by F. G. Cottam
‘So you did a bit more digging?’
‘He worked in the service of a cardinal so politically powerful you wouldn’t even believe it.’
‘I think I might.’
‘Think about it, Jane. A reclusive brotherhood functions in secrecy since the time of the first pope. A worldly cardinal causes some deliberate disruption to what they’re doing. A serial killer conversant with scripture and fluent in ancient languages begins a murder spree in London. I can’t join the dots, but I know you don’t believe in coincidence.’
‘Anything else you wish to share?’
‘It isn’t relevant, but I think Jack the Ripper might have been a man named Edmund Caul.’
‘It’s for me to decide what’s relevant. Tell me why you think that?’
She listened to his talk of tracking generator invoices and uncovering a war crimes transcript and an experimental drug with the code name Magenta 10 and a doomed cleric who should more fittingly perhaps have entered commerce or politics. She listened, thinking that Jacob would have made an excellent detective but for that air of something she’d sensed at their first encounter. It wasn’t quite vulnerability. It wasn’t innocence and since their shared kiss, she no longer thought of it at all as piety.
The forensics people called, interrupting before he was quite through with his account. They had prioritized the Scholar investigation. The speed with which they were working was both flattering and a rebuke, because despite all their effort and their unpaid overtime, no progress was being made in the resolution of the case. And since she was heading up the investigation, she was being blamed for that. Quite right too, she thought.
The body parts belonged to Alice Cranfield. Hers was the only DNA on those and the packaging and the pasted-together-letters note she had been sent. Or delivered, she thought, since he must have come within a few feet of her to slide his jestful little missive onto the top of the wall dividing Embankment from the river. It had shifted, fitfully, in the night breeze. He had watched from a place of concealment, grinning through the white and even teeth Charlotte Reynard had described without the mirth ever visiting his black eyes.
The call ended. Jane blinked through her window at the dark vista beyond. Street lamps dwindled in the matte, afflicted air. She’d never seen anything remotely like it in her life. She didn’t think anyone had, not since the great smog era, and the last of those had occurred no later than the 1950s, she was sure.
‘Would you like coffee?’
Her desk phone sounded again. It was the Commissioner. The Southall Imam assaulted the previous evening had died of a heart attack in his hospital bed half an hour ago. In an unrelated development, the Knights of Excalibur were holding an impromptu rally in Trafalgar Square.
‘In this filth?’
‘They’ve improvised pitch torches and mobile floodlights on flatbed trucks. They’ve attracted an enormous crowd. The square’s teeming. It’s all very Nuremburg Rally choreographed by Leni Riefenstahl.’
That’s what you got these days, Jane thought. You got Police Commissioners with further degrees and a lofty perspective on history. The downside was they thought handcuffs were devices used exclusively on stag weekends. To Jacob she said again, ‘Would you like coffee?’
He didn’t get the chance to answer. His mobile rang and he lifted it to his ear and listened and grunted a couple of affirmative noises Jane thought surly and reluctant.
‘Let me guess, an old girlfriend?’
‘What on earth makes you think that?’
‘Your churlish tone makes me think that. Unless it was Elaine Page, saying she can’t play the lead in the Women’s Institute production of ‘Evita!’ you’re directing.’
‘You’re very droll, Jane.’
‘It’s the least of my talents.’
‘Have you looked outside? Jesus.’
‘Who was it called you just now?’
‘It was Peter Chadwick. He wants to meet with me in the morning. He says there’s something both important and urgent he wants us to discuss.’
‘Do you want back-up?’
‘He’s not the Scholar. He’s tough, no aversion to violence I don’t think. But I don’t think meeting him puts me in the way of jeopardy.’
‘I could arm our surveillance people. I could have an armed response unit in the vicinity, on stand-by. You wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for me.’
‘It’s a meeting, not an ambush. It’s not even a dodgy pub in the Finsbury Park badlands. He wants to meet me in the lobby of the Dorchester hotel.’
‘How’s a defrocked priest living in a hostel affording the Dorchester?’
‘It doesn’t cost anything to sit in the lobby.’
‘It still sounds suspicious.’
‘I’m flattered by your concern but I’ll be fine. He must have come to a decision and it might be good news if he has.’
‘Do you think he’s part of this brotherhood?’
‘If he’s not, then he’s some kind of affiliate. He knows who they are. He knows what the Lazarus Prophecy is. He understands its implications. They wouldn’t command his loyalty if he didn’t.’
‘Meeting you suggests he might be willing to share the secret.’
‘Their hand’s been forced, that’s all. It’s been forced by the crimes the Scholar’s committing on the Met’s ground. I don’t think he wants another murder on his conscience if it can be avoided. I doubt the people in the Pyrenees do, either.’
It was only after Jacob had gone that Jane thought again about the Yeats poem left by their killer at the scene of his most recent murder. The lines, the couplet, went through her head.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Bethlehem. It was the name from which the Lambeth madhouse Bedlam had been bastardized. Originally, that had been the Bethlehem Hospital. It was a reference she should have spotted on hearing Carter’s translation at the scene of the Cranfield murder a full two days earlier.
She looked out her unseeing office window, at the black whorls of smog blinding her to the familiar vista. And it hit Jane Sullivan like a punch to the gut that this was a case she had nowhere near the necessary intellect to solve. The Scholar was aptly named. He was cleverer than she was. He was cleverer than any of them were.
Chapter Nine
Jane had mentioned the Trafalgar Square rally to him before he left her office and, out of curiosity, Jacob went to have a look. It wasn’t too much of a detour on his route home. He walked rather than rode his bike there because the smog along Victoria Street and Whitehall seemed all but impenetrable.
Cars and lorries were grinding a path through the gloom in first gear but only making progress inches at a time. Every hundred feet or so there was the diesel throb of a bus with seated rows of passengers. They looked resigned and jaundiced as he passed the yellowy interiors they occupied. Travelling by foot seemed to make more sense.
He heard a boom from behind him that sounded unearthly and ominous, like the audible shock of something vast, shifted abruptly from its moorings. But then it repeated and he knew it was only Big Ben tolling the hour in a tone corrupted by this odd, alien atmosphere.
The air was soot-spangled and thick, soiled and intrusive in the nostrils and lungs. It left a charred taste in the throat and he thought about how much people had come to take clean air for granted. The buildings of London were no longer blackly stained by the weather. There were exhaust fumes, but the road traffic had considerably diminished in the centre of the city ever since the introduction of the exclusion zone. Salmon swam in the Thames. This, out of nowhere, was as bad as it was inexplicable.
He was still two or three hundred yards from where Whitehall opened out onto the square when the crowd on the pavement began to thicken and his progress became suddenly trickier. He chained his bike to a street railing. Ordinarily he thought there would be a danger in doing that of the police removing and confiscating
it. But this was no ordinary day and the police, he realized as he got closer to the improvised podium at the centre of the square, had their hands pretty full.
The audience drawn there was a sea of bobbing heads, indistinct and drained of colour in the ashen air. The whole scene had a monochromatic look, like a period photograph slyly animated. There were far too many people massed for kettling or dispersal by the police. They were packed as closely as the spectators had been packed on the terraces of football stadiums in England in the days before standing was banned.
There were burning torches, hand held, spluttering. You didn’t get those in football crowds. They brought an oily kerosene tang and dotted blooms of orange and yellow at once meagre and vivid against the dark pallor of a day more and more resembling midnight.
A makeshift stage had been built from scaffolding poles and planks and sited, from where Jacob stood, to the left of Nelson’s Column. There was a low chug of noise from the engines of flatbed trucks onto the backs of which searchlights had been mounted. The beams of some of them cleaved precise paths through the smog and played on various sections of the gathered horde in swatches of brightness. But most of them were angled to illuminate the person speaking into a cluster of microphones on the stage.
Jacob recognized the platinum blonde tresses of the woman from the Knights of Excalibur, the striking spokeswoman who’d been giving incendiary quotes to the press ever since news of Friday night’s killing had broken the following day. They must have timed this meeting to coincide with the parliamentary debate. They couldn’t have known about the smog in advance. But they had a core constituency well capable of improvising floodlights at short notice. They were EBay-literate, car boot sale-savvy doers and fixers, this lot. They were the pit-bull-owning backbone of the black economy.
There he was, doing it again. There had to be better than 20,000 people massed in the square. The smog stopped him seeing the individuals there in anything like accurate detail. But their sheer number meant they likely came from all walks of life and had made the effort to gather and listen out of more than shared bigotry.
She was very demurely outfitted. She was wearing a long-sleeved, ankle-length dress of some pale fabric trimmed in a darker shade it wasn’t possible to determine in the alternating gloom and flaring light. She wore a belt, loosely buckled just above her hips. Give her a wimple and she’d be Guinevere, he thought, remembering his joke to Jane about the Knights, suspecting he’d seriously underestimated both their sophistication and their popular appeal.
She was talking about the Scholar killings. Of course she was. He’d remember her name in a minute. She was Joan something. That was it. She was Joan Fairchild.
The crowd members were jostling, clapping spontaneously, calling out odd words of encouragement, sound muffled and made dull and given a staccato suddenness by the dense obstruction of the smog. The speaker was clearer and less distorted, her voice amplified and tone measured, using reason more than rhetoric to level insistent accusations at an Islamic serial killer she implied was unlikely to be working alone.
Jacob smiled to himself. He thought Joan Fairchild probably a nom de guerre. It was nicely Anglo-Saxon and her surname was practically a manifesto, if you cherished beliefs of the Little England persuasion. He’d heard and seen enough. He turned to leave.
A man stood directly in his path. He’d have to squeeze past him. He was about an inch taller than Jacob and around the same age. He was spare and muscular under a well-cut suit. It looked ambiguously grey or blue in the crepuscular dimness and there was a gleam or shimmer to the fabric when it was briefly dabbed at by a searchlight beam in which the fellow’s face was pale and his eyes held a black sparkle.
‘Good, isn’t she, chum?’
‘She’s got something,’ Jacob said.
‘She’s just the ticket.’
‘She’s seized the moment, alright.’
‘But you’re voting with your feet.’
‘Her politics aren’t to my taste.’
‘It’s a free country,’ the man said, ‘for now.’
‘Hard to believe this has happened so suddenly.’
‘Anger doesn’t wait. It erupts, flaming.’
‘It dies down just as quickly.’
‘It does unless the fire’s stoked.’
His voice was mellifluous and deep. It was a seductive voice, but there was a taint to his breath like opening a box of un-struck matches. And he wore a cloying aftershave.
‘Excuse me,’ Jacob said, brushing past him, aware of the iron density of the man’s upper arm as he did so, as solid and un-shifting as a street bollard.
‘See you again, chum,’ the fellow said.
Jacob walked back to his bike and unchained it and walked the route back along Whitehall and over Westminster Bridge towards home. He didn’t subscribe to Knights of Excalibur style conspiracy theories. The Islamist Scholar claim was a convenient bit of opportunism for a populist political movement on the make. But he did think that the way modern life was lived made it easier for a killer to target successful women than had been the case in the past.
He was as prey as anyone else to what Peter Chadwick had called the dinner party game of guessing the next potential victim. He personally figured that the headlines would scream loudest over two possible candidates. One of those was Susan Lassiter, who might be on her feet holding forth as he pondered this, a few hundred yards distant from where he stood in the House of Commons. The Home Secretary was probably the most powerful woman in Britain. She was clever, chic, successful, as principled as any politician realistically could be and a household name.
She wasn’t necessarily someone people felt affectionate about in the way they tended to over a person with the seductive charms of a Charlotte Reynard. She didn’t have the saintly credentials Alice Cranfield had come in death to possess. But she would be a huge prize to a killer who had demonstrated a consistent fondness for trophies and a recent fondness also for dominating the national news.
He didn’t really think she’d be next on the Scholar’s list. She was arguably the biggest prize and the challenge might tempt him, but the practicalities prevented it. She was guarded by a team of security services personnel. The terror threat that had escalated in the first decade of the new century made that a necessity. Her personal protection team would be discreet, to permit her some semblance of a family life when she wasn’t on duty. But they were always on duty and they would be armed and vigilant and thoroughly trained.
Jacob’s second candidate was one he was reluctant to consider, because it was Detective Chief Inspector Jane Sullivan and therefore far too close to home. He’d left her 90 minutes earlier very much the person in control of a major police investigation. He’d offered his opinion to her about her being the one capable of joining the dots to make a recognizable pattern from what he’d discovered about the mountain brotherhood. He’d suggested sincerely that it was within her powers to do it because he believed she was a formidable investigator. She was talented, motivated, dedicated and shrewd.
He’d also seen her on Saturday evening, when she’d been unguarded and self-questioning, young and slightly tipsy and totally beautiful in her scuffed leather jacket and jeans. He’d seen the sweet, vulnerable side of Jane and then somewhat to his own astonishment, at the end of the evening he’d not just kissed, but more or less propositioned her. He’d done it because he’d seen and been aroused by the sexy side of Jane.
It wasn’t an arrestable offence. It had felt perfectly natural at the time. She was an attractive single woman, flesh and blood under the exalted rank and attendant protocols. She was not just entitled to a private life. It might be something she actually wanted. He really liked her. He thought it would be unfair to say he wanted the Scholar caught to facilitate a romance with Jane. He wasn’t quite that callous or superficial. But he knew it wouldn’t happen until the killer was apprehended and he'd resolved that when that happened, he’d definitely ask Jane Sullivan out on a date.
She could only say no.
Unless, that was, she asked him. It was perfectly possible. She’d already done it once. The fact that she was so willful, so much her own woman was one of the things he found most attractive about her.
He’d reached the bridge and the Thames under it, lapping all but invisibly against its stone abutments, smog voiding the world beyond its twin rows of wrought-iron trident lamps so that the bridge and its static weight of traffic seemed a tiny secluded universe all of its own. Headlamps described dirty circles of yellow light. A barge sounded its mournful horn trailing through the arch under his feet and in a brief break in the gloom he saw the creamy tumble of its wake before the sight was drowned in murk again.
This was how Whistler had seen London and painted it, too. This was the London Monet had described on canvas from the window of his room at the Savoy. This was the city which had wrapped the Whitechapel killer in its inky embrace and made him all but invisible.
Apparently he’d been a man named Edmund Caul. Maybe, having learned the few tantalizing details he had about Caul, Jacob would one day research and write a book exposing the Ripper’s true identity. There seemed to be a consistent public demand for that sort of thing and he might actually earn some money at last using his skill at finding things out. He’d discover whether he could write. It was said everyone had a book in him and his would have an intriguing subject to discuss.
That was for the future, though. For now he was worried about Jane. He knew about the song lyric she’d been sent. He’d not discussed with her but had heard on the news that morning about the package she’d more or less been hand delivered the previous evening. He didn’t think such clues and gestures would impede the Scholar for a moment in making Jane his next victim if he thought he could get away with it. She didn’t enjoy police protection. She was charged with providing it. That was ironic, because in the Lambeth house she occupied alone, it made her, to his mind, a temptingly easy target.