The Lazarus Prophecy (28 page)

He didn't really think she'd be next on the Scholar's list. She was arguably the biggest prize and the challenge might tempt him, but the practicalities prevented it. She was guarded by a team of security services personnel. The terror threat that had escalated in the first decade of the new century made that a necessity. Her personal protection team would be discreet, to permit her some semblance of a family life when she wasn't on duty. But they were always on duty and they would be armed and vigilant and thoroughly trained.

Jacob's second candidate was one he was reluctant to consider, because it was Detective Chief Inspector Jane Sullivan and therefore far too close to home. He'd left her 90 minutes earlier very much the person in control of a major police investigation. He'd offered his opinion to her about her being the one capable of joining the dots to make a recognizable pattern from what he'd discovered about the mountain brotherhood. He'd suggested sincerely that it was
within her powers to do it because he believed she was a formidable investigator. She was talented, motivated, dedicated and shrewd.

He'd also seen her on Saturday evening, when she'd been unguarded and self-questioning, young and slightly tipsy and totally beautiful in her scuffed leather jacket and jeans. He'd seen the sweet, vulnerable side of Jane and then somewhat to his own astonishment, at the end of the evening he'd not just kissed, but more or less propositioned her. He'd done it because he'd seen and been aroused by the sexy side of Jane.

It wasn't an arrestable offence. It had felt perfectly natural at the time. She was an attractive single woman, flesh and blood under the exalted rank and attendant protocols. She was not just entitled to a private life. It might be something she actually wanted. He really liked her. He thought it would be unfair to say he wanted the Scholar caught to facilitate a romance with Jane. He wasn't quite that callous or superficial. But he knew it wouldn't happen until the killer was apprehended and he'd resolved that when that happened, he'd definitely ask Jane Sullivan out on a date.

She could only say no.

Unless, that was, she asked him. It was perfectly possible. She'd already done it once. The fact that she was so willful, so much her own woman was one of the things he found most attractive about her.

He'd reached the bridge and the Thames under it, lapping all but invisibly against its stone abutments, smog voiding the world beyond its twin rows of wrought-iron trident lamps so that the bridge and its static weight of traffic seemed a tiny secluded universe all of its own. Headlamps described dirty circles of yellow light. A barge sounded its mournful horn trailing through the arch under his feet and in a brief break in the gloom he saw the creamy tumble of its wake before the sight was drowned in murk again.

This was how Whistler had seen London and painted it, too. This was the London Monet had described on canvas from the window of his room at the Savoy. This was the city which had wrapped the Whitechapel killer in its inky embrace and made him all but invisible.

Apparently he'd been a man named Edmund Caul. Maybe, having learned the few tantalizing details he had about Caul, Jacob would one day research and write a book exposing
the Ripper's true identity. There seemed to be a consistent public demand for that sort of thing and he might actually earn some money at last using his skill at finding things out. He'd discover whether he could write. It was said everyone had a book in him and his would have an intriguing subject to discuss.

That was for the future, though. For now he was worried about Jane. He knew about the song lyric she'd been sent. He'd not discussed with her but had heard on the news that morning about the package she'd more or less been hand delivered the previous evening. He didn't think such clues and gestures would impede the Scholar for a moment in making Jane his next victim if he thought he could get away with it. She didn't enjoy police protection. She was charged with providing it. That was ironic, because in the Lambeth house she occupied alone, it made her, to his mind, a temptingly easy target.

That he might personally be in danger didn't occur to Jacob at all. The previous day's papers had named him as one of the civilian experts aiding the police in the investigation. But he didn't think that would provoke the Scholar into changing his habits or method. He was doing as Chadwick had suggested he would and basking in the attention two outrages in a week had garnered him.

When he did kill again, and he would unless they caught him, his victim would be another woman. He set his own timetable and he had plenty of choice. Jacob assumed night police patrols had been stepped up in every London borough. There would be plainclothes officers deployed at strategic locations. It wouldn't deter their man. They didn't even know what he looked like. He didn't really entertain the prospect of detection and capture. He was too arrogant to consider that a risk worth taking seriously.

Brother Philip had not left the confines of the brotherhood's mountain refuge since entering into it just over 50 years earlier. A man called John F. Kennedy still cherished dreams of a nobler America from the oval office in the White House then. A group of musicians called the Beatles were scraping together the funds to record their first long playing record. Soviet Russia was sending dogs and primates aboard rockets into space.

He did not consider that the world beyond the walls familiar to him had improved much in the time he had spent away from it. He had no relish for travel, for sightseeing, for the sensations secular life offered humankind. But he had no choice. It was his mission now only to do what he could to prevent the prophecy from being realized. If he did not succeed in that, his whole life would have been worthless. The mission he and his brethren had dedicated their existences to would finally have failed.

He did not want that on his conscience. Of course they should have ignored the cardinal's commands, rather than done as they had and feebly capitulated. Reduced to three in number by the influenza epidemic of the previous winter, they had been diminished in spirit too. They had possessed less defiance than they would have had they not been afflicted by loss and grief and been denuded of the symbolic power the strength of seven represented to them.

But he knew that in more robust times, the brotherhood would have defied Rome. Belief should have banished all thought of cowering obedience. Their duty to their order and their solemn obligation should have overridden all else. The cardinal, in his pompous ignorance, was of course partially to blame. But so were they. And Philip was their leader and so more guilty of cowardice and failure than anyone. He should have led by militant example. Instead he had meekly surrendered.

They had five new recruits. Two had already arrived, one from Central America and one from Corsica. Another three were on their way. Their agents had long sounded out likely members in the corners of the world where devout communities still existed. It was a question of faith and character, of sacrifice and discretion. The Cardinal had said they should elect seven-times-seven to the brotherhood and he had not suggested it in jest.

Of course, his eminence had suggested that only after reading the prophecy and becoming party to the secret. They would achieve the required strength in a matter of weeks, though Philip could not but wonder was there now any point to it.

He was in the library. Here resided the secret works of some of their most illustrious brothers. There was Michael of York, Scourge of Demons, who in the sixth century had vanquished a presence so baleful it had driven the congregation of a parish church insane. They
had started to gnaw at their own limbs, consuming themselves. The madness had spread to surrounding settlements with the speed of an epidemic.

By day the demon capered. By night it lurked in the church. It had squatted there, in the English phrase. It slouched and when Michael confronted it, it taunted him and delivered its vaunting threats. He defeated it in scorn, casting it out, consigning it back to the dark region that spawned it.

There were others. Peter of Copenhagen in the 11th century, Vladimir of Sebastopol in the 13th, Sigmund of Austerlitz in the 16th; it was a roll-call of honour and piety and courage. For centuries his predecessors had risked hell with the prospect of no recognition beyond these walls and no earthly reward for the fearsome deeds they accomplished.

He stood. He was weary just at the thought of the travel ahead of him. He went down to the door opening onto the nine descending flights to where they'd kept their guest and vigil before Rome's recent, rude intervention. He put the key in the lock. He did not relish this next episode in his long life but knew that it was necessary.

He counted down each flight. The echo of his footsteps accompanied him. He lit his way, as was their custom, with a taper. Long habit enabled him to see far better than most men were able to in the dark. He could sculpt gloom into shapes and interpret shadows with his eyes. He could feel on his skin and smell what other men only groped blindly for. They were skills acquired over decades that had become as instinct to him.

He reached the bottom of the ninth and final flight and stood before the cell door, with its dead candles and its bronze relief. He opened the tabernacle above the relief. Inside, there was a small silver cross. It was plain and set into a rough Calvary of hill shaped clay from which he plucked it. He held it reverently in the palm of his hand for a moment, fingering the pitted metal before slipping the cross into the pocket of his robe.

He pushed the cell door. It was not locked. It opened a foot on the oiled balance of its hinges, perfectly hung, despite its massive size and weight. He smelled the sweet, somehow moist spoor of the former occupant and swallowed fear. He hesitated and the flame of his taper spluttered slightly as if in protest at what he intended to do. But he felt up to the ordeal and felt
he deserved no better than to endure it. His misjudgment might yet prove catastrophic. He felt he should be properly served a reminder of the fact.

He walked into the cell, careful not to tread on Caul's discarded clothing, careful to avoid tripping on his buttoned boots and the faded spats with their splotched human stains. His black Malacca cane glimmered under varnish in the corner where he'd left it.

His pocket watch hung from its waistcoat chain on a hook screwed into the wall. From eight feet away, Philip could hear it ticking strongly. He raised the taper and saw that the blued hands on the porcelain dial showed the correct time. It was a good trick. It was, too, most certainly the Devil's work. Despite himself, he shuddered.

He raised the taper high and looked at the shapes scratched into every inch of stone on the walls. Their prisoner had been industrious in his lies and blaspheming and perhaps in boastful predictions he was now turning into truths.

It wasn't possible to tell. Some of the symbols were runic and some were hieroglyphic but all were so ancient that deciphering them would be the work of decades. Easier to understand, though not to look upon, were the things he had drawn. Christ was crucified upside down amid a horde of gleeful imps. Mary was riven and mutilated. Heaven's archangels sodomised children and goats with expressions of ecstasy on their ethereal faces.

Then a patch of wall claimed Philip's attention because the words engraved into the stone there were as plain to him as the Spanish he'd learned as an infant in Madrid from rhymes listened to on his mother's lap. They were written in Latin. They read:

There is one who will know me. She will know he who it was I have been before and who I am and has the gift to know what I can accomplish. I will know her only when I find her. I will recognize this comely creature of lavish endowments. I will save her to the end which will be the end only of the beginning. Hers will be a slow and exquisite adieu.

Philip had seen enough. He walked out of the cell, closed its door, fingered the cross in his pocket for the consolation it offered him and climbed back up the steps. When he got to the
top he locked the carved door behind him and walked through galleries that led to the centre of the building. He blew out his taper.

He opened the door to the courtyard. Sunlight glazed the cobbles. The June sun seemed impossibly bright. He winced and walked to where Brother Stephen worked the bellows to heat the coke in the furnace for the job of smelting and casting they would do before his departure.

There was an anvil to the right of where Brother Stephen stood and worked and sweated. Philip took out the cross and placed it there. He looked at it. They both did.

‘You're sure about this?' brother Stephen asked.

‘I've thought about it hard,' Philip said. ‘I cannot see an alternative.'

‘Half of me wishes to see the cardinal fail,' Stephen said, ‘God forgive me.'

‘He would not forgive you, brother,' Philip said. ‘Without what I will deliver him, the cardinal would certainly fail. But we must not wish for it. We must pray ardently that God's warriors in London are successful.'

The coke in the furnace was yellow and in places white with heat. It rippled and buckled the air. It seared the skin in radiant blasts and was ready. Stephen reached for a long-handled iron smelting ladle from a rack of them hung to his right. He placed the silver cross very carefully in the bowl of the ladle and put the ladle to the fire.

He crossed himself. Both men did. The silver object puddled and wilted and then pooled in a molten gleam at the bottom of the bowl. ‘Fetch me the molds, brother,' Stephen said. ‘And then let's pray it's only Christ who gains from this enterprise and not the Devil who profits.'

‘Amen,' Philip said.

Charlotte Reynard thought the likeness quite good. She'd decided against the moustache. She thought that he was too vain for anachronisms and would likely be clean-shaven now. The pallor of his skin was difficult, because it had a smooth and weirdly ageless texture to it. But she thought she'd captured the eyes and the mouth well enough. The former were darkly intense and the latter was sensuous. His cheekbones were pronounced without being sharp and his chin was strong. It should have been a pleasing visage, all told. It wasn't.