Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  Susie Canning, vicar’s daughter, fifteen, missing from her home in Banbury for just under a week.

  Craig Rotheray, health-club entrepreneur, twenty-nine, reported missing by his fiancée four days ago.

  And Caroline Chaudry, a medical student.

  The force had ripped Oxfordshire apart looking for the three of them. Not a sniff.

  Rose had had a word with Hume about going public, putting out a statement warning that the killer was likely to strike again. Hume – as she’d known he would – had dismissed the idea. ‘Enough fucking hysteria around as it is,’ he’d said in exasperation. A cynical part of her guessed that Hume was more worried about everyone finding out just how little progress the force had made on the case. What exactly could they say, after all? There’s someone out there, we don’t know what he looks like, what his name is or where he is – but take care, or he might kill you. How would that sound? Hume wasn’t much of a one for focus groups and community engagement but he knew a PR disaster when he saw one coming.

  Rose returned to the reports. Sighed. Flipped through the French dictionary.

  This was Murder Three. No, she reminded herself: it was the murder of Emilie Jourdain. A person, more than a number. The pictures had showed a pattern of body parts laid out on the dusty tiles of a derelict library. As she cross-referenced the words in the dictionary she scribbled her loose translations in the margins of the report.

  Souris. Mice.

  Température ambiante. Room temperature.

  Décomposé. Decomposed.

  She paused. Her mind lurched into a higher gear. She scrabbled through the paperwork for the crime-scene photos. Here they were: the butchered body parts, dark slabs of meat laid out on the chessboard floor tiles. They were, she saw now, a little shabby, ragged-edged where mice, rats and stray cats had gnawed and worried at them. And they lacked the gloss of fresh meat: the camera flash showed only a dull, dead, matte grey.

  Décomposé.

  Murder Three, Rose realized with a thudding sense of dread, had gone wrong. Maybe a security guard called in sick, maybe a builder forgot to show up.

  No one had found this until 21 October. But it had been there, waiting – for how long?

  The other victims had been found soon after their deaths, but the state of this body suggested Murder Three had been undiscovered for days after its presentation. That meant that the timeline Rose was working from was wrong. She grabbed for her phone, to call Brask, Hume, Phillips, anyone – to tell them that time was running out, that it was later than they’d thought.

  It went off in her hand, rattling through its shrill routine of descending bleeps. She swore violently, cursed Olly fucking Stevenage and the fucking vultures from the press …

  But it wasn’t the press. It was PC Ganley, calling from a stretch of fallow land outside Oxford. His voice was broken in a way that by now seemed almost familiar to Rose. It wavered, thick with horror.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Brask sat at his computer in the stark light of his anglepoise lamp, a stack of notes at his elbow, books piled on the floor, a dozen tabs open in his web browser.

  No sense in lying in bed, he’d finally figured, when it was clear that sleep had given up on him. He’d dropped off for a couple of desperate hours around two, been up since five and at his office in All Souls since six. Researching, working. Now he leafed through a stack of printouts of the Interpol files. The clock showed seven-thirty.

  In his own eyes he seemed foolish, delusional.

  You’re not a cop, he told himself. You’re an academic playing at being a private eye.

  He’d looked up at his own photograph on the wall. The hair forcibly combed into a side parting, the grin boyish and toothy above the Roman collar. Hardly Humphrey Bogart.

  But it helped. Thinking through the case, trying to find Katerina’s killer – it helped him.

  And he’d hardly realized that he needed helping.

  He’d drawn out a rough chart on a page of his notebook. Across the top there were four dates, the dates of the four French killings. In the columns lists of names. Saints’ names.

  Most people, he knew, thought of saints’ days – if they thought of them at all – as just footnotes on the calendar, scattered thinly through the year and scarcely regarded. Send your lover some chocolate on St Valentine’s, get drunk on stout on St Patrick’s Day – that was about it.

  But in the Catholic Church the calendar was dense with saints’ days. Each was rich in history, tradition, meaning; each one mattered to someone, somewhere.

  They found Katerina on her cartwheel on 4 October – and on the same day ten years previously, in the crypt of a church in Rheims, they’d found a young woman’s body parts arranged into a coarse likeness of the body of the crucified St Peter.

  That day, 4 October, was the day of St Ammon, of St Francis of Assisi, of St Petronius, of St Peter of Damascus, of St Hierotheus, of St Quintus.

  In Brask’s notes the name of St Quintus was underlined in red.

  He’d done a little digging. Quintus wasn’t much known among western Catholics – he was an obscure martyr from the sixth century, killed at the court of a Frankish king. In the east, though, he was more widely venerated, thanks to the influence of the Orthodox Church. There was even, he’d discovered, an Order of St Quintus, founded somewhere in the north-central Balkans. One of its central figures was an Abbot Cerbonius.

  The feast of St Cerbonius fell on 10 October. The day they found David Norfolk. Could’ve been a coincidence, sure. For all they really knew, this whole damn case – Katerina’s wheel, David Norfolk’s mutilation, the dates, the French killings – could’ve been nothing but a run of macabre coincidences.

  Facts were what they needed.

  Now, squinting, leaning close to the monitor, Brask scrolled through a series of blurred scans from an English-language Croatian newspaper. They were dated from the early 1990s – the height of the Yugoslav Wars, when the country was falling apart and Sarajevo was in flames.

  What happened at St Quintus hadn’t had much coverage in the west – certainly not in the States, as far as he remembered. But the facts were all here, scanned and posted to the web by a Croatian blogger whose handle was Nikad Zaboraviti. He’d googled the name, only to find that it wasn’t a name; it was Croat for never forget.

  No one knew, it seemed, just how many people had been killed by rogue Serb units at the monastery of St Quintus the night it was attacked. Dozens, maybe hundreds. As he read through the muddy, close-set type of the news reports, Brask’s own words on the subject of evil came back to him. The signatures of evil. The marks it leaves.

  He read about what the soldiers had done to the Croat women who lived in the shadow of the monastery. He read about what had been done to the children caught trying to escape the slaughter.

  Men aren’t capable of true evil? God, Rose must have thought him such a fool – such a child.

  Still, though: even the soldiers who ravaged the village, raped the women, shot down the fleeing children, pillaged and burned the monastery were only men. Not devils. Only men.

  Remember this, Matt, the professor told himself.

  The destruction of the monastery of St Quintus had had wider repercussions for the Church in the Balkan region. It had been thought safe, secure; the village in which it was situated wasn’t a military target, had no strategic value. So the monastery had been used as a store-house. A treasure-house. Ancient artefacts from churches across Croatia had been crated up and shipped to the brothers of St Quintus – so as to be safe, it was thought, from theft, fire, war.

  In one terrible night the brothers had learned that their safety was a cruel illusion. None had survived the butchery.

  Brask hadn’t been able to dig up an inventory of the treasures held at the monastery. It wouldn’t have been common knowledge, of course. Maybe he could dial up some old contacts. Someone somewhere must know; no institution on earth had a longer memory than the Church.

/>   The treasure could have been pretty much anything: paintings, icons, statues, chalices, illuminated manuscripts, relics.

  The last word struck him with a new force. Relics. Fragments of the True Cross. Strands of hair. The bones of saints.

  Katerina’s missing ankle bone. Norfolk’s taken wrist bone.

  Brask checked his watch. Nearly seven. Rose would be up. This was hardly the big break in the case they needed, but it was something she should know about. It was 18 October already. They didn’t have time to ignore any leads.

  He reached for his phone, then froze at a sharp noise from behind him. A draught stirred his papers. He turned.

  Dmitry Rakić stood in the doorway. He held a gun, and the gun, black and unwavering, was pointed at Brask’s heart.

  This man, a liar. This woman, a whore. This man greedy, this man selfish, this man cruel.

  Is this why Christ has forsaken us? Little Mouse wondered. Are there no deserving souls among us?

  He prowled the late-night street. The priest had told him not to go to the village again but he had come anyway. In the ruined square men sat around an oil-drum fire, drinking, getting drunk. A thin woman and her young daughter picked their way through a burned-out shop, foraging, thieving.

  Not a single soul glowed with the holy light Little Mouse sought. The light that encircled the vision of the abbot – the divine light of Christ.

  He watched two scrawny children run by. Street children. He watched one trip the other mischievously, watched them tangle, fight, heard them swear disgustingly.

  ‘Damned,’ he murmured. ‘All of you – damned.’

  A hand fell heavily on his shoulder. When he turned he saw the cavernous face of the priest looking down at him.

  ‘Father!’

  The priest struck him fiercely, back-handed, across the mouth. He spat foul words from spittle-flecked lips: wretched child, miserable boy, disobedient, strayed from Christ …

  The ranting priest loomed above him but Little Mouse’s gaze was drawn to another figure. From a higher, further, better place, the abbot was smiling upon him.

  ‘What you seek, my beloved child,’ the abbot said, ‘stands before you.’

  Little Mouse blinked. The priest still shouted. He still looked decrepit, used-up. But Little Mouse saw something he had not seen before. Something new.

  The priest had changed. He was the same mortal man, his flesh no less withered, no less wasted. But beneath his wrinkled skin, behind his half-blind pale eyes, he shone with an unmistakeable light.

  Little Mouse groped on the ground for a stone. When he found one he swung it with all his strength at the old priest.

  The man toppled unconscious to land at Little Mouse’s feet.

  The night was dark, but the old man, he shone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The sky was sunless, sullen, a blanket of ominous grey. It was just after eight and barely light. Rose climbed from her car, flexed her shoulders wearily. She wondered what to expect. Warned herself to be prepared for anything.

  They’d shut the crime scene down tight, this time. As if they’ve done it before, Rose thought bitterly. A decisive sergeant had taken charge: the hazy meadow was closed off with police tape and uniformed constables lined the meadow edge, grim-faced and ankle-deep in nettles.

  Rose sought out Ganley in the line.

  ‘Constable.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  The young policeman seemed to have aged a decade in the past two weeks. Rose gave in to an old copper’s habit: the darker the mood, the more pressing the need to joke.

  ‘No puke on your shoes today, Ganley,’ she said. ‘I’ll take that as a good sign.’

  ‘No, ma’am.’ Ganley didn’t smile. ‘It’s me what’s changed. Not him.’

  Him.

  Rose thanked the young officer for his call before moving off into the field. Grey skies, a bare Oxford meadow … It felt like a recurring nightmare.

  There was a sluggish, low-lying mist here that she hadn’t noticed on leaving her flat. Off the river, she supposed; she could see the stooped willows that marked the riverbank half a mile to the west.

  And there was this smell – it put her in mind of a summer barbecue.

  She stopped suddenly. Her hand flew to her mouth and she gulped down hard on a throatful of vomit.

  She knew without any doubt what she was going to see beyond the glimmering police tape. For the first time she wondered if she’d be able to bear it – after Katerina, after Norfolk, after everything.

  It’s your job to bear it, Rose, she told herself angrily. She pushed on through the wet grass. With every forward footstep she heard it, insistent, relentless, like a thumping heartbeat: Do your job, do your job, do your job.

  The WPC at the tape looked as sick as Rose felt. Rose knew her slightly. She liked her: a solid, smart young constable, transferred from inner-city Birmingham a year or two back. No shrinking violet, well able to hold her own in an argument – or a fight, come to that.

  ‘Is it as bad as I think it is, Constable?’ Rose asked her, masking her unease as she ducked below the cordon.

  The WPC shook her head. When she spoke it sounded as though she was winded from a body blow.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ she said. ‘It’s worse. It’s much worse.’

  This guy’s put the wind up the entire force, Rose thought as she moved cautiously onward. She’d never seen anything like it.

  The Trick or Treat Killer.

  There’s never been anything like it, she thought.

  Up ahead, just beyond a patch of scrub and gorse, a dark-brown patch had been burned in the grass. Circling wide, moving past the scrub, she saw that the patch was the leading edge of a round, ragged scorch mark, maybe eight feet across, and that at its middle was the killer’s latest victim. Murder Three.

  We knew it was coming, Rose thought. We knew it was coming and yet we couldn’t stop it.

  She put herself in a place beyond shock, beyond horror, because that was where she had to be to do her job. She had to look on the blackened corpse with a clear, clinical eye. Thinking analytically, logically, didn’t make you a robot or a psycho or an ice-maiden, didn’t make you any less human; Dr Matilda Rooke had taught her that.

  The victim sat chained to a crudely made iron chair in the middle of a rising column of white smoke. The chair stood in a pit in the middle of a heap of coal, some still dark grey, some spent and white, some still glowing a hellish orange-red.

  Watery fat glistened in yellowish puddles around the soot-blackened chair legs. The body was a dark husk. Hair burned off, eyeballs boiled away; skin charcoal-black and creased with blood.

  White teeth framed a withered tongue. Another silent scream. Another scream born in unimaginable suffering and enduring through death – another scream that would haunt Rose’s nightmares.

  The stench was almost overpowering.

  Rose looked down. There was a pool of porridgey sick by her feet. Mike Angler, she guessed. Over the phone Ganley had told her that the stout DS had been down with DCI Hume first thing to view the scene. Angler was a boozer – and this was no sight for a man with a hangover.

  Hume was there when Rose returned to the open meadow. He stomped towards her through the grass, blue-black bags under his gleaming eyes, mud on his trouser cuffs.

  Rose got straight to the point: ‘Which one is it, sir?’

  ‘Chaudry’s ID was on the scene.’ The DCI’s voice sounded as tired as he looked. ‘The state of her, there’s no way to confirm visually. We’ll have to wait for Rooke to get her on the slab before it’s official. My money’s on Chaudry, though, even without the ID.’

  Rose nodded. She was glad she’d seen the body before she knew that. It was hard to be analytical, hard to see with a clear eye, when you knew that the charred carcass had a name, and a face, when you’d seen her smiling out of a dozen missing-person bulletins.

  ‘Why’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘Build’s all wrong for the bl
oke, Rotheray, he’s six-foot-some, and that poor bastard over there can’t be more than five-six.’

  ‘How about Canning?’

  ‘Canning turned up last night. Ran off to Norwich with some old fucking pervert. Back with her family now, all tears and apologies.’ Hume sighed, crossed his arms. ‘So it’s Chaudry.’

  Caroline Chaudry. Just twenty-one.

  ‘I knew it,’ Rose said – without meaning to speak. Hume heard her.

  ‘Another fucking hunch, Rose? Christ. Fat lot of fucking good those have done you so far. Nostra-fucking-damus you aren’t.’

  ‘No, guv.’

  ‘Stick to police work.’ He looked at her frankly from under his scruffy eyebrows. ‘It’s what you’re good at.’

  ‘Yes, guv.’

  ‘Keep me posted.’

  He walked off across the field, back towards the lane. She could see Angler waiting by the DCI’s car, propping a cup of coffee on the car roof.

  Caroline had been a medical student at Oxford, gifted, by all accounts, even by the university’s high standards. Grew up in Bradford – big family in the suburbs. Spent her gap year in Angola, working with a health charity.

  Kind, charitable, loyal, generous with her time, well liked …

  Rose had known, whatever Hume said. Caroline Chaudry had just felt right.

  She thought back to what Brask had said last week – about evil, about how evil is somehow something men do, but not what they are … Bullshit, she thought angrily. This guy, whoever he is, maybe he’s not Satan, not the devil – but if he’s not evil, through-and-through, down-to-the-bone evil, then I don’t know what is.

  Funny, she thought. Brask was a priest, a Catholic bloody priest – shouldn’t he be the one preaching hellfire and calling down damnation on the wicked?

  And shouldn’t she, the seen-it-all veteran copper, be the one dealing in shades of grey? The one explaining how the world was more complicated than it seemed, how ideas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ weren’t really so straightforward?

  But no. In the kind of old-school nick where she’d learned the ropes, bad guys were just bad guys – or villains, nonces, wrong ’uns, psychos, smackheads, scumbags. Walk into a Met section house preaching rehabilitation and you’d get short shrift.