Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  If you didn’t know better, you might almost think he gave a damn. She’d thrown down the paper thinking that Stevenage had almost achieved the impossible: making her want to defend Dmitry Rakić.

  National press were making their presence felt, too. Crime reporters from most of the major dailies had been nosing around headquarters. So far Hume had kept them away from her – or her away from them.

  She shifted in her seat for the thousandth time, trying in vain to get comfortable. Took a mouthful of tepid bottled water and wondered whether the corner shop on Davenport Road would be open yet.

  She checked her watch: barely eight. The light of a TV screen had glowed in Rakić’s window all night. All quiet on the Western Front.

  Her phone went off like a grenade.

  ‘Christ.’ She laughed at herself, at her own jumpiness – her dad wouldn’t have known whether to laugh or cry, seeing her startled out of her wits by a bloody ringtone.

  Fumbled for the phone in her bag, hit the green button.

  ‘Rose here.’

  ‘Ma’am?’ She knew the voice – struggled to place it. ‘Ma’am, it’s PC Ganley.’

  That was it: the awkward copper who’d made a bollocks of her crime scene. She hardened her voice, only barely aware that she was doing so.

  ‘What is it, Ganley? Something up with your radio?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’ His voice wavered as though on the brink of breaking. Poor lamb, she thought uncharitably. Someone steal your BMX? Beat you up for your lunch money? She’d heard Phillips say that, with some young coppers, when they said ‘ma’am’ they really meant ‘mummy’. There was something in that.

  ‘Then what the hell’s the matter, Constable?’

  ‘There’s something – something I think you should see, ma’am.’

  Rose’s skin prickled.

  Oh God.

  ‘It’s –’ The PC paused. She heard him gulp. Then he said: ‘Ma’am, it’s another one. Ma’am – the bastard’s done it again.’

  Rakić would hear the squeal of tyres and the urgent rev of the engine but Rose didn’t give a shit about that now. This had nothing to do with Rakić – oh Christ, none of this had anything to do with Rakić, none of it ever had – she’d known it, she’d known it.

  The man had been under the closest surveillance for three damn days, and now another innocent person lay dead.

  Rose slammed her palms against the steering wheel. That stupid, pig-headed bastard Hume! And Phillips, with his certainty, his self-satisfaction, his know-it-all sneer –

  All this time the murderer had been out on the streets, out in the open, stalking his victim. This was the time they might’ve got him; this – when he’d broken cover, was taking risks – had been their opportunity. And where’d she been? Eating bloody crisps and watching an insomniac thug drink himself stupid in front of the TV.

  It was still early, the traffic starting to build up but not yet at its rush-hour peak. She jumped a red light on the Botley Road and gunned the engine hard down the A34. PC Ganley had given her a location south of the city. A field, he’d said. A field, and a stand of trees.

  When she pulled up on the worn verge of a nowhere B-road a little way east of Boars Hill, the first faces she saw were those of DI Leland Phillips and DCI Morgan Hume. Ganley had told her, with an apologetic dip in his voice, that the pair of them would be there – ‘but I thought you ought to be told, ma’am,’ he’d added.

  It was a snub, an obvious signal that she was being sidelined. Wasn’t this her investigation? On another day she’d have leapt out of her car spitting fire.

  Not today.

  Phillips was white-faced. Hands in his pockets to hide the shakes. Nothing but pride keeping his chin up. Hume, meanwhile, simply looked knackered, utterly spent – twenty years older than the dynamic DCI she’d seen the day before.

  Rose hadn’t time to hold anyone’s hand – least of all her boss’s.

  ‘Guv. What have we got?’

  Hume shook his head.

  ‘God knows.’ A drawn-out sigh. ‘Fu-u-ck. Go and have a look.’ He pointed over to the police cordon at the edge of the stand of spindly birches.

  Rose gave herself no time to think, to wonder, to imagine. She headed off at a brisk pace across the yellowish sheep-cropped grass.

  Phillips called after her: ‘Brace yourself, Rose.’

  Rose tried to ignore him. Walked on towards the shivering trees. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than Katerina, she told herself as she ducked under the twanging police tape.

  She was wrong.

  There was a D-shaped clearing on the edge of the wood, like an inlet cut into a coastline. Rose stood in its middle, her nostrils filled with the smell of blood. The semicircular curve of pale trees hemmed in her horizons and drew her gaze naturally towards a central point – the point straight ahead of her.

  She faced it. She stared it down.

  It had been a man, once. Now it was a smear of deep red with bared white teeth. Raw flesh against grey bark. Twisted hands cupped limply around the clean head of an iron nail.

  Rose moved towards the thing. The leaf mould was spongy beneath her feet and smells of rot and fungus mingled with the metallic stench of blood.

  He’d been skinned. He looked like a thing on a butcher’s counter. His blood-red flesh was dotted with small black flies. His arms had been wrenched over his head, his hands fixed to the tree trunk with a single nail. He was oddly dressed, robed in a heavy, greasy fabric – an untreated animal hide, Rose guessed. She thought of the animal bones left in Brask’s office.

  She took a step nearer, leaned in for a closer look –

  The realization hardened quickly in the pit of her stomach: no, not an animal hide. She gulped down a mouthful of bile. It was the man’s own skin, draped across his shoulders, coiled about his waist and bound in a loose knot in front like a loincloth.

  A wide bolt of hessian, marked with black blood, hung round the man’s neck. Its ends dangled to the floor.

  Rose felt the blood rush from her head, but she steadied herself. She forced herself to lift her eyes and meet, again, the dead stare. All humanity had been flayed from the face, the nose, brows, lips torn away. And yet –

  And yet there was a terrible, unbearable expressiveness in the muscles and tendons that remained. It spoke of horror. Of despair. Of pain.

  She’d wait for Matilda Rooke to give the official verdict but, on looking into the staring lidless eyes of the thing nailed to the tree, Rose already knew for sure: the skin had been ripped from live flesh. Whoever had done this had done it to a living, breathing man.

  She knew it, but she couldn’t contemplate it. This astonishing cruelty. The inhuman horror of it. She swore under her breath and stepped back. Took a last look at the skinless skull frozen in a silent scream. Turned away.

  Hume and Phillips talked her through what they knew.

  ‘David Norfolk, forty-eight years of age.’ Hume, slumped in the front seat of Phillips’s car like a pile of dirty washing, wagged a driver’s licence wearily. ‘Lived locally, if this is up to date.’

  ‘We found that by the tree,’ Phillips supplied. ‘Couldn’t miss it, really. No accident – he wants us to know who these people are.’

  ‘Like with your Miss Zrinski.’

  Rose said: ‘It’s the same guy.’

  It wasn’t a question.

  ‘We’re running checks on Mr Norfolk,’ Hume said. ‘Older than Katerina Zrinski, different sex, different nationality. Maybe they’ve something in common but my guess is not.’

  ‘No pattern,’ Phillips put in self-importantly. He’d recovered some of his old bulletproof arrogance.

  Rose murmured: ‘Yet.’

  They were quiet for a few moments. And Rose knew what Hume and Phillips were thinking. It was the same thing she had herself been thinking as she walked away from what was left of David Norfolk. A phrase that loomed above them as large as the horizon but no one dared utter. It was always the way.
Her oldest brother, Michael, had told her about it; he’d been a DC down in Wandsworth, back in the early nineties, when some nutter had made a name for himself stabbing sex workers. Of course it was all over the papers but at HQ it was like a dirty word.

  Serial killer.

  The thing no one wanted to say, wanted to admit. The bleak reality no one dared confront.

  Hume rubbed at his face with both hands. In front of her, in the driver’s seat, Phillips was pinching colour back into his cheeks.

  ‘What next, guv?’ Rose prompted. Was she the only one with a sense of urgency? Could no one else see that it was only a matter of time before this happened again? Another innocent tortured and defiled. Another horror nailed to a wheel or a tree in an Oxford meadow.

  Hume looked at her. An old man, she thought, bitterly, resentfully. A tired, beaten-up, defeated old man.

  Did he understand what he’d done? Did he realize that by single-mindedly going after Rakić, by letting his own prejudices lead him by the nose … did he know what that had cost David Norfolk?

  Of course he bloody well did. It was written all over him. Well, she hoped it made him sick.

  ‘Any ideas, Inspector?’ he said.

  Rose felt her blood rise. Her stomach clenched like a fist.

  Now it’s my case. Now you need my help. She was on the brink of yelling in the old copper’s face: Why wasn’t I called in straight away? Why did you think this was a job for your fucking boys’ club?

  The radio crackled. Hume took the call.

  A report from the university, Rose heard. Another body. This one on a roof.

  One name, one face sprang sharply into Rose’s mind: Brask. She was out of the door and running for her own car before Hume had said a word.

  Little Mouse and the priest kept to the dark places.

  ‘Christ’s light burns brighter to the soul in shadow,’ the priest had muttered cryptically.

  Many had come to the village from the towns to the east, burned out and brutalized by the rogue Serb units. They slept in the ruins of the monastery. Little Mouse saw their pale faces at the windows. They were hungry, he understood. Hungry, wounded, sick and homeless.

  The priest called them izbjeglice – refugees.

  If his country wasn’t delivered from the demon Serb, none would survive. The True Church would fail. Little Mouse understood this now.

  They watched the woman, Olga, move among them. To some she brought baskets of food, just as she had brought to the priest’s hut. To others she gave blankets or wood to make a fire. And where people were hurt, she helped as best she could, changing bandages, supplying medicine, all the while murmuring kind words, words of comfort.

  The priest’s pale eyes shone like moons as he watched.

  ‘A saint,’ he whispered, over and over. ‘A saint.’

  This Little Mouse did not have to be told. When he turned his head and let the image of the woman filter through the black smudges at the edge of his damaged vision, she glowed like a burning brand. A holy light. Christ’s light.

  A most special soul, he thought. A most special and deserving soul.

  A saint.

  Chapter Twelve

  It felt like a cross between a train crash and a rock festival.

  ‘Police. Move aside, please. Police. Make room.’

  With her sharp elbows and her hard-edged copper’s voice, Rose forced her way through the crowd of students. There was a sense of dread here, she felt, real fear in some of the upturned faces – but there were rubberneckers, too, gawping, laughing and taking photos with their phones.

  She’d seen it as soon as she’d turned into Radcliffe Square: a black silhouette on the roof of the building they called the Camera, perched at an awkward, ungainly angle, like a giant crow against the morning sky.

  Brask had been her first thought – but if Brask was in danger it was Dmitry Rakić who was the threat, and Rakić hadn’t been anywhere near the university. She was sure of that, at least.

  Then she’d thought of Olly Stevenage. He’d managed to make an enemy of Rakić, back in Katerina’s meadow, but for a guy like the Croatian gang leader the kid was surely small fry, an irritant, a mosquito bite – not worth going to any trouble for.

  But the killer might be of a different mind. It was anyone’s guess how many people in Oxford Stevenage had managed to piss off. Maybe – not knowing who he was dealing with – he’d pushed his Trick or Treat Killer too far, too many times.

  Rose reached the front of the crowd and squinted up at the unsettling shape. It was cloaked in black cloth; Rose noted with a rush of nausea that under the cloak its proportions were out of whack, the limbs misshapen, the pose unnatural, the angle of the head all wrong.

  Whoever had beheaded Katerina Zrinski and flayed the skin from David Norfolk had done a real number on this poor bastard, she thought.

  A paramedic balanced precariously on a roofer’s ladder, trying to make his way up the domed roof to where the cloaked body was fixed. He was a lean guy, bearded, with a climber’s build. In the grip of a cold, aching tension, Rose watched him fumble for a handhold. He was four storeys up, forty metres or so off the ground. One slip and he was history.

  All around her the university security team were doing an amateurish job of trying to disperse the heaving crowd of students. But Rose was barely aware of the shouts, shoving and juvenile heckles. In her mind she was up there with the paramedic – with him, and with whoever was under that forbidding black cloth.

  The paramedic was off the ladder now, inching his way up the Camera’s ridged dome. Rose tried to zero in on him, see what he was seeing, feel what he was feeling. You think they’re alive under there, don’t you? she thought. Or maybe you just hope they are. Because there’s always a chance, right? That’s why you do what you do. You know there’s always a chance. You haven’t lost hope.

  Rose watched the man climb, and burned with something like admiration and something like envy. She couldn’t find any hope for the poor figure cloaked in black.

  She glanced across to the foot of the ladder where the man’s colleagues were gathered anxiously by the open doors of a backed-up emergency ambulance. An approaching fire-engine siren skirled over the hubbub. The man on the roof stayed calm, moving inch by inch. Rose could see the paramedic’s mouth moving as he drew close to the cloaked figure: telling whoever was under there that things would be okay, that he was there to help.

  Silence settled on the crowd as the paramedic steadied himself and made sure of his footing. The black cloak fluttered gently in the breeze. A camera clicked. Someone at Rose’s shoulder murmured something, maybe ‘Oh God’, maybe ‘Please, God’.

  The paramedic extended his arm. Rose realized that she was holding her breath.

  When the man, feeling beneath the cloak – for a pulse to check, for a hand to hold – uttered a loud exclamation, the crowd jerked, as one, like a startled animal. When the man yanked his hand back from the cloak Rose saw that it glimmered red with blood.

  Someone in the crowd screamed; someone else swore. One of the paramedic’s colleagues started up the ladder. But Rose’s gaze was on the cloaked figure; she’d seen it sway at the man’s touch and now she watched in horror as its balance shifted, as it see-sawed on its base, as its centre of gravity lurched –

  As it slipped. As it fell.

  The paramedic grabbed and missed as the figure skidded down the domed roof, painting a gaudy stripe of blood across the copper. The crowd stirred, split, broke. A tumult of voices, a thunder of footsteps, screams as the body struck the guttering in a burst of dark-pink spray – a sudden, heart-stopping silence as the body bounced, looped into the air.

  There was a panicked scramble as the crowd surged back. Spinning in free fall, the body dropped towards the Camera’s stone steps.

  Only Rose moved forwards. Fat red spots spattered the steps. She was at the forefront of the crowd when with a sickening crunch of bone and tissue, the body hit the ground.

  It ba
rely bounced. It rolled a few inches, heavily, with a thick, liquid gulp.

  It lay still – angled between steps, half-draped in blood-drenched black. The broken ends of red bones jutted out.

  Rose let out a strangled noise: a sigh, a groan, a rattling cry of release.

  Not a man, not a woman. A pig. A pig’s carcass, nicked from a slaughterhouse, bought from a butcher, whatever –

  She closed her eyes, pressed trembling fingertips to the bridge of her nose. Not another murder. Not another victim.

  When she opened her eyes all hell was breaking loose. She’d thought coppers could swear, but they had nothing on the rangy paramedic, who jumped down from the roofer’s ladder and spat a fearsome mouthful of abuse at the nearest gaggle of wide-eyed students. Fucking bastard student cunts think it’s a fucking joke … Rose felt bodies push past her, against her, jostling for a look at the shattered carcass in its pool of blood. The clicking of camera-phones sounded like the descent of a swarm of insects. There was laughter, breaking from the silence like water from a breached dam – the wild laughter of relief and embarrassment.

  Fucking Halloween.

  A part of Rose told her to clear the square, secure the scene, protect the evidence. There’d been a serious offence committed here; this was more than a prank, this was a grievous waste of police time. This was a crime scene. This was no place for stupid, sniggering, snap-happy students.

  But another part of her told her to just get the hell out of there. She had a real crime to deal with.

  This was the part she listened to.

  As she elbowed her way back through the milling fringes of the crowd, Rose heard a voice she knew. American accents were ten-a-penny in Oxford – tourists, visiting academics, imported postgrads – but this one was distinctive: politely authoritative, ringingly earnest. She looked over. Brask was in conversation with a confused-looking PC and the bald-headed man she’d found him talking to on her first visit to All Souls. Rose moved closer.