Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  Rose momentarily locked eyes with the tall, arrogant DI. Fat bloody chance of that, she thought.

  Phillips was holding the woman’s bagged-up driver’s licence. He glanced down at it, smoothed the clear plastic of the bag to read the details. His face creased as if he’d smelled something rancid.

  ‘Have fun in the Leys,’ he said. Tossed the bag to Rose, then smoothed the parting in his hair. ‘Take an interpreter.’

  But Rose was looking up again at the brutalized ruin of Katerina Zrinski. Was it someone you knew, Katerina? she wondered. It nearly always was. A lover, a neighbour – even a father or a brother.

  The Leys was an immigrant district. She wondered where Katerina had come from, how far she’d travelled – just to end up here, to wind up like this. Poland, Lithuania, Russia?

  The family would be hard. Family was always hard. She should know: it was a job the male coppers always ducked out of, turned over to the only woman of the team. ‘Job for a female officer, this.’ That was the formula. ‘Needs, y’know, a woman’s touch.’

  Rose reached up to brush the fingertips of the dead woman’s right hand with her own.

  This is going to be tough for your family, Katerina, she thought, and I’m sorry for that – more sorry than I can say.

  Dropped her hand to her side, snapped off the glove, turned away. But not as sorry as this sick bastard will be when I catch up with him.

  Everything is steeped in the vivid red of the abbot’s blood. Little Mouse looks down at his hands: they, too, drip with blood. The dead abbot, sprawled on his back, mouths Little Mouse’s name, over and over. Little Mouse is on his knees. The Serb has made him kneel. The muzzle of the soldier’s gun fills the world. The soldier presses it to Little Mouse’s forehead. The touch of it burns him like a ladle handle left over a gas flame, and he howls. He smells the oily smoke-smell. The monastery is burning, the village is burning – and now Little Mouse is burning, with flames of blood-red that dance and roar and rise and rise –

  His own scream woke him. He jerked upright, wheezing for breath.

  ‘Child. You are awake.’ A voice he didn’t know. A man’s voice. Slow and old and thick with saliva.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  Little Mouse’s head thundered to the pounding rhythm of his heartbeat. He blinked. Was it dark – or was he blind?

  ‘I am here, child. You have found … salvation.’

  Little Mouse jumped with alarm as a match flared in the darkness and the swelling light of a candle illuminated a black-robed figure. He seemed out of focus, blurred. Little Mouse realized that his vision was fogged, a ragged ring of flickering shadow with a small, clear spot in its centre.

  The figure approached, and settled with a murmur of discomfort on the foot of the bed.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You will call me Father.’

  ‘I was shot,’ Little Mouse mumbled. ‘Wasn’t I? I was shot.’

  ‘You were. Is there pain?’

  ‘I – I can’t see right. My eye, my left eye is like looking through smudged glass. And my head hurts.’

  The figure made a disapproving growl. ‘These are small things, beside the sufferings of Christ.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Little Mouse hesitantly. The figure seemed to be waiting. He did not want to anger the figure. He felt that something terrible would happen if he did. ‘Father,’ he added, in a small voice.

  The figure let out a wet breath of satisfaction. Little Mouse shivered at the sound.

  He shrank under his blanket as the candle began to move waveringly towards him. He saw its hooked black wick, the stub of dirty wax and the stained saucer the candle stood in. He stared at the gnarled thumb that gripped the saucer, deeply ridged at the knuckle, the thumbnail an inch long and rimmed with grime.

  Then the candle lifted and illuminated a face straight from hell.

  A pockmarked white brow. Bald head beneath a filthy skullcap. Long black shadows, the shape of graves, beneath high cheekbones. A damp, tangled white beard that clung to the chin and ropey throat. Spit glimmered on a tremulous lower lip the colour of over-boiled liver.

  And his eyes – Little Mouse caught their pale gaze for a brief second and had to hide his face behind his hands.

  ‘How – how did I survive?’ Little Mouse whimpered. He thought of the man with the gun and the dead black eye of the revolver. He thought of the other children, Radi, Mirko, and all the brothers of St Quintus. He thought of the abbot with the coin of blood on his forehead. How many of them still lived? Of all the monastery’s faithful, was he the only one to escape the Serbs? ‘How can it be?’ he wailed.

  The man – Father – didn’t answer. Instead he leaned closer to Little Mouse and said: ‘Are you of the True Church, child?’

  Little Mouse nodded quickly. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.’

  ‘You are baptized and truly penitent?’ the man pressed. ‘Do you love the body of Christ?’

  ‘I am – I do, Father.’

  He glanced up at the man’s face. The terrible pale eyes were wide and seemed to burn like the sun through cloud.

  ‘You will say the Roman catechism.’

  Little Mouse gulped.

  ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth,’ he recited, numbly.

  ‘Again.’

  ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of –’

  ‘Why did God become man?’

  Little Mouse stumbled. ‘That, that m-man might become God.’ Even in the strange hut and under the intense stare of the priest, there was a comfort in these questions.

  ‘Who showed to mankind the path from damnation to salvation?’

  ‘My lord Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Who is your saviour, child?’

  The sob broke, rolling thickly, achingly up through Little Mouse’s throat, and spilled chokingly from his mouth. God is here, Little Mouse realized. Even in this darkest of times and most frightening of places.

  ‘M-my, m-my l-l-lord –’

  The priest bared his brown teeth and leaned closer, his ravaged face so near that Little Mouse could smell onion and black tea on his breath.

  ‘I said who is your saviour?’ the priest demanded.

  ‘My lord Jesus Christ, Father! My lord Jesus Christ!’

  And then Little Mouse was lost in tears. For what, exactly, he couldn’t say. He wept with grief, despair, as a lost child weeps – but he felt a strange happiness, too. Despite how harshly it had been tested, his faith remained true. Through his losses, Little Mouse had found his salvation in Christ’s love.

  He pressed his face into the coarse, unwashed blanket and sobbed in gratitude. Was every brother and boy of St Quintus dead? Of all the flock of the monastery, had the Lord saved only him? He felt a hand on his shoulder. The touch of it was as hard, as strong as yew wood.

  ‘You asked why you are still alive,’ he heard the man say. ‘I will tell you. It is God’s doing. The demon Serb’s bullet is still lodged in your head, but by the grace of the Lord you live. Are you listening to me, child? The Lord spared you so that you may do his bidding, and serve as his instrument. You are blessed, truly blessed.’ The man’s voice had fallen to a hoarse whisper, clotted with emotion. ‘You belong to the True Church now,’ he rasped. ‘Do you hear? You belong to God now.’

  Chapter Two

  The kid slammed into the side of the car before Rose even saw him. She jumped at the juddering impact, swore, flung open the driver’s door –

  ‘Are you okay? What the hell were you playing at?’

  The kid – stick-thin in a hoodie and cheap trainers – gawped at her, swaying against the car’s offside wing. Hollow-cheeked face spattered with angry pimples. Pupils swollen, the rims of his eyelids a jaundiced yellow. He said something: ‘Yurrhh’ or ‘Yohh’.

  What was he, fifteen, sixteen? And high as a bloody kite at seven-thirty in the morning.

  She flashed her badge wearily. ‘You want to watch i
t,’ she said, giving him a steady look. ‘You never know who you might run into.’

  The kid laughed and shouted a few words of gibberish. Reeled off down the street, vanished into the shadows of a rotten-looking tower block.

  Rose slumped back into the driver’s seat and sighed. The Leys. Yeah, this was Oxford, not South London – yeah, her dad would’ve said it was a bloody kiddies’ playground next to the arse-end of Peckham, Bow, Brixton Hill – but still. A bad place, a tough place. A place no one would live if they had a choice. A place full of people who ran out of choices a long time ago.

  She drove on, taking it slow, keeping an eye out, and pulled up in a side road by an estate of dingy-looking brown-washed housing blocks. Checked her notes. This was the address on the driver’s licence. Katerina’s home.

  The usual crap littered the thinly grassed forecourt: a broken pane of glass, a stained, ripped mattress, a carrier bag of dirty nappies, a heap of damp cardboard. The lock on the main door was broken – the door moved sluggishly open at her push. Lobby stank of piss and skunk. Lift out of order, of course. Rose took the concrete stairs two at a time.

  The landings were strewn with boxes, bags, rubbish. Graffiti coloured the grimy walls with a dozen languages. She found she knew the odd word, picked up here and there: lopov, Bosnian for ‘thief’; zeu, Romanian for ‘God’; pyktis, Lithuanian for ‘fuck’.

  And on every floor eyes watched her and voices muttered. Should’ve brought a sign to pin on my back, she thought: ‘I AM NOT FROM IMMIGRATION’ in nine languages. The place buzzed with suspicion. Christ, you couldn’t blame them.

  Rose knew she had to get a handle on this girl, this woman, who up to now had been nothing to her but a horror in an Oxford meadow and a name and a face on a laminated card. It’ll be family she lived with, she thought as she neared Katerina’s flat, not friends. Family’s what matters in a place like this.

  Family makes it harder. Family means real, bone-deep grief; family means tears, anger, denial, blame. But Katerina’s family will be the ones who knew her the best. That’s what Rose needed. No one knows you like your flesh and blood know you.

  On the fifth floor she found the flat and knocked, a proper copper’s knock that rattled the cheap door in its frame. That was for the benefit of whoever was watching from across the hall or lurking in the stairwell, it said Don’t dare fuck with me, and said it loud and clear – but she regretted it the moment the door opened.

  A girl with Katerina’s eyes stood in the doorway, her hand trembling on the latch.

  Rose let her hard front slip a little. Kept her badge in her pocket for now.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. The girl didn’t answer. Just kept on chewing her lip. Rose pressed on: ‘My name’s Detective Insp– I mean, my name’s Lauren Rose. I’m from the police.’ A brief smile to offset the force of the word. ‘Do you – do you speak English?’

  The girl, shivering in her faded pink dressing-gown, said nothing. Her eyes – so palely blue they seemed almost to have no colour at all – shone with tears.

  As if she already knew.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Rose prompted.

  A door opened in the flat and another young woman stepped out into the hallway. Older, this one; a little darker. Less afraid, maybe – but not by much. She was in a thin dressing-gown too. It made Rose cold to look at them.

  The new girl put her hand on the younger one’s shoulder. Sisters: there could be no doubt when you saw them side by side. She looked at Rose as if reading something written in her face. Rose was about to ask her if she spoke English when the girl said a word that was the same in any language.

  ‘Katerina?’ she whispered.

  And in answer Rose could only shake her head.

  There was a moment of perfect silence when the girls’ eyes widened and their faces went taut. Shock? Horror? No, Rose thought as she watched the body blow of this terrible news crash into them. It was despair. Pure despair. When the moment passed the two young women collapsed, wailing, into each other’s arms.

  Rose stepped into the flat and softly closed the door behind her.

  Phillips, damn him, had been right – she should’ve brought an interpreter. Rose perched on the drab sofa while the girls talked between themselves.

  She could guess roughly at what they were saying – grief is grief, wherever you come from – but at best she was getting the message in broad brushstrokes; what she needed was the fine detail. Not just the words, though that would have helped, but the inflections, the emphasis, the nuance – and the words not spoken: the ones that should have been there but weren’t.

  Rose stuck at it for a few minutes. She pegged the language as Slavic, maybe Serbian, Croatian – but she couldn’t make much of it. Besides, after a while, it seemed to her that everything the girls said was overwhelmed by that one repeated word: Katerina.

  Listening not just to what people said but how they said it was an unofficial branch of forensics, and part of every good copper’s toolkit. Here, barely understanding a word, Rose felt as though she’d been deprived of her sense of touch or smell. Lost.

  She got up and walked to the kitchen counter. It barely took her a dozen paces to cross the flat. There was a chunky electric kettle with a frayed lead, a glass jar of teabags on a shelf over the sink. She filled the kettle as behind her the girls talked on.

  They had an awful lot to say to each other, she thought. Of course, grief could take people in all sorts of different ways, but still –

  Rose remembered her mother’s death. It had been quick, as these things go; she died in a hospice three weeks after the first diagnosis of cancer. They were there with her at the end, Lauren, her three brothers, her dad. All coppers, or future coppers. Cracking jokes and swapping stories at the bedside – her mum, too.

  Then after, she remembered, no one had said much. No one had given her a hug, even at the funeral. She remembered, not long after, seeing her dad in the back garden by himself, smoking a cigarette. She’d run to the door, to go out there, talk to him, play with him – but Michael, her oldest brother, had stopped her. ‘Dad just needs a bit of time to himself,’ he’d said, and winked, and sent her off upstairs to play with her toys. She was five years old.

  And that was pretty much it. That was as close as the Roses had ever got to showing grief, real grief.

  Did it mean they cared any less? Did it mean they didn’t love one another, wouldn’t have died for one another, killed for one another? Did it hell. Different people had different ways of dealing with things. That was all.

  She remembered the ache, though – the ache of losing the most loved, the most important person in her life. Of course she remembered it. It had never gone away.

  The click of the kettle switching itself off was unexpectedly loud. The girls stopped talking. Rose turned to look at them. Whatever the detail, whatever the fine print, these girls were feeling the first tremors of that same ache right now.

  ‘I – I thought I’d make us tea. Then perhaps we can talk.’

  The older girl, working her pale fingers together anxiously, took a step towards her.

  ‘Katerina,’ she said, hesitantly. ‘How?’

  A vision of Katerina’s body – spreadeagled, decapitated, defiled, abandoned – flashed across Rose’s vision and she turned back to the kitchen counter, fumbling for mugs in the cupboard, fishing three teabags clumsily from the jar.

  ‘We’re – investigating,’ she said.

  ‘Was it – did she suffer?’

  Turn it on, turn it off. Like a tap, remember. As she poured hot water into the cheap tin cups she carefully composed her face: calm, professional, neutral. She took up two of the mugs and turned again to face the girl.

  ‘We’re investigating,’ she repeated, ‘and believe me, we’re doing everything we can to find out exactly what happened to Katerina.’

  The older girl spoke decent English, it turned out. Her name was Sofia. She was Katerina’s sister – the middle sister. She sat bent
over on a broken cane chair and held her mug of tea cupped between both hands. Her mousy hair had partly spilled from its knot at the nape of her neck. Her face was sharper than either of her sisters’, longer in the nose, with an upper lip that was peaked rather than full.

  Rose sat on the sofa. The youngest sister, Adrijana, was curled beside her, silent, with her knees drawn up to her skinny chest. Her attention jumped from her sister’s face to Rose’s, but her gaze skittered away whenever Rose met her eyes.

  ‘Can you think of anyone,’ Rose asked Sofia gently, ‘who might have wanted to cause Katerina harm? Who might have wanted to hurt her?’

  A quick look passed between the two sisters. Rose made two mental notes: first, something’s up; second, this pair know more English than they’re letting on.

  ‘No,’ Sofia said. When she moved her left hand from her mug to push a stray hank of hair from her face Rose saw that the hand was trembling.

  She changed tack.

  ‘When I came to the door just now,’ she said, looking first at Adrijana and then at Sofia, ‘you knew something was wrong, didn’t you? Something to do with Katerina?’

  Silence.

  ‘Was Katerina in some sort of trouble?’

  Sofia sniffed, and shook her head.

  ‘No. Never.’ Another furtive glance at Adrijana. You must think I’m bloody daft, girl, Rose thought. ‘We didn’t know where she was,’ Sofia went on. Her voice teetered on the brink of breaking. There was strain in it, like the groan of weak ice. ‘Three days, we hadn’t seen her. And we couldn’t, we didn’t –’

  ‘No police,’ interrupted Adrijana in a resentful voice. ‘They say. People here. No police, or else. Who to tell? Who can help?’

  ‘We asked Father Florian,’ Sofia said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our priest – at our church, Church of the Queen of Peace. The last time –’ She broke off. Took a sip of tea, gulped, managed to master her feelings. ‘The last time we see Katerina, she was going to church. For confession.’