by F. G. Cottam
‘It was why he killed her.’
‘He’ll bask for a while in Alice Cranfield’s spotlight. The next one will be an even bigger name.’
‘Can you think of any likely candidates?’
‘That’s a game people will be playing all over London at tonight’s dinner parties.’
‘He sent a personal message to Jane Sullivan.’
‘She’s a bigger draw left alive. No glamour, dead.’
‘Sandra Matlock?’
‘That would cause a stir. But the public wouldn’t do much hand-wringing over a dead journalist. She should fit decent locks anyway, not that they’d stop him.’
‘Help us catch him, Chadwick. Tell me what you know.’
‘How does a theology buff eavesdrop on a wireless transmission made from a private address?’
‘A hostel isn’t a private address.’
‘Answer the question.’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘I can make an educated guess. Equally, there are things I can’t tell you. I want the killer stopped as much as you do. Give me a couple of days. Give me a contact number. Either way, I’ll be in touch.’
‘What do you mean by either way?’
‘Whether I can tell you anything or I can’t, Pilgrim.’
‘She could haul you back in, charge you with obstruction.’
‘She’d be wasting her time, clutching at straws.’
‘She’s already doing that,’ Jacob said.
They had kissed the ring. They had prepared a meal and made something of a formality of their greeting despite the abrupt suddenness of his arrival unannounced at the door of their mountain keep. They were devout men. There was no mistaking that. He had loved James Cantrell but had known there was something of the Rottweiler in the young priests’ character. In some ways he had been the cardinal’s attack dog. The cardinal was ashamed now that he had ever thought James an appropriate emissary. He felt remorseful and guilty and more fallible than he could remember having felt since his ordination.
‘We were in Rome until the second century, your eminence,’ Brother Philip said. ‘The need for secrecy forced our order from the Holy See during the advent of the Dark Ages.’
‘Where did the brotherhood go?’
‘First we went to France, where a monastery was established in the Auvergne. It was necessary to go to remoter places as the centuries wore on, but they needed to be locations where our refuge would not be ransacked by warring tribes and our secrecy breached or our members simply slain as the Goths and later the Vikings were apt to slay servants of Christ.’
‘So, in time, you moved from the Auvergne.’
‘We were in the West of Ireland for a peaceful interlude of 400 years. Then the brotherhood occupied a priory in Northumberland on the North Sea coast of England. When the raiders came over the sea from Norway in their long ships, our predecessors were forced to leave there and re-establish a home in Silesia. After that it was an old fortress built originally by the Moors in the hills outside Madrid.’
‘Finally, you came here.’
‘This place was built for us at the time of the Black Death.’
‘That was a tumultuous period.’
‘So the historians say. Humanity came close to reaching the tipping point.’
‘Despite that, this place was built for the brothers of the Most Holy Order of St. John’s Gospel. The effort and cost must have been colossal.’
‘Yet it was met, your eminence.’
The cardinal nodded. The implication of Brother Philip’s words was plain. The cost had been met because the need had been considered both urgent and important. Influential men, perhaps kings, had been told the secret and had not only acted upon it but kept it faithfully.
‘You have a written copy of the prophecy?’
‘We do. The original is in Hebrew, chiseled into stone. The tablets are here but they are very fragile now and kept in a chamber where it is both cool and dark so they incur no further damage. Are they the proof you demand?’
‘I require no proof. Most of my doubt was dispelled by what a good man with a sharp memory told me last night about Monsignor Dubois’ visit here in 1935. After that, into the small hours, I read the Barry account.’
Brother Philip smiled slightly. ‘Monsignor Dubois’ visit was considerably before my own time,’ he said.
‘But you know about it?’
‘I do. I can show you a translation of the prophecy, if you are capable of reading Medieval Latin?’
‘I am, Brother Philip. And I am aware of the weight of responsibility you assume in sharing the secret with an outsider.’
‘You are a servant of God,’ Brother Philip said.
And there’s no point locking the stable door once the horse has bolted, the cardinal thought, remembering the English proverb because what was happening was happening there, in London. He said, ‘I would like to read the prophecy with my own eyes. But there is something else I would like to do first.’
Brother Philip held out his arms, the willing supplicant.
‘You are the Sacred Keepers of the Gate, are you not?’
‘More accurate to say we were, until eight weeks ago, your eminence.’
The cardinal smiled. The rebuke was thoroughly deserved. He said. ‘Before I read the prophecy, I would like to see the gate.’
London changed and it remained the same, Charlotte thought. She winced at a spasm from her ankle. She had not exaggerated in telling Jane Sullivan that it was painful. She was used to pain. It had been a nagging characteristic of her professional life throughout her entire career. But she had tried to rush her rehabilitation, doing more than the physiotherapist had recommended. The pain she felt now was a rebuke. Nobody in her 30’s healed like she took for granted doing when a decade younger.
She was on Old Paradise Street, where a man named Edmund Caul had taken lodgings in June of 1888. It was just after 5 o’clock in the afternoon. It was bright and sunny. The street ran roughly south to the point just after it bisected Lambeth Walk and became Lollard Street. She had walked up and down it twice, without feeling any intuition concerning its history. She stood now at its northern extremity, where it dead-ended into Lambeth High Street.
She stood only a few hundred yards from the apartment building in which Julie Longmuir had been killed less than a week earlier. There were no real clues at this spot as to the proximity of the river or the panoramic bustle of the traffic on its banks. Lambeth High Street was quiet and deserted, short and unprepossessing. It was anomalous in name, not really a high street at all anymore, not a single shop to help merit the distinction.
But there was a pub. She could see that. It was only a couple of hundred yards away from the mouth of Old Paradise Street and it looked Victorian. Charlotte thought that bomb damage during the Blitz had probably determined the schizoid nature of the area she was in; the juxtaposition of old and quaint with characterless and modern. But the pub had survived the bombs by the look of things. It was quite possible that Edmund Caul had entertained himself within.
Jane had told her about the death of Alice Cranfield. She had spared her by around an hour the shock of learning about it from the radio or via the internet. She’d been touched by the policewoman’s thoughtfulness. It was a punctilious and kindly gesture probably typical of someone she was coming to admire as well as like.
She had been shocked but not surprised. The Scholar had come very close to taking her on Tuesday evening. Taking someone close to her was a reminder of how narrow had been her escape. It might be coincidental and it might not. She thought probably not.
She suspected there was an element of game playing in the way in which the Scholar went about his business. He left clues and contrived symbols. Jane had confirmed as much. Killing Alice deprived medicine and the wider world of someone fundamentally good and valuable. Was it vain to think that the choice of victim also admonished her? She didn’t think so.
The Scholar knew more than h
e reasonably could. He had known she was outside her door in Pimlico awash with dread at the knowledge he was inside awaiting her return home. He had witnessed not just her escape but also somehow the reason for it. And he had communicated with her in a way that had required no audible words. He’d seemed gleeful at the manifestation of her gift. She didn’t know why. She did know, though, that she was about to try to use it again.
Edmund Caul, the only plausible Edmund Caul Jane Sullivan’s people had found, had been a man who took lodgings in Lambeth in the year of the Whitechapel killings. Jane had told her he had briefly been a suspect in the Ripper hunt. His name had been crossed off a list of possible culprits. She postulated that the Scholar could know more than was in the public domain about Caul, could somehow have discovered he was guilty of the original crimes and could be copying him.
She thought it wise to leave the theorizing to someone trained and paid to do it. Jane’s reasoning was systematic and her thinking clear. She possessed a strong and proven intuition. Catching killers was what she did. All Charlotte knew for certain was that when the name had come to her, in Julie Longmuir’s apartment around the corner from where she stood, it had arrived in her mind with shocking force.
There were memories in the masonry and iron street railings hereabouts, in lampposts oddly left like curious, spindly relics. London was a city peopled like no other by its ghosts. But Edmund Caul had not been a shade or spectre. The reality of him had hit her with an impact that sent her reeling. She’d blacked out in the dead woman’s apartment. A sinister sense memory had not done that to her. It had been the potent, urgent strength of him with his restless force and his keening, bloody will.
It was why she had gone there. She could make no chronological sense of Edmund Caul taking lodgings in Lambeth 130 years ago. But she trusted her gift and she was sure of the name. She would grope and scour like someone divining for water. She would see what her mind allowed her to. She might get nothing. She might provoke a nocturnal visitation. She was indignant and angry and curious and the news Jane had broken at her borrowed refuge in Bermondsey had left her unable to do nothing.
The pub was called the Windmill. Charlotte’s architectural expertise was pretty much based on a guest appearance on a property show popular on daytime television. She’d been invited to bid for houses in an effort to judge their real value at auction. She’d scored badly and come last, placed well behind the celebrity nutritionist and premiership footballer also guesting. The appearance fee hadn’t covered the cost of the outfit she’d bought to wear for the show. She’d have guessed the Windmill dated from about the 1860s. But I wouldn’t bet my life on it, she thought.
She limped along Lambeth High Street and went inside the pub and ordered a Diet Pepsi. Assuming she survived this experience, her mother was scheduled to bring the kids back bathed and fed at around 8pm. In early Saturday evening traffic in a flagged-down cab she was maybe 20 minutes from home.
She was the only customer. The man she assumed to be the landlord was middle-aged and paunchy and didn’t look like he got much sunlight. He had pale skin and wore glasses with oversized frames. Their lenses magnified his eyes but he averted his gaze in a manner suggesting casual conversation wasn’t his thing. That was fine. On this occasion, it wasn’t hers either.
The fittings were not original. Original would have been velveteen plush with rows of brass studs tarnished by time and nicotine. There would have been spittoons and the dead odour of cheap cigars and mirrors carrying adverts on their glass. And the pub would have been full, because the water wasn’t fit to drink and drink delivered the desperate the oblivion they sought and there was nothing else in those days for people to do.
There was music in the pub. It played from bookshelf speakers wired to an old cassette machine behind the bar. The landlord seemed to be a soul fan. As she stood and sipped her drink, Summer Breeze segued mournfully into Me and Mrs. Jones. The landlord busied himself with the pretense of polishing a glass and Charlotte closed her eyes and ran her palm lightly along the wood of the bar.
Nothing.
She was confident that the bar itself was original. It had been rubbed-down and re-varnished any number of times, but its weight and solidity did not suggest refurbishment to her. It had been scarred and scored and cigarette burned at its edge through decades. Edmund Caul might have rested his elbow in its surface, idly contemplating involvement in a game of dice underway at a table in the saloon. If he had, there was nothing left of him there.
‘You alright for a minute, Miss? I need to nip upstairs.’
Charlotte jumped. She had been lost momentarily to her reverie. It was just the landlord, telling her in code that he was off to sit by an open upstairs window and steal a crafty smoke. She smiled and nodded. He shuffled off. She’d drain her drink and go. Pain and limping made her thirsty but she didn’t want another and had come here on a fool’s errand.
Ice clicked against her teeth as she raised and emptied her glass and then on no more than a whim, she put it down on the bar and walked to the far corner and the gents’ lavatory. She looked around. She was still the only customer.
She pushed open the door and walked in on the stench of strong disinfectant masking ancient piss in four giant Victorian urinals. There was the rhythmic plop from a cistern of water in one of the two adjacent stalls. The urinals were glazed and white with countless tiny fissures under the glaze, giving them a grey aspect until studied close up. They reached from a gutter on the floor to chest height and Charlotte ran a palm along the rim of one of them. Nothing happened.
What happened next, she could never have explained. It occurred out of some curious compulsion far beyond her control. She did it dictated to by an instinct too strong to question or deny. She did not know she was going to do it until the act was done.
Each of the urinals had a copper knob placed high at its centre. They were stained a sludgy green where water ran out of them to sluice the piss away. They dribbled fitfully. Charlotte stepped across to the third of the four urinals and she leant forward. The reek of disinfectant made her nostrils prick. She put a steadying hand to either side of the porcelain. It felt smooth and cold under her fingertips. She arranged her lips around its copper nob as someone would in an open kiss and she licked the metal, tasting its cold, tart harshness.
She groped and fumbled her way back through the pub. It was ill-lit and sawdust trailed her dragging foot on its floorboards. She could hear laughter and shouts and the tinkling of a pianola and the gloomy air was pungent with tobacco and stout. Oil lamps painted the corners in florid yellow orbs which had no reach.
Smog slicked the cobbles outside. The world had shrunk to what feeble pinpricks of gaslight allowed, strung out along Lambeth High Street. Somewhere a baby cried and the cry was hunger induced and wretched. People passed, all ragged, a dim procession of shadows. The slums sagged in a forlorn row across the street from her, their windowpanes blackly naked and their interiors unlit. Unseen, a horse clopped, the iron shod hooves striking stone louder as the beast approached.
She saw the black bulk of something defining itself in the sooty air and recognized a hansom cab and saw the horse pulling it wore its mane in a black plume. Leather and metal detail glimmered dully and the animal snorted, reined to a halt. A figure slipped lithely from the cab’s interior and tossed a coin at the driver who caught it, smartly.
‘Obliged, Mr. Caul,’ he said.
Edmund Caul was pale and tall in an ulster and bowler hat tilted rakishly in the brief monochrome glimpse she caught of him through the smog before he slipped inside the pub’s door. He wore a trimmed moustache. He was sinewy inside his clothes and moved like liquid. He winked at her before he disappeared. He flashed Charlotte a grin.
‘He carries a cane, like me,’ she said aloud, smiling through her own surprised tears as the hansom creaked away and she limped, weeping, each step weighted by terror and foreboding until she reached the end of the street and the air cleared and the buildin
gs around clarified into shapes and structures she recognized. She saw cars swish by on their way to the junction on the south side of Lambeth Bridge. She could have sunk to the pavement and hugged the stones, so ecstatic was she with relief.
There was a bronze relief at the centre of the door. The stubs of seven candles in various states of cold expiry stood in seven holders there. Above them was a tabernacle. Above that had been molded an image of the crucified Christ.
‘God forgive me,’ the cardinal said.
‘Seven for the seven signs of His divinity,’ Brother Philip said. ‘Mass was said here seven times a day. Even after the influenza epidemic of the winter, when we were but three as we remain today, the rituals were enacted. They stopped only eight weeks ago, when we received your edict.’
‘How did he endure your ministrations?’
‘He was voluble. The Devil is the Lord of Misrule, the Prince of Mischief and sometimes he is the Crimson King. He is never quiet.’
‘This wasn’t Satan himself you housed.’
Brother Philip raised an eyebrow. ‘We didn’t house him. We imprisoned him. Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he blasphemed in dead languages. He would parody the liturgy in voices mimicking our own. The similarity was uncanny, like listening to a demonic echo. Sometimes he would merely sing. That was the worst. He would croon ditties from the English music hall. He sounded almost nostalgic, doing that.’
‘You imply a nature, a personality?’
Brother Philip shook his head. ‘No. Physically he resembles a man in every aspect. But there are differences. He absorbs rather than reflects light, so he cannot be photographed. He was confined by our rituals, but locks cannot hold him.’
‘Some trick of telekinesis?’
‘A trick should you wish to describe it as such, your eminence.’
‘I’m sorry, this is difficult for me.’
Brother Philip produced a key. He unlocked the cell door. He said, ‘Go and examine the relics he left behind. Nothing reinforces faith in the skeptic so much as physical evidence.’