Chapter Nine

Brask pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes until dizzying patterns swelled behind his eyelids. Dig all you want, Inspector Rose, he thought. Find all the secrets you can, broadcast them as far and wide as you please.

I don’t give a damn, he thought. I just don’t give a damn.

He straightened, rubbed at his aching neck. Hadn’t slept. Hadn’t eaten. That morning, in meetings, he’d been barely coherent – his colleagues must’ve picked up on it, if any of them had been listening.

It was how the old saints lived, he thought. Starving themselves, beating themselves, always searching for new ways to make life harder, new ways to suffer.

And why did they do this?

He bent stiffly, picked up the photograph Rose had left on the bench. When he did, he saw again Katerina’s smile. Felt her warmth.

To atone for their sins.

Some of the details of Katerina’s death had filtered through to him – from contacts in the community, from colleagues who’d read that goddamn rag of a student paper. The thought of her suffering bit deeply, and left him aching inside. He’d found himself asking all those desperate, uncomprehending questions – How? Why? Who? What kind of monster could do a thing like this?

The answer had been right there. Rakić.

Brask knew it had been crazy to hold out on DI Rose. He stood and shook himself. He’d thought, like a goddamn fool, that to tell the whole truth about Katerina: about how she’d longed to leave Rakić, about how she’d loved Brask, about all the conversations they’d had, and all the promises they’d made …

At the time, he’d thought that telling DI Rose all those personal things about Katerina would have been a betrayal.

He knew better now. He knew it more clearly, more sharply and certainly the more he thought about it.

The only way he could betray Katerina now was to stand in the way of the hunt for her killer. The only way he could help her was to do all he could to make sure that the man who took her life paid, and paid hard, for what he’d done.

DI Rose, Brask realized with a lurch of self-reproach, understood that. He cursed himself fiercely for not seeing it sooner.

The sound of approaching footsteps in the hall outside made him start. DI Rose again, he guessed – must’ve forgotten something. Come back to give him a little more hell.

It’d be no less than he deserved, he thought grimly.

He reached for the door handle, ready for the knock.

There was no knock.

The door crashed open, the jamb splintering free, the heavy edge of the door slamming into Brask’s knuckles. He grunted and stumbled back, clutching at his desk for support.

The outline of a man blocked the open doorway. The strip light behind his shaven head reduced him to a black silhouette, impossibly tall, impossibly broad. As a reflex, Brask shrank back as the man moved purposefully forwards.

The door behind him banged closed, sagged on its hinges. The light through the blind at the window painted stripes across the man’s impassive face.

‘Brask.’

But it wasn’t the giant who had spoken. A second man, a man the professor hadn’t seen until now, who’d come into the room in the shadow of his taller companion, took a step sideways and then a step forwards. This second man braced himself springily, as though for a leap, or a fight.

Dmitry Rakić. White-faced with fury. Pulsing with intent.

When Rakić spoke again he did not scream or spit but quite calmly and levelly said her name, said, ‘Katerina.’ The name of the woman they’d both loved.

He forced himself to look Rakić in the eye.

‘They know,’ he said. Fear tautened his voice. ‘There’s no point in this. They know it was you.’

Perhaps Rakić did not believe the lie. Perhaps he did not understand. Perhaps he did not care. He stepped forwards. Brask took another step backwards. It wasn’t the threat of violence that caused him to back away: it was Rakić’s eyes. They were wild and senseless. They were the eyes of a madman.

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 wheel 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?’