Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  ‘We do.’ Rose wrapped her coat tighter, looked up at Brask with a wintry smile. ‘We have to stop the bastard.’

  Brask nodded vaguely, but he looked unconvinced.

  Little Mouse would never have thought the priest had the strength to scream so loudly.

  He had anointed the old man with the necessary oils.

  He had spoken the litany.

  He had asked the priest to pray with him – but the priest had refused to pray. The old man only begged to be freed, to be spared.

  Little Mouse had lifted the priest from his bed. After days without food the man was only scraps of bone, leather and hair bound in stinking sackcloth.

  Little Mouse had tied the wrists of the priest to a branch of an ash tree a day’s walk from the village.

  He’d taken the iron claws from their burlap sack. These were fine things and he was proud of them. He had scrubbed away every spot of rust and greased the metal with balsam oil. The edges of the hooked blades were stropped and keen.

  It was at this point that the priest, hanging from the bough by his string y arms, began to scream. Began, and – as Little Mouse buried the bladed claws in his abdomen, ploughed away the flesh, drew out the blades, wiped them clean and ploughed again – did not stop.

  For all the screaming, no one came. In this part of Croatia people had long since learned to ignore far-off screams. In all the hours Little Mouse worked and the priest screamed no one came.

  Finally the priest hung motionless and silent.

  ‘You have found the heaven you longed for, Father,’ Little Mouse cried, his face drenched with sweat and tears. ‘By the grace of Christ, you are saved.’

  Still no one came.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  26 October

  DCI Morgan Hume was a sly old dog. He’d found a middle way. Rose was still officially heading the investigation – that is, as far as the press and the chief super were concerned. But in reality?

  ‘Hello. Ken Randall here. I live in Iffley, run a little tea shop there, quite a successful one as these things go, but anyway, this probably isn’t relevant, but I mentioned it to my wife, Mary, and she said, “Ken, that could be important, you have to call that police hotline we saw on Meridian” – so here I am, and the thing is, it’s probably nothing, but I was leaving the golf club the other night, Tuesday, it would have been, it’s just outside Littlemore, not Iffley at all really, and I saw these young lads, young men more like, Asian-looking, in what d’you call them, those hooded cardigans, and it wasn’t so much what they were doing as how they looked, if you see what I mean …’

  Managing the tip-off hotline. An appeal had gone out on the local news: cue a deluge of calls from hoaxers, busybodies, lonely pensioners, conspiracy theorists (‘Yes, but have you checked the alibi of the Earl of Oxford?’) …

  All while DI Leland Phillips strutted about the place as de facto head of the murder team with DS Angler following in his wake like a pageboy.

  One upside of this was that it gave Rose headspace and – in the rare moments when the bloody phone wasn’t ringing off the hook – time to herself. Time for research. Brask had been helpful: he’d given her a stack of books and a list of obscure websites with .hr web extensions (‘hr’ for Hrvatska, he’d explained: Croatia in Croat).

  She’d been learning all about the St Quintus massacre.

  There were good reasons why no one remembered it. News reports during the wars had focused on the atrocities of the marauding Serb forces among the Muslim Bosniaks, at Srebrenica and elsewhere – they focused, as they always did, on the greatest horrors. There was only so much mass murder you could cram into a teatime TV news bulletin, Rose reflected grimly.

  And so few people knew what was done in Croatia.

  As Yugoslavia tore itself bloodily apart, the Orthodox Serb units, punching through the Croatian border to the west, targeted Catholic Croat communities, Catholic churches. In 1991 the monastery at St Quintus was burned to the ground and the neighbouring community viciously brutalized. No one had counted the dead. Maybe a hundred, maybe more.

  Rose had followed a trail of URLs to an obscure decade-old report from the International Criminal Court at The Hague. She printed off the spotty PDF, flipped through. St Quintus was mentioned here and there: in a footnote, an appendix, low down in a long list. It was almost lost entirely in the dense, tightly spaced columns.

  Among several photographs, there was one that stuck with her.

  Someone had obviously thought it striking enough to be included in the report but hadn’t been able to figure out where it belonged. It was dated, and captioned ‘near St Quintus monastery, Croatia’, but that was all. Nothing else in the report – lists of POWs taken at Sarajevo, an account of the discovery of a mass grave near Hrasnica – seemed to belong to it.

  She squinted at it. Couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t make sense of the overexposed monochrome.

  She looked again, more closely. Wished she hadn’t.

  The phone began to ring again but she ignored it. It was hard to believe that the photo really showed what it seemed to show.

  A bleak, sunlit, rocky landscape of low shrubs and scattered boulders.

  A tall tree, alone among the rocks.

  A man tied by his hands to a low-hanging branch.

  The high contrast of the photo tested Rose’s eyes. The man was hardly more than a silhouette, a stark figure of black and white. Sunlight gleamed on his bald head. His scrawny arms looked like black ropes.

  His bare torso tapered weirdly inward at the middle, above the waist, like an apple chewed down to the core. Rose might have thought it was an oddity of his build, a physical deformity, had the photograph not clearly shown the sun reflecting white from the exposed bones of his ribcage.

  Three ribs on each side showed starkly against the bloodied skin. The flesh of the man’s trunk had simply been ripped away.

  Another Serb atrocity? But the date on the photo was four weeks after the sacking of St Quintus.

  Rose tucked the page with the photo into her file. The image of the man tied to the tree remained, though: burned into her vision like the after-image of a bright light. It was horrific, haunting – but, more than that, it was somehow familiar.

  The phone began to ring again. She swore under her breath. Here we go.

  ‘Thames Valley Police, murder investigation hotline.’

  ‘Ah, finally. You really ought to answer more promptly – it could be important.’ A well-spoken, teacherly voice. Retired public-school headmaster, Rose guessed.

  ‘Do you have some information for us, sir?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I do. It all began on Thursday afternoon. My basset hound, Charlemagne, normally such a mild old fellow, suddenly began barking furiously at our next-door neighbour, a chap named Goldthorpe …’

  Rose propped her cheek on her hand as the man rambled on.

  You could hardly blame people for losing the plot, she thought. This case was reducing hard-as-nails coppers to blancmange. Take a psychopathic murderer, throw in a few blood-curdling newspaper reports, give the whole lot a good shaking: result, a collective nervous breakdown for the population of Oxford.

  ‘… now, I don’t know much about this chap Goldthorpe, but my wife’s close friend Henrietta Crawford, who lives three doors up on the other side, tells us she has good reason to believe that …’

  Thing was, no one felt safe. Normally killers like this had their favourites – they murdered women, they murdered rent boys, they murdered lone hikers or wealthy pensioners.

  But a Croatian immigrant from the Leys, a middle-class Bletchingdon farmer, a university student from Bradford – what was the pattern here?

  No one could make sense of it. And confusion fostered fear.

  The door opened. Rose looked up to see Evans, the baggy-eyed desk sergeant, jerking a thumb towards the cells and mouthing: ‘Another one.’

  She rolled her eyes, made a with-you-in-two-minutes gesture. Evans nodde
d, disappeared.

  ‘… and what you have to understand, you see, is that Charlemagne really is a tremendously good judge of character, and …’

  ‘Sir, what you’ve told me is very helpful. I’ll add a note to our case file – and, on behalf of the whole Thames Valley force, I’d like to thank you for your public spiritedness in calling us today.’

  She hung up before the man could reply. Almost sounded sincere that time, she thought. You’re getting good at this.

  She grabbed a watery black coffee from the machine before heading down to the cells. Another one. Terrific. That’d be, what, the fifth in two days?

  For some of the local nutcases, it turned out, the phone wasn’t good enough. They preferred to waste the police’s time in person.

  ‘Wouldn’t tell me what exactly he wants to confess to,’ Evans explained as he led the way into the station’s custody unit. ‘Just said he wanted to speak to a senior officer on the David Norfolk case.’

  He led her down to a cell at the farthest end of the unit, snapped open the communication grille.

  Rose peered through.

  A middle-aged man in grey jeans and a blue jumper out at the elbows. Wild grey-black hair and a weak chin thick with white stubble. He had his feet up on the bench. Seemed to be talking to himself.

  ‘Seems about par for the course,’ Rose murmured.

  Evans grinned, shut the grille.

  ‘Count yourself lucky, ma’am. DI Phillips had an hour yesterday with a chap reckoned he was a werewolf.’

  ‘I’m not counting my chickens, Sergeant. We don’t know what this one thinks he is yet.’ She smiled wearily. ‘Interview room five. I’ll be there in a sec.’

  The room was the usual set-up: scuffed tiles, hard seats, rank BO smell and humming tape recorder. The sergeant half asleep beside her.

  At least today the conversation was a little different.

  ‘I ate her face, first of all. Fried up in beef dripping.’

  ‘Mm. Okay.’

  ‘I really did, you know. Write it down. I cut her face off her head and fried it and ate it. With bread and butter.’

  ‘No brown sauce? Fascinating.’

  The man’s weak chin quivered with indignation.

  ‘It’s no laughing matter, this, Inspector. I’m giving you the confession of the century here, on a plate. You oughtn’t to make fun.’ His lower lip poked out. ‘I’ve had it with people making fun.’

  ‘You want to stop talking bollocks then, Frank,’ Evans rumbled.

  Francis Ryan John O’Neill gave Rose a goggle-eyed look.

  ‘Here, Inspector, is he allowed to talk to me like that?’

  ‘Depends, Mr O’Neill. Do you want us to arrest you for wasting police time?’

  O’Neill shook his head so that the loose skin of his ropey throat wobbled.

  ‘I’m not wasting anyone’s time. It’s you that’s wasting time. I’m the Trick or Treat Killer, d’you see? I am him, and you ought to put me away before I kill again.’

  Rose glanced to her right to see that Evans was scribbling a note behind his hand. She read it quickly, nodded. Frank O’Neill had been in this very nick, drunk and incapable, on the nights of the first two murders.

  Okay. They’d done their duty as by-the-book coppers. Now it was time to get shot of this clown.

  ‘With the first one I sucked the marrow out of her bones, d’you see, and …’

  ‘Mr O’Neill, I’ve had enough. Interview terminated, two-oh-eight p.m.’ She reached across, shut off the recorder. ‘Now, Frank, I’m going to have Sergeant Evans here escort you off the premises. He’ll be very polite and decent about it, because he’s like that. But if I ever see you here again, day or night, drunk or sober, I’ll do the job myself – and I’m not half so polite. You’ll go stumbling back to your hostel with my boot print on your arse. Do you understand?’

  Now it was Evans’s turn to get the goggle-eyed look.

  ‘Here, Sergeant, is she allowed to talk to me like –’

  ‘Come on, Hannibal,’ Evans sighed, rising to his feet. ‘Let’s get you out of here before DI Rose goes proper feral on you. She’ll make a meal of you with bread and butter if you don’t watch it.’

  O’Neill was led from the interview room shaking his head sadly.

  ‘You know,’ Rose heard him say, ‘I used to have such respect for the police. Such respect …’

  The door banged shut behind him. Rose leaned back in her chair and sighed. That was the thing: half of Oxford was giving the force grief for not having caught the killer yet, while the other half seemed hell-bent on wasting time and resources that should have been ploughed into the manhunt.

  Then there were the likes of that piss-artist Frank O’Neill, who did both.

  Halloween wasn’t helping, either. Not with a city full of students just looking for an excuse to take the piss. Every detail leaked from the investigation quickly found its way into sick jokes in the union bars and fancy-dress routines on the city pub crawls.

  The victims’ rough cloth clothing had been the latest. She’d driven past a fancy-dress hire place on the edge of town that was displaying a bloodied mannequin dressed in ragged hessian in its window. Headless, of course.

  She’d gone in and torn the owner a new one. He’d promised to take it down, but it was a drop in the ocean. Come the night of Halloween there were going to be some real horrors out on the streets – and nothing the police could do about it.

  What happened to a ghost made from an old bed sheet and a pumpkin with a candle in it? Rose wondered. Nothing like a student town for making you feel old.

  She didn’t feel any need to rush back to the tip-off hotline. Instead she found an empty office on the third floor and looked over the autopsy report on Caroline Chaudry.

  It was a sign of how far out in the cold she was that Hume hadn’t even bothered to send her a copy. She’d had to talk Matilda Rooke into sending one straight to her, in direct breach of the unit’s protocol. Rooke had obliged: ‘I know you’ll look after the poor girl,’ her email had read.

  ‘I’ll try, Matilda,’ Rose had replied, and she meant it – if looking after Caroline meant tracking down her killer and stopping what had happened to Caroline happening to anyone else.

  It was too late to do anything more.

  The report was a rigorous analysis, a rational, hard-headed breakdown of all the information the pathologist could scrape together.

  Thanks to Brask, she finally had some predictions she could test against these facts.

  He had a theory that the guy was a relic-hunter, a bone-collector – that they could expect the latest victim to have had a bone removed.

  Check. Caroline’s lowest rib had been taken out. But that didn’t tell Rose much: she already knew that was part of their man’s MO.

  Brask had said that the ‘iron chair’ was often spiked, to increase the victim’s suffering.

  Check. Once the body had been prised from the chair the two-inch metal spikes had been evident. As had the puncture wounds.

  He’d said that the martyrs were shown no mercy.

  Rose turned to the paragraph detailing the cause of death.

  Check. Caroline had been burned alive.

  She threw down the report. For once she couldn’t hold back the tears.

  Rose sat in the dying afternoon light that filtered in lines through the slatted window blinds and wept for all of them. For Caroline, for David, for Katerina. Her phone buzzed in her pocket: Brask. But Rose couldn’t speak to even him right now.

  She wanted to make some kind of vow, swear a solemn oath: By all that’s holy, I’ll catch this murderer! On my mother’s grave, I swear your deaths will be avenged!

  But what was the point now? She glanced up at the wall calendar: 26 October.

  What was the point in making promises you couldn’t keep?

  Chapter Twenty-three

  She’d taken another look at the photo of the hanging, mutilated man from the International Cr
iminal Court report – looked as closely as she could bear and discovered something she hadn’t noticed before. She wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. It was something odd. Something that could make all the difference …

  Still chewing it over, Rose had straightened herself up in the station toilets, pulled herself together – turn it on, turn it off – and was heading back to tip-off hotline purgatory. The DCI had caught her on the stairs. She’d never seen him like this. Hume was lost-the-plot furious.

  ‘You,’ he’d croaked. His face was a dangerous purple. His jaw clenched and dark brows bent into a forbidding V.

  Rose had had a bellyful of DCI Morgan Hume lately. The evening before, shuttered in an office in the MCU suite, he and Leland Phillips had worked on her for two hours, hammering home their take on the case: Rakić, Rakić, Rakić.

  And making it increasingly clear that it was their way or the highway.

  Rakić had a motive, they’d said. Rakić was in love with Katerina – madly in love (Hume had pointedly stressed the ‘mad’).

  ‘Feelings like that can do strange things to some men,’ Phillips had said, tucking his thumbs in his pockets and affecting a worldly air, ‘if they don’t know how to handle it.’

  Katerina had threatened to leave him for Matt Brask, Rakić had flipped, it all ends up with an ugly scene in an Oxford meadow. End of.

  ‘End of? What about Norfolk and Chaudry?’ Rose asked.

  ‘He got a taste for it.’ Phillips shrugged. ‘Pegging out the Zrinski girl in the field was a cover, misdirection to throw us off his scent – maybe that was what he told himself. But deep down he knew he got off on it. So he did it again. And again.’

  Rakić had had the opportunity. Yeah, he had alibis left, right and centre, but so what? His type always did. They carried alibis around with them like business cards. But what sort of jury is going to take the word of a bunch of well-dodgy Leys faces in a case like this?

  ‘He was under our own surveillance when Norfolk was abducted and murdered.’

  ‘Under your surveillance for most of the time,’ Phillips said. ‘And you have to admit, Rose, you haven’t exactly had two firm hands on recent events, have you? Not too much of a stretch to think Rakić gave you the slip, is it?’