Chapter Nineteen

The sky was sunless, sullen, a blanket of ominous grey. It was just after eight and barely light. Rose climbed from her car, flexed her shoulders wearily. She wondered what to expect. Warned herself to be prepared for anything.

They’d shut the crime scene down tight, this time. As if they’ve done it before, Rose thought bitterly. A decisive sergeant had taken charge: the hazy meadow was closed off with police tape and uniformed constables lined the meadow edge, grim-faced and ankle-deep in nettles.

Rose sought out Ganley in the line.

‘Constable.’

‘Ma’am.’

The young policeman seemed to have aged a decade in the past two weeks. Rose gave in to an old copper’s habit: the darker the mood, the more pressing the need to joke.

‘No puke on your shoes today, Ganley,’ she said. ‘I’ll take that as a good sign.’

‘No, ma’am.’ Ganley didn’t smile. ‘It’s me what’s changed. Not him.’

Him.

Rose thanked the young officer for his call before moving off into the field. Grey skies, a bare Oxford meadow … It felt like a recurring nightmare.

There was a sluggish, low-lying mist here that she hadn’t noticed on leaving her flat. Off the river, she supposed; she could see the stooped willows that marked the riverbank half a mile to the west.

And there was this smell – it put her in mind of a summer barbecue.

She stopped suddenly. Her hand flew to her mouth and she gulped down hard on a throatful of vomit.

She knew without any doubt what she was going to see beyond the glimmering police tape. For the first time she wondered if she’d be able to bear it – after Katerina, after Norfolk, after everything.

It’s your job to bear it, Rose, she told herself angrily. She pushed on through the wet grass. With every forward footstep she heard it, insistent, relentless, like a thumping heartbeat: Do your job, do your job, do your job.

The WPC at the tape looked as sick as Rose felt. Rose knew her slightly. She liked her: a solid, smart young constable, transferred from inner-city Birmingham a year or two back. No shrinking violet, well able to hold her own in an argument – or a fight, come to that.

‘Is it as bad as I think it is, Constable?’ Rose asked her, masking her unease as she ducked below the cordon.

The WPC shook her head. When she spoke it sounded as though she was winded from a body blow.

‘No, ma’am,’ she said. ‘It’s worse. It’s much worse.’

This guy’s put the wind up the entire force, Rose thought as she moved cautiously onward. She’d never seen anything like it.

The Trick or Treat Killer.

There’s never been anything like it, she thought.

Up ahead, just beyond a patch of scrub and gorse, a dark-brown patch had been burned in the grass. Circling wide, moving past the scrub, she saw that the patch was the leading edge of a round, ragged scorch mark, maybe eight feet across, and that at its middle was the killer’s latest victim. Murder Three.

We knew it was coming, Rose thought. We knew it was coming and yet we couldn’t stop it.

She put herself in a place beyond shock, beyond horror, because that was where she had to be to do her job. She had to look on the blackened corpse with a clear, clinical eye. Thinking analytically, logically, didn’t make you a robot or a psycho or an ice-maiden, didn’t make you any less human; Dr Matilda Rooke had taught her that.

The victim sat chained to a crudely made iron chair in the middle of a rising column of white smoke. The chair stood in a pit in the middle of a heap of coal, some still dark grey, some spent and white, some still glowing a hellish orange-red.

Watery fat glistened in yellowish puddles around the soot-blackened chair legs. The body was a dark husk. Hair burned off, eyeballs boiled away; skin charcoal-black and creased with blood.

White teeth framed a withered tongue. Another silent scream. Another scream born in unimaginable suffering and enduring through death – another scream that would haunt Rose’s nightmares.

The stench was almost overpowering.

Rose looked down. There was a pool of porridgey sick by her feet. Mike Angler, she guessed. Over the phone Ganley had told her that the stout DS had been down with DCI Hume first thing to view the scene. Angler was a boozer – and this was no sight for a man with a hangover.

Hume was there when Rose returned to the open meadow. He stomped towards her through the grass, blue-black bags under his gleaming eyes, mud on his trouser cuffs.

Rose got straight to the point: ‘Which one is it, sir?’

‘Chaudry’s ID was on the scene.’ The DCI’s voice sounded as tired as he looked. ‘The state of her, there’s no way to confirm visually. We’ll have to wait for Rooke to get her on the slab before it’s official. My money’s on Chaudry, though, even without the ID.’

Rose nodded. She was glad she’d seen the body before she knew that. It was hard to be analytical, hard to see with a clear eye, when you knew that the charred carcass had a name, and a face, when you’d seen her smiling out of a dozen missing-person bulletins.

‘Why’s that?’ she asked.

‘Build’s all wrong for the bloke, Rotheray, he’s six-foot-some, and that poor bastard over there can’t be more than five-six.’

‘How about Canning?’

‘Canning turned up last night. Ran off to Norwich with some old fucking pervert. Back with her family now, all tears and apologies.’ Hume sighed, crossed his arms. ‘So it’s Chaudry.’

Caroline Chaudry. Just twenty-one.

‘I knew it,’ Rose said – without meaning to speak. Hume heard her.

‘Another fucking hunch, Rose? Christ. Fat lot of fucking good those have done you so far. Nostra-fucking-damus you aren’t.’

‘No, guv.’

‘Stick to police work.’ He looked at her frankly from under his scruffy eyebrows. ‘It’s what you’re good at.’

‘Yes, guv.’

‘Keep me posted.’

He walked off across the field, back towards the lane. She could see Angler waiting by the DCI’s car, propping a cup of coffee on the car roof.

Caroline had been a medical student at Oxford, gifted, by all accounts, even by the university’s high standards. Grew up in Bradford – big family in the suburbs. Spent her gap year in Angola, working with a health charity.

Kind, charitable, loyal, generous with her time, well liked …

Rose had known, whatever Hume said. Caroline Chaudry had just felt right.

She thought back to what Brask had said last week – about evil, about how evil is somehow something men do, but not what they are … Bullshit, she thought angrily. This guy, whoever he is, maybe he’s not Satan, not the devil – but if he’s not evil, through-and-through, down-to-the-bone evil, then I don’t know what is.

Funny, she thought. Brask was a priest, a Catholic bloody priest – shouldn’t he be the one preaching hellfire and calling down damnation on the wicked?

And shouldn’t she, the seen-it-all veteran copper, be the one dealing in shades of grey? The one explaining how the world was more complicated than it seemed, how ideas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ weren’t really so straightforward?

But no. In the kind of old-school nick where she’d learned the ropes, bad guys were just bad guys – or villains, nonces, wrong ’uns, psychos, smackheads, scumbags. Walk into a Met section house preaching rehabilitation and you’d get short shrift.

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.