Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

Probably not a Thames Valley DI on a murder investigation, anyway.

  She pushed open the door. The man Brask had been talking to looked at her. Bald, fortyish. Didn’t look much like an academic.

  ‘Well, so long, Luka,’ Brask said. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for the score on Wednesday night.’

  The man nodded, smiled. ‘You’re a good man, Professor,’ he said as he shuffled out, ‘but not much on the pitch.’ Brask turned to Rose.

  ‘The rules of rugby,’ the professor said, ‘will always be a mystery to me. Doesn’t keep me from trying, though.’ He lifted his eyebrows in a so-how-can-I-help? expression.

  Did a double-take when Rose showed her badge.

  ‘Police? My goodness. What –’

  ‘Please sit down, Professor. Can I sit down? Thanks.’

  That was called getting the upper hand. But the real trick, she knew, was keeping it.

  Brask watched her in silence as she took off her coat, set her umbrella against the wall and took a seat on the padded bench that faced the professor’s desk.

  Only then did she say: ‘Professor Brask, I’m Detective Inspector Lauren Rose. I’m here with – with some bad news.’

  He blinked.

  ‘Bad news? From – from back home?’

  His accent was gently Midwestern, an old-movie accent, both likeable and corny as hell.

  ‘No, nothing like that.’ She watched him carefully. ‘From the Leys.’

  Brask just nodded. Nothing in the eyes but sincere concern, no twitch, no tremor. Good actor? Innocent man? Cold-hearted killer?

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he said, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘We’re investigating a murder.’

  He raised his eyebrows at that. Not shock – you’d have to be pretty unworldly to be shocked by a murder in the Leys – but surprise, interest, again something that looked a lot like real concern. ‘Gangs?’ he suggested.

  ‘We’re looking at all available leads,’ Rose said neutrally.

  She couldn’t hold it off any longer. She wondered, quickly, what there was between Katerina and this polite American. Had she loved him? Had he loved her?

  She thought, How much is this going to hurt?

  ‘We found the body of Katerina Zrinski,’ she said, ‘in a field north of Oxford in the early hours of the fourth of October. She’d been murdered.’

  Brask’s knuckles whitened on the arms of his chair. The colour ran from his face.

  ‘Katerina?’ he said, indistinctly.

  A nod was all he was getting.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Oh – oh, oh, dear God.’ His brow puckered and he pressed one open hand to his face, dislodging his glasses. He drew a long, wavering breath, said again, ‘Oh, dear God.’

  Dear God, Rose thought bleakly, had nothing to do with it.

  She knew that maybe she was being pretty tough on a man who’d lost a friend, perhaps a good friend, a lover even.

  But then, maybe she was going pretty easy on the man who’d butchered Katerina Zrinski.

  Brask took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes and nose. Straightened his glasses. Looked up at Rose with an expression that was difficult to read. There was something formidable in his eyes, she thought, something hard.

  ‘All available leads, you said.’ He swallowed. ‘Including me?’

  Rose stonewalled.

  ‘I have a few questions,’ she said.

  Yes, he and Katerina had been friends. No, he hadn’t seen her for a little while, a week or two perhaps.

  If he was hiding something, he was hiding it well. Yes, he was nervous – Rose had made it pretty clear he was a suspect in a murder investigation; who wouldn’t be? But he was composed, lucid, took time to think before each answer, wasn’t obviously evasive or hesitant.

  So what are you, Professor Brask? Rose wondered. A good actor? Or an innocent man?

  As they cycled through the questions, Rose took in the details of Brask’s office. There were no vials of holy oil, at least, no cobwebbed books. In a lot of ways it wasn’t so different from the offices of her old college lecturers – only where they’d have had a holiday snap of their kids, Brask had pinned up a print of a medieval Virgin-and-child painting; where they’d have had unmarked essays strewn across their desks, Brask seemed to have been reading from a photocopied manuscript written in Hebrew.

  And where pride of place in her old lecturers’ offices would’ve been taken by a framed photo of them graduating from Hendon or receiving a bravery award, Brask had a professional-looking picture of himself in a Roman collar.

  He’d been a priest?

  No, Brask didn’t have any idea why anyone would want to hurt Katerina. Yes, he went fairly regularly to the Queen of Peace church: ‘I’m a professor of comparative religion,’ he explained. ‘I go to a lot of churches.’

  There were a couple of other photos in the office. One showed Brask at a party or a dance, relaxed and grinning, with his arms around a pretty, black-haired woman. Not very priestly, Rose thought. She made a quick comparison: he was a little older in this picture than in the one with the collar. An ex-priest, then. A disgraced priest?

  Yes, he had a lot of contacts among the Oxford Eastern European communities. No, he didn’t know Dmitry Rakić – except by reputation.

  On a bookshelf beside Brask’s desk Rose saw another photo, without a frame, worn-looking, propped against a ring-binder. A familiar photo: the same one Father Florian had shown her of church volunteers grinning in the sun. Katerina smiling at the camera, Brask smiling at Katerina.

  It was right by his desk, where he could look at it every day.

  She interrupted him in mid-answer.

  ‘Were you and Katerina in a sexual relationship, Professor Brask?’

  He stopped dead. Gaped at her. Worked his jaw a couple of times before getting it out: ‘No! Me and Katerina, in a – No, Inspector Rose – no.’

  Rose nodded evenly but she didn’t deny herself the inner kick of satisfaction. Got you. There were still a lot of things in this case that she didn’t understand, but at least now she knew one thing for sure. Professor Matt Brask was a liar.

  Little Mouse couldn’t remember the last thing he’d had to eat. The oat biscuit dipped in black tea? The slice of cold, boiled sausage? The bread smeared with lamb-fat?

  Had that been two days ago? Three days ago?

  If only he weren’t so weak he might remember.

  He had pleaded with the priest to feed him and begged him to release him from his chains. The priest had only shaken his head and said that he need not worry about his body, only his soul. Think of the martyrs of the True Church, he had said. Their suffering was necessary to purify their spirit. So too was Little Mouse’s own suffering.

  ‘Do you not love me, Father?’ Little Mouse had begged the priest. ‘Am I not a good Christian? Have I failed you?’

  The priest’s old eyes filled with tears. ‘You are of the True Church, my son,’ he said. His gravelly voice was thick with emotion. ‘You are good and selfless. That is why you are so worthy. This is not a punishment but a reward.’

  Little Mouse did not understand. He thought that perhaps the woman from the village would come – to free him, give him food. Make things right.

  But the woman had not come.

  Indistinctly, as if in a dream, the abbot had appeared to him again, a being of pure light and unequalled benevolence. The abbot told Little Mouse not to be afraid. ‘Have faith, my son,’ the abbot told him. The same thing the priest had said.

  Little Mouse wept. The priest told him to dry his eyes. His time of suffering would soon end.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Katerina – can you call me, please? I know you’re scared; I understand why, I really do. But I have to talk to you. Give me a chance – please.’

  Another:

  ‘I just want to know what it is you’re feeling. This is killing me, Katerina. I need you to tell me the truth – that’s all.’

  An
other:

  ‘We can’t pretend this isn’t happening, Katerina. It is – Katerina, it already has. Call me.’

  Katerina Zrinski’s voicemails, retrieved from her phone company. The voice was Matt Brask’s.

  She and Hume talked it through over bad machine coffee.

  ‘I still say Rakić.’ The DCI sat on a desk, scuffed shoes up on a chair, arms folded across his knees. ‘Stick with that angle. If she was fucking Rakić and seeing this professor on the side, that points to Rakić – he found out, blew up, killed her. If she wasn’t fucking Rakić, she’d rumbled his operation in the Leys and was causing trouble – he blew up, killed her, it’s a gang hit. Or she was fucking the professor, not fucking Rakić, Rakić couldn’t take it, blew up, killed her.’ He threw up his hands. ‘See what I’m saying?’

  ‘I get the point, guv.’ Rose shook her head. ‘But Brask lied to me. About his relationship with the murder victim! That doesn’t look good, you’ve got to admit.’

  ‘If you’re fucking the sweetheart of a Croatian gang leader, maybe you get into the habit of not shouting it from the fucking rooftops.’ The DCI slurped his coffee, shrugged. ‘I’m not defending this prick of a professor, Rose. But for my money, it’s our boy Dmitry all the way.’

  He crumpled his coffee cup, threw it aside. ‘Stick with Rakić, Rose.’

  ‘Look, guv, none of Rakić’s guys have given us a sniff, have they? I know Phillips has been leaning on them hard, and they haven’t copped to anything. They’ve no idea what we’re talking about.’

  ‘Hard nuts. You know what they’re like.’

  Rose could’ve screamed in exasperation.

  ‘Sir, I really think –’

  ‘I’m still in charge around here, Detective Inspector. Stick with Rakić.’ He stood, briefly examined a coffee stain on his tie. Looked seriously at Rose. ‘You’re mad at Brask because he lied to you. Remember what this case is about, Rose.’

  ‘I thought it was about finding the killer, guv.’

  ‘It is.’ Hume nodded. ‘And that means it’s not about your fucking feelings.’

  She was pulling on her coat, getting ready to head out to the Leys to meet a contact from the fringes of the Rakić gang, when her phone buzzed. Dr Matilda Rooke – the pathologist. Rose knew her well. Liked her.

  ‘I was told to bump this poor girl of yours to the top of my list, Lauren.’ Dr Rooke spoke slowly in a low, lugubrious voice. It was just as well – if she could speak as fast as she could think, no one would have been able to keep up with her. ‘I’m getting her ready now. I thought you might like – well, not like exactly, but you know – to come and watch.’

  ‘That might be helpful, Matilda. Thanks.’

  ‘No rush, love. I’m just going to have a cup of tea before we get cracking, so you’ve got a good ten minutes.’ The line went dead. Rose smiled. Funny how it took a woman who spent her life around dead bodies to make her feel human again.

  That feeling lasted all of the fifteen minutes it took her to drive to the morgue. Once she was in Matilda’s lab the deathly bleakness of this case closed over her head like an icy sea. Katerina’s body, fish-grey on the slab. Katerina’s head, on a nearby table. Matilda Rooke’s warmth hidden behind a surgical mask and gown. The air cold, clammy.

  She shivered.

  She was a career copper; she’d seen dead bodies before, women’s bodies, too, beaten, mutilated, lifeless in a pathologist’s lab. They’d never made her feel as bad as Katerina’s remains made her feel. They’d never, somehow, seemed so helpless – so betrayed.

  ‘Now don’t worry, love,’ Matilda said. She was bent over a steel tray, prepping her instruments. Their aseptic steel gleamed unwholesomely. ‘This is going to be horrible, but it’ll all be over soon, I promise.’

  Rose’s mouth shaped to say thank you – but then she realized that Matilda wasn’t talking to her. She was talking to Katerina. To the corpse.

  She’d heard about this from Phillips, she remembered. He’d been in on an autopsy with Matilda before – that mad bag in the lab, he called her. ‘Only pathologist in the world who talks to her patients.’ Matilda, he’d said, called it her ‘bedside manner’.

  At the time Rose had thought it was just another crank story to file alongside all the others people liked to pass around about the weirdos in the path lab. Milk and sandwiches kept in the fridge next to platters of eyeballs and severed fingers. Cadavers dressed up in tinsel boas and party hats for the work Christmas do. The guy who collected thumbnails.

  Some were true, some – surely – weren’t. Either way, they were good for raising a smile when the job turned dark.

  But seeing this now – seeing Matilda say sorry to Katerina the first time she touched the scalpel to her skin – did more than raise a smile. Rose saw the true humanity in this.

  ‘Let’s have a look at you, you poor thing,’ Matilda murmured, prising apart her first incision. ‘Let’s see if we can figure out what they did to you.’

  Rose looked away.

  They’d already talked over the preliminary data, gathered at the scene. Time of death was difficult to call, Matilda had said – but from the dry condition of the severance, Katerina had been beheaded some time before she’d been taken to the meadow.

  ‘Then there’s her temperature,’ the doctor had added, tapping a printout with the tip of her pen. ‘She was cold, much more cold than she ought to have been. Around eleven degrees when SOCO arrived – but the outdoor temperature that night never dropped below thirteen.’

  Rose had shuddered.

  ‘It felt so much colder.’

  Matilda had given her a beady look. ‘I can well imagine.’

  The data suggested that Katerina’s body had been kept somewhere very cold for some time. Refrigerated. An image of the poor woman’s body dangling in a meat locker had surged sickeningly into Rose’s mind.

  She still hadn’t managed to shake it off.

  ‘Is this how it happened, my love? Is this how he did it? Look here.’ A lift, a professional edge in her voice indicated that Matilda was talking to Rose now. Rose leaned in, ran her eyes over the pale-grey skin.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘Bruises.’ Matilda pointed. ‘Old ones, faded, but real enough, and heavy, too. She took a real beating, didn’t you, eh?’

  ‘Enough to kill her?’

  A brisk shrug.

  ‘Couldn’t say just yet. My first guess is a beating to the body coupled with strangulation.’

  Rose nodded. That’d been her first hunch. But there was little satisfaction in being proved right.

  ‘You’ll have to wait for my final report to be sure,’ Matilda added.

  Rose nodded. Another report. She was already waiting for lab results on Katerina’s strange hessian clothes – they were clearly handmade, SOCO had said, ruffling them cursorily as they were bagged up – and on the traces of scented oil left on her body. She’d sent uniform round to the church to get hold of Florian’s vial of chrism. A chemical comparison would clear a few things up – one way or another.

  The doctor’s unwavering blade drew a sharp longitudinal line through Katerina’s shallow navel. The flesh parted greasily. Rose did her best to swallow her revulsion. It’s just – just meat, she told herself. Just dead stuff, not a person, not a human.

  What was human in Katerina had been snuffed out of this pale carcass some time ago.

  The dry gleam of bowel. Ridged tissue, pale-veined viscera.

  Matilda sniffed.

  ‘You were hungry, weren’t you, Katerina? Hadn’t eaten.’ She probed deeper, folding back the cut skin with care, wrist-deep in the woman’s belly.

  After a while she looked up at Rose.

  ‘Nothing in her stomach, barely a thing in her gut at all.’ Matilda shook her head. ‘She didn’t starve – she’s skinny, but there’re no signs of serious malnutrition – but she hadn’t eaten for over a day. Goodness, she must have been hungry.’

  Starved. Beaten. Strang
led. Frozen. And then –

  The faces moved in flickering sequence behind her eyes: Rakić. Brask. Florian. Her chest constricted. I’ll nail you, she thought, fiercely. Whatever it takes, I’ll nail you.

  She became aware that Matilda was watching her. The doctor’s eyes were soft with sympathy over the severe line of her mask.

  ‘You’ll make this right, Lauren,’ she said. Nodded firmly. ‘I know you will. You’ll do what’s needed – for poor Katerina here.’ She set down her scalpel, let out a sigh. ‘Now why don’t you go wait outside, leave me and Katerina to it?’ She looked down at the disfigured body. ‘It’s not going to get any more pleasant from here on in, I’m afraid.’

  It was over an hour before Matilda stepped out of the lab into the brown-tiled waiting area, weary-eyed and absently rubbing alcohol into her hands.

  Rose set down the files she’d been rereading and looked at the pathologist expectantly.

  ‘As I said, you’ll have to wait for my report for anything really conclusive.’ Matilda dropped heavily into the chair opposite her. ‘But you can be pretty sure about the cause of death. And there was something else.’ She lifted her eyebrows. ‘Something a bit odd.’

  Rose hunkered forwards.

  ‘Okay. You’ve got my attention.’

  ‘Her ankle bone, of all things. The left one.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It wasn’t there.’ Her eyes gleamed behind her spectacles. ‘I thought at first it was an old surgical wound, sports-injury op, something like that – certainly a very neat job. But it was new, very new.’

  ‘There was nothing in her medical record about it.’

  ‘No. I took a closer look. The thing had just been cut out. No rhyme or reason that I could see. Cut out and stitched up, tidy as you like.’

  ‘Post mortem?’

  ‘My guess is yes. Really, I’ve never seen anything like it.’ She took off her spectacles, rubbed at her eyes. ‘And as you know, Lauren, dear, I’ve seen such an awful lot.’

  Stripped of her surgical get-up – comfy and scruffy in a charity-shop sweater, corduroys and off-white trainers – Dr Matilda Rooke looked small and painfully vulnerable. As she got up to go, Rose laid a hand on the doctor’s shoulder.