by F. G. Cottam
‘Psychics help us from time to time. We don’t advertise the fact and the ones who believe they’re genuine don’t seek publicity. Some of my colleagues are unconvinced. I’ve always kept an open mind.’
Charlotte reached for her tea. Jane thought she was keeping it together remarkably well but that any questions about the night’s earlier events risked provoking an episode of real trauma. Fingers trembled across the table towards the mug and gripped its handle. It wobbled on its way to her mouth but the tea didn’t spill. She slurped and gulped and Jane felt a stab of sympathy so strong for the woman it felt like a wound.
‘Where are you planning to stay the night?’
‘Your liaison officer booked a hotel room on my behalf.’
‘Would you feel safer with a police guard?’
‘It isn’t necessary. He won’t come for me again.’
‘Why won’t he?’
‘I don’t know, Detective Chief Inspector. I just know that he won’t.’
‘I’d like you to call me Jane.’
‘That might change, though, mightn’t it, if I provoke him?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I mean I can’t help you, Jane. Even if I could, I’d be afraid to. Do you think that’s cowardly?’
‘I think you’ve already been very brave. I think it was courageous of you to agree to talk to me at all. I’ll arrange a car to drop you at your hotel. If you need anything from the Pimlico flat I can arrange to get that to you.’
At the mention of the flat, Charlotte grew even paler. Her eyes widened and the tiny blue veins at her temples beat against the skin. She tried to stand and the weight on her damaged ankle caused her to gasp in pain and she sat down heavily again. Jane stood and went across and opened the door and gestured for the liaison officer, waiting outside, to come back in.
‘If you remember anything else, Charlotte, I’d be grateful to hear it.’
‘There’s nothing else,’ Charlotte said, her voice made weak and tremulous by the rude assault of events.
Jane nodded and left the room.
She was very tired. She could barely focus on the bland furniture lining the long corridor, the noticeboards and heating radiators and the strip lights illuminating her way from above. When she got to the lift she punched the button she wanted by touch because her eyes couldn’t clarify the brightly lit display.
She thought she had just been given an important if reluctant clue. She felt an intuitive faith in the authenticity of Charlotte Reynard’s gift. The Scholar would not come for her now and the reason was nothing to do with her talented feet or her pretty face or her estimable charity work. They had together combined only to provoke him.
Her knowing he wouldn’t come for her informed, perversely, the very reason he wouldn’t do so. Did he admire her for her psychic power? It was something that unsettled people generally, something usually considered sinister. How did he even know about it? It was strange to regard as an attribute something thought of until recently as an element of witchcraft.
She called Jacob Prior.
‘This has to stop. I’m in bed. I’m asleep. This is basically harassment.’
‘When was the last witchcraft trial in Britain?’
‘During the Second World War, when a Portsmouth woman revealed the sinking of a Royal Naval warship the intelligence people were keeping secret from the public.’
‘What happened?’
‘She made it known to the grieving families she could communicate with the dead crewmen. HMS Barham, it was. Churchill intervened personally. She was convicted and sent to prison in 1944.’
‘The court thought her powers real?’
‘Obviously they did.’
‘But they didn’t think them God-given.’
‘No, I’d say quite the opposite.’
‘I think the Scholar might approve of witchcraft.’
‘Yeah, well, even I’d worked out that he’s a very bad man.’
‘Goodnight, Jacob.’
‘You’ve got nothing, really, have you?’
‘We’re looking for someone physically strong, familiar with London and expertly versed in theology. It’s fair to say he’s got a grudge too against the established Church. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re in the frame. Night, Jacob.’
‘Sweet dreams, Jane.’
Chapter Three
Father Cantrell was scheduled to meet the Cardinal in the afternoon at Bayonne. He had spent the night in San Sebastian where he attended early morning mass and then decided he would rent a mountain bike and ride along the coast. The salt air and sunshine would invigorate him. He craved somewhere bright and clean and unambiguous, after his brief dip into the murky London world of the Irish adventurer Daniel Barry the previous night.
He breakfasted at a street café in a square in the pretty Basque port town. There was a smell of freshly brewed coffee and Spanish tobacco and eucalyptus. The iron wheel rims of a cart laden with fruit clacked, hand-drawn across the cobbles. Street vendors barked and bantered with early good cheer. He had a leaflet from the hotel he studied as he drank his espresso and ate a sweet almond croissant. There was a tennis court with a ball machine he could rent for an hour. He was a good player. He considered himself too good for the baseline lottery of a borrowed racket. Those he owned were custom-weighted to his own game.
A woman at an adjacent table lit a cigarette and sipped from her coffee cup and smiled alluringly at him. Cantrell was attired for breakfast in cream chinos and boat shoes and a sky blue polo shirt. He didn’t very much look like what he was. But he thought disguises rather suited the often clandestine work he carried out. He thought about the coarse and threadbare habits worn against their skin by the hermits he had left to their redundant future the previous day and almost shivered at the thought of them. They were distasteful. With their fasters’ breath and grey, sunless skin, they were almost repulsive.
He could swim, which was a temptation. But he had more time to kill than a swim would usefully occupy. A bike seemed the best bet. There were the sinewy twists of the coast road to negotiate. There were trails, should he feel adventurous, and he could enjoy an early picnic lunch before his departure from the spot. His legs were slightly feeling the climb of the previous day and it would do him good to pump some oxygenated blood into them. He had in his travel bag in his room the bright Lycra shorts and jersey he wore to cycle in. A man had to take his chances where he could. Or at least some of them, he thought, returning his breakfast neighbour’s smile.
He had spoken to the Cardinal just as soon as his mobile, plugged into the Jeep’s cigarette lighter, had shown a sufficiently strong signal to enable him to do so. That had been at about 6pm the previous evening, a couple of hours after his departure from the priory. The descent on foot had been relatively straightforward because the icy snow patches of the morning had softened into slush with the heat of the afternoon.
And he had felt energized by the success of his mission. He was a dynamic man, which was one reason he had been chosen for the decisive role he played in front-line Church politics. He could be easily angered and sometimes too easily discouraged, but felt events in the High Pyrenees had gone as well as they reasonably could have.
In their short satellite phone conversation, he did not mention to the Cardinal the existence of the document the mountain brethren had pleaded with him to read. He didn’t consider it strictly relevant. He wanted to stress the success of the priory negotiation without diminishing his achievement with unnecessary detail or potential ambiguity.
He planned to mention it, at the appropriate time. When he had read the whole of the journal, he would précis the contents and present His Eminence with them. They would provide a curious footnote only, he was sure.
Doing so would break the solemn promise made to Brother Philip. But Cantrell was in no doubt as to where his loyalties lay. He knew who it was he served. He was confident about the rights and wrongs of what politicians were apt
to call the bigger picture. The truth was sometimes absolute. On this occasion it was contingent. He would break his promise to the mountain brethren with his conscience untroubled about doing so.
These conclusions were reached at the wheel of the Jeep. They were arrived at in daylight, strapped into a $40,000 vehicle with four wheel drive and SatNav and climate control. They were decided as Nina Simone sang the definitive version of Feeling Good on the car’s excellent stereo system and quartz fragments brought a summer sparkle to the smooth surface of the road. He began the Barry journal only late in the evening, in solitary darkness after dinner, in the room of his San Sebastian hotel.
Perhaps its contents contributed to his death. It might have been that he rode the following morning carelessly preoccupied. He might have been a bit shaken by the implications of what he’d read. The only witness to the collision was the driver of the Ferrari that rounded the bend and hit his rear wheel at 90 kilometers an hour, trashing the bike, killing its rider instantly, only slightly denting his own front bumper.
The bike was a rented Marin, an American cycle built in California and equipped with Shimano components. It had three chain rings and 18 speeds and a frame made from double-butted titanium tubes. It was a high performance machine, sleek and fast, and Father Cantrell might have been tempted to ride it recklessly. The Ferrari driver said not, entirely willing to accept the blame. He was 21 and the son of a casino owner. The car had been a birthday gift four months earlier from his parents.
The Spanish police attending the accident informed the Cardinal’s secretariat of Father Cantrell’s demise within an hour of the doctor pronouncing him dead at the scene. They were prompted to do so by instructions printed on a laminated card carried in the victim’s wallet. Next of kin were not the priority in the family of the Church.
They examined and inventoried the contents of his hotel room. They discovered no note. Suicide by car involved head-on collision and this one had clearly been accidental. A court could decide on culpability. That wasn’t their job. They packed the priest’s belongings and ordered a courier to transfer them on to Bayonne as requested as their former owner lay oblivious to events and smashed pretty much beyond recognition under a rubber blanket in a mortuary drawer.
He’d done a bit of research into Jane Sullivan. His interest wasn’t morbid. He thought she was one of the two or three most attractive women he’d encountered in his adult life and was intrigued on that basis to learn more about her.
She was way out of his league and not at all the sort of person to mix the professional and the personal, he was sure. Her sole aim was to catch the killer they were calling the Scholar. He’d agreed to help because he’d been approached and believed the killer needed to be caught as a matter of urgency. But he sourced a few preliminary facts about Jane. She wasn’t at all what he’d expected a senior murder squad detective to be like.
She’d gone into the police service as a graduate recruit straight from university. It was as a student that she’d met the man she married in her early 20s. He went into local government in their home city of Hull. She transferred from the Humberside force to the Met when the marriage failed after a couple of years. She was already a rising star at the time of the transfer.
There was nothing tokenistic about her rapid promotion through the ranks. It clearly wasn’t motivated by political correctness. She had an outstanding conviction rate on the robbery squad. It dropped, understandably, when she was seconded to the anti-terrorist unit of the service for a couple of years.
She’d been heading up murder investigations for three years, since the age of 28. She’d covered an awful lot of ground for someone so young. He’d thought her funny and human and warm, but wondered whether that wasn’t just a persona she found it convenient to adopt. It would make civilians assisting feel comfortable around her. She was obviously clever and single minded and nothing got in the way of her nailing the bad guys. He sensed she’d give a cosmic bollocking to any of her own people ever guilty of fucking up. She was more than slightly intimidating.
He rolled his eyes, thinking about what he’d said to her about the Marlene Dietrich film. Jane Sullivan would have assumed the obvious: that Elaine Page and Barbra Streisand featured heavily in his CD collection and that he couldn’t get through The Wizard of Oz without a box of Kleenex to hand.
He’d known that it was Helen Mirren in the 70’s version of Miss Julie because he watched far too much television. He also held the personal opinion that the ninth round of the 1987 encounter between Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard was one of the greatest ever contested in a ring. But she hadn’t asked him about boxing. She’d referenced Miss Julie and got totally the wrong impression about him just because he was good at remembering trivia.
Jacob had tried to do as Jane had requested and frame a realistic academic background for the Scholar. His principle areas of expertise were ancient languages and the Bible, with particular reference to the Gospel of St John. His knowledge of the scriptures was impressively comprehensive. And particularly in the last message he’d left, he wasn’t just quoting biblical passages and references. He was making blasphemous claims and propagating beliefs that were heretical.
One order above all others in the established Church shared the intellectual credentials and taste for apocalyptic subject matter demonstrated by the Scholar. And they were the Jesuits. The more Jacob thought about it, the more plausible it seemed to him that the killer’s background involved the rigorous theological training and debate of the Jesuit priesthood. There were universities where he could have acquired his obscure knowledge and linguistic skills. But they suggested more the seminary. The fierce dogma of his beliefs hinted at faith once deeply held and now foully corrupted.
It was a good theory until it came up against the victims. It worked neatly for the messages. It didn’t comfortably fit the actual crimes. There was a tradition in some religious faiths of trivializing or denigrating women. There wasn’t in Christianity. Catholics particularly revered women because of the crucial part Mary had played in the birth of Christ and his journey to maturity. Culturally, Catholic countries were overwhelmingly matriarchal. Put at its simplest, all the boys loved their mum.
Plenty of women had been burned and hanged and drowned as heretics and witches and the practice had continued until a few hundred years ago. Retrospectively, many of these women were seen by the Church as martyrs. Some, like Joan of Arc, had actually been canonized as saints. Even a renegade Jesuit would not naturally be misogynistic.
The first three victims of the Scholar had been prostitutes. Mary Magdalene had been a prostitute and Christ had forgiven her with no recorded qualms. The fourth had been an actress, which wasn’t a sinful profession. And the fifth intended victim, the dancer, had raised so much money for good causes she qualified almost as a secular saint in her own right.
He called the direct number Jane Sullivan had given him. He got through to her answering service. He went into his kitchen to make a cup of tea. She called him back before the kettle had been given time to boil.
‘They’re exhibitions of atrocity.’
‘Go on, Jacob, I’m listening.’
‘He has nothing against women. It might sound counter-intuitive to say that, but strictly speaking, I think it’s true. He chose prostitutes because they were easy targets access-wise. The mutilations were the more shocking because the victims were so physically attractive before he went to work on them. He upped the ante when he didn’t get publicity.’
‘That doesn’t explain the links both Longmuir and Reynard have to the year of the Whitechapel killings.’
‘That’s a coincidence.’
‘No, Jacob, it’s not. There’s no such thing. And you’ve told me nothing we haven’t already worked out for ourselves. The Scholar craves a public. You heard me say as much at yesterday’s press conference. He’ll be delighted with today’s papers. Have you seen them?’
‘No.’
‘They all lead o
n the Longmuir killing. There’s plenty of lurid detail and no shortage of wild speculation. They’ve really gone to town.’
‘I think he might be a renegade priest. If he was so seriously delusional as to think he’s the Antichrist, his superiors in the Church hierarchy would have had him assessed psychologically. They would probably have insisted on psychiatric help. He might even have been committed or sectioned or whatever the term is.’
Jane Sullivan’s end of the line was silent.
‘His knowledge of early Christianity and language skills point the way of a Jesuit. So a former Jesuit priest who went off the rails, someone who knows London well and is physically strong enough to kill the way the Scholar does; how many candidates can there be?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I will by this afternoon.’
Jacob thought he might as well go and do a session at the gym. He’d done as Jane had asked of him in regard to her elusive killer and there was paid-for work he could and probably should be getting on with but he needed to get out of his chair and away from his desk for a couple of hours.
His membership of the GymBox health club in Holborn was his single biggest extravagance. Some people liked to take drugs and some liked to celebrity-spot in exclusive Soho watering holes with suits on the door and roped off areas for VIP guests. He thought each to his own. His personal preference in his leisure time was for hitting the punch bag and doing floor-work and skipping a heavy leather rope to a clock on the wall that measured off time in three minute rounds.
He’d boxed as a schoolboy and he’d boxed at university and, though he didn’t miss gloving up and hitting people, research was such a sedentary occupation it only seemed sensible to try to stay in the shape he’d developed and maintained from his mid-teens.
He travelled there on foot from the flat he occupied alone in an old walk-up block at the Oval. Kennington Road became Westminster Bridge Road and he turned right onto Embankment at the South Bank Lion and the vista of London along the river opened up to him, always slightly dreamlike despite or maybe because of its familiarity. He glanced over his own shoulder at the Commons clock tower on the other side of the water and at the curvaceous sweep of Westminster Bridge.