Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  ‘Then what was the truth?’

  ‘A crazy story.’

  ‘Dragan.’

  ‘All right.’ He slapped the dashboard in irritation and glared red-faced at Rose. ‘She said that the old priest had brought a demon into his house. All right? She said that the priest raised the demon as his son. That the demon had devoured her daughter, Olga – and that in the end the demon had devoured the priest, too.’

  Dragan shook his head, pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes.

  ‘Wasting time on a mad old hag’s bogeyman stories. This is how police work in England?’ He held out a meaty hand for the car key. ‘Can we go now?’

  As they drove away, Rose stared out of the car window but saw nothing of the world beyond. Her thoughts were elsewhere. A thing made from greasy bones, given to the girl just before she disappeared. Like the one left for Katerina. Like the one left for Brask.

  A demon? No.

  But a damaged, lonely young man, scarred by the war, cut off from the world and raised in isolation by a zealous priest –

  Someone had taken the girl, Rose thought. Someone had slaughtered the priest.

  A cold feeling of horror uncurled in her stomach.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  To her surprise Rose found, amid the ruins of St Quintus, that she had a mobile signal. She dialled quickly before she lost it. Brask. Yes, he was the arsehole who’d wrecked her investigation – but he was also the last person to have found a greasy structure of animal bones on his doorstep.

  The last person still alive anyway.

  Voicemail. Bloody hell. She left a quick message, asking him to call back ASAP.

  She needed to speak to a copper – someone reliable, clear-thinking, effective. Phillips and Angler were out. Ganley? Too young, too shaky – a good constable but, right now, a bag of nerves. Instead she dialled Pete Conners, the tough ex-Met PC who’d been with Ganley that first night, that night in the meadow when they’d found Katerina.

  He answered on the second ring. Thank God.

  Conners sounded a little puzzled, a little wary at first, but he agreed to do as Rose asked: call in on Matt Brask, see if he was okay, keep a keen eye out for anything not right, anything suspicious. Before she rang off Rose asked him how things were in Oxford.

  ‘Bloody awful, ma’am,’ Conners said cheerfully.

  She thanked him, put away her phone. Looked around at the place in which she stood – at the rubble, the derelict foundations and the scorched earth that had once been the monastery of St Quintus. Rose had seen photos of the old monastery before it was destroyed. It had been, if not majestic, at least impressive. Now it was little more than stray piles of stone being slowly reclaimed by the forest.

  ‘You have some strange ideas about how to spend a holiday,’ called Dragan. ‘First the mad old woman, now this.’

  The big translator had regained his usual unflappable good humour. He was sitting on a tumbledown wall, playing a game on his phone.

  ‘It’s not a holiday.’

  ‘I thought English women were fun.’

  ‘Did you meet many women like me when you were in England?’

  He looked up at her, narrowing his eyes in the low sun.

  ‘No,’ he said, after a moment. Shook his head with a half-smile. ‘No. None.’

  He went back to his game.

  Rose wandered the ruins. Anxiety began to wheedle its way into her brain. The jigsaw puzzle, she felt, was slowly coming together, and she had the sense she wasn’t going to like the picture it showed her. The priest, the refugee boy, the missing girl – and this place. St Quintus. Where men lived among the bones of saints.

  She touched a hand to the sandstone of a stricken archway. Such an ancient place – and yet ruined so recently. It had the feeling of a castle destroyed by Vikings or Yorkists or Cromwellians, by siege engines or cannon in a long-gone past. Not by the shells and guns of vengeful Serbs, barely twenty-five years ago.

  She took her hand away from the stone. The death is fresh here, she reminded herself. The destruction is new. Modern. Ours.

  Checked her phone. Nothing: no word from Brask, no word from Conners. Rose chewed her lip. Couldn’t shut off her rising unease.

  They’d left the car in a lay-by at the south side of the monastery site. Circling the area to the west, Rose found that the place wasn’t quite as derelict as it had at first seemed. Beyond the ruins of the north-west tower there was a small, fenced car park and a memorial to the murdered monks. The memorial was an off-white standing stone, engraved simply with the date of the massacre, and a series of weathered information panels.

  She took a look. The boards featured printed text in Croat, English, Russian and German, sketching out the background to the destruction of St Quintus. There wasn’t much in it that Rose didn’t already know. She’d read pretty much everything ever written in English about St Quintus, about its history, its status as a valued Catholic reliquary, the high position of Abbot Cerbonius within the Balkan Church – and its destruction, amid blood and fire, on that terrible October night.

  She did find something new here, though: pictures, colour photographs of the brothers of the order. The first board showed her the face of Abbot Cerbonius, an intelligent-looking man in late middle age, broad-shouldered and silver-haired, smiling slightly crookedly into the camera. For what it was worth, Rose thought that he looked like a good man. But she knew that it wasn’t worth much.

  The other two boards displayed photographs of life in the monastery interspersed with text. There were robed brothers at prayer, monks brewing and gardening, the abbot saying Mass, staff busy in the kitchens, a wiry-haired monk reading to a class of children. Rose snapped a quick photo of each image. The quality would be dismal – the images had already been faded by sun and rain – but you never knew.

  These images made her think. They forced Rose to see the murdered brothers as men of flesh and blood, not just bit-players in a historical tragedy. They made it hard for her to look at the blackened, crumbling stones of St Quintus and not imagine flames leaping to the dark sky, the clatter of automatic weapons, the growing terror of the monks gathered within their burning home.

  She thought of brothers executed on their knees before the chapel altar.

  Of children shot down as they ran from the carnage.

  Of the torn-out heart of an ancient order.

  Rose hadn’t yet figured out the whole story. But somehow, that night, a monster was born at St Quintus.

  Her phone buzzed in the quiet. Brask?

  No: Conners.

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘Nothing good, ma’am.’ The constable’s voice hissed and doubled on the long-distance line. ‘I called his college. Professor Brask’s not been seen all day. Missed three meetings, one of them pretty important – something to do with funding. Need the details?’

  Rose’s stomach plunged as if she was falling from a great height. The ruins of St Quintus were gone. Croatia was gone. For a moment there was only Rose, the constable’s words ringing in her ears, and the swelling blossom of terror in her gut. She struggled to find her voice.

  ‘N-no – thank you, Constable. But I want you to go to his house – the address is on file.’ She swallowed, gulping down her nausea. ‘It’s important. I want him found, Conners.’

  Rang off. Oh Jesus.

  DI Phillips had called Brask a proper little do-gooder. Maybe someone else had him pegged as a saint.

  Images of blood and fire flickered across her mind.

  Saints die as martyrs. Martyrs suffer.

  When you find his body, Phillips, Rose thought as she raced back to the car, you won’t be able to say you weren’t warned.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Brask’s hand closed around the grip of his baseball bat.

  Once again he’d been woken by a noise somewhere in the house. Something out of place: a window breaking? A latch giving way? He’d been dreaming – a confused, messy dream of dark meadows, old p
aintings, monochrome photographs, half-forgotten faces –

  On opening his eyes, it had taken him a moment to get oriented. Wakefulness. A dark room, the furniture nothing but dim outlines. He was alone. A storm outside. He was in England. Oxford. What day was it?

  What was the date?

  Again the out-of-place noise. A kind of scuttling, too substantial to be a mouse.

  He’d lain still. He’d listened to his own shallow breathing, the too-fast beating of his own heart, the wind at the bedroom windowpane and footsteps – he was almost certain that’s what they were – in the hallway downstairs.

  That’s when he’d reached for his bat.

  It had always been with him, the bat, a reminder of home, of the little-league baseball he’d played back in Ohio, of America’s great national pastime. Sentimental? Maybe, but what the hell? And as far as methods to dissuade unwanted late-night visitors went, a baseball bat was hard to beat.

  Now, hearing the faint, creaking footsteps – were they footsteps? – mount the staircase, he hefted the bat and felt further from home than ever before.

  ‘Hello?’

  It came out sounding funny, croaky. No spit in his mouth. He swallowed, climbed out of bed. The floorboards were cold under his bare feet. With the bat cocked over his right shoulder, he moved to the door.

  Flicked on the light. Waited. Didn’t breathe.

  No more footsteps. No sounds at all except for those of the storm raging outside.

  He eased open the bedroom door and slipped out on to the landing. The bat knocked loudly on the door frame. Dammit. He quickly hit the light switch, blinked in the glare. Nobody.

  Dmitry Rakić was in jail. But Rakić had friends – a lot of friends.

  Brask moved along the landing to the stairwell. The window rattled in the wind. Blowing a gale out there. It’s an old house, he told himself. Old houses creak in the wind – like ships. He paused again to listen. Yes: nothing but the small protests of an old roof, old rafters, old boards, old window frames.

  He flicked off the landing light, went back into the bedroom. Leaned the bat against the wall in a nook by the bed.

  A scream sounded over the noise of the wind. A woman’s scream – out in the street.

  Brask dashed to the window, threw aside the curtain, pushed up the sash. The cold was like a slap across the face. He leaned out. The street seemed to tremble as tree branches swayed in the storm.

  ‘Hello?’ he called.

  A woman came running. A young woman, sprinting from the shadows, a young woman in a miniskirt, knee-high boots, a cape and a witch’s hat. She screamed again. Racing behind her were two young women and a man dressed in black gowns – academic gowns, Brask noted with a grin – and white Scream masks. One had a rubber axe. All were completely oblivious to his presence.

  He watched them run yelling out of sight and pushed the window closed. Halloween. You had to love it. Finally, he smiled to himself, the Brits are getting into the spirit of it – the young ones anyway.

  Nothing on earth more American than Halloween, Brask thought as he turned back to his bed. Now he really did feel at home.

  He glanced over to where he’d propped his baseball bat.

  It was gone.

  The curtain stirred, a floorboard creaked. A muscular arm locked around his throat.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  1 November

  Rose pushed ninety on the M40 from Heathrow and her little car juddered with the effort of it. On the passenger seat her phone blinked slowly as it tried to download a file of high-res jpegs from the assistant archivist at The Hague.

  She cursed them both, the car and the phone. While she was at it she also cursed the commuter traffic, the hold-ups at Heathrow, the hours of waiting at Zagreb, the high winds at Slavonski that had kept the rattletrap plane stalled on the runway for forty-five minutes …

  Why was everything so fucking slow?

  Everything except the clock. That seemed to hurtle forwards; time seemed to be in free fall. Every minute was a minute she couldn’t afford to waste. Every second was the second that could save a man’s life.

  Matt’s life.

  She dialled Matt’s number on the hands-free for the tenth time. Still no answer. Reception had been so spotty in the Balkans that she had not yet heard what Conners had found at the professor’s flat. There was still a chance Brask was laid up at home with food poisoning or a hangover. There was still a chance that he was okay.

  Rose swung out into a barely-there fast-lane gap and rocketed past a dawdling white van, ignored the irritated flash of an Audi’s lights behind her.

  She called Hume.

  ‘Rose.’ The DCI’s voice came over in an urgent bark. Rose got ready to do some fast talking. She’d been so busy playing planes, trains and – she accelerated past a lorry on the inside – bloody automobiles she hadn’t had the chance for a proper debrief with Hume. She’d done her best to fill in the DCI by email and she’d hoped Conners had filled in some of the gaps. She only hoped it had done the trick. ‘Tell me what I need to know, Rose. We’ve no fucking time to waste.’

  Rose could’ve wept with relief. Hume was finally onside.

  ‘It’s not Rakić, guv, not the gang. But it is from Croatia. A woman out there remembers, her daughter was given one of them in the early nineties.’ She paused – but there was no sceptical sigh this time, no ‘But that was twenty-five fucking years ago …’

  ‘One of these bone things,’ she went on. ‘Weird things, animal bones, knotted into shapes. There was one at Katerina’s place, one in Brask’s office. And –’

  Hume cut her off.

  ‘We found one in Caroline Chaudry’s halls of residence.’ A stiff, awkward pause. ‘Weren’t you told?’

  No, I bloody wasn’t. But this was no time to air a workplace grievance.

  ‘It’s the Trick or Treat Killer,’ she said, with certainty. ‘He makes them; they’re a sign, part of a kind of ritual – I don’t know exactly, it doesn’t matter. But it means that Matt Brask is next on his list, and if –’

  ‘Brask’s been taken,’ Hume said grimly.

  She’d known, of course she’d known – all the facts had pointed that way, all her instincts had said so. But it still hit her like a body blow.

  ‘How?’

  ‘At his place, looks like. Forced entry, signs of a struggle. I’ve not been over there yet but your boy Conners said it looked like Brask put up quite a fucking fight. Furniture knocked over, window put through.’

  Good for you, Matt, Rose thought. I hope you made him suffer.

  ‘So,’ said Hume, ‘it’s your call, Rose. What next?’

  ‘Send a team to clean out the Norfolk farm, guv, top-to-bottom search. There’ll be a bone thing there, somewhere.’

  ‘That’s not going to help Brask.’

  ‘Maybe he got clumsy,’ Rose said. ‘Left us a print or other trace we can use to find the bastard.’ Rose pushed her car ahead of a lumbering HGV, dived on to the city slip road.

  ‘That’d be a fair bit of luck.’

  ‘I’d say we’re due some luck, wouldn’t you, guv?’

  There was a brief pause before Hume said: ‘Listen, Rose. I’m not much of a one for apologies but –’

  ‘Then why break the habit of a lifetime?’ She jumped the roundabout lights, cut sharply across three lanes of traffic. ‘Don’t apologize, don’t thank me. Just help me find this bastard before he – before he does it again.’

  Had she ever spoken to a senior officer like this before?

  She’d never been on the track of a serial killer before.

  Hume said: ‘Let me know what you need.’ Rang off.

  Ten minutes later Rose slewed into a parking space opposite her flat, ditched the car at a forty-five-degree angle from the kerb. She checked her phone as she jogged across the road: still a few minutes to go till the damn files downloaded.

  The flat was as she’d left it. A half-empty coffee cup on the kitchen counter, lapt
op open on the table. No one lying in wait. No weird Croatian bone structures anywhere.

  She grabbed the case file from her carry-on bag, woke up the laptop. There had to be something, something in the data, something someone had said or done, a detail, a whisper – something to tell her who this guy was, and where. Something to lead her to Brask.

  As she was spreading her papers across the table her phone pinged softly.

  Download complete.

  In his email the fussy Hague archivist explained that these were pictures found in a file confiscated from the Serbs; an unofficial kill-list, he called it, a file on prominent Catholics in the north-eastern provinces of Croatia. In the troubled weeks before the massacre the Serb troops had tramped from village to village taking names and pictures. It was all about intimidation, Rose supposed. Echoes of Nazi Germany – or Communist East Germany, come to that.

  The archivist had sent her pages regarding the staff of St Quintus.

  She scrolled through the photographs. Not much information for each entry: just a face, and – if the goons had been especially thorough that day – the person’s name. You got more than that from a police mugshot.

  Some faces she recognized from her earlier research. The Abbot Cerbonius glowered gravely at the photographer. A man who knew wickedness when he saw it. Other faces were half-familiar: was this wiry-haired monk the teacher from the information panel in the car park? And this boy –

  Rose stopped scrolling. This boy.

  She stared at the photograph. The boy stared back at her.

  She dropped her phone, started scrabbling through her papers. She was sure she’d seen that face before, but when? Where?

  Add in some lines on the brow and around the eyes and mouth. Add twenty-five years. Take away his hair. Take away his innocence.

  Rose dug out her copy of the photo she’d been given by Father Florian, Katerina’s priest. There they were: Katerina Zrinski, Matt Brask, the rest of the church volunteers, grinning in the sunshine.

  Hanging back a little, off to one side, part-hidden by someone’s shoulder … An uncertain smile, a bald head, the same face as that Croatian boy. A face she knew. But from where?