by F. G. Cottam
She liked him. She thought he was a good man, intelligent and sensitive and probably much too sentimental ever to make anything of himself in such a heartless world. She thought he could be useful to them and at the same time hoped he wouldn’t have to be. Her greatest wish was that the Scholar’s killing spree would just stop. But she didn’t think that was going to happen. This was her first conversation with Jacob Prior. It was highly unlikely to be the last they would share.
‘Am I right in thinking there’s a conflict between Christ and Antichrist at the End of Days?’
‘There’s more to it than that. All the scribes who referred to it agreed that the conflict would take place and that Christ would triumph. But they were peddling Christian propaganda and risking accusations of heresy if they said anything different.’
‘What more is there to it?’
‘There’s the collateral damage. The Son of Perdition will claim to be God and empires will fall.’
‘Which empires are those?’
‘That part can be read as metaphor. The Devil is sometimes known as the Lord of Misrule. His son will rob humanity of hope. Civilization will fail.’
‘Is there anything else, Mr. Prior?’
‘I’d be more comfortable if you called me Jacob. The only people who refer to me as Mr. are call-centre staff phoning about overdue credit card repayments.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘One on one I’m Jane. In the presence of other police officers, it should really be Ms. Sullivan.’
‘I’m sure I can manage that.’
‘On a subject adjacent to overdue credit card repayments, Jacob, we will need you to sign a confidentiality agreement. It’s a sort of contract. And it’s binding.’
‘What does it bind me to?’
‘You can’t blog about this case.’
‘I don’t blog.’
‘You can’t tweet about it either.’
‘I don’t have a Twitter account.’
‘Most importantly, you can’t talk to the press about it. You might get offers from one or two of the tabloids. I’d say it’s likely and I’d predict that if there’s another murder the offers might start to get generous.’
‘By generous, you mean tempting?’
‘I suppose I do. But we can’t let the killer know anything about the progress of the investigation. He’s leaving clues. We haven’t interpreted them successfully yet, but I wouldn’t want him to stop leaving them, not if he goes on killing. Do you appreciate that?’
Prior looked at the faxed transcripts on the desk. His cheeks had coloured. Blushing slightly, he looked even younger. He said, ‘I wouldn’t be tempted, not by any amount of money. I wouldn’t wish to profit from tragedy. Murdered women shouldn’t be a source of personal gain for anyone.’
Spoken like a priest, she almost said. But she resisted the joke because it was in poor taste and because she knew he was telling the truth.
‘He won’t, by the way.’
‘He won’t what?’
‘He won’t stop leaving clues.’
‘Why won’t he?’
‘Because he doesn’t think you’ll catch him, because of who he thinks he is.’
They shook hands and he left after assuring her that his mobile would remain switched on for the duration of his involvement with the case. ‘That’s day and night,’ she said, ‘particularly night.’
He took the Carter transcripts with him. He wanted to cross-reference some of what they said. There were some minor chronological contradictions.
‘You think he’s got his facts wrong?’
‘Actually I suspect he’s got his facts right in areas where we’ve had them wrong. You were bang on, calling him the Scholar.’
Jane was happy to let Prior take the material away. They had copies. She thought the more familiar he became with the mind of the man who’d written the messages, the better. She thought he possessed an insight into character that was shrewd and well developed. It was a rare talent most common in people with little or no ego of their own.
After he had gone she opened up the Whitechapel file again on her desktop. There was no specific reason for doing this. She had an intuition of her own that this information from the past might prove enlightening and even useful to her at some point in the future. She didn’t yet know why or how.
When she closed the file an hour later, she fetched herself a fresh cup of coffee from the machine on the corridor and then sat back at her desk and opened the case notes on Julie Longmuir.
The actress had been rehearsing the lead role in Strindberg’s play, Miss Julie. Jane had seen an old BBC dramatization starring someone like Janet Suzman or Glenda Jackson years earlier. She had largely forgotten the plot details. She couldn’t even properly remember who’d played Miss Julie. One or two scenes had stayed with her. There’d been the interminable polishing by a servant of a boot. She remembered about it that it wasn’t exactly light entertainment. Scandinavian drama of the period was decidedly light on laughs.
What exactly was the period? She looked it up. She saw that Strindberg had written the play in 1888. It was a coincidence, wasn’t it? Except that Jane Sullivan had a detective’s belief in coincidence. She didn’t trust it in the slightest.
It wasn’t at all what Father James Cantrell expected. His first emotions were a contradictory mingling of relief and indignation. The bleak austerity of the priory so far was a theme he’d expected to see continued beyond the iron door. He’d expected a dungeon, he realized, a stone cell hewn from rock in medieval times for captivity and confinement in dark cold secrecy. He’d expected shackles riven into pitted walls.
He had been stupid, hadn’t he? If the place had been designed principally as a prison it would be below rather than above that the cells would have been built. That had been the custom then. It was still the custom now. Subterranean spaces were more secure. Where there was no light, hope tended to extinguish itself. It was a custom as true of the Lubyanka Prison run by the KGB as it had been of the Tower of London used by Plantagenet kings.
The door opened instead onto a large and spacious library. It wasn’t well-lit, but gloom was a relative notion and compared to what he had left behind it seemed both sumptuous and airy. The windows were narrow but they were thickly glazed with glass and there were several of them, evenly spaced, in a single row across both exterior walls. Between the windows there were crammed bookcases and bookcases lined both interior walls for the whole of their length.
Most of the volumes were bound in leather with gilt tooled titles glimmering on their spines and the overall impression, in the dry and relative warmth and brightness of the library, was one of scholarly privilege.
The room had a high ceiling and a wooden ladder on wheels had been constructed to enable readers to climb to reach the books placed on the more remote shelves. Apart from that, the only furniture was a rectangular oak table at the centre of the room equipped with a single straight-backed chair. The floor was smoothly flagged stone, but this was still by far the most comfortable and congenial area of the priory Cantrell had experienced.
There was a smell he knew was a mingling in there of vellum and parchment and hide. It hinted at the age of the order and the weight of its ancient tradition. He shook his head. He thought of the generations of devout men whose dedications had been squandered on a wicked fallacy.
Then he noticed the single slender item placed on the table at the centre of the room. He sighed, disappointed, knowing with a sinking plunge in the pit of his stomach that this was what they thought of as their proof. Words inked on pages: rumour, embellishment, speculation and lies. He hardly had the will to go and see what had been left there for him. He strode from the door to the table and looked just the same. The cover was stiff and marbled board without a single character, let alone a title, to tell the reader what the volume might contain.
He took the top corner at the unbound edge and opened it. And he read a copperplate frontispiece that said, Being an account of the L
ondon Mission of Brother Daniel Barry in the Year of Our Lord, 1888.
He shook his head. He was tempted to read no further. He had wasted more than enough time. What he needed to do was to go and confront the trio of fustian-clad unknowing clowns he had left at the bottom of the spiral of stairs. He needed to spell out to them the specifics of what the Cardinal had ordered they should do. And more pertinently, the blasphemous rituals they should no longer practice.
He didn’t think he could influence their beliefs. He’d seen the incredulity on their faces when he’d informed them of the contemporary interpretation of what really happened with the miracle of Lazarus and his apparent return from the dead. Father Cantrell didn’t delude himself about what he could achieve with the men he’d left down there. Above all, he liked to think he was a pragmatist.
He let the cover of the book slip from his fingers and noticed a puff of dust escape the pages when it dropped back down. Whatever Brother Daniel’s mission had been back in the great metropolis of the Victorian era, over recent years, it seemed evident nobody here had bothered to remind themselves about it. That was fine by Cantrell. He had no intention of reading about it either.
He descended the spiral of steps in darkness. Darkness didn’t intimidate him the way the thought of it had, clutching his taper on the way up. The journey down led to only one destination and the shaft was straight and the steps evenly cut into the stone. He opened the door at their base and rather enjoyed the crestfallen expressions that claimed the faces of the three brethren waiting for him in the room beyond.
‘You haven’t read it,’ Brother Stephen said. His tone was not so much forlorn as abject.
‘I’ve no intention of reading it.’
‘That sounds like the bigotry of which we stand accused,’ Brother Dominic said.
‘Words written on a page are proof of nothing,’ Cantrell said. ‘They amount to conjecture. At best they can be described as an affidavit. They must be taken on trust. They are not tangible or demonstrable. They do not qualify as evidence.’
‘Neither do the Gospels, by your definition,’ Brother Philip said.
‘Who was this Daniel Barry?’
‘He came from Dublin. He was first a sailor,’ Brother Philip said. ‘He was a sometimes prize-fighter. In his more reflective moments he wrote song and verse.’
‘Sounds like one of those Byronic all-rounders,’ Cantrell said, ‘common only to the 19th century.’
‘He was both common and uncommon,’ Brother Stephen said. ‘He was not an aristocrat like Lord Byron. He was intelligent. He was resourceful. He was physically formidable.’
‘The fasting didn’t weaken him?’
‘He was not required, in his role, to fast,’ Brother Dominic said. ‘And it ill-becomes you, Father, to make fun of us.’
‘How did he stumble across your Order?’
‘We recruited him,’ Brother Philip said. ‘His faith was staunchly held and sometimes a Soldier of God must be a warrior. At the outset he was unconvinced. We were able to convince him. He took on his mission with hope and resolution.’
‘You haven’t convinced me,’ Cantrell said.
‘Please,’ Brother Philip said. He sounded desperate. ‘Please read his account.’
Cantrell remembered the Cardinal’s instruction to treat them kindly. He looked at his wristwatch. It was approaching 3.30 in the afternoon. He was absolutely determined he wouldn’t spend the night enduring their hospitality. He had more than sufficient daylight left for his descent to where he had left the rental Jeep. It was June and wouldn’t be dark until comfortably after 9pm.
He said, ‘I’ll take it away with me.’
‘That’s forbidden,’ Brother Stephen said.
‘By whom is it forbidden?’
‘We exist in a condition of necessary secrecy,’ Brother Philip said.
‘That’s my condition. That’s my only condition,’ Cantrell said to them. ‘I give my solemn word I’ll read Barry’s account. I’ll give my solemn word not to show it to another living soul. But I need to take it away with me to contemplate its implications fully. I will not be coerced and I won’t be rushed.’
‘You give us no choice,’ Brother Dominic said.
‘None,’ Cantrell said.
‘Then we must accede,’ Brother Philip said.
Cantrell said, ‘When I arrived here, you mentioned your prayers and observations. There are also the rituals you perform, are there not?’
‘Not since the Cardinal wrote to us threatening the sanctions he did unless we stopped,’ Brother Stephen said. ‘We have not performed any of our rites since then.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Just over seven weeks ago,’ Brother Philip said.
Brother Stephen frowned. ‘It’s closer to eight,’ he said.
‘You give me those assurances in truth, before God?’
‘Our rites have not been practiced since the day we received the Cardinal’s letter forbidding them,’ Brother Philip said.
It was precisely the assurance he had travelled there to hear. Cantrell spread his arms wide. ‘And yet the world has not come crashing around your ears since then, gentlemen. Everything remains the same, does it not?’
They looked at him dubiously. None of them commented on this rather stark observation. It was a little like dealing with recalcitrant children. The Cardinal had hinted at excommunication should they defy his instruction. It was the harshest possible punishment the Church could inflict. But Cantrell thought it the only one that would have stopped them. They were steeped in their traditions and motivated, he supposed, by a childish sort of terror.
He broke bread with them before he left the priory. The custom only delayed his departure by 20 minutes or so. A small part of him felt remorseful at having humiliated three feeble old men. It had been a necessary process but when you attacked people without the means to retaliate it could justifiably be described as bullying. The role of bully was not one with which he felt comfortable.
They seemed happier, or at least relieved, when he put Daniel Barry’s account carefully into his rucksack. Their secrets were safe with him. He had told them the truth about that. Their beliefs and the purpose of their order would do untold damage to the credibility of the Church should any of their antics be exposed as duties practiced until as recently as seven or eight weeks ago.
‘Make sure that they are obeying my explicit instructions,’ the Cardinal had said. ‘If there is further damage, do what you can to conceal and limit it. We will have of course to close the priory and dissolve the order and disperse them and reintegrate each of them individually into the true faith over the next few months. But in the first instance, their strict obedience is the most important thing, that and their silence.’
Cantrell felt he could leave quite satisfied for the present. He felt magnanimous enough to eat their mountain cheese and home baked loaves with them in their stove-warmed kitchen and to sip more of the cold well water that had earlier satisfied his thirst. They offered him wine as their guest. But he refused it because the descent he faced to the meadow where he’d left the Jeep was long and arduous and required sobriety.
He wondered about their individual natures and backgrounds. Dominic was not what the Americans would have called the sharpest knife in the drawer. Stephen was the most openly defiant of authority. Philip was their leader, more intelligent and pragmatic than the other two, someone whose intellectual gifts might, in other circumstances, have been useful in Rome. He could have seen Philip in the role of a Vatican diplomat, had the self-delusion of his calling not caused him to waste his vocation and life.
They had each wasted their lives, he thought, chatting pleasantly with them, a smile on his face, his compliments about the quality of the bread provoking a smirk from Brother Dominic, who had kneaded the flour and yeast and done the baking, he was modestly informed.
He paused as the heavy wooden door slammed juddering in its stone frame against his back, with th
e world a panorama before him of fluffy clouds and bleak rock gullies still smeared this high by stretches of winter snow. He turned and saw the home the three old men shared once more as a forbidding rampart erected on deceit, defending malign and covert practices.
For a moment it occurred to him that they might simply have lied about their obedience to the Cardinal’s command. It would be difficult to abandon rituals faithfully observed over a lifetime of self-denial. It would make all that suffering seem futile. He turned back to the vastness of the view and shook his head. They would not risk exile from the Kingdom of Heaven, would they? That was, for men like them, too terrible a price to think about having to pay.
Pride, ego, ligaments, muscles, spirit, sinews: there wasn’t a single part of her that didn’t hurt. She left the rehearsal studio in Covent Garden with the vet-smell of embrocation rising from the sorest bits of her severely abused body. She decided she would walk to the flat she had recently rented for herself and the children in Pimlico. If she cut south along Catherine Street she could cross the Strand and do most of the journey with a view to her left of the river.
It was eight o’clock in the evening and nowhere near dusk yet. It had been a sunny day. It had been a hard afternoon at the barre. The piano pieces she’d rehearsed to still rang vibrantly in her ears. She had almost forgotten that the piano was of course a percussion instrument. Four hours of its loud and relentless prompting had been an emphatic reminder of that.
She needed the serenity the walk would provide. The walk would work in this balmy July weather as an effective warm-down. The kids were with their dad for a couple of days so there was no overtime bartering to have to factor in with the time-conscious nanny she’d too hastily employed. The walk would be stress-free. It was a good idea.
Except that Charlotte Reynard did what she always did when she walked without an appointment to keep or a deadline to have to meet. She inventoried her successes and her failures. She took stock of her life. She calculated the pluses and minuses with the cold and objective analysis to which a forensic accountant might subject a balance sheet for evidence of profit and loss.