The Lazarus Prophecy

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘Nobody,’ Charlotte said, looking at the computer likeness, at the slight smile playing on Edmund Caul’s lips without ever reaching his dark and unreadable eyes.

  ‘Take care, on your way back, in this weather on that motorbike.’

  ‘Outside just now, I thought it was clearing slightly,’ Claire said.

  She hadn’t always been Joan Fairchild. She’d been born Jana Adamcewski and originally came from Poznan. She was also older than she looked. She was 40, a decade more mature than the age she claimed but thanks to her genes she didn’t look anywhere near it. And she was of the belief that if you were going to invent yourself you should give that invention every possible asset available. Youth counted highly among those.

  Leaving Jana Adamcewski behind had been a necessity as much as it had been a choice. She had been involved with Neo-Nazi and far right groups since her days as an undergraduate in Gdansk. As Jana she’d had links with groups in Russia and eastern Germany and America and had spent a year among the white supremacists in Texas learning how they funded their activities through organized crime.

  She’d had a romance with a Chapter Head in Houston she’d enjoyed. He was a paroled lifer and their romance flourished until he was killed in a shoot-out following a bank robbery in Austin. The bank robbery had not been about personal gain. Politics was expensive when it wasn’t just hostile competition from the black and Hispanic gangs but the Federal Government opposed to your principles and practices. Growth was a function without which no organization survived. Her Texan had been the victim not of greed or even dishonesty but of ambition.

  His death had not been in vain. He’d taken down two federal marshals in the firefight and martyrdom was useful to the cause. The only thing Jana really regretted about her American experience was the tattoos she had been inked with there. They had been marks of identification she began to think might compromise her future even before her skin had properly healed. She’d had them lasered off a decade ago and habitually wore long sleeves to hide the tell-tale scarring.

  As Jana, she’d managed to accrue a number of criminal convictions. Most were for petty acts of violence at demonstrations. The most serious was for spreading rumours eight years earlier in Germany that a prominent Social Democrat was also an active and prolific paedophile.

  Naivety had been her undoing. She was much cleverer now at establishing proxy addresses and identities on computers than she’d been at the time. She’d been fined 5,000 marks and given a prison sentence suspended for two years. But that conviction had effectively been Jana’s death sentence. Two weeks later, in the English town of Manchester, Joan was consequently born.

  The Joan Fairchild whose identity she’d stolen had died at the age of five from meningitis. She’d been an orphan, so the chance of relatives suddenly appearing and seeking a tearful reconciliation was remote. A talent for mimicry had enabled Jana to start to speak English with Joan’s flat vowels without difficulty. In the years since, she’d allowed the accent to fade. Sometimes they did when you relocated and she’d lived in West London for five years and the heartland of the Knights was the South-East of England.

  That was one of the many things Joan was working to change. They’d established cells in Bradford and Leeds, where over the past 24 hours three mosques had been firebombed and two of those successfully razed to the ground. They were gaining a following in the old Lancashire market town of Preston. They had control of Wigan’s streets after dark and were influential in Manchester’s Moss Side.

  Birmingham was as ripe for recruitment in the West Midlands as Wolverhampton and West Bromwich were. And in the East Midlands they would soon have a stranglehold on most of Nottingham’s white and disenfranchised council estates.

  In London they held peaceful meetings hosted in incendiary locations like Hackney and Shepherd’s Bush. They kept the rhetoric calm and deliberate. There was no aggressiveness or triumphalism. They let circumstances do the rest.

  They had learned shrewd lessons about the spontaneity and volatility of the mob from the London Riots of three years earlier. They had learned, ironically, the lessons of the Arab Spring. Social network sites and smartphones had changed populist protest in a fundamental way and the party politicians with their reliance on parliamentary tradition and established voting patterns were being left adrift behind the pace of events.

  The Scholar was heaven sent. Joan had no real curiosity about the killer or his motivation and thought that by the time the police caught him, if they ever did, he would no longer be relevant because matters would have escalated so far by then. Next would be the inevitable wave of home-grown Islamic retaliation. Then there would be the radical reinforcements from the Middle East and Pakistan.

  England’s white, working-class would respond in fury and in numbers in every city and town and in the Knights of Excalibur they would have not just a voice and a cultural touchstone but leadership in the fight until they claimed victory. And that victory would be crushing and total because the numbers were overwhelmingly on their side.

  In the meeting prior to the rally in the smog, she had suggested giving the Scholar some help. They knew his methodology. Everyone did from the newspaper stories and the police press conferences. And what wasn’t in the public domain was known to Joan from her own police source.

  She had compiled a list of names of potential victims whose deaths would stoke up the shock and outrage. She thought that leaving a specifically Koranic tract at the scenes would provide emphatic evidence of the killer’s nature and creed.

  It was the sort of thing Hitler or Stalin would have done in manipulating existing circumstances to benefit the cause. But their esteemed leader had baulked at the idea when he’d read the list of names Joan had written down. He had actually turned pale and his mouth had puckered with disgust and the page she’d torn from her notebook had trembled slightly in his hand.

  ‘We have people prepared to do this?’

  ‘We have people who’d be flattered to be asked.’

  ‘It’s a step too far, Joan. It’s too dark for me, for any of us.’

  Their leader was esteemed for the present. He was their acceptable public face and he had done well in his televised verbal duels on Newsnight and Question Time. His bucolic tributes to Morris Men and country pubs and evensong played well. But events would soon overtake him and Joan had leadership plans of her own for when that moment inevitably came.

  She was at home, pleased with the way her interview with the fat journalist had gone, preparing for her early evening chat in the park with her source from the scholar investigation.

  She changed from the demure outfit she’d worn for the interview into leather jeans and a denim jacket. She shaped a generous mouth with crimson lipstick. She outlined her eyes in mascara. She pinned up her hair and pulled on a black bobbed wig. Lastly, because the smog had lifted and the sun had lately appeared in a clearing sky, she put on her sunglasses.

  Her Scholar contact was a dwarfish man with a russet beard and a fondness for playing the part of an Imperial Knight in a long-winded computer game. They had told him they would make a real knight of him when their revolution was achieved. It was difficult to imagine a less likely candidate for a warhorse and a broadsword. But it was Joan Fairchild’s abiding belief that people believed what they wanted to.

  Chapter Ten

  Jacob played tennis with Kath Cooper that evening. She called at four o’clock when the smog was clearing and said she thought the weird weather earlier in the day would have put people off booking and that they should take a chance.

  ‘I’ll see you there at seven. If we can’t get a court, we’ll go and have a drink. We can’t lose, either way.’

  ‘You lost the last time we played.’

  ‘Just how anally retentive are you?’

  ‘Quite, I suppose. But I’d never beaten you before.’

  ‘That was a rhetorical question, Jacob.’

  ‘I’ll see you at seven.’

  She
played poorly again. Ordinarily she hit a really solid ball, but not tonight. He thought her footwork was the problem which was only a problem because she wasn’t concentrating properly on the game. He thought the tennis a pretext, the preamble to something more significant and serious. When she’d taken her racket and balls out of the basket on the front of her bike, he’d noticed the rubberized cover of an expensive looking little laptop.

  He beat her again. There was no satisfaction in the victory. By the second game of the second set she was doing no more than going through the motions. The sun was shining in the western sky but there was still something pallid and sickly about the early evening in the aftermath of all that sooty gloom. It was as though the smog’s residue had soiled the heavens permanently. It was just an impression, but thinking it left the skin feeling sticky and unclean.

  Even for a Monday evening, the pub was quiet. They had no trouble finding an interior table away from the eyes and ears of anyone else. At shortly after eight o’clock on a June night as warm as this one was, they would ordinarily have sat outside. But Jacob couldn’t shake the feeling of contamination the day wore in the open air. He thought it would take the empty chill of the night and the following cleansing dawn to dispel it completely.

  ‘Cheers,’ Kath said. She raised her pint to her lips and gulped lager and lime. She was an attractive woman, tall and good looking, but she had this hail-fellow-well-met tomboy thing going on that made her seem less alluring in that way than she should have been. And then there were the terrible puns. Jacob wondered once again whether she had a boyfriend, or for that matter a girlfriend. She’d never alluded to either if she did. She was a spook, of course, and they were good at secrecy.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  ‘Neither,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were wondering whether I’m currently being fucked and you were speculating on their gender. The fact is I’m not. And I’m straight, by the way. And I’ve rather been carrying a torch for you since we worked together, but that wouldn’t have occurred to you. That’s one of the things I find attractive about you, by the way. You’ve really no idea about yourself.’

  Jacob couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He stared at the froth on the top of his pint. It was dispersing, gently.

  ‘I’m upset, Jacob. Not about you, about this case you’re working on. You’re still working on it?’

  ‘According to yesterday’s paper I am.’

  ‘When I’m upset my mouth can take a confrontational turn. It’s not you. It’s not about you. It’s the Scholar.’

  ‘Did you know Alice Cranfield?’

  ‘Only by reputation.’

  ‘You seem to be taking it personally.’

  ‘I’m taking it professionally. Did you hear about this morning’s rally in Trafalgar Square?’

  ‘I was there.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me that.’

  ‘I went out of curiosity.’

  ‘A shame the same can’t be said about the 20,000 people who joined you there.’

  ‘Joan Fairchild’s quite a sight.’

  ‘There’s more to Ms. Fairchild than meets the eye.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning that tomorrow’s Sandra Matlock piece on her should really be listed under fiction. There’s nothing we can substantiate yet; she’s covered her tracks very adeptly, but we’re working on it.’

  ‘So she’s less the lady in the lake than a woman with a past.’

  Kath winced and picked up her glass from the table between them and drank beer.

  ‘When you’re in this mood, you don’t bother with the puns.’

  ‘You don’t realize the seriousness of the situation, Jacob. The way in which the Scholar’s crimes are being manipulated and exploited is creating enormous tension. Islamic communities innocent of any crime are feeling under siege. Retaliation for mosque burning and the assault of Imams is inevitable. And it won’t come from the moderates. It will be the work of extremists.’

  ‘You’re not worried about communities becoming radicalized?’

  ‘We’re worried about the immediate security threat. And I don’t mean a suicide vest at Henley Regatta. I’m talking about a nuclear device in a suitcase.’

  ‘One of those would never get through.’

  ‘One might, if you had the means to bring 30 or 50 or 100 in.’

  For the second time since they’d sat down, Jacob could think of nothing to say in response.

  ‘A holy war is coming, which will actually be an unholy war and has the potential to escalate globally.’

  ‘You genuinely believe that could happen?’

  ‘It’s why I don’t mind telling you I’m not being fucked, Jacob. It’s why I don’t mind sharing the feeling that I’d rather like to fuck you. I don’t think it matters much anymore. Basically, I think we’re all fucked.’

  He wanted to change the subject. It wasn’t that he disbelieved her. It was that she was becoming more upset the more she speculated on the escalating crisis unwittingly triggered by the Scholar. He was a victim too of it because if it did come to what Kath was predicting, his crimes would be forgotten. He’d be no more than a footnote in its history. That was if there was anyone left to write a history of the event.

  ‘I don’t think you came here tonight to lose at tennis, Kath. I don’t think you came here to proposition me. And I don’t think you came to prophesize the End of Days.’

  ‘The End of Days?’

  ‘Freudian slip, I meant the end of the world.’

  She frowned. ‘It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? I mean it does if the Antichrist wins, right?’

  ‘It does,’ Jacob said. Cogs were turning in his mind and his stomach felt suddenly empty and sick. He thought that if he reached for his drink his hand would tremble and if he got it to his mouth and sipped he’d retch anything swallowed back up straight away.

  ‘I came to show you this,’ she said, unzipping the case from the little laptop he’d noticed earlier in her bike’s basket. ‘It’s an image the Met Police Commissioner emailed us this afternoon. Apparently DCI Sullivan sourced it in a rather unconventional manner. We tried to get more, but were only told the provenance is complicated. It’s also confidential. Were you any part of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘No.’

  She booted up the little machine, got what she was looking for and turned it around for Jacob to see.

  ‘Jane Sullivan thinks this is an accurate likeness.’

  Jacob looked at the face staring back at him from the screen.

  ‘You okay, Jacob? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I saw him, today, at the rally in the square, Kath. He called me chum. He spoke to me.’

  Peter Chadwick stood to greet him. He said, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ He held out his hand for Jacob to shake. He looked friendly and nervous at the same time. In the interview room where Jacob had first observed him, he’d looked smug and slightly contemptuous. In the pub he’d been sarcastic and bordered on hostile. He was very different today. It could have been the presence of the man there with him, who also stood.

  ‘Your eminence,’ Jacob said.

  The cardinal smiled at him. The smile was strained but genuine. He said, ‘I think we should all sit and see if the Dorchester can’t serve us up some coffee. I was scheduled to get in last night but the flight was delayed by the smog. I didn’t arrive until a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘Yesterday’s weather was diabolical,’ Chadwick said.

  ‘You were unlucky, your eminence,’ Jacob said, wondering why the cardinal was there at all. ‘The smog was a one off.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Chadwick said. ‘There’s probably a lot more where that came from.’

  ‘Your friend has the habit of speaking in riddles, your eminence,’ Jacob said. ‘Personally I find it pretty irritating.’

  ‘He isn’t my friend,�
�� the cardinal said. ‘I met Mr. Chadwick for the first time only an hour ago.’

  ‘Why are you here at all?’

  The cardinal exchanged a glance with Chadwick, who raised an eyebrow and shrugged. He said, ‘Several weeks ago I made a mistake. I set a chain of events in motion. My intention was to end practices I believed misguided and possibly even heretical. It was a miscalculation. The murders committed by the killer you call the Scholar are the consequence.’

  ‘This is to do with the Most Holy Brotherhood of the Gospel of St. John, isn’t it? It’s to do with a New York priest called Father James Cantrell, who’s dead. Mostly, though, it’s to do with the Lazarus Prophecy.’

  ‘I told you he was sharp,’ Chadwick said.

  ‘That much I’d already surmised,’ the cardinal said. ‘I doubt the Detective Chief Inspector leading the Scholar investigation suffers fools.’

  Jacob said, ‘What is the Lazarus Prophecy?’

  Chadwick blew out air. ‘Look around you, Pilgrim,’ he said. ‘We’re living it.’

  ‘It’s to do with the End of Days, right?’

  Their coffee arrived. A smartly dressed hotel flunky delivered a tray with a cafetiere and milk and cream and sugar and cups. Jacob thought about the remark Chadwick had just made. In here everything was spotless and sumptuous and well-drilled. The hotel was a bastion of tradition and protocol and a well-heeled sort of refinement. It was what people thought of as civilized.

  Outside, things were changing. There was palpable tension on the streets. The disabling smog of the previous day had lifted, but it could descend again as abruptly and with the same blind density. Diabolical, Chadwick had just called it. Jacob had an uneasy feeling he meant that literally.

  The cardinal had a briefcase at his feet. He leant forward and opened it and pulled from it a padded envelope of the sort used when posting books. He said, ‘I’d like you to read this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the account by a man named Daniel Barry of his experiences in London in 1888. Will you read it?’

  ‘I’d struggle to see the point,’ Jacob said. ‘There’s a theory the Scholar is copying the Whitechapel killer. I know he was believed by the mountain brotherhood to be a man named Edmund Caul. I know a Vatican fixer called Monsignor Dubois became convinced Caul was the Ripper back in the 1930s. I understand the significance of the year, but can honestly think of more productive ways to spend my time than wading through Victorian reminiscences.’