The Lazarus Prophecy

by F. G. Cottam

  They had always existed in secrecy. If that had always suited them, now, ironically, it also suited their mother Church. They adhered to a faith that made medieval Christianity seem forward-looking. And they were funded from Rome, which to anyone neutral would suggest Papal approval, would it not?

  The truth was both more and less complicated than that. The fact was that the organized Catholic Church was a vast organization with a massive and complex bureaucracy. The truth was that this order had been overlooked, forgotten about. They had slipped from official thought and sanction at some time in the 1930s, when the Church was concerned with the rise of Fascism and the challenge of trying to accommodate governments in Europe not only secular but actively hostile to its interests.

  ‘In language you would understand, with them, we rather dropped the ball,’ the Cardinal said.

  A Paris Jesuit, Monsignor Dubois, had been the last official liaison with the members of the order Father Cantrell was on his way to see. Dubois had been seconded to Munich in 1936 to organize an escape route for German priests persecuted by the Nazis. He had been captured and jailed in Dusseldorf in 1939 and had died during the war in a concentration camp. The retreat in the high Pyrenees, its occupants and purpose had subsequently officially been forgotten about.

  It was understandable. Dubois had not been able to brief a successor in the assumption of his various responsibilities. The war had been a huge distraction. In its aftermath, in the reconstructed Europe, the Catholic Church had faced enormous challenges. There were attacks from those who said it had pandered to Mussolini and to Hitler to ensure its own survival in the Fascist era. There was the wholesale persecution of priests and nuns to have to try to combat in the zealously anti-religious Eastern Bloc. It was not surprising that the dwindling representatives of an ancient order based in a remote location went officially neglected.

  Their anomalous existence was only revealed by a recent audit, when it was discovered that funds were being sent each month to a post office in a French Pyrenean village for the purchase of food and clothing and fuel.

  ‘We assumed they had become extinct as an active element of the See,’ the Cardinal said. ‘But each month this pittance is collected and presumably spent. They are there. They are a complication, a potential complication that needs to be addressed.’

  ‘They’re unlikely to be publically exposed after this length of time. I would have thought the opposite was true.’

  ‘When I tell you of their supposed function, the task to which they dedicate their lives, you will agree that their exposure is a risk we cannot take.’

  ‘Who ordains them?’ Father Cantrell asked, incredulous, once he’d been told.

  The Cardinal shrugged. ‘They were granted the right of ordination when they were established, by the Holy Father himself. Things were rather different, James, when the Church was in its infancy.’

  ‘It’s blasphemous nonsense. It’s worse; it’s heresy.’

  ‘I have corresponded with them. I had to do so by writing to them care of the post office to which their funds are sent. They have very little contact with the world beyond the walls of where they live their simple lives. They are three men only now, old and enfeebled by the harshness of their devotions. Try to be diplomatic with them. Better, try to be kind.’

  He paused for a breather. The path really was steep and it was slippery in places with snow and ice. He thought the incline almost difficult enough to require he be roped. He glanced at the descent behind him and it occurred to him that a slip would probably be fatal. There was nothing to impede your fall. You’d just go on rolling and clattering for hundreds of feet, if you didn’t careen off the route into a precipice and the void.

  Their supplies were brought to them by residents of the village with the post office. They were shopped for there and then delivered by donkey once a month. It was a custom so old, this provisioning, that no one really knew its origin, the Cardinal had told him.

  He shook his head. He didn’t object to piety or commitment to the faith. They had their place; they were even essential. But fealty was a feudal concept which had no place in the scheme of things in the here and now. You did not exploit the basic Christian goodwill of your believers to turn them into servants carrying out slavish tasks. It was wrong in principle and demeaning in practice, to both parties.

  Pausing there, it occurred to him that the order would have been very powerful once. They would have been even more powerful than the Templars, whom they comfortably pre-dated. Their mission would have been considered an absolute priority. Every stone of the refuge he was about to visit had been carried up there to enable its construction. And this was achieved at a time when chaos and loss, in the shape of the plague, had made men doubtful of every apparent certainty in their lives.

  Labour would have been in short supply at a time when fields overgrew because there weren’t the peasants left alive by the pestilence to cultivate them. Yet the monastery had been completed. It must have been seen not only as a duty, back then in the 14th century, but as a necessity.

  You could only achieve such a feat through fear. Having heard what the Cardinal had told him, he knew what the source of that fear had been. People were credulous back then. There was no differentiation at the time between magic and rationality. That had come only centuries later. The devil was not a metaphor to them in the struggle between the abstract concepts of good and evil. He was Lucifer or he was Satan and he existed as a tangible presence in direct opposition to God. Kings held as resolutely to that idea as did the humblest serf.

  The secret had been kept. It was still being kept. But it had been shared with someone powerful and influential enough to have this secret place completed in what had been the darkest period of the blackest century of the last millennium.

  There were clouds, concealing the peaks around him. A blessedly light wind shifted them across the high sky. In a sudden patch of blue, he caught his first glimpse of his destination. Its geometry was fashioned not by nature but by man in the shape of a wall made of weather-pitted stone with the gloomy magnitude, above him, of a rampart.

  The press conference was as turbulent and unmanageable as DCI Jane Sullivan expected it to be. She tried to orchestrate the event on no sleep, because she’d had no opportunity or inclination to try to get any. The detail of the most recent crime scene was too raw and vivid in her mind. The frankincense smell was still cloying in her nostrils. She’d taken a shower and changed her clothes, but the scent clung stubbornly to her sense memory. She’d hoped to get inside the killer’s head in that first period alone at the crime scene but had failed, she knew, to do so. He was maddeningly abstract.

  She was taking questions from the floor. Most of the faces in front of her had become familiar over the years. The heavyweights were out, the chief crime reporters. Smart phones bobbed and weaved in front of most of them as they filmed and recorded the event. The lights from the television cameras made the room bright and hot, shrinking it, making it seem slightly claustrophobic.

  ‘Don’t these murders remind you of anything?’

  ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’

  ‘Prostitutes killed and mutilated in London, a killer who deliberately goads the police, messages left at the scene, trophies taken.’

  ‘I think regarding these as copycat killings after an interval of 130 years is a stretch,’ she said. ‘And he probably lives in London. Lots of people do.’

  There’d been nothing on the CCTV at Julie Longmuir’s apartment building. The night concierge had been adamant that no one had come or gone that evening that didn’t either live there, or was a regular visitor. She had split with her boyfriend the previous January. That had been her decision. The concierge was adamant that she was much too classy a woman for one-night-stands. She had come in after a play rehearsal, alone at 9.30pm. She had chatted briefly to the people on the desk as was her charming habit.

  They had both of her phones and they had her laptop. But on what lit
tle she’d learned about the victim, Jane thought it unlikely she had met or had any contact with her killer prior to the one fatal encounter.

  She hadn’t seemed the type for internet dating. She hadn’t had a Twitter account. There’d been a Facebook page dedicated to her, but it was a fan-site with which she hadn’t interacted. It was run by a man with mild spectrum Asperger’s Syndrome and a solid alibi. There’d been no persistent stage-door Johnnies to identify and question because her play hadn’t opened yet. She’d been fastidious socially. There was nothing frayed or chaotic. No loose ends at all.

  ‘Why did you deliberately conceal the first three crimes from the press?’

  ‘It was a judgment call. There’s an attention seeking element to the murders.’

  ‘Then why go public on this one?’

  She glanced at the Deputy Commissioner, sitting beside her. His expression said this was her ball to carry, or drop. She said, ‘We didn’t have a choice. Someone leaked it. And frankly the high profile of the victim and nature of the murder gave us no real option. The man responsible will derive gratification from what you people write and say on-air. He might feel in some way vindicated. But going public was inevitable.’

  ‘Because this victim mattered, because she wasn’t on the game?’

  ‘That’s a gratuitous assumption.’

  ‘It seems a fairly obvious assumption. It also seems quite reasonable.’

  ‘We haven’t caught him. We have no suspects. The situation has escalated. Women living alone need to be warned and vigilant. And we could do with the help of the public. I doubt a man who kills four times in seven weeks in the manner he has behaves normally otherwise. Someone will suspect something and if they do, I’d implore them to call us.’

  ‘Is it true you call him The Scholar?’

  She smiled and looked down at the desk in front of her. ‘It’s easier to say than perpetrator,’ she said. ‘I look forward to calling him by his name, when I identify and arrest and charge him.’

  ‘You’re confident you’ll catch him?’

  ‘I am and we will.’

  ‘Before he kills again?’

  ‘That’s what we’re all striving to achieve.’

  After the conference, she called Dominic Carter, the professor of ancient languages at Oxford helping them decipher the Scholar’s messages.

  ‘This one’s different from the others,’ he said.

  ‘Different in what way?’

  ‘It’s quite fundamentally distinct in idiom, grammar and expression, Ms. Sullivan. The others were formal in the way that they were couched. This has much more of a vernacular character.’

  ‘Do you have a plain way of putting this?’

  ‘Yes, very. Anyone could have written what he wrote in the other languages. Well, any classicist familiar with those languages could. They don’t tell you anything about the character of the writer. This Hebrew text is different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He sounds the way a Nazarene might in Judea at the time of the life of Christ.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s impersonation?’

  ‘Impersonation or parody, yes.’

  ‘What would be the point of that?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘How about the subject matter?’

  ‘More End of Days stuff. I’ll provide you with a translation later today. But I really think you might require a theologian at this stage.’

  ‘Because impersonating Jesus Christ is deliberately blasphemous?’

  ‘And because there might be clues as to his motivation I’m missing that will be more obvious to someone schooled in Christian theology.’

  It seemed a stretch to Jane. It seemed an even bigger stretch than the copycat link the guy from The Sun had tried to make at the conference. But it also seemed a potentially careless omission. They’d had the first of the texts for seven weeks. She wondered where you got a theologian from. It wasn’t like they advertised their services on Gumtree or in the Yellow Pages.

  To Carter, she said, ‘Can you recommend anyone?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I can,’ he said.

  At the conclusion of their conversation she rang the contact number he had given her. It was for a man named Jacob Prior. No one picked up and so she left a message, requesting that Prior call back, stressing it was urgent. Urgency was a growing feature of this case because the crimes were escalating in both savagery and the frequency with which they were being committed.

  She looked at her watch. It was now one o’clock. She could grab a sandwich in the canteen or she could access the Met file on the Whitechapel killings and spend an hour reading that. She’d earlier scoffed at the idea of any link. But Carter had reminded her that the Scholar knew his history. Maybe history also inspired him.

  The file listed eleven possible Ripper victims, two of whom had never been identified. Jane concluded during her reading that there had actually been seven, starting with Martha Tabram in April of 1888 and concluding with Rose Mylett the following December. Some criminologists speculated that there might have been between 20 and 30 victims. She thought those sensationalist figures plucked out of thin air. Only seven suited the methodology and time-frame in which a spree killer would likely operate.

  There had been no shortage of plausible suspects. The man in overall charge of the investigation, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, had favoured the Pole, Kosminski. But there had been no real consensus among the senior officers. Druitt, Ostrog and Tumblety were equally likely or unlikely to have been responsible for the seven murders and varying degree of mutilation involved. Time had determined that. When he had been given plenty of it, he had turned Mary Jane Kelly into something that looked barely human. He had savaged her beyond recognition and taken away her uterus.

  He had sent letters to the men investigating him. Or somebody had. The overall opinion was that these were genuine and Jane thought that more likely than not. Apart from one message hastily obliterated, he had not left anything written at the crime scenes in the manner of the Scholar. Or had he?

  The paradox of the Whitechapel killings was that the murder of women considered worthless by Victorian standards had so shocked Victorian London. It had caused moral outrage and triggered an epidemic of terror by no means confined to the East End. It had undermined the confidence of the public in the police. It had threatened public order. It was as though a capering demon had been unleashed on those cobbled streets and its gruesome devilment had shaken belief and destroyed the faith people had in their society.

  Perhaps the Whitechapel killer had left messages behind. Maybe the police had kept that from the public and the press. Possibly they had been ordered to do so. Some of the files pertaining to the investigation were still classified. But the Scholar would have to have known that to be copying it now and there was absolutely no way that he could.

  She thought they’d done very well with their investigation. They’d been exhaustively thorough in interviewing and compiling copious detail. It had all been after the fact and they had been hampered by what they hadn’t had. There’d been no witnesses, so there was no description of a suspect. There were no forensics, so they had no fingerprints. Their scene of crime photography was haphazard and pitifully limited by the available technology. They hadn’t even had telephones.

  They’d been working in the dark, Jane thought, because it was in darkness that the crimes were committed against women probably made helpless to retaliate to the attacks on them by drink. You had actually to hope they’d been drunk. The violations sober would have been truly hellish to endure. You had to hope the victims had been senseless with gin when they were singled out and their throats were slashed and their lifeblood leaked copiously away.

  She thought London in the period probably quite a nightmarish place, for the most part. There had been pockets of affluence. There’d been Wilde plays performed in theatres on the Strand where Escoffier created his culinary masterpieces at the Savoy. There’d
been energy and invention and private acts of altruism and political reform.

  For the most part, though, there’d been smog-slicked cobbles and the heaving stink of the river and poverty so abject it beggared belief in modern times. It was not a period through which she would have liked to live. Only aristocrats and courtesans among her gender had possessed any influence or credibility. She was reminded that some criminologists put the number of the Ripper’s victims into double figures. She supposed it was possible. It was a bleak area of speculation.

  Her mobile rang and the familiar sound of it made her jump. It was the theologian, Jacob Prior, returning her call. That was good. She closed the computer page she’d been looking at and started to explain to him how his expertise might help them better profile their killer. He listened without comment or interruption until she’d finished. And then in a voice more youthful than she’d expected to hear he said he’d seen her morning press conference on the midday news and would do whatever he could to help with their investigation.

  He thought it resembled less a place of piety than a fortress. The location might be partially responsible for that. The monolithic character of the structure might be a consequence of the weather it was forced to endure. Pyrenean winters could be harsh at this altitude. Ice eroded stonework. Wind withered masonry. They had built it to last and last it had, he thought, as he rapped painfully with his knuckles on the iron-braced wood of the door.

  He looked up, appraisingly. The façade was high and almost featureless. It was flat-roofed, with crenellations like those that surmounted a medieval keep. It was coloured a stained dark grey and windows no wider really than chinks had been hewn into the stone at high intervals. He shivered. He was not cold after the exertion of climbing the hazardous path to the spot. The building he stood before seemed to cast not just a shadow but a surrounding chill. It squatted there. There was a sense in which he thought it silently brooded too.

  Bolts were drawn back with what sounded like ponderous slowness and he looked frowning at his wristwatch. Already, he was impatient to be away from this refuge of heresy and obsolescence, this blemish on the character of a faith properly equipped to flourish in the contemporary world. Before even having met them, Father Cantrell was offended by the human relics he was obliged to confront and the offensive nonsense their order had peddled down the centuries. He would put a stop to it. It was his mission and if he was indignant, he thought his indignation entirely of the righteous sort.