A savage undercut to the ribs ripped the air from Brask’s lungs. He doubled over, felt a fist close in his hair and heard himself cry out as his head was smashed into the corner of his hardwood desk. A gout of blood from his temple fell in a spatter to the carpet. He soon followed it to the floor, face first, his body jack-knifing as a boot thumped into his midriff.
Trapped in the space between his desk and the bookcase, awaiting another blow, another boot, a knife, a bullet, Professor Matt Brask prayed.
For justice. For forgiveness. For Katerina’s soul.
He did not pray for mercy – it was too late for that.
Rakić’s fist thundered iron-hard into the ribs beneath Brask’s arm. He gagged, tasted blood. A word was hissed in Croatian; another blow glanced off the side of his neck, slamming his head into the floor. A heavy boot on his ankle ground the bones of his lower leg. He had no breath left to scream – and besides, what good would it do?
The crunch of bones, the rending of tissue, the howl of nerve endings, the panicked flaring of neurones – what was it, beside the torture of Katerina’s loss? Beside the ache of her absence?
Through a screen of blood he made out the blurred shape of a weapon – a club or a broad blade. A hand gripped his throat.
The pain, Brask thought emptily, is nothing but a promise. A promise of release. A promise of peace.
He was not afraid. The hand at his throat tightened and Brask watched the weapon descend. If this is what God wills, he thought, then so be it – amen.
The room filled with light.
Rakić’s shadow lifted from Brask’s body and there was noise in the room, yelling, the thump of colliding bodies. Fists against faces, knees against ribs. Brask shifted position, trying to see what was happening. He grunted at the pain and pawed the blood from his eyes.
When he could see again his eyes revealed a surprise. Rakić was on his back, sprawled in the centre of the office. A short club lay a yard from his left hand but he seemed floored, utterly winded. The man blinked red-faced at the ceiling.
By the open door, Rakić’s big companion was hunched in a struggle with another man, similarly shaven-headed but barely two-thirds the size. Brask realized, fuzzily, that he knew this man: Luka, his friend from the kitchens. The pair exchanged cramped blows, grappled grimly for superiority.
And now there were other noises, from outside, from the corridor: doors banging, screams, a thickly accented cry of ‘Police!’
Brask heard Dmitry’s hoarse mutter: ‘Fuck.’ Then he watched as the tattooed Croat rolled awkwardly to his feet and limped to the doorway.
Luka was on his knees, one forearm held stiffly across his face, holding on to the big guy’s wrist with his other hand, his face twisted with pain and effort.
It was a David and Goliath scenario, thought Brask as he watched the mismatched men struggle. But Rakić tugged at the giant’s shoulder, yelling in Croatian, gesturing to the open door. The gist was clear: no time for fighting – let’s get the hell out of here. With obvious reluctance, the big man stepped back and dropped his hands. Luka, his strength just about exhausted, sagged like a broken puppet.
Rakić’s fury wasn’t quite spent. As his hulking enforcer lumbered to the door and peered out warily into the corridor, the Croat turned sharply, jabbing a finger at Brask.
‘Kill you,’ he said. The English words were thick, clumsy in his mouth, but loaded with venom. ‘Make – suffer. Make – scream.’ He drew a stubby finger across his throat. ‘For Katerina,’ he said. Then he followed his companion through the door.
Brask heard their running footsteps recede.
Alive – saved. But why? For what?
He fought to focus on Luka. Had he been hurt? The wiry man was standing now, a wavering silhouette in the doorway. Brask’s tongue was thick in his mouth, his throat burning. He wanted to say thank you. He reached out a hand.
Luka nodded, raised his own hand in salute.
‘I will get help, Professor,’ he said.
Sirens. Police sirens, shrieking in the street outside.
Brask’s head lolled on the carpet. He was faintly aware of people gathering at the doorway, and of anxious voices. He tried to lift his head, to rise –
The room spun. He heard a voice, one he knew, urgent, forceful, rising above the rest. The voice said his name. It belonged to a woman. It belonged to DI Rose.
Brask blacked out.
‘You were lucky.’
Two hours later. A quiet café across the square. A college handyman was fixing Brask’s smashed door jamb while a cleaner sponged his blood out of the carpet. A police doctor had tried to take him in ‘for observation’. Brask had refused.
Now he sat behind a cup of tepid herbal tea, rubbed his pounding head and swallowed down the obvious retort: I don’t feel lucky.
DI Rose watched him searchingly from across the café table. The smell of her espresso made his stomach turn.
‘So what’s your take on it, Professor?’ she asked. ‘This was Rakić trying to shut you up? Stop you pinning Katerina’s murder on him?’
Brask shrugged, blinked slowly.
‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t know what to think. I can’t think.’
Once the pain from his head, leg and ribs had dulled, the other pain, the real pain, had risen up within him like a tidal surge. Flooding everything.
He’d felt a pain like this once before. He’d prayed to God, then, to keep him from ever having to feel it again.
‘The alternative,’ Rose said thoughtfully, ‘is that you’re Dmitry Rakić’s prime suspect, too.’
What was the use in denying it?
‘He said he was going to kill me,’ he said. ‘As he was leaving. He was going to kill me, for – for her.’
Rose nodded.
She was hard to shake off, this sharp-edged DI, Brask thought. She’d beaten the uniformed cops to the scene by a minute – had been halfway across the square, she’d said, when she’d heard a shout: the college porter, Maurice, yelling blue murder and waving his rolled-up racing paper over his head.
The detective appeared to hesitate. Not something Brask would have expected from her.
‘Go ahead,’ Brask prompted. He mustered a bone-dry smile. ‘Whatever it is you have to say to me, I’m sure I deserve it.’
Rose’s dark eyes were a mystery.
‘I’m not,’ she said.
She opened her soft-leather case, drew out a plain cardboard file and laid it on the tabletop.
Brask stared. The pounding in his head intensified. He knew, right away, what was in the file. He knew what he’d see if he opened it.
‘This isn’t something I can force you to do,’ Rose said quietly. She slid the folder towards him. ‘It’s something I’m asking you to do.’
‘Why?’ He slid back his chair, shook his head. His pulse pounded in his head. ‘Why would I do that?’ His stomach churned at the thought.
Katerina. Brask knew she was in the file. What was left of her.
Rose gave a fractional shrug.
‘Because you loved her. Because you have to know what happened to her – however much it hurts.’
Brask fixed her with a look.
‘I thought you figured I already knew what happened to her, Inspector,’ he snapped. ‘Aren’t I your number-one suspect?’
Rose said nothing. Just sat, watched him coolly. The folder on the table between them seemed magnified, amplified, impossible to ignore.
‘I can’t,’ Brask said. He moved his hand – brushed the cardboard with his fingertips.
He heard Rose say: ‘You don’t have to.’
You know that’s not true, he thought. He picked up the folder.
What did he expect? What had he imagined? In waking nightmares he’d pictured Katerina’s suffering, her terror, her helplessness – but this …
The lank hair knotted about the dead fingers of the hand. The fragile body forced into an unnatural posture, splayed horribly on the w
heel of half-rotted wood. The dark-scabbed stump of the neck.
The paper-white skin. The glassy dead eyes.
‘My God …’
There were six pictures in the file. Pin-sharp, unforgiving. Brutal.
As Brask looked at them, he felt the world fall away – the café and its hissing machines and background pop music, DI Rose’s questions and penetrating stare, the rain that scrawled on the café windows, the empty square, the grandeur of All Souls, all of it, gone.
Only his grief remained.
He closed the folder, dropped it on to the table and covered his eyes.
‘I’m sorry.’
The detective’s voice seemed to come from a great distance away.
The questions began their relentless chorus again: Who? How? Why? After seeing those pictures they were even harder to stomach than they’d been before – God knows, it had never been easy, but now even the little certainties he’d felt so sure of lay broken into pieces. How could Rakić have done this? The man was a brute, an unreflecting thug with a hair-trigger temper and violence in his blood – but he was a man, after all.
No man did this, Brask thought. Whatever did this came straight from hell.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Rose said.
But how could he? How could he put this into words? There was a horror to this, so gut-twisting and soul-deep that he could never hope to express it.
‘It’s … unreal,’ he muttered. ‘A nightmare.’
‘I know.’
Something stirred in the back of his mind. Unreal, yes, but – familiar? He became conscious of an unfolding sense that he’d seen this somewhere before. And not in nightmares, either. How was that possible? It’s just déjà vu, he tried to tell himself. But he knew that it wasn’t, that it was something more than that –
An image began to take shape in his mind. From where? Florence, Valetta, Siena? A painting in a dusty, dimly lit hall – some place a thousand miles from here. Brask’s usually razor-sharp mind was still blunted by the images of the horrific crime scene, but his thoughts slowly came into focus.
He could see it now. White skin. A timber wheel. A face of aching beauty. The cruelty of martyrdom. Saintly eyes turned to heaven, oblivious to the executioner’s blade.
‘St Catherine,’ he said, without meaning to speak out loud.
Rose blinked.
‘Who?’
In his iron chains, on his sweat-soaked cot, Little Mouse prayed. To Christ Jesus, to Mother Mary, to God the Father.
To Cerbonius, his lost abbot.
He prayed to understand what was happening to him. And though he knew it was shameful, he prayed to be saved.
The priest told him that he was a good boy with the pure soul of a true believer. The man burned incense, and lit candles, and sharpened his knives.
Though he tried to be deserving, when the priest was not there Little Mouse sometimes could not help but cry aloud.
On the third night the abbot returned. Again the beloved man was a warm, glowing spirit at the fringes of the boy’s uncertain sight. Again Little Mouse felt the touch of his love and his kindness, unearthly and limitless.
Little Mouse wept and told the abbot that he tried to be good and grateful, but he was hungry, he said – so hungry, and so afraid.
The abbot smiled upon him and told him to have no fear.
‘Faith, my child, will always triumph over fear. So long as it is strong.’
Though he trembled on his cot, Little Mouse nodded. He gulped down tears and swore that his faith was strong and true, that he would try not to be frightened.
But he confessed that he did not want to suffer any longer. He did not want to die.
The abbot smiled.
The abbot said that he would be spared – that Christ Himself would see to it that he would be spared, if only he proved himself worthy of His mercy.
‘How?’ Little Mouse begged to know. ‘How?’
‘It is not given to us to know the ways of God’s judgement,’ the abbot told him. ‘It is not for us to question. Strange and wonderful is the mercy of Christ. Trust in Him, my child.’ Again the abbot smiled. ‘Love Him, praise Him and trust in Him. Yes, you will be spared – if only you prove yourself worthy.’
That day the priest had told Little Mouse that he was to endure the martyrdom of St Erasmus of Formium, and so be delivered into the arms of God.
The monastery had many books but reading had always been difficult for Little Mouse. His favourite tome in the library was a thick and richly coloured collection containing reproductions of some of the Church’s most precious works of art. This is how he learned of St Erasmus.
In the early days of the Church, Erasmus was seized by the soldiers of the heathen emperor Maximian. His teeth were pulled from his head with pincers. His skin was scoured, his hands stuck with iron nails, his eyes gouged out and his body burned upon a griddle.
Then his stomach was slit open and his insides drawn out.
Remembering this now, Little Mouse shuddered with terror. But he must be strong. He must promise the Lord God that his faith cannot be broken, no matter how hard it is tested.
Whether he must endure pulled teeth or gouged eyes, he would not fail Christ and he would not fail the abbot.
He promised the abbot that he would prove himself worthy.
Chapter Ten
It might still be him. He could be the killer. He might be the madman who murdered Katerina and made a nightmare of her body.
Rose walked the long stone-flagged gallery four paces behind the limping Brask.
If you really believe that, she asked herself, would you be here right now?
They’d made the short walk across Oxford to Balliol College, where, according to Brask, there was a collection of works depicting the martyrdom of the fourth-century saint Catherine of Alexandria.
‘Catherine is Balliol’s patron saint,’ Brask had explained.
There was probably a reason why a twenty-first-century educational institution felt the need to associate itself with an Egyptian murder victim from the Dark Ages, Rose thought. She’d never understand it, but there probably was one.
She hadn’t much idea about St Catherine, full stop. She knew – from childhood firework displays – that she’d died, somehow, on a wheel. That was about it.
But she went along with Brask. Not because she really gave a damn about St Catherine or the paintings or Balliol bloody College. More to keep an eye on Brask himself – on this puzzling, contradictory American academic – or priest, or art historian, or whatever the hell else he turned out to be.
Murderer?
She held on to the thought – kept it fastened as if by a thread.
She’d keep a close eye on him, watch the way he moved, gestured, fidgeted, reacted. She’d listen to the way he spoke, even the way he breathed, searching for the things he said without saying anything, and seeing the things he gave away without meaning to. Rose thought back to the Zrinski girls’ flat and how their secrets had slowly unwound from them.
You could learn a lot just by sticking around.
Brask had slipped into lecturer mode as they’d trudged together along Turl Street. Probably his way of coping – his idea of something safe, familiar.
‘Catherine of Alexandria is a legendary saint, not a historical one.’ He’d given her a sidelong look. ‘That’s our way of saying she probably didn’t exist. No scholars mentioned her until the ninth century, long after her supposed death. But in the Middle Ages she was really all the rage.
‘According to legend, young Catherine was gifted by God with extraordinary learning, able to defeat the emperor’s most eminent scholars in theological debate. When the emperor – that’s Emperor Maxentius, who certainly existed and was probably a pretty nasty piece of work – began persecuting Christians, Catherine led the protests. Brave girl! Inevitably she was captured by the emperor’s soldiers. And in punishment –’
Brask broke off. Cleared his throat. When
he resumed, his voice had lost its detached, sardonic quality.
‘In punishment,’ he said, ‘she was bound to a spiked wheel. When the wheel broke – thanks be to God,’ Brask put in bitterly, ‘Catherine was – was beheaded.’
Rose nodded. She was glad, now, she’d agreed to come along. ‘What happened to her body?’
‘Borne by angels to the summit of Mount Sinai,’ Brask said, fluttering a hand mockingly. Beats being borne by Matilda Rooke to a Headington morgue, Rose thought. The professor went on: ‘The monastery there claims to have her relics.’
‘Relics?’
‘Holy souvenirs. The monks at Sinai supposedly have Catherine’s head and left hand. Historically, archaeologically, it’s pretty unlikely, of course – but it’s interesting to those of us who study the Church.’
Crossing Broad Street, they’d passed two students, a boy and a girl, who’d both recognized Brask: ‘Hey, Professor!’, ‘Afternoon, Professor!’
Brask didn’t strike Rose as the kind of tutor who’d insist on formalities – more of a call-me-Matt guy, for all his obvious erudition. These kids, she guessed, had called him ‘Professor’ not because they had to but as a sign of respect.
Quite something, considering the kids she had to deal with. Imagine a seventeen-year-old from the Leys calling her ‘Detective Inspector’.
‘Students of yours?’
‘I don’t have any students. Too highbrow for that.’ Again the wry look. ‘But I know Jake and Martha from the student history society. Oh, and the classics society, too. Bright kids.’
They turned in to the gates of Balliol.
‘Here we are,’ Brask said with a gesture. ‘Balliol – it’s stood here since 1263, if you can believe it. There was a Balliol College on this spot five hundred years before my country even existed.’
But Rose had stopped listening. She was a little tired of dates and historical facts, but that wasn’t what had distracted her.
Rakić’s man. He’d followed them.
She’d seen him in the periphery of her vision as they’d turned the corner into the college quadrangle: a skinheaded heavyweight ducking behind a parked car. She was damn sure it was the guy she’d seen with Rakić at the meadow. From Brask’s descriptions, she bet the big bruiser was also one of the gang members who’d paid a visit to the professor’s office.
Trick or Treat Page 10