The Lazarus Prophecy (16 page)

‘Will we play again?'

She took a final surreptitious look around. No one was showing them the slightest bit of interest. She took a slip of paper from the pocket of her track-top and folded it into his wallet, on the table between them. ‘We'll play again, but you've beaten me for the last time.'

‘Regards to George, when next you see him,' Jacob said.

Her bike was leant unlocked against the metal railings beside where they sat. She climbed onto the saddle and pedaled away without a backward glance. He took the slip of paper from his wallet and smoothed out the fold and looked at what was written there. There were a set of numbers he knew were map coordinates. There was a name, which was Fr. James Cantrell.

Alice Cranfield was fastidious about her friendships almost to the point of austerity. She didn't suffer fools. She thought that life was simply too short for unnecessary compromises. She felt compassion for humanity generally but found that she warmed personally to few people. Once, this detachment had been a source of disappointment to her, but as she matured from her 20's into her 30's she became more comfortable with herself. If she was as a character a touch on the cold side, she had compensated with a great deal through her clinical prowess that was wholly good and worthwhile.

She didn't hanker after a large and garrulous social circle, but that didn't mean she was self-sufficient. She had been reasonably content with her life up to the point at which her husband had died almost a year ago. She had loved her husband deeply and regarded him as her soul-mate. They had met studying medicine at Edinburgh and it had been as close to love at first sight as reality allows. In his understated phrase, they were a good fit.

A heart attack had killed him. The problem was congenital but it had gone undiagnosed. He had been a vigorous individual who hill walked and played tennis and golf. In the summer he sailed and in the winter he skied expertly. So his death was a shock. And since it, she had become rather lonely.

She was 39. She was not in what in loathsome modern parlance was called the ‘right space' for another relationship with a man. The lottery of human biology had left her childless. She had colleagues she admired and was even fond of, but they weren't close friends. She had a
sister, ten years younger, who specialized in tropical diseases and had just accepted a professorship at a teaching hospital in Boston. Her relationship with Sarah had taught her that a decade was an uncomfortable gap for siblings to have to bridge. Besides, the Eastern Seaboard of America was a long way distant.

Alice thought that she might try to establish a friendship with Charlotte Reynard. They had already got on as colleagues on the boards of two charitable foundations. She admired Charlotte's single-mindedness when it came to project allocation of the funds her energy and vision had enabled her to earn for the good causes she supported.

Stunts like the Cheddar Gorge tightrope walk had, Alice thought, put a slightly disdainful distance between the two women. At least, they had from her perspective. She thought the media attention-seeking crass. But when she'd seen Charlotte limping along a hospital corridor on her injured ankle earlier in the week, she'd experienced a flood of sympathy for the woman she realized she would feel only for someone she genuinely liked.

She thought about Charlotte on the walk home, after a long shift at the hospital, to the riverside flat she owned at Chelsea Reach. She had only recently moved there from the late Victorian home she'd shared with Tom in Fulham. She'd rattled around a bit in that after he'd gone, ambushed in the garden or at the study window by shared memories as sharp and painful as a scalpel stroke. She'd had to get out. There was nothing of Tom in the new place. And the view of the Thames she now enjoyed was quite something, with dusk approaching on a summer night.

She'd escaped the hospital at 3pm for a late lunch and on impulse had bought two DVDs at a video store on the Fulham Road she intended to watch that evening. They were both ballets and they both featured Charlotte Reynard in principal roles she had, in the first decade of the new century, made her own. That was what the majority of the critics had agreed. The ballets were Giselle and Frederick Ashton's Cinderella.

Alice had been too young to see Margot Fonteyn dance in the flesh. She had, though, seen Fonteyn dance the same parts in both of these ballets on film. She'd thought Charlotte at least Fonteyn's equal when watching her live and looked forward to re-visiting each
performance in high definition and surround sound with a large glass of something with a good vintage to hand.

It had been a long week. She'd had departmental stuff to deal with and a paper to try to complete and three surgical procedures to have to carry out. The most exhausting of those had been successfully completed on the day she'd run into Charlotte on the hospital corridor. Practically, she had saved two lives and improved the quality of a third very considerably, if the post-surgical prognosis proved correct.

It didn't amount to a bad week's work. She felt proud of her skills and satisfied with their application. She also felt privileged to be doing what she was doing and often quite humbled by the result. Medicine had been a vocational choice for her, which meant really that it had been no choice at all, because it had been dictated to her. She'd never seriously considered any other career and, of course, she'd never regretted that.

When she got in, she switched on the laptop computer on the desk in her study and accessed her personal email account. It wasn't linked to the phone she used at the hospital. Neither was Twitter or Tumblr or any other social media app. She hadn't the time for such distractions at work and even if she'd had the time, she had no inclination to indulge in that sort of thing. She considered it trivial and pointless.

There was an email left that morning from Charlotte Reynard. Just the coincidence of it having been sent that day made her smile before she opened it and read its contents. It said,

‘You should know what an inspiration you can be to people, Alice. You really are, you know. I wonder could you do lunch anytime soon? Unforeseen circumstances (aka the ankle injury) have freed up some of my time. I've always enjoyed what time we've spent together. It would be rewarding, for me at least, to get to know you better.'

Alice replied saying she'd be delighted to meet for lunch and suggesting a couple of provisional weekend dates. She thought that weekends might be slightly difficult for Charlotte because she remembered the dancer had young children. But she must also have full-time child
care. And it was the weekends that yawned like chasms of solitude for her. She had not successfully found a satisfying means of occupying them.

She switched off the laptop and tore the cellophane from the two DVDs she'd bought and mused over which to view first. She'd choose watching the last of the sun descend out over the river, she decided, enjoying the view from her balcony. She poured the last of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the fridge. It was almost a glass-full. For the ballet, she would fetch a good bottle of red from the cellar.

After seeing the sun go down she prepared and ate a salad dinner. She had wolfed down a huge portion of lasagna for lunch, had eaten it late, and didn't have a large appetite. She garnished her salad with pine nuts and a dressing of balsamic vinegar and olive oil and then grated a little Pecorino Romano over the contents of the dish.

To her own surprise and slight amusement, she found herself humming a melody as she assembled her meal. It wasn't anything from Giselle, which she'd decided on the balcony to view first. It was from a show she'd seen with Tom at a theatre on the Strand 20 years earlier and thought she'd forgotten all about. It was from a popular revival called
‘Me and My Girl'
. It was a catchy little song entitled ‘
The Lambeth Walk
'.

For much of the day, she'd been slightly preoccupied by thoughts of the murdered actress, Julie Longmuir. She had never seen her perform on the stage and had only caught her in a televised play and a six-part Sunday night series about fraught goings-on in a Cotswold village in the 1970's. She'd been telegenic and convincing and of course her death was an atrocious waste of an unfulfilled talent. But it wasn't that, really.

It was a piece she'd read over breakfast in her morning paper by a journalist named Sandra Matlock, implying that no single woman with a prominent career profile was safe. In a city with London's sophistication and capacity for surveillance, it was a ridiculous claim. The piece had almost seemed to suggest that successful women were practically tempting fate. An article unsubtly positioned next to it hinted that the woman detective heading the murder hunt had all the qualifications now required of a potential victim.

Alice finished her meal and put the used plate and utensils into the dishwasher in the kitchen. She washed her hands at the kitchen sink, dried them carefully on a wad of kitchen roll
and then loaded the DVD player in her sitting room. She pulled the curtains so the night sky wouldn't provide a distraction.

She thought about laying a cozy fire in the wood burner but decided against doing so because it was a mild night and already getting quite late, if she really intended to sit through two full ballet performances. She probably would do. She had no pressing obligations. Nobody cared how late she lay in on a Saturday morning. She went down to the cellar for her wine.

When she climbed back up the stairs, she became immediately aware of two changes to what she had left moments earlier. The first was that the lights had been switched off. They had been low anyway, so as not to compete with the images shortly to be shown on the screen. But now the sitting room was dark.

The second difference was that there was now a discernable smell in her flat for which she was certain she was not responsible. It wasn't the smell of oil and vinegar, or the scent of exotic wood from the pile in the basket by the log burner. It wasn't Chanel Number 5, which was all that Alice ever wore in the way of perfume. It was faint and subtle and was a mixture she thought of camphor oil and lavender.

She sensed movement in an uncoiling rush of dark strength and swiftness. Hot breath enveloped her in an exhalation so foul, her eyes smarted. She struggled, trying to move and escape, bound by an arm as secure as an iron barrel hoop. He licked the side of her face slowly with a coarse tongue and a saltpeter stink of saliva dried in the general heat of his proximity on her skin. They don't know he does that, she thought. He must clean them, afterwards.

She felt the first cleaving shock of intrusion as he made the knife thrust, sure and so deep she felt the point of it scrape her spine. The assault was too sudden for pain to register. He chuckled deeply, pulling the blade upward through her as she gasped and life erupted out of her in a hot gush towards the floor

He sang to her. He crooned. Lastly, she heard the words:

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

The cardinal endured few intervals of genuine doubt. He never doubted his faith or his vocation. He had never been prey to the temptations of the flesh that had so soiled the reputation of the priesthood in recent times. He thought the cause he served noble and the fellow souls among whom he served it predominantly good.

When he doubted, it was evidential doubt that tended to torment him. He had been charged in his mission by the Pontiff himself. It was to root out the heresies and cabals of secret belief that threatened the fabric and credibility of the modern Church.

The Church was a brotherhood that had throughout its history begat smaller and less inclusive brotherhoods. They were called orders, but they were, some of them, closer to being sects. Secrecy had always been an important characteristic of a faith founded at a time of persecution.

Some blamed the Romans for this tendency to vows of silence and the prevalence among the brotherhoods of signals and codes only their initiates could interpret. The cardinal held the opposing opinion that it was a very long time since a Christian had been thrown to a hungry lion.

Opus Dei was probably the biggest and most influential sub-group in the modern Church. They were not an order. Neither did they really qualify as a sect. But they were powerful, influential, tight-lipped about their practices and membership, and some moderates and liberals among the Catholic clergy considered their beliefs extreme.

The Templars were the most notorious historical example of how a religious order established with the best of intentions could become not only powerful and corrupt, but actively detrimental to the interests of the Vatican. They had been less like a cult, though, than a multi-national company, putting its own fiscal interests before obeisance to popes or to kings believed then to be ruling by divine right.

The Most Holy Order of the Gospel of St. John had been founded more than a thousand years before the Templars were established. They owed their existence to Peter, the fisherman, the Bishop of Rome, the martyr and apostle, the right-hand of Christ and the first Pontiff, the rock upon which the redeemer had said he would build his church.

This was the problem for the cardinal, the cause of his present uneasiness, the reason he had come to Bayonne in the first place. He was there because the retreat in the French town near the Spanish border housed a very elderly priest. Father Gerard was 98 years old and frail and blind and partially deaf. But he retained his mental faculties and at the age of 19, from 1934, he had spent a year assisting Monsignor Dubois, the Jesuit and the last liaison from Rome with the priory in the Pyrenees and the monks there.

Father Gerard had been ill for several days and too weak to receive his eminence. In that time, the cardinal had learned of the death of James Cantrell, received his protégé's personal effects, mourned the loss and begun to investigate whether the death was indeed, as claimed, accidental. He had also entertained increasing doubts about his initial contemptuous dismissal of the mission the priory brothers had served and perpetuated with such single-minded piety for so long as they had.