escape in Pimlico. Trauma was a problem for Jane and she had coping mechanisms she'd been encouraged to develop over a decade long career of dealing with violent crime. Charlotte didn't. She could be on her way to a breakdown triggered or at least accelerated by her voluntary involvement with the case.

‘You don't believe me, do you?'

‘I try to keep an open mind.'

‘You think I'm on the way to losing mine.'

‘I think you need to take a step back, Charlotte. I don't think you should have gone to Lambeth yesterday without first discussing doing so with me. You'd had a bad shock which resulted in a physical injury that's hampering your comeback plans and causing you a lot of discomfort. You were pretty low emotionally before yesterday, when you learned that a friend had died in a manner that was grotesque.'

‘Alice was why I had to try to do it.'

‘I know that. You acted with the best of intentions. It seems to me that you always do. You're brave and selfless and enormously likeable. You're also the single mother of two young kids and you really have to keep things together.'

Charlotte had begun to cry. ‘You're right,' she said.

‘Take a step back. Don't do anything else until we've talked it through. Think very carefully before you share this information with anyone else.'

‘That's the last thing I plan to do. You already think I'm mad. I don't want anyone else thinking it.'

‘I don't think that about you. I've had someone researching Edmund Caul all over the weekend. He's as good at digging for facts as anyone I've got working on the entire investigation and he'll brief me tomorrow morning.'

Charlotte tried to smile. Jane hugged her awkwardly across their table. She'd put the children to bed and asked the nanny to stay while she walked along the river to Gabriel's Wharf to share a pizza dinner with Jane. They'd avoided talking about anything to do with the Scholar
until the food arrived. Now it lay congealing on their plates. They'd ordered a bottle of Chablis. It was cold and crisp but Jane picked up her glass and sipped wishing she was drinking something stronger.

She was glad at least she'd had time to go home and change out of her dress uniform before meeting Charlotte. Had she still been wearing that, she thought this encounter would have been even more strained and difficult.

In her bag on the back of her chair, her phone rang. She reached for it and saw that the number was Jacob's. She switched it off. Her priority just then was calming and reassuring Charlotte and it required all of her attention. Charlotte hadn't struck her as a high maintenance woman by celebrity standards, but she was in a high maintenance mood.

‘I can give you a description of your killer.'

Jane didn't reply. She groped in her mind for something diplomatic to say.

Charlotte sipped wine. Her hand was reasonably steady doing so. She said, ‘No one else can tell you what he looks like. You haven't got a clue. I can tell you exactly.'

Still Jane didn't say anything. She thought it better just to let Charlotte talk. Her tone was becoming more deliberate. She sounded suddenly on confident ground.

‘He's tallish, about six-one.' She smiled, ‘Tall by Victorian standards, I suppose.'

Jane nodded.

‘He's slender but strong and very fluid in his movement, swift and balanced, like a dancer or a track athlete. Except he doesn't look flushed with health the way athletes tend to. He's sallow and rather pale like someone who deliberately avoids the sun. He has a full head of thick dark hair. His hair is straight. I saw that when he removed his hat on entering the pub. He had a moustache, but he might have shaved it off, now.'

Jane drank wine. She thought if this was a hallucination, it was unusually detailed. They were usually fragmentary, like dreams.

‘He has black eyes. They're his most striking feature. They're probably actually a very dark brown, like that dark hardwood.'

‘Like mahogany?'

‘Yes, a brown so dark it appears black, exactly like that. And they're expressionless. He has teeth that are very white and straight when he smiles but the expression doesn't reach his eyes even when he winks.'

‘He winked at you?'

‘I don't think he's without charm.'

‘What age would you put him at?'

‘Mid-thirties, but I wouldn't bet money on that. He could be younger, or a bit older. He has an air of self-possession.'

‘Is there anything else?'

‘He dresses well. That won't have changed. He's a bit of a what-do-you-call-it?'

‘He's a bit of a dandy.'

‘Yes. He is. And he wears a scent. It's somewhere between lavender water and camphor oil.'

‘That's very comprehensive.'

‘Don't patronize me.'

‘Is there anything else?'

‘He's a good tipper.'

‘I'm not patronizing you. I'll cross-reference what you've told me with anything I'm told by my murder squad colleague researching Caul in the morning. Try to eat some of your food, Charlotte. You look like you've lost weight and can't afford to. Try and eat something and then I'll walk you back to Bermondsey.'

She was walking homeward in darkness with the river to her right along the Southbank an hour later when Jacob Prior called her again.

‘They're some kind of secret religious brotherhood. They sound anachronistic and sinister. They believe in something I've never heard of called the Lazarus Prophecy. I think your killer might be one of them. I'd respectfully suggest you bring Peter Chadwick in again and question him further.'

‘I thought there was some suggestion he might volunteer information to you?'

‘There's no guarantee. How long are you prepared to wait?'

‘Till tomorrow evening; nothing by then and I'll bring him in again. Do you have time to brief me fully in the morning?'

‘You know I do.'

‘Eleven?'

‘See you then.'

‘What do you know about the Knights of Excalibur?'

‘I'm picturing a dozen right-wing thugs in replica football shirts plotting world domination while they get sunburned in a pub garden.'

‘They're a bit more serious than that.'

‘I doubt they even know Excalibur was Arthur's sword. They're probably named after a by-pass in somewhere like Chingford.'

Jane laughed, but she thought it slightly ominous that someone as bright as Jacob took a group like the Knights so lightly. Their leader always seemed capable of the right sound-bite on television. And now they were on her mind she realized he was on the telly a lot. They had performed strongly in local elections. History taught that the liberal intelligentsia only ever woke up to the threat of political extremism when it was too late to act.

She remembered then what Chadwick had said about history at the conclusion of their interview. She was looking forward to Monday morning. She was intrigued to hear in detail what Jacob had found out about the place in the mountains. She was keen to learn what Dave Livermore had managed to discover, between his bouts of Warhammer, about Edmund Caul's Lambeth sojourn.

She could not have said at what point she became aware that she was being followed. The tracker was careful and extremely cautious. There was nothing physical to hint at it. She didn't hear anything to betray the person shadowing her. It was just the certain insistence of her intuition. Once she knew she was the subject of pursuit, she stopped abruptly to listen for the single footstep followed by a pause that would catch out whoever it was. She did that twice, but both times the expected footstep didn't fall.

She didn't look back. She didn't sense whoever it was try to close the distance. It was dark and there were few pedestrians on the river bank and there were stretches lit only by the
ornamental orbs sited at intervals long enough to leave black passages of gloom between their spheres of glowing brightness. It was still quite warm. She could smell the river, dank and cooling, black and restless in the glittering reflection of the lamps.

Her progress seemed labored. She was headed for the steps that ascended to the south side of Westminster Bridge. She could see the Commons clock tower in the distance but it appeared to her to be getting no closer. Her gait became contrived to her because she knew it was being studied by the keen eyes of whoever followed her. The scrutiny made her self-conscious. She thought it would be extremely foolish to slow down. The temptation was to walk more swiftly to the refuge of the light and bustle beyond the Southbank. But she knew haste would suggest fear and panic and be a worse mistake.

Her pursuer began to whistle. It was soft rather than strident. It was an unusual sound in 21st century London that had once been ubiquitous. Sweeps and window-cleaners had whistled balancing brushes and ladders over their shoulders as they pedaled their bikes. Butcher's boys and bus conductors whistled all the time in old films. Her whistler was skilled and mellifluous and it only really became unpleasant to listen to when she recognized the tune as ‘
The Lambeth Walk
'.

She did turn then. But when she did, there was nobody there to see. The whistling had abruptly stopped. Perhaps a final phrase of it resonated through the air but its originator had slipped from sight. She walked back slowly, her skin coarsened under her clothing by the foreboding the sound had chilled her with on recognizing the melody. Her breaths felt shallow and inadequate to the task of giving her sufficient air to sustain any strength. She felt oxygen starved, slightly lightheaded. She recognized the condition as terror.

Something snagged in her sightline. It was a package that shifted slightly in the breeze on the wall between where she stood and the water. It scraped over the stone with a sandpapery sigh and she went and retrieved it. It had been placed in a spot equidistant between lamps where the prevailing dimness prevented her from examining it properly. It bulged slightly and felt at once soft and hard under the pressure of her fingertips.

She walked carrying the package into a pool of lamplight. She opened it and briefly registered an eyeball staring deadly back at her. There were two of them, she knew whose, the
second having squirmed under her own grip so that its rear and optic nerve whorled palely next to its staring twin. She swallowed disgust. There was a note. She removed and opened and read it. In script that had become dismayingly familiar he had assembled letters that read: