Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  ‘Saints have a habit of making enemies,’ she said. At Adrijana’s blank look she clarified: ‘Bad people don’t like it when people – people like Katerina, maybe – try to stop them doing what they want.’

  Adrijana frowned.

  ‘Bad people?’

  ‘Nitić? Nitić’s gang?’ She watched the girl closely as she spoke. ‘Nitic was very angry about something. Was he angry with Katerina?’

  Adrijana gave her a sidelong look that was tinged with irritation.

  ‘Nitić angry with you.’

  You’re not wrong there, Rose thought, conscious again of the deep ache in her ribs, the throb of her bruised face.

  ‘But the gang,’ she persisted. ‘They work from here, they do their business here, don’t they? Did Katerina know what they were doing? Did they try to frighten her?’

  The grim stairwell rang unexpectedly with Adrijana’s laughter.

  ‘Katerina never frighten,’ she said emphatically. ‘Not frighten of anything. For sure not frighten of gang.’

  Rose looked at her sharply. But her time was up – they were at the fifth floor, and the corridors were suddenly busy with people. It was, Rose thought, like being at the aftermath of an earthquake or a train wreck. The air trembling with sobs and cries. Face after face distorted by sorrow. A man with a pepper-grey beard seized her hand as she tried to pass him by, speaking words she couldn’t understand through a creased mask of tears. A woman veiled and gowned in black sang a haunting song in a minor key. Rose lost Adrijana to the crowd almost at once. Pushing her way through to the door of the Zrinskis’ flat, she saw the other sister, Sofia, leaning in the doorway. She wasn’t weeping, or singing; her eyes were fixed on a distant point, her eyelids half-lowered. She had drawn a dark-blue headscarf over her brown hair and her pale hands anxiously knotted and unknotted the trailing loose ends.

  ‘Sofia?’ Rose pushed forwards, put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. Sofia’s eyes twitched, but she didn’t look up. She said again, ‘Sofia!’ – nothing.

  There was no sign, now, of the girl’s earlier volubility. Shock setting in, Rose guessed. Grief taking hold.

  A rattle of Croatian at her side: Adrijana, emerging from the embrace of a tearful young woman in jeans and a pullover. She shook Sofia by the shoulder, firmly but not unkindly. Sofia looked at her, blinked, murmured a syllable. Adrijana spoke again, jerked a thumb at Rose – Christ, she would have killed to know what the girl was saying.

  ‘Could we go inside?’ she interjected. ‘I know it’s such a difficult time, but –’

  Sofia shrugged one shoulder and turned back into the flat. Adrijana went after her, followed by Rose. She left the door of the flat open – on balance, she thought, it was best not to give the Zrinskis’ neighbours the impression that this was a matter of whispers and secrets. Besides – what was the old line about justice being done, and being seen to be done?

  They stood awkwardly in the Zrinskis’ sitting room. Rose’s beaten body ached to sit down but she didn’t want these girls to get too comfortable, not yet, not while there was still so much she didn’t know – or, more to the point, so much they weren’t telling her.

  Time to target Sofia.

  ‘I was asking Adrijana,’ she said, ‘about Nitić – about the gang? Do you know them?’

  A dull stare in reply, and: ‘Everyone knows them.’

  ‘Did Katerina?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Sofia, did she – was she frightened of them?’

  Sofia didn’t laugh as her sister had, but the ghost of a bitter smile passed over her face.

  ‘Frightened? Katerina? Never. She was fearless.’ Her sharp upper lip twisted in a momentary sneer and she added, as if talking half to herself, ‘Katerina, frightened of Radovan Rakić and his friends? A joke.’

  Rakić. Rose made a mental note of the name. Gang leader? Nitić’s boss? The Leys gang had to be involved in all this, in Katerina’s death – somehow. Rakić was a name she’d heard before. Never with anything good attached to it.

  But the thing now was not to assemble data but to get at the truth, the human truth of Katerina’s life.

  ‘She knew them well, then? Rakić? Nitić?’

  ‘Nitić is a clown,’ Sofia snorted.

  ‘The other man, then. Rakić. The leader? Was he – a friend of hers?’

  Sofia’s face gave away nothing. Rose glanced quickly at Adrijana – caught her looking questioningly at Sofia, as if to ask Shall we tell? or Will you tell? or Dare I tell?

  ‘Adrijana? Katerina and Rakić – were they close?’

  Then to the older sister: ‘Sofia, I need to know about Katerina’s life – who she knew, who she saw …’

  Rose remembered DCI Hume’s order: I want to know who she was fucking – especially that.

  Deep breath. Then: ‘Was Katerina seeing anyone?’ No answer – but she was close. She could feel it. ‘Sofia? Adrijana? Was she in a relationship?’

  ‘No,’ said Adrijana.

  An answer – any answer – was a foothold, a wedge in the crack. Rose forced the girl to meet her eye. Turning up the tough-cop stuff.

  ‘She was, wasn’t she? Don’t lie to me, Adrijana, not now. There’s too much at stake. Anything you can tell me – anything – could help me find the man who killed Katerina.’

  Adrijana bit her lip. One more push, Rose thought.

  ‘It was Rakić, wasn’t it?’ She nodded her head sharply as she said it, watching for the echoing gesture in Adrijana. It never came. The girl held her eye. A tear had appeared on her left cheek. One more push.

  She said it slowly, clearly, as a simple fact – as if she knew it for sure: ‘Katerina was sleeping with Radovan Rakić.’

  Adrijana’s wet eyes blinked, and shimmered, and told her nothing.

  A shriek of laughter burst the silence like a grenade. Rose jumped, spun to look at Sofia: the older sister’s eyes were wild, her mouth thrown open, and the shrill, unnerving laughter spilled from her throat. She clutched at her midriff as if in pain.

  ‘Sofia –’

  ‘Radovan Rakić! Katerina and Radovan Rakić!’

  Rose hesitated. Blown it, was her first thought. Sofia was closer to the edge than she’d realized. She’d taken a shot in the dark – and lost her. But a part of her brain insisted: You weren’t wrong. It said: Trust your instincts. The glances exchanged, the muttered words, the set-up, the feel of the situation –

  She’d hit a nerve. She was close, she knew it, close enough to get a reaction. It was a question of figuring out the detail – and figuring out Sofia Zrinski.

  Sofia’s jangling laugh stopped abruptly. The look she turned on Rose was steady and mocking.

  Take your textbooks on the five stages of grief and tear them up, Rose thought. There’s no second-guessing this one.

  She returned Sofia’s stare icily.

  ‘Do you want to tell me what’s funny?’

  ‘What’s funny is that you know nothing, police lady,’ Sofia said. ‘Except maybe how to make trouble for people.’

  ‘Why were you laughing?’

  Sofia crossed her arms.

  ‘Radovan Rakić is seventy-two years old. He wears a horrible bearskin hat, even indoors, and has a grey moustache full of old food. He smokes a pipe and smells of booze, smoke and cured fish. He trades in smuggled meat and stolen car batteries. Back in Zagreb, he was a petrol-pump attendant.’ She forced a grimacing smile. ‘Him and Katerina. That is what is funny, Mrs Rose.’

  Still there: You weren’t wrong, you weren’t wrong.

  ‘Then –’

  ‘It’s his son you should be talking to,’ Sofia said. She looked at Rose, at her sister, at the ceiling. Then she let out a long, whimpering sigh and dissolved into helpless tears.

  The picture the girls built up, slowly, hesitantly, as the morning shaded into fast-darkening afternoon and the corridors outside grew quiet, was vivid and troubling: Dmitry Rakić, thirty-four, maybe thirty-five; raised in a tough neighbo
urhood outside Zagreb, did time there for robbery, intimidation, arson; hit the UK in 2002, and hit the ground running: the impetus – the demon, Sofia said – behind a sudden expansion in his father’s business. Old Radovan had been in England since the war in Croatia. Unambitious kingpin of a black-economy dealership in untaxed canned goods, stolen motor parts, counterfeit food vouchers and Russian cigarettes, he found that his son had lit a fire beneath him. By the mid-2000s his Thames Valley petty-crime racket had become a trafficking empire – drugs, people, whatever paid a profit – that reached beyond Oxford to Swindon, Bristol, Cardiff, even stretches of north-west London.

  Dmitry himself seemed to offer few surprises: bold, cocky, violent, ambitious. Not bad-looking, considering, Sofia said. A blue-eyed bully. Old Radovan still swaggered about the place with his chest puffed out but it was Dimi who ran things now – everyone knew it, Adrijana said fearfully.

  He and Katerina had been drawn to each other for different reasons. ‘She wanted to save him,’ Sofia said. She shook her head. ‘He wanted – well, you can guess what he wanted.’

  Adrijana piped up quaveringly: ‘She would never, never. With him? Never. She would rather –’

  She broke off, covered her mouth with her hand. In her head Rose finished the thought: she would rather die.

  ‘Was there anyone else?’ she asked gently, desperate to keep the girls with her, terrified that the line might break. God, she was tired – body, brain, everything. How long was it since she’d slept? More than a day. But she had to play this out to the end. ‘If there was nothing like that between her and Dmitry, was she seeing anybody else?’

  Sofia – sounding as spent as Rose felt – said: ‘Maybe. Maybe. A man. On the phone, sometimes – she spoke, she spoke.’ Slowing, grinding word by word towards shutdown, like a tape-player with a dying battery. ‘On the phone. Someone, a man – you can tell. In English. She spoke English.’

  Rose kept one eye on Adrijana as Sofia spoke. The younger sister watched the floor, picked at her fingernails.

  ‘Do you have any idea who he was?’ Rose prompted.

  Sofia shook her head heavily.

  ‘No. But unless he was the devil himself, he couldn’t be worse than Dmitry.’

  The tears came. Not hysterically, as before, not loudly, but from deep down, deep inside – unrestrained tears, and a series of low, soft moans, dragged from the girl’s gut, over and over. Without hesitation Adrijana slipped from her chair and gathered her elder sister in her arms. Rose watched the girls weep, seeing in their unchecked emotion both utter exhaustion and desperately needed release. Interview, she thought drily, terminated.

  She stood, handed them her card, gave them her thanks and her condolences, and left the flat.

  Once in the hall, Rose thought of what Sofia had said: that the last time they’d seen Katerina she’d been leaving the house on her way to confession. Rose leaned on the stair-rail, looking down once more into the five-storey drop. The thought of it made her feel sick: not the drop she’d come so close to taking, but the thought of a woman like Katerina Zrinski, a good woman, a saint, walking out into the world and asking to be forgiven for her sins. Feeling guilty for what modest transgressions she might have made, never knowing that she was about to cross paths with true evil.

  A monster.

  A demon.

  ‘Nitić? The big feller? He’s in with Lel Phillips.’ The desk sergeant shrugged. ‘Been forty-five minutes or so now.’

  Rose swore. There was nothing the bastards wouldn’t try to take from you if they sniffed a headline in it. Nitić was hers – she’d got the bruises, the cracked rib, the pounding head to prove it. She grabbed a black coffee from the machine and stormed upstairs.

  Hume was in the office, signing off the paperwork on a stack of crates seized from the housing block. He saw Rose coming and, putting down his sheaf of papers, raised his open hands in a gesture of mock surrender.

  It didn’t even slow her down: ‘Guv, you have got to be bloody kidding if –’

  ‘Rose, Rose.’ Now one hand was held out in a ‘stop’ sign. ‘I know what you think. You think you’ve landed a plum case and it’s got “DI Lauren Rose” written on the nametag, and here’s fucking Lel Phillips snatching it away from you. Well, you’re right and you’re wrong. It is your case, until such a time as you either solve it or fuck it up. And yes, Phillips is in there with Bernie the Bosnian – and I swear, Rose, I’ll never know how you took down that big cunt by yourself, unless you fed him a fucking horse tranquillizer – but do you know why Phillips is in there, instead of you? I’ll tell you. He took a translator in there with him, did Phillips. Waited half an hour for him to drive over from Wantage. Doesn’t miss a trick, our boy Leland. But I could’ve told him, you don’t need a fucking translator, because I could go in there myself, not speaking a word of the bloody lingo, and I could tell you exactly what he’s saying. Because what that big boy’s saying – as DI Phillips is at present finding out – is FUCK ALL. Which essentially sounds the same in any language.’ He paused for breath, raised his eyebrows. ‘And you’re up here, DI Rose, because you’re going to go down in the history of the force as the copper who helped DCI Morgan Hume nail the Rakić gang.’ A bark of a laugh.

  Rose fought for focus. Hume could throw you like that – if he wanted to, he could absolutely scramble you.

  ‘Dmitry Rakić, guv? You’ve brought him in?’

  ‘Not in person. Haven’t yet had the pleasure. But uniform dug up enough in that Leys shithole to put him away proper. Him and his dad and fucking Uncle Tom Cobley and all, if we want. They brought in five of Rakić’s boys on drugs charges this morning, we’ve warrants out for half a dozen more, and these are smart lads, not shaved monkeys like your thug Nitić, they know what the smart move is – and the smart move is to sing to the rafters. Rakić is history.’ Hume chuckled, rubbed his hands together.

  ‘And – and Katerina?’

  Hume cocked a finger.

  ‘That poor bloody lass is the nail in the coffin for Rakić. Every time we bear down on these fuckers they cry harassment, bleating to the papers, saying we’ve got it in for Eastern European immigrants, that every time we’ve a cold case we haul in some innocent Serbian citizen –’

  ‘God forbid,’ Rose muttered, too tired for diplomacy.

  ‘– but once people hear about what they did to her there’ll be no sympathy. Carte fucking blanche, we’ll have, Rose, pardon my French. Speaking of which – I’ve a press conference to get to.’ Again the strange bark of a laugh. ‘Telly news and everything. Good work today, Rose. I mean it. Now you’ll have to excuse me – Mr de Mille, I’m ready for my close-up …’

  He bustled from the room. Through the office window Rose watched him jog down the corridor, pulling on an ugly green blazer as he went, and disappear into the lift.

  She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose between finger and thumb. Her body needed rest. Her brain needed sleep. Christ, she had nothing left.

  But this case had to be investigated. Katerina Zrinski had to be saved from becoming nothing more than a sensational footnote in the case against the Rakić gang. Rose ran Hume’s scenario through her mind: a Rakić-ordered hit, a jilted lover’s revenge on Katerina …

  But men don’t display their murdered lovers in the way poor Katerina was strung up and mutilated. Neither do gangland executioners, unless they’re trying to send one hell of a message. Though there was also the possibility that the sheer horror of the spectacle was itself a kind of ruse. A panicked lover or impulsive gang member’s attempt to disguise Katerina’s murder to look like, well, like nothing else on earth.

  No, Katerina’s murder was not near as clear cut as the DCI made it out to be. Once you peeked past the surface, little in the Rakićs’ MO seemed to match up with what’d been done to Katerina. Hume was too smart not to see that, once he’d got bored with the limelight.

  She took a slurp of the tepid coffee. It tasted vile.

  At her de
sk, fighting to keep her eyes from closing, she leafed through her notes on Katerina’s last hours. There was the church, of course; she’d call there tomorrow, find out who – if anyone – heard Katerina’s last confession. That’ll be a bloody bundle of laughs. And there was the hospital where she worked: colleagues, employers, patients to interview.

  She could barely hold her head up. Her falling eyelashes blurred her vision.

  ‘Rose!’

  She jerked awake. Hume again, barging into the office, junior officers scrambling in his wake.

  ‘Guv?’

  ‘Rise and shine, Rose. Problem at your crime scene. The girl. We need you there now.’

  Rose nodded, stood, fumbled automatically for her bag, phone, notes, car keys –

  Hume snatched the keys from her.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ he called over his shoulder, making for the door. ‘State you’re in you’ll fall asleep at the fucking wheel.’

  She had to run to catch him up, boot heels loud on the tiled floor.

  ‘You’re coming, guv? What about the world’s media?’

  Hume snorted.

  ‘Fuck the world’s media. Phillips can do it. We’ve got a fucking job to do.’

  The figure approached Little Mouse’s bed. It was not the man he now called Father. It was not dressed in black, it carried no candle. It was both less than a man and more than a man, and it seemed to make its own light. Little Mouse blinked. His sight was still poor. The figure glowed and shimmered like a flame seen through fog.

  At first he was afraid. The priest spoke sometimes of wicked spirits that visited in the night. He had told Little Mouse of devils that stole a boy’s breath as he slept and of the shining ghosts of the winter marsh that were the lost spirits of babies that died without baptism.

  But there was no wickedness here. The approaching figure – it was so close now that Little Mouse could have reached out and touched it – emanated only goodwill, and kindness, and love. Little Mouse felt the goodness of its heart as he had once felt the warmth of a kitchen stove.

  He had come to love the man he called Father. But at the same time he had learned that love was a strange and complicated thing. It was as beautiful as it was frightening.