by F. G. Cottam
‘He got out somehow.’
She looked again at the body. She did not think that Alice Cranfield looked very much like a human being, deprived of her head and hands. Rigor made her look like a ghoulish waxwork from an end of pier show of the sort popular in Victorian times; the sort designed to scare and titillate prurient visitors in equal measure. What could be more naked than a body opened up to display its organs? It was intimacy of a sort that broke any final taboo.
Jane descended the stairs to the cellar. The clothes Alice Cranfield had been wearing were there, tossed down in a heap once torn from her, the skirt and jacket cut, the pale blouse stiff and black with congealed gore. She bent down, using a torch to examine the items in the gloom, careful not to touch and disturb and contaminate anything. They had designer labels. The victim had been prosperous and taken a rightful pride in her appearance.
Charlotte Reynard would take this hard, Jane thought. She would tell her personally about the death before the news of it broke. Sandra Matlock would declare no woman of achievement in London safe under a banner headline on her paper’s front page. Perhaps she would be right. Jane would have no official comment to make because by then she would be off the investigation, substituted by someone better qualified to catch the killer.
Someone with insights and energy and superior organizational skills, she thought, her knees cracking audibly as she stood and climbed the wooden steps back to the bedroom. She’d photograph the Scholar’s message on her phone. She’d send that to Professor Carter for a translation she could forward to Jacob Prior in order that the nice looking young theologian could draw another blank about their killer’s identity.
If only it had been Peter Chadwick, she thought. She would write up her Chadwick notes. She would tactfully suggest to whomever her replacement was that he was still of interest to the investigation. She would recommend that they keep Jacob Prior in the loop. Their three death metal thugs were each proving to have strong alibis for at least some of the evenings they’d been questioned about. Prior was more useful in profiling the Scholar than Geoff Toomey had ever been and he was discreet.
Her phone rang. ‘It’s Assyrian,’ Carter said, ‘a dialect no one has used for about 2,000 years. The vocabulary and scansion have inevitably been slightly altered by the limitations of an ancient language. I didn’t recognize it at first.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the Yeats poem “The Second Coming”, the famous one inspired by Revelations?’
‘So it’s another departure?’
‘It’s not scripture, but its subject is still the apocalypse. You know:
“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”’
Jane looked at the characters, written in blood, in a language not spoken for millennia. ‘How does the poem conclude?’
‘“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”’
She swallowed. She thanked the professor. She was mostly ignorant of poetry but vaguely knew that Yeats had been an Irishman and a modernist and she didn’t think she needed a degree in English Literature or a theologian’s expert guidance to identify the rough beast he’d alluded to.
The SOCOS had arrived. Jane told Richard Allenby she was going to go outside to get some air. He nodded. ‘I’m pretty much done,’ he said, peeling off his latex gloves, dropping them into his bag and closing it. She thanked him for attending. He said, ‘I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure.’
‘You didn’t know her, did you?’
‘Only by reputation, Jane, but I greatly admired her. I think everyone did.’
Outside, uniforms in stab-proof vests were unraveling crime tape between makeshift plastic barriers on the pavement. The sky was blue, unsullied but for the odd high wisp of vapour trail. It was a beautiful early summer’s day Alice Cranfield had not lived to witness.
She called Dave Livermore. ‘Busy?’
‘Busy playing Warhammer. I’m not working today, ma’am.’
‘There’s a neurosurgeon based at the Chelsea and Westminster. I want to know if she has any connection to the year of the Whitechapel killings.’
‘I expect we all do, if you go back far enough and don’t mind your links tenuous.’
‘Just check it out, alright?’
‘Sorry, ma’am.’
She gave him the name.
He called back just over 5 minutes later. ‘Her maiden name was Besant. She took pride in being a descendent of Annie Besant, the theosophist and champion of Irish and Indian independence. Before she lost interest in secular matters, her ancestor was a Fabian Socialist and follower of Marx.’
‘You’re not really ringing any bells.’
‘You’ve heard of a company called Bryant and May?’
‘They make matches.’
‘Matches were extremely important in Victorian times, totally essential because there was no electricity and lamps had to be lit. But their manufacture was dangerous because it involved white phosphorous, which caused bone diseases.’
‘Go on.’
‘The London match girls working in the Bryant and May factory went on strike. Annie Besant took up their cause. She organized rallies and lobbied parliament. The strike was staged in July of 1888.’
Jane closed her eyes against the bright sunshine. It was harsh, reflected off the river surface behind her back at the sky. It was warm and the passing traffic was a slow rumble filling the air with exhaust fumes. She said, ‘When Edmund Caul was where, Dave?’
‘I was saving that till Monday.’
‘You’re talking to me now.’
‘He was in Lambeth, ma’am. In June of that year, Edmund Caul took lodgings there, at an address on Old Paradise Street.’
Jane was silent.
‘I used the past tense just now, ma’am, talking about Alice Cranfield. You didn’t bother to correct me.’
‘That’s because there wasn’t any need.’
‘Lucifers.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry, ma’am, just a bit of free-association; it’s the slang name for matches from Victorian times. It’s what Edmund Caul would have called them when he used them to light his cigars.’
‘He smoked cigars?’
‘All the men back then smoked something. Early days, but I’m not really seeing him as a pipe man. I’ll have more for you Monday.’
Her phone rang the moment she ended the call. It was the DC. He said, ‘Please tell me this one’s a hoax.’
‘I wish I could.’
‘You’re off it, Jane. I’m sorry. I don’t believe you’re giving me a choice.’
She called Charlotte Reynard. ‘Are you at home?’
‘Yes. The ankle’s sore today.’
‘Are your children there?’
‘No, they’re at my mum’s for a few hours. What’s wrong?’
‘I’ll see you in half an hour, Charlotte. I’m coming over now.’
The cardinal saw his upward trudge as penance. The weather was benign. The snow was soft under his feet on the route in scant patches. Visibility was good enough. He would not plunge over a precipice or into a chasm unless fog descended and, though such meteorological developments were always possible in the mountains, he considered it unlikely. The avalanche and the crevasse were more plausible hazards, and there was the wind, of course. Rising and strengthening at altitude, it could pluck a man un-roped from the face into the void with a single, capricious gust.
It was a climb because he was ascending steeply. But it was not a technical climb. A sure-footed hiker with a head for heights could accomplish it at this time of the year. He was 67 years old and his muscles had atrophied with age and he was not an athlete, as had been his protégé James Cantrell.
But the cardinal had been born and brought up in Sardinia. As a solitary boy, debating his vocation with himself, he had sought o
ut isolated places in which to contemplate without distraction.
The Sardinian peaks were still the least exploited mountains in the whole of Europe. As a boy he had explored the isolated gorges and canyons of the Supramente Massif on the east coast of the island. He had climbed down the Gola su Gorrupu, the mightiest ravine in Europe. And once having done so, he’d had no choice but to climb back up again.
He was reasonably agile in his North Face mountain trekking boots and his brightly coloured performance clothing. His stamina was good. He had smoked when young, when everybody had, but had given up the habit at the age of 39. His regular exercise comprised only cycling these days, but his mileage around Rome was fairly substantial. He had never gained any fat, to speak of. His health-conscious housekeeper fed him seasonal vegetables and mackerel and salmon. He ate oily fish more than he would have without her prompting, but his diet overall was excellent.
Physically, he was comfortable despite the strenuous nature of his journey. Mentally, he was in turmoil. After leaving Father Gerard the previous evening, he had read the journal James had been charged, he suspected, to deliver to him. He had read Daniel Barry’s account of his London experiences in the year 1888.
He’d left the old priest suspecting that the world might be a much darker place than he’d previously imagined, or feared. He’d finished the Barry journal convinced of it. He’d snatched four hours of fitful sleep and then driven from Bayonne, only stopping to buy the clothing and rucksack he was wearing on his back on his route to the Pyrenees.
He had a cellular phone in his pack. He had a distress beacon and a compass, because the man in the outdoor equipment store had told him that the GPS signal on a smart phone was unreliable at altitude. ‘Much of what is modern is unreliable,’ he’d muttered under his breath, expecting the man to react with a look of suspicion. Instead, he had nodded in agreement. They were for a second or two kindred spirits in their shared belief that the world today was not a place to be entirely relied upon.
He’d read the journal remembering where he’d heard before of Daniel Barry of Dublin. It had been during an attempt to clear a bureaucratic backlog as a young priest with a talent for administrative organization. Barry had been a candidate for beatification. His name had been put forward after his death during the influenza epidemic that followed the Great War. He’d been 59 at the time of his death, which meant that he’d been 28 at the time of his London experience.
The Archbishop of Dublin had tried to put Barry on the path to sainthood, but when they’d examined the file, there was not a shred of supporting evidence put down. They’d filed the application in a very large cabinet, housing documents over which no further action was required.
He was wearing gloves. They were crafted from wonder fabrics such as Kevlar and neoprene. They were too snug to accommodate his cardinal’s ring, which was secure under a Velcro fastening in a side-pocket of his rucksack. The men of the priory did not know what he looked like. They had never spoken to him. Letters only had been exchanged in their terse and dictatorial dialogue. The ring would be all they would require. It was the proof of him, as a crown would be the proof of monarchy for a medieval king.
The previous day, he would have judged this mindset of theirs only with a lofty sort of disdain. Now he thought of it quite differently. They had certainty in their lives. They had unshakeable faith. They were humble in the awful magnitude of their duty. Spiritually as well as physically, it was the priory brotherhood who occupied the high ground to which he was struggling now to ascend.
He had listened to the car radio on the drive from Bayonne to the point on the mountain road at which four wheels could take him no closer to his destination. He had listened to a news bulletin. There had been during it a report about the serial killer in Great Britain the police there had dubbed The Scholar. He had just claimed his second victim in a week, his fifth in an eight-week spree causing panic and dismay among women in London.
There was talk of the British Government’s Home Secretary making a statement about the progress of the investigation. It was to be made on Monday morning, when she had gathered all the relevant facts and assessed the leads being followed by detectives involved in the case personally.
The latest victim was an eminent neurosurgeon who had lived alone in a luxurious apartment with a sumptuous view of the River Thames in fashionable Chelsea. The cardinal thought it strange the way journalists embellished stories with clichés when the facts, unadorned, were so shocking of themselves.
The murdered woman had been mutilated. The nature of the mutilation had not been publically revealed, to spare distress to relatives and also, the Cardinal suspected, to avoid the common revulsion of other women who feared they might be singled out next.
Fear was contagious. Panic was blind. Order was something maintained fundamentally only by common consent. He remembered the philosopher who had stated that nobody really knows anyone. It was a bleak and defeating assessment. He remembered the philosopher who had said that civilization was soap.
He looked up and against the veined crags and white dazzle of summer snow saw something pewter-hued and hewn from stone and built up here by men, massive and brooding only a few hundred feet above him. He knew now that the demons feared in our collective childhoods sometimes matured and escaped, capering into the grown-up world. He knew too that hope sometimes abided in remote and unlikely places. He paused and took a long breath to provide himself with fortitude. He began the last stretch of his mountain journey.
‘What’s your story, Pilgrim?’
‘Do I need to have a story?’
Chadwick sat down. He grinned. He took a sip of his pint. It was lager, not his first. ‘You don’t mind if I join you?’
‘Suit yourself,’ Jacob said, ‘you seem the sort of bloke who generally does.’
The pub interior was dark. The décor was Victorian, the furnishings of the reclaimed wood variety. There was a chalk-board full of lunch menu specials positioned above the bar. The light was feeble through engraved panes despite the brightness of the day outside. Gentrification had reached Finsbury Park. There were no gurgling fruit machines, no Sky TV, not even a juke box. The girl serving behind the bar was pretty in jeans and a hooped sailor top. She was listening to a retro Roberts Radio.
All the talk on the station she’d tuned into was about The Scholar’s latest crime. Identification was pretty much instantaneous if you were murdered in your own home, but Jacob remembered the days when the victims took days to be named officially. Relatives were informed first. Formalities were observed for the sake of dignity. That was before the information hemorrhage of the Twitter age.
‘How quickly did you spot me?’
‘Probably about five minutes after you took up position outside the hostel, I’d say.’
‘I walked past, casually.’
‘You were up and down the road like a sentry. I got bored watching you. It’s why I led you here. What the fuck do you want?’
‘I want to know what you know about the man butchering women all over London for the last eight weeks. You know something, don’t you, Mr. Chadwick?’
Chadwick sat back on his stool and raised a finger and grinned. ‘It was you behind the mirror in that interview room. It was you, wasn’t it?’
‘I can’t discuss my involvement with the investigation.’
‘Share and share alike, I say, Pilgrim, unless we’ve both promised to keep shtum, which might prove to be the case.’
‘I know about your conversation with that place in the Pyrenees after the press conference that followed the Longmuir killing.’
Chadwick sipped beer. ‘But you haven’t told the pretty policewoman who questioned me, because you’re not a copper, are you?’
‘I could tell her.’
‘And I could drag you outside and give you a hiding.’
‘You might not find that totally straightforward.’
‘You’ve got a bit of scar tissue under those eyebrows. I rec
kon you’ve done a bit of boxing. Probably you were good at it and you obviously keep in shape. You’d be no match for me on the pavement, Pilgrim. It’s a grown-up world out there.’
‘Funny, you don’t sound like a priest.’
‘I was something else before I was a priest and now I’m not a priest anymore; I’m something else again.’
‘I’ve got no interest at all in macho bullshit,’ Jacob said, ‘and I don’t want to piss away a summer afternoon in a pub. I just want to know what you know about The Scholar.’
‘He’s a very bad individual.’
‘Get away.’
‘Theology is my guess,’ Chadwick said. ‘You’re helping out with those messages he’s leaving at the scenes. You must have impressed the pretty DCI for her to have put you behind the two-way mirror if all you are is technical assistance.’
‘Who is he? You know, don’t you? You think he came here from that place in the Pyrenees. You think he killed a mountain guide and took his clothes. Who is he, Chadwick? Why the fuck won’t you help?’
‘You know more about him than I do,’ Chadwick said. ‘If you’ve seen the messages he leaves, you know about his character and intentions.’
‘You can give me more.’
‘If I did, you’d think me a lunatic. The name won’t help. The Scholar’s as good as any name for him.’
‘He could kill again soon. He could take someone’s life tonight. You could help stop him.’
Chadwick sipped beer. ‘He won’t,’ he said. ‘He’s not about the woman he kills. He’s about the collateral damage. Have you not listened to today’s news? Too busy being Sherlock Holmes?’
‘I’ve never thought it was personal.’
‘The Home Secretary’s asked for a briefing. There’ll be questions in the House of Commons on Monday morning. If there’s a parliamentary debate, it’ll amount to a vote of no confidence in the Met’s senior officers. Tomorrow’s papers are going to be full of screaming headlines and outrage and general hysteria. He’ll sit back and enjoy it all.’
‘And then he’ll kill again.’
‘Yes, he will. And it won’t be a working girl. They gave him easy access, but the police were able to keep them quiet. Everything changed on Monday, when he killed Julie Longmuir.’
