Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  It lay on a shelf of the bookcase. Oil had pooled on the fine-grained wood.

  ‘Any significance to these books?’ Rose asked, squinting at the embossed spines.

  ‘Not that I can figure. They’re not in any order – I haven’t gotten around to arranging my books properly since I moved in. Besides, I don’t think he meant to leave it there – you interrupted him, remember.’

  ‘Right. He was probably planning to string it up like before.’

  ‘I can’t say I like his idea of interior decoration. It’s a heck of a thing.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Look, Professor. It’s time to start taking this seriously. Whatever this is supposed to mean – it’s a threat. You’ve been beaten up; now your house has been broken into. The bottom line is you’re not safe. I’m going to put a security detail on you.’

  Brask leaned on his desk, spread his hands.

  ‘How can I let you do that? I know how it is, Inspector – you’re way underfunded, stretched too thin as it is. You just don’t have the resources. How can I justify you going out of your way to protect me when the maniac who killed Katerina is still out there?’

  Rose gave him a calculating look.

  ‘We have a watch on Dmitry Rakić,’ she said levelly.

  ‘Yeah? What about his goons?’ Brask asked, pointing to the artefact of feathers and bones. The professor shook his head slowly. ‘Anyway, I heard the news reports. I know about the second killing, that poor farmer.’ He caught Rose’s eye and held it. ‘It’s not Rakić, is it? I mean, I know the guy’s a psycho, a real nut, but …’

  Rose stonewalled.

  ‘We’re looking at all the angles,’ she said. Carefully – feeling the world lurch – she got to her feet. ‘Come on. We’re getting you out of here.’

  Brask looked surprised.

  ‘It’s a little late for a hotel.’

  ‘You can stay at mine, on the sofa.’ She raised a hand to forestall Brask’s reply. ‘No arguing, Professor. Getting yourself killed won’t help us find this guy. I want you out of harm’s way. Go and get dressed.’

  On the doorstep, heading out, Rose stumbled, caught herself, gripped the door frame. Took a long, steadying breath. Saw Brask watching her with concern.

  She threw him her car keys.

  ‘You’d better drive,’ she said.

  Brask fixed a pot of strong coffee while Rose moved around the small flat, picking up discarded clothes, shifting stacks of binders and papers, tidying away Chinese takeaway cartons, empty mugs, unwashed plates. It felt like she was hardly ever here … how the hell had she managed to get the place in such a mess?

  ‘Don’t have many guests,’ she muttered apologetically. Also, she thought, I’m a slob.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Brask handed her a pungently steaming cup. ‘You have a lot of more important things to worry about. You’ve had a heck of a time lately, Inspector.’

  Don’t I know it, Rose thought. Her thumping head and sore limbs reminded her of it every time she moved.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, sinking into the spare chair, ‘I’m going to call you Matt, and you’re going to call me Lauren. I’m too bloody tired for anything else.’

  Brask smiled: ‘Sure.’

  She sipped the potent coffee. Closed her eyes for a moment, let the world settle into place. But it wouldn’t quite settle right. How could it?

  A late-night interview with a victim’s sister. Two weird bone sculptures. A break-in and a fight. Just another day on the Thames Valley beat, she thought wryly. It didn’t matter how tired she was, she wasn’t going to get much sleep tonight. Police work could do that to you: leave you utterly exhausted but at the same time buzzing, wired, keyed-up.

  She glanced at Brask. He was staring into space – looked almost as knackered as she felt.

  ‘What do you know about the murder of David Norfolk?’ she asked.

  The professor blew out a breath, rubbed at his brow.

  ‘Not much. Only what I read in the papers. A family man, right? A farmer. Worked with charities. Seemed like a good guy.’ He looked at Rose searchingly. ‘The reports said he’d been – mutilated?’ A pause. ‘Was it … was it like Katerina?’

  Brask’s a part of this now, Rose thought. He’s involved, deeply involved – and that means he’s here to stay.

  This was a guy who committed to his causes, she knew. A fleeting thought struck her: it must have taken something serious, something big, to make him leave the priesthood. From what she’d seen of the professor she didn’t think it was in Brask’s character to give up.

  But that was a conversation for another time.

  ‘Can I tell you,’ she said slowly, ‘what was done to David Norfolk?’

  Brask set down his coffee cup. Sat forwards. Nodded.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

  She tried not to leave anything out, tried to remember every detail of that terrible scene in the birch wood. The thick iron nail in the grey bark. The bolt of hessian that fluttered in the breeze. The nightmarish robe of skin. And the body – the dark-red, blood-red body of the farmer, flayed cruelly bare, frozen in unimaginable anguish.

  Brask listened carefully, grimly expressionless.

  When she was done – finished, spent, empty – Rose prompted: ‘So – what do you think?’ She thought of the grim medieval images of poor St Catherine. ‘Do you know what it might mean? The scenes are so elaborate. There must be a reason the killer’s going to so much trouble. What’s the message meant to be? What’s he trying to do?’

  Instead of responding, the professor reached for Rose’s laptop, which was open on the coffee table. With his jaw set, he tapped in a search term. Spun the laptop to show Rose the screen.

  She flinched. Couldn’t help it.

  The screen was filled with image after image of men bound, stripped and having the skin cut from their flesh.

  ‘The martyrdom of St Bartholomew,’ Brask said. ‘One of the great themes in medieval art.’

  Rose scrolled slowly through the pictures.

  ‘Maybe our man fancies himself as an artist,’ she murmured. A few names she’d heard of were showing up on screen – Michelangelo, Bronzino – along with a lot more she hadn’t. The paintings were visceral, powerful, grotesque.

  ‘Do you want to know the story?’

  Rose grimaced. ‘No. But tell me anyway.’

  ‘Bartholomew was one of Christ’s Apostles – we also know him as Nathaniel. We don’t know a lot about him, but according to tradition he travelled widely in the east: Persia, Mesopotamia, maybe even India.

  ‘He’s said to have finished up in the kingdom of Armenia, on the Black Sea. He converted the Armenian king to Christianity and destroyed all the idols in the temple. The king’s brother, in a fury, had him seized, beaten and –’ he made a weary gesture towards the images on the screen – ‘executed.’

  ‘By being skinned alive?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Actually there’s quite a tradition of flaying as a punishment in that region. In Mesopotamia, eight hundred years before Christ, rebel leaders captured by the emperor were often skinned alive. And if you know your Greek mythology –’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘– then you’ll remember it features there, too. Apollo flayed the satyr Marsyas for daring to challenge him. There are dozens more examples. Everywhere from medieval France to Aztec folklore.’

  ‘Christ. What a way to die.’

  ‘Quite a martyrdom,’ Brask agreed.

  Rose looked at him.

  ‘I think you’re going to have to talk me through that, Matt,’ she said. ‘Martyrdom – dying horribly for a good cause, right?’

  Brask shrugged, nodded.

  ‘Kind of. I can only give you the Catholic take on it. The ancient martyrs are hugely venerated within the Church. These were the guys who, in the first centuries after Christ’s death, endured all kinds of persecution – in the Roman Empire and elsewhere – for their faith. We’re talking ar
ound two hundred and fifty years of victimization and torture.’

  ‘But the idea is that martyrdom gets you fast-tracked to heaven?’

  ‘It’s – complicated.’ Brask grinned. ‘Everything’s complicated in the Catholic Church. But yeah – a person who is designated a martyr is considered to have been accepted into heaven.’

  ‘So it’s not all bad,’ Rose remarked drily.

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

  They both stared at the screen. A dozen despairing faces stared back at them.

  An hour later the coffee pot stood empty and Rose and Brask were side by side at the kitchen table, leafing through the files sent over by Interpol.

  You’re in deep now, Professor Brask, she’d thought as she’d dug out the folder from her briefcase. No going back.

  These were the old cases that bore a resemblance to Katerina’s murder: major mutilations, pseudo-religious imagery, bone extraction. She’d asked for a broad sweep and the Interpol researchers had obliged. The file was a horror movie.

  Rose thought – no, knew – she’d got used to it, grown hardened to violence and bloodshed and death over her years on the force. But this was something else. These crimes populated the nightmarish outer fringe of what humanity was capable of. They represented the kind of horrors that were well outside her scope of experience – or at least they had been, until some monster delivered them right to her doorstep.

  The crime-scene photos showed limbs hacked away. Organs cut out. Faces and genitals mutilated. Victims sawn open like joints of meat prepared for cooking.

  Almost all women, Rose noted bitterly.

  At her side, Brask had grown pale, his cheeks hollower, his brow creased – but he worked on; he was on to something, he reckoned. The fates of the martyrs, the executions of the early Church. There were some resemblances here, he’d said – ‘Echoes, tributes, homages, call it what you like.’

  ‘We’d call them copycat killings,’ Rose said.

  ‘Look here.’ Brask had pulled out three files from the pile he’d set aside. ‘From north-east France, back in 2005. Cold cases. Horrific stuff – but kind of familiar.’

  His voice was heavy with meaning; Rose didn’t quite see why. She swiftly scanned the printouts.

  ‘I don’t see it,’ she said. She tapped the top sheet with her pen. ‘This woman was cut into pieces, completely dismembered. That’s not how our man works.’ So far.

  ‘They all were. Three victims. No’ – he moved another page on to the pile – ‘make that four. All cut into a dozen pieces. Not our guy’s MO at all, I know – and the lab in Rheims got nothing from examining the body parts.’ He looked at Rose. ‘But I think I know why. Look here.’

  He fished a sheet of photographs from the pile. Rose bent over and stared at them. Black-and-white crime-scene photos. She’d looked at them once already: twelve pieces of a human body, twelve lumps of neatly butchered meat, laid out on a stone-flagged floor. Police tags and tapes marked the distances and angles.

  She was no good at guessing games.

  ‘What am I supposed to be seeing?’

  ‘There’s no reason you should see it – no reason anyone should, unless they knew what they were looking for.’

  Rose turned to Brask. Unless they thought like a psychopath.

  ‘So what is it?’

  Brask angled the sheet of pictures.

  ‘It isn’t easy to see, with the camera position where it is – but there’s a pattern here. Look. Imagine the body parts are points on a chart.’

  ‘Join the dots, you mean?’

  ‘If you like.’ He traced a fingertip across one of the photographs. ‘From here – to here – to here –’

  ‘Matt, for God’s sake –’

  ‘– to here – to here … Do you see?’

  She was about to say We’re wasting our bloody time here or This is getting us nowhere or I could be doing some real police work right now, Professor –

  – when she saw it.

  A figure. A human body, mapped out in body parts like a constellation drawn in stars. Arms outstretched.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Art.’ Brask said the word sharply, ironically. ‘I know it, I know this shape, this figure. The arms held out like that, the tilt of the head, the position of the legs.’ He shook his head, looked at Rose. ‘It’s St Peter – St Peter, the father of the Church, who was crucified upside down because he declared himself unworthy of suffering the same punishment as Christ.’

  Rose was sceptical. She squinted at the grotesque outline in the pictures.

  ‘How can you possibly know that? It could be anyone.’

  ‘Caravaggio,’ Brask said stonily. ‘I’ve looked at the painting a million times. It’s Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St Peter. It’s one of my favourite Renaissance pieces. Or used to be.’

  Rose had been leafing through the autopsy reports on the four victims. Now her mouth went dry.

  ‘Matt.’

  ‘And in this one the outline suggests the dying pose of St Paul, in the nineteenth-century painting by –’

  ‘Matt. Look. Look here – and here – and here –’

  A portion of bone had been removed cleanly from the victim’s forearm … The body showed clear signs of a recent surgical operation to remove the first bone of the left thumb … The victim was missing a portion of vertebra …

  The wording was different in each report but to Rose the meaning was plain.

  To Brask, too.

  ‘This can’t be coincidence,’ he said. ‘And did you take note of the causes of death? Stoning. Burning alive. These aren’t twenty-first-century homicides, Lauren.’ He looked at her gravely. ‘These are martyrs’ deaths.’

  But Rose had stopped listening. She was staring at the first page of the first file – the crime report, the call log from when the first grisly mosaic had been found laid out on the floor of a Saint-Dizier basement.

  The date-stamp in stark black type: 4 October.

  ‘Katerina was found,’ she breathed, ‘in the early hours of the fourth of October.’ She snatched the second file from Brask’s hand, tore through to the relevant page. Her pulse thundered in her temples.

  ‘Lauren, what the –’

  ‘Tenth of October.’ She let the file drop, looked at Brask. ‘The body of David Norfolk was found on the tenth.’

  Brask’s jaw dropped as he reached the same conclusion Rose had just come to. She was already reaching for the third file. Whatever the date on it was, Rose thought desperately, it was more than a clue, now.

  It was a deadline.

  There had been no answer, no sign. Little Mouse and the priest had prayed daily, together, for hours at a time, their voices echoing hoarse and strained in the fetid dark of the cottage – and yet they had still not been delivered.

  Still the Serbs ravaged their land. At Osijek, at Dakovo, at Slatina – still Karadžič’s infidel legions spilled Croat blood, raped Croat women, defiled Croatia’s holy places.

  It had been a week since Little Mouse had buried the body of the woman deep in the mouldering earth of the forest. A week and no sign of deliverance.

  Sometimes the priest would weep. Sometimes, Little Mouse thought darkly, it was as though the priest was losing faith.

  On the seventh night after the woman’s martyrdom the Abbot Cerbonius appeared to Little Mouse in a burning vision. The abbot told him that his work was not yet done – that, after all, the soul of one woman was a small thing indeed, balanced against the destiny of Christ’s kingdom and the restoration of the holiest of orders.

  Their homeland, their monastery and the venerated Order of St Quintus itself would not be resurrected by a single conjuring trick, the abbot said. Little Mouse felt in his blood the abbot’s indignation. The sacred treasures of the order will not be restored by piety and prayer alone.

  ‘There must be new relics, Little Mouse,’ the abbot said. ‘There must be new treasures.’

  Chapter Sixteenr />
  12 October

  Nine days. Nine days to stop it happening again.

  The date-stamp on the third killing in the French murders was 21 October. Rose put down her tea and reread the old report from 2006. It was pretty sketchy. She needed more. Chasing up the French police authorities was top priority.

  It was nearly ten. Christ, she had needed that sleep.

  She looked up at the sound of Brask’s footsteps in the hall. When he appeared in the doorway she laughed – and shocked herself with the freshness, the sheer spontaneity of it. It felt like something she hadn’t done in a long time.

  Brask blinked at her stupidly. During the night his wiry dark hair had knotted itself into a drunkenly towering up-do, a listing mass of unkempt curls whose waving split ends brushed the door lintel.

  ‘Sleep well?’ Rose asked.

  ‘Uh-huh, thanks.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the small mammal that made a nest in your hair overnight.’

  Brask lifted a hand to his scalp and smiled ruefully.

  ‘I guess I’ve gotten used to waking up alone,’ he said. He shambled into the kitchen. ‘Should I cook breakfast?’ he called. ‘I feel it’s the least I can do.’

  Rose stood, suddenly awkward. Got used to waking up alone? You’re not the only one, Prof. It was a long time since she’d had a man in the house overnight. Self-consciously she followed Brask into the kitchen.

  He was standing in front of her open refrigerator, one hand on the door, shaking his head in mock dismay. Or real dismay, for all she knew.

  ‘It can be hard to keep up with shopping, the hours I work,’ she said defensively.

  Brask smiled.

  ‘You don’t say? I’d assumed the delivery guy from the stale-cheese-and-half-jar-of-mayo store must’ve only just left.’ He closed the fridge door with a whump. ‘Sorry. You know I’m only kidding. My place is hardly any better. Do you have anything edible in this apartment at all, or should I go out for groceries?’

  ‘There’s bread.’ Rose shrugged. ‘And, um, jam. In the cupboard by the cooker.’

  ‘Breakfast,’ grinned Brask, ‘of champions.’