Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  Coppers of her dad’s generation had a pretty uncomplicated sense of morality, she reflected. Right now she felt that Professor Matt bloody Brask would benefit from a good dose of that sort of common sense – even if it made him sick.

  She was alone in the middle of the meadow, halfway back to her car, when a call came through from dispatch.

  Emergency at the university. College of All Souls.

  Chapter Twenty

  Rose had said that Rakić was smart.

  Brask had thought he was an animal.

  Now the Croatian gangster looked out of his mind.

  ‘Dmitry. Take it easy. Take it easy, now.’

  The Croat’s piercing eyes were bloodshot and heavy-lidded, his chin dark with stubble, his clothes obviously a few days old. But his grip on the gun was rock steady.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is for Katerina.’

  Brask raised his hands. This is what comes of playing at policemen, he thought disgustedly. ‘Don’t. Please.’

  ‘You. You kill her. My Katerina.’ Brask could see a vein pounding in Dmitry’s heavy right biceps.

  Brask shook his head urgently. ‘No. No. Not me. Dmitry, believe me – I’d never hurt Katerina.’

  ‘Liar.’ The man took a pace forwards across the office threshold. Again: ‘Liar.’

  On campus in broad daylight, waving a gun around, making no attempt to hide, even to be quiet: this is a man, Brask thought, with nothing left to live for. A dangerous man. No, Brask corrected himself. Rakić had always been dangerous. Now he was a bomb ready to blow.

  Brask heard a shuffling noise in the corridor outside. Rakić heard it too and, wild-eyed, turned sharply, levelled the gun at whoever had surprised him. Brask couldn’t see who was there but he heard a gasp followed by a low whimper.

  ‘Don’t shoot, Dmitry!’ Brask cried, leaping to his feet.

  Dmitry cocked the gun.

  Between Dmitry and the door frame Brask could now make out the stunned, sheep-like face of Professor Sir Harold Warde-Fowler. A great authority on English religious sects of the mid-seventeenth century. Ninety-two years of age and, unfortunately for him, an early riser.

  Rakić was sighting the gun right between the old scholar’s eyes.

  ‘Dmitry!’ Brask yelled. ‘Dmitry!’

  The Croat looked round. A glaze seemed to lift from his eyes as he abruptly remembered why he’d come to All Souls with a loaded gun and a heart full of helpless rage. The gun swung again through the stale office air.

  Brask backed away. He couldn’t take his eyes off the gun but he could hear – oh, thank God – Warde-Fowler’s footsteps retreating down the corridor.

  ‘Shut the door, Dmitry,’ he said. ‘Come in, shut the door – and we can talk.’

  ‘Not here,’ snarled Rakić, ‘to talk. Here’ – he shook the gun in Brask’s face – ‘for this.’

  Brask’s face felt numb, his legs weak, his gut achingly hollow. How, he wondered, is a man like me supposed to face death? Without protest, without regret, knowing this is God’s plan? Am I meant to just accept it?

  Maybe he would have, before. The last time Rakić was there, Brask hadn’t given a good goddamn for his own life, hadn’t cared whether he died or lived, hadn’t felt afraid, because – God forgive him – he couldn’t see how dying could be any worse than living in a world where Katerina was gone.

  Things were different now. He’d stopped weeping, stopped regretting and second-guessing. Instead he’d started doing something. He was involved in the hunt for the killer now, deeply involved. DI Rose needed him – which meant Katerina needed him. It wasn’t much to live for, wasn’t much to fight for. But it was enough.

  I do not accept it, he decided. I do not give up. He eyed the unwavering gun barrel.

  He’d been playing at being a cop and he knew how a cop would fight: a straight right to the villain’s jaw, a decisive blow to knock the miscreant out cold. You’re not a cop, Matt, he thought. You’re a priest – or near enough. And you know there’s more than one way to fight.

  ‘Tell me about Katerina, Dmitry,’ he said, battling to keep his voice calm. Pretend it’s just a seminar with a student, he told himself. Just a chat over a cup of coffee. ‘You knew her better than I ever did.’

  Rakić bared his teeth.

  ‘You did not know her.’

  ‘Tell me. Talk to me.’

  Beneath his t-shirt, Rakić’s chest was heaving. His pale face was spotted with red.

  ‘What for? What point? Talking not bring her back.’

  ‘In a way,’ Brask said gently, ‘it might.’ He met Rakić’s rabid stare. ‘Remembrance is how we ensure that the people we lose never really leave us.’

  He saw Rakić shift his grip on the butt of the gun.

  ‘I not lose Katerina. You took her.’

  ‘Someone took her. I don’t know who. It was a cruel and terrible thing to do.’

  ‘Then why?’ Rakić blinked. ‘Why? Tell me! Why take her, why take Katerina?’ He moved forwards and kicked the door closed behind him. He leaned his back against the door, as if exhausted, and maybe he was. The gun was still levelled at Brask, but it no longer seemed the focus of Rakić’s intent.

  ‘I can’t tell you why, Dmitry. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Katerina a saint. Never hurt anybody. Who would hurt her? Make her – suffer?’ His voice faltered. The gun bobbed. ‘She was perfect.’ He grimaced. Brask could see clearly the fierce battle Rakić was fighting with his emotions. ‘A perfect thing. For me, in my life. So much stupid, ugly, bang-bang, money, drug. And then – Katerina. A perfect thing.’ He looked at Brask. ‘When she go – nothing. For me, nothing.’

  The Croat blinked again. But Brask saw that it wasn’t enough to keep back the tears. They glimmered in his pale eyelashes.

  ‘Tell me why.’ Dmitry jabbed the air with the gun.

  Why? Countless men of God had spent lifetimes asking that question. Brask wondered if any of them had ever really found an answer.

  ‘Katerina,’ he said cautiously, ‘had great religious faith. Do you think God –’

  The muscles of Rakić’s tattooed forearm tightened.

  ‘God! That govno jedno. Fuck him. Jebi ga. Fuck your God.’ Rakić’s brow was furrowed and beaded with sweat. ‘Katerina, she believe, good girl, good Christian. Always in the church. Always pray. And your God, he let this happen for her? To be killed? Crucify? Her head …’ He bit his lip. ‘Your God is a piece of shit.’

  ‘Dmitry, I know –’

  ‘You know nothing.’ The gun wavered. Rakić rubbed his face with his free hand. ‘Katerina. This man now, his skin? Cut off? What is this?’ He looked Brask in the eye. The madness, Brask saw, had drained away. Now there was only the weariness, the dullness, the deadness of loss. ‘What sort of God?’ Rakić threw up his hands. ‘What sort of God, hey? What sort of world?’

  Brask had no answer. No one did. He felt the nausea of an adrenaline crash climbing in his chest.

  Sirens screamed, somewhere outside. Warde-Fowler’s doing, no doubt.

  Rakić slumped on to the couch by the door. The hand that gripped the gun went limp at his side.

  ‘I love her,’ he said, wiping a thumb across one wet eye.

  ‘I know,’ said Brask.

  One last flash of anger. ‘You? You don’t know. You …’ He tailed off. Gave a broken-down shrug. ‘Maybe you do. Whatever.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Katerina, Dmitry.’

  The Croat looked at him appraisingly, his lively eyes narrowed. Rose was right, Brask thought. Not dumb. Razor-sharp – but hurting beyond all tolerance.

  ‘No,’ Rakić said at last. ‘No. Not you.’

  ‘Not me, Dmitry.’ Brask swallowed. Brushed his eye with his cuff. ‘I loved her too.’

  Rakić dropped his gun. It thudded dully on the floor as the gangster’s face contorted. Brask saw his own pain reflected in the man’s tortured expression. He couldn’t bear it; he buried his own face in his hands, shoulders heaving
.

  Neither of them moved when a loud knock rattled the door. At the third knock Brask called out hoarsely: ‘It’s okay.’

  The handle turned and DI Lauren Rose stepped cautiously into the room. Looked curiously at the two men. We must look like we’ve been having a therapy session, Brask thought.

  ‘You all right?’ she barked at him.

  He smiled sadly.

  ‘I will be,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ‘What’ll they do with him?’

  Rose had arrived ten minutes ahead of an armed police unit. She’d watched with Brask as two gun-toting officers, severe in their smart caps and flak jackets, led Rakić away in cuffs. Now they sat in Brask’s office drinking instant coffee from the college kitchen.

  ‘I doubt that firearm was licensed.’ Rose shrugged. ‘He’ll do some time for that, I reckon, with his record. Beyond that, it’s pretty much up to you. Will you press charges?’

  Brask shook his head.

  ‘No. I can’t see the point in it.’

  The guy takes you hostage at gunpoint in your own office and you don’t see the point in prosecuting? But Rose said nothing. Just watched him. He seemed calm, weirdly so. Not that she expected him to have a fit of the screaming abdabs or a full-blown PTSD episode. But it was something, how he spooned the grainy coffee into the cups without the faintest quiver in his hand.

  He just seemed sad – terribly sad.

  ‘How about Professor Warde-Fowler?’ Brask asked.

  ‘The old guy who phoned in the report? He’s as bad as you, Matt.’ She shook her head. ‘You academics. Said he didn’t want any trouble, wanted to be left alone. He was very polite about it, though.’

  Brask managed a smile.

  ‘He would be. But I think what he really wants is to be allowed to retreat to the seventeenth century and stay there.’

  Rose laughed. Then she leaned forwards, looked at Brask questioningly.

  ‘Listen, Matt – do you want to get out of here? You’ve just been through a hell of an experience in this room. It might not feel like it yet, but –’

  ‘No.’ He spoke decisively. ‘No, I’m not going anywhere. I’m fine. Actually, there’re some things I have to tell you. I’ve been doing research.’ He leaned over, took up a sheaf of papers from his desk.

  Rose nodded and shifted her mental focus. If Brask said he was fine, she’d have to take his word for it. The case was what mattered now.

  ‘More medieval art?’

  ‘More medieval religion. But much more than that. Listen …’

  Rose snapped open her notebook and took shorthand notes while Brask talked. He really had been doing some research. A bloody civil war. A Catholic treasure trove. A forgotten atrocity in a Balkan backwater. This was all getting much bigger than she was prepared for.

  When Brask paused for breath Rose broke in: ‘Matt. Slow down. The Croatian War of Independence was, what, about twenty-five years ago?’ She remembered it only dimly from the reports on the six o’clock news. Bullet holes in concrete and thin faces behind barbed wire. ‘These relics, or whatever they are – they’re long gone now. Scattered across Europe or destroyed outright. Who knows?’

  ‘I know.’ Brask made a face. ‘I can’t make much sense of it. But the bones taken from Katerina and Norfolk’s bodies, removed so carefully, with such delicacy – I’d say this guy’s collecting relics.’

  ‘And that’s our only link?’

  ‘That and the dates. The feasts of St Cerbonius and St Quintus.’

  Rose lifted her eyebrows.

  ‘It’s not much, Matt.’

  ‘I know it. But can we afford to ignore it? It’s three days till the twenty-first, Rose. We’re running out of time.’

  She looked at him sharply. Took a second to twig: of course – he didn’t know. She drew a breath.

  ‘We were wrong, Matt.’

  He looked puzzled.

  ‘Wrong? About what?’

  ‘The date of Murder Three, in France. Remember?’

  ‘Of course. The file said October twenty-first. That was the one with the body parts arranged on the floor of the library. How were we wrong?’

  ‘We assumed that everything went to plan for our guy. We assumed that all the bodies were found when he wanted them to be found.’ Swiftly she explained about the decomposed flesh, the body parts left for three days to be chewed on by vermin.

  Brask frowned sceptically.

  ‘You seem pretty certain about this,’ he said. ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because,’ Rose said, ‘the charred body of Caroline Chaudry was found at a quarter past six this morning.’

  Rooks cawed in the tall oaks beneath a pewter sky. The air was cool and damp, the shingle path spotted with shallow puddles of rainwater.

  At Rose’s insistence they’d left Brask’s office and come out into the grounds of All Souls. She’d felt too cramped in there, too confined – it was a bad place to talk about what they had to talk about. When Brask had started telling her about old torture methods she’d felt the windowless walls begin to close in. She’d needed fresh air, to wash out her airways, to take away the terrible, long-lingering burned-meat stench of the meadow that morning.

  ‘The ancient civilizations of Europe were very inventive in finding ways to torment Christians,’ Brask said now as they walked the winding path behind the towering college buildings. ‘Fire was always popular. Not much effort, maximum suffering.’ His voice was heavy with contempt. ‘A man named Perillus the Athenian, for instance, invented the brazen bull: a hollow model of a bull, cast in bronze. There was a door in the side, through which the luckless Christian was pushed.

  ‘Then the door was bolted and the bull was heated over red-hot coals – slowly.’ He looked sideways at Rose. ‘The victim’s echoing screams were meant to sound like the bellowing of the bull. And the smoke of the burning body issued from the bull’s nostrils, like steamy breath.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘It’s said St Antipas and St Eustachius both perished in the bull. But at least justice was done in the end – if you like your justice Old Testament-style.’

  ‘Perillus came to a bad end?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Shut up in his own brazen bull and roasted to death.’

  It was hard to know what to say. More platitudes about man’s inhumanity to man? No – she was sick of philosophy. And she couldn’t think of a copper’s jet-black joke to break the mood.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said again.

  ‘Leaves you lost for words, doesn’t it?’ Brask shook his head. ‘It’s hard to imagine that scale of indifference to human suffering.’

  ‘Not as hard as it was two weeks ago,’ Rose said darkly.

  She asked about the specifics of Caroline’s death: the iron chair, the glowing coals.

  ‘It was pretty common in the days of the early martyrs,’ Brask said. ‘The iron chair was kind of a thrift-store brazen bull. A lot of Christians were tortured and killed in that way.’

  ‘And they were alive throughout?’

  ‘Yeah. Sometimes they died quickly – the chair would be red-hot before they were chained to it – and sometimes slowly. More often than not the chair would be spiked, too.’

  ‘This is where you rattle off a long list of Catholic saints killed this way.’

  Brask smiled without humour.

  ‘Well, St Lawrence, St Dorotheus and St Macedonius all suffered something similar – roasted on a gridiron. But St Blandina is foremost among those martyrs condemned to the iron chair. She was a slave girl, according to legend, in the second century. She was martyred before a baying crowd at Lyon, in France. Fifteen years old.’

  ‘According to legend,’ Rose stressed.

  Brask tilted his head.

  ‘Sure. Blandina’s legend may be false – she may not have even existed. But these things surely happened to someone. People did these things to each other, just because of the things they believed. This happened, Lauren
– just as surely as what was done to Caroline Chaudry this morning.’

  They walked on in silence.

  Rose had never had much time for ancient history. Wasn’t it a byword for irrelevance, after all? That’s all ancient history now. She’d never been hit by its full force, its vivid reality – until now.

  Real blood, real pain, real wounds. Was that how Brask saw it all? The ordeal of a slave girl in a Roman amphitheatre, the agony of a martyr as the flaying knife slid beneath his skin, the suffering of a carpenter stretched on a wooden cross –

  Perhaps, to Brask, it was all as real as Katerina’s pain, or David Norfolk’s, or Caroline’s.

  As real to him as the death of a young woman on an Ohio freeway a decade ago.

  As real, Rose thought with a lurch, as a thirty-six-year-old woman dying from cancer on a hospital bed twenty-eight years ago.

  ‘All Souls’ Day,’ Brask said suddenly.

  She looked up at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s when the fourth body in France was found. November second. All Souls’ Day.’ He met her enquiring gaze. ‘That’s when you’ll find the next victim.’

  ‘Unless we stop him.’

  Brask nodded. They’d come to a halt in the lee of a yellow-lichened stone wall.

  ‘You have to get the word out,’ he said urgently. He took hold of her arm. ‘Warn people. It’s the only way.’

  ‘A recipe for mass hysteria is what it is.’ She pulled away. ‘And warn them of what? Bogeymen? Things that go bump in the night? We’ve got nothing, Matt. And people here are already on the brink.’ Even the police.

  ‘Can you blame them? They need to know. We have to tell them what we know.’

  ‘How can we?’ She shook her head in exasperation. ‘Matt, what could we possibly say that wouldn’t make things worse? You wait till word gets out about poor Caroline. Wait till you see what our friends in the press make of that, on top of everything else. Then tell me what we need is more panic.’

  ‘But we have to do something,’ Brask protested.