The Lazarus Prophecy

by F. G. Cottam

  She was glad at least she’d had time to go home and change out of her dress uniform before meeting Charlotte. Had she still been wearing that, she thought this encounter would have been even more strained and difficult.

  In her bag on the back of her chair, her phone rang. She reached for it and saw that the number was Jacob’s. She switched it off. Her priority just then was calming and reassuring Charlotte and it required all of her attention. Charlotte hadn’t struck her as a high maintenance woman by celebrity standards, but she was in a high maintenance mood.

  ‘I can give you a description of your killer.’

  Jane didn’t reply. She groped in her mind for something diplomatic to say.

  Charlotte sipped wine. Her hand was reasonably steady doing so. She said, ‘No one else can tell you what he looks like. You haven’t got a clue. I can tell you exactly.’

  Still Jane didn’t say anything. She thought it better just to let Charlotte talk. Her tone was becoming more deliberate. She sounded suddenly on confident ground.

  ‘He’s tallish, about six-one.’ She smiled, ‘Tall by Victorian standards, I suppose.’

  Jane nodded.

  ‘He’s slender but strong and very fluid in his movement, swift and balanced, like a dancer or a track athlete. Except he doesn’t look flushed with health the way athletes tend to. He’s sallow and rather pale like someone who deliberately avoids the sun. He has a full head of thick dark hair. His hair is straight. I saw that when he removed his hat on entering the pub. He had a moustache, but he might have shaved it off, now.’

  Jane drank wine. She thought if this was a hallucination, it was unusually detailed. They were usually fragmentary, like dreams.

  ‘He has black eyes. They’re his most striking feature. They’re probably actually a very dark brown, like that dark hardwood.’

  ‘Like mahogany?’

  ‘Yes, a brown so dark it appears black, exactly like that. And they’re expressionless. He has teeth that are very white and straight when he smiles but the expression doesn’t reach his eyes even when he winks.’

  ‘He winked at you?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s without charm.’

  ‘What age would you put him at?’

  ‘Mid-thirties, but I wouldn’t bet money on that. He could be younger, or a bit older. He has an air of self-possession.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘He dresses well. That won’t have changed. He’s a bit of a what-do-you-call-it?’

  ‘He’s a bit of a dandy.’

  ‘Yes. He is. And he wears a scent. It’s somewhere between lavender water and camphor oil.’

  ‘That’s very comprehensive.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘He’s a good tipper.’

  ‘I’m not patronizing you. I’ll cross-reference what you’ve told me with anything I’m told by my murder squad colleague researching Caul in the morning. Try to eat some of your food, Charlotte. You look like you’ve lost weight and can’t afford to. Try and eat something and then I’ll walk you back to Bermondsey.’

  She was walking homeward in darkness with the river to her right along the Southbank an hour later when Jacob Prior called her again.

  ‘They’re some kind of secret religious brotherhood. They sound anachronistic and sinister. They believe in something I’ve never heard of called the Lazarus Prophecy. I think your killer might be one of them. I’d respectfully suggest you bring Peter Chadwick in again and question him further.’

  ‘I thought there was some suggestion he might volunteer information to you?’

  ‘There’s no guarantee. How long are you prepared to wait?’

  ‘Till tomorrow evening; nothing by then and I’ll bring him in again. Do you have time to brief me fully in the morning?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Eleven?’

  ‘See you then.’

  ‘What do you know about the Knights of Excalibur?’

  ‘I’m picturing a dozen right-wing thugs in replica football shirts plotting world domination while they get sunburned in a pub garden.’

  ‘They’re a bit more serious than that.’

  ‘I doubt they even know Excalibur was Arthur’s sword. They’re probably named after a by-pass in somewhere like Chingford.’

  Jane laughed, but she thought it slightly ominous that someone as bright as Jacob took a group like the Knights so lightly. Their leader always seemed capable of the right sound-bite on television. And now they were on her mind she realized he was on the telly a lot. They had performed strongly in local elections. History taught that the liberal intelligentsia only ever woke up to the threat of political extremism when it was too late to act.

  She remembered then what Chadwick had said about history at the conclusion of their interview. She was looking forward to Monday morning. She was intrigued to hear in detail what Jacob had found out about the place in the mountains. She was keen to learn what Dave Livermore had managed to discover, between his bouts of Warhammer, about Edmund Caul’s Lambeth sojourn.

  She could not have said at what point she became aware that she was being followed. The tracker was careful and extremely cautious. There was nothing physical to hint at it. She didn’t hear anything to betray the person shadowing her. It was just the certain insistence of her intuition. Once she knew she was the subject of pursuit, she stopped abruptly to listen for the single footstep followed by a pause that would catch out whoever it was. She did that twice, but both times the expected footstep didn’t fall.

  She didn’t look back. She didn’t sense whoever it was try to close the distance. It was dark and there were few pedestrians on the river bank and there were stretches lit only by the ornamental orbs sited at intervals long enough to leave black passages of gloom between their spheres of glowing brightness. It was still quite warm. She could smell the river, dank and cooling, black and restless in the glittering reflection of the lamps.

  Her progress seemed labored. She was headed for the steps that ascended to the south side of Westminster Bridge. She could see the Commons clock tower in the distance but it appeared to her to be getting no closer. Her gait became contrived to her because she knew it was being studied by the keen eyes of whoever followed her. The scrutiny made her self-conscious. She thought it would be extremely foolish to slow down. The temptation was to walk more swiftly to the refuge of the light and bustle beyond the Southbank. But she knew haste would suggest fear and panic and be a worse mistake.

  Her pursuer began to whistle. It was soft rather than strident. It was an unusual sound in 21st century London that had once been ubiquitous. Sweeps and window-cleaners had whistled balancing brushes and ladders over their shoulders as they pedaled their bikes. Butcher’s boys and bus conductors whistled all the time in old films. Her whistler was skilled and mellifluous and it only really became unpleasant to listen to when she recognized the tune as ‘The Lambeth Walk’.

  She did turn then. But when she did, there was nobody there to see. The whistling had abruptly stopped. Perhaps a final phrase of it resonated through the air but its originator had slipped from sight. She walked back slowly, her skin coarsened under her clothing by the foreboding the sound had chilled her with on recognizing the melody. Her breaths felt shallow and inadequate to the task of giving her sufficient air to sustain any strength. She felt oxygen starved, slightly lightheaded. She recognized the condition as terror.

  Something snagged in her sightline. It was a package that shifted slightly in the breeze on the wall between where she stood and the water. It scraped over the stone with a sandpapery sigh and she went and retrieved it. It had been placed in a spot equidistant between lamps where the prevailing dimness prevented her from examining it properly. It bulged slightly and felt at once soft and hard under the pressure of her fingertips.

  She walked carrying the package into a pool of lamplight. She opened it and briefly registered an eyeball staring dead
ly back at her. There were two of them, she knew whose, the second having squirmed under her own grip so that its rear and optic nerve whorled palely next to its staring twin. She swallowed disgust. There was a note. She removed and opened and read it. In script that had become dismayingly familiar he had assembled letters that read:

  There are none so blind

  As those who will not see

  The envelope containing the eyes smelled strongly of formaldehyde. The paper on which the words were pasted too smelled of the chemical. But they smelled also of something else, sweeter and more subtle. Jane thought she knew what it was. She raised it to her nose and sniffed. It was a mingling of lavender water and camphor oil. She put the note back in the envelope and the envelope into her bag.

  Her phone rang. It was the Commander. ‘I’ve just got off the phone to the Home Secretary. She was quite impressed with you, despite everything. She’s intelligent enough to realize that the Scholar is a cut above the average murderous lunatic. She’s pragmatic enough to know that if you fail to catch him, the failure will blight the rest of your professional career.’

  ‘They’re cheerful tidings.’

  ‘Susan Lassiter’s ringing endorsement is not the reason I called you. Are you aware of any of the specifics concerning Sandra Matlock’s domestic life?’

  ‘The amount she writes, I’d assumed she didn’t have one.’

  ‘She’s divorced, one child, a seven year old daughter of whom, somewhat unusually, the father has full custody. She has her daughter on alternate weekends. This was her weekend and she took her back as she always does at five o’clock.’

  ‘I’m sure this is going somewhere, Sir.’

  ‘It’s going back to Sandra Matlock’s Southwark flat with her, just after six o’clock. She owns a set of Sabatier knives.’

  ‘That’s not against the law.’

  ‘A carving knife had been driven through the breadboard in her kitchen with sufficient force to pin it to the beech work surface on which it was placed.’

  ‘Go on, Sir.’

  ‘Impaled on the breadboard was a human tongue. I don’t think there’s any great doubt regarding its original owner. There was no note, nothing daubed on walls or anything of that nature. No sign of a break-in, either. Ms. Matlock is naturally quite shaken. She’s interpreting it as a threat.’

  ‘She’s got him all wrong, if she thinks it’s a threat,’ Jane said.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He likes being talked about, Sir. The tongue is a pun and a compliment. I don’t believe the Scholar wastes his energy on threats.’

  She completed the call with the sound of her own bravado echoing emptily around her ears. She thought he might still be there, in the concealment of the shadows, watching sardonically, listening, disseminating and scheming. She couldn’t make sense of it as a linear narrative, but thought that he would suit Charlotte’s physical description quite accurately in the important particulars.

  She walked on, vulnerable but no longer afraid. It would make no sense to tease and then kill her immediately. That would defeat the very object of his goading her. But even when he didn’t kill, it was women who claimed his attentions.

  Sandra Matlock had that morning brought press exposure to the part being played by Dom Carter and Jacob Prior in the investigation. Jane thought that if the Scholar had delivered them some of his trophies, she would have heard about it. He’d already had a busy evening. He wasn’t omnipresent, was he? He couldn’t be everywhere. Not that he needed to be. Carter was in Oxford. But their theologian’s Kennington flat was only a brisk 10 minute walk from where she stood.

  For the moment, though, women were his focus. Jacob had said that despite the violations they involved there was something impersonal about them. They were sensational and savage, but they were not acts demonstrating anger or spite. Somewhat reluctantly, she was forced to agree with that. Fury resulted in carelessness. If he had a personal grudge against women hateful enough to provoke him into this level of violence, he would have made a mistake by now, which he hadn’t done.

  The police forensics lab was in Lambeth, not far from where she lived. She took her package there and filed a weary report after sealing it in an evidence bag and instructing a technician to refrigerate the contents before returning home. It had been a long day and tomorrow promised to be busy. She would sleep the sleep of the innocent. She thought the Scholar, bloodily drenched in guilt, would sleep soundly too. He’d enjoyed a satisfactory evening, high on amusement. Except that she couldn’t readily imagine him sleeping. She wondered did he ever feel the need at all.

  ‘How did Warhammer go?’

  ‘Present tense, ma’am, it’s ongoing. That’s the beauty of it. It’s an epic saga. It’s total immersion in another world, not some five-minute video arcade shoot-’em-up.’

  ‘What part do you play, Dave?’

  ‘I’m an Imperial Knight,’ he said, blushing.

  He didn’t look very much like an Imperial Knight. She couldn’t imagine him astride a snorting stallion, buckled into armour, inflicting carnage on a battlefield with a broadsword. He was shortish and plump and wore a russet goatee beard. But she didn’t expect anyone would voluntarily play a Warhammer dwarf.

  ‘You still found the time for Edmund Caul?’

  It was eight a.m. and they were in her office at New Scotland Yard. He’d arrived carrying a cardboard Starbucks cup. It was already warm with the sun slanting from a cloudless sky through her window. There were dust motes and the coffee smelled strong and sugary.

  ‘Caul was an intriguing guy. It was an interesting time. London was probably the busiest metropolis in the world. It was the hub of Empire back then and was a major port city. I hadn’t realized that. For a number of social and economic reasons it was a place in a state of flux. It was majorly violent, even on the recorded crime stats, which were probably only a fraction of what was going on.’

  ‘And the forces of law and order were always playing catch-up?’

  ‘They never caught up. You’ve got this weird paradox of an incredibly conservative ruling establishment and an anarchic population beyond anyone’s control. There were no-go areas in London for the police back then, criminal ghettoes.

  ‘The most notorious was the Rookeries at St. Giles, which reached to Seven Dials in what’s now Covent Garden. There was no anti-drug legislation on the statute books. Disease epidemics took a massive toll on lives. Child mortality was 50 per cent. Poisoning and garroting were routine crimes. That’s the background.’

  ‘That’s the environment into which Edmund Caul was born?’

  ‘There’s no record of his birth. There’s no record of his nationality, though he was assumed to be English. There’s no consensus concerning his age and he didn’t have an occupation and we don’t know into what denomination he was born. That’s quite unusual. Every parish kept a record of births, marriages and deaths. He seems never to have been born or baptized or to have died.’

  ‘You’re depressing me, Dave. Tell me what we do know.’

  ‘He was prosperous. That’s the most unusual thing about him.’

  ‘Prosperity wasn’t unusual in Victorian times.’

  ‘You didn’t let me finish, ma’am. It was unusual for a rich man to live in Lambeth then. The river was a dividing line the prosperous didn’t cross. Not unless they were up to mischief, they didn’t. Lambeth was the slums and the workhouses and bedlam. Nobody wealthy had any business being there.’

  ‘But Caul took lodgings in Lambeth nevertheless.’

  ‘He did, at a cost of five shillings a week, in Old Paradise Street. His landlady was a Mrs. Hollander. She’d been the subject in the previous decade of a conviction for running a house of ill repute in Vauxhall. She got six months hard labour in Pentonville and a 5 pound fine. By the period we’re looking at, she’d quit the vice trade, invested her profits in residential property and was making an income from rents. By Lambeth standards, she’d become respectable.’

&nb
sp; ‘When does the Caul paper trail begin?’

  ‘It starts in June of 1888. There was a brawl in the Windmill pub on Lambeth High Street that resulted in two fatalities. The men killed were both stevedores. They’d been involved in a game of cards that turned acrimonious.’

  ‘Caul was playing?’

  ‘His name was on a list compiled by the landlord of those present at the time. He wasn’t incriminated. He was just there, allegedly. He’d left by the time the police arrived but he was in the saloon bar when trouble broke out.’

  ‘How did the men die?’

  ‘They were each stabbed and died of their injuries. Slash injuries. They bled to death in the gutter in the street outside the pub.’

  ‘Was anyone ever convicted?’

  ‘Someone called Daniel Barry was arrested and questioned but released without charge. The clear up rate in those days was shocking, ma’am.’

  ‘We’re in no position to gloat, Dave. Not considering our current investigation, we’re not.’

  ‘There was another kerfuffle involving Caul at the beginning of July. This time he was followed out of a poker game staged at a private address in Bermondsey.’

  ‘What was Bermondsey like then?’

  ‘Docks, fruit trade, meat and vegetable markets, all hustle and bustle, rough and ready, but not the sink Lambeth was regarded as.’

  ‘I live in Lambeth.’

  ‘No offence, ma’am. I’m sure it’s improved.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Some sort of gambling den, bloke hosting matters gets concerned after three Polish sailors follow our boy out onto the street.’

  ‘He’d won big?’

  ‘Apparently not, but he hadn’t lost either and had a reputation for carrying gold around with him.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Gold was easily converted into cash at assay offices or pawn brokers’ shops, which were more plentiful than banks then and kept more relaxed opening hours.’

  ‘Rather like having a debit card today.’

  ‘A constable was summoned outside Borough Market. He alerted a colleague close by and they caught up with Caul, who announced himself perfectly fine and looking for a hansom home. The Poles never rejoined their ship. They just vanished.’