The Lazarus Prophecy (41 page)

‘It's a game to him,' she said.

‘It always has been,' Jacob said.

And when we have our bit of fun,
Oh, Boy.

The Smog engulfed the figure of Edmund Caul before he reached the quayside so entirely that it looked as though he might never have existed at all.

‘None of this happened,' Jane said, squeezing Jacob's hand so hard her grip made him wince, her eyes on the small bulge of coins in their bag on the table again.

The coins given to Jacob by Brother Philip for his wager were cast from silver. The silver had, until the smelting and casting, existed for centuries in the shape of a simple cross. This relic had itself been created out of silver coins. There had been thirty of them originally, small and thin, faded and ancient; the price paid an apostle called Judas in return for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.

It was Brother Philip's belief that Divine Intervention was rare. Man had not been abandoned, but the tinkering with him of the Old Testament was a thing of the distant past. Free will was one of Christianity's defining principles. Sometimes, however, the intervention of the Almighty was urgently required. And Philip was a realist. He thought there far less chance of getting it through prayer than provocation.

He'd thought that if making the money paid for Christ's life the devil's property didn't provoke help from above then nothing was going to do it. It was a gamble he thought he might pay a price for taking in the afterlife, but he was sanguine about that. Its success relied on the entity called Edmund Caul cheating at the table. But Philip was a shrewd enough judge of character to have regarded that as a betting certainty.

The crisis worsened over the week that followed events that evening aboard the Allegra. Political and religious hostility escalated and spread internationally. A riot in Hyderabad claimed the lives of almost 400 people. Racial gang war at a number of high security prisons in America threatened to undermine the nation's entire penal system and a score of Federal correction facilities went into total lockdown.

A State of Emergency was declared by the Mayor of the city of Detroit. The western suburbs of Paris burned, becoming a no-go area for the forces of law and order. There were mass demonstrations in Stockholm and Sidney and Milan and a curfew was imposed in the English city of Birmingham. Spanish unions called a General Strike. The workers of Greece came out in solidarity. Armies were mobilized in Russia and Pakistan. The world held its breath.

By the time the British Home Secretary was assassinated ten days later, the situation had actually begun to settle and calm. Moderate people, given a taste of anarchy and the subsequent destruction and danger it posed to them as individuals, recognized that they had far more to lose than to gain from a religious or racial conflict for which they didn't really have the stomach or the will. The cause was ultimately a dubious one and the collateral damage unacceptable. To paraphrase the old anti-nuclear slogan, global war would cost the earth.

Prayers for peace were said in mosques and churches, in temples and synagogues. Senior religious figures from around the world made passionate pleas for peace. Prayer vigils were held and a conference organized involving the commitment to participate of every major denomination. It resulted in the Cairo Accord, a pledge intended to guarantee peaceful co-existence and mutual respect between competing faith groups.

Nobody believed the death of Susan Lassiter was anything to do with the serial killer dubbed The Scholar. The murder was carried out with a high powered rifle. She was killed as she rode her gelding on a late June afternoon in the Berkshire countryside.

A single killing shot suggested expertise with the weapon. The marksmanship was a clue. Kath Cooper headed the intelligence effort to trace and nail the assassin. It took them six weeks to identify him as a former soldier suffering battle trauma after two grueling tours of duty served as a sniper in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. It was revealed he was a fully paid-up member of the Knights of Excalibur. By that time the arc of their public popularity was anyway on its vertiginous descent.

Susan Lassiter's murder probably saved Jane Sullivan's job. There were no more Scholar killings after Joan Fairchild and that one lost what remained of its impact days later, when in the aftermath of the Home Secretary's assassination, Fairchild's actual background was revealed in a newspaper exclusive that also had the effect of destroying Sandra Matlock's credibility at a stroke. The information contained in the story was detailed and precise. The source was never disclosed. Jacob Prior thought himself almost certainly familiar with the person responsible.

The British public had sobered by then. Vigilante lynchings and the threat to life and limb and hard-earned property had sobered them. The accomplishments of a politician who
had dedicated her life to such principles as law and order seemed more impressive than an identity thief strong on supremacist rhetoric and picturesque clothes. Dead, Saint Joan rather lost her allure.

She'd been right about one thing, though. Events overtook The Scholar. When his killings stopped, he stopped being news. The investigation continued, but the effort was quietly scaled down and DCI Sullivan assigned to other cases where she enjoyed the sort of success upon which her credibility had always depended.

It puzzled her for a while in the aftermath of events aboard the Allegra that the press leaks concerning the investigation had persisted for so long. They had persisted beyond the serious warning she'd given the profiler Geoff Toomey. They'd continued beyond the Deputy Commissioner's abrupt removal from his role in overseeing the case.

This mystery was solved when she saw a photograph taken in St James's Park early one evening by one of the plainclothes men briefed on the computer likeness and patrolling as dozens of them were around New Scotland Yard in case The Scholar should attempt to deliver them one of his personal missives.

The photograph was taken surreptitiously and showed two subjects apparently in earnest discussion. One of them was the murder squad's resident computer expert, Dave Livermore. The detective sergeant who took the shot did so because he thought the other person in the picture, the woman with the black bob and sunglasses, so incongruously attractive a character for a geek like Warhammer Dave to be mixing with at all. He also thought there was something oddly familiar about her body language.

Analysis of her height, build and the size and structure of her facial features positively identified her as Joan Fairchild. It's fair to say that after this discovery, Livermore failed to prosper in the little that was left of his active career with the Met.

Jane solved one further mystery only in retrospect. It was how Caul had managed to leave the scene of Alice Cranfield's murder without being seen, covered in his victim's blood. Allegra was moored only about 300 metres from her riverside flat. At the time of the killing, the tide had been on the full. A guest cabin aboard the boat had been occupied by a man called Dan Luce. Caul had squirmed through his porthole and swum to his victim's home. He was agile
and strong enough to do it. He had killed her with knives taken from her own kitchen. He had killed her naked, but had not been inhibited by that. The swim back to Allegra had sluiced off his victim's blood.

Jacob Prior was offered and took a full-time intelligence job. Kath Cooper, responsible for recruiting him, became his immediate boss. She explained that the offer had been made purely on merit. His work for them in the past had been solid and had saved them otherwise costly expenditure on wasted surveillance work. His work with the Met had been professional and insightful. Recent events had reminded them of how volatile the world could be and how quickly situations could deteriorate into crisis. His skills set made him an asset.

Jane had followed him on the night he confronted Caul aboard the Allegra. She'd had a hunch he was up to something. He was not the possessor of a poker face. During the drink they shared he seemed both preoccupied and subdued, as if daunted or even afraid. She followed him back to his flat after he walked her home from Cleaver Square. When he emerged, changed into a suit, after 15 minutes, she followed him on the dim route to Chelsea Reach, careful to keep him at a spectral distance so he didn't pick up on her pursuit.

Aboard the boat she learned that a poker face was not the only attribute he lacked at a gaming table. He had no facility at all for cards. But he was a courageous man acting selflessly and if he had deceived her, for the second time, he had done so with a noble purpose. She thought deceit unlikely to become a regular habit of his. All told, she thought him a better bet than most men and one probably worth taking a chance on.

Charlotte Reynard's ballet comeback had been nothing short of triumphant. She was right about the mature strength of her body and she had no real shortage of motivation. Those closest to her thought that self-confidence might be the vital missing ingredient, as she tried to re-scale the past heights to which her performances had once elevated her.

But she was a dancer transformed. She was even better than she had been before she retired. She was not just strong but utterly fearless on the stage. It was, as one critic said, ‘As though she has been tempered in the white heat of the forge and emerged the stronger from the testing flames.'

Quite how the experience of two years of guest appearances on trite Television shows with dwindling ratings had achieved this steely new composure she possessed, no one knew
or really cared. Success stories were heartwarming. It was a talented dancer's right and obligation to revel in the spotlight. Besides, Charlotte Reynard was almost a national treasure.

And Jane had never told her friend about the list of names they discovered at Joan Fairchild's apartment. It was copied out in her handwriting and identified a dozen prominent women, along with their home addresses. Jane thought it was probably a back-handed compliment to be included on this list, where her own name occupied fifth place. Charlotte's was at the head of it, a distinction she'd endured enough, Jane thought, without ever being told about.

Peter Chadwick disappeared. Jacob Prior was tempted to use the intelligence resources newly available to him after the former soldier and priest vanished from his modest lodgings in Finsbury Park. He was intrigued by Chadwick's character and wondered where this enigmatic man might have gone, compelled by what mission to abruptly vanish.

But he'd grown to like and respect Chadwick in the end. The man had possessed sufficient social conscience to put in serious time trying to turn around adolescents alienated from society by their own petty crimes. He'd served his country in major conflicts with courage and distinction. Whatever he was up to, wherever, he'd surely earned the right to determine his own destiny.

Destiny was something Jacob Prior pondered on. Other names for this phenomenon were fate and predestination, familiar notions to a theologian. He wondered whether Joan Fairchild represented a departure for the serial killer the police dubbed The Scholar. Or did something link her too with what had happened in the city where she died in 1888?

Her real name was Adamcewski and she was a Pole. A Pole called Aaron Kosminski had been suspected of the original Whitechapel murders. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson had named him as the likeliest culprit after his retirement from the force.

Jacob wondered would genealogical probing prove a link between Kosminski and Adamcewski and strongly suspected that if he did that research, it would. There'd be a blood connection, he'd have bet money on it. But to have proven such a link would have been dismaying. It would have only added detail to a pattern still short of finding its ominous
resolution. So he left matters alone. He decided to let them lie. There are facts it sometimes doesn't really pay a person to discover.

Then there are the mountain brethren in their lonely Pyrenean bastion, the members of the Most Holy Order of the Gospel of St John, the Sacred Keepers of the Gate. They are 49 in number now, still presided over by Brother Philip, still with their mission and their vigilant agents all over the world dedicated to discovering any sign that the Lazarus Prophecy is about to prove a hazard again to humankind.

Brother Philip has spent a contented year since his return from England. The cardinal has become his Order's faithful champion and friend. The secrecy is maintained but His Eminence is a frequent and cordial visitor who was only telling the truth when he described himself as a man committed to learning from his mistakes.

The new recruits are welcome and even necessary and they are young and resolute and Philip finds no fault with them. But he sometimes seeks refuge in the library with his brothers Dominic and Stephen, as elderly men will, to reminisce about the old days and the experiences they shared when Edmund Caul was their prisoner and there was a vital practical point to their daily observations.

Tonight too Philip wishes to discuss something specific with his colleagues and cherished companions. For the smog has descended again. Its sooty pallor masks the snow on the slopes through the windows. It makes an oily, impressionistic daub of the distant descending sun to the west. It is the third visitation in a month and he can think of no meteorological justification for such a phenomenon.

It settles, this mist, grimy and miasmic, drying the throat and bitter on the tongue as it creeps through the slit windows in their impregnable walls and trespasses upon the interior space. It roils through the candle-lit cloisters and corridors of ancient stone like a listless, inhuman invasion.

The smog groped in tendrils when it first visited, descending the steep flights of steps to the vacant cell at their deep conclusion. It remains there, dense and still, reaching upward as far as the sixth return. No one goes down there now. No one braves the gloom. Philip tries not to think about that stone chamber with its abandoned clothes and runic scrawls embellishing the
walls and the steady tick of its strongly running pocket watch. When he does, he's visited by the heretical fancy that it's less like a place of incarceration than a shrine.