Soul Murder. Daniel Blake

St Paul Cathedral, it read: a foundation of faith, building a future of hope.

      Patrese shuddered, and stopped. Beradino gripped his forearm.

      ‘Franco, listen. You want me to take care of this one alone? I understand.’

      Patrese shook his head. ‘No.’

      ‘Come on, Franco. He was a friend of your family’s, this is the place you just buried your parents. You got a thousand-yard stare on you. Let me handle this.’

      ‘I told you, Mark, I’m fine.’ Patrese managed a weak laugh. ‘Vacant stare’s probably jet lag.’

      ‘Huh?’

      ‘Extra hour’s sleep this morning. When the clocks went back.’

      ‘Yeah.’ Beradino looked at Patrese a moment more, and then shrugged. ‘OK. You win. Come on.’

      The cathedral’s main door was open. Before Patrese and Beradino were inside, they could smell the burning – the piquant aroma of woodsmoke and the half-sweet, half-acrid overlay of charred flesh.

      Patrese puffed out his cheeks and rolled his head in a circle, counter-clockwise and then clockwise; preparing the body for what the mind was about to suffer.

      A few hours ago, he’d been at Heinz Field, watching his beloved Steelers put thirty-four points past the New England Patriots. Now he was at the holding station inside the door, where he and Beradino put on the usual anti-contamination suits, the ones which made the wearer look like a hybrid astronaut cum sewage treatment worker.

      Just a normal day in a homicide detective’s life, in other words.

      The cathedral’s nave comprised five aisles beneath pointed arches and ribbed vaulting. The detectives walked between silent pews and past crime-scene officers and firefighters, men whose concerns – secular, scientific – usually had little place in here.

      Focus, Patrese told himself, with a ferocity which made his teeth clench. Focus. Don’t think about Kohler, and everything he’d been. There’d be time enough for that later. Just work the scene, the way you would any other homicide.

      Kohler’s body was prostrate on the floor, a yard or so in front of the confessional’s ruined timbers; too far simply to have fallen when the confessional collapsed.

      He’d tried to escape. Died on his feet, as it were; gone towards death rather than simply waited for death to claim him.

      You could mix religion up any way you chose, Patrese thought, believe absolutely in the afterlife and kingdoms beyond this realm; but when it came down to it, simple biological imperatives hardwired into humankind made people fight against the dying of the light. It was nothing to do with soul, or faith, or belief; it was the survival instinct, pure and simple, and it was in you for as long as you breathed.

      Kohler looked much as Redwine had; arms raised as though to fight, and clothes – in this case, a bishop’s surplice – melted in patches to his skin.

      ‘Who could do this?’ Beradino said, and Patrese noted the tremble in his voice. ‘To a man of God, in the house of God…’ He shook his head, as though unable to fathom the limitless depths of mankind’s mendacity, and then turned to Patrese.

      ‘I know he was a special man, to you and your family…’

      ‘You could say that.’

      ‘…and so I promise you, we’ll find whoever did this. Just like when a cop’s killed, Franco, we’ll pull out all the stops. That’s my promise to you, right here.’

      Patrese nodded.

      The photographer was snapping dispassionately away, a vulture with a Canon. He glanced up from his viewfinder as Beradino and Patrese came to a halt.

      ‘No chalk fairies, then,’ Beradino said.

      No one could draw chalk outlines round the body or any other object until the photographers had been and gone. Photographs had to be representations of the crime scene as it was when the incident was reported, or they were inadmissible as evidence. A good lawyer could get a case thrown out of court for less.

      ‘None at all,’ the photographer said. ‘You train your cops well.’

      ‘Sometimes,’ Beradino replied.

      Patrese looked around again.

      The fire damage was substantially less extensive here than at Redwine’s apartment. Not only had the fire department been on the scene within three minutes of Grubb’s call, but the confessional had also been set against stone walls to one side of the church. Everything else flammable – pews, pulpits, curtains, altar cloths – was far enough away to have prevented the fire from making the jump.

      Patrese swallowed hard, and again Beradino noticed; he knew, too, that Patrese hadn’t turned a hair at the sight of Redwine’s body, which had been no less horrific than this.

      Patrese looked away, more to avoid Beradino’s quizzical gaze than anything else.

      They set to searching the place.

      There were several ways of doing this – spiraling out from or into a central point, dividing the area into zones, shoulder-to-shoulder along pre-designated lines – but Beradino’s chosen method was criss-crossing. They’d go up and down the room and then side to side, so that every point was covered twice.

      If you missed something the first time, you’d find it the second.

      If you missed it the second time, you were in the wrong job.

      They used tweezers to pick up objects and bag them, and their elbows to open and close doors. The fewer traces of themselves they left here, the better.

      It was lying on the flagstone floor, and Patrese saw it first.

      A piece of wood, with what looked like some kind of sculpture attached to it; and broken, that was clear from the ragged edges, smashed rather than cut.

      It wasn’t hard to recognize what it was. Half the Western world had one.

      A crucifix.

      More precisely, the bottom half of one.

      The top half wasn’t far away. The break ran diagonally across Jesus’ chest.

      ‘You got these?’ Patrese asked the photographer.

      ‘Every which way.’

      Patrese squatted down, pulled a transparent plastic evidence bag from his pocket, pushed it inside out and, with the plastic covering his fingers, carefully picked up one half of the crucifix.

      It was broken, but not burnt.

      Patrese turned it over in his hand.

      It felt solid, weighty.

      Not the kind of thing which would break if you simply dropped it on the floor.

      If you hurled it, yes; but not if you just dropped it.

      He looked around again.

      Nearby, also smashed, were pieces of wood painted in bright gold and red.

      Patrese found three, and could fit them together in his head without needing to check with the photographer again as to whether he could pick them up.

      They looked very like the constituent parts of a medieval icon.

      ‘Mark,’ Patrese said. ‘Look at this.’

      ‘You look at this, Franco.’

      Patrese glanced up; first at Beradino, and then in the direction he was staring.

      Beradino was looking at the stained-glass windows high above them; in particular, at the three windows which had been smashed.

       11:17