Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’

  Adrijana shook her head firmly.

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Never. Is – creepy.’

  You’re dead right there, Rose thought. She rubbed her eyes, took a good look at the structure. As far as she could see it was just the same as the artefact left in Brask’s office – the Blair Witch thing, she’d come to think of it as.

  ‘Why now, Adrijana?’ she asked. Tried to smile encouragingly, felt the dryness of her tired skin. ‘Why did you wait till tonight to show me this?’

  Adrijana shrugged nervously.

  ‘Was our business, Sofia say. Not for police.’ She caught Rose’s eye fleetingly. ‘Sofia very worry.’ Adrijana looked away – thinking darkly of something, of her lost sister perhaps, or of Sofia, racked by anxiety and grief. ‘Then I hear on the news. A murder, another murder.’ She gave Rose a frank look. ‘And I think, maybe same man. I think, man who kill Katerina kill again.’ A brief, disgusted gesture towards the bone-thing on the table. ‘I think maybe clue. I think – I think maybe help you stop. Stop him.’

  The effort of speaking and the emotion stirred by what she had said showed clearly in Adrijana’s glimmering blue eyes. She started to say something else – please, Rose thought – but her pale lips folded inward and tears spilled down her cheeks.

  Rose leaned forwards, took the girl’s hand. It felt tiny and cold. She murmured what she hoped were comforting words: ‘We’ll do all we can; we won’t let you down.’

  So many tears, she thought. All this sorrow, all this hurt – and still no answers in sight.

  Rose sorted out a car to take Adrijana home, then walked her down to the front office and waited with her while the car was brought around. She saw the girl off with more reassurances and sincere thanks for her help. She’d made desultory small talk with the desk sergeant, then grabbed a pallid-looking sandwich from a vending machine on one of the landings.

  Now she sat dead-tired in the interview room and looked at the off-white bones gleaming unpleasantly in the low lighting.

  The first of these things (no, she corrected herself – the second) had been left with Brask to spook him, they’d assumed. An elaborate calling card from the Rakić mob. So did this mean that they’d been trying to spook Katerina, intimidate her, threaten her? She’d got used to the idea that Hume and Phillips’s gang angle was way off-beam – now she was thinking again.

  It’d be easy enough, she realized, to ignore this new information, or to warp it to fit her pet theory. But it was a detective’s job to be flexible, to alter course mid-investigation, to tailor the theory to fit the facts. Not the other way around; that was just lazy police work. That, she thought, was what Hume and Phillips had done – and now David Norfolk and his grieving family had paid mightily for it.

  So say Katerina’s murder had been a revenge hit, say Rakić had staged the display of her corpse to make it look like something else, something it wasn’t. She turned the hypothetical set-up over in her head.

  The Norfolks hadn’t mentioned any threats, any weird bone-things. So had David Norfolk just been a red herring? A feint to throw them off the scent? Maybe he’d been picked at random – picked, in fact, just because he had no links to the Rakić gang.

  It was a hell of a thing to brutally torture and butcher an innocent man just to avoid the suspicion of murder. Was Rakić really that far gone?

  Was anyone?

  Rose knew all too well that the question was rhetorical. Its answer was strewn all over her desk and the front pages of every newspaper in the country.

  Well, it was a theory. And the bone artefact Adrijana had brought her was unmistakeably evidence. It was also – at 10.45 at bloody night – more paperwork.

  Rose chewed down the last of her flavourless sandwich and got to work. She carefully bagged the thing of bones, the greasy twine and the paper they had been wrapped in. Logged the evidence diligently in the files: times, dates, names, circumstances. Wrote out an explanatory note, ordering chemical analyses on the oil, the twine, the bones, the leather – hell, why not, the newspaper too. Told them to run a comparison with the thing left in Brask’s office. Took the lift down four storeys to forensics, left the whole lot on the deserted desk of the head lab tech.

  Ignoring her thumping headache and her heavy legs, she trudged back up to the interview room. Popped out the tape of her interview with Adrijana, dropped it in her pocket – she could listen to it on the drive home.

  Home. It felt like a long way away.

  Then back in the lift, g’night to the sarge, out into the car park –

  It was empty, cold, lit with flat white light. She took a deep breath and exhaled a long day’s worth of stale station air. Christ. Christ, this was tough.

  But then, she told herself, so are you.

  You’ve had to be.

  Something about the clammy-cold night, the desolate car park, made her think of her first murder case in CID. She’d been a DS then, newly transferred from uniform at the Met. Thought she was a hard nut. Got that knocked out of her pretty quick.

  Mary McTiernan had been found under a rhododendron bush beside a train-station car park. She was thirteen. Rose hadn’t been leading the case – it’d been Morgan Hume’s, just a DI back then, and he’d worked round the clock to nail the bastard who did it – but it had given her sleepless nights all the same.

  It hadn’t just been the long hours – though God knew there’d been plenty of those, on the streets, on the phones, in the interrogation rooms, in the labs and the morgues. No, the thing that had got to her, that had wormed under her skin, dug itself deep into her unconscious and left her wide-eyed in the small hours, was the sense of helplessness – the feeling that there was nothing anyone could have done to save little Mary McTiernan from what had been done to her. She’d realized that she was always going to be chasing, always going to be one step behind.

  Bad things – the very worst things – were always going to happen. By the time they reached her, the most she could do was clear up the mess. That’s what the job was. She examined the broken pieces and sorted out who was to blame, but nothing was ever going to make the victims caught in the wreckage whole again.

  And the thing was that these messes – the murders, and crime and catastrophes – they never stopped. Being a cop was a parade of horrors as senseless as they were endless.

  After the Mary McTiernan case was all over – they’d put the guy away for life, and he’d hanged himself in Parkhurst – she’d talked to Hume about it. Hadn’t opened up all the way, of course, just hinted at her unease, her self-doubt. Hume hadn’t been unkind, but his message had been clear as a bell: get tough, quick – or get out.

  And now here she was. Still here, after all. She sighed, ran a hand through her hair. It felt greasy, uncared for. Yet another thing she hadn’t allowed herself time to worry about.

  She was unlocking her car door when, deep in her coat pocket, her phone buzzed. A call.

  Ignore it.

  It can wait.

  Don’t pick up. Don’t pick up. Don’t don’t don’t –

  ‘DI Rose here.’

  ‘Inspector, it’s Matt Brask.’

  Rose tensed. The same old cornball Midwestern accent but compressed to a hoarse whisper, and tightened by fear or pain.

  ‘Professor? What’s the matter?’

  An agonizing pause. Brask’s breathing. The noise of him working saliva into a bone-dry mouth.

  ‘There’s – there’s someone here. In my house.’

  Oh Jesus.

  ‘Do you know who?’

  ‘No. Just noises. Someone moving.’

  Rakić. Had to be. Christ, she should’ve insisted on a security detail for the stubborn bastard. Rose felt a sickly surge of dread.

  ‘Tell me where you are.’

  Brask gave her an address in the Jericho district. The panic in his voice was palpable, but he was keeping a lid on it – just.

  ‘I’ll be t
here soon. I’m leaving now.’ As she spoke she was dropping into her driver’s seat, firing up the engine. She felt nauseous, like she’d taken a shot of strong espresso on an empty stomach. That was adrenaline – that was fear. ‘Professor, if you can, get out of there. Can you hear me? Get out of there.’

  A silence, then the line went dead.

  On the first day she had begged for medicine to soothe the pain in her head.

  On the second day she had begged to be released from the shackles and for food.

  Now she lay still. Her breathing was shallow, her skin damp with sweat. There was a grey smear of ashes on her pale forehead. Her black-lashed eyes were closed; her lips were slightly parted. Her dark-chestnut hair was a lank coil on the dirty sheet. The air of the hut was thick with smells of incense, oil, wax and excrement.

  ‘You are bound for a greater glory, miss,’ Little Mouse had reassured her. ‘You are to be reborn in Christ.’ But she had not understood.

  The priest had taught him well. The necessary rites had been conducted and the blade was sharp.

  He had not enjoyed killing the hen – she had struggled in his arms and he had felt her heart beating in fear. But the hen’s death, too, served a higher purpose. Little Mouse had daubed the bird’s blood on the concrete floor beneath the bed.

  The priest now stood at the foot of the bed, intoning the Latin litany.

  Little Mouse parted the robe of sackcloth in which they had dressed the woman. He thought of the glorious martyrdom of St Erasmus. His eyes filled with tears at the beauty of it.

  It was a fate that might have been his, he knew. But the Almighty had intended for him a different path. He was Christ’s servant. He was the Lord’s blade.

  He drew the knife blade across the woman’s belly. She woke from her fevered dozing and screamed. The fine red line scored by the blade swelled into a glossy belt of blood.

  She screams because the body does not want to release the soul, Little Mouse thought. The body is a blind thing. Soon she will see – soon she will see the light. Again he drove the blade through the skin. The cut he made bisected the first to make a cross.

  He put his hand wrist-deep into the woman’s hot, roiling belly. Blood slopped over his feet. Shrieks rang in his ears. He thought: This is not like when I killed the hen. That was a practical matter, a necessity. This is something greater – O, far greater, and far more magnificent!

  Little Mouse’s spirit soared.

  Though he knew that this was the most solemn and the most sacred of rites, though he knew that in this moment he was in the very presence of Christ, as he drew out from her gut a fistful of the howling woman’s intestine, Little Mouse began to laugh.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wade Street was a thickly shadowed curve of tall Victorian red-brick terraced houses, lined with parked cars and the odd ragged sapling. Rose parked a hundred yards from Brask’s address. Yes, she could have done it by the book. She could have forwarded Brask’s call to dispatch, but for her money, Rose thought she was a sight better than whichever pair of wet-behind-the-ears constables happened to respond to Brask’s call.

  She was quicker by herself. Better by herself.

  She grabbed her baton from the glovebox, jumped from her car and loped warily towards Brask’s place. About twenty yards short she spotted a figure in the shadows outside Brask’s address. The sight of it made her pause.

  After a moment’s watching she let out a breath: it was Brask. Shivering on the pavement in pyjama bottoms and a short leather jacket. Alive. Safe.

  He looked up at her approach.

  ‘Is he still in there?’ was Rose’s first question.

  Brask nodded stiffly. It was a cold night, dank and bone-chilling.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘He got in through a window – the noise woke me up. It sounded like he was coming up the stairs, but he must have ducked into one of the other bedrooms up there. I got down the stairs and found the hall window open. That’s when I called you.’

  ‘Is there a back way out?’

  ‘The kitchen door – or a jump out of the upstairs windows into the bushes if he was desperate … and there’s a skylight. Opens on to the roof.’

  ‘Okay.’ She moved out into the road, scrutinizing the narrow-fronted house as she went. Steep stairs. Lots of windows. Lots of outs. She flexed her legs and arms almost unconsciously. She jerked out her baton to its full length, took a limbering-up backhand swipe through the air.

  Over her shoulder she said to Brask: ‘If you see him come out the front, yell.’ Then she quickly closed the distance to the house. The front door opened quietly, which was something: she’d been braced for an ear-splitting gothic creak – it was that kind of place, and that kind of night. The hall was dark and deserted. Rose closed the door softly behind her and paused at the foot of the stairs.

  Waited. Listened.

  A noise – the slightest of noises. Might’ve been a mouse under the boards. Might’ve been the next-door neighbour rolling over in bed.

  Rose cocked her head, held her breath.

  And again, a rustle, from inside this house, definitely, and from this floor – down the hall, one of the back rooms. There was a kitchen there, she already knew (her mind raced: knives, cleavers, flames – no place for a fight); and there was another room, adjoining the kitchen. Must be small, she thought, picturing the dimensions of the building. A study?

  A small room meant not much space for throwing a punch or swinging a baseball bat.

  And no stairs to be dangled over.

  Rose edged down the hall. The door of a room on her right at the far end of the passageway was open.

  Another noise.

  If the intruder was the big Croat she’d seen at Katerina’s meadow and again at All Souls, this was going to be over very quickly. Maybe she’d stand a chance if it was Dmitry Rakić. Rakić wasn’t a big man, and besides, he’d be too smart to do a real number on a copper. Maybe.

  She hesitated a yard from the door. The small noises went on, intermittently. They were the sounds of a person at work, hurried, perhaps, but careful. Meticulous even.

  Whoever he was, he hadn’t heard her approach.

  Rose moved forwards into the open doorway. Yes, a study: desk, office chair, dully gleaming PC screen, bookcases, a winged armchair – and a crouched figure in the furthest corner. Hidden by shadow. Was it Dmitry Rakić? The figure was roughly the right size and build, but she couldn’t say for sure.

  Rose’s nose wrinkled involuntarily. A musty, familiar smell.

  She lifted her baton and charged forwards.

  The back of the man’s neck was her target. Aim carefully, hit hard: job done.

  Never quite that easy, though.

  At her first step the man whirled. He straightened like an uncoiled spring and raised an arm defensively. He was hooded, dressed in black.

  Rose crashed through his attempt to block her and brought the baton whistling down. He writhed, grabbed – got lucky. His hand, broad and sinewy, closed around the shaft; he yanked it with astonishing strength. Rose’s thumb twisted backwards. Her baton fell with a clatter to the floorboards.

  Shit.

  She lunged for the man’s neck and tried to wrap an arm around his throat. He made a gurgling grunt, jerked his head forwards. With his hood pulled low and his chin forced down into her forearm, there was nothing to see of his face but a jutting white nose.

  ‘Police,’ Rose hissed.

  The man squirmed and braced his feet against the bookcase. She said it again: ‘Police.’

  He bit her. She felt his teeth tear the skin of her arm.

  Rose swore savagely – then swore again as the man broke her grip, scrambled free and made for the door. She lunged after him, following the sound of his panting breath.

  Her grasping hand closed on his sleeve. She hauled and felt his arm crash against the edge of the heavy dark-wood door. She renewed her grip and pushed, the arm bent backwards.

  The man’s animal cr
y of agony ran through Rose like a knife blade. She felt his hand close in her hair and bunch into a fist. There was a moment of fierce pain as her scalp felt as if it was about to be ripped open – then the side of her forehead crashed into the weighty brass doorknob. The last thing she heard was the sound of his fleeing footsteps.

  A dark blur in an off-white oval resolved itself into a face. A saw-edged baritone hum became a voice.

  ‘You’re all right,’ said Brask. ‘Inspector? You’re all right.’

  She pressed a hand to her head. No blood – just a banging pain behind her eyes. She was getting used to that. The bright light in the room made her nauseous.

  She sat up and looked around.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He got out the back way.’ Brask put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You were out cold. Take it easy.’

  ‘Did you chase him? Did you see him?’

  Brask gave her a look.

  ‘I was a little more concerned about the police officer lying unconscious on my study carpet.’

  Rose shook her head. Civilians.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get you on to the chair. Easy now.’ He took her elbow and helped her to her feet. The room spun gently.

  ‘Oof.’

  ‘I know. You must’ve taken quite a whack, Inspector. We ought to get you to a hospital.’

  ‘How long was I out?’

  ‘Can’t have been long.’

  ‘Then I’ll be fine. No hospital.’ Rose hated hospitals. She’d hated them since she was five years old.

  ‘But you –’

  ‘No hospital. What happened?’

  ‘I heard a bang, came running. The back door was still swinging. A minute, not much more.’

  She sighed. Tried to think past the ache in her head.

  In a voice heavy with meaning, Brask added: ‘He left something.’

  Rose looked up and followed the professor’s gaze to the wall behind her.

  It wasn’t quite like the others. It was a thing of bones, but elongated, more like a crude figure than a cage, and it was dressed with feathers, black feathers – a crow’s or rook’s maybe. Again the bones were greased and held in place by leather thongs.