by F. G. Cottam
That he might personally be in danger didn’t occur to Jacob at all. The previous day’s papers had named him as one of the civilian experts aiding the police in the investigation. But he didn’t think that would provoke the Scholar into changing his habits or method. He was doing as Chadwick had suggested he would and basking in the attention two outrages in a week had garnered him.
When he did kill again, and he would unless they caught him, his victim would be another woman. He set his own timetable and he had plenty of choice. Jacob assumed night police patrols had been stepped up in every London borough. There would be plainclothes officers deployed at strategic locations. It wouldn’t deter their man. They didn’t even know what he looked like. He didn’t really entertain the prospect of detection and capture. He was too arrogant to consider that a risk worth taking seriously.
Brother Philip had not left the confines of the brotherhood’s mountain refuge since entering into it just over 50 years earlier. A man called John F. Kennedy still cherished dreams of a nobler America from the oval office in the White House then. A group of musicians called the Beatles were scraping together the funds to record their first long playing record. Soviet Russia was sending dogs and primates aboard rockets into space.
He did not consider that the world beyond the walls familiar to him had improved much in the time he had spent away from it. He had no relish for travel, for sightseeing, for the sensations secular life offered humankind. But he had no choice. It was his mission now only to do what he could to prevent the prophecy from being realized. If he did not succeed in that, his whole life would have been worthless. The mission he and his brethren had dedicated their existences to would finally have failed.
He did not want that on his conscience. Of course they should have ignored the cardinal’s commands, rather than done as they had and feebly capitulated. Reduced to three in number by the influenza epidemic of the previous winter, they had been diminished in spirit too. They had possessed less defiance than they would have had they not been afflicted by loss and grief and been denuded of the symbolic power the strength of seven represented to them.
But he knew that in more robust times, the brotherhood would have defied Rome. Belief should have banished all thought of cowering obedience. Their duty to their order and their solemn obligation should have overridden all else. The cardinal, in his pompous ignorance, was of course partially to blame. But so were they. And Philip was their leader and so more guilty of cowardice and failure than anyone. He should have led by militant example. Instead he had meekly surrendered.
They had five new recruits. Two had already arrived, one from Central America and one from Corsica. Another three were on their way. Their agents had long sounded out likely members in the corners of the world where devout communities still existed. It was a question of faith and character, of sacrifice and discretion. The Cardinal had said they should elect seven-times-seven to the brotherhood and he had not suggested it in jest.
Of course, his eminence had suggested that only after reading the prophecy and becoming party to the secret. They would achieve the required strength in a matter of weeks, though Philip could not but wonder was there now any point to it.
He was in the library. Here resided the secret works of some of their most illustrious brothers. There was Michael of York, Scourge of Demons, who in the sixth century had vanquished a presence so baleful it had driven the congregation of a parish church insane. They had started to gnaw at their own limbs, consuming themselves. The madness had spread to surrounding settlements with the speed of an epidemic.
By day the demon capered. By night it lurked in the church. It had squatted there, in the English phrase. It slouched and when Michael confronted it, it taunted him and delivered its vaunting threats. He defeated it in scorn, casting it out, consigning it back to the dark region that spawned it.
There were others. Peter of Copenhagen in the 11th century, Vladimir of Sebastopol in the 13th, Sigmund of Austerlitz in the 16th; it was a roll-call of honour and piety and courage. For centuries his predecessors had risked hell with the prospect of no recognition beyond these walls and no earthly reward for the fearsome deeds they accomplished.
He stood. He was weary just at the thought of the travel ahead of him. He went down to the door opening onto the nine descending flights to where they’d kept their guest and vigil before Rome’s recent, rude intervention. He put the key in the lock. He did not relish this next episode in his long life but knew that it was necessary.
He counted down each flight. The echo of his footsteps accompanied him. He lit his way, as was their custom, with a taper. Long habit enabled him to see far better than most men were able to in the dark. He could sculpt gloom into shapes and interpret shadows with his eyes. He could feel on his skin and smell what other men only groped blindly for. They were skills acquired over decades that had become as instinct to him.
He reached the bottom of the ninth and final flight and stood before the cell door, with its dead candles and its bronze relief. He opened the tabernacle above the relief. Inside, there was a small silver cross. It was plain and set into a rough Calvary of hill shaped clay from which he plucked it. He held it reverently in the palm of his hand for a moment, fingering the pitted metal before slipping the cross into the pocket of his robe.
He pushed the cell door. It was not locked. It opened a foot on the oiled balance of its hinges, perfectly hung, despite its massive size and weight. He smelled the sweet, somehow moist spoor of the former occupant and swallowed fear. He hesitated and the flame of his taper spluttered slightly as if in protest at what he intended to do. But he felt up to the ordeal and felt he deserved no better than to endure it. His misjudgment might yet prove catastrophic. He felt he should be properly served a reminder of the fact.
He walked into the cell, careful not to tread on Caul’s discarded clothing, careful to avoid tripping on his buttoned boots and the faded spats with their splotched human stains. His black Malacca cane glimmered under varnish in the corner where he’d left it.
His pocket watch hung from its waistcoat chain on a hook screwed into the wall. From eight feet away, Philip could hear it ticking strongly. He raised the taper and saw that the blued hands on the porcelain dial showed the correct time. It was a good trick. It was, too, most certainly the Devil’s work. Despite himself, he shuddered.
He raised the taper high and looked at the shapes scratched into every inch of stone on the walls. Their prisoner had been industrious in his lies and blaspheming and perhaps in boastful predictions he was now turning into truths.
It wasn’t possible to tell. Some of the symbols were runic and some were hieroglyphic but all were so ancient that deciphering them would be the work of decades. Easier to understand, though not to look upon, were the things he had drawn. Christ was crucified upside down amid a horde of gleeful imps. Mary was riven and mutilated. Heaven’s archangels sodomised children and goats with expressions of ecstasy on their ethereal faces.
Then a patch of wall claimed Philip’s attention because the words engraved into the stone there were as plain to him as the Spanish he’d learned as an infant in Madrid from rhymes listened to on his mother’s lap. They were written in Latin. They read:
There is one who will know me. She will know he who it was I have been before and who I am and has the gift to know what I can accomplish. I will know her only when I find her. I will recognize this comely creature of lavish endowments. I will save her to the end which will be the end only of the beginning. Hers will be a slow and exquisite adieu.
Philip had seen enough. He walked out of the cell, closed its door, fingered the cross in his pocket for the consolation it offered him and climbed back up the steps. When he got to the top he locked the carved door behind him and walked through galleries that led to the centre of the building. He blew out his taper.
He opened the door to the courtyard. Sunlight glazed the cobbles. The June sun seemed impossibly bright. He winced and walked to
where Brother Stephen worked the bellows to heat the coke in the furnace for the job of smelting and casting they would do before his departure.
There was an anvil to the right of where Brother Stephen stood and worked and sweated. Philip took out the cross and placed it there. He looked at it. They both did.
‘You’re sure about this?’ brother Stephen asked.
‘I’ve thought about it hard,’ Philip said. ‘I cannot see an alternative.’
‘Half of me wishes to see the cardinal fail,’ Stephen said, ‘God forgive me.’
‘He would not forgive you, brother,’ Philip said. ‘Without what I will deliver him, the cardinal would certainly fail. But we must not wish for it. We must pray ardently that God’s warriors in London are successful.’
The coke in the furnace was yellow and in places white with heat. It rippled and buckled the air. It seared the skin in radiant blasts and was ready. Stephen reached for a long-handled iron smelting ladle from a rack of them hung to his right. He placed the silver cross very carefully in the bowl of the ladle and put the ladle to the fire.
He crossed himself. Both men did. The silver object puddled and wilted and then pooled in a molten gleam at the bottom of the bowl. ‘Fetch me the molds, brother,’ Stephen said. ‘And then let’s pray it’s only Christ who gains from this enterprise and not the Devil who profits.’
‘Amen,’ Philip said.
Charlotte Reynard thought the likeness quite good. She’d decided against the moustache. She thought that he was too vain for anachronisms and would likely be clean-shaven now. The pallor of his skin was difficult, because it had a smooth and weirdly ageless texture to it. But she thought she’d captured the eyes and the mouth well enough. The former were darkly intense and the latter was sensuous. His cheekbones were pronounced without being sharp and his chin was strong. It should have been a pleasing visage, all told. It wasn’t.
‘He’s a good-looking dude.’
‘You wouldn’t think so if you met him, I don’t think, though you might. I don’t know. What do I know? Maybe you would. Is there any point to this?’
The police artist was a woman named Claire. ‘Artist’ had suggested a pad and charcoal or pencils to Charlotte but Claire was achieving the likeness on a laptop. It was less portraiture than a process of elimination. She had thousands, maybe millions of human features to choose from in the programme she was using. It was a question of selecting the closest to life. Then there was the blending in. Claire was skilled at the blending in. They’d been at it for two hours.
Charlotte could answer her own question as to whether there was any point to this. Jane Sullivan had called that morning and asked would she be prepared to do it. The children were at school. She’d tested her ankle and winced and then looked at the smog outside mantling Bermondsey in soot and vagueness and decided she wasn’t going anywhere any time particularly soon.
Her agent had that morning sent her a set of game show episodes filmed in Sweden. A London-based production company was planning a pilot using the same format and wanted Charlotte on their guest panel for the show. She was unenthusiastic about the idea, still committed in her heart and mind to a fully-fledged stage comeback. Doing the computer likeness of the man she’d seen in Lambeth High Street would justify putting off viewing the Swedish game-show. It was a more disturbing but much less tedious way to occupy her day.
Jane had explained that she couldn’t make the likeness public. There was so little to go on regarding the Scholar’s appearance that she had to explore every avenue, she said. But she couldn’t validate the description without revealing its source and that would compromise Charlotte and expose the Met to public ridicule. She wanted the image to satisfy her own curiosity. She’d learned a detail about Edmund Caul Charlotte had got right but couldn’t possibly have known.
‘What detail was that?’
‘It was his height.’
‘I could have guessed.’
‘You could, but you didn’t.’
Claire stopped and saved her work and excused herself for a cigarette break on the patio of Charlotte’s borrowed home. She was bleached and tattooed and she called men dudes and rolled her own from a pouch of Old Holborn. She’d arrived astride a motorbike. She was probably about 23 or 24 and she made Charlotte feel staid going on matronly.
She decided she might hobble to the gym when Claire had finished and packed up and left. She could work on her abdominals and her upper body strength and tone. It wasn’t just vanity. She was a professional dancer audiences were going to pay a lot to see perform solo in the spotlight. Maintaining her shape was a professional obligation. Vanity of course played its part, though, as it did with any performer.
Out on the patio, Claire was an indistinct shape, her cigarette an orange glow that brightened when she raised it to her face and dragged on it. Charlotte thought the smog a little like the ash cloud that descended in the vicinity sometimes of an active volcano readying itself for eruption. It gave the air that dense and bitter quality. It was really strange for London in June. It brought a deaf stillness to the street outside. It was somehow mournful too, as though the city was attired for its own funeral.
It’s Edmund Caul weather, she thought to herself. She shuddered and glanced at the image on Claire’s computer screen and felt suddenly cold. She felt the groping reach of a connection she didn’t want to make and looked outside again to where the police artist was now a monochrome blur with a mobile phone to her ear, probably catching up on a hectic social life or talking to her significant dude.
She switched on the television. It was a large wall-mounted flat-screen, a necessary fixture for the film director friend who had lent her the house. She flicked the remote through the junk jewelry and monster trucks and personal injury claims ads until she got a news channel. They were doing an item about a rally held in Trafalgar Square that morning by the Knights of Excalibur.
Charlotte knew little about the Knights. They were talking about a woman called Joan Fairchild and they had footage of the rally where a jostled camera didn’t pick up very much through the sooty atmosphere and play of floodlight beams. Then they had stills of Fairchild in which she looked suitably Arthurian, with her blonde hair done in medieval braids corseted by bits of leather. It was a look so contrived and ornamental Charlotte thought it verging on ridiculous.
She isn’t so much styled, Charlotte said to herself, as costumed.
Next was a brief piece about that morning’s Commons debate. The Government had carried the vote only narrowly. London was still just about a safe place for a woman. Thank God for that, Charlotte thought, smiling to herself. Now we can all officially relax. The Home Secretary looked slightly harassed in an expensive suit and immaculate hair as she offered a microphone in the weird gloom of College Green a sound-bite on her full confidence in the progress of the Scholar investigation.
They switched to a studio. A plump woman guest in a chair was coming off a bad second-best looks-wise against a big-haired and seriously glammed-up Sky News presenter. Charlotte felt a bit sorry for her. Then her name came up in a sub-title and she was Sandra Matlock and the sympathy evaporated.
She talked about the gruesome human trophy that had confronted her in her kitchen after she’d returned her daughter to the girl’s father the previous evening. She explained that she was now staying indefinitely at a hotel guarded by 24-7 security.
‘What’s that costing?’
‘It’s costing the taxpayer nothing. Fleet Street takes care of its own.’
‘Will what happened last night deter you from writing about the Scholar case again?’
‘Don’t become the story,’ Matlock said, ‘it’s the first rule of journalism and I’ve broken it.’
‘You weren’t really given a choice, Sandra.’
‘I’m only human. I was naturally very shocked last night. It was a violation that degraded the memory of a woman we all admired. But the answer to your question is no, I won’t stop writing.’
That made Sandra Matlock smile. She looked at her hands in her lap in an expression that Charlotte assumed was meant to imply modesty. All it did was emphasize her double-chin. She said, ‘I’m doing an in-depth interview with Joan Fairchild this afternoon. You can read it in tomorrow’s Telegraph. She’s a strong and dynamic character and right now, she’s setting the agenda.’
‘She’s stunning to look at.’
‘And there’s far more to her than meets the eye. I think my piece will make compelling reading. I’m certain of it.’
Claire came back in. Charlotte switched off the television. They both looked at the image on the computer screen. It reached from just below the clavicle to the thick head of hair he wore lightly oiled and combed straight back.
Claire said, ‘We should put him in something, a crew-neck sweater or maybe a polo shirt, just the suggestion of clothing. What do you say?’
‘Neither of those,’ Charlotte said. ‘Suit lapels, narrow, something with a lustre like tonic or sharkskin.’
‘Open collared-shirt?’
‘No, a tie with a Windsor knot and a tie pin too. Make the tie purple. Top the pin with mother of pearl.’
Claire looked at her. She was biting her lip. She looked away and then back again.
‘What?’
‘You’re the real deal, aren’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve worked with psychics before. I’ve always thought it a waste of my time. But you’re the genuine article.’
‘Creepy, isn’t it?’
‘It’s actually quite scary.’
‘It’s scarier for me, Claire.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘You can’t tell anyone.’
‘I know that. I’d lose my job. DCI Sullivan warned me personally before I came here. Anyway, who would believe me?’
