by F. G. Cottam
The second difference was that there was now a discernable smell in her flat for which she was certain she was not responsible. It wasn’t the smell of oil and vinegar, or the scent of exotic wood from the pile in the basket by the log burner. It wasn’t Chanel Number 5, which was all that Alice ever wore in the way of perfume. It was faint and subtle and was a mixture she thought of camphor oil and lavender.
She sensed movement in an uncoiling rush of dark strength and swiftness. Hot breath enveloped her in an exhalation so foul, her eyes smarted. She struggled, trying to move and escape, bound by an arm as secure as an iron barrel hoop. He licked the side of her face slowly with a coarse tongue and a saltpeter stink of saliva dried in the general heat of his proximity on her skin. They don’t know he does that, she thought. He must clean them, afterwards.
She felt the first cleaving shock of intrusion as he made the knife thrust, sure and so deep she felt the point of it scrape her spine. The assault was too sudden for pain to register. He chuckled deeply, pulling the blade upward through her as she gasped and life erupted out of her in a hot gush towards the floor
He sang to her. He crooned. Lastly, she heard the words:
And when we have our bit of fun,
Oh, Boy.
The cardinal endured few intervals of genuine doubt. He never doubted his faith or his vocation. He had never been prey to the temptations of the flesh that had so soiled the reputation of the priesthood in recent times. He thought the cause he served noble and the fellow souls among whom he served it predominantly good.
When he doubted, it was evidential doubt that tended to torment him. He had been charged in his mission by the Pontiff himself. It was to root out the heresies and cabals of secret belief that threatened the fabric and credibility of the modern Church.
The Church was a brotherhood that had throughout its history begat smaller and less inclusive brotherhoods. They were called orders, but they were, some of them, closer to being sects. Secrecy had always been an important characteristic of a faith founded at a time of persecution.
Some blamed the Romans for this tendency to vows of silence and the prevalence among the brotherhoods of signals and codes only their initiates could interpret. The cardinal held the opposing opinion that it was a very long time since a Christian had been thrown to a hungry lion.
Opus Dei was probably the biggest and most influential sub-group in the modern Church. They were not an order. Neither did they really qualify as a sect. But they were powerful, influential, tight-lipped about their practices and membership, and some moderates and liberals among the Catholic clergy considered their beliefs extreme.
The Templars were the most notorious historical example of how a religious order established with the best of intentions could become not only powerful and corrupt, but actively detrimental to the interests of the Vatican. They had been less like a cult, though, than a multi-national company, putting its own fiscal interests before obeisance to popes or to kings believed then to be ruling by divine right.
The Most Holy Order of the Gospel of St. John had been founded more than a thousand years before the Templars were established. They owed their existence to Peter, the fisherman, the Bishop of Rome, the martyr and apostle, the right-hand of Christ and the first Pontiff, the rock upon which the redeemer had said he would build his church.
This was the problem for the cardinal, the cause of his present uneasiness, the reason he had come to Bayonne in the first place. He was there because the retreat in the French town near the Spanish border housed a very elderly priest. Father Gerard was 98 years old and frail and blind and partially deaf. But he retained his mental faculties and at the age of 19, from 1934, he had spent a year assisting Monsignor Dubois, the Jesuit and the last liaison from Rome with the priory in the Pyrenees and the monks there.
Father Gerard had been ill for several days and too weak to receive his eminence. In that time, the cardinal had learned of the death of James Cantrell, received his protégé’s personal effects, mourned the loss and begun to investigate whether the death was indeed, as claimed, accidental. He had also entertained increasing doubts about his initial contemptuous dismissal of the mission the priory brothers had served and perpetuated with such single-minded piety for so long as they had.
The length of their devotions was the problem, the fact that the vigil had been made through all the centuries from the time of the very foundation of the Church. They had been charged with their task by a man Christ had known personally, and forgiven the sin of thrice denying him, and trusted. It was problematical, this provenance. It was filling the cardinal with a sensation his perennial self-confidence made new to him. The feeling, as he waited the final few minutes for his audience with the old priest, was one of trepidation.
The miracle described in chapter 11 of the Gospel of St. John involved Lazarus of Bethany, a town not far from the city of Jerusalem. His sisters, Mary and Martha, were known to Christ and sent for him when their brother became gravely ill.
Christ deliberately delayed his departure, despite the urgency of the summons. When finally he arrived, Lazarus had been dead for four days. He wept on being told this. Then he went to the tomb and rolled away the stone sealing its entrance and called Lazarus forth. And Lazarus came, restored to life.
Early Christians believed Christ embodied seven signs of divine authority. Power over death itself was the final, climactic sign. The restoration of Lazarus to life was its emphatic demonstration.
John believed – and stated in his Gospel – that the raising from the dead of Lazarus led directly to the decision of the Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin to kill Jesus. Some scholars disputed that John ever made such a claim, however, because they believed this gospel to have been the written work of Lazarus himself.
None of this was radically new, though some of it was controversial. The Caiaphas was a Jewish high priest and the Sanhedrin a Jewish justice body, but Jewish theologians had through history blamed the Romans for the decision to have Christ crucified.
The cardinal, now, was not concerned with authorship of the relevant gospel or with the political issue of who condemned Christ to death. He considered the gospel accurate so far as it went and the death of Christ an inevitable sacrifice for mankind which then enabled the resurrection.
His concern was the summoning back from death of a man, and the specifics of that event, four days after he had been interred. The faithful believed it manifested the seventh sign.
The brothers of the Most Holy Order of St. John’s Gospel, The Sacred Keepers of the Gate, believed something far more radical. They believed that Lazarus was a sinner, judged before the Almighty and found wanting. They believed the real miracle was that Lazarus was summoned back not from death, but from hell.
They believed he had learned something there of Satan’s plans for humankind. This knowledge formed the basis of the Lazarus Prophecy, told to Peter. And Peter’s response on hearing it was their foundation, with the power of ordination of their own brethren and a vow of eternal secrecy to keep. The cardinal, who knew his scripture, remembered the words of Christ quoted in Matthew 16: ‘And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’
Peter had established the order now dwindling in a Pyrenean keep because he remembered those words and took the duty to which they bound him seriously. The cardinal had sent a priest who didn’t believe in hell to stop them. The problem was that if Matthew had quoted correctly, Christ had certainly believed in hell. And it was his teachings their faith was supposed to serve.
The old priest’s eyes were pale and opaque with cataracts. It was late in the evening and his cell was lit by votive candles in a metal holder from which wax palely drooled. The stone floor was covered in the relative luxury of coconut matting. The bed was covered in a coarse woolen blanket, tautly pulled. There was a single chair at a desk. Father Gerard groped for the cardinal’s hand to kiss his ring and the cardinal allowed
this, feeling unworthy, as he always did, of the obeisance done him.
He guided the priest to the bed, where they both sat. He put a hand on a frail shoulder and said, ‘I wish to know about Monsignor Dubois, Father. I wish to know what he told you about his contact with the brothers of the Most Holy Order of St. John’s Gospel.’
‘The mountain brothers,’ Father Gerard said, ‘The Sacred Keepers of the Gate.’
‘Just so,’ the cardinal said.
‘He thought them fools, your eminence. He thought them deluded men who would pay for the practice of heresy in purgatory.’
Their voices were low. It was late, the light flickering and feeble, the space they were in sparse and confined. The substance of their conversation was confidential, but that wasn’t the reason they murmured and neither was it just that the older of the two of them lacked breath. The subject matter, the cardinal thought, encouraged a certain caution.
‘Do you know the substance of the prophecy?’
Father Gerard nodded slowly and his blind eyes blinked, pointlessly. He crossed himself and said, ‘God help me, I do. Lazarus told Peter that Satan would visit demons upon the earth. They would come in human guise and they would be clever and elusive. They would inflict grief and bewilderment and would cause men to lose faith.’
‘That’s all?’
‘They could be caught and confined but the hunt was very dangerous and only for skilled and devout men. And the confinement required constant vigilance.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all until the End of Days, your eminence. At the End of Days Satan will send his own progeny. The Antichrist will come and the final conflict will be upon us.’
‘But Monsignor Dubois believed none of this?’
‘They gave him something to read. It was an account of events in England in a year in the last century. He would not discuss its contents beyond saying they were most disturbing. He suspected that they were truthfully put down, but that their conclusions could have been mistaken. He said the alternative was an awful possibility to contemplate.’
‘Do you know the substance of this account?’
‘He would not discuss it with me. I know it troubled him, gave him sleepless nights. The detail it contained seemed to sober and age him suddenly. He was a bright and inquisitive man with a happy disposition. What happened to him afterwards in Germany was terrible.’
‘He didn’t confide in you at all?’
‘He went to visit them again after reading what they had given him. This was in the winter of 1935, February, a vicious month in a vicious winter. We had a succession of those before the war, as though the world was hardening its heart for conflict.’
‘Go on.’
‘The mountains were treacherous. I pleaded with him not to go. I had become fond of him, of his kindnesses and considerate ways and the wisdom he was happy to share with a young and callow novitiate. I did not wish him to perish in an avalanche or abyss. I did not wish for him to slip on the ice and fall, ascending.’
‘But he went.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he didn’t fall.’
‘No, he faltered neither on the climb nor on the descent. He returned seven days after his departure and his demeanor was different and in the months before his finally leaving late that summer for Dusseldorf, I don’t believe I once saw him smile.’
‘You think he lost his faith in the mountains?’
The old priest licked dry lips with a yellow tongue, turning his opaque gaze towards where the candles flickered, perhaps seeking the comfort of light with the last grey vestiges of sight left to him.
‘I think he discovered there was more to his faith than he wanted to believe,’ Father Gerard said. ‘None of us wishes to believe, your eminence, in the demons that scared us in the darkness as children. We like to think them but figments of a child’s imagination. Perhaps it takes a certain maturity to accept that they are real.’
‘You speak for yourself, Father?’
‘I speak for Monsignor Dubois. I heard him with the sharp ears of a man still mostly a boy. I was not yet 20 but remember it as though it were yesterday. He told me that at the mountain priory, they showed him their proof.’
Chapter Six
The Scholar’s letter notifying the Met of Alice Cranfield’s murder was addressed personally to Detective Chief Inspector Jane Sullivan and was not immediately picked up on. It was placed in her in-tray on her desk in her own office rather than at the work station she habitually used in the incident room.
This happened because the letter was delivered in the early hours of Saturday and because no one directly attached to the investigation immediately saw it to make the connection. New Scotland Yard was light on clerical staff at the weekend. Jane had intended to spend at least some of her day off looking at the Whitechapel Killer exhibits held by the Museum of London at Docklands.
An alert police constable delivering a hand written memo to her desk recognized the font-type on the envelope at 11.30am. The memo was a reminder from the Commissioner for all senior officers to stay within budget on overtime payments. The constable told his superintendent and Jane was informed and at her desk to discover the contents of the note just after noon.
She was outside the alleged victim’s home 40 minutes later, having failed to contact her at either the hospital or at home on the number surrendered by the hospital administrator. When the surgeon failed to answer her mobile, Jane experienced a feeling as close as anything she thought she’d ever felt in her life to dread.
She called Dr. Richard Allenby and requested that he attend. Allenby was not the duty physician that weekend, but he’d brought a modicum of comfort and dignity to the scene of Julie Longmuir’s murder Jane remembered feeling grateful for. She thought that if they discovered a body today, she would be taken off the case.
It was the least of her concerns. The Scholar was not typically someone to waste police time. Allenby was at home in West Hampstead and Jane had him picked up by an area pursuit vehicle 5 minutes after the conclusion of their call. The car was unmarked but its blue lights and siren would get him through the weekend traffic to the scene faster than any other means with a specialist driver at the wheel.
She was on the pavement outside the address when the car tore around the corner, wailing and flashing brightly with a shudder of rubber and a low moan of engine torque and it was just so much theatre, she thought, as the vehicle braked and halted with a squeal. It was so long after the fact it actually qualified as farce. The woman who’d lived within was lifeless and stiff and performance driving and a clever physician could do nothing to reverse what had been done to her.
They went into the flat together. He’d said in his note that he’d leave the door open for them as a courtesy. He was as good as his word. The blinds were closed and the rooms were consequently gloomy. They were obliged to leave the crime scene intact. There was sufficient available light to see what had been done. Jane thought the lack of brutal sunlight something of a blessing. Alice Cranfield was stretched out on her bed, eviscerated in the manner of the previous victims, with one significant alteration. The Scholar had decapitated her.
Two discrepancies, Jane thought, seeing that the victim’s hands had been neatly severed at the wrists.
Allenby examined the body. Jane examined the flat. She found the head placed upright in the refrigerator in the kitchen. There was a faint waft of perfume on opening the door. The fridge had been switched off and the flesh of the face appeared waxy and dull under its cap of lusterless hair. The head didn’t stare deadly back at her. It had been mutilated. She went back into the bedroom.
She said, ‘He’s taken her eyes and ears and tongue. He’s cut off her nose.’
‘She was dead when he did it. She died at about half past ten last night. Massive blood loss, catastrophic physical trauma, her death would have been fairly rapid, no more than a few seconds.’
‘But long enough to know who was killing her.�
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‘She was an intelligent woman. I expect there was time for that penny to drop.’
‘He’s basically deprived her of her five senses. He’s taken her capacity to smell, see, hear, taste and touch.’
‘He took those,’ Allenby said, ‘when he ripped her open.’
‘Yes, but he likes his symbolism.’
‘In taking the hands, he’s robbed her of her capacity to heal. That’s assuming he knew she was a surgeon?’
‘He knew. The good she did condemned her.’
They both turned then to the message written on the wall. It was inscribed in a language totally alien to Jane. She looked quizzically at Allenby, but he just shrugged. He said, ‘It isn’t Latin or Greek. That’s as much as I can tell you. Except that it isn’t Russian, either; I’m familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. My daughter studied Russian at university.’
‘Did she do well?’
‘Very. Bright lass took a first.’
‘No frankincense,’ Jane said.
She could smell only blood. There were flowers in the sitting room, orchids in a crystal vase, and they were fairly recently bought and their bouquet potent in there. It didn’t reach the bedroom and dispel the odour of recent, violent death.
‘She was killed in the hallway,’ Allenby said. ‘She was clothed, that’s obvious from the splatter pattern on the carpet of the blood stains there. It didn’t spill unimpeded. He carried her in here as the life left her and then stripped her when she was dead and went to work.’
‘So he was covered in blood himself.’
Allenby shrugged. ‘I don’t see a trail of it. Maybe the SOCOS will discover an exit route.’
‘A man can’t walk through the streets half-soaked in fresh blood without someone seeing him and calling 999.’
‘There’s a balcony,’ Allenby said, ‘off the sitting room.’
Jane sighed. She said, ‘It’s a balcony that drops thirty feet down to the river. At low tide he’d break his neck. At high tide he’d drown. It’s impossible.’
