The Ripper Secret
Page 1
The Ripper Secret
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Also by James Becker
Copyright
The Ripper Secret
James Becker
Prologue
1870
Under the Haram es-Sharif (Temple Mount), Jerusalem
‘I need more light,’ Warren said, the whites of his eyes the only feature visible in his blackened face. ‘Pass me that lantern.’
A few feet behind him, a second figure, his face equally filthy and his clothes just as invisible below layers of dirt, stepped closer and passed him the Davy lamp, the dim light casting giant wavering shadows on the rocks around them.
‘What is it?’
‘The entrance to another chamber,’ Charles Warren replied, his voice echoing from the rock walls that tightly enclosed that part of the labyrinth, ‘or at least I think that’s what it is.’
Sergeant Henry Birtles shook his head. He’d virtually lost count of the number of chambers and passageways and shafts, rock walls and ancient stones that he’d seen in the three years that he and Warren had been working on the site. At first, it had been quite exciting, wondering what the next day’s or week’s excavation would reveal, but as time passed and all they found were yet more chambers filled with rubble and debris, his enthusiasm for the job had waned markedly.
And it was hard, draining work, because of the heat, the humidity, the cramped and confined underground spaces they were forced to work in, the sheer physical labour needed to tunnel their way into the hidden places they’d found, and of course the circumstances, which were, at best, somewhat peculiar. Because, although their presence in the old city of Jerusalem, where they’d lived for the previous three years, had been authorized and approved, Birtles had no doubt that what he and Warren were doing was actually illegal. He also had no doubt of the likely consequences if they were caught.
‘So is it a chamber, sir?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Warren replied. ‘It looks as if it’s open on the other side, but the entrance is low and very tight. I’ll take this lamp and try and slide through. You stay here, just in case I meet any problems.’
On several occasions, when they’d entered chambers that were comparatively clear, they’d found evidence of rock falls, and the possibility of one of the men being trapped by a boulder dropping from the roof was always uppermost in their minds. Whenever they entered a new space, their normal practice was for one of them to carry out an initial inspection, while the other waited in a safe – or least a safer – location. Fate or chance had decreed that this time it was Warren’s turn to go first.
He stretched his hand out in front of him, pushing the Davy lamp through the restricted entrance he’d found, then crawled forward, steadily easing himself through the narrow gap and into the open space which lay beyond. The entrance itself was clearly man-made, not a natural fissure in the rock, and appeared to be the top of a very low arch formed from the massive stones they were used to finding underneath the Temple Mount.
In fact, it was only by chance that Warren had spotted the square corner of one of the stones and realized there was an entrance there at all – the earth had been piled up so high against the wall that most of the masonry had been invisible. It had taken them the better part of half an hour to shift enough of it to reveal the entrance, which was extremely small: they guessed only about three feet high and the same wide. They hadn’t cleared it all, just opened it enough to allow Warren to wriggle inside. It certainly wasn’t a normal chamber, and they’d guessed it was probably some kind of a small store room.
Not for the first time, Warren wished they had better illumination for their work. The Davy lamp gave more light than a candle, and was considerably safer than a naked flame, but it still wasn’t particularly bright. The men weren’t concerned about the possibility of explosions – which was the reason behind the creation of the Davy lamp, designed as a flame-proof light for use in mines – because there was no evidence of gas in the tunnels and chambers they were exploring. Nevertheless, a candle flame was easily extinguished by any sudden movement or even an errant draught, and they needed a reliable and constant source of light to see what they were doing in the utter blackness.
As his head emerged from the archway into the chamber Warren paused, repositioning the Davy lamp so that he could see exactly what lay ahead of him – and more importantly any loose rocks on the ceiling above which might tumble free – before he continued crawling forward.
The small chamber appeared to be very much like the others that the two men had forced their way into and already explored. He could see a low ceiling hacked from the rock, walls formed by patches of ancient masonry built into and around natural stone, and a floor of beaten earth. In a few places he could still see marks in the earth made by the unyielding soles of the sandals of the men who last worked in that dark and claustrophobic space, perhaps two millennia ago.
Satisfied that the ceiling wasn’t about to fall on his head, Warren completed his transit of the archway and got to his feet, lifting the lamp above his head to provide the greatest possible illumination. The room was quite small, certainly a lot less spacious than many of the other chambers they had entered, perhaps twelve or fifteen feet square, the roughly hewn ceiling about seven feet above floor level. And, again like all of the other spaces they’d explored, there appeared to be absolutely nothing in it.
Ever since he’d arrived in Jerusalem three years earlier, Warren had been hoping to make a discovery that would justify the decision by the Palestine Exploration Fund to send him, rather than a professional archaeologist, to explore this ancient site. But though he and Birtles and the other men under his command had explored and mapped a fascinating underground maze, they’d found no significant artefacts of any sort. It was as if the intricate labyrinth of tunnels and chambers under the Temple Mount had been emptied centuries, or even millennia, earlier, stripped of any treasures that it might origi
nally have held.
Warren walked around the perimeter of the small chamber, the glow of light from the Davy lamp dim, but adequate, because his eyes were well used to the gloom. He and Birtles actually found it quite painful when they finally re-emerged from the shaft at the end of each dig, and their eyes were suddenly subjected to the brilliant Mediterranean sunlight again.
‘Anything in there?’ Birtles asked.
Warren shook his head.
‘Nothing yet,’ he said, continuing to walk around the perimeter of the room. ‘Oh, just a minute,’ he added, ‘this might be interesting.’
He stopped in one corner, where a natural fissure in the rock appeared to have been widened slightly. Warren could just make out the marks made by chisels on the sides of the opening.
He lifted the Davy lamp so that its light penetrated the cavity as far as possible, then shook his head in disappointment. It looked as if there was nothing inside the gap. He turned away and took another step, but then a sudden thought struck him and he turned back. There had been something in the fissure, a lumpy object in the centre that he’d assumed was simply rock, but which his subconscious mind had just recognized as perhaps being something else.
He pushed the lamp into the gap as far as it would go, jamming the metal case into a narrow crack at the top of the opening so that he would have both hands free. Then he reached out and touched the dark mass which occupied the centre and rear of the fissure.
The moment he did so, he felt a tingle of excitement, because what he was touching was neither cold nor solid, and it yielded slightly under his probing fingers. It appeared to be fabric of some sort, cloth or maybe thin leather.
Scarcely daring to breathe, Warren felt around in the cavity, pushing and pulling at the fabric as he tried to discern what, if anything, it was concealing. And almost at once he discovered it was covering something. That much was immediately clear, because he could feel a solid object underneath it. He needed to remove the cloth – the material was too thin to be leather – and his probing fingers eventually discovered a tiny tear in the fabric.
Warren checked that the Davy lamp was still securely positioned, then inserted his two index fingers into the tear and carefully began to pull the material apart. The ancient cloth didn’t yield its secrets easily, the fabric giving way with the greatest of reluctance, but after a few seconds Warren had opened up the split in the cloth far enough for the tips of his fingers to touch the object it had been concealing.
It was clearly metal, but for a few seconds that was all he could tell. He was looking at a gently curved section of tubing which terminated in a much larger, rounded, bulbous and apparently ornate shape, and he had not the slightest idea what it could be. The metal appeared black in the faint illumination, either covered in paint or possibly simply displaying the encrusted dirt of the ages.
Warren rubbed his thumbnail along the piece of metal he’d exposed, and then caught his breath. Under the black coating, which he now thought probably was paint, his action had revealed the faint gleam of a dull yellowish metal, and his mind sprang to the obvious conclusion. He’d found a gold relic of some sort, a wonderful and valuable find.
But what, exactly, was it?
Carefully, he felt around inside the tear in the cloth, the tips of his fingers tracing the shape of the object. His sense of touch was telling him that it seemed to be shaped like a flower, a long stem with the head of the flower at its end. And that did make a kind of sense. Or rather, he realized a moment later, it didn’t.
Warren knew quite a lot about Jerusalem and the Jewish religion. Before he had arrived in the Holy Land he had studied numerous books dealing with the history of the country. One of the most important treatises in Judaism was the Zohar, essentially one of the source documents of the Kabbalah, the sacred scriptures and teachings which explain the relationship between the divine architect of the universe and his creation. And the early part of the Zohar compared the Jewish people to a rose with thirteen petals. Could that be what he had found, a symbolic representation of that image?
But there was an obvious problem with that idea. Warren knew that the Zohar had surfaced comparatively recently, in the thirteenth century, in fact, in Spain, but it was believed to date from the period of the Second Temple, from between about 540 BC and 70 AD, because of the language it was written in, which was Aramaic. He was unsure when the chamber had last been used by anyone, but he would have been surprised if the footprints he could see on the earth floor had been left there less than two thousand years earlier.
So the date was about right, if the object he was exploring with his fingers was a carving of a rose. But one of the most fundamental and best-known tenets of Judaism was the prohibition on idolatry and graven images. The Jews simply didn’t produce representations of anything, and they never had, not since the time of Moses. So that idea had to be wrong.
As his fingers continued probing, he wondered if the object was some later relic, something left under the Temple Mount by the Knights Templar or the Muslim invaders or some other group. But again that didn’t accord with his researches. Anything found in these tunnels and chambers had most likely been left there by the Jews.
So what was it?
He again traced the curved metal with his fingertips, then felt further under the material as he tried to get a better idea of the shape of the entire object. He felt another flower-like object close to the first, and his fingers traced the ‘stem’ of metal that extended below it.
Warren shook his head. He had no idea what it was. He would have to drag it out of the crevice and examine it properly.
But as his hands closed around it, he suddenly gasped with shock, because in that single instant he knew exactly, without the faintest shadow of a doubt, what the object had to be.
‘Oh, my dear God,’ he muttered.
Outside the chamber, Birtles must have heard his sudden intake of breath, or his murmured invocation.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ he asked, his slightly muffled voice echoing through the gloom. ‘Do you need any help?’
Warren needed time to think, just a few seconds, to decide what to do. And he needed Birtles to remain where he was.
‘No, stay there,’ he ordered. ‘I’m fine. Just banged my knee on a rock, that’s all. Give me a minute.’
Warren’s mind was racing. If he was right – and the shape of the object that his fingers had traced beneath the material led to only one conclusion, as far as he could see – then what he’d found was at once the most valuable and by far the most dangerous relic that had ever been discovered anywhere in the Holy Land. He knew that if he simply dragged it out of the chamber and up to the surface, there was a very good chance that he and his men would be dead within twenty-four hours. But he couldn’t leave it where it was. It was too important, and far too valuable, for him to just walk away from.
He had to make a decision.
‘Did you find anything?’ Birtles asked.
Warren paused for another second or two, weighing up the likely consequences of the action he was contemplating, and in that instant he made a decision, the repercussions of which, unknown to him, were to dominate much of his life from that point onwards. He couldn’t simply leave the relic behind in the dark of that hidden chamber, but equally he couldn’t permit anybody, not even his own men, to know what he intended to do with it.
So he replied to the corporal, comprehensively burning his boats behind him, but just possibly saving the man’s life.
‘No, nothing of any interest,’ Warren said. ‘It’s just another empty chamber. I’ll make a note of the location when we get out of here. In fact, let’s head back now. There’s nothing else we can do here for the moment.’
A few moments later, Warren emerged from the shallow opening and the two men began retracing their steps along the tunnel towards the vertical shaft that would take them back up to the surface.
* * *
The entire reason that Charles Warren was mo
re or less living underground in Jerusalem was a woman. But not, it has to be said, just any woman.
In the summer of 1866, Warren had been instructed by his commanding officer to attend a meeting in a building on the Strand – in a bank, in fact – but the senior officers he was anticipating had been nowhere in evidence as he was escorted to the small private room on the first floor. There, already seated at a table and waiting for him, was an elegant lady who introduced herself simply as ‘Angela’.
But that didn’t matter, because Warren had recognized her immediately. His hostess was an aristocratic lady named Angela Burdett Coutts. She was a baroness, the daughter of the banker Thomas Coutts, who owned the building they were sitting in, and at that time she was the wealthiest woman in England. And Warren had not the slightest idea what she could possibly want with a humble army lieutenant. That, at least, quickly became clear.
‘I was simply appalled, Lieutenant Warren,’ she began. ‘The water tasted utterly vile, and I could not believe that our Lord Jesus might have had to drink such filth.’
The story, as ‘Angela’ told it, was simple enough. She had visited Jerusalem in 1865, the previous year, as part of a Grand Tour, where a commonplace and seemingly utterly insignificant event had taken place. It was a hot and sultry day, the baking air barely moving, and she had been given a drink of water by her guide, a drink that the man had drawn from one of the old cisterns that lay under the city. The water in the mug he offered was foul and stinking, and that had started her thinking.
‘I was in the Royal City of David,’ she went on, ‘treading in the footsteps of Christ himself, and it occurred to me that if there was such foul water in one cistern under the old city, there must surely be other cisterns where the water is sweeter.’
Warren hadn’t been entirely sure what she was driving at.
‘You want me to go to Jerusalem and find the old water cisterns?’ he asked.
‘Of course not,’ Baroness Coutts snapped. ‘The water supply is irrelevant. But because there must be underground water storage tanks, there are probably also other underground structures, storerooms and passages and tunnels, and I want you to go to Jerusalem and explore them.’