by F. G. Cottam
‘He’s the ninth,’ Brother Philip said.
‘I remember you said that outside his cell door at the priory,’ the cardinal said. ‘I didn’t know what you meant by it then and I still don’t.’
‘I think he is the heir,’ Brother Philip said. ‘I think that Satan sent his own spawn to fulfill the prophecy.’
‘Tell us about him, Brother Philip,’ Jacob said. ‘You studied him for years. What’s he like?’
‘He’s as he appears in the Bible. He’s nowhere near so noble a figure as the English Protestant poet John Milton chose to romanticize in Paradise Lost.’
‘You can do better than that,’ the cardinal said.
‘He’s vain and proud, as you have just said, your eminence, and as Daniel Barry was able to exploit. He’s endlessly boastful. He likes music. Puerile humour delights him. Every joke must have its victim. He cannot resist a wager or the last word. He’s clever. He’s not without the ability to judge character. He is the master of every language ever spoken. He delights in nothing more than dispatching a good soul to hell. He’ll want to do that with you, Jacob.’
‘My soul isn’t particularly good.’
‘You love God.’
‘I think God sometimes cruel and capricious.’
Brother Philip frowned. ‘I thought you were doing this for love.’
‘There’s more than one sort of love,’ Chadwick said. ‘Please continue, Uncle.’
‘He is in most respects exactly like a man. It is vital that people generally think his mischief human, so he has most of the human frailties. He eats and sleeps and breathes. But he is unnaturally physically strong and of course he doesn’t age as we do. And now that there is a likeness of him circulating generally, he will have changed his appearance. The change will be quite subtle, but some of his distinguishing features will have altered.
‘He has no fingerprints because he doesn’t secrete. It’s a mystery to me how the police here managed to get a likeness. He absorbs rather than reflects light, so he has no mirror image and cannot be photographed.’
‘They used a psychic,’ Jacob said. ‘She’s someone with a genuine gift. She saw him as he was when he was the Whitechapel Killer, which caused a bit of confusion. But it was him she saw. Two police officers recognized him last night. They attempted to subdue and arrest him, strapping lads the pair of them apparently, both now in hospital.’
‘They’re extremely lucky to be alive,’ Brother Philip said. ‘He is by definition merciless.’
‘Barry subdued him with opium. What if they’d successfully Tasered him and got him into a cell?’
‘The cell hasn’t been built that can hold him,’ Brother Philip said. ‘Not without performing and sustaining the necessary rituals.’ He glanced at the cardinal, who stared intently at the plush shag-pile carpeting his suite.
Jacob said, ‘He can pick locks?’
Chadwick said, ‘There were those who thought Houdini’s escapades the work of the devil. A priest once accused him of Satanism during a performance. Demons aren’t traditionally discouraged by locks. A theologian should know that.’
‘I’ve never been strong on demonology.’
‘Welcome to the crash course,’ Chadwick said.
‘His eminence called it telekinesis,’ Brother Philip said.
‘I was more naïve a man when I said that. Events have humbled me. It was a necessary lesson and I pray not the last I’m given the opportunity to learn.’
Spoken like a politician, Jacob thought.
Brother Philip said, ‘He mentioned this psychic in the final boast scrawled on the wall of his cell. It was cryptically put, but he said he wouldn’t know her until he found her. “I will save her to the end which will be the end only of the beginning.”’
Jacob knew, hearing these words, that his gloomy intuition about Charlotte Reynard had been correct. The Scholar was coming back for her. He took no pleasure whatsoever in this vindication. Susan Lassiter was difficult to get to. It meant to his mind that Jane Sullivan was probably next. He said, ‘So what do we have to do?’
The cardinal said, ‘We have to first find him. We have to challenge him to a bet that he cannot walk away from. He’s a skilled gambler and if he possibly can he will cheat. We have to be vigilant to that and to negate the consequences if it happens. Then, brothers, we need to win the bet.’
‘Daniel Barry risked damnation,’ Jacob said.
Nobody replied to that. No one needed to.
Jacob had gone home and changed into a suit for the meeting. Now he was glad he had because he would get served without trouble or disdain in the Dorchester bar. It was only just after 5 o’clock so more afternoon in summer than evening because it wouldn’t get dark until almost ten. In the persistent false twilight of the smog, however, that was immaterial. And regardless of what time it was, bars were places a person could think.
He called Jane. He said, ‘I think you should ask Charlotte Reynard to visit the apartment Dan Luce lived in when he dated Julie Longmuir.’
‘I already have.’
‘Is anyone living there now?’
‘No, it’s still vacant. I’ve had a forensics team go over it but the only traces they found belonged to contract cleaners. We’re planning to visit there early this evening. It was going to be this afternoon but I’ve been slowed up by the weather. She finds this sort of thing a really brutal ordeal, but she’s brave and quite selfless.’
‘Shame Saint Charlotte doesn’t have the ring about it of Saint Joan.’
‘Joan was no saint.’
‘I knew that.’
‘Yes, I forgot. You’ve got some secret friends who keep you in the know.’
You’ve got no idea, he thought, thinking of the secret friends he’d just left.
‘You haven’t briefed me on the contents of that document Peter Chadwick gave you yesterday.’
‘Are you still having Chadwick watched?’
‘No. The team’s had to be deployed elsewhere. We’re really stretched. I called the surveillance off last night.’
‘Would you have time for a drink, later?’
‘Depends how it pans out with Charlotte. I don’t really fancy sitting in Cleaver Square in this filthy air. On the other hand, I might be in need of one.’
‘See how it goes,’ he said. ‘I’m available at short notice.’
‘That’s just another way of saying you’re desperate, Jake.’
‘Also,’ he said, ‘I’m desperate.’
He didn’t like deceiving Jane. He thought it could be catastrophic because she was very sharp and if she suspected the deception that would signal the end of everything between them. But he needed to locate Edmund Caul and couldn’t tell her the reason for wanting to find him. She would think him mad if he did.
‘Any revelations, in the thing Chadwick gave you to read?’
‘Yes, but only if you’re interested in learning the identity of Jack the Ripper.’
‘I believe he was a character named Caul.’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said.
They’d given him a bag of trinkets to wear for the gambling encounter. The cardinal had given him a Rolex watch on a solid gold bracelet and a hallmarked cigarette case with a Dunhill logo. He had a wallet fashioned from alligator skin. The wallet was crammed with 50 pound notes. There was a tie-pin set with diamonds and a pair of platinum cuff-links embellished with fat and bloodshot rubies. There was a 24 carat signet ring that felt bulbous on the little finger of his right hand when tried it for size.
‘He’s greedy,’ his eminence said. ‘He’ll want to strip you of everything valuable and the more he can see riding on the wager, the greater the temptation for him.’
‘The devil likes bling,’ Jacob said. He thought the line quite a good one but delivered it dry-mouthed with fear at the prospect facing him.
The cardinal reached across and gave his shoulder a consolatory squeeze.
‘Also, he needs a new watch,’ Brother
Philip said, his tone mordant and his smile comfortless. ‘At least, he does until we re-unite him in his guest quarters with the one he left behind.’
Charlotte thought going back to the apartment building where Julie Longmuir had been killed unavoidable. They had come encouragingly close to catching the Scholar the previous evening. Had the two officers at the scene managed to get a Taser onto him he’d presently be in police custody. He’d been too quick and powerful but they had an accurate description and it was surely only a matter of time. Either he started to do things differently or they’d get him and the man she’d seen in Lambeth High Street was too arrogant for compromise.
Her worry was that they wouldn’t get him before he got her. She no longer believed her own reprieve to be anything but temporary. In his mind he’d only deferred her fate. He hadn’t changed it. She was convinced that she was on his list and every killing brought her closer to the top of it.
She’d grieved and was still grieving for Alice Cranfield. She’d shed no tears over Joan Fairchild as the white, working-class masses seemed currently to be doing. She didn’t share their lachrymose anguish. She considered herself working-class. Her father had been a tool fitter before his retirement and her mother had done the service washes in a launderette. Her background had probably given her the drive she had, but it hadn’t endeared her to Fairchild, with her absurd costumes and calculated rhetoric.
Her death had certainly, though, had a dramatic effect. It was as though the first killings had been for recreation and then Edmund Caul had discovered his purpose or remembered who he was and why he was there. After that he’d started to kill in a way that triggered dismay and uncertainty and hatred. He’d tapped a seething reservoir of resentment. They were becoming engulfed by the resulting flood.
She was on his list. She thought that Jane Sullivan was probably on it too. She felt stronger for the episode in the pub in Lambeth of the previous Saturday. Hers was a more resilient gift than she’d realized. It was also stronger. She wouldn’t black out, as she had in the Longmuir apartment on that first occasion. She’d learn some significant clue about the man they were hunting. She’d help nail him. She was determined to do that while there was still breath left in her body.
She walked along Kennington Road, her ankle already strengthening as the damaged ligaments healed themselves. She was fit and healthy and a quick healer and though she was still using the cane, she was able to put her full weight on that leg without the wincing agony of even a few days earlier. She felt confident of her prognosis. She was actually eager now to dance again. Fonteyn had enjoyed her finest stage years in her early forties. Charlotte was only just 32. The comeback would be successful. She’d make it happen.
She was at the Imperial War Museum, just a block away from Jane’s address, when she had to stop for a short rest. The ornamental railings of the museum ghosted black and spindly out of the dirty air. The museum itself was reduced to remote yellow pinpricks of light through its windows from its interior. A tall man in a raincoat and a fedora materialized in front of her and touched the brim of his hat between finger and thumb in an old-fashioned gesture of courtesy.
She thought for a moment that she recognized him. He was very handsome in a brooding, broken-nosed sort of way and there was a bit of devil in the smile to which he treated her. She half turned in his wake but he had an athletic stride and by then the gloom had swallowed him.
Dan Luce, who was the Scholar, who was Edmund Caul, had rented on the top floor. To Jane the empty apartment, devoid of furniture or even blinds, looked entirely featureless. Smog pressed in a dark grey smear against windows it had streaked and spangled with soot.
‘I’m really glad we don’t live in the era of pea-soupers,’ she said to Charlotte. ‘They must have been quite depressing.’
‘We’ll never know,’ Charlotte said. ‘They’re like the Crusades and Saint Joan and Jack the Ripper. They belong to the past.’
‘I dislike anachronisms. I particularly dislike them when they keep coming back and hitting you in the face.’
‘I totally agree.’
‘Are you getting anything?’
She shuddered. She said, ‘He slept in here. It was in here he dreamed. I can’t venture into the dreams. If I try to explore them, I‘ll never get out again.’
‘I need a location, Charlotte, somewhere he goes. I get the feeling he’s a creature of habit. That’s why he came back to Lambeth.’
‘If you believe that, you believe he’s Edmund Caul. Wouldn’t that be reincarnation, Jane? You’ve already told me you don’t believe in reincarnation.’
‘He’s Edmund Caul,’ Jane said. ‘He can’t be photographed. He doesn’t secrete. He’s inhumanly strong and I’m coming to the conclusion that no other explanation for him is really plausible. I don’t like it. It isn’t convenient. But the Scholar and the Whitechapel Killer are one and the same. I don’t pretend to understand it but can blind myself no longer to the evidence. And I owe you an apology.’
‘You won’t say this publically?’
‘I’ve got until Friday to catch him. After that it won’t matter what I say publically. Not even Sandra Matlock would print it.’
Charlotte closed her eyes. She grazed a searching hand along the bland plaster of the wall. She said, ‘He spent a lot of time in the bathroom. He liked to preen himself before going out. It’s a source of great frustration to him that he can’t see his reflection. His appearance is important to him. He’s vain, enormously pleased with himself.’
She opened her eyes. She walked to Caul’s bathroom and Jane followed her. She looked in the mirror for a long moment. Her pupils were tiny, like those of someone drugged, Jane thought, or in shock. She walked across to the lavatory and stooped and lifted its lid. Careful of her ankle, she knelt before it and scooped water from the bowl, drinking it from her cupped hand. She heaved on swallowing, but didn’t gag.
‘You won’t find the trophies he took. He ate them. He thinks of them as sweetmeats.’
‘I don’t know how you can do this.’
‘And I don’t think I really have a choice.’
‘What do you have for me?’
Charlotte stood. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She said, ‘There’s a boat moored at Chelsea Reach. She’s a sort of themed extravagance, like one of those Mississippi riverboats from the time of Mark Twain.’
‘You mean a paddle steamer?’
‘She’s a gaudy gin palace of a place. There’s music played by a house band. People go there to gamble. There’s a casino that occupies an entire deck. There are card schools, blackjack tables, high stakes fruit machines. He goes there. She’s called Allegra.’
Jacob had changed out of his suit for the drink he had that evening with Jane in Cleaver Square. They sat inside the pub to escape the contaminated air drifting across its gravel and through its perimeter of stately summer trees. Then he walked her dutifully home. He didn’t attempt to kiss her. And then he went back to his flat and putting on a fresh shirt changed back into his suit, bound for the boat at Chelsea Reach she had told him about, careful to adorn himself before he did so with the trinkets provided him by the cardinal.
By the time of his preparation, Jane had already had a plainclothes squad of armed police officers stake out Allegra and the area around where she was berthed. It would do no good, Jacob didn’t think. He believed Brother Philip’s claim that Edmund Caul could and would have altered his appearance. Brother Philip was something of an authority on Caul. Not telling Jane this felt like a deception, but a small one in the scheme of things and he didn’t think she’d have believed him anyway.
He walked to Chelsea Reach. It was quite a distance and felt even further in the blanketed streets and then along the river. He was in no particular hurry, though, to get to his destination. It was almost midnight, but gamblers didn’t give much thought to beauty sleep. They were nocturnal by nature. They did not clock-watch or ever go eager to the cosy refuge of their beds.
There was no such thing to them as late. Caul might be there and he might not be. Jacob had the sobering conviction that he would.
The water lapped discreetly to his left. Elsewhere the night was littered with random sound. A car engine shuddered. A door slammed. He heard a peal of female laughter through an open window and a whoosh of air brakes and a cat screech of feline terror that seemed to have carried for miles. He heard the fog horns too of blinded, cautious boats.
He heard Allegra before he properly saw her. He heard her band of trumpets and trombones and clarinets. They played in the trad-jazz style of garish stripes and straw boaters and the tune they were performing was ‘The Lambeth Walk’.
She was lit by rows of bulbs. They picked out the shape of her hull and paddles and high twin-funnels but they didn’t burn brightly, diminished by the night miasma of floating soot, and to Jacob she looked spectral, like a ghost ship that had drifted in aimlessly, lost on a voyage from another time.
The band played at a hectic tempo. They riffed and improvised and soloed by brassy turn. There was something hysterical about the music, something insistently shrill and almost nightmarish. But then Jacob thought that was probably just his mood and the dread clutching at him, making him feel cold and fraying his senses at the same moment. He shot his cuffs, feeling their plump rubies between finger and thumb, and ascended the gangplank, going aboard.
He entered a large cabin lit, in a way he thought contrived to look authentic, by wall-mounted lamps. They were sparsely positioned and the illumination they provided was feeble. They made a bright draw of the gurgling machines blinking in the corners. He went to one of these and began to play, without thought or strategy. He had not looked at any of the people in the room. If he was there, Caul would find him.
He’d risked about 30 pounds without return when he heard a voice behind him he remembered say, ‘Not terribly good at this, are you, chum?’
He turned. The appearance was different but the attitude was unchanged. His hair was still extravagant, auburn now with a distinctive widow’s peak. The cheekbones were slightly more pronounced and the eyes blue and very pale, like ice sometimes is seen through the shimmer of gin. When he smiled the teeth were bigger and subtly uneven, the canines sharply pronounced.
