Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  ‘You’re not sorry,’ she said. ‘Admit it. You’re not sorry at all. You think you did the right thing.’

  ‘You don’t have to say it with so much contempt,’ Brask said defensively. ‘Doing the right thing might be a dirty word on the police force, but –’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’ She stood, pushed her face close to Brask’s. ‘Don’t you even dare try and pull that on me. Are we perfect? No. Are you? Do we always get it right? No. Do you? Everyone on this force is busting a gut to catch this bastard. And now you not only go out of your way to undermine the biggest manhunt in Oxford’s history, you’ve got the fucking brass neck to lecture us on morality!’

  Brask’s face was pale, his mouth a tense, hard line.

  Eventually he said: ‘I got you in trouble with your boss, obviously.’

  She had to turn away. The alternative was a right hook across Brask’s jaw.

  ‘As it happens,’ she said, through clenched teeth, ‘you did. You sold me out without a thought. But you know what? That’s nothing. That’s nothing beside the harm you’ve done to this investigation.’

  ‘People have a right to know,’ Brask insisted.

  ‘To know what? That you’ve got a theory? Every nutcase shouting on the street corner, every mad bastard sending me long letters in green ink has a bloody theory. They don’t all go on the bloody evening news and cause mass bloody hysteria!’

  He looked at her grimly.

  ‘You know I’m right.’ Brask straightened his shoulders. The look on his face was withering. ‘You want me to say sorry? All right.’ He nodded stiffly. ‘I’m sorry I spoke the truth without running it by your press office first. I’m sorry I did the right thing without regard for office politics in the Thames Valley Major Crimes Unit. I’m sorry I put the safety of innocent people before your career prospects.’

  ‘Oh, you sanctimonious prick.’

  ‘I made a judgement call, Inspector.’

  ‘Based on what? Your extensive experience of murder investigations?’

  ‘Oh, please, tell me, how was this one going before I came along?’

  ‘Before you came along and lied to the police?’

  ‘You needed my help, Rose.’

  ‘I trusted you.’ She stopped, conscious of her reddening face, of her voice on the brink of breaking. She had to admit it to herself: she was more than angry. She was hurt. Drew a breath. Steady. ‘I trusted you,’ she said again, ‘and you betrayed me.’

  Brask kept up his straight-backed poker-up-the-arse stance.

  ‘I’m truly sorry,’ he said, ‘that you feel that way.’

  There was a noise at the door, behind Rose. She turned. A moon-faced woman, middle-aged with golden-brown hair knotted in an untidy bun, peered uncertainly around the door frame.

  ‘I, um, think I booked this room? For, um, the seminar on … on … on Images of the Visitation, and … and –’

  Brask, recovering his temper with a visible effort, held up an apologetic hand.

  ‘Of course, Dr Helpmann,’ he said. ‘We’ll be done very soon. If you could just give us five minutes –’

  ‘No need,’ Rose interrupted him, snatching up her coat. ‘We’re done here.’

  ‘But Inspector –’

  ‘We’re done, Professor.’

  She pushed past the worried-looking Dr Helpmann and out into the corridor. Brask called after her, something she didn’t hear, didn’t want to hear. She was conscious of being watched curiously as she hurried through the college: by two academics loitering by a water cooler, by a librarian wheeling a trolley of books down a corridor, by the fat porter, who looked up from his paper as she passed.

  Well, that’s that, she thought, as she passed out into the college courtyard, pulling on her coat. You’re on your own again, Inspector Rose.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  29 October

  She’d tried forgetting, tried thinking about other things, tried keeping busy. She rejoined the gym; cleaned the flat; started reading books she’d set aside ages ago for when she had a bit of spare time; called up a couple of old school friends and talked about their fulfilling jobs, their happy marriages, their wonderful kids …

  It hadn’t worked. How could she forget? Someone out there – a good person: a charity worker, a food-bank volunteer, a legal-aid lawyer, Christ, who knew? – was going to die. They’d be tortured and then butchered – and who was going to stop that happening? A burned-out DCI and an arrogant, out-of-his-depth detective? A do-gooding Yank theologian?

  No.

  The flat was a tip again. Takeaway cartons were piled on the kitchen counter and there was an unwashed wine glass, pink with dregs, on the table. Three dark-stained coffee cups were set on the carpet. There were papers everywhere.

  Rose had thrown herself back into the case. They could suspend her but they couldn’t stop her working.

  The Interpol reports, the documents from The Hague, the crime-scene photos, printouts from websites on Balkan history, classical art, Catholicism in south-eastern Europe, anything, everything … covered virtually every surface in her kitchen and living room.

  Now she slurped down cold coffee and peered again – her vision fuzzed by strain and sleeplessness – at the photograph in the old report from the International Criminal Court. The man hanging from the tree in unforgiving black and white. The man whose flesh had been ripped away, whose ravaged ribs glinted in the sunlight.

  She felt like she’d been gazing at the terrible image for ever. Since the day of her suspension she must have looked at it a thousand times – and each time her certainty grew. It wasn’t insomnia or stress skewing her judgement. It wasn’t her eyes failing her. It wasn’t a trick of the light.

  The Trick or Treat Killer cut away body parts, didn’t he? As keepsakes maybe, or – as Brask theorized – to collect them as modern-day relics. The murderer’s sick way of playing out whatever religious psychosis infected him. She blinked, refocused.

  The picture was nearly twenty-five years old, for Christ’s sake – and from a country hundreds of miles away. A different world.

  And yet –

  It was right there, on the page. In black and white.

  ‘His ear,’ Rose said again. ‘He’s missing his ear.’ She’d noticed the mutilation just minutes before Hume had unceremoniously dumped her from the case and sent her on her merry way, but the sudden onslaught of his fury had driven the revelation from her mind.

  ‘I have the picture in front of me as we speak, Inspector Rose. I cannot see the mutilation you describe.’ The man spoke fluent, polished English with a faint Dutch accent.

  ‘Look closer. It’s hard to make out because of the high contrast.’

  A long pause on the line.

  A gentle, apologetic clearing of the throat.

  ‘His right ear is missing,’ the archivist said.

  Finally.

  ‘Yes. Ear removed, torso ripped to pieces. A record must have been taken, surely. Some kind of report, a mention in despatches.’

  ‘Possibly. Possibly.’ He made a dissatisfied little noise. ‘But at the time, Inspector, the situation in eastern Croatia was very disorganized.’

  That was one way of putting it.

  ‘Can you say whereabouts it was found? Where it was in relation to the monastery of St Quintus?’

  ‘Ah, well, the monastery’s location is on record and well-attested: a village called Niza. But the body …’ He tailed off in disappointment. ‘Very disorganized,’ he said again.

  The staff at the International Criminal Court had been helpful; a couple of calls had got her through to this man, an assistant archivist specializing in material relating to the Croatian War of Independence. It seemed like a nightmare job. There were stacks of documentation: reports, transcripts, written orders, press cuttings, inventories, troop numbers, casualty lists, material from the peace negotiations, depositions from the post-war prosecutions. All of it in a state of chaos.

  What was that old line? Trut
h is the first casualty of war. This guy would have disagreed: the first casualty of war was efficient organization of paperwork.

  ‘I will look into this matter for you, Inspector Rose,’ the man said, his reedy voice firm with determination. ‘I will find all the facts I can.’

  Rose thanked him, wished him good luck. Hung up.

  She put the kettle on and, leaning on the kitchen counter, leafed again through her printout of the ICC report, looked again at the dead man hanging from the black tree.

  A victim, Rose was convinced, of the iron claws.

  She’d done some research of her own.

  The iron claws went right back to the days before Jesus’s birth, to the sacred Hebrew Books of the Maccabees. Soldiers of the tyrant Antiochus, Rose had read, had tormented a Jewish youth because he refused to eat forbidden meats: ‘They ripped out his muscles with their iron claws,’ the ancient text read, ‘and tore his flesh all the way up to his chin.’

  The boy was a Jewish martyr, though; Catholicism was the thread – the only thread – that linked together Katerina, David, Caroline and the monastery of St Quintus.

  Rose had continued her search.

  Grisly medieval paintings. Catalogues of witch-hunts and Inquisitions. Eye-watering accounts of emperors’ bloodthirsty circuses.

  She’d found what she was looking for in third-century Rome. St Tatiana, a deaconess of the Early Church, was tortured on the orders of Emperor Severus Alexander. The most terrible of the punishments Tatiana suffered was being raked with iron claws, which ripped the flesh from her upper body.

  Angels descended to heal Tatiana’s wounds and transport her to heaven.

  Rose thought back to the figure in the photo strung from a tree. No healing angels there. Must’ve turned up after the photo was taken.

  She set the report down, rubbed her eyes. What the hell was she doing? A twenty-five-year-old massacre. Torture in ancient Rome, saints and martyrs, obscure Hebrew texts … Hume was right. This wasn’t police work. Meeting Brask had knocked her way off course.

  But what was she supposed to do? She was off the case and out of the loop, barred from any contact with the Zrinskis or the Norfolks or Dmitry Rakić. Even Leland Phillips wasn’t taking her calls. The orders from the top were clear: leave the case alone.

  But the case wouldn’t leave her alone.

  Brask could’ve helped. He’d have known about the iron claws, St Tatiana, all the stuff it’d taken Rose hours to dig out.

  The professor wanted to help, too. He’d left half a dozen voicemails on Rose’s phone, apologizing, explaining, offering to do whatever it took to set things right. It was all a little familiar, Rose’d thought, listening to the messages. She’d heard that same sincere, earnestly pleading tone before – on Katerina’s phone.

  Katerina had never had the chance to call him back.

  Rose didn’t have the inclination. After what he’d done she was seriously not in the mood for Brask’s well-meaning intrusions.

  All this stuff, though, from the Yugoslav Wars, from the Early Church. Okay, it was obscure, maybe kind of tenuous, and the thought of standing up in court and setting it out before a judge – ‘You see, m’lud, it all begins with the ancient Hebrew Books of the Maccabees …’ – made her want to laugh and cry at the same time.

  But it fitted. It felt right.

  She heard DCI Hume’s mocking jibe: Another fucking hunch, Rose?

  Yeah, well. If she was off the case, Hume wasn’t in charge any more.

  She picked up the phone, ready to bother the fussy assistant archivist with yet more enquiries about a little-known monastery and long-forgotten corpse – and then stopped mid-dial. To a copper used to asking direct questions, going through the ICC records office felt unsatisfying, third-hand, like a long-range game of Chinese whispers. Was there a way to cut out the middleman?

  The Abbot of St Quintus and the one-eared dead man were long gone and weren’t going to be helping anyone with their enquiries any time soon – even if it was Halloween.

  Christ – Halloween! Sunk in her research, Rose had almost forgotten about that. The night before she’d stopped at a corner supermarket to pick up bread, tea and a bottle of wine, and had had to pick her way through rack after rack of plastic merchandise in lurid pumpkin-orange. In the student quarters of town the fancy-dress partying was already underway. She’d passed one kid passed out drunk on a park bench near Magdalen, his pissed-up mates dousing him with joke-shop blood. The local paper had run a story on a third-year Classics student who’d jumped into the Isis in full Dracula costume and nearly drowned. Real fun and games.

  Over-excited kids, drunk teenagers and a city in the grip of serial-killer hysteria …

  And it was only going to get worse. She had to do something.

  She put down the phone and moved to the kitchen table, where her laptop hummed softly on standby. She fired it up. New browser window. Quick search: flights to Croatia.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  31 October

  Mass graves. Bloodied bodies. Shelled-out towns. The old reports from The Hague had painted this part of eastern Croatia as a hell on earth.

  But now, out of the car window, bathed in clear, cold, late-autumn light, it looked almost like heaven.

  Rose turned to her translator and driver, Dragan.

  ‘Is the whole country this beautiful?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Dragan said simply. He moved the hired car up a gear, nodded with satisfaction. ‘Most beautiful country.’

  The villages they passed through were picture-book pretty, set in expansive landscapes of stone and river, forest and sky. As Rose watched, a dark crowd of thousands of starlings rose from a stand of bare trees to perform a dramatic flight over the road, furling and unfurling like a black flag waving in the wind.

  So strange that only twenty-five years ago this was a nation in the grip of civil war. Twenty-five years ago this soil was soaked with blood and this countryside was in flames.

  Twenty-five years ago a man was tied to a tree and his body was stripped of its flesh.

  Twenty-five years later, Rose wondered, had his killer returned?

  She thought of the Interpol files from France a decade before, the terrible monochrome pictures of dismembered corpses strewn across dusty floors. Had he ever, in fact, gone away?

  ‘Not far,’ Dragan said, gesturing as a road sign flashed by.

  Niza. The town nearest to the tree from which the man’s body had been strung. Would anyone there remember? Would anyone care?

  Rose was counting on it. Niza was her best shot at getting to the dark heart of this case.

  A mile or so later they swung on to a side road and followed its winding course up into starkly handsome hill country.

  ‘Many monasteries in the hills,’ Dragan said conversationally. ‘Higher you climb, closer you are to God.’

  Another sharp turn-off, into a swaying tunnel of overhanging trees, and then a steep, straight climb to where a whitewashed gable end marked the western edge of a small huddle of buildings.

  Dragan revved noisily up the slope, swung the car into a bare tract of land that seemed to serve as a car park. He killed the engine and slapped the steering wheel with finality.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, beaming behind his blackout sunglasses. ‘Welcome to Niza.’

  Rose smiled uncertainly.

  She’d come to like this beefy, uncomplicated Croat. He was a good translator – he’d spent four years in England, working variously as a taxi driver, hospital porter, trucker’s mate and nightclub bouncer – and knew every inch of this part of Croatia. He was maybe thirty-five, forty. He thought fast, learned quickly and spoke without thinking.

  And he smiled a lot. Even when Rose had explained who she was, what she was doing in Croatia and what her interest was in Niza, he’d smiled – smiled and said, ‘No problem.’

  A hard man to faze. A hard man full stop. Reminded her of some coppers she’d known.

  They clim
bed out of the car. It had been mild enough down in Slavonski, to the south-west, where her connecting flight from Zagreb – a wind-buffeted hundred-mile hop in a twin-propellered rust bucket – had set her down. Up here, though, it was blustery and stingingly cold. Rose shivered.

  Dragan, who seemed comfortable in his tracksuit bottoms and tatty hoodie, stretched extravagantly and said: ‘All right, boss. What now?’

  She zipped her coat, checked her pockets for notebook and pen.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘we do some old-fashioned police work.’

  Twenty-five minutes of door-to-dooring around the village reminded Rose that people – whatever their nationality or language – really aren’t so different underneath.

  No one likes talking to coppers.

  She’d shown the picture of the dead priest to maybe seventeen people. Her in-built persistence coupled with Dragan’s straight-talking charm had earned them maybe five half-useful answers – plus a nice collection of suspicious looks, frank refusals, slammed doors and Croat go-fuck-yourselves.

  ‘Nasty memories,’ Dragan had shrugged after a middle-aged lady had threatened to set her dogs on them. ‘A long time ago, but nasty, still. Painful. No one wants to be reminded.’

  ‘Don’t people want justice?’

  ‘Some, maybe. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, maybe. But it’s just a word now, justice. The trials go on and on. War crime. Milošević, Karadžić. Me, I’d sooner forget.’

  But someone has to remember, Rose thought.

  As they crossed the deserted village square, Dragan said he knew the butcher in the village; he’d done a little business with him, he explained vaguely. Poached venison, Rose guessed – though from what she knew of Dragan it could have been anything from used car parts to smuggled small arms.

  ‘Old man, this Karel, very, very ancient,’ he said. ‘Knows everything in Niza. Knows nothing outside Niza – but in Niza, everything.’