The Lazarus Prophecy (26 page)

He was reading the letter for the second time when he took a call from the investigative agency examining the specifics of his protégé's death. The Spanish police had been thorough, they said. The casino owner's son was spoiled but not feckless or drunk or involved with some conspiracy. The only body to which he belonged was his tennis club. He had killed the priest accidentally. He had broken no laws. He had been legally entitled to drive the car, which had been in good mechanical repair. There had been no speed limit on the road. It was no more or less than a tragic accident.

The cardinal sighed after ending the call. He would arrange the burial. He would pay for it personally. He would commission a headstone and preside over the requiem mass for James. But callous as it might be to think it, James was in no hurry. He had more urgent business elsewhere first.

He switched on his laptop and angled the screen so that it did not show him only his own grim ageing reflection. He read the English newspapers, studied their blanket coverage of what they were calling the Scholar killings and their increasingly serious and more widespread repercussions.

The more sensationalist titles flagged up the possibility that the Metropolitan Police were struggling to second-guess Britain's first Muslim serial killer. There were the usual incendiary quotes from the extreme political right on this. A group called the Knights of Excalibur was calling for an immediate halt on immigration and an insistence on the teaching of Christian religious principles in all state schools. There was a charismatic look to their leader, as
there always was to such men. Their pretty blonde social affairs spokeswoman had penned a piece championing the rights of women, ‘in the civilized world.'

Mosques had been attacked the previous evening in Bradford and Leeds and the outer-London suburb of Southall, where an Imam had been assaulted and his beard shorn by his attackers. A public meeting set for the coming Tuesday, organized by the Knights to discuss the Scholar killings, had been cancelled on police advice in the inner-London borough of Hackney. Their social affairs spokeswoman had called this ‘a sinister affront to liberty in a country more concerned with political correctness than justice for women.'

Everywhere in the papers, Alice Cranfield was deified. If she had not been a household name at the time of her brutal destruction on Friday evening, she was by the time Monday morning's papers were being read and digested.

She had saved many lives and inspired dozens of junior colleagues. She had been a role model for women consultants in a specialist medical field still dominated numerically and culturally by men. She'd been gracious, good-looking, selfless and civilized. She'd sat on the boards of several charitable foundations. Her colleague on two of them had been the Prima Ballerina Charlotte Reynard, who paid touching and generous tribute in articles printed under a variety of fetching stock shots.

The cardinal looked at his watch. The British parliament's emergency debate on the murders would begin in about two hours. He couldn't see the point of it. Obviously the Knights of Excalibur could not be allowed to dominate the agenda with their clever and emotive sound-bites. Established political groups had the right to their say on the killing spate. But it would be so much hot air in terms of framing a practical strategy for catching who was responsible. The motion before the House was: ‘No woman in London is safe after dark.'

It was the cardinal's considered opinion that the individual they'd dubbed the Scholar preferred darkness. Both practically and metaphysically, he would always have chosen it over light. But light would not inhibit him and with the summer solstice due in England in only a few more days, the nights would start, in the English phrase, their process of drawing in.

The cardinal thought there were several countries in which a religious street war was a real possibility. It would likely be confined to the capital, but it could conceivably happen in
Stockholm or Amsterdam. England was where it was likeliest, though. England was where it was being contrived and where he knew it was the devil's work.

He sighed again and drained his coffee cup of its bitter dregs and regretted, for the first time in 30 years, that the calming solace of a cigarette was no longer available to him. He would have liked the leisure to reflect on how much his perception of life's fundamentals had shifted since his chance exposure to the Lazarus Prophecy and his rash response to discovering the existence of the secret brotherhood established as its consequence. A week of solitude in some leafy retreat would be a welcome way in which to adapt to this new perspective events had forced on him.

There was no time. Instead, he accessed the files on his desk top to read once more the scant information provided in Sandra Matlock's story of the previous day about the young theologian, Jacob Prior. On a pad on the table beside his laptop, he began to scribble a short series of notes.

He wondered how the brethren he'd left high in their mountain solitude were doing in the business of recruiting acolytes bound for an austere life in the service of their vocation. They were men fashioned by a lifetime of isolation and secrecy. They were a trio of gaolers who had lost the only prisoner it was their mission to confine.

He thought that they would be doing rather well with the recruitment. They were old and physically feeble. But their faith was unshakeable and he had given them carte blanche. They knew how to plot and organize and conspire for if they were the Sacred Keepers of the Gate, they were also considerably more than that. They were the Most Holy Order of the Gospel of St. John and they had been since Mother Church was in her infancy. They had centuries of lore and custom to call upon. They had vigorous allies like their man in London. They were not beaten.
And neither am I
, the cardinal muttered confidentially to himself.

He had read the papers. He went to the BBC news site to discover had anything else developed since they'd gone to press the previous evening. Thus he discovered that Sandra Matlock had been presented at her own home with a human tongue. Only that morning, a shaken intern in the post room at the Tate Modern gallery had opened a parcel containing a pair of human hands. Two bloodied ears had been received in a package at the Albert Hall.

The police were said to be pondering on the significance of where these trophies had been sent while tests were carried out to see had they belonged to any of the Scholar's victims. The cardinal thought he knew from whom the body parts had come and knew also that their destinations were crude puns and gory jokes. The devil relished mischief. The complexities of modern life had done nothing to change his ways.

Some of his conclusions would be shared by the detective heading the investigation. DCI Jane Sullivan would have had to be more able than her male colleagues to have achieved her exalted rank at so young an age. Sandra Matlock had suggested that her position was at risk, but no one had repeated this opinion elsewhere and she had the explicit backing of the Home Secretary, who implicitly seemed to believe that a case involving the murder of women would best be led by someone sharing their gender.

It was a political decision. The cardinal's Vatican career had made him familiar enough with them to recognize one of those. It might also be pragmatic, given her past success rate. But he felt rather sorry for Ms. Sullivan. She was a handsome woman wearing the formal cap and status-studded lapels of the dress uniform her file photo had her pictured in. She had scored notable victories against thieves and terrorist cells and takers of human life. Her failure in this instance, though, was inevitable. She had not remotely the means at her disposal to solve the case she headed and catch the killer.

He would drink a second cup of coffee. He would use the number given him by Brother Philip at the priory to call the former soldier Peter Chadwick. With his coffee cup re-filled, he would search the internet for anything else pertaining to the life and times of Mr. Prior. He sensed a contradictory and possibly conflicted young fellow. But he was clever and sturdy and it was the cardinal's belief that much would now rest on his strong and youthful shoulders.

Jane went to the incident room after her chat with Dave Livermore. It was by then a quarter to nine. He walked in as she'd asked him to do, just after his official start time of 9 a.m., looking exactly like someone only then arriving for work. She didn't know who had been leaking to Sandra Matlock after Geoff Toomey's removal from the case, but somebody had. It was how the journalist had known that Jane's own position was at risk. She wanted to limit gossip
and speculation because it was a distraction that could only alert the Scholar to their thinking and subsequent moves.

She talked to her gathered squad members about the trophies delivered, including her own of the previous evening. She didn't say anything about having been followed because the circumstances in which she'd recovered her package made it obvious she'd been tailed. She described the words he'd written.

‘You're the only recipient who got a message,' someone said.

‘The message is pretty obvious when you deliver a tongue to a news reporter. The same is true of ears to a concert hall and hands to an art gallery. It's a joke at the expense of the victim and the investigation. It's a gruesome pun. It's a blatant and concerted effort at attention seeking which seeks to trivialize everyone but the perpetrator.

‘And there's a human cost. Alice Cranfield has relatives suffering from the shock and raw grief of her death on Friday evening. That news was only broken to them on Saturday, now this. The intern who opened the package containing the hands at the Tate is 18 years old. She's completely traumatized.'

‘It's the second note addressing you personally, ma'am. He sent you the lyrics to a song from an old musical. The song's about the district where you live.'

‘What's your point?'

‘Some of us think he's trying to establish a relationship with you. He seems to be seeking some kind of personal rapport. It might even be described as a flirtation. '

At ten o'clock she met with the Commissioner for a full de-brief of her meeting with the Home Secretary of the previous afternoon. In the lift on the way there, it occurred to her that the DC might have been the one doing the leaking. He'd been jerked more than merely taken out of the loop. Whatever he'd been reassigned to was an awfully long way away from the Scholar investigation. She couldn't think of a likely motive beyond the press agreeing to keep his name out of it if the investigation faltered and failed. Whatever, he was well out of it now.

She was in her office and waiting for Jacob Prior to arrive at 10.55 when she noticed that the sun was no longer shining brightly. A yellowy fog had insinuated itself across the sky. It was drifting from the direction of the river. She opened a window. There was a sharp, sulfurous
smell to the air, a taint so thick it almost seemed tangible. And the fog was thickening. The sun through it was dimming from pale to opaque and there was an ochre weight to drifts and banks of mist settling solid and sightless around the bases of buildings.

By the time Jacob arrived, five minutes late, the scene outside had taken on the hue of a dirty, feeble dusk. Black particles danced and glimmered and glued themselves to her window panes. Hampered traffic bleated blindly on horns in the streets beneath where she stood.

Jacob had his upturned cycle helmet in his hand and a pair of bike lamps stashed in the helmet's padded oval bowl. He was bright-eyed but his skin had a murky sort of sheen. She went to fetch him paper towels from the adjacent bathroom with which to wipe his face.

‘Smog,' he said, when he'd cleaned off some of it. ‘Never imagined I'd see smog in London. Not in my lifetime.'

‘All those wood-burners,' Jane said. ‘The aspirational lifestyle takes its inevitable toll.'

‘I wouldn't know. But I expect you've got one.'

‘Tell me about the Lazarus Prophecy,' she said. Her eyes drifted once more to the window. It was ten past eleven in the morning on the 17th of June and through the roiling gloom outside the streetlamps had come on.

Jacob briefed her. ‘I had another crack at it this morning,' he said, ‘came up with precisely nothing again.'

‘What's your instinct?'

‘Lazarus was around at the time of Christ. His sisters were disciples. He was known to most of the Apostles. There's some speculation that the Gospel of St. John was actually written by Lazarus, who became Bishop of Marseilles when the Church was in its infancy.'

‘I don't know what any of that signifies.'

‘Lazarus was returned from the dead, you know that's the biblical claim?'

‘If I had your expertise, you wouldn't be sitting there. It doesn't mean I'm an idiot.'

‘After his return he served Peter, the fisherman and first Pontiff. This was at the time of the Roman Empire. Christians were persecuted.'

‘Fed to the lions?'

‘That and far worse. Lazarus had the commitment of a man literally given his life back. Symbolically, his return from death demonstrated the seventh and final proof of Christ's divinity. If Lazarus prophesied something, you can be bloody sure the Church listened and believed.'

‘Then why don't we know about it?'

‘I can only think it was something so fearful it had to be kept secret. That's why we've never heard of the Most Holy Brotherhood. That's why the Sacred Keepers of the Gate doesn't ring a bell. They've been working clandestinely.'

‘Nobody keeps a secret for 2,000 years.'

‘If they did, we wouldn't know.'

‘That's a fair point.'

‘When Chadwick spoke to the priory, he mentioned the death of a priest called Father James Cantrell. I thought that sufficiently interesting a reference to look up Cantrell's obituary.'

‘Who was he?'

‘He was originally from New York. He was killed in an accident in San Sebastian in Spain at the beginning of last week. It occurred to me that San Sebastian is an awful lot closer to the Pyrenees than it is to Queens or the Bowery.'