Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  ‘Then Matt –?’

  ‘Uh-huh. It’s Matt’s turn to flirt with Mr Blažević.’

  Adrijana giggled.

  The youngest Zrinski girl had been in on the project from the start; the door of the Zrinskis’ flat had been the first Rose had knocked on after securing her DCI’s stripes. She’d needed someone local, someone to help her establish trust with the residents of the Leys, if her diplomacy drive was going to get off the ground.

  Adrijana was smart, a quick learner and understood what the people in the housing blocks were going through – because she’d been through it herself, and a hell of a lot more besides. It helped that she had a teenager’s elastic capacity for new languages. She could help Rose out with everything from Estonian to Romanian.

  ‘How’s Sofia?’

  ‘Doing good.’ Adrijana, her mug of tea cupped in both hands, nodded. ‘Her boss at the supermarket is very happy. Maybe permanent job.’

  ‘And Dr Levinson?’

  ‘He says she makes very good progress.’ A shadow passed across the girl’s expression. ‘It’s very hard.’ She looked at Rose. ‘It hurts, Lauren.’

  ‘I know, Jana.’ She reached forwards to lightly touch Adrijana’s arm. ‘She’s lucky to have you.’

  ‘And I am very lucky to have her also.’ She gave a brittle smile. ‘So.’

  They’d both of them been through hell, Rose knew. With help, they were finding ways to carry on. One-on-one psychotherapy, grief counselling, victim-support groups – an awful lot of airy-fucking-fairy touchy-fucking-feely, she thought wryly. And it was working, little by little, week by week, but it was working.

  Rose sometimes went to see Maureen Norfolk and her girls on the farm out at Bletchingdon. The place was still an open wound. Raw, angry. It was hard, she knew, for them to see her. Maureen wasn’t going to consider her a friend any time soon. Didn’t matter, though. Rose knew there were things there she could help with – and as long as she knew that she’d do whatever she could.

  And she’d spoken on the phone to the Chaudrys in Bradford. They were a big family, the parents successful second-generation Gujarati Indians, seven kids all high-achievers, students, lawyers, scientists – and all of them broken into pieces by what had happened to Caroline. It was easy sometimes, Rose knew, to think that the loss was less when the family was big. But she knew that the mathematics of grief didn’t work that way. Caroline’s murder had torn a hole that could never be mended.

  Mr Blažević was their last visitor of the day. When the teapot was drained Adrijana bounced up, wished Rose a good day, grabbed her bag and went. She had a date, she said, with a young plumber’s lad from the next block along. ‘Ukrainian. Seventeen. Very buff.’ Rose smiled as out of the window she watched the girl hurry along the sunlit footpath, bright in a green vest top and yellow cord skirt. God’s gift to the charity shop, that girl.

  She had a quick tidy – rinsed the mugs, put away the thick-as-your-arm file of Mr Blažević’s complaints – and checked her phone. Twelve calls. Christ. Back to it, DCI Rose. She locked up the office and headed back to her car.

  The Leys was no place to leave your car when everyone in a four-mile radius knew you were a copper. It was a bit of a banger, but Rose liked it with its paintwork and four tyres intact. She’d got into the habit of parking up a couple of miles short of the Leys, towards town, and of walking through the estates – whatever time of day or night it was.

  It was sobering to think that Adrijana walked these underlit paths between the bleak, hard-edged housing blocks every day. But it gave Rose a connection with the place. She’d known a lot of detectives lose touch with the streets when they hit DI or DCI level. This way she gave herself no choice.

  Besides, it was simply good policing. Any mug could cruise by in a patrol car and see this was a bloody tough area; everything about the Leys said so, in a voice you could hardly ignore. Walking the paths gave Rose a chance to listen out for the whispers.

  It tested her nerve, too. She didn’t like to admit this, even to herself. She didn’t like to think that her nerve ever needed testing.

  But despite the summer sun, Oxford had been a dark place for her since the Trick or Treat murders. She saw ghosts everywhere.

  It could have been worse, she reflected as she passed through the shadow of Dmitry Rakić’s old housing block. Rakić was history: banged up for eighteen months for his gun-waving appearance at All Souls, he’d been transferred from HM Bullingdon up to Wakefield in Yorkshire to keep him from pulling any strings from behind the prison wall. Wakefield had done for him. There were some real villains in that place, Rose knew. One of them had pushed Rakić too far. The Croat had stabbed him to death in the exercise yard. Twenty-five years. She didn’t expect to see Dmitry Rakić again.

  She didn’t expect to see Luka again, either – but that didn’t stop her spying his face half hidden in the bustling town crowds, his stringy figure forever lurking on the edge of her vision, his broken, blood-spattered body in the darkness when she closed her eyes to sleep.

  An autopsy had revealed a bullet lodged deep in the murderer’s brain. Rose guessed that it was a goodbye kiss from one of the Serbs who’d destroyed St Quintus so many years ago. Had it been this brain damage that sent Luka so deep into his religious psychosis? Rose didn’t know – never would. But she wondered about it all the time.

  Yes, she was going to be stuck with Luka for a while yet. But then, every copper had a ghost or two. It went with the job. Some coppers she’d known had seemed to collect them, like old coins or postage stamps.

  At least she knew beyond doubt that Luka was dead – unlike Father Florian.

  The thought of the shuffling old priest made her shiver. A city-wide sweep hadn’t found him; there hadn’t been so much as a sighting since, despite appeals in the papers.

  Rose had wondered, at first, if Florian had had friends who might have helped him hide – helped him leave the country, even. Florian had helped Luka; what if Florian, in his turn, had had helpers, accomplices? She’d found herself imagining an underground network of them – who knew how many more Florians? How many more Lukas might be out there?

  Phillips, though, had been dead sure that Florian had pegged out in his hiding place – that he was lying dead in a storm gutter or a drainage ditch somewhere. ‘Good bloody riddance,’ he’d said, theatrically dusting his hands together.

  But he and his cocky certainty were gone now.

  So no Phillips and no Hume, but Mike Angler was still there. The dim DS was too bone idle to ever go anywhere else. Conners had finally made sergeant, over in uniform. She sometimes still saw PC Ganley gangling about the place.

  And then there was Matt Brask.

  For now he still walked with a stick.

  ‘I’ll miss the gravitas it gives me,’ he’d said, only the night before, when he and Rose had met for a catch-up in an Oxford pub. ‘I think a professor should look venerable. Right?’

  She’d laughed and said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’

  ‘Though I still think they ought to have given me a staff,’ he’d added, setting the stick against the panelled wall of the booth and sliding awkwardly into the bench seat. ‘You know, like Moses. Ow.’

  ‘Hip still sore?’

  ‘A little. But in a month or so, they tell me, I’ll be leaping around like a spring lamb.’

  The jokes didn’t quite disguise a subtle change in Brask since All Souls’ Day, since that night in the Church of the Queen of Peace. It was true, he did have more gravitas, but the walking stick had nothing to do with it.

  Brask, Rose knew, had never been an ivory-tower academic. He’d never tried to cut himself off from the real world of human hardship. His break with the Church, the loss of Hester, even his work in Oxford with the Leys communities – this was a guy who’d always fronted up to the real world. He’d had to.

  But what he’d been through with Luka was different. Had it made him harder, tougher, more distant? Rose had watched him, in the
pub, chatting with the barman as he fetched in their drinks. No – no, quite the opposite. If anything, the new Brask reached out to people even more readily than before.

  If Brask had been a different kind of character, what Luka had put him through might have kept him from ever trusting anyone again. And who could have blamed him? But Brask seemed to have found the capacity – somehow, somewhere – to welcome the world into his life, without conditions. He hadn’t got harder. Just stronger.

  It made Rose think of her walks alone in the dark through the alleys of the Leys, that need to test herself, push herself.

  Brask had slid her glass of red wine on to the tabletop in front of her and worked his way back into his seat.

  ‘You’re all right taking tomorrow’s open-door?’ He’d sipped his bitter and made an apologetic face. ‘I know you’re snowed under, but I have to fly out to Bologna first thing tomorrow, for a conference.’

  ‘Such a hard life. Yeah, that’s fine. But you know I can’t make the week after? Meeting with the council. “Problems” with traveller communities. Going to have to knock some heads together.’

  He’d laughed, called her a militant do-gooder.

  Then she’d remembered something Lel Phillips had emailed her about the day before. Subject line: KARMA.

  ‘I heard something about an old friend of ours,’ she’d told Brask.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘A trial at the Old Bailey. Three tabloid journos up for phone hacking.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me –’

  She’d nodded, not bothering to hide her satisfaction.

  ‘Olly Stevenage. Suspended sentence, and two hundred hours of community service.’

  ‘Couldn’t,’ Brask said, ‘have happened to a more deserving fellow.’

  Ambitious young Stevenage, according to Phillips, had dropped out of his Oxford degree course in February; on the strength of his scoops in the Trick or Treat Killer case he’d landed a job at one of the downmarket red tops. Acquired some bad habits and got run in when a hacked-off celeb went to the police.

  The thought of Stevenage scrubbing graffiti and picking up litter went some way to restoring Rose’s faith in the justice system. Christ, she thought, it was almost enough to make you believe there was a God …

  The conversation had turned back to the Leys. It always did, somehow. They’d talked for a while about the poverty, the problems, the crime, Mr Blažević’s complaints …

  In the middle of the conversation – halfway through denouncing the state of the accommodation provided for asylum-seekers – Rose had broken off abruptly. Looked frankly at Brask.

  ‘Can you imagine Morgan Hume talking like this?’

  ‘Nope.’

  She’d rubbed her eyes wearily.

  ‘Am I still even a copper, Matt? I mean, with all this.’ She’d taken a slug of wine. ‘Sometimes I wonder what I’m even doing.’

  ‘You’re keeping people safe,’ Brask had said without hesitation. ‘You’re helping people make the right choices. You’re looking after people.’ He’d slapped the table with a grin, making their drinks jump. ‘Of course you’re a goddamn cop.’

  Now, as she left the Leys and walked sore-footed through the suburbs, she felt the heat of the day weighing heavily on her.

  Her car was parked in a residential street of well-kept semis, not far from the football ground. Up ahead, a grey tabby cat slunk across the road and slipped into a hedgerow. A blackbird burbled in a scrubby hawthorn. Midges fogged the air.

  Rose’s car stood alone, half on and half off the kerb, next to a bank of dull-green nettles and the side wall of someone’s garage. She slumped into the driver’s seat. For a moment she thought: Christ, this car needs a new air freshener. It smelled like something had gone rotten, started to ferment.

  Then instinct kicked in. It was a smell she knew. Her gut recoiled. Her body tensed.

  The church cellar.

  Brask’s office.

  Katerina’s body.

  The bones.

  Balsam oil – Father Florian’s sickly sacred chrism.

  She turned her head to the passenger seat, not wanting to see, not wanting to believe.

  The oil had seeped into the upholstery, making a black stain. In the declining sunlight of late afternoon the greased bones gleamed.

  A small cage of ribs, knotted about a single bone. The single bone was broken in the middle. Its splintered ends made her think of Luka, impaled and spreadeagled on the cross.

  A short thong of cracked leather fastened the cage to a larger construction, just the same except for its size – and the bone in this one was not broken.

  Something moved on the edge of Rose’s vision. Her eyes flickered to the rear-view mirror …

  THE END

  THE BEGINNING

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  First published 2015

  Copyright © Working Partners Two Limited, 2015

  Cover image © Elizabeth Fernandez G./Getty Images

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-405-92027-8