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the faxed transcripts on the desk. His cheeks had coloured. Blushing slightly, he looked even younger. He said, ‘I wouldn’t be tempted, not by any amount of money. I wouldn’t wish to profit from tragedy. Murdered women shouldn’t be a source of personal gain for anyone.’
    Spoken like a priest,
she almost said. But she resisted the joke because it was in poor taste and because she knew he was telling the truth.
    â€˜He won’t, by the way.’
    â€˜He won’t what?’
    â€˜He won’t stop leaving clues.’
    â€˜Why won’t he?’
    â€˜Because he doesn’t think you’ll catch him, because of who he thinks he is.’
    They shook hands and he left after assuring her that his mobile would remain switched on for the duration of his involvement with the case. ‘That’s day and night,’ she said, ‘particularly night.’
    He took the Carter transcripts with him. He wanted to cross-reference some of what they said. There were some minor chronological contradictions.
    â€˜You think he’s got his facts wrong?’
    â€˜Actually I suspect he’s got his facts right in areas where we’ve had them wrong. You were bang on, calling him the Scholar.’
    Jane was happy to let Prior take the material away. They had copies. She thought the more familiar he became with the mind of the man who’d written the messages, the better. She thought he possessed an insight into character that was shrewd and well developed. It was a rare talent most common in people with little or no ego of their own.
    After he had gone she opened up the Whitechapel file again on her desktop. There was no specific reason for doing this. She had an intuition of her own that this information from the past might prove enlightening and even useful to her at some point in the future. She didn’t yet know why or how.
    When she closed the file an hour later, she fetched herself a fresh cup of coffee from the machine on the corridor and then sat back at her desk and opened the case notes on Julie Longmuir.
    The actress had been rehearsing the lead role in Strindberg’s play, Miss Julie. Jane had seen an old BBC dramatization starring someone like Janet Suzman or Glenda Jackson years earlier. She had largely forgotten the plot details. She couldn’t even properly remember who’d played Miss Julie. One or two scenes had stayed with her. There’d been the interminable polishing by a servant of a boot. She remembered about it that it wasn’t exactly light entertainment. Scandinavian drama of the period was decidedly light on laughs.
    What exactly was the period? She looked it up. She saw that Strindberg had written the play in 1888. It was a coincidence, wasn’t it? Except that Jane Sullivan had a detective’s belief in coincidence. She didn’t trust it in the slightest.
    It wasn’t at all what Father James Cantrell expected. His first emotions were a contradictory mingling of relief and indignation. The bleak austerity of the priory so far was a theme he’d expected to see continued beyond the iron door. He’d expected a dungeon, he realized, a stonecell hewn from rock in medieval times for captivity and confinement in dark cold secrecy. He’d expected shackles riven into pitted walls.
    He had been stupid, hadn’t he? If the place had been designed principally as a prison it would be below rather than above that the cells would have been built. That had been the custom then. It was still the custom now. Subterranean spaces were more secure. Where there was no light, hope tended to extinguish itself. It was a custom as true of the Lubyanka Prison run by the KGB as it had been of the Tower of London used by Plantagenet kings.
    The door opened instead onto a large and spacious library. It wasn’t well-lit, but gloom was a relative notion and compared to what he had left behind it seemed both sumptuous and airy. The windows