by F. G. Cottam
She climbed the steps under the imperious snarl of the Southbank Lion and turned left and ten minutes later was outside Jane’s door. The door was wooden and painted red and had a brass knocker and when Jane opened it, the hallway beyond was spacious with white painted walls and parquet varnished on the floor.
‘Would you like to come in and have some coffee or tea?’
‘No,’ Charlotte said, sounding grumpy to herself. ‘Any other time, Jane, I’d take the guided tour. Right now, I just want to get this over with.’
They used a service entrance to the block. Jane explained that she had pre-arranged this earlier in the afternoon. She’d taken what Charlotte had said about confidentiality sufficiently seriously not to want to risk the vestibule. She’d had a pass key couriered to Victoria and she took this from her pocket and used it to let them in.
They still had to access the lobby and enter the apartment by the front door. It was the only way in. There was incident tape in bright yellow bands and a crudely fitted hasp secured by a weighty padlock Charlotte assumed put there by the police to secure the scene. Jane undid the padlock and, aware of her ankle, Charlotte followed the detective awkwardly through a gap she pried in the tape.
The sitting room was lit through its blinds by the glare of the slanting sun. She saw photographs on cluttered shelves and a BAFTA mask trophy leering metallically in pride of place at the centre of a mantelpiece. There was the faint smell of something sweetish she couldn’t readily identify. For some reason the genteel odours of lavender water and camphor oil suggested themselves, but it was sweeter and less subtle than either, almost cloying in her nostrils.
‘She was found in the bedroom,’ Jane said.
The bed had been stripped to its springs.
‘Are you getting anything?’
‘Nothing,’ Charlotte said. She looked at the words painted in blood on the wall. Julie Longmuir’s bedroom was at the rear of her apartment and faced south-east through its windows and was much gloomier in the early evening than her west-facing sitting room was. The script appeared black on the white wall. The wall appeared a sombre shade of cream. They had not switched on the lights.
‘He works in darkness,’ Jane Sullivan said.
Charlotte went over to the message daubed in Julie Longmuir’s blood as the actress lay dead and oblivious to her killer’s industry. She reached out a hand and then hesitated. She swallowed fear, which had the corrosive flavor of bile in her throat. And she brushed the pads of her fingers softly against the curdled words. Her world became black and its black folds enveloped her.
She came to on the sofa in the sitting room. She was lying along its length and her head had been propped on a cushion. Jane was unscrewing a hip flask, seated beside her.
‘Drink this.’
Charlotte sipped and grimaced. ‘God, it’s revolting. What is it?’
‘Rum,’ Jane said.
‘Why?’
‘It was the only potent drink I had in the house. You didn’t get anything, did you?’
‘I got something strong enough to make me pass out.’
‘Do you want to tell me?’
‘Give me another sip of rum.’
Jane did. ‘Do you want to tell me now?’
‘I have to get away from here.’
They exited the way they’d come in. They crossed the road and stopped by the river, at the foot of Lambeth Pier, near the little café there, and sat on a low wall bordering grass and a display of flowers with the river in front of them and Lambeth Palace to their rear.
‘What did you see?’
‘Darkness, Jane, darkness and blood and pain.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘Something else came to me. I believe you’re looking for a man named Edmund Caul.’
Chapter Five
His involvement with the Metropolitan Police wasn’t Jacob Prior’s first experience of consultancy work. He’d helped the security services on a couple of occasions. That too had been on the recommendation of Professor Carter and that too had required he was first vetted to make sure there was nothing unsound or unstable about his character.
A third similarity was that his work there, like his involvement now with the police, had been voluntary and therefore unpaid. Though to be fair, he thought wryly, Jane Sullivan had bought him that lunchtime sandwich eaten yesterday afternoon in the park.
His work for the intelligence people had involved two groups of Islamic fundamentalists being monitored because their beliefs were considered sufficiently extreme for them to pose a potential danger to the state. Jacob had thought this highly improbable in both cases and he’d been able to demonstrate why. Esoteric beliefs, however fervently held, didn’t lead to suicide vests. It tended to be hatred encouraged by ignorance that did that.
He’d done his research and studied the subject groups and then argued his point convincingly. In so doing he’d saved the security service a fair bit of manpower and surveillance funding. He’d also made a contact in Katherine Cooper, a 30 year old intelligence operative with whom he’d liaised on both occasions. In espionage terminology, she’d been his handler. Except that he’d been more technical support than an actual spy.
Kath was a gifted linguist with a doctorate in mathematics. She was also a county level tennis player with a fondness for appalling puns and a long standing crush on George Clooney. Jacob had played her at tennis a few times on the courts at Archbishop’s Park. Afterwards the routine was to share an early evening drink outside the Pineapple pub in Hercules Road, generally while Kath did the cryptic crossword in The Times in about five minutes without ever seeming to give it her full attention. He shelled and ate pistachio nuts. And then she wobbled off on her Pashley push-bike.
She was a spook. But with her booming forehand and sunny disposition and Surrey boarding school vowels, she’d never struck Jacob as a particularly spooky spook. He could ask a favour of her. They were friendly enough for that. The favour wasn’t going to threaten national security and if she thought it might compromise her in the slightest in any way, she always had the option of saying no.
He was curious about Peter Chadwick. He didn’t think he shared Jane Sullivan’s heightened intuitive instinct but he wasn’t a bad judge of character and Chadwick had seemed unbelievably sure of himself for someone undergoing questioning as part of a major murder investigation. Being under suspicion hadn’t fazed him in the slightest. Neither, though, had he been angrily indignant about protesting his innocence, the way Jacob felt most blameless people would be in similar circumstances.
What Chadwick had actually been like, was a man with a connection to the case. He was a daunting specimen. There was quite a lot of him physically and it all looked impressively energetic and powerful. But Jacob thought there was still a lot more to him than readily met the eye.
He hadn’t been shocked at coming under suspicion. Did that mean he hadn’t been shocked by the nature of the Scholar’s crimes? It didn’t necessarily. And it didn’t necessarily mean he was indifferent either to their lurid brutality.
He’d been a priest. He possessed a social conscience sufficiently well-developed that he helped young offenders stay out of the sort of institutions that tended to criminalize them for life. He’d wished Jane luck in catching the killer in his parting remark but he hadn’t sounded at all convinced that she would. It didn’t mean he knew anything more than anyone else did about the Scholar. But the inference, to Jacob, was that he thought he did.
He called Kath Cooper after sleeping on it, the morning after observing what went on in the interview room and his elliptical chat in the park afterwards with Jane. It was eight o’clock and a Friday and he thought it more sensible to call her on her mobile than to wait for her to get to her desk. It wouldn’t really influence whether she said yes or no to his request but she would be able to speak more freely from her home.
‘Can’t play tonight, I’ve got a prior commitment,’ she said.
&
nbsp; ‘Can’t you fit me in prior to that?’
‘Do you seriously need another drubbing administered so soon after the last one, Mr. Prior?’
‘This is more business than pleasure, Kath.’
‘Really, what do you want?’
‘There’s this priest. Well, he’s defrocked, got into trouble, apparently. Before he was a priest he was a soldier.’
‘Sounds like a character out of Graham Greene.’
‘He’s real enough. He lives at a hostel in Finsbury Park and does voluntary youth work.’
‘Why are you telling me?’
‘I want to know more about him, that’s all.’
‘What are you up to, Jacob?’
‘I’m doing some work confidentially for the Met. I can’t discuss it.’
There was a silence. Jacob could almost hear the wheels whirr and click in Kath Cooper’s clever mind. ‘I can only think of one case your skill set could help them with. That’s heavy stuff.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Give me the hostel address. I’ll see if there’s anything worth digging out. What’s his name?’
‘Peter Chadwick.’
‘I’ll call you tonight.’
‘It’s good of you to do this.’
‘I’m always at your service.’
‘My service is erratic. Yours, by contrast, is poetry in motion.’
‘That’s a pun even I wouldn’t stoop to.’
‘It’s also true.’
‘And flattery will get you everywhere.’
He didn’t think it would. He ended the conversation thinking that Kath would only tell him anything if there was nothing really of significance to tell. If there was an intelligence file on the delinquent priest its contents would be classified. But it would be useful just to infer that much from whatever she told him later. If there was a file, he’d suggest to Jane Sullivan that she should try to discover its contents. She would have the clout, or someone above her in the chain of police command would, if the file was considered relevant to the inquiry she was pursuing.
He remembered the remark Chadwick had made about Churchill and history teaching people nothing and his contention that the aphorism was basically mistaken. He didn’t honestly know what to make of that. As he lacked Jane’s intuition, so he lacked also the knack for the cryptic clue Kath so ably demonstrated filling in crossword puzzles. But the more he pondered on it, the more he was convinced that the former priest had information about the Scholar he was choosing not to share.
Kath called him back at 10am. There was traffic noise in the background. She was on her mobile. ‘Cigarette break,’ she said.
‘You don’t smoke.’
‘We’d probably get a court for tonight, wouldn’t we? They’re hardly at a premium on a Friday evening. It’s when normal people go out.’
‘You have a prior commitment.’
‘I have a commitment to Mr. Prior.’
She’d obviously found something out. She wasn’t going to tell him what it was other than face to face. She said, ‘Hot date with Jane Sullivan?’
‘She doesn’t do hot dates. How do you know about her?’
‘I watch the news. She’s pretty hot. Another killing, though, and I suspect she’ll be off the case.’
‘You think there’ll be another killing?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘I’ll book the court for seven.’
‘That’s my boy.’
Edmund Caul, in 21st century Britain, was an unusual name. They’d found a total of 31 of them by 9.30am and by 11.15am had ruled out 20 of those. Age and infirmity did for some of them. Half a dozen were children. A proportion was living abroad. By noon they had narrowed it down to five potential leads, all of whom had been cleared of any suspicion by 1 o’clock, when Jane left her work station in the incident room for a walk intended to clear her head and a sandwich in the park intended to fill the hollow in her stomach she knew was down more to disappointment than it was to hunger.
Census forms were how you found people. Or you found them by searching the electoral roll. There was a national database of births, marriages and deaths. People filled in and submitted tax returns. They were given National Insurance numbers. They were liable for council tax. They had bank accounts and drivers’ licenses and paid insurance premiums. They had credit files. They registered as unemployed when they weren’t working and claimed Jobseekers’ Allowance and housing benefit. Unless you used a forged identity or a deliberate and well established alias, it was extremely difficult to hide.
The alias was no longer what it had been when Jane had joined the force a decade earlier. Computer software linked perpetrators to their crimes on methodology and geography and chronology and forensics. Graphics were printed off daisy-chaining criminals to their suspected aliases in diagrams that looked similar to family trees and were just as easy to follow.
She sipped coffee from a paper cup on a bench in the sunshine while the pigeons gathered around her feet in search of crumbs. She thought about the previous evening at Julie Longmuir’s apartment. She thought about the fact that the last witchcraft trial in England had taken place as recently as 1944. Charlotte Reynard wasn’t a witch. But Jane thought her psychic ability genuine. She hadn’t exactly been showboating, had she last night? She had evoked a place memory so potent it had knocked her cold.
Rum, it had been bloody rum because that had been what the last man to briefly share her home and life had drunk. The relationship had been a disaster, but last night he had finally and unwittingly contributed something practical in helping Jane get Charlotte over the shock of what she’d endured. He’d been gone a year. He’d left the rum behind. His exit had been hasty. The rum was, apparently, still drinkable. Charlotte hadn’t enjoyed it, but it hadn’t poisoned her either.
There was no famous fictional Edmund Caul. It wasn’t a name Charlotte had dragged up from her subconscious, having read it in a novel or seen a character called that in a drama on the screen. They’d checked.
Her coffee cup was empty. She screwed it up and tossed it accurately into a nearby bin. She wondered if a combination of wishful thinking and gullibility hadn’t got to her the previous evening. The visit to the Longmuir crime scene had followed on from the interview with Peter Chadwick. She’d been hopeful about that and had seen her hopes founder on the former priest’s rock solid alibi. He was still, in the hackneyed phrase, of interest to the police. But he wasn’t Edmund Caul and he certainly wasn’t the Scholar.
They were still pursuing the Death Metal angle. There were three seriously hardcore followers of satanic bands they wanted to talk to. All three had police records in which violence featured prominently. One was a Swede, one a Pole and the third was from Lithuania. The Pole and the Swede had been physically abusive in relationships with women. The Lithuanian had restricted his fights to rival gang members usually outside bars. The Swede and the Pole both lived in Greater London and the Lithuanian in Sussex, within easy distance of the murder scenes astride his Harley Davidson.
She’d read their files. They were unsavoury men. They listened to music with apocalyptic imagery. It was gruesome, misogynistic and sometimes sinister. But a nasty domestic was a hell of a long way from eviscerating strangers just on the basis of gender. Plus, they were bikers who styled themselves, judging from the pictures, as a cross between a Hell’s Angel and the kind of barbarian warrior who’d helped bring down the Roman Empire. They were deliberately conspicuous.
Two details made Jane pessimistic about nailing these crimes on a death metal fan, even if you ignored the absence of a clear motive. They were the lack of forensic clues and the linguistic and theological knowledge responsible in the first place for the killer’s nickname. The Pole and Lithuanian had, surprisingly, both graduated from university. But their subjects, respectively, were physics and land economy.
She’d joked over the phone with Jacob Prior after their first meeting that he was in the frame. And it had been a joke.
But he had at least some of the required attributes. So did Peter Chadwick. Their death metal candidates didn’t. They’d haul them in and speak to them and do the necessary checks. But Jane knew in her heart and mind it was a perfunctory, procedural investigative formality.
She thought it probably time for a case review. She thought that there must be something they were missing a fresh pair of eyes might find blindingly obvious. She had some good people working on this case but eight weeks after the first killing they were tired and stale and morale had slipped below the level she considered acceptable. She led as much as she could by example but without the breakthrough they all desperately wanted, a fresh look was probably a good idea.
Today’s newspaper story by Sandra Matlock had still clung stubbornly to the Scholar theme. Deprived of Geoff Toomey’s insights and with no one else close to the investigation leaking facts, she’d penned an opinion piece.
Her contention was that the death of Julie Longmuir, the manner of it, said something significant about the vulnerability of career women who chose to live alone. Success made them targets. Their achievements nurtured resentment. Wealth, paradoxically, isolated them from the safety most people enjoyed. Technology, for all its sophistication, could neither protect them nor aid effectively in the detection of those who preyed upon them.
It was a cleverly argued article. It managed to portray the dead actress as a sort of martyr to her own lifestyle. It conveniently ignored the fact that serial killing was statistically extremely rare and that its practitioners in modern times were almost always apprehended. It castigated the police for their failure generally to protect the public but identified a malaise in a society in which someone as bright and beautiful as Julie Longmuir could be singled out for so awful a fate.