The Lazarus Prophecy (3 page)

They had both of her phones and they had her laptop. But on what little she'd learned about the victim, Jane thought it unlikely she had met or had any contact with her killer prior to the one fatal encounter.

She hadn't seemed the type for internet dating. She hadn't had a Twitter account. There'd been a Facebook page dedicated to her, but it was a fan-site with which she hadn't
interacted. It was run by a man with mild spectrum Asperger's Syndrome and a solid alibi. There'd been no persistent stage-door Johnnies to identify and question because her play hadn't opened yet. She'd been fastidious socially. There was nothing frayed or chaotic. No loose ends at all.

‘Why did you deliberately conceal the first three crimes from the press?'

‘It was a judgment call. There's an attention seeking element to the murders.'

‘Then why go public on this one?'

She glanced at the Deputy Commissioner, sitting beside her. His expression said this was her ball to carry, or drop. She said, ‘We didn't have a choice. Someone leaked it. And frankly the high profile of the victim and nature of the murder gave us no real option. The man responsible will derive gratification from what you people write and say on-air. He might feel in some way vindicated. But going public was inevitable.'

‘Because this victim mattered, because she wasn't on the game?'

‘That's a gratuitous assumption.'

‘It seems a fairly obvious assumption. It also seems quite reasonable.'

‘We haven't caught him. We have no suspects. The situation has escalated. Women living alone need to be warned and vigilant. And we could do with the help of the public. I doubt a man who kills four times in seven weeks in the manner he has behaves normally otherwise. Someone will suspect something and if they do, I'd implore them to call us.'

‘Is it true you call him The Scholar?'

She smiled and looked down at the desk in front of her. ‘It's easier to say than perpetrator,' she said. ‘I look forward to calling him by his name, when I identify and arrest and charge him.'

‘You're confident you'll catch him?'

‘I am and we will.'

‘Before he kills again?'

‘That's what we're all striving to achieve.'

After the conference, she called Dominic Carter, the professor of ancient languages at Oxford helping them decipher the Scholar's messages.

‘This one's different from the others,' he said.

‘Different in what way?'

‘It's quite fundamentally distinct in idiom, grammar and expression, Ms. Sullivan. The others were formal in the way that they were couched. This has much more of a vernacular character.'

‘Do you have a plain way of putting this?'

‘Yes, very. Anyone could have written what he wrote in the other languages. Well, any classicist familiar with those languages could. They don't tell you anything about the character of the writer. This Hebrew text is different.'

‘How?'

‘He sounds the way a Nazarene might in Judea at the time of the life of Christ.'

‘You're saying it's impersonation?'

‘Impersonation or parody, yes.'

‘What would be the point of that?'

‘I haven't the faintest idea.'

‘How about the subject matter?'

‘More End of Days stuff. I'll provide you with a translation later today. But I really think you might require a theologian at this stage.'

‘Because impersonating Jesus Christ is deliberately blasphemous?'

‘And because there might be clues as to his motivation I'm missing that will be more obvious to someone schooled in Christian theology.'

It seemed a stretch to Jane. It seemed an even bigger stretch than the copycat link the guy from The Sun had tried to make at the conference. But it also seemed a potentially careless omission. They'd had the first of the texts for seven weeks. She wondered where you got a theologian from. It wasn't like they advertised their services on Gumtree or in the Yellow Pages.

To Carter, she said, ‘Can you recommend anyone?'

‘As a matter of fact, I can,' he said.

At the conclusion of their conversation she rang the contact number he had given her. It was for a man named Jacob
Prior. No one picked up and so she left a message, requesting that Prior call back, stressing it was urgent. Urgency was a growing feature of this case because the crimes were escalating in both savagery and the frequency with which they were being committed.

She looked at her watch. It was now one o'clock. She could grab a sandwich in the canteen or she could access the Met file on the Whitechapel killings and spend an hour reading that. She'd earlier scoffed at the idea of any link. But Carter had reminded her that the Scholar knew his history. Maybe history also inspired him.

The file listed eleven possible Ripper victims, two of whom had never been identified. Jane concluded during her reading that there had actually been seven, starting with Martha Tabram in April of 1888 and concluding with Rose Mylett the following December. Some criminologists speculated that there might have been between 20 and 30 victims. She thought those sensationalist figures plucked out of thin air. Only seven suited the methodology and time-frame in which a spree killer would likely operate.

There had been no shortage of plausible suspects. The man in overall charge of the investigation, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, had favoured the Pole, Kosminski. But there had been no real consensus among the senior officers. Druitt, Ostrog and Tumblety were equally likely or unlikely to have been responsible for the seven murders and varying degree of mutilation involved. Time had determined that. When he had been given plenty of it, he had turned Mary Jane Kelly into something that looked barely human. He had savaged her beyond recognition and taken away her uterus.

He had sent letters to the men investigating him. Or somebody had. The overall opinion was that these were genuine and Jane thought that more likely than not. Apart from one message hastily obliterated, he had not left anything written at the crime scenes in the manner of the Scholar. Or had he?

The paradox of the Whitechapel killings was that the murder of women considered worthless by Victorian standards had so shocked Victorian London. It had caused moral outrage and triggered an epidemic of terror by no means confined to the East End. It had undermined the confidence of the public in the police. It had threatened public order. It was as
though a capering demon had been unleashed on those cobbled streets and its gruesome devilment had shaken belief and destroyed the faith people had in their society.

Perhaps the Whitechapel killer had left messages behind. Maybe the police had kept that from the public and the press. Possibly they had been ordered to do so. Some of the files pertaining to the investigation were still classified. But the Scholar would have to have known that to be copying it now and there was absolutely no way that he could.

She thought they'd done very well with their investigation. They'd been exhaustively thorough in interviewing and compiling copious detail. It had all been after the fact and they had been hampered by what they hadn't had. There'd been no witnesses, so there was no description of a suspect. There were no forensics, so they had no fingerprints. Their scene of crime photography was haphazard and pitifully limited by the available technology. They hadn't even had telephones.

They'd been working in the dark, Jane thought, because it was in darkness that the crimes were committed against women probably made helpless to retaliate to the attacks on them by drink. You had actually to hope they'd been drunk. The violations sober would have been truly hellish to endure. You had to hope the victims had been senseless with gin when they were singled out and their throats were slashed and their lifeblood leaked copiously away.

She thought London in the period probably quite a nightmarish place, for the most part. There had been pockets of affluence. There'd been Wilde plays performed in theatres on the Strand where Escoffier created his culinary masterpieces at the Savoy. There'd been energy and invention and private acts of altruism and political reform.

For the most part, though, there'd been smog-slicked cobbles and the heaving stink of the river and poverty so abject it beggared belief in modern times. It was not a period through which she would have liked to live. Only aristocrats and courtesans among her gender had possessed any influence or credibility. She was reminded that some criminologists put the number of the Ripper's victims into double figures. She supposed it was possible. It was a bleak area of speculation.

Her mobile rang and the familiar sound of it made her jump. It was the theologian, Jacob Prior, returning her call. That was good. She closed the computer page she'd been looking at and
started to explain to him how his expertise might help them better profile their killer. He listened without comment or interruption until she'd finished. And then in a voice more youthful than she'd expected to hear he said he'd seen her morning press conference on the midday news and would do whatever he could to help with their investigation.

He thought it resembled less a place of piety than a fortress. The location might be partially responsible for that. The monolithic character of the structure might be a consequence of the weather it was forced to endure. Pyrenean winters could be harsh at this altitude. Ice eroded stonework. Wind withered masonry. They had built it to last and last it had, he thought, as he rapped painfully with his knuckles on the iron-braced wood of the door.

He looked up, appraisingly. The façade was high and almost featureless. It was flat-roofed, with crenellations like those that surmounted a medieval keep. It was coloured a stained dark grey and windows no wider really than chinks had been hewn into the stone at high intervals. He shivered. He was not cold after the exertion of climbing the hazardous path to the spot. The building he stood before seemed to cast not just a shadow but a surrounding chill. It squatted there. There was a sense in which he thought it silently brooded too.

Bolts were drawn back with what sounded like ponderous slowness and he looked frowning at his wristwatch. Already, he was impatient to be away from this refuge of heresy and obsolescence, this blemish on the character of a faith properly equipped to flourish in the contemporary world. Before even having met them, Father Cantrell was offended by the human relics he was obliged to confront and the offensive nonsense their order had peddled down the centuries. He would put a stop to it. It was his mission and if he was indignant, he thought his indignation entirely of the righteous sort.

The man who opened the door was very elderly. He blinked at the light and vastness against which Cantrell knew he must be framed in the doorway. He was tall and thin and stooped from what looked like the affliction of arthritis. It had bent his back and deformed his hands, twisting the fingers of both in on his palms in a mannerism that made him seem obsequious or afraid. He wore a coarse brown woolen habit and a silver crucifix that looked antique hung from a frayed leather cord around his scrawny neck.

‘I am Brother Dominic,' he said. ‘You will be Father James, sent by the Cardinal. Come in, Father. I will not pretend that you are welcome.' The words were delivered with a blast of the halitosis common to serial fasters. The chemicals of the stomach, deprived of food, revolted.

Cantrell felt relieved at the rudeness he'd just encountered. He despised cant and hypocrisy. His presence here was a threat not just to the way that the residents of this place lived and worshipped but to their very existence. It would be perverse for them to pretend to be pleased by his arrival. He'd deliver the news they needed to hear and his departure afterwards would not be delayed by unnecessary courtesies.

There was no brightness within, because there was no power. There were candles on high stands, he saw as his eyes adjusted to the absence of illumination, but they were not lit. Gloom pervaded. What scant light there was entered through glassless windows in the stone fabric of the building as deep and narrow as archery slits. The flagged floor of the large chamber he was in was strewn with a thin carpeting of straw. There was no furniture and no decoration other than a heavy wooden cross hanging unadorned on the wall opposite the wall in which the door was hung.

To his left, he saw there was an archway. It was to this that Brother Dominic gestured as he said, ‘Come.'

The archway shaped the entrance to a corridor. It was long and lit along its length by tapers set in sconces on its walls. Cantrell had become aware of how cold it was in the building. He couldn't see his breath, but it felt chilly enough in there to do so. It was silent apart from the sound of their footsteps echoing slightly as they progressed. He looked down and saw that Brother Dominic wore leather sandals over bare feet.

The corridor opened onto a large and largely featureless room. Two men stood in it. They were elderly like Brother Dominic and, like him, they were gaunt looking and grim of expression, attired in the same coarse habit he wore. Their expressions turned hostile when they saw their visitor. One was almost entirely bald. The other had a head of white hair shorn close to the scalp. He was introduced as Brother Stephen. The bald monk was Brother Philip.

They invited him to sit at a table equipped with a long bench to either side of it. He sat on one side and they sat on the other. There was no point, he thought, in observing non-confrontational
niceties when it came to the seating arrangements. He was there only to confront them.

There was a pewter jug on the table on a beaten pewter tray with four beakers. Cantrell was thirsty after the climb to get there. He poured from the jug into one of the beakers and raised it to his lips. It was well-water, cold enough when he swallowed the first sip to possess a skein of ice.

‘Is this all that remains of you, just the three?'