Chapter Thirty-six
‘You.’ His voice was steeped in hatred and hoarse with grief. ‘You.’
‘Luka Savić, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murders of Caroline Chaudry, David Norfolk and Katerina Zrinski, of the kidnap and attempted murder of Professor Matthew Brask, and –’
It all sounded so inadequate, so weak, in this place, beside the horror of Luka’s crimes.
Luka was already on his feet and backing away as Rose spoke, holding up his hands, shaking his head.
‘Not now, not here,’ he said. ‘Sanctuary. I must not be stopped. I am so close. House of God. Sanctuary.’
‘I don’t think so, Luka.’ Rose moved forwards, maintaining the distance between them at six, seven feet. ‘You have to answer for Katerina. For David. For Caroline. It’s called justice.’
Luka’s lip quivered.
‘I – I delivered them.’
‘You killed them, Luka. Doesn’t your God have something to say about that? You put them through suffering I wouldn’t wish on any living thing, and you killed them.’
‘I purged them of their sins,’ Luka whimpered. ‘I – I mortified their flesh, and –’
‘It’s over, Luka,’ she said softly.
She’d been sizing him up, readying herself mentally for the next move. Yes, he’d overpowered her down in the kitchen basement, but she’d been in shock, in terrible pain, with her ankles bound. Now – well, now she still felt like hell.
But at least this was face to face, on level ground.
He wasn’t a big man, after all. Perhaps five-six, five-seven. A few years older than Rose, she guessed, but that wouldn’t count for much. He wasn’t muscular, but he wasn’t skinny either; he seemed as hard and resilient as wire. Plus, Rose thought, he’s crazy, a fanatic. There was a strength in that, she knew, that she’d be a fool to underestimate.
Forget his child’s eyes, his tears, whatever horrors are buried in his past, she told herself. This guy took down David Norfolk, a farmer in his physical prime, a good man but tough as old boots. Caroline and Katerina were far from defenceless either.
Whatever else he was, this man was a killer and a predator.
She tensed, ready to make her move.
‘I will not fight,’ Luka said. ‘Not here. Not in this place of Christ.’
Rose kept her guard up, held herself on the balls of her feet.
‘Good. Then you’ll come with me.’
The expression on Luka’s face shifted like the surface of a sea in a storm. His mouth gaped and tears again shone in his dark eyes.
‘I was so close,’ he cried again. ‘Only one. I needed only one – to complete my work, the abbot’s mission …’
He was talking about those relics again. Rose felt her temper start to stir.
‘Do you think your God gives a damn about a scrap of bone from a dead man?’
The tears still came, but unforgiving iron entered into Luka’s gaze.
‘You understand nothing.’
‘So you’ve said. But I understand you well enough, Luka.’ She took a pace towards him – he didn’t back away. This was it. ‘Come with me.’
He was almost within arm’s reach. A weeping man-child, small and pale in ill-made sackcloth, trembling in the shadow of the altar’s monumental iron cross.
‘Come with me,’ Rose said again. Then she lunged.
She was expecting him to run and slip out of her grasp once again. She wasn’t expecting him to step in, pivot on his left foot and deliver a punch of crippling power to her lower ribs. As she doubled over, she cursed herself for a bloody idiot.
He’s not a broken kid. He’s not going to run sobbing into your arms.
He’ll do to you what he did to all the others. Remember that.
Now that he’d thrown her off balance, Luka did run.
The punch had given him a few seconds’ start, but Rose, quickly scoping the layout, second-guessed him and cut off the space as he veered left, towards the exit, towards escape. She drove herself forwards with a hand on the corner of a pew and swung herself into his path, forcing him to shift direction. He skidded, turned awkwardly, slipped beyond her reach –
Feet pattering on the wooden floor, he vanished like a ghost into the darkness behind the altar.
Rose, gulping achingly for breath, clawed her way along the altar rail and followed him into the gloom, where she found a metal spiral staircase twisting upwards to a mezzanine floor.
At its base, one hand on the cold iron newel, she paused.
Luka was up there, waiting, knowing that she’d follow him. He knew this place like a rabbit knew its warren. On the other hand, Rose had no damn idea what to expect. He was out of his mind, right on the brink, pushed by trauma and madness to a point where he was capable of anything.
But she was a copper doing her job. So what choice did she have?
She gripped the newel and began to climb.
There was a little light up here, at least. A semicircular window of plain glass let in the dull orange glow of a nearby street lamp. Rose climbed slowly, letting her eyes adjust. This place would’ve been for what? A choir? For members of the congregation? Brask would know –
– but Brask was downstairs, barely conscious, barely alive, hurt, alone, terrified …
Rose couldn’t afford to think about him right now.
The mezzanine stretched the full width of the building, a broad balcony of smooth, dusty boards that overhung the echoing space of the church to a distance of perhaps twenty feet. A decorative wrought-iron rail marked the far edge.
Rose scanned the space. A stack of hymn books set against the wall. Three metal-framed chairs heaped on top of one another. A spatter of white bird shit from an old pigeon’s nest in the eaves.
And Luka. He was backed into the far corner of the mezzanine. The dull light gleamed in his wide, wet eyes.
Rose stopped dead. In the silent church she could hear his breathing: fast, shallow, panicked – that and the runaway gallop of her own heart.
‘There’s nowhere to go, Luka,’ she said. The words rang from the dark beams above.
Luka’s voice came from the gloom, a gabbled incoherent whinny: ‘Jedini. The only one, only one, to redeem, to restore … blagoslovio oca, gone, lost, mrtav …’ He stuttered to a halt.
‘No more,’ Rose said. She did her best to sound strong, but she felt weak, so weak, inside.
‘One more,’ he said.
‘No.’ She began to cross the mezzanine. The boards bowed beneath her feet. ‘Luka? This ends here. There’s no point any more. No point in going on.’
Luka twitched.
‘One more. One more and I will be with my brothers again.’ He grimaced, nodded. ‘With my blessed father.’
For a moment she was sharply conscious of Luka’s madness. His strength. Her own pain. Keenly aware of the long, dark drop to the hard church floor and of what would happen to Matt Brask if she took on Luka and lost. And in this moment Rose hesitated.
Luka pounced.
He came for her throat, his sinewy white hands outstretched and a wild, desperate look in his eyes that had nothing to do with God or Christ.
His right thumb dug deep between the tendons of her neck. The fingers of his right hand bunched to a tight, wrenching fist in her hair. She blocked the swing of his left hand and replied with a jabbing elbow that glanced off Luka’s jaw.
He grunted and snarled something in Croatian. His free hand snaked through her flailing defence. Rose thought he groped for her throat or her face but what he found was her ear. His long fingernails dug into her skin.
She swore fiercely and kicked out. Luka evaded her boot and tightened his grip. Rose felt blood running down her collar. Felt her skin about to rip like paper, like he was trying to tear her ear from her head …
One more?
She thought of the ghastly glass jars, the sick souvenirs looted from innocent bodies. Luka’s relics.
Fuck that!
She slammed her head forwards. Luka recoiled. Rose – with a splintering rush of pain – felt the left side of her forehead connect with the bridge of his nose. His blood spattered her face.
He reeled backwards, across the groaning mezzanine boards, both hands pressed to his shattered, bleeding nose. He mouthed indistinct syllables: roaring, blood-filled noises of pain and fury. Rose went after him. She grabbed a fistful of his sackcloth garment and tried to pin him against the wrought-iron rail, but he twisted, squirmed, like a man having a fit.
She took two hard blows to her head and shoulder from Luka’s hard-knuckled fists. These pushed Rose disorientingly backwards. She swung off balance and then felt the ornate iron edge of the rail press into the flesh of her lower back.
She could see the dying light of the candles at the altar rail, deep in the darkness so far below.
‘You.’
She turned back to Luka, whose blood-splashed face was six inches from hers, whose strong fingers dug like iron nails into her upper arms. He shook her like a dog worrying a rat.
‘You broke it, you spoiled –’
‘No, Luka.’
‘I was so close, so, so –’
‘No.’ Rose tried to shift her body and dislodge the hard point of the rail from the muscles of her back. ‘Not me, Luka.’ She thought fast and desperately. ‘He didn’t let it happen, did He? Your God – your beloved God, He saw what you were doing, and, Luka, He stopped it – didn’t He? He didn’t want you to do it. He didn’t want you to kill those people. He didn’t want you to kill Brask –’
She gasped as Luka, with a grunt, jerked her harder against the rail; she thought of the vertiginous drop into the church just inches behind her. ‘He didn’t want you to kill me …’
There was a crash from the front of the church that made the mezzanine shake. Flashlight beams broke the darkness of the pews below. Shouts sounded as dark figures moved down the naves and aisles.
Munro’s FR team. Finally.
A hissing noise broke from Luka’s throat. He, too, was staring into the darkness beyond the rail, at the probing flashlights. His grip on her arms grew tighter.
There wasn’t going to be another chance.
Rose braced her back against the piercing iron and, grimacing at the pain, forced one foot forwards. She gripped the rail with one grasping hand and drove the full weight of her body against Luka, turning as she did so and bringing up a hand as Luka’s grip loosened to seize the sackcloth collar of his vestment –
And now it was she who held him fast, by his collar and his left wrist, against the rail.
And now, bloodied, tearful, he looked like a broken boy again.
‘Don’t move,’ she said, emphasizing the words with a tug on his collar. ‘Don’t even try.’
Luka shook his head dully. His eyes were blank.
There was more shouting and then the noise of boots on metal. The mezzanine shook with heavy footsteps. Someone was coming up the spiral staircase.
‘I’m okay,’ Rose called over her shoulder.
Another reassuring lie.
Luka mumbled something and glanced backwards at the drop.
She looked at him. ‘What?’ she asked.
‘One more.’
She let her bitterness surface. ‘One more stolen fragment of flesh, Luka? One more mouldy bone?’
His eyes gleamed.
Oh Christ.
‘One more soul,’ he said.
She braced herself for one last, desperate lunge from Luka. She prepared herself to counter the force of his shoulder driven into her chest. She was ready to heave him back – but instead of a fresh assault Luka’s body suddenly went limp. The balance between them lurched, like a game of tug-of-war when one side suddenly lets go. He stumbled like a drunkard back into the rail, his centre of gravity at a tipping point.
Rose snatched for his wrist. Her fingers grazed his sweaty skin and felt it slip away.
Luka fell.
Rose heard a shout from below. An alarmed clatter of boots. Then this noise …
It sounded, she thought in confusion, like the noise of Luka’s arrow entering Brask’s body. A thick, raw noise, a stomach-turning crunch of bone, flesh and iron.
She darted to the rail and looked down. Saw him, lit by groping flashlights and the sputtering candles.
She looked away. In the last few weeks she’d seen enough blood to last her a lifetime.
But as she stared, trembling, into the darkness of the church’s roof space, the image of him lingered before her eyes. Luka’s arms and legs had been thrown out, as if in celebration or release, his body a pale star glowing against the dimness. His robes had been torn away. His eyes were open, his mouth agape in something like a smile. The iron cross of the altar jutted from his chest in a bloody wreckage of smashed ribs and spilling guts. His lips had been moving, saying something, something she couldn’t make out, over and over.
It was Munro she’d heard climbing the stairs. He moved towards her uncertainly.
‘You okay, ma’am?’
Rose stared at the sergeant.
‘Fucking hell, no,’ she said.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Nothing that won’t mend.’ She looked at the grim-faced Scot. ‘Is he dead?’
Munro peered over the railing and made a grimace of his own. He nodded. ‘He is.’
Rose returned the nod, not knowing quite what she meant by it.
‘What – what was he saying? Did they hear what he was saying?’
Munro frowned. ‘Ma’am?’
‘His lips were moving. As he was – after he landed.’
Munro touched his earpiece. Muttered the question: ‘Were there any last words?’
The reply buzzed promptly back; Rose didn’t catch it.
‘What was that, Sergeant?’
Munro cleared his throat softly.
‘He said, “Father.” ’ He looked at her curiously. ‘Does it mean something?’
‘Does anything?’
‘Ma’am?’
She sighed, rubbed her eyes.
‘Never mind. No – I don’t know. Was that all he said?’
‘Aye. I don’t suppose he had time for much more.’
Some people, Rose thought, would say that Luka was free now – free from his madness and his hurt. Some would say that, at last, he was with his lost father, the abbot, and with his murdered brothers of the Order of St Quintus.
Some would say he’d cheated justice.
Some would say he’d burn in hell.
It was all the same to Rose. To her, all that mattered now was that he was dead and gone – it was time to worry about those left behind.
‘The annexe,’ she said quickly to Munro, moving towards the stairs. ‘In the basement – Matt, Professor Brask, he’s …’
She trailed off at the sight of Munro’s face. Grave, sombre. A face with bad news behind it, a face that went with ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you …’ or ‘There’s no easy way to say this …’
‘I know, ma’am,’ Munro said. ‘We already found him.’