The Lazarus Prophecy (29 page)

‘He's a good-looking dude.'

‘You wouldn't think so if you met him, I don't think, though you might. I don't know. What do I know? Maybe you would. Is there any point to this?'

The police artist was a woman named Claire. ‘Artist' had suggested a pad and charcoal or pencils to Charlotte but Claire was achieving the likeness on a laptop. It was less portraiture than a process of elimination. She had thousands, maybe millions of human features to choose from in the programme she was using. It was a question of selecting the closest to life. Then there was the blending in. Claire was skilled at the blending in. They'd been at it for two hours.

Charlotte could answer her own question as to whether there was any point to this. Jane Sullivan had called that morning and asked would she be prepared to do it. The children were at school. She'd tested her ankle and winced and then looked at the smog outside mantling Bermondsey in soot and vagueness and decided she wasn't going anywhere any time particularly soon.

Her agent had that morning sent her a set of game show episodes filmed in Sweden. A London-based production company was planning a pilot using the same format and wanted Charlotte on their guest panel for the show. She was unenthusiastic about the idea, still committed in her heart and mind to a fully-fledged stage comeback. Doing the computer likeness of the man she'd seen in Lambeth High Street would justify putting off viewing the Swedish game-show. It was a more disturbing but much less tedious way to occupy her day.

Jane had explained that she couldn't make the likeness public. There was so little to go on regarding the Scholar's appearance that she had to explore every avenue, she said. But she couldn't validate the description without revealing its source and that would compromise Charlotte and expose the Met to public ridicule. She wanted the image to satisfy her own curiosity. She'd learned a detail about Edmund Caul Charlotte had got right but couldn't possibly have known.

‘What detail was that?'
‘It was his height.'
‘I could have guessed.'
‘You could, but you didn't.'

Claire stopped and saved her work and excused herself for a cigarette break on the patio of Charlotte's borrowed home. She was bleached and tattooed and she called men dudes and rolled her own from a pouch of Old Holborn. She'd arrived astride a motorbike. She was probably about 23 or 24 and she made Charlotte feel staid going on matronly.

She decided she might hobble to the gym when Claire had finished and packed up and left. She could work on her abdominals and her upper body strength and tone. It wasn't just vanity. She was a professional dancer audiences were going to pay a lot to see perform solo in the spotlight. Maintaining her shape was a professional obligation. Vanity of course played its part, though, as it did with any performer.

Out on the patio, Claire was an indistinct shape, her cigarette an orange glow that brightened when she raised it to her face and dragged on it. Charlotte thought the smog a little like the ash cloud that descended in the vicinity sometimes of an active volcano readying itself for eruption. It gave the air that dense and bitter quality. It was really strange for London in June. It brought a deaf stillness to the street outside. It was somehow mournful too, as though the city was attired for its own funeral.

It's Edmund Caul weather,
she thought to herself. She shuddered and glanced at the image on Claire's computer screen and felt suddenly cold. She felt the groping reach of a connection she didn't want to make and looked outside again to where the police artist was now a monochrome blur with a mobile phone to her ear, probably catching up on a hectic social life or talking to her significant dude.

She switched on the television. It was a large wall-mounted flat-screen, a necessary fixture for the film director friend who had lent her the house. She flicked the remote through the junk jewelry and monster trucks and personal injury claims ads until she got a news channel. They were doing an item about a rally held in Trafalgar Square that morning by the Knights of Excalibur.

Charlotte knew little about the Knights. They were talking about a woman called Joan Fairchild and they had footage of the rally where a jostled camera didn't pick up very much through the sooty atmosphere and play of floodlight beams. Then they had stills of Fairchild in which she looked suitably Arthurian, with her blonde hair done in medieval braids corseted by
bits of leather. It was a look so contrived and ornamental Charlotte thought it verging on ridiculous.

She isn't so much styled,
Charlotte said to herself,
as costumed.

Next was a brief piece about that morning's Commons debate. The Government had carried the vote only narrowly. London was still just about a safe place for a woman. Thank God for that, Charlotte thought, smiling to herself. Now we can all officially relax. The Home Secretary looked slightly harassed in an expensive suit and immaculate hair as she offered a microphone in the weird gloom of College Green a sound-bite on her full confidence in the progress of the Scholar investigation.

They switched to a studio. A plump woman guest in a chair was coming off a bad second-best looks-wise against a big-haired and seriously glammed-up Sky News presenter. Charlotte felt a bit sorry for her. Then her name came up in a sub-title and she was Sandra Matlock and the sympathy evaporated.

She talked about the gruesome human trophy that had confronted her in her kitchen after she'd returned her daughter to the girl's father the previous evening. She explained that she was now staying indefinitely at a hotel guarded by 24-7 security.

‘What's that costing?'

‘It's costing the taxpayer nothing. Fleet Street takes care of its own.'

‘Will what happened last night deter you from writing about the Scholar case again?'

‘Don't become the story,' Matlock said, ‘it's the first rule of journalism and I've broken it.'

‘You weren't really given a choice, Sandra.'

‘I'm only human. I was naturally very shocked last night. It was a violation that degraded the memory of a woman we all admired. But the answer to your question is no, I won't stop writing.'

The presenter said, ‘If you've any new revelations, Sandra, please feel free to share them with us now.'

That made Sandra Matlock smile. She looked at her hands in her lap in an expression that Charlotte assumed was meant to imply modesty. All it did was emphasize her double-chin.
She said, ‘I'm doing an in-depth interview with Joan Fairchild this afternoon. You can read it in tomorrow's Telegraph. She's a strong and dynamic character and right now, she's setting the agenda.'

‘She's stunning to look at.'

‘And there's far more to her than meets the eye. I think my piece will make compelling reading. I'm certain of it.'

Claire came back in. Charlotte switched off the television. They both looked at the image on the computer screen. It reached from just below the clavicle to the thick head of hair he wore lightly oiled and combed straight back.

Claire said, ‘We should put him in something, a crew-neck sweater or maybe a polo shirt, just the suggestion of clothing. What do you say?'

‘Neither of those,' Charlotte said. ‘Suit lapels, narrow, something with a lustre like tonic or sharkskin.'

‘Open collared-shirt?'

‘No, a tie with a Windsor knot and a tie pin too. Make the tie purple. Top the pin with mother of pearl.'

Claire looked at her. She was biting her lip. She looked away and then back again.

‘What?'

‘You're the real deal, aren't you?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I've worked with psychics before. I've always thought it a waste of my time. But you're the genuine article.'

‘Creepy, isn't it?'

‘It's actually quite scary.'

‘It's scarier for me, Claire.'

‘I'll bet.'

‘You can't tell anyone.'

‘I know that. I'd lose my job. DCI Sullivan warned me personally before I came here. Anyway, who would believe me?'

‘Nobody,' Charlotte said, looking at the computer likeness, at the slight smile playing on Edmund Caul's lips without ever reaching his dark and unreadable eyes.

‘Take care, on your way back, in this weather on that motorbike.'

‘Outside just now, I thought it was clearing slightly,' Claire said.

She hadn't always been Joan Fairchild. She'd been born Jana Adamcewski and originally came from Poznan. She was also older than she looked. She was 40, a decade more mature than the age she claimed but thanks to her genes she didn't look anywhere near it. And she was of the belief that if you were going to invent yourself you should give that invention every possible asset available. Youth counted highly among those.

Leaving Jana Adamcewski behind had been a necessity as much as it had been a choice. She had been involved with Neo-Nazi and far right groups since her days as an undergraduate in Gdansk. As Jana she'd had links with groups in Russia and eastern Germany and America and had spent a year among the white supremacists in Texas learning how they funded their activities through organized crime.

She'd had a romance with a Chapter Head in Houston she'd enjoyed. He was a paroled lifer and their romance flourished until he was killed in a shoot-out following a bank robbery in Austin. The bank robbery had not been about personal gain. Politics was expensive when it wasn't just hostile competition from the black and Hispanic gangs but the Federal Government opposed to your principles and practices. Growth was a function without which no organization survived. Her Texan had been the victim not of greed or even dishonesty but of ambition.

His death had not been in vain. He'd taken down two federal marshals in the firefight and martyrdom was useful to the cause. The only thing Jana really regretted about her American experience was the tattoos she had been inked with there. They had been marks of identification she began to think might compromise her future even before her skin had properly healed. She'd had them lasered off a decade ago and habitually wore long sleeves to hide the tell-tale scarring.

As Jana, she'd managed to accrue a number of criminal convictions. Most were for petty acts of violence at demonstrations. The most serious was for spreading rumours eight years earlier in Germany that a prominent Social Democrat was also an active and prolific paedophile.

Naivety had been her undoing. She was much cleverer now at establishing proxy addresses and identities on computers than she'd been at the time. She'd been fined 5,000 marks and given a prison sentence suspended for two years. But that conviction had effectively been Jana's death sentence. Two weeks later, in the English town of Manchester, Joan was consequently born.

The Joan Fairchild whose identity she'd stolen had died at the age of five from meningitis. She'd been an orphan, so the chance of relatives suddenly appearing and seeking a tearful reconciliation was remote. A talent for mimicry had enabled Jana to start to speak English with Joan's flat vowels without difficulty. In the years since, she'd allowed the accent to fade. Sometimes they did when you relocated and she'd lived in West London for five years and the heartland of the Knights was the South-East of England.

That was one of the many things Joan was working to change. They'd established cells in Bradford and Leeds, where over the past 24 hours three mosques had been firebombed and two of those successfully razed to the ground. They were gaining a following in the old Lancashire market town of Preston. They had control of Wigan's streets after dark and were influential in Manchester's Moss Side.

Birmingham was as ripe for recruitment in the West Midlands as Wolverhampton and West Bromwich were. And in the East Midlands they would soon have a stranglehold on most of Nottingham's white and disenfranchised council estates.

In London they held peaceful meetings hosted in incendiary locations like Hackney and Shepherd's Bush. They kept the rhetoric calm and deliberate. There was no aggressiveness or triumphalism. They let circumstances do the rest.

They had learned shrewd lessons about the spontaneity and volatility of the mob from the London Riots of three years earlier. They had learned, ironically, the lessons of the Arab Spring. Social network sites and smartphones had changed populist protest in a fundamental
way and the party politicians with their reliance on parliamentary tradition and established voting patterns were being left adrift behind the pace of events.

The Scholar was heaven sent. Joan had no real curiosity about the killer or his motivation and thought that by the time the police caught him, if they ever did, he would no longer be relevant because matters would have escalated so far by then. Next would be the inevitable wave of home-grown Islamic retaliation. Then there would be the radical reinforcements from the Middle East and Pakistan.

England's white, working-class would respond in fury and in numbers in every city and town and in the Knights of Excalibur they would have not just a voice and a cultural touchstone but leadership in the fight until they claimed victory. And that victory would be crushing and total because the numbers were overwhelmingly on their side.

In the meeting prior to the rally in the smog, she had suggested giving the Scholar some help. They knew his methodology. Everyone did from the newspaper stories and the police press conferences. And what wasn't in the public domain was known to Joan from her own police source.

She had compiled a list of names of potential victims whose deaths would stoke up the shock and outrage. She thought that leaving a specifically Koranic tract at the scenes would provide emphatic evidence of the killer's nature and creed.

It was the sort of thing Hitler or Stalin would have done in manipulating existing circumstances to benefit the cause. But their esteemed leader had baulked at the idea when he'd read the list of names Joan had written down. He had actually turned pale and his mouth had puckered with disgust and the page she'd torn from her notebook had trembled slightly in his hand.