Free The Lazarus Prophecy by F. G. Cottam Page A

mountain brethren had pleaded with him to read. He didn’t consider it strictly relevant. He wanted to stress the success of the priory negotiation without diminishing his achievement with unnecessary detail or potential ambiguity.
    He planned to mention it, at the appropriate time. When he had read the whole of the journal, he would précis the contents and present His Eminence with them. They would provide a curious footnote only, he was sure.
    Doing so would break the solemn promise made to Brother Philip. But Cantrell was in no doubt as to where his loyalties lay. He knew who it was he served. He was confident about the rights and wrongs of what politicians were apt to call the bigger picture. The truth was sometimes absolute. On this occasion it was contingent. He would break his promise to the mountain brethren with his conscience untroubled about doing so.
    These conclusions were reached at the wheel of the Jeep. They were arrived at in daylight, strapped into a $40,000 vehicle with four wheel drive and SatNav and climate control. They were decided as Nina Simone sang the definitive version of
Feeling Good
on the car’s excellent stereo system and quartz fragments brought a summer sparkle to the smooth surface of the road. He began the Barry journal only late in the evening, in solitary darkness after dinner, in the room of his San Sebastian hotel.
    Perhaps its contents contributed to his death. It might have been that he rode the following morning carelessly preoccupied. He might have been a bit shaken by the implicationsof what he’d read. The only witness to the collision was the driver of the Ferrari that rounded the bend and hit his rear wheel at 90 kilometers an hour, trashing the bike, killing its rider instantly, only slightly denting his own front bumper.
    The bike was a rented Marin, an American cycle built in California and equipped with Shimano components. It had three chain rings and 18 speeds and a frame made from double-butted titanium tubes. It was a high performance machine, sleek and fast, and Father Cantrell might have been tempted to ride it recklessly. The Ferrari driver said not, entirely willing to accept the blame. He was 21 and the son of a casino owner. The car had been a birthday gift four months earlier from his parents.
    The Spanish police attending the accident informed the Cardinal’s secretariat of Father Cantrell’s demise within an hour of the doctor pronouncing him dead at the scene. They were prompted to do so by instructions printed on a laminated card carried in the victim’s wallet. Next of kin were not the priority in the family of the Church.
    They examined and inventoried the contents of his hotel room. They discovered no note. Suicide by car involved head-on collision and this one had clearly been accidental. A court could decide on culpability. That wasn’t their job. They packed the priest’s belongings and ordered a courier to transfer them on to Bayonne as requested as their former owner lay oblivious to events and smashed pretty much beyond recognition under a rubber blanket in a mortuary drawer.
    He’d done a bit of research into Jane Sullivan. His interest wasn’t morbid. He thought she was one of the two or three most attractive women he’d encountered in his adult life and was intrigued on that basis to learn more about her.
    She was way out of his league and not at all the sort of person to mix the professional and the personal, he was sure. Her sole aim was to catch the killer they were calling the Scholar. He’d agreed to help because he’d been approached and believed the killer needed to be caught as a matter of urgency. But he sourced a few preliminary facts about Jane. She wasn’t at all what he’d expected a senior murder squad detective to be like.
    She’d gone into the police service as a graduate recruit straight from university. It was as a student that she’d met the man she married in