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.’

Another:

‘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. Strangled. 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.

‘You were right, Matilda,’ she said. ‘I’ll make this okay. I’ll – I’ll finish this.’

Matilda slowly lifted her head. Replaced her spectacles. Looked up at Rose.

‘I’m always right, my love,’ she said.

Her warm, dry hand rested on Lauren’s for just a moment.

In a way it was a relief. The missing bone: it was something real, something concrete. Weird, for sure – but a hard fact, too, something she could hold on to, hang an investigation on. Too much of this case had felt unreal, hallucinatory, played out in flickering scenes from a nightmare. This was as real as a scalpel-edge and a surgeon’s textbook; this was the work of a man, not a monster.

Rose dialled the MCU office as she crossed the morgue car park to her car. A surly DS took her orders: an urgent query to Interpol, Europe-wide, Russia, Middle East, the Balkans – anything like this in the records, anything with surgery, bones removed, oil smeared on the body, the weird handmade clothes – anything, from any time, anywhere –

Just give me a lead, she thought. Just give me a way in.

As she was fastening her seatbelt, her phone buzzed back at her. A result? Quick work. She checked the message – it was from Hume.

Just a hyperlink. Nothing more. Not that she expected a kiss or a smiley face from the brusque DCI.

She hit the link.

Oh God.

HALLOWEEN COMES EARLY TO OXFORD. The banner headline filled the screen of her phone. She scrolled, stopped – oh Christ.

Katerina. Katerina’s face – Katerina’s head, dangling from Katerina’s crooked dead hand.

It was a grainy shot, bad lighting, an awkward angle, but there was no mistaking it; this was no fake. Rose scrolled to the byline, already knowing full well what she’d see.

There it was: Exclusive report and picture by OLIVER STEVENAGE.

She closed the browser. Swore viciously.

How could she have been so bloody sloppy? And just after the bollocking she’d given Ganley, too. Stevenage, the slippery little bastard, must have taken the picture on his smartphone. What had she been thinking, to confiscate the camera and not frisk him for a phone? Made her feel old as well as stupid. Spotting a pap by his camera was as outdated as spotting a journo by the press pass tucked in the band of his trilby.

The flash that set her running after Stevenage had surely been from the camera, but he must have chanced a shot with his phone first. Then it struck her, painfully, humiliatingly, that there’d been no other light at the scene – except the narrow beam of her torch. So she’d not only let him photograph the scene with his phone … she’d bloody well lit it for him too.

She looked at her phone and waited.

It buzzed. Incoming call: DCI Hume. Here we go. With a tightening stomach, she hit the button to connect.

‘Sir.’

‘You’ve seen it?’

‘Yes, and I –’

‘Then can you explain to me, Rose, what the fuck you think you were doing inviting a cunt of a student journalist to take fucking photographs at my fucking crime scene?’

She closed her eyes, settled in for an old-fashioned bollocking.

‘You can’t be any madder about it than I am, guv,’ she said resignedly.

She thought she could feel the phone vibrate with fury.

‘Can’t I? Can’t I? You’ve no fucking idea how fucking angry I can be when some fucker makes a fuck-up of my fucking murder inquiry.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Rose.’

‘Yes, sir.’

It took Hume maybe five more expletive-strewn minutes to regain his temper. The last tirade ended with a long, shuddering, sulphurous sigh down the line, and a drawn-out ‘Fu-u-uck’. A silence. Then:

‘We’ve told the university to make them take that shit down pronto. They’re on it right now, or they’d better be.’

‘Stevenage’ll love that, sir. A chance to start crying about the freedom of the press.’

A renewed flash of temper.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Rose, what would you rather we did, give him a fucking Pulitzer prize? Jesus.’ A snort. ‘Pull yourself together, Inspector. There’s going to be an unholy shit-storm over this and I don’t intend to take it alone. The press office has already gone into meltdown. Nationals have picked up on it.’

‘I’m sorry, guv.’

‘You will be. Oh, and they’ve given him a name, too, did you know that?’

‘The murderer? What –’

‘ “The Trick or Treat Killer”. Snappy, isn’t it? Clever. Likely to catch on, I reckon.’ She heard him grind his teeth. ‘Fucking hell, Rose. You’d better put this right.’

‘I will, sir.’ She swallowed, nodded. ‘You’ll see. I will.’

But the phone was already dead.