by F. G. Cottam
It ran alongside a shorter piece topped by a long lens photo of Jane exiting the rear of a car-pool Jaguar showing rather a lot of leg. This profile of the ‘murder hunt supremo’ stressed that career detective DCI Sullivan was a high-flier who had spurned marriage and motherhood to strive for the pinnacle of her profession and, naturally, lived alone. She owned a sumptuous bachelorette townhouse. Gleeful reference was made to her salary and there was speculation about her pension package. The article called her a woman with the steely ambition needed to compete in what was still a man’s world. Sandra Matlock was an effective writer, but apparently devoid of a sense of irony.
Jane’s phone rang. It was Livermore, the computer technician who’d put Chadwick at the scene of the murders on the afternoon of her mid-morning press conference on Tuesday. He said, ‘Would you like to hear an interesting bit of trivia concerning Edmund Caul?’
‘I’m not really in the mood for trivia,’ she said. She struggled for his first name, ‘thanks anyway, Dave.’
But Dave Livermore persisted. He said, ‘It’s more in the way of a coincidence, actually. Trivia is the wrong word, ma’am. Sorry.’
‘Go on.’
‘You’ll remember Chief Inspector Donald Swanson was in overall charge of the original investigation into the Whitechapel Killer?’
‘Why would I remember that, Dave?’
‘Because you were the last person logged as accessing the file I’m reading now. I guess you were looking for copycat similarities, Ma’am.’
‘Curiosity led me there, after a remark made at the conference by one of the crime reporters present. Why are you reading the file?’
‘I was led to it by Edmund Caul. The name appears on a list of suspects Swanson compiled in a memo to the Home Office in the late summer of 1888.’
‘I didn’t see that.’
‘Some of the names are crossed out. His is one of them. They must have discussed the memo in a meeting and eliminated some of the suspects. There’s enhancement software that reveals what’s written under the crossing-outs. It’s his name, alright, originally seventh on the list. It’s a hell of a coincidence.’
‘There’s no such thing,’ Jane said.
‘There must be, Ma’am, with respect,’ Livermore said. ‘The alternative is belief in ghosts.’
It was a fair assumption. Dave Livermore didn’t know why Edmund Caul had suddenly become a line of enquiry in their investigation. Nobody did except for the DC and Charlotte Reynard, from whom the name had come.
Jane considered what she’d just been told the first solid evidence that the Scholar was copying the Whitechapel Killer. Jacob Prior had suggested their perpetrator was delusional and thought himself someone much more important than Jack the Ripper. But Charlotte hadn’t plucked the name out of the ether, had she? It had been cited in a police memo discussed in Whitehall 130 years before she’d uttered it.
It suggested the intriguing possibility that the Scholar knew more about the identity of the Ripper than was in the public domain, or even the Met files on the Whitechapel investigation. How could he? It was a mystery she looked forward to solving personally when she made her arrest and interrogated him.
‘I want to know everything you can uncover about the Edmund Caul in Swanson’s memo, Dave. I know that’s a tough ask after all this time, but it could be important. Anything you can find out about his character, occupation, age, appearance, where he originally came from and what happened to him after they crossed him off their list. Are you up for that?’
‘Research is what I do,’ Livermore said.
‘Anything you do find out is for my ears only. Is that clear?’
‘As daylight,’ he said. ‘I’m on it, ma’am.’
They played tennis for an hour from 7 o’clock in the evening. Archbishop’s Park was one of Jacob’s favourite London locations. There were two courts and they were lined by high rows of trees at either end. The foliage of the trees didn’t seem to affect the ambient light on court, though you could lose a ball against leaf dapple if it was hit high enough.
The western boundary wall of the park bordered Lambeth Palace Gardens. Lambeth Palace itself, parts of it, were a thousand years old. West of the palace, just across the roundabout on the south side of Lambeth Bridge, was the apartment building where Julie Longmuir had lived until Monday night, when she’d died there. Jacob imagined that her home boasted a view encompassing the palace. The actress had perished only a five minute walk from the courts. He wondered: had she ever used them?
He didn’t think Kath’s mind was really on the points they played. He’d taken a set off her several times but never beaten her in a match. She was athletic around the court, didn’t make unforced errors and was a tough competitor. But tonight her shot selection was poorer than was typical with her. She seemed half a yard slow anticipating the ball. He took the first set 7-5 and the second pretty much at a canter, 6-2.
They shook hands. Their hour was played out. Kath had flushed cheeks from the exertion and a smile more complex than Jacob remembered having seen on her generally cheerful face before. The heat of the day had diminished, it was a cool June evening now, but there was still well over an hour of light left in the sky before dusk began its stealthy encroachment.
‘You’ve time for a drink?’
‘Gagging,’ she said.
She zipped her racquet into its case and put that into the woven basket mounted on the handlebars of her bike. She’d tied her abundant black hair back for the match and now slipped off the tie and shook it out. They walked without speaking out of the park entrance nearest the courts, Kath wheeling her bike, under the railway arches to Hercules Road and the pub.
He didn’t think it would do to rush this. He thought her preoccupation on the court likely caused as much by doubts over whether to tell him what she’d discovered as by the discovery itself. He’d paid for the court and so she insisted on buying their drinks. She’d taken a couple of gulps of her pint of lager shandy at their table outside before she said anything. And before she spoke, he saw her eyes switch swiftly from left to right to ensure no one was seated close enough to eavesdrop on them.
‘There’s nothing of note on our boy. He had an exemplary service record. He was a fine combat soldier with strong religious convictions.’
‘They used to call it Muscular Christianity.’
‘That’s a Victorian concept.’
‘I know. Somehow, he brings it to mind.’
‘He was an exceptional soldier, Jacob, brave and disciplined. His service record suggests he’s an exceptional man.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘Obviously it’s not.’ She smiled. ‘I blew out George Clooney to be here. I wouldn’t have done that just to gift you a win at tennis.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘So are we. We do a lot of listening. And GCHQ do a lot of listening on our behalf. We listen and the big mainframe computers analyze the traffic we pick up.’ She looked around again, took a sip of her drink. ‘We don’t hear Morse code much anymore. Radio hams still use it for their call signals. It’s pretty much obsolete otherwise as a method of communication. But we picked up a Morse dialogue this week. And the instigator was at the Finsbury Park address you gave me for Peter Chadwick.’
‘Who was he talking to?’
‘It was someone in the Pyrenees, on the French-Spanish border. I can give you location coordinates, but no more information than that. This came across my desk, which is your good fortune. I’ve no justification for probing it further.’
‘Can you tell me what they were talking about?’
‘Chadwick described the Scholar killings. He talked about the time frame. He said a guide had been killed and his clothes taken near the location he was speaking to in the days before the first murder. The victim was male, but he’d been eviscerated.’
‘Jesus.’
‘His name didn’t come up, Jacob. But there was a faith element to the conversation.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Chadwick didn’t sound de-frocked. He sounded actively involved.’
‘Involved how?’
‘There was a second, briefer dialogue later the same evening. Chadwick mentioned the death of a priest in a road accident on the coast road outside San Sebastian. He didn’t sound like someone finished with the Church.’
‘What do you think?’
Kath shrugged. ‘I don’t know and it isn’t for me to speculate. I’ve told you as much as I do know and more than I should have. You didn’t hear it from me and I’d better go.’
‘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.