Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  ‘– big feast, for students, very great, very expense.’ The bald man was agitated, seemingly on the verge of tears. ‘This pig, my pig, from my freezer. For the feast! Stolen, stolen, for –’

  The young PC tried to interrupt: ‘Now, sir, you say –’

  ‘– for this joke,’ the man wailed and wrung his hands.

  Brask broke into the conversation again: ‘Luka, it’s all right. The college will cover the costs. There’s been no serious harm done –’ He glanced up, saw Rose. Managed a polite, harried-looking smile. ‘Inspector! How are you?’ He motioned for her to join the mismatched little group.

  The young constable touched his cap respectfully as she did so; the bald-headed man gave her a grim-faced nod.

  ‘Inspector Rose,’ said Brask with a gesture, ‘this is Luka, a cook in the All Souls kitchens.’

  ‘Yes – we met briefly. Pleased to meet you.’ The man’s handshake was solid and brief. ‘Now – is there a problem here?’

  ‘I don’t think so, ma’am,’ put in the constable. ‘The pig was apparently in the custody of this gentleman when it was stolen.’ He allowed himself a half-smile. ‘He’s a bit upset about the whole thing.’ Glanced over to the throng on the Camera steps. ‘Not very appetizing now.’

  Luka began to speak – not impressed, it seemed, by the policeman’s flippant tone – but Rose cut him off.

  ‘I’m sorry about the inconvenience to you, Mr – ?’

  ‘Savić.’

  ‘– Mr Savić, and the college may be entitled to a payment through the criminal compensation system. I assure you we’ll be conducting a full inquiry into what happened here today.’ She turned from Luka to the PC, caught his eye and nodded. All yours, Constable.

  As she started to move away, Brask touched her arm.

  ‘Luka,’ he said, ‘was the man who intervened the other day. When that animal Rakić and his thug were –’ Brask winced slightly at the memory – ‘were giving me a beating.’ He glanced at Luka. His expression was inscrutable. ‘I believe he saved my life.’

  ‘It was very brave of you,’ she said to Luka.

  It was another rote response. She didn’t have time for this. That desolate field, that desolate thing nailed to a tree were waiting for her.

  And if she didn’t get a move on, Phillips would be all over it. She realized with an odd sensation that this had moved beyond office politics. It felt more like betrayal – or theft. This case was hers. Katerina, David, St Catherine, Brask and all – it was hers.

  With another nod to the PC, she was off.

  To her irritation, Brask jogged after her.

  She didn’t slow, didn’t turn her head. She knew what Brask wanted. He wanted an update, and she had nothing. Nothing that would make him feel better, anyway. Brask fell into step with her. Together they left the emptying square and turned into Brasenose Lane. A tough character to shake off, Professor Brask, Rose thought, once he takes hold. Katerina had found that out.

  ‘I was wondering,’ the professor said, ‘what progress you’ve made on – on the case. The St Catherine connection –’

  ‘Dead end, I’m afraid.’ She forced herself to be brusque. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk over the latest killing with Brask – the guy knew things. The similarities between Katerina’s killing and St Catherine’s execution had been interesting. And talking to Brask beat trading put-downs with Phillips. But there wasn’t enough time. Interviews had to be taken while the memories were fresh, evidence had to be collected and reports pored over. There was never enough time.

  They reached Rose’s rain-spotted car. She gave Brask a handshake and a cordial goodbye – that was all. Climbed in and through the streaked window glass watched him walk away.

  As she started the engine, she saw a silhouette stir at the edge of a dark-brick building across the street. A man’s dim profile poked from a hood. It was turned her way.

  Someone watching.

  On reflex she bolted from the car. She was fast, but by the time she crossed the street the silhouette had slipped away. She jogged over to the building without much hope. When she reached the corner there was no one there. No trace of anything or anyone.

  Rose wasn’t surprised, but she sighed anyway.

  She replayed the lines of the figure. She didn’t have more than a half-seen silhouette to go on, but there was something about his stance, his build, his demeanour … He’d looked a lot like Dmitry Rakić.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The leafless outer branches of a hawthorn tree knocked insistently against the kitchen window frame. The stubbled field beyond was dotted with black rooks and white gulls. Rose sat at the kitchen table with both hands cupped around a cup of tea. She wished it was something stronger.

  ‘I hope you’re happy,’ said Maureen Norfolk. Her heavy jaw jutted. Her eyes were red-rimmed behind thick glasses.

  Rose looked down at the table.

  ‘Not at all, Mrs Norfolk,’ she said. ‘Believe me. Not at all.’

  ‘Well, why should we believe you? I’ll never believe another word the police tell me. Three days ago we told you David was missing – three days! And what did we hear from you lot? Doing everything we can, you said. Following all available leads, you said. What a load of rubbish. Nothing but a lot of lies.’

  ‘Mrs Norfolk, I can assure you –’ Rose began, knowing she was whistling in the wind.

  Helen, the elder of the family’s two daughters, stabbed the tabletop noisily with a fingertip.

  ‘Do you know what they asked her? Those policemen what came?’ She made a revolted face. ‘They asked our mum if our dad had been having an affair. They thought he’d run off with some other woman. That was the best they could do.’

  ‘Our dad never would.’ Alice, fourteen, was quieter, the shy one. But her voice quivered with anger. ‘Never.’

  ‘Of course he wouldn’t, Alice,’ Mrs Norfolk nodded. Fixed Rose with a fiercely disdainful look. ‘And now they send this slip of a girl to tell us that my David … that my David …’ The formidable front wobbled.

  Rose looked away as Mrs Norfolk succumbed to the bitterest of tears.

  She didn’t blame the Norfolk women for channelling their grief into anger. How could she? Everyone had their own way of dealing with loss – she’d seen it with her own brothers and father, with the Zrinski girls, with a hundred different families down the years.

  And for Christ’s sake, who wouldn’t be angry about this? An adored man, taken without reason from his loving wife and daughters. How could it not make your blood boil?

  She’d told them that David’s body had been found in woodland south of Oxford: both the plain truth and an ugly lie.

  Before she’d driven to the Norfolks’ small farm in Bletchingdon, to the north of the city, she’d looked up the missing-person report on David Norfolk. A farmer, small-scale, his farm the type of business that went to the wall once a week in these parts, these days – but Norfolk’s holding had been run well and turned a profit. Norfolk himself came across as a stand-up citizen: didn’t drink, didn’t gamble, had never had an affair or a run-in with HMRC (the investigating PC had left a cynical marginal note: ‘STS’. So they say).

  More than that, he was active in the local community. Lots of kids in these farming districts left school early with not much to show for it; David Norfolk, Rose learned, had made it his business to teach reading, maths, basic bookkeeping to local kids who needed it. Helped the kids who came on to the farms with the immigrant work gangs with their English, too. Never charged a penny.

  The local primary schools loved him. A field trip to the Norfolk farm was a long-standing tradition in the area: generations of seven-year-olds had been shown how piglets were fed and how spring lambs were born by the avuncular Mr Norfolk. And he didn’t stop there: he made a classroom of the whole countryside, helping the kids to sketch wildflowers, find thrushes’ nests and look for slow-worms in the compost heaps.

  To cap it all, the man was a lector at the l
ocal church. Well, of course he was, Rose had thought, closing the file with a sigh. David Norfolk had been an impeccably, untiringly, exhaustingly decent man.

  Now she sat and watched his widow weep in the kitchen of the home they’d built together.

  She stood and told them softly that she’d better get going – and that she was sorry, so sorry, for their loss.

  ‘I’ll be in touch again,’ she promised, leaving her card on the table.

  Helen, the elder daughter, had her arm about her mother’s heaving shoulders. She looked up, red-eyed. Swallowed down a sob and snapped: ‘Don’t bother. You’ve helped enough already.’

  Rose nodded gravely. Let herself out.

  Back on the road, thrumming south through the blustery dusk, she mentally thumbed through her case notes. She had a lead – kind of. The guy’s MO: abduction, followed by murder. The Zrinskis hadn’t reported Katerina missing, but afterwards they said they’d not seen her in days. The police missing-persons roster was going to be their friend if they were going to stop this bastard. A lot of runaway teens and double-crossing husbands were going to get a lot of attention from a lot of coppers.

  Beyond that Rose hadn’t learned much. But then that hadn’t been the whole point of her visit to Bletchingdon. What she’d done – without having much choice in the matter – was act as a target, a scapegoat; she’d given the Norfolks a safety valve.

  She’d come to the Norfolks’ farm with the worst news in the world. Platitudes about not shooting the messenger weren’t worth horseshit – the Norfolks would never forgive her for the terrible news she’d delivered to them. But these things worked in balance, she knew. The next copper to come along would get an easier ride. Especially if it was a smooth-talking bastard like DI Leland Phillips.

  That was going to sting – but if it meant progress, it was a hit she was happy to take.

  As she swung on to the Oxford ring road Rose plotted her next steps. One: cross-reference what the Norfolks had told her with the missing-person report; double-check everything, sniff out any hint of a slip, a contradiction, something concealed – the PC who’d scribbled STS had been cynical but he hadn’t been stupid.

  Two: chase up David Norfolk’s connections with the kids on the rural work gangs. He’d have worked with local charities, education agencies. Maybe there was a link to the Leys, to the Rakić gang, to Katerina. If there was, it’d be the thinnest of threads and not a lot to take to DCI Hume. But at least it’d be something.

  Could Dmitry Rakić have killed David Norfolk?

  He’d been watched, day in, day out. It would have taken an almost unimaginable feat of deception to beat the stakeout – and he was a Croat smack trafficker, Rose told herself, not David bloody Blaine.

  Her focus now was on ruling the Rakić gang out. And finding someone else to rule in.

  When she thought of who that might be her heart seemed to falter, her skin seemed to crawl. The man who’d severed Katerina’s head. The man who’d cut the skin from David Norfolk’s flesh.

  Who in the name of God was he? And what in the name of God would he do next?

  ‘He is ill, gravely ill,’ Little Mouse said. ‘I fear he hasn’t long. He is dying – Father is dying.’

  Olga gasped and crossed herself. ‘I will get my things,’ she said.

  ‘Please hurry,’ Little Mouse begged.

  He helped her through the half-dark of the village with her baskets of blankets, herbs and medicines. Their shadows were stretched and warped by the humming street lights.

  As they went, they prayed together. Prayers to attend the release of the soul.

  A weak gas lamp flickered by the door of the priest’s grey-planked hut. Little Mouse pushed open the door.

  ‘Go to him,’ he urged. ‘Please, he needs your help.’

  The woman went inside and Little Mouse followed, closing the door behind him.

  The priest sat by a guttering coal fire. He looked up from a cup of black tea. His eyes shone, and he smiled as the woman hurried to him.

  ‘I knew you would come,’ he said. ‘You are such a good soul, Olga. Bless you. I knew I could depend upon you.’

  The woman turned to Little Mouse with an expression of puzzlement. She opened her mouth to speak.

  Little Mouse brought half a brick down hard on her head.

  Chapter Fourteen

  11 October

  It was the wrist bone, this time.

  Another cup of tasteless tepid coffee. Another late night under the blueish strip lights of the MCU office. Rose sat with her head bowed over the report from David Norfolk’s autopsy.

  He’d been starved.

  He’d been slathered with scented oil.

  He’d been draped in a cape of rough-spun fabric.

  And his wrist bone, the left one, had been removed from his arm with surgical skill and considerable care.

  It was all just the same as it had been in the first case. And the connection between David Norfolk and Katerina Zrinski?

  There wasn’t one.

  She’d hammered every contact, chased every half-lead – there just wasn’t one. The frustration pushed her to the brink of tears. She wanted to scream: Why? Why them?

  The clock on the wall ticked. It was gone nine. Heating pipes clanged somewhere in the building. Rose pushed her hair away from her face, blinked, looked again at the report. The close black type was beginning to blur. Time to call it a night, Lauren.

  No: one more read-through. One more check on the details. She could at least do that much for Katerina and David. Rose rubbed her aching neck and flipped back through the report.

  David’s body had been at ambient temperature, unlike Katerina’s. But in an explanatory note Dr Rooke warned against drawing hasty conclusions. The ambient temperature had been much lower on the night David’s body had been placed on display, touching zero around midnight. And besides, David’s body – even at the umpteenth time of reading, Rose shuddered at these words – had been denied its insulating covering of skin. It was impossible, the report stated in cold clinicalese, to properly evaluate the effect of skinlessness on heat retention in the human body; such a circumstance, it said, was apparently unknown in the scientific literature.

  Lucky old scientific literature, Rose thought wearily.

  The lab report wasn’t yet in on the oil recovered from David’s body. But study of Katerina’s oil had shown it to be infused with balsam.

  Just like four-fifths of the sacred oils used in Christian practice from Alaska to Ethiopia.

  Rose closed the report and finished the gritty coffee, wondered if she’d be able to stay awake on the drive home.

  She took the lift downstairs. The baggy-eyed sergeant on the front desk nodded a weary goodnight as she passed through the station’s entrance hall to the glazed double doors that led out into the car park.

  Then she froze, with one hand flat on the glass of the door. Looking out – looking out into the darkness at the pale face that looked back at her.

  For a moment she was sure it was a phantom. Tangled white-blonde hair. Lifeless light-blue eyes set above flat Slavic cheekbones. It was Katerina. Oh God, it was Katerina.

  Rose shoved open the door. Winced at the bite of the October wind. Blinked.

  A small hand closed on her upper arm.

  ‘Inspector,’ said Adrijana Zrinski. ‘I help you. I tell you. I help.’

  Katerina’s younger sister looked as though she hadn’t slept in days. Maybe she hadn’t. Rose sat her down in a ‘soft’ interview room, stood a cup of sugary tea on the table in front of her. Adrijana stared unseeing through both tea and tabletop. There were indigo-blue shadows under her heavy-lidded eyes.

  Rose checked a yawn. Whatever Adrijana had come here to tell her, there was no use in trying to force it. Even if it took all night – sleep could damn well wait.

  She asked the girl gently where Sofia was, if Sofia was okay.

  Adrijana gave her a hunted look.

  ‘Sleeping,’ she s
aid. ‘Very worry, very trouble.’ She shook her head. ‘Does not know. Must not know.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone you came to see me, Adrijana,’ Rose promised.

  The girl nodded, sipped her tea.

  ‘Before,’ she said, after a moment – then stopped.

  Rose leaned a little closer to her across the tabletop. ‘Before?’ She was careful to speak quietly, slowly, without the least hint of urgency. It wasn’t easy. ‘Before you came to this country?’ A shake of the unkempt blonde head. ‘Before Katerina went missing?’

  A nod.

  Rose sat back. Let the silence do the work. Adrijana fidgeted with trembling hands. Her pale face looked taut, smudged with sleeplessness. But there was determination in there, too. Rose had noticed it the first time they’d met. The girl looked frail but she had a seam of iron underneath.

  Then she said: ‘A thing. In our home. A – a thing was left. We found.’

  A chill of anticipation rose up Rose’s spine as Adrijana reached into the folds of her outsized tracksuit top and drew out something wrapped in a supermarket carrier bag.

  ‘Someone left it in your flat? You don’t know who?’

  Adrijana shook her head again. She began to unwrap the thing in the bag. Rose watched intently as she drew it out; it was an elongated ball, maybe the size of a pineapple, covered in a sheet of newspaper.

  Already Rose knew what it was – before Adrijana peeled back the grease-marked paper, before her nostrils filled with the smell of old bone.

  It was a cage of animal ribs, fastened with leather thongs. A boiled-clean fragment of bone tied in the middle.

  In the creased newspaper Rose saw a tangle of greasy twine.

  She looked at Adrijana carefully.

  ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘Window. Window of our home.’

  The girl had been holding the thing in her lap. Now she put it on the table and drew her hands quickly away, as if she badly wanted rid of it.