Chapter Thirty-four

Rose awoke and the world swam. She turned her head and vomited on the floor.

Where? What?

The pain in her head was unbearable. It was more, so much more than a headache. It screamed, pounded and tore at her nerves.

Luka must have been hiding. He must have seen her arrive and been waiting for his chance to attack her. All that time he’d been lurking in the dark while she talked to the old priest and …

The old priest. Had Luka attacked him, too? Was Father Florian yet another victim Rose was responsible for?

Christ, her head hurt.

And it wasn’t just the pain. She felt as though she were drowning in a dense fog of oily perfume. She gagged, coughed. The smell was all too familiar. Katerina. The bones. Balsam.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Tried to think – tried to block out the pain, block out the fear, and think.

The floor was painfully hard under her hip, knee and elbow. She could see now that the tiles she lay on were red. She definitely wasn’t in the church. So where the hell was she? And how long had she been here?

What light illuminated the room was faint, tremulous. In front of her there was a stained white-papered wall and a dusty skirting board. She shifted her position, to try to get a better look at her surroundings.

Steel counters. A grease-spotted intake rising to the ceiling. A faint, bitter odour of fried onion.

She must be in the kitchens, Luka’s kitchens, in the annexe to the church.

She was in Luka’s kitchens.

Panic surged in her chest.

This was most likely where he’d beaten and decapitated Katerina and flayed David alive, and Rose couldn’t move her arms or legs.

Her wrists were tied behind her back, her ankles bound tightly together. She struggled, jerked – felt not an inch of give, not the slightest sign of weakness. They felt like old fibre ropes, with none of the smooth feel of nylon, but they were well tied.

She subsided. She’d seen Luka’s handiwork before, after all. The bastard was nothing if not thorough.

Best to save what strength she had. It wasn’t much – but it was all she had.

When she rolled on to her left side the light pushed a spike of pain through her eyes, into her head. Candles, more candles, two dozen or more. These weren’t the grubby tallow of the ones at Luka’s shrines but tall, brightly burning pillar candles of blood-red wax. Their light was agony to her pounding head. She clenched her jaw and rolled away.

But it wasn’t just because of the bright flames …

Beyond the candle flames she’d glimpsed a vision as from a gallery of medieval art: a man, stripped bare, bound with his arms behind him to a post, a dark-wood pillar that ran from floor to ceiling. He looked bloodlessly pale. His skin gleamed with oil and his head lolled to his chest. Lit from below, sacrificial, terrible.

St Sebastian the martyr.

Professor Matt Brask.

‘Matt!’

Rose was surprised to find she had the breath in her lungs to call out his name. She managed to squirm on to her back. Above her, a bare grey light bulb, ancient polystyrene ceiling tiles and a wavering circle of candlelight.

‘Matt? Can you hear me?’ She steeled herself to turn her head back towards the light, towards Brask; again the fierce light jabbed at her and her vision blurred. All she could see of the man bound to the post was the dark spot of his head.

It was moving.

‘Matt!’

‘Katerina?’ His voice was slurred, broken, but still Brask’s. He was trying to lift his head.

‘Matt, it’s Inspector Rose – it’s Lauren.’ She blinked, winced. ‘Where – where is he?’

‘Get out.’ Brask spoke like a man trying to make himself heard in a hurricane or a snowstorm. The words were indistinct but the terror in them rang like steel on stone. ‘Lauren, get out – it’s not safe, Katerina, my darling, it’s … it’s not safe – he’s coming …’

Rose wondered what Luka could have done to Brask to reduce him to this state. Then, in her head, she heard Matilda Rooke’s kind, sad voice: You were hungry, weren’t you, Katerina? Hadn’t eaten …

The man hadn’t been beaten, poisoned or drugged. Just starved half to death. Barely an ounce of strength left in his body – and he’d used it, not to cry out for help but to try and warn her. To try to save her.

Her and Katerina.

‘Hold on, Matt,’ she called. She heard the fear in her own voice. ‘Just hold on.’

There had to be a way of getting free, getting out. Had to be.

There was a row of stripped-back steel counters running along the wall beyond the circle of candles. This is a kitchen, Rose thought hurriedly, so there must be, what, knives, cleavers?

No way of knowing where they were. No way of getting to them, with her ankles tied. No way of using them, with her wrists tied. No way. No use.

Think, Lauren. Think.

Again she heard Brask’s broken voice, thick with dread: ‘He’s coming …’

Soft, barefooted steps sounded on the tiles behind her head. The effort of craning her neck made her want to scream.

A silhouette. A man’s dark shape against the inferno of candles. Him. Luka.

‘It is almost time,’ he said.

He sounded grave, solemn – but there was the tautness of intense emotion in his voice, too.

Luka padded across the tiles to the edge of the circle of candlelight. He lowered himself to the floor in front of Rose and crossed his legs.

‘I want,’ he said, ‘to explain.’

Rose looked at him and he met her gaze without hesitation. Her gut tightened nauseatingly. He had child’s eyes. They were the haunted eyes of a damaged boy in the worn face of a forty-year-old man. She could see the gleam of perspiration on his shaved scalp and in the pit of his throat.

There was a smear of black on his brow. Ashes.

He wore a robe of hessian. Sackcloth, just like the fabric that had clothed Katerina, cloaked David and now swaddled Brask’s waist.

Luka, she saw, was a penitent – in his own eyes, at least. A miserable sinner, seeking redemption.

This was his idea of redemption?

Rose’s body stiffened as a fresh wave of pain ran like a harrow through her head. Holding her head up was too much; she let it fall to the hard tiles, grunted and closed her eyes. Her hands, bent under her body, ached with cramp.

She listened to the thunder of her own heartbeat.

Then Luka spoke again.

‘I want you to understand,’ he said. ‘I want – I want you to see. Because I understand you, Lauren Rose. I know that you are afraid and I know why. I want to take away your fear, and take away your pain.’

Muscle spasms shook her shoulders. Then untie my fucking hands.

‘What I do,’ Luka said, like it was his job, like he was a quantity surveyor or a lab technician, ‘is enable the truest expression of God’s love.’

Rose felt sick.

‘Martyrdom.’

‘Yes.’ She could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Professor Brask has taught you well. Through martyrdom, the elect – the deserving ones – enter into the shining glory of Christ’s kingdom.’

Rose opened her eyes again, to look at Luka.

‘All you do is cause pain and hurt,’ she told him. ‘Suffering, Luka, is what you enable.’

He nodded seriously.

‘That is a part of what I do, yes. The road to salvation is a hard one to travel. But I believe that – in the end – the blessed ones I lead along that road are grateful to me.’

Rose laughed harshly.

‘You believe? You mean no one has ever said thank you?’

Luka frowned, compressed his lips into a stern line.

Then he said: ‘You should be happy. If Professor Brask is your friend, you should be glad that he is to be saved.’

‘I guess I’m not a very good Christian.’

Luka shook his head.

‘Indeed you are not.’

‘Then where do I fit in, Luka?’ She struggled to sit up, to meet his eye. ‘I see what part Professor Brask plays in all this, but what’s my role here? How does kidnapping a policewoman fit into Christ’s plan?’

Luka’s eyes narrowed.

‘The Devil places many obstacles in the path of the righteous,’ he said.

‘Then I’m an agent of the Devil?’

Another sombre nod.

‘You do not even know it – I see that. It is often this way. You think you are on the side of good. Perhaps even on the side of Christ. But you do Satan’s work.’

He rose to his feet, lithely, an athletic man in spite of his slight frame.

‘Now there is work to do,’ he said bluntly. ‘The last martyr must be prepared.’

Rose watched as he moved to the ring of candles. Brask, she saw, was quite still. Luka took a tray of jars from the kitchen counter and set it with a gentle clink on the floor. He made the sign of the cross and murmured to himself – a blessing, a benediction, Rose supposed.

She heard him say ‘pater’, ‘father’. Then ‘Cerbonius’.

The long-dead abbot of St Quintus.

Luka’s religion – or whatever the hell you wanted to call it – was a thing of chaos, Rose saw, a monstrous creation, a chimera pieced together from the shattered wreckage of a traumatized boy’s mind.

She squinted at the jars. They shimmered with reflected candlelight but inside she could see dark shapes suspended in clear fluid. In one, the outline of what may have been a finger bone. In another, what looked like an incisor tooth, the long root broken off halfway.

The relics. Body parts from Katerina, David, Caroline, the victims in France. She made a quick count. Eight of them – and a ninth left empty.

Eight?

Three English victims so far. Four in France. And yet eight relics?

She narrowed her eyes, peered again at the relics. In the smallest jar, a flattish, uneven shape floated horizontally, like a dead fish. It was an ear.

The stark black-and-white image flashed into her mind. For a moment she’d forgotten the priest: the old priest who was carved up and hung from a tree in a Croatia convulsed by war. The priest who was missing an ear. The priest, Mrs Matić had said, who raised a demon in his house, loved it, nurtured it, until it devoured him.

Eight relics then. The ninth would be taken from Brask.

‘Luka.’

The cry escaped her almost without her meaning it to.

He turned to her, his face a shifting map of dark hollows in the candlelight.

‘What we do is sacred. There must be no more interruptions.’

‘Father Florian called the police,’ she improvised desperately. ‘A firearms team is on its way.’

Luka shook his head slowly.

‘Father Florian is a most righteous man,’ he said. ‘He will do nothing to stand in the way of Christ’s work.’ He glanced briefly at Rose. ‘I am sorry he had to strike you. But the wrath of God was within him.’

Florian! Florian, the first link in the chain. The old man knew! He’d known from the start.

Rose tried to hide her dismay. She could have stopped it all that very first day, that first bloody day; she could have pulled Florian in, leaned on him, made him talk. By Christ, she’d have made him talk, if she’d had any idea what he knew. Then he’d have led her to Luka.

That would have saved David Norfolk and Caroline Chaudry.

It would have saved Matt.

‘The police are coming,’ she managed to say. ‘They’ll have this place shut down tight, Luka. They know you, know all about you. You won’t escape.’

Luka went on fiddling with his jars.

‘Escape,’ he murmured, ‘is not a part of the plan.’

Rose struggled for words, something to trap Luka, outwit him, confuse him, make him see the madness in what he was doing.

She fought against saying the words that rose in her throat. Help. Please. No.

‘Luka, talk to me.’

‘There is nothing more to say. Now I speak only to God.’

Rose wished Brask would wake up, produce a smart argument, a theological paradox or a clever moral theory to cut through Luka’s insanity. Because what hope did she have on her own? What was she, but a career copper with a copper’s education? Not much of a reader, certainly no scholar and not a religious bone in her body. She’d never believed, never had much time for airy guesswork about God and the afterlife, never set much store by what people called ‘faith’. Rose had learned to stand on her own two feet, to trade in facts, to face the hard realities of every day full on and fearless. She’d never had anything to fall back on – except the truth.

The one thing, maybe, that Luka was afraid of.

‘It won’t change anything,’ she said sharply.

Luka had been on his knees, unwrapping something tied up in a sheet. She guessed what it was from the shape of its long, taut curve through the fabric. Now he paused, looked at her.

‘It won’t change anything,’ she repeated. ‘Whatever you do, to me, to Brask, it won’t … it won’t bring Abbot Cerbonius back.’

A spasm of anger passed over Luka’s face.

‘You do not say his name.’ He stood. Rose saw that his hands were quivering.

‘He’s gone, Luka.’ She kept her voice level, detached, cold as concrete. As hard as the facts themselves. ‘Nothing can bring the abbot back. All the killing, all the blood and bones – it won’t help.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘The abbot is dead in the ground. Gone. Gone for good.’

Luka’s lips curled in a grimace.

‘And you say you are not Satan’s thing.’

‘It’s the simple truth.’

‘So says the Father of Lies.’

‘I think you know what’s real and what isn’t, Luka,’ Rose insisted. ‘The abbot is dead, the monastery burned to the ground, the relics are dust – you know these things.’

‘No.’

‘That’s why you hide. In your “religion”. Say the holy words, block out the truth. Live in the past, try to pretend what happened didn’t happen. You say escape isn’t part of the plan but that’s not true, is it? Escape is what all this is about. Escape is all you want. Escape from what happened at Niza, what happened to you.

‘And now you try to drown the truth in blood, the blood of innocent people. But underneath it all – you know what’s real. You know what you’re hiding from.’

‘No.’

Luka turned his back to her, dropped again to his knees. He threw aside the tangled sheet.

The fine-grained wood of the bow shone in the candlelight. Rose saw the glinting steel tips of half a dozen arrows. Luka, his hand trembling, thumbed the bowstring gently and it sang a soft bass note.

‘It isn’t real, Luka!’ Rose shouted, her self-control snapping. ‘None of this, it’s not true, it’s not real!’

Luka picked up the bow and a long-shafted arrow. Turned the arrow over in his hands. Its point was barbed and savage-looking. He stood, the bow in his left hand, the arrow in his right; he handled the weapons expertly, with confidence.

The shadows of his movements flickered across the tiles.

‘You will find,’ he said softly, ‘that it is real enough.’

In a single movement, fluid and well practised, he stood, turned, nocked the arrow to the bowstring, drew with a soft grunt of effort, aimed and fired from point-blank range.

The arrow point plunged into Matt Brask’s body.

Brask screamed, his head jerking up.

For a moment a fine mist of blood darkened the air over the shimmering fire of the candles.