Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  There were more photos on her phone. Rose ran frantically through the messily filed albums. There’d been so many new faces in these last few weeks, new places, strange circumstances. She’d kept snapping as she’d gone along. Good habit for a copper to get into.

  Finally she found him. He’d been in Radcliffe Square; the agitated cook whose pig had been stolen by the student pranksters. This was the man who’d also stepped in to stop Brask from being beaten to death by Dmitry Rakić. In fact, she’d seen him that very first time she’d met Brask: the bald man had been in his office. The two of them had been talking about rugby. Christ, he must have been keeping his eye on Brask since the very beginning. And all right under Rose’s own fucking nose …

  Brask had known his name, spoken to him as a friend … a good man the killer had called him.

  Good enough to be a saint.

  Good enough to be a martyr.

  Rose glanced again at the face staring back at her from the phone.

  He was the Trick or Treat Killer.

  Chapter Thirty

  A downstairs flat in a two-storey house, on the edge of a newish west-Oxford housing estate. Most of the houses had Halloween pumpkins in front of them, but not this one. Rented through an agency for the last few years. Neat lawn. Drawn curtains. Could’ve been anyone’s.

  This was the place the Trick or Treat Killer called home.

  Once Rose had connected the photo of the boy from St Quintus to the photo of the cook from Oxford all it took was a call to the University Contract Services to match a name with that face.

  Luka Savić was his name, and today the Thames Valley police force was going to pay him a visit he wasn’t likely to forget.

  ‘Take it apart,’ growled Rose.

  The Firearms Response sergeant rapped out an order. There was a splintering thump as the back door went through. A few seconds later Rose saw flashlight beams play over the curtains. She waited. Didn’t dare breathe.

  No shots.

  The sergeant, Munro, waved forward the rest of his unit. They deployed swiftly, silently, across the front of the house. Rose heard the lock on the front door pop.

  Munro was muttering into his comms headset. He nodded, turned to Rose.

  ‘Ground floor’s clear, ma’am,’ he said in his clipped Glaswegian accent. The second unit of armed officers were filtering in through the front door. ‘Standing by.’

  No nasty surprises then. Yet.

  She took a second to compose herself. She was so close, so damn close to pinning down the man who’d caused so much misery, who’d put so many people through hell. A part of her, pent-up and raging, was ready to tear his home apart with her bare hands.

  But this thing wasn’t over, not by a long way. Luka had Brask. And Brask’s life depended on Rose making the right calls – on Rose doing her job.

  She turned to Munro and nodded.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Up the green-tinged stone path into a bare, carpeted hallway. Shop-bought religious prints on the right-hand wall. No real smell to the place; that was odd. Three officers stood, guns cocked, by the door that opened into a small living room. Flashlights glimmered in the gloom inside. Someone coughed softly.

  The atmosphere was hair-trigger tense.

  ‘Let’s get some light in here,’ Munro snapped. At his gesture two officers ripped down the cheap blue curtains. Grey late-afternoon light flooded a nondescript room. Another religious print on the wall, a bookcase stacked with clutter, rosary beads hanging from a hook on the chimney breast. A metal crucifix nailed to the wall above an unplugged TV.

  There was a sofa and chair that looked hardly sat on.

  This is his flat, Rose thought, moving slowly through the room, but it’s not where he lives.

  Her heart was galloping.

  Two doors opened to the right. The first led into a small, magnolia-washed bedroom. The FR boys had done a number on it: the single bed was overturned, a wardrobe door off its hinges. A carved dark-wood crucifix on the wall had taken a knock and hung at a crooked angle.

  ‘Nice work, lads,’ Munro murmured, taking it in with a glance. ‘Thorough.’

  One of the officers nodded, touched his cap with a grin.

  The kitchen, too, was plain, clean, normal. Save, Rose noted, for the splintered back door. She turned to the officer who stood in the doorway.

  ‘Anything in the fridge?’

  The officer grimaced.

  ‘Nothing you’d want to eat.’

  Rose’s stomach lurched. She thought of missing ankle bones and severed ears.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Old food, ma’am. Bottle of milk that’s been there for weeks. Bit of green sausage. Kept his bread in there, too, the weirdo.’

  It’d be a turn-up if that was the weirdest thing they found today, Rose thought.

  She walked through the narrow kitchen, splinters from the door crunching under her feet. Beyond the tall fridge, half hidden by a plywood plank, was another door. A cellar door. Bolted.

  The sudden knowledge – call it instinct, call it intuition – rose up in her like a shark through dark water: This is it.

  There was no doubt in her mind. Whatever was down there, it held the key: to the murders, to Luka’s madness, maybe to saving Matt Brask’s life. Whatever was down there, it was what Rose had come here to find.

  Munro had followed her into the kitchen. She gave him a look.

  He nodded. ‘Barkley, in here with the cutters,’ he shouted sharply.

  The officer, young, black-bearded and athletic, ducked through the crowded kitchen and readied the heavy-bladed bolt cutters against the padlock.

  There was a blood-curdling clatter of guns being cocked. The feeling of bodies tensing, senses sharpening, minds shifting up into a new mode of operation. The door had clearly been locked from the outside but no chances would be taken with this one. Rose backed out of the room as the FR team moved silently into formation.

  Barkley cut the lock and the men surged into the darkness beyond.

  Brace yourselves, boys, Rose thought, her gut tight. Christ alone knew what they’d find – what was waiting for them down there. She steeled herself for shouts or gunshots, but she heard only the officers’ footsteps and Munro’s sharply clipped commands. She edged into the doorway, looked down. Blinked at the acrid smell that rose up the dank stairwell.

  Scented oil. Burned wax.

  Munro’s face appeared at the foot of the stairs, grave and lit from below by a flickering glow.

  ‘No one here, ma’am,’ he called up. It was clear from his voice, though, that there was something she needed to see.

  PC Ganley with puke on his shoes, trembling at the edge of Katerina’s meadow. DCI Morgan Hume, beaten down and haggard after finding David Norfolk. The tough ex-Brum WPC guarding the cordon where Caroline had been burned alive, looking like she’d tasted poison.

  And now Sergeant Munro, beckoning her down into the darkness. All these coppers – good coppers, good men and women – bringing her a new kind of hell each time.

  She started slowly down the steps. We’re into the endgame now, she told herself. We’re going to put things right, we’re going to stop this – all of this.

  Munro moved aside to let her step into a wide, low-ceilinged cellar. The other officers had gathered into a loose group and Rose overheard snatches of their muttered conversation: Nutter … Batshit craz y … Creepy as fuck, man …

  They’d killed their dazzling flashlights and now the cellar was lit only by low-burning candles. Lots of candles. Hundreds of them, arranged in heights and valleys like a range of flickering mountains.

  Rose pulled out her own torch and ran its narrow beam across the damp-eaten brick walls.

  Felt her chest constrict as she took in the sight. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Munro quietly agreed.

  There was part of a wall for each of them, for each of the Oxford victims. Maps, photos, charts, calendars, duct-taped
to the brick. Some of the photographs were blurred and obviously snatched from a distance, others had been taken from disturbingly nearby. Rose peered closer. The maps were looped and dotted with marker pen, tracking movements, predicting routes. Spidery timetables logged the victims’ activities over periods of hours, days, weeks. Charts of scrawled lines drew together the names of the victims’ friends, families, colleagues, neighbours.

  In a way it was disturbingly familiar.

  ‘Looks like he’d have made a good copper,’ Munro remarked.

  That was it. Looked like a bloody incident room. Who else watched people so closely? Who else dug so deep into the lives of strangers?

  Only the walls of incident rooms weren’t decked with crosses made from brown-tinged bones. The walls of incident rooms weren’t plastered with medieval images of bloodily martyred saints. The walls of incident rooms didn’t carry anatomical diagrams showing how the skin can be pared from a human body, how the blood vessels of the neck can be severed and tied.

  It was terrifying. There was so much madness here, so much power. It wasn’t just that Luka did what he did, Rose thought – it was that he could. He could do it, with the knowledge he’d built up, the skills he’d learned, the twisted courage that drove him, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

  Till now, perhaps. We’re closing in on you, Luka, she thought.

  Tried to make herself believe it.

  Rose panned her torch slowly around the four shadow-blackened walls. One for Katerina Zrinski: a painful lump swelled in Rose’s throat as she let the torch beam linger on the photos. Katerina grinning in the church doorway. Katerina, hair tied up, leaving her flat in the Leys. Katerina kicking a football around with some local kids. She’d been so full of life.

  Rose moved the torch beam on. One for David Norfolk, one for Caroline Chaudry.

  One for Matt Brask.

  They might have got him already, she thought, as goosebumps crept up her arms. There’s a team hitting the All Souls’ kitchen right now – Luka might already be in custody and Matt might be all right.

  ‘Have you seen the shrines?’ Munro pointed downwards. ‘Proper confused, this boy.’

  On the concrete floor, behind the banks of greasy, glimmering candles, more photographs were propped against the brickwork. They were blown-up full-face shots, as close as a stalker could really get to a formal portrait, framed in wood or brass. Prayers or blessings – in English, Latin and what Rose now knew to be Croat – were scratched into the walls.

  The floor gleamed dully with a thick ledge of dirty wax – rendered from Christ knew where, but evidence of candles kept burning on and on, day after day.

  Rose thought back to the old woman’s gloomy cottage in Niza, the candles at the shrine to Olga Matić.

  She shone her torch on the portraits. Yes, there were Katerina, David, Caroline; then there were other faces, faces she didn’t immediately recognize. One, a middle-aged black woman, wore a nurse’s uniform in unfamiliar colours. Then it clicked for Rose: these were the French victims, the killings from a decade before.

  ‘You’ve got a long memory, Luka,’ she murmured.

  There was no portrait of Matt Brask. Not yet.

  She swept her torch beam round to the wall papered with data on the missing professor. She knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

  There was Matt’s life, stripped down to dates, times, the streets he walked, the people he knew. Interlocking lines of ink on a map charted his routes from home to All Souls, to the churches he visited, the libraries and archives he used in his work. There were press cuttings about his work with the immigrant communities, even a clipping from a US local paper: FREMONT WOMAN KILLED IN DRUNK-DRIVE HORROR.

  And there was DI Lauren Rose. A short slash of black ink linked her to Matt in a stark spider chart. She was struck by how few other names there were: a couple of academics, three Brasks from back home, a handful of names grouped under the heading ‘crkva’, ‘church’ – and Katerina, of course.

  Brask didn’t have many people in his life, Rose realized.

  And right now he had no one but her.

  She tried to set aside her worries about what he might be going through, what he might be thinking, feeling, suffering. She tried to blot it out and focus on the job in hand. Tried to be nothing but a copper.

  Tried and failed. A dozen terrible scenarios, blood-drenched and black as night, played out behind her eyes.

  In one she pictured Luka, hollow-eyed and intent, drawing out a small, blood-smeared bone from Brask’s carefully sliced flesh –

  A relic.

  Rose shook away the thoughts and swept her torch beam back towards the shrines. The bones – the wrist bone from David Norfolk, the ankle bone from Katerina, Caroline’s rib – they weren’t here. This struck her as strange. Shouldn’t they, the relics of Luka’s saints, be here in pride of place? Set up at an altar or behind glass or something?

  Unless he was keeping them somewhere else. Not here, and not at his work in the All Souls’ kitchens. Some third location.

  Could be anywhere, Rose thought in bitter frustration, anywhere in this damn city, anywhere in this damn country – Christ, he could have been shipping them back to bloody Croatia for all she knew.

  But working in the dark was part of the job. You could never know everything. You just had to keep on, keep on – digging, looking, thinking – until you knew enough.

  Her drifting torch beam picked out one of the medieval prints Luka had duct-taped to the wall. An unfamiliar one. She checked back: yes, Katerina’s wall had a garish depiction – a photo of an old stained-glass window, she thought – of poor St Catherine, lashed to the wheel and waiting for the decapitating blade; David’s a print of a Renaissance painting she’d seen before, of St Bartholomew, flayed down to the muscle, with his own skin folded over his arm like a bath towel; Caroline’s a horrible woodcut of young St Blandina, roasting slowly to death on the iron chair.

  The print taped up on Matt’s wall showed a stripped young man bound to a wooden post. His white body was disfigured by savage wounds and from each wound jutted the shaft of an arrow. The young man’s head drooped limply on to his shoulder.

  ‘St Sebastian,’ came Munro’s voice from behind her. ‘Christ’s pincushion.’ When Rose turned to look at him he smiled awkwardly and shrugged. ‘Catholic school.’

  She looked back at the picture and the agony in it struck her hard. She thought of the puncture wounds, the cruel arrowheads buried deep in the man’s defenceless flesh. Shuddered.

  This is what Luka has planned for Matt? A martyr’s death by a hundred arrows?

  Nausea gripped her stomach. A kind of claustrophobia seized her chest and ramped up her heart rate. She couldn’t stay here. She needed air, she needed light. More than anything, she needed to do something.

  She’d always thought she could take pretty much anything, if she had to; DI Lauren Rose could stick anything the world could throw at her. But this feeling of helplessness, utter helplessness … this she couldn’t stand.

  She told Munro to sit tight in the flat. She passed SOCO on the stairs. Then she was off and running.

  Leland Phillips’s deep-red Audi was swinging up on to the pavement outside the house when Rose broke from the front door into the quiet suburban dusk.

  He was out the car almost before it had come to a standstill.

  ‘Hold on,’ he called to Rose across the car roof. ‘News from the college.’

  No smart remarks, no supercilious smirk. This was Lel Phillips when the chips were down. A copper, after all.

  Rose jogged over.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘No trace.’ He shook his head gravely. ‘Our Luka wasn’t in today, wasn’t in yesterday. We know he has a car, know the reg: we’ve got tech going through the number-plate recognition logs from CCTV across Oxford.’

  ‘That’s a start.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And there’s something else. At the Norfolk farm –’

&
nbsp; ‘Bones?’

  ‘In the barn. One of those bloody weird bone things. No one found it before because it wasn’t where they keep the livestock – it was buried in straw, over in a corner. Turns out Norfolk used to sleep there sometimes, if he’d a sick animal.’

  Rose blew out a sigh.

  ‘So now we know.’

  ‘Looks that way. The bones are warnings, or blessings – Christ knows with this guy. If you get one, you’re on his list. Hey.’ Phillips cocked his head and squinted at her. ‘Rose, you couldn’t have known he’d come for Brask. They don’t teach weird fucking occult symbolism at that ex-poly you studied at, do they? It’s done with. Come on.’ He ducked back into the car.

  Rose paused, her hand on the door pillar.

  Phillips leaned across.

  ‘Rose? Get in. I’ll drive you back to the nick.’

  The farm, the Norfolk farm. There was something about it, something stirring in the back of her mind. Where had it been, Bletchingdon? Way out to the north.

  ‘No,’ Rose said.

  ‘No? What –’

  ‘Come inside. There’s something in the cellar. You need to see it.’ She began to walk back towards Luka’s house. ‘The answer’s in there,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘I know it is, I bloody know it is. I just don’t know where.’

  Phillips followed her into the house and down the stairs to the cellar.

  Rose shooed SOCO out of the dank room before they could get fully set up. Okay, a crime scene was sacrosanct, she knew that – she remembered the bollocking she’d given Ganley, that first night. But to wait for all this to be dusted, logged, bagged, filed, run through the labs and written up –

  They just didn’t have time. Brask didn’t have time.

  ‘So what am I supposed to be seeing?’ Phillips asked after taking in the sheer insanity of the room.

  Rose motioned Phillips to her so that they stood side by side in front of a local Ordnance Survey map Luka had taped to the wide back wall of the candlelit cellar.

  The white-coated SOCO techs sat impatiently around the foot of the stairwell as Rose and Phillips frowned over the map.