Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  They settled into a thoughtful quiet as, sitting elbow to elbow again at the table, they worked their way through a pot of tea and a stack of toast with raspberry jam. Both preoccupied, both looking ahead. The twenty-first of October. That was the deadline for the discovery of the next body. Nine days.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Brask said after a while.

  She eyed him warily.

  ‘Personal or professional?’

  ‘Professional.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘These cases. This killer.’ Brask’s look was intent, serious. ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’

  Rose shook her head emphatically.

  ‘Never. I mean, I’ve been a copper a long time, I’ve seen a lot of blood, violence, murders, my fair share of X-rated stuff. But this.’ She blew out a breath. ‘It’s something else. It’s not just all in a day’s work. It’s – well, it’s the kind of thing a murder detective has nightmares about.’ She returned his look. ‘Okay. Your turn.’

  Brask smiled.

  ‘Only fair, I guess. Personal or professional?’

  ‘I – I’m not sure.’

  ‘Consider me intrigued. Shoot.’

  Rose took a slurp of tea.

  ‘Your picture, the picture in your office.’ She spoke cautiously, inching forwards as though on weak ice. ‘You, in a – a dog collar, do you call it? You as – as a priest.’

  Brask looked at her solemnly, then nodded.

  ‘Halloween, 1997,’ he said. ‘Quite a party. And your question is, where did I hire the costume?’

  Brask held the deadpan for a moment – then let rip a deep-chested laugh. Jesus, this guy can be as corny as his accent, Rose thought. Couldn’t help but laugh along, though.

  ‘No, it’s true, I admit it,’ Brask went on. He spread his hands earnestly. ‘And I guess I shouldn’t kid about it. It was – is – a serious thing. I was ordained into the Church. I wore the Roman collar. A real commitment. Meaningful.’

  ‘But you –’ Rose hesitated, let the sentence hang unfinished.

  ‘Broke my vows? Deserted the Church? Turned my back on God?’ He cocked an eyebrow wryly. ‘Yup – I did all those things. To a greater or lesser extent.’

  ‘Why?’

  His smile grew distant, inscrutable.

  ‘The usual story.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Do you have to sound so surprised? Yeah – a woman.’ He swallowed, rubbed his upper lip. ‘And I lost her, too.’ When he looked up at Rose his dark eyes were intense, almost fierce. ‘Drunk-driver, Fremont, Ohio, July, 2006.’ Looked away, shook his head. Rose thought he was going to say something more – but he only frowned, and shook his head again, and picked up his mug of tea.

  Grief and loss, blood and death. They ran through both of their lives, Rose reflected, like a black thread through coloured cloth. Small wonder he had taken the loss of Katerina so hard.

  For the thousandth time Rose saw the face, Katerina’s still, white face, in her mind – she saw the whole scene all over again: the cartwheel, the black blood, the stitched skin. Images of David Norfolk’s ruined red body soon followed. Last came the crime scenes in bleak monochrome from France. So many victims. So many flavours of pain.

  All from one monster.

  ‘Do you believe in evil, Matt?’ she asked, in a quiet voice. It sounded ridiculous as soon as she’d said it. Imagine asking that in the police canteen, she thought. Imagine asking Phillips or Angler. Imagine asking DCI Keith Rose of the Metropolitan Police – aka Dad. God, you’d never live it down. She could imagine the derisive laughter. Coppers didn’t trade in good and evil.

  For a lecturer in comparative religion at All Souls, Oxford, though, this was his meat and drink. Brask didn’t laugh. His brow creased and he set down his drink.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘In abstract – as a force, for want of a better word, in human society. We do terrible things to each other, inhuman things. I think these things are the signatures of evil, its footprints, the marks it leaves. But do I think humans can be evil?’ He shrugged one shoulder. ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘That sounds pretty subtle.’

  Brask smiled.

  ‘I didn’t go through four years at the seminary for nothing. But listen.’ He ran a hand through his tangled hair. ‘When Hester died – she was visiting her folks in Fremont, driving from the airport at Sandusky, a pickup truck lost control on the freeway … when she died, man, I believed in evil that day. And I thought it had a human face: the face of Larry P. Mickelson – see, I still remember his name. I mean, of course I do. How could I forget it: the lousy drunk who drove her rental car off the road and didn’t even stop to see if she was all right.

  ‘My God, I hated that man.’ Brask’s face was grim. ‘He embodied everything that I thought evil: selfishness, greed, cowardice, basic disregard for human life, for his fellow man. What could be more evil than that?

  ‘Then I saw him in court.’ His lip curled in a bitter smile at the memory. ‘And I saw what Larry P. Mickelson truly was. He wasn’t Satan, wasn’t a monster. He was just an asshole.’ Brask showed his teeth briefly. ‘You understand me? He was a dumb guy, not much education, not much of an upbringing. A wreck of a guy, I saw there in court. Scared, stupid, ignorant. And you know what, I believe he was sorry for what he did.’

  ‘That hardly makes it all right,’ Rose butted in. ‘Drink-driving is unforgivable.’

  ‘It’s appalling, awful, a terrible crime to commit.’ Brask nodded. ‘But I’d say it’s half an inch short of unforgivable.’ He measured the distance with his thumb and forefinger. ‘And I look back on my life, times when I’ve been stupid, selfish, reckless, times when I’ve made terrible mistakes – and I think, thank God for that half an inch.’

  Rose shook her head.

  ‘This is a bit too abstract for me,’ she said. ‘People are defined by what they do. Murders don’t commit themselves. Murderers –’

  She broke off. But Brask had guessed where she was heading.

  ‘Can I forgive the man who murdered Katerina – like I forgave the man who killed my Hester?’ Something in his face and voice acknowledged that this wasn’t just academic discussion any more – that they were face to face with the reality of evil. ‘One thing I know,’ he said slowly, ‘is that he’s not the devil. He’s a man – a sick man, a man who’s done things beyond the reach of any recognizable morality – but still a man.’ He met Rose’s eye, seemed like he was forcing himself not to look away. ‘This will sound crazy,’ he said, ‘but when I look at the photographs of Katerina, of her body, the crime scene, I see something more than murder. There’s – a kind of care there. Attention, observance. I dunno, Lauren, it’s nuts, but – I see a kind of tenderness.’

  He was quiet for a moment, then stood abruptly and began to collect up the tea mugs and crumb-strewn plates. Muttered something about getting to work.

  Rose sat silent, watching him tidy up. Her gaze wandered back to the photos strewn across the tabletop.

  It’s not nuts, she thought. I see it too.

  The cold of the previous night had yielded to a mild, moist morning of milky sunshine and sputtering winds. As she and Brask left her apartment building in the west of the city, Rose felt – for the first time since 4 October – that the day had promise.

  Yes, there was work to be done, hard, serious work; there was still a killer on the loose in Oxford, for Christ’s sake. And nothing could shake the chilling grip this case had taken on her heart. Maybe nothing ever would.

  But she finally had a solid lead. She finally felt like she could begin to see the way forward, the way to get justice for Katerina and David Norfolk and bring the Trick or Treat Killer’s murders to an end. Yes, she felt less lost this morning. Less threatened. Less afraid. It was a good feeling, amid the darkness.

  It lasted all of two minutes.

  ‘What a happy couple!’

  She spun, startled, and found herself looking into the broad, sne
ering smile of Olly Stevenage. He waggled a smartphone under her nose. ‘Here you go, Ms Rose. Smash it, if you want. Drop it down a drain. I’ve already uploaded the goods to the Cloud: a dozen hi-res pictures of you and the professor here leaving your flat together – very obviously,’ he added, with a mocking up-and-down glance at Brask’s rumpled sweater and cords, ‘in the same clothes you were wearing last night.’

  Rose felt Brask’s hand brush her coat sleeve – the merest of touches, enough to say Take it easy, don’t make this worse.

  ‘Good to see a new generation being brought up in the best traditions of British journalism,’ she said bitterly. ‘Should I be grateful you didn’t go for an up-skirt shot?’

  ‘It’s called reportage,’ Stevenage said.

  ‘It’s called gutter journalism, more like,’ cut in Brask. ‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?’

  The young man flicked back his hair and self-importantly presented a press card.

  ‘Oliver Stevenage, Oxford Times.’

  ‘That paper,’ Brask said heavily, ‘has quite a tradition – and a fine reputation.’

  ‘It’s got a bright future, too,’ leered Stevenage. ‘We’ll be the talk of the national media when we break this story.’

  Rose knew it was coming, knew Brask was too naive, too unschooled in these things not to set Stevenage up with the ugly punchline the little rat craved. She tried to hurry him along, get him to the car, but he stood his ground. With a bewildered expression he said: ‘Wait, Rose.’ Then to Stevenage: ‘What story?’

  Stevenage held his fingers at right angles to frame an imaginary headline.

  ‘Trick or Treat Killer probe police chief leaves Oxford love-nest with prime suspect – how does that sound?’ He sniggered nastily. ‘Enough to get you booted off the force, would you say, Inspector?’

  Brask made a strangled noise in his throat.

  ‘I’m not going to justify any of that bullshit with a denial or an explanation,’ Rose said sharply. She stepped closer to Stevenage. She had a handle on her anger – but she wasn’t going to let Stevenage know that. ‘What I’m going to do instead is assure you that if you run that headline – or anything like it – I’ll nail you. I don’t care what for. I’ll find something. I’ll nail you, and you’ll be out of this university, out of this city, for good.’

  The kid had some nerve – she had to give him that. He didn’t take a backward step.

  ‘I don’t need a headline,’ he said. Rose could see he was fighting hard to keep the querulous tremor from his voice. ‘I don’t need to write a thing. What’s that phrase? “A picture says a thousand words.” I publish my photos this morning and within an hour I’ll have the world’s press eating out of my hand.’ He leaned down until his beaky nose was inches from hers. His breath smelled of coffee and onions. ‘It’s hard to see how you could have bested this, Ms Rose,’ he said. ‘Short of inviting Dmitry Rakić round for a three-way, you two really couldn’t have made this any juicier.’ He laughed, skipped back to the kerb, climbed nimbly aboard a parked-up scooter.

  Brask shouted: ‘I’ll be speaking to the vice-chancellor about this, Mr Stevenage.’

  The scooter’s engine drowned out Stevenage’s reply but Rose didn’t have to be an expert lip-reader to make it out: oooh, scared.

  They watched him drive away, revving the little engine triumphantly.

  ‘Puerile little prick,’ Rose spat. She breathed out hard through her nose, looked up at Brask. ‘If it’s any comfort,’ she said drily, ‘you’re no longer our prime suspect.’

  Her anger had subsided to a dull, helpless exasperation – tinged now with embarrassment at Stevenage’s remarks. Love-nest?

  ‘I’m sure he won’t dare print … what he said he was going to print,’ Brask said uncomfortably as they climbed into her car. ‘It’d be libellous – defamatory – whatever you have over here.’

  ‘You don’t know much about the British press,’ Rose snapped.

  ‘It was not enough,’ Little Mouse told the priest furiously.

  He held in his quivering hand a two-day-old newspaper he had found blowing through the street. It brought more news of the barbarians – of the heathen Serb still rampaging unchecked through their godly land. Thirty-seven killed, the paper said, at Kutjevo, and two churches burned to the ground.

  The priest’s awful pale eyes were filled with anxiety. He looked so ancient – so withered and worn.

  ‘Father.’ Little Mouse shook him by the shoulder. ‘It was not enough!’

  In a weak, arid voice: ‘Were we wrong, my child?’

  ‘Wrong? No. Our hands were guided, Father. We were in Christ’s command. I felt it.’ He hesitated. ‘Didn’t you?’

  The priest’s scabbed head wobbled in a vague nod.

  ‘The woman was a deserving soul,’ Little Mouse insisted. ‘We conducted the rite. It was a true martyrdom, Father. And yet our land is not free, the order not restored –’

  He looked at the priest. Hunched and snivelling in the shadows, he seemed to Little Mouse diminished, weakened.

  Little Mouse’s vision flickered. In the blurred periphery of his sight he saw the abbot and in the depths of his soul he heard the abbot speak.

  ‘The path of the righteous,’ the abbot said, ‘is a hard path to tread. Not everyone has the strength. Many fall by the wayside.’

  And yet all have a part to play.

  Little Mouse looked again at the newspaper headlines: slaughter, pillage and fire. Saw again the monastery of St Quintus consumed by flames. Smelled the burning. Heard the screaming.

  Many fall by the wayside, but Little Mouse swore to himself that he would not be one of them.

  ‘It was not enough,’ he told the priest.

  Chapter Seventeen

  18 October

  Rose’s phone was ringing piercingly. It jerked her from sleep into a sombre grey morning. She blinked, checked the clock. Barely seven.

  Say what you like about journalists, she thought, you can’t knock their work ethic. The last call the night before had been at 11.45. No rest for the wicked.

  When nothing appeared on the Oxford Times website the morning Olly had surprised them coming out of Rose’s flat, she’d dared hope that they’d scared him enough to drop it. She checked the site the next morning and then the next … nothing for three days. She’d almost thought the matter was done with. In the meantime she’d interviewed David Norfolk’s farmhands, close friends and charity contacts. She’d visited all of the children he’d met through his tutoring – including several who lived in the Leys. After hours criss-crossing the countryside on her way from one emotional interview to the next, all Rose knew for sure was that the world had lost one good man.

  No new suspects.

  No new leads.

  No answers.

  Then, on the morning of 15 October, Olly’s headline finally appeared, blaring in twenty-four-point font at the top of the Oxford Times. It was precisely what Stevenage had said it would be, except with a couple of exclamation marks added for good measure.

  The little shit had been holding out for the print edition.

  DCI Hume had done his best and the Thames Valley press office had been blitzing their contacts on the nationals but it had done no good. Stevenage had been right: once his ‘story’ had gone online and the tabloids got wind of it, no force on earth could have kept it under wraps.

  She’d read the piece. She’d had to – and anyway she’d had Hume bellow every word of it down the phone to her within ten minutes of it going live. Leland Phillips had spent the day sending her choice extracts by text message.

  Late-night tryst … looking tired but happy … exchanging warm, intimate smiles … no attempt to conceal … shameless …

  Rose had had to change her phone number twice that day. Hadn’t worked. Everyone from the lowest tabloid slime to the top broadsheet crime correspondents to reporters on the evening news had been on her back.

  Now she checked the caller ID,
recognized the number of a hack from one of the hang-’em-and-flog-’em right-wing papers, hit the ‘off’ button. Crawled from bed.

  Focus, she told herself. It’s about Katerina. It’s about David Norfolk. Focus.

  Today was 18 October. If the killings followed the same pattern as the ones in France, that meant they had three days to go.

  Showered and dressed, with coffee brewing, Rose pored over the new information Interpol had pulled together for her. The email with the zipped files had been sent over to her just after 1 a.m., UK time. Did no one in the world sleep any more?

  Here was the full works on the four French killings from ten years before. All the case notes, transcripts, tech reports; all the cold leads, dead ends, wrong guesses. Mostly in French. Rose had a dictionary propped open on the desk beside her; with this and a half-remembered GCSE, she found she could pretty much make sense of it.

  Of the words, anyway. The deeds the words described remained beyond her grasp.

  A few weeks ago, she thought wearily, this kind of stuff – countless unpaid extra hours, liaison with overseas forces, in-depth case research – would’ve earned her a gold star and a shedload of brownie points from DCI Hume.

  Now it was all that was keeping her from being kicked off the case. That and Hume’s pride: the idea of admitting that he’d blundered in putting Rose in charge, she guessed, was too much for the pig-headed old copper to stomach.

  But he had a breaking point, she knew. With the constant barrage of venomous press coverage – not to mention Phillips dripping his poison in the chief’s ear – it surely couldn’t be far off.

  Again she remembered the date, the deadline. Wondered who, how, where. Tried to blot out the thought of some poor woman shivering in a locked cellar, tied up in a car boot or the back of a van, who knew –

  They’d been keeping a close eye on the missing-person logs. She and Hume had drawn up a shortlist, strictly off the record. Three people on it: three missing persons with no obvious reasons for going AWOL, no history of mental illness, no financial problems, no love affairs or dirty secrets anyone knew about.