The Lazarus Prophecy (25 page)

There are none so blind
As those who will not see

The envelope containing the eyes smelled strongly of formaldehyde. The paper on which the words were pasted too smelled of the chemical. But they smelled also of something else, sweeter and more subtle. Jane thought she knew what it was. She raised it to her nose and sniffed. It was a mingling of lavender water and camphor oil. She put the note back in the envelope and the envelope into her bag.

Her phone rang. It was the Commander. ‘I've just got off the phone to the Home Secretary. She was quite impressed with you, despite everything. She's intelligent enough to realize that the Scholar is a cut above the average murderous lunatic. She's pragmatic enough to know that if you fail to catch him, the failure will blight the rest of your professional career.'

‘They're cheerful tidings.'

‘Susan Lassiter's ringing endorsement is not the reason I called you. Are you aware of any of the specifics concerning Sandra Matlock's domestic life?'

‘The amount she writes, I'd assumed she didn't have one.'

‘She's divorced, one child, a seven year old daughter of whom, somewhat unusually, the father has full custody. She has her daughter on alternate weekends. This was her weekend and she took her back as she always does at five o'clock.'

‘I'm sure this is going somewhere, Sir.'

‘It's going back to Sandra Matlock's Southwark flat with her, just after six o'clock. She owns a set of Sabatier knives.'

‘That's not against the law.'

‘A carving knife had been driven through the breadboard in her kitchen with sufficient force to pin it to the beech work surface on which it was placed.'

‘Go on, Sir.'

‘Impaled on the breadboard was a human tongue. I don't think there's any great doubt regarding its original owner. There was no note, nothing daubed on walls or anything of that nature. No sign of a break-in, either. Ms. Matlock is naturally quite shaken. She's interpreting it as a threat.'

‘She's got him all wrong, if she thinks it's a threat,' Jane said.

‘How so?'

‘He likes being talked about, Sir. The tongue is a pun and a compliment. I don't believe the Scholar wastes his energy on threats.'

She completed the call with the sound of her own bravado echoing emptily around her ears. She thought he might still be there, in the concealment of the shadows, watching sardonically, listening, disseminating and scheming. She couldn't make sense of it as a linear narrative, but thought that he would suit Charlotte's physical description quite accurately in the important particulars.

She walked on, vulnerable but no longer afraid. It would make no sense to tease and then kill her immediately. That would defeat the very object of his goading her. But even when he didn't kill, it was women who claimed his attentions.

Sandra Matlock had that morning brought press exposure to the part being played by Dom Carter and Jacob Prior in the investigation. Jane thought that if the Scholar had delivered them some of his trophies, she would have heard about it. He'd already had a busy evening. He wasn't omnipresent, was he? He couldn't be everywhere. Not that he needed to be. Carter was in Oxford. But their theologian's Kennington flat was only a brisk 10 minute walk from where she stood.

For the moment, though, women were his focus. Jacob had said that despite the violations they involved there was something impersonal about them. They were sensational and savage, but they were not acts demonstrating anger or spite. Somewhat reluctantly, she was forced to agree with that. Fury resulted in carelessness. If he had a personal grudge against women hateful enough to provoke him into this level of violence, he would have made a mistake by now, which he hadn't done.

The police forensics lab was in Lambeth, not far from where she lived. She took her package there and filed a weary report after sealing it in an evidence bag and instructing a technician to refrigerate the contents before returning home. It had been a long day and tomorrow promised to be busy. She would sleep the sleep of the innocent. She thought the Scholar, bloodily drenched in guilt, would sleep soundly too. He'd enjoyed a satisfactory evening, high on amusement. Except that she couldn't readily imagine him sleeping. She wondered did he ever feel the need at all.

‘How did Warhammer go?'

‘Present tense, ma'am, it's ongoing. That's the beauty of it. It's an epic saga. It's total immersion in another world, not some five-minute video arcade shoot-'em-up.'

‘What part do you play, Dave?'

‘I'm an Imperial Knight,' he said, blushing.

He didn't look very much like an Imperial Knight. She couldn't imagine him astride a snorting stallion, buckled into armour, inflicting carnage on a battlefield with a broadsword. He was shortish and plump and wore a russet goatee beard. But she didn't expect anyone would voluntarily play a Warhammer dwarf.

‘You still found the time for Edmund Caul?'

It was eight a.m. and they were in her office at New Scotland Yard. He'd arrived carrying a cardboard Starbucks cup. It was already warm with the sun slanting from a cloudless sky through her window. There were dust motes and the coffee smelled strong and sugary.

‘Caul was an intriguing guy. It was an interesting time. London was probably the busiest metropolis in the world. It was the hub of Empire back then and was a major port city. I hadn't realized that. For a number of social and economic reasons it was a place in a state of flux. It was majorly violent, even on the recorded crime stats, which were probably only a fraction of what was going on.'

‘And the forces of law and order were always playing catch-up?'

‘They never caught up. You've got this weird paradox of an incredibly conservative ruling establishment and an anarchic population beyond anyone's control. There were no-go areas in London for the police back then, criminal ghettoes.

‘The most notorious was the Rookeries at St. Giles, which reached to Seven Dials in what's now Covent Garden. There was no anti-drug legislation on the statute books. Disease epidemics took a massive toll on lives. Child mortality was 50 per cent. Poisoning and garroting were routine crimes. That's the background.'

‘That's the environment into which Edmund Caul was born?'

‘There's no record of his birth. There's no record of his nationality, though he was assumed to be English. There's no consensus concerning his age and he didn't have an occupation and we don't know into what denomination he was born. That's quite unusual. Every parish kept a record of births, marriages and deaths. He seems never to have been born or baptized or to have died.'

‘You're depressing me, Dave. Tell me what we do know.'

‘He was prosperous. That's the most unusual thing about him.'

‘Prosperity wasn't unusual in Victorian times.'

‘You didn't let me finish, ma'am. It was unusual for a rich man to live in Lambeth then. The river was a dividing line the prosperous didn't cross. Not unless they were up to mischief, they didn't. Lambeth was the slums and the workhouses and bedlam. Nobody wealthy had any business being there.'

‘But Caul took lodgings in Lambeth nevertheless.'

‘He did, at a cost of five shillings a week, in Old Paradise Street. His landlady was a Mrs. Hollander. She'd been the subject in the previous decade of a conviction for running a house of ill repute in Vauxhall. She got six months hard labour in Pentonville and a 5 pound fine. By the period we're looking at, she'd quit the vice trade, invested her profits in residential property and was making an income from rents. By Lambeth standards, she'd become respectable.'

‘When does the Caul paper trail begin?'

‘It starts in June of 1888. There was a brawl in the Windmill pub on Lambeth High Street that resulted in two fatalities. The men killed were both stevedores. They'd been involved in a game of cards that turned acrimonious.'

‘Caul was playing?'

‘His name was on a list compiled by the landlord of those present at the time. He wasn't incriminated. He was just there, allegedly. He'd left by the time the police arrived but he was in the saloon bar when trouble broke out.'

‘How did the men die?'

‘They were each stabbed and died of their injuries. Slash injuries. They bled to death in the gutter in the street outside the pub.'

‘Was anyone ever convicted?'

‘Someone called Daniel Barry was arrested and questioned but released without charge. The clear up rate in those days was shocking, ma'am.'

‘We're in no position to gloat, Dave. Not considering our current investigation, we're not.'

‘There was another kerfuffle involving Caul at the beginning of July. This time he was followed out of a poker game staged at a private address in Bermondsey.'

‘What was Bermondsey like then?'

‘Docks, fruit trade, meat and vegetable markets, all hustle and bustle, rough and ready, but not the sink Lambeth was regarded as.'

‘I live in Lambeth.'

‘No offence, ma'am. I'm sure it's improved.'

‘Go on.'

‘Some sort of gambling den, bloke hosting matters gets concerned after three Polish sailors follow our boy out onto the street.'

‘He'd won big?'

‘Apparently not, but he hadn't lost either and had a reputation for carrying gold around with him.'

‘Why would he do that?'

‘Gold was easily converted into cash at assay offices or pawn brokers' shops, which were more plentiful than banks then and kept more relaxed opening hours.'

‘Rather like having a debit card today.'

‘A constable was summoned outside Borough Market. He alerted a colleague close by and they caught up with Caul, who announced himself perfectly fine and looking for a hansom home. The Poles never rejoined their ship. They just vanished.'

‘Into the water, somewhere around Hay's Wharf,' Jane said, ‘cut and cold.'

‘There's no evidence of that.'

‘It sounds like people were accident-prone around Caul.'

‘I think that's fair to say, ma'am.'

‘Next?'

‘Next is the Ripper suspect list he was crossed off at the meeting in Whitehall in September. Parliament's just finished its annual summer recess. There must have been a whole load of departmental and ministerial stuff to deal with, but they were discussing the Whitechapel killings.'

‘Which is odd,' Jane said, ‘because the first murder attributed to the Ripper was Polly Nichols on August 31. Even if you think Martha Tabram was the first victim, which I'd assumed on reading the file, that only takes you back to August 7.'

‘There had to be more,' he said.

‘I think that's true on two counts,' Jane said. ‘There was more than was revealed at the crime scenes. There was something sufficiently disturbing to make tackling this a priority for the government of the day.

‘And he started sooner than the official record suggests. And he was more prolific. Two victims wouldn't have provoked the sense of urgency I'm seeing among ministers and civil servants. I suspect he started back in June when he arrived in Lambeth. I reckon the police and the politicians had compelling reasons for covering the killings up.'

‘They sound fair assumptions'.

‘What happens to him after being crossed off that list?'

‘A Soho tailor complained there was still a bill outstanding owed by one Edmund Caul in late September. Two fancy waistcoats and one three-piece suit. Then there's no mention of him anywhere,' Livermore said. ‘Everything goes cold. It's like he disappeared from the face of the earth.'

‘If only we could find out why he was included on that list and then discover why he was taken off it.'

‘You'd like to put Caul in the frame for the Whitechapel killings, ma'am?'

‘I'd like him to put himself there.'

‘You really think it's him, don't you?'

‘More importantly the Scholar thinks it and is paying a kind of homage. I'm intrigued to know how the hell our killer can be so sure about his facts concerning what the world's seen as an unsolved mystery for over a century.'

‘I'll keep on it, ma'am.'

‘If there's a tailor's bill, there might be a tailor's record of Caul's measurements.'

‘I was coming to that. He had a 32 inch waist and a 40 inch chest. He had a 35 inch inside leg, which makes him long-limbed. He took a size 9 shoe.'

‘And he was 6ft 1 inch tall,' Jane said.

‘How did you know that?'

‘It's a lucky guess. Is there anything else?'

‘It's not relevant, but he was the regular customer of a pharmacy in Bloomsbury where they made him up a scent. There was no deodorant back then and men perfumed themselves heavily to mask their own smell. The principle ingredients of what he wore were lavender water and camphor oil.'

The cardinal read his correspondence on the terrace of his villa in Rome. The sun was bright and strong on a benevolent morning. They were all benevolent there at this time of the year. This part of Italy was beautiful and blessed. Birds sang in the poplars and cypress trees and there was a smell of clematis and pine resin and honeysuckle sweetening the bitter aroma rising from the marble table top in front of him of the strong coffee he habitually drank.

He had opened a letter sent him from the mother of James Cantrell. He had read the words formed by her shaking hand with tears pricking at his eyes. She gave vent to no anger or recrimination. She accepted God's will. She expressed only gratitude that the cardinal had singled James out and mentored him in the service of his faith and the Church. His eminence had been the wise and compassionate father, she said, her son had been denied by blood. And James had loved him deeply.

She wanted her son buried in Rome, his spiritual home. She wanted the cardinal to preside over the funeral service. She was too infirm to attend. She did not require the proximity of a grave to feel able to honour the memory of her son.