Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  She’d moved her hand sharply to her jacket pocket and tugged at Brask’s sleeve with her free hand.

  ‘Sorry – my damn phone’s buzzing.’ Glanced at the phone, faked a reaction. ‘I’m going to have to take this,’ she’d said with an apologetic grimace. ‘Give me a minute?’

  ‘Sure,’ shrugged Brask.

  She pressed the phone to her ear and quickly walked back in the direction they’d come. She paused at the car, a knackered old Nissan, where she’d seen Rakić’s man. No sign. A narrow path between buildings led off to the right. Over the road were a lifeless-looking hedgerow, more parked cars, a looming sandstone building with a gated entrance.

  Nobody.

  Rose sighed and dropped her phone back into her pocket. Bloody hell. She made her way back up the road to where Brask waited, leaning on the college railings. He looked – no, not happier, but more alive, somehow, away from All Souls and his little office.

  ‘Not bad news, I hope?’ he’d asked politely.

  Rose – with difficulty – shook off her scowl. Fact was the big skinhead had spooked her. Brask, having been on the end of one serious beating, seemed pretty stoical – strangely, unsettlingly so – about the risk of receiving another. Maybe he felt he had it coming. Christ, Rose thought – what was it with Catholics and guilt?

  The thread tugged: maybe he’s got something to feel guilty about. But the thought was becoming harder to keep a hold on.

  ‘No. Nothing serious.’ I hope. She looked up at Balliol’s towers. She wasn’t going to tell Brask that she’d seen the skinhead skulking after them – not yet, anyway. It was unlikely he’d be in danger while they were in the open like this. Still, she decided to stick with the professor to see if any more of Rakić’s henchmen lurked nearby.

  ‘Come on, Professor. Let’s go and find St Catherine. See what she can tell us.’

  Rose followed Brask into the cold gallery. She didn’t need to get deep into the exhibit before an unavoidable truth became clear: picture after picture after picture told her that the twenty-first-century murder of Katerina Zrinski was insane, sick, horrifying – but not unique. According to legend, a young woman had died in much the same way, 1,700 years before.

  It was crazy, surely, to think that the two deaths could be connected – but did it make any more sense to assume that the uncanny similarities were nothing more than the result of mere chance?

  No, Rose realized slowly, with a disturbing certainty that solidified as she moved from painting to painting. This was no coincidence.

  The wheel on which, in these paintings, St Catherine died a hundred deaths – it was the same as Katerina’s cartwheel. Though the structure in the field had been rough-hewn and crudely built, something fundamental in its shape and in the darkness of its purpose marked it out clearly as a twin of these medieval torture instruments.

  A ‘breaking wheel’ Brask had said it was called. Designed – by who, Rose wondered, by what kind of sick mind? – to dislocate the bones and muscles of the body bound to its rim.

  She noticed that some of the pictures caused Brask to quicken his pace as he passed them. It wasn’t hard to see why. One showed the impassive executioner gripping Catherine by her hair as he prepared to strike off her head. In others, the saint raised her hands to greet a magnificent angel, descended from broken clouds to end her sufferings and deliver her to heaven.

  A seventeenth-century Spanish painting made Rose catch her breath. Here, Catherine stood upright, clothed in red – and held her own severed head in her hand. An altarpiece, the information notice said. For people to look at as they prayed.

  For what? she wondered. To what kind of God?

  Rose caught up with Brask at the end of the gallery. He looked a little pale.

  ‘I had no idea this kind of art could be so gruesome,’ she admitted.

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Brask nodded, slipping readily back into the role of teacher. ‘People talk about violent movies and video games nowadays – they have no idea. This stuff is hardcore.’

  They headed back down the gallery, past the row of suffering saints.

  ‘Christianity has always had a seed of violence in its core,’ Brask went on thoughtfully. ‘Steeped in blood, if you like. Starting with what happened to Jesus Christ – and going on from there. Look at the Isenheim Altarpiece, from the fifteen hundreds. By a guy named Grünewald. It’s an image of Christ on the cross – but it’s not beautiful, it’s awful; the body is turning green, the skin is blistered with sores … Christ isn’t just dying, He’s rotting.’

  ‘But why? What’s the point? Where’s all the love and peace I thought these things were meant to be about?’

  ‘It’s not about the violence.’ Brask shrugged. He made a gesture that took in the row of paintings. ‘It’s about your response to the horror. Your pity, your consciousness of the martyr’s suffering. When Caravaggio paints Christ being flogged – and, man, it looks like it hurts – he wants you to feel it. He wants you to feel Christ’s pain, what He went through, for – for us.’

  Rose stopped, turned back to the gallery.

  ‘Caravaggio. Did I just see that name?’

  ‘You did. Here.’ He steered them further down the room. It was a small painting, one of the first they’d passed. ‘It’s a copy of Caravaggio’s Catherine. Painted in 1599.’ He looked at Rose’s expression, grinned briefly. ‘It’s a little different, isn’t it?’

  Rose nodded. It certainly was. This Catherine didn’t seem to be suffering – she stood beside a cruelly spiked wheel, she carried a blade, but her expression was hardly submissive. She was beautiful. And she looked like a girl you wouldn’t mess with.

  ‘Fillide Melandroni,’ Brask said. ‘Caravaggio’s most celebrated model.’ Another fleeting smile. ‘And a prostitute.’

  Rose raised an eyebrow. Takes more than that to shock a DI, she thought.

  ‘Not very saintly,’ she remarked, as they moved on.

  ‘Sainthood,’ said Brask, ‘is a complicated thing.’

  Not for the first time Rose wondered just how much this priest-turned-professor knew about the real world, the world beyond the seminary and the ivory tower. How much it had touched him. Whether it had left marks.

  She remembered the picture she’d seen in his office: Brask with his arms around a pretty, dark-haired young woman. There had to be a story there.

  They didn’t talk much on the walk back to Brask’s office. The paintings had added a new layer to the haunting parade of images this case had imprinted on Rose’s mind. As for Brask – well, who knew what was going through his head?

  He’d told her there was no need for her to accompany him back to All Souls but she’d insisted. She gave an excuse about double-checking the loose ends and taking a last look for evidence of Rakić’s brutal intrusion. Of course, she knew, there was no hope of nailing Rakić on an ABH charge – even now he’d be working the estates, drumming up enough watertight alibis to clear Dr Crippen. She kept a close eye out for any more of his henchmen as they made their way back to the college.

  Brask’s corridor smelled of disinfectant and sawdust.

  ‘Listen, Inspector, you should get back to –’ Brask began.

  He stopped in mid-sentence.

  His office door was open.

  The repairmen could have left it open after fixing the jamb. Perhaps the explanation was that simple. But Rose’s gut said otherwise, and she guessed that Brask’s had as well.

  She took the lead, pushing Brask back with a forearm as she moved cautiously forwards. She was sharply aware, all at once, of her aching ribs and bruised cheekbone, her wrung-out muscles and the trauma her body had been through in the last few days. If Rakić was here, spoiling for a fight – what the hell was she going to do about it?

  There was no noise inside the room. No sound of movement. White wood glue gleamed on the door frame. Rose blinked as the smell of TCP grew stronger. There was another smell, too, an undertone to the disinfectant reek, something familiar –<
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  She looked up.

  She hardly had time to gasp before Brask darted right alongside her.

  ‘What the hell?’

  What the hell, indeed, Rose thought. It was suspended from the door lintel in a frame of taut brown twine. It glistened unwholesomely with grease, or oil.

  Rose ducked carefully under the twine, shaking her head as she examined the thing. She tried to be as clinical as she could about it but her revulsion was instinctive.

  ‘Bones,’ she said. ‘Animal bones.’

  Two ribcages, bound together with leather ligatures. Brask moved to touch it.

  ‘Don’t,’ Rose warned. ‘It’s evidence.’ But of what?

  Within the rough sphere formed by the ribcages, eight more bones – irregularly shaped but with cleanly broken ends – were knotted together in a ragged star shape.

  She looked at Brask.

  ‘Mean anything to you?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘A message, a warning of some kind?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Inspector, I really don’t. I guess one of Rakić’s guys came back and …’ He tailed off, frowning. He didn’t seem afraid, Rose thought – more annoyed by being presented with a puzzle he couldn’t solve.

  She knew the feeling.

  ‘Religious?’ she guessed. ‘A curse, or, or –’

  ‘Black magic?’ Brask smiled grimly. ‘I’m not saying people don’t believe some way-out stuff, Inspector. There’s more diversity in the world’s religions than you could fit in a hundred books. But I think it’s more likely that this is somebody trying to frighten me – somebody who’s watched The Blair Witch Project a few too many times.’

  Rose could have slapped herself. She was meant to be the streetwise, savvy one, the veteran copper with her feet on the ground – and here she was being handed a reality check by a bloody theology professor. A curse? For Christ’s sake, Rose.

  She made a quick call to HQ for a team to take the – the whatever it was in as evidence and give the place a sweep.

  ‘Just to be sure,’ she said to Brask.

  God, she was tired. The thing dangling from the twine reeked of blood.

  It reeked of death.

  Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was a warning from Rakić or maybe it was just a joke. An early Halloween prank by a student.

  Chase every clue, run down every lead, she thought. Just like you promised Katerina.

  His wrists were raw from the shackles. His aching belly rebelled against the sweet stench of the chrism slathered on his skin.

  The priest murmured litanies in Latin. The stropped knife blade glowed silver-black in the candlelight. Soon, Little Mouse understood. Soon the real pain would begin.

  Little Mouse saw the abbot on the frayed edge of his murky sight. He knew the beloved man had come to give him strength.

  The abbot told him that it was the sacred duty of the faithful to make sacrifices. The abbot told him that his suffering would be a gateway to a greater glory.

  Still Little Mouse whimpered as the knife blade touched his skin.

  The abbot asked, ‘Would you fail your God and saviour?’

  ‘No,’ Little Mouse said. ‘I will not fail my God.’

  The abbot asked, ‘Would you not gladly give up your life to restore the treasures of our order and the glory of the True Church?’

  ‘I would, I would,’ Little Mouse said weakly. ‘I would give my life for His glory.’

  The abbot grew angry, as the boy had never seen him angry in life, and spoke with hatred, as the boy had never heard him speak.

  ‘You must resign yourself to suffering and death, child, as did the martyrs of old,’ the abbot said. ‘For how else is the order to be resurrected? The True Church rightly glorified? The unworthy Serb to be driven howling from our holy land?’

  Little Mouse felt the sting of the knife edge. He felt warm blood spill across his jutting hip bone. The pain sang through him and as it did, it silenced his fear.

  Through tears he cried out: ‘I shall! I shall give all I have to give to restore the order! I shall drive out the Serb! In death or in life, by the power of my faith I shall!’

  He screamed the name of Abbot Cerbonius.

  He heard the clatter of the knife falling to the concrete floor.

  The abbot vanished from his sight. All Little Mouse could see was the priest. The old man’s hollow cheeks were wet with tears.

  For a second Little Mouse was smothered in the malodorous black of the priest’s robes. He felt the press and scrape of metal on his bones – and then he was free.

  Free, the weeping priest declared, to stand with him against Satan and the Serb. Free to help him in his devotions, free to restore the True Church to its throne.

  Little Mouse had proved his faith unbreakable, the priest told him. He had survived his trial as strong as tempered steel. He will be more than a tool of Christ: he will be His blade.

  ‘You are free, my son.’ The priest kissed him. ‘Finally and truly free to do the work of God.’

  Chapter Eleven

  10 October

  For a gangland psycho, Dmitry Rakić lived a pretty quiet life. But then, Rose reflected, his girlfriend was dead and half his mates were banged up at St Aldate’s on trafficking charges – what was there for him to do? Rose popped open a packet of crisps. Went on watching his windows.

  Three days she’d been on stakeout. To begin with – for the first day – she’d railed against it, knowing that sitting on her arse in a parked car was no job for a bloody DI, knowing that Hume, damn him, was punishing her for letting Olly Stevenage grab his smartphone shots at the crime scene. She’d brooded on it as she’d sat watching Rakić’s flat, worked herself into a fury over it – given Angler a proper earful when he’d come to relieve her at quarter to midnight.

  The unshaven DS had grunted something about ‘Time of the month, is it, guv?’ as he’d peeled back the cellophane on his corner-shop Cornish pasty.

  By now she was settled into the job. Not happy – but focused, clear on her objectives, committed to getting all she could from her hours of watching, watching, watching …

  Rakić did his own shopping – bog roll, milk, bread from the Polish corner shop. Plus a lot of bottles from the off-licence further up the street. He was drinking hard, it seemed, wasn’t eating a lot. Had a cleaner, a trim young black girl who came on Tuesdays. She’d checked out okay: on a student visa from Mozambique, training as a nurse at St Michael’s. Rakić watched a lot of TV, often late into the night. He took walks, after midnight, to nowhere in particular. Didn’t seem like he was looking after himself too well; he looked unslept, dishevelled.

  Guilt. Grief. Who knew?

  But then, he wasn’t stupid either, Rose knew. Stupid gang leaders didn’t stay gang leaders long. What with Katerina and the drugs bust in the Leys – not to mention the ruckus at All Souls – he had to know the police would be all over him. Rakić was treading carefully.

  The living-room light in the flat went out. The bathroom light went on. Rose sighed. What a bloody week.

  St Aldate’s might have been as full as a high-season B&B with dodgy Leys faces but it was starting to look like a lot of work for sod-all result. Rakić ran a tight ship; no one was talking. Big Nitić, the thug who’d cracked her ribs and dangled her over the stairwell, was going down for GBH, and based on the gear they’d seized from the estate they could maybe nail a handful of others on intent to supply – but these were pretty slim pickings, a poor return on a high-risk investment. And no one seemed to know a bloody thing about Katerina Zrinski.

  Hume was going spare.

  It didn’t help the investigation that Professor Matt Brask had dropped out of the frame. His alibi, an international symposium in York over the days in which Katerina went missing and was killed, had checked out.

  Yes, Rose was glad that Brask wasn’t a killer. He seemed like a decent guy and she was happy that her initial suspicions had been unfounded. But it was another avenue closed
off, another dead end. She was running out of leads.

  They were getting a lot of calls – that was true. No shortage of hoaxes and pranks; more trolls, time-wasters and sickos than they knew what to do with. Just last night uniform had rushed to Wadham College at half-two in the morning – a first-year student had rung 999 in a state of hysteria, reporting a severed head in his bed.

  A mannequin’s head, it turned out, soused in tomato ketchup.

  The poor lad had been in bits. Next morning three guys from his block were all over Twitter and Facebook, crowing about the ‘classic’ prank. It was just ‘banter’, they told the WPC who’d paid them a visit.

  The chief super was leaning on the university to get the little bastards slung out.

  All this was against a wearying backdrop of hard-boozing students in Halloween fancy dress, gruesome fly-posters for this college’s ‘Murder Ball’ or that club’s ‘Trick or Treat Social’, zany Halloween-themed cocktails in the local bars …

  And all the while young Mr Oliver Stevenage kept up a torrent of vitriol against the force, the investigation and Rose herself.

  She had the latest copy of the student paper on the passenger seat. Strewn with crisp crumbs and marked by spilt coffee. It was no less than the rag deserved. Angler had brought it for her – ‘Case you get caught short,’ he’d grinned coarsely.

  Stevenage’s leader column had had her seething.

  This newspaper, he’d written, fully acknowledges the benefits – cultural and socio-economic – brought to Oxford by the vibrant law-abiding East European community. We hold no brief for the far-right agenda; we are not interested in a racist witch-hunt.

  But when the Thames Valley Major Crimes Unit investigation – under the panicky leadership of Ms DI Lauren Rose – allows members of an immigrant crime ring to commit perhaps the most wickedly vile crime in Oxford’s history, making no arrests in the case and leaving the only suspect – a tattooed Balkan hoodlum – to swagger about the streets unimpeded and unquestioned, we have no hesitation in saying that the force is failing in its duty to our city, to the safety of the public and to Katerina Zrinski.