Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  She stepped through, let the door thud closed behind her. As good a way as any of announcing her presence. The priest looked round at her, startled.

  He said something in a foreign language, and then, in heavily accented English, ‘This is not a public place – you cannot be here.’

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Lauren Rose.’ Flashed her badge. The priest winced – she made a mental note of that. ‘Father Florian? I was hoping I could speak to you in private.’

  The priest made an impatient gesture, pointed to a door off the corridor.

  ‘My study,’ he said, not looking at Rose. ‘Wait.’

  She kept a hold on her irritation. Nodded coldly, brushed past the priest and the boy. A plate on the door read PRIVATE. She slipped inside, clicked the door closed, leaned on it. Let out a long breath through her nose. Bloody hell. Was this how the priest always greeted visitors to his church? Was it because she was English? Because she was a woman? Because she was a copper? All three?

  It was a small office, or study, or vestry, or whatever it was called. Shelves on three walls. Books in several languages: some old, with broken spines, faded titles; others newer. A desk covered with unruly papers. A crucifix nailed to the wall. A page of scripture in a black frame.

  On one of the shelves a space had been cleared for a row of narrow glass bottles. They looked like a set of cooking oils – she’d something similar in her kitchen cupboard – only older, darker. The stoppers were crusted.

  Rose took down the nearest. Loosened the stopper, sniffed quickly at the contents.

  She nearly dropped the bottle. The field. The grass. The cartwheel. The body. Katerina. The smell – woody, delicate, complex. Katerina’s body had had the same smell.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The bearded priest had entered without her hearing. She replaced the stopper, set the bottle back on the shelf.

  ‘You have some … interesting things in here, Father Florian.’

  ‘You should not have touched that.’ The scowling priest’s thick eyebrows met in the middle above a narrow, pointed nose. He showed tea-brown lower teeth when he spoke. ‘That is a sacred oil. You must not touch.’

  Rose inclined her head slightly: ‘understood’, not ‘sorry’. She was damned if she was going to apologize.

  ‘What’s this one?’ She pointed to the bottle she had taken down – the oil with the smell of Katerina.

  ‘Chrism.’ The priest moved to his chair, shoved a pile of papers to one side, sat down heavily. ‘An oil of balsam, most holy, most sacred. Used in certain ritual.’ He paused. ‘You would not understand.’

  He fixed her with a challenging gaze. His black eyes were pink-rimmed and watery.

  He stared at her, until the quiet of the room was pierced by soft footsteps. The boy the priest had been scolding skulked past them in the hall. When the lad saw Rose notice him through the open doorway his eyes widened and he took off like a shot. Looked half terrified, the poor little bugger.

  ‘The boy out there.’ She cocked her head towards the door. ‘What did he do?’

  The priest glared. ‘He had misbehaved, of course.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He was seen daydreaming during Mass. While the faithful were saying the Jesus Prayer the little dolt was gawping out of the window with his mouth hanging open like a fool.’

  Rose laughed.

  ‘That doesn’t sound that bad.’

  Father Florian lifted his brows scornfully.

  ‘Not to you, perhaps. But for us, yes, it is bad. God asks so little of us. To disobey him in even the smallest thing – what an insult!’ The priest sucked at his teeth. ‘That little wretch.’

  ‘Will he get into trouble at home?’

  ‘His parents are true Christians. So I trust that he will.’ He shook his head impatiently. ‘Can I ask what is the meaning of this? You have something to ask me, apart from about a bottle of oil, a child’s sins?’

  Rose nodded, shifted gear. What’d happened to Katerina was hard news to hear, heart-breaking news. Even for this arsehole of a priest, maybe – if he had a heart.

  As she opened her mouth to speak, Father Florian said: ‘Katerina. I know.’

  She looked at him. For the first time there was feeling in his upturned face.

  ‘In our community word travels fast,’ he said, ‘and we do not keep secrets from one another.’

  No. Only from us.

  ‘I know she meant a lot to the community.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Very much.’ Father Florian nodded sombrely, spread his hands. ‘But after all, we belong to Jesus Christ. He does with us what He will.’

  I’m sure that’s a great bloody comfort for her sisters, Rose thought with a sharp surge of contempt. It was the kind of crap she’d heard vicars say at funerals.

  Back to business, then.

  ‘From what we know of Katerina’s last movements,’ she said, pulling out notebook and pencil, ‘she left her home in the Leys area to go to confession. That was on the second of October, around nine-thirty, ten a.m. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. She came for confession that day.’

  ‘Who took her confession?’

  ‘I did. Who else?’

  She made a note calmly enough, nodded calmly enough, but something had connected in Rose’s brain. Something automatic. On a murder investigation, when you found yourself face to face with the last person to see the victim alive –

  Okay, they might not have had anything to do with it. That didn’t matter. Something clicked, like a notch on a ratchet.

  She knew to go steady.

  ‘Tell me about Katerina,’ she said. Give ’em enough rope, that was the idea. ‘What was her involvement in the church?’

  Father Florian, to her surprise, smiled.

  ‘She was – wonderful. A true child of Christ.’

  ‘Was she very devout?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Yes, very devout, very observant. But that was not all. Many will say the holy words and read the holy book and no more. And that is no sin! But Katerina – she did not only want to help herself. You understand? The soup kitchen, with the homeless ones. Missions, to London, Bristol, here, there. Wherever there were people who needed help – there was Katerina.’

  He turned abruptly in his chair, fumbled in a drawer of his desk. Rose glanced over his shoulder. A dusty jumble of papers, odds and ends, scribbled notes. He took out a picture in a cheap plastic frame, handed it to Rose.

  ‘You see. A special person.’

  It was Katerina, in a group picture with a bunch of other young people. Arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning in the sunshine somewhere. Nice.

  But Rose saw more than just the photo. It was in a frame – so it had been on display, once, instead of crammed in a drawer. There were no other photographs in Father Florian’s office, no personal souvenirs or tokens of any kind. So Katerina’s picture had been the only one he wanted to see?

  And he’d taken it down. Recently, too – it wasn’t dusty. Why?

  Because he couldn’t bear the sight of it?

  ‘You took this picture?’

  ‘It was a gift, from Katerina. It is our church group. Volunteers.’

  ‘It’s a lovely shot.’ She looked more closely at the grinning faces. Katerina stood out – for her beauty, yes, but also for her vibrancy, for the life that showed in her face. They all looked like good kids, Rose thought. A girl in a headscarf had her arm slung round the neck of a tall young man with an angular face; beside him, Katerina; beside Katerina, a tanned, dark-haired guy, fine-rimmed glasses and good teeth; beside him, a flat-featured blonde girl with cropped hair and a nose-stud –

  Rose’s fingers tightened on the frame. She knew Father Florian was watching her, she knew she hadn’t moved a muscle in her face. But her heart was racing.

  That dark-haired man beside Katerina.

  ‘Who’s this?’ she asked, casually, tapping the Perspex with a fingertip. Florian craned hi
s neck to see.

  ‘You don’t know?’ He smiled thinly. ‘I thought everyone knew Professor Brask. A most famous man, very learned. A member of our church,’ the priest added proudly.

  Brask. Did she know the name?

  In the picture he was standing beside Katerina, on her left. They weren’t standing particularly close, but it looked like he had his hand on the small of her back.

  More importantly, while everyone else was beaming at the camera, Brask was looking only at Katerina. And his smile was the widest of all.

  ‘Is he Croatian?’

  ‘No,’ the priest scoffed. ‘No, Professor Brask is an American. A visiting professor, they call it, at the university. I thought everyone knew this.’

  American. Katerina had spoken on the phone in English, Sofia had said – to a man.

  Rose handed the picture back to Father Florian and thanked him politely for his time. He grunted a grudging goodbye, waved a hand dismissively. She wasn’t sorry to leave him to his old books and his bottles of magic oil.

  She was out of the church grounds and pulling out on to the main road when it hit her. Brask. She had heard it before. Dmitry Rakić, in the meadow, as he was walking away.

  He’d said that name, said Brask – just before he’d promised to kill the murdering bastard.

  Little Mouse woke and found that he couldn’t move. His arms, legs – he couldn’t move! Had he died in the night? He struggled and heard the dull clink of chains at his ankles and wrists. The chill of metal bit into his skin.

  He was naked. Where were his clothes? Goosebumps prickled his skin.

  ‘Father?’

  The priest loomed from the shadows. Only his mouth and chin could be seen beneath the pointed hood he wore. Instead of his usual black garb he wore the ash-grey sackcloth of the penitent. He approached Little Mouse’s cot.

  It was only the priest, Little Mouse knew. His – his father. And yet he could not keep from trembling.

  Moving slowly, with care, as in a ritual, the priest unstoppered a vial of oil and poured a quantity into his cupped palm. Little Mouse gagged at its pungent scent.

  The priest murmured verses in Latin. Little Mouse did not know what they meant. The priest went on murmuring as he smeared the oil on Little Mouse’s body: his bare chest, his cuffed wrists, his forehead. He felt the oil trickle into his hair.

  He could not suppress a frightened sob.

  ‘Father!’

  The hooded priest set the vial of oil aside. Went silently from the room. Little Mouse lay without moving, barely breathing. Waiting.

  When he returned, the priest held a struggling chicken by its throat and feet. To Little Mouse, the room seemed distorted by the bird’s noise, ugliness and fear.

  He knew what happened to animals that were brought into this room.

  But it was not the scalpel. Instead the priest produced from within his robe a broad-bladed knife, a ceremonial knife, its handle carved and set with gold.

  A short flurry, a noise like tearing fabric, followed by the familiar iron stink of blood. Little Mouse heard it spatter on the floor, felt its warmth spill across his legs.

  He closed his eyes as the priest crouched over his cot and half expected to feel the blade of the knife against his own flesh.

  A scraping sound. He opened his eyes. The priest was kneeling by his cot. He was moving the blade of the gory knife against the pitted concrete floor while he murmured in Latin. The priest was writing something, Little Mouse thought.

  Writing something in blood.

  Chapter Six

  Hume wasn’t buying it.

  ‘Come on, Rose. Everything we have points to Rakić. The two of them were in a relationship of some sort. We know what that means in a case like this. He’s running drugs on her fucking doorstep. She finds out, makes trouble, Rakić has her killed – and makes an example of her. End of.’

  End of. Hume knew better than that. Nothing in policing was ever end of.

  ‘It doesn’t add up, guv. There’s more to this, a lot more.’

  ‘There might well be, but that doesn’t alter the bottom line. Rakić. This starts and ends with Rakić. You saw how he was yesterday. Off his head.’

  It was mid-morning at the nick but she already had a dull headache and eyelids like sandpaper. She yawned, rubbed her face.

  Phillips, sitting with his feet up on his desk, put in: ‘I reckon Lauren would rather go and sip a cappuccino with this Oxford don than do some real police work out at the Leys.’

  Mike Angler, elbow-deep in Phillips’s paperwork at an adjoining desk, sniggered obligingly.

  Rose sighed. Wished she’d never bloody mentioned this Professor Matthew Brask. It didn’t fit with how the Major Crimes crew looked at the world. Crime, they thought, was done by criminals – by lowlifes like Nitić and Rakić, scumbags from the Leys. And most of the time they were right. The percentage game was the smart play; follow the averages, go where the stats point you.

  Or to put it another way, Rose thought, just keep doing exactly what you did the last time.

  But she wasn’t prepared to let the averages shut out her instincts. Not now. She’d seen the professor’s dopey grin in Florian’s photo – seen, too, the look of hatred in Rakić’s eyes and heard the fury in his voice as he’d said, no, spat the word: Brask. Like a curse. The worst curse he could think of.

  There was a connection here, something real – maybe something important. She could feel it.

  Hume was looking at her thoughtfully.

  ‘What was this feller’s name again?’

  ‘Brask, Matthew Brask. He’s a visiting professor in religion from Harvard. Fellow at All Souls.’

  ‘Brask. I know that name. Do we know him, Phillips?’

  Phillips shrugged.

  ‘Can’t think why we would.’

  ‘I could swear we’ve crossed paths with a Brask. Look him up.’

  ‘PNC check, guv?’ Phillips took up his phone to dial down to the database team.

  ‘Nah. JFGI.’ Hume flipped open a laptop. Looked up, caught Rose’s eye. ‘Just Fucking Google It.’

  Rose watched over his shoulder as he ran the search: Matthew Brask Oxford.

  First result was Brask’s page on the university website. There was a short profile, a list of research interests, a long bibliography of publications – and a picture.

  Hume drew in a breath.

  ‘I knew I knew him,’ he said.

  Rose looked at him quizzically. Wouldn’t have had DCI Hume down as a scholar of theology.

  ‘Sir?’

  Phillips, coming alongside, swore sharply.

  ‘That bastard,’ he said. ‘Yeah, we know him all right, don’t we, guv? Proper little do-gooder.’

  Seeing Rose nonplussed, Hume swiftly filled in the detail.

  ‘You know I was talking about the grief we get about “harassment” in the Leys? This bloke’s responsible for a good two-thirds of it. Didn’t know he was a professor, just signs himself Matt Brask on his letters.’

  ‘And his emails, and his petitions …’ Phillips added wearily.

  ‘Old-fashioned bleeding-heart liberal, our Professor Brask. Thinks we go too hard on the poor old Eastern European community. Says we’re targeting vulnerable minorities. Wonder if he’s ever been held up in a Leys back alley with a vulnerable minority pointing a knife at his throat. Anyway, that’s him – champion of the oppressed.’ Hume sat back, chewed his lip. ‘Maybe you should go and have a word with him, Rose,’ he said. ‘Shake him up a bit, see what falls out. Go this afternoon.’

  ‘Do they work afternoons, academics?’ sneered Phillips with a short laugh.

  Angler looked up from his paperwork. Muttered something about getting a proper job.

  A thin, cold drizzle fell on Oxford as Rose crossed Radcliffe Square, headed for the forbidding gate of All Souls College. A far cry from the dreary ex-polytechnic where she’d got her criminology degree, that was for sure.

  In the porters’ lodge a
fat porter set down his racing paper to sign her in and ask who she was there to see. When she told him his pink face lit up.

  ‘Professor Brask! Lovely feller. Tell him Maurice said hello, will you?’

  She said she would, headed for the stairs. Everyone’s friend, this Brask, she thought. If that’s not bloody suspicious, I don’t know what is.

  It was library-quiet in the upper corridors of the college. All Souls, she knew, had no undergraduates – no students to break the silence.

  Brask’s office was tucked away in the north-east corner of the building (the fat porter had helpfully scribbled her a map with his bookie’s biro). It seemed to take her for ever to get there – felt like miles, over deadening grey carpet, under low ceilings lined with strip lights. She’d somehow expected grand staircases and marble halls. This could have been any old sixth-form college or red-brick ex-poly. It’s a place of work, after all, she reminded herself. Not bloody Hogwarts.

  His office door was half open. Rose got a look at him before he heard her approach. He seemed much as he’d appeared in Florian’s photo; the same thin-rimmed glasses, the same mop of dark hair. Mid-thirties, she guessed. He wore a blue shirt with a faint grey stripe and was talking to someone – she couldn’t see who. She heard whoever it was laugh softly. Caught a snatch of conversation about sport.

  Music was playing quietly in the background – some kind of choral music, the kind that always made Rose think of funerals. Not so inappropriate, considering the conversation they were about to have.

  She knocked on the door frame. The conversation broke off; Brask looked up, saw her. Started politely to get to his feet.

  ‘Oh – hi there. Come in.’ His expression was friendly, open. She wondered what he took her for – a fellow theologian? The provost’s new secretary?