Trick or Treat

Prologue

Little Mouse awoke in the dark and jumped at the noise of a gunshot. It was followed by more, in staccato succession, and then by men’s voices, raised in anger and alarm. There was also an oily smoke-smell, the smell of chicken or pork left too long in the oven. He swung his legs out of bed, rubbing at his face. Had Marek the Cook put a joint of meat on to roast for supper, and forgotten about it? Or, more likely, got dead drunk on raki and passed out in the kitchen chair …

But it was still dark! And this noise –

He pulled aside the hessian curtain at the dormitory’s only window. He shivered and thumbed at his eyes, trying to smear away the fog of sleep.

Light, beyond the misted windowpane. Orange light. Firelight. More gunshots, shouting – and screaming, too, wild screaming. And the smell –

Something worse than a burned joint of meat, this. He wiped the glass with the heel of his hand and called over his shoulder: ‘Radi? Mirko? Come and look at this. Something’s going on.’

No answer. He turned. In the darkness he could see the three white oblongs of the other boys’ beds. Blankets thrown aside. Empty.

The brothers of St Quintus had given him his name, Mali Miš, Little Mouse, when he had first entered the monastery as a half-starved child. Timid, twitchy, scrawny and wide-eyed – that was Little Mouse. Even now, at fifteen, he stood out among the boys at the monastery for his small size, his wary manner, his quietness.

His gut squirmed like a trapped animal.

A scream of pure terror pierced the windows and walls of the building.

Here in the dorm, Little Mouse thought, there is no screaming and no smoke. There are no guns and no fire. Here in the dorm I am safe.

His throat hurt. The fear in his gut threatened to burst loose. He swallowed down a sob.

Here in the dorm, I am alone.

He turned from the window. He ran for the door.

The monastery courtyard flickered white and black. Someone had turned on the big floodlight, but the generator that ran it from the basement was old and temperamental and the light could never be relied on.

Through the shuddering darkness Little Mouse looked upon the killing.

Men in uniform were everywhere. Not smart like the soldiers Little Mouse had sometimes seen parading through the town. These were shabby, desperate.

At the monastery gate he saw a soldier on one knee, holding another man flat to the floor with his arm bent up his back. The man on the ground had a black beard and was shouting something over and over. The soldier had a gun in his free hand. He put it to the man’s head. Little Mouse looked away but he couldn’t close his ears to the noise of the shot. Neither could he shut his mind to the terror of the silence that followed it.

In the shadow of the west wall, where Brother Vidić cultivated his bean plants, three soldiers with rifles stood around a woman who lay on her back. She was screaming, too. A headscarf and some other garments lay beside her. When one of the soldiers turned away Little Mouse saw first that he was laughing and then that his trousers were unfastened. There were dark stains down his front.

Beyond the walls a fire was raging.

Little Mouse thought that soldiers were supposed to protect people, but these men had brought nothing but violence and fire and death.

Little Mouse took a few steps down into the courtyard. Through the gates he could see more flames, roaring from the houses and shops of the village’s main street. Gunshots rattled like hailstones on an iron roof.

Two men, running fast, hurtled round the corner of the street, headed for the monastery gates. There was a series of quick booms, like angry rapping at a door, then the men tumbled, one after the other. Both crashed face first to the concrete.

Little Mouse winced. Then he saw the blood pooling under their heads, more blood than you would ever get from a broken nose or a grazed elbow. A man in uniform, with no cap and his jacket open, jogged up behind them and fired his rifle three more times into their still bodies.

The soldiers were Serbs, Little Mouse understood. Vicious enemies from another country with another religion.

Heathens, some of the brothers said they were. But Abbot Cerbonius only called them ‘children of another god’. The abbot could sometimes be hard to understand. Subtle, Little Mouse had heard the others call him. He could tell they didn’t always mean this description as a compliment – but Little Mouse loved the abbot anyway.

Where was he now? Little Mouse wondered. The abbot was the wisest and bravest man Little Mouse knew. He would put a stop to this horror. He would tell Little Mouse what was happening and how they could put an end to it. Little Mouse looked around, craning for a glimpse of the familiar tall, cassocked figure.

At the eastern end of the yard, in the shadow of an arcade of brick arches, he glimpsed a hunched figure; the flickering light revealed the steel-blue of his cassock, and Little Mouse’s heart leapt –

But in another moment he realized that it was not the abbot but Brother Markus, the stony-faced schoolteacher. And Brother Markus wasn’t alone: with him, being shepherded cautiously through the dark arches towards the rear gate, were the monastery’s other boys – Mirko, Radi, Nema – his friends!

Little Mouse called out. But it would take a miracle to be heard over the uproar of guns, flames and terrified screams. The sounds of hell itself, it seemed to Little Mouse. But the abbot taught that God watches over us even in the darkest places – especially in the darkest places – so Little Mouse kept his faith. ‘Brother Markus,’ he called again. Again his words were whisked away by the shrieks of the tormented and the howling laughter of demons. Little Mouse whispered a prayer to Jesus, and called a third time, ‘Brother Markus!’

The monk turned his head. He looked directly towards Little Mouse. A miracle, Little Mouse thought fleetingly. Christ protects the meek and Little Mouse was the meekest of all his children. He felt sick with relief – he would escape with the others and Brother Markus would take him far from the vicious Serbs.

But then Brother Markus’s face hardened. The monk turned away and followed the boys into the shadows, and none of Little Mouse’s calls or prayers brought him back.

You saw me, Little Mouse thought, tears blearing his vision. You saw me, an idiot boy, a half-witted kitchen lad. Christ turned your head towards me, he thought, bitterly, angrily. Christ gave you the choice: save me, or desert me. And it was the man in you that made the choice. God forgive you, brother!

Little Mouse took a few hopeless steps towards the gates. He blinked in the smoke. Two soldiers hammered at the unmoving body of a man with their rifle butts. A woman knelt on the ground with her face buried in her hands while a soldier postured behind her with a hunting knife.

Across the wide concrete street he saw frantic cassocked figures silhouetted against the flames that played against the windows of the monks’ quarters. Soldiers drank and smoked cigarettes in the street outside while the building burned. When one of the figures smashed the window and began to climb through to escape the fire, one of the soldiers raised a gun and shot him dead. His body hung as limp as a doll’s, half in and half out of the broken window.

There was laughter from the soldiers, and a shout: ‘Goreti, goreti.’ Burn, burn.

Flames consumed the still body of the fallen monk.

Little Mouse thought of that smell, that inescapable smell, the smell of oily kitchen-smoke, of something left too long in the oven –

‘Little Mouse!’

He spun round, whimpering in dread, to see a huge figure bearing down on him, arms outstretched. He flinched, raising his hands to protect himself – but then, shadowed against the flickering floodlight, he made out a shock of untamed white hair, and heard the apparition again say his name, ‘Little Mouse,’ in a familiar deep-chested voice, and knew that the abbot had come back to save him.

Little Mouse sobbed out a noise as Abbot Cerbonius grabbed him and clutched him to his chest. The abbot’s crucifix dug into the boy’s cheek but he cherished the pain.

‘We must act quickly,’ the abbot said. He loosened his embrace and gripped the boy sternly by his shoulders. The old man’s grey gaze was steady and calm but his voice betrayed overpowering emotion. ‘Only we remain, do you understand? When the devils grow weary of murder they will plunder our treasures. The glories of our Church. They are coming now, Little Mouse, do you understand me?’ He straightened, looking around wildly. ‘The treasures are the sacred responsibility of our order, and we must protect them. We are the only ones left who can stop the devils, child. Praise be to Christ Jesus. We are the only –’

He broke off. Little Mouse watched him, puzzled. The abbot stared at something above Little Mouse, his jaw hanging open. Something in the sky. A vision! Little Mouse thought. He knew that only the most faithful of God’s servants were blessed with such a gift.

Then he saw the dark-red coin appear on the abbot’s high forehead, a circle the size of a dinar piece, then a five-dinar piece, then a heavy tear of dark blood rolled from the coin and down the abbot’s face, painting a red stripe across his open eyeball.

The abbot crumpled to the floor. Behind him stood a soldier, chewing gum and gripping the butt of a revolver with both hands. He began to lower the gun – but then he saw Little Mouse and the black eye of the revolver’s muzzle lifted again.

‘Fucking stinking Croat shits living in filth like rats in a sewer,’ the soldier said in a dull voice. ‘And you bastards here with your cellars stuffed with gold. Living like fucking kings, huh?’ He cocked the gun. ‘Don’t remember when I last got paid. And we should’ve got extra for all the overtime we put in at Hrasnica.’

Little Mouse’s throat was dry. He looked at his beloved abbot’s still body.

I have nothing, he wanted to say. No gold. No friends. No family. I have nothing in the world.

‘I’ll give you five seconds for one last prayer,’ the soldier said. He smiled with just his mouth. ‘Better make it a quick one.’

I have nothing, Little Mouse thought. You have taken from me the only father I ever had.

He looked into the eye of the gun and swore to God that he wouldn’t blink.

‘Crazy little bastard,’ the soldier said. His finger tightened on the trigger.

Chapter One

4 October

White face. Staring eyes, red-rimmed in the car’s headlamps. A trembling hand holding a half-empty bottle of water.

Christ, Rose thought. The things that call themselves coppers nowadays.

She killed the engine, got out of the car. It was cold – it was always a few degrees colder out here in the bloody cabbage fields. She pulled on leather gloves as she crossed the road to where the PC waited by his patrol car.

‘M-ma’am,’ he stuttered.

She flexed her fingers into the gloves and looked him up and down.

‘What are you?’

‘PC Ganley, ma’am.’

‘Where’s Conners?’

‘Qu-questioning the lad who found the b-body, ma’am.’ Ganley gulped. She almost felt sorry for him. Made damn sure not to show it.

‘Then who’s guarding the body, Constable Ganley?’

The constable looked out into the darkness of the field. His Adam’s apple bobbed.

‘I wouldn’t w-worry, ma’am.’ He looked her in the eye briefly, then looked away. ‘She’s not going anywhere.’

She could have slapped him. He knew as well as she did that that wasn’t the bloody point. Instead she said: ‘Next time you throw up on duty, Ganley, be sure to turn your back to the wind. Find a tissue and get that puke off your shoes. And I’ll be mentioning this to Sergeant O’Dwyer.’

She turned away. She saw Pete Conners, notebook in hand, talking to a man who had his back to her. Conners gave her the slightest of nods. Solid man. Ex-Met. She looked at the man he was talking to. Tall. Shock of hair under a woolly hat. Narrow trousers, corduroy coat. Student? Long way out of town for four in the morning. But then, they get everywhere, students, Rose thought – like woodlice.

Conners and the suspect – because that was what he’d end up being, whatever his story was – stood at the edge of a broad sweep of grassy field that vanished into darkness beyond the glow of the patrol car’s headlamps. A row of black trees about a mile away screened the weak crown of light that marked Oxford town.

Rose clicked on her torch and stepped into the darkness. The waist-high grass sighed. She looked back over her shoulder.

‘Are you in any state to help, Constable,’ she called out, letting a twang of impatience enter her tone, ‘or do you want me to just wander around in the dark till I stumble across a corpse?’

She knew Conners and the suspect were looking at her, but a bit of theatre never did any harm. Let the suspect know he wasn’t going to get an easy ride. Give Conners something to grin about – he’d need it, what with this coming at the end of an eight-hour night shift. And get this young lad Ganley’s mind off – well, off whatever it was he’d seen out there.

Ganley jogged awkwardly down the verge – ‘Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.’ – and pointed his torch beam along a faint diagonal pathway someone’s feet had made in the grass.

‘Along there,’ he said, making the torch beam wag. ‘A hundred metres or so. You can’t miss it,’ he added, in a sick voice.

‘Who made the path?’

‘Here when we got here, ma’am. Could’ve been the killer, or maybe the lad Conners is talking to.’

‘Or a curious passer-by. Or the press. Or a coachload of Japanese tourists for all you’d know.’ She breathed out hard through her nose. ‘Jesus, Ganley. Never leave a crime scene unattended.’

‘No, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.’

‘Now piss off out of it. Go see if Conners has got any sense out of our friend over there.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She waited till his clumping footsteps had faded – heard the murmur of him and Conners talking by the car. The tips of the grass stems bristled against her bare wrist. Then she moved forwards, into the field.

It was like stepping into the sea. The dark grass, petrol-blue in the gloom, moved with the wind in soughing waves. It felt cold and heavy about her legs as she walked. Her torch beam danced, neurotically alert, a narrow beam, designed to pick out detail.

A hundred metres, he’d said. She’d see it soon. She forced herself to breathe.

She’d never liked going in the sea, as a kid. Too much you couldn’t see, too much mystery. Too many monsters.

A little way ahead the grass path widened into a clearing of stamped-down grass. She paused, tracking the torch beam carefully, right, left, right, left. The crime scene might not yet be a completely lost cause, in spite of stupid young Ganley’s best efforts. She moved forwards carefully, peering into the darkness. There’d be a body, sure, she was ready for that and God knew what else, but a crime scene was about so much more than a body. Even in her granddad’s day they’d known that, and now, with DNA fingerprinting, forensic serology, blood-spatter analysis – now you could build a prosecution case on a quarter-inch of a blade of grass, and make it stick.

A body at a crime scene is a cry in the dark. But when you’re a copper you have to listen for the whispers, too.

The narrow torch beam picked out a foot. A small foot, a woman’s bare foot. Rose squinted. The body wasn’t lying on the ground. It was hanging, or pinioned. But there was a fresh breeze blowing from the north and the foot didn’t move, the body didn’t sway – and anyway, what was there for it to hang from out here in the middle of a field?

The leg, in some sort of hippy-type hessian trouser, was angled away from the vertical. Rose’s torch beam crept upwards through the darkness. The folds of the hessian made vivid shadows. Legs loosely apart. No visible damage yet, no stains. It wasn’t the horror-movie bloodbath Ganley’s reaction had led her to expect.

Her top, too, was woven from coarse fabric. An inch of pale belly showed between the top and trousers. Ill-fitting and ugly. The round torch beam took in the dead woman’s skinny torso, shoulders, hips. Her arms were spread. She was spreadeagled – on a hay bale, a stack of timber, something like that. Funny that her clothes were all intact, then.

It’ll be the face that spooked Ganley, Rose thought. There’s something about faces – and something about us, something that means we can’t stand the sight of another human face that’s been messed with, fucked up, made wrong.

The torch beam moved up the woman’s splayed body. It didn’t quiver. She wouldn’t let it quiver.

Whatever you’ve done to her face, you sick bastard, she thought, I’m ready for it.

The neckline of the strange hessian top showed two pale collarbones and a small cross on a fine chain. The skin of the woman’s neck was bleakly white. Then –

A cap of black blood. A cut edge of vertebra. The rotten timber behind. Nothing else.

‘Jesus,’ Rose murmured. Cleanly beheaded. What the hell?

She moved the torch beam to the right, tracking carefully down the woman’s shoulder, her arm, to her clawed left hand.

To what was held in her clawed left hand.

Oh Christ. Oh Jesus bloody Christ.

Rose stepped reflexively backwards, caught her heel on a tussock of grass. Fell sprawling.

She lay on her back in the half-darkness, fighting for breath, staring up at the woman’s body, fastened to a cross, holding her own severed head in her left hand.

Rose climbed to her feet, mind racing. She fought to get a grip on her thoughts, to master her heartbeat, her breathing – to contain the panic. For half a second, when the white torch beam had fallen across the lifeless face, she’d wondered if she was finally having that breakdown everyone said she had coming. It was, surely, an image from a nightmare, a psychotic’s hallucination – that dangling, lifeless head, suspended by its pale-blonde hair.

But this is real, Rose told herself. This. Is. Real.

A real crime. A real murder, and a real murderer. A real body, that was once a real woman, with real friends, real family –

Time to do your bloody job, DI Rose.

Now she went over the body with the torch held close by her right temple. The woman wasn’t tied to the cross – she was pinned to it, with neat iron pins pushed through the skin of her calves and wrists. She hadn’t bled. The cross itself wasn’t a cross but a section of an old wooden cartwheel, propped up with scrap timber.

The hair of the woman’s head was knotted intricately to the dead hand. Her eyes were closed. She’d been pretty, Rose noted – pale as paper in the torchlight, with striking dark brows and an accentuated upper lip. Her chin was pointed and her cheekbones were high and flat.

Rose pulled off her leather gloves and snapped on a pair of latex disposables. She knelt to examine the severed throat. Wasn’t sure what she was looking for – Christ, she wasn’t a pathologist, and wouldn’t want to be – but you never knew. She gently touched her fingertips to the cut edge of flesh, suppressing a shiver at its coldness. So tidy, she thought. A neat job. One of those. She’d read about the type: the retired accountant running women’s skins through his Singer sewing machine and never missing a stitch; the model-plane enthusiast with a shelf full of severed human ears, each one neatly bottled, pickled, labelled and filed. OCD psychos. As if it was somehow better, neater, because you didn’t leave a mess.

Every murder leaves a mess, Rose knew.

The man – yes, it was a man, must be a man – had done a clean, tidy job with the neck, too. Rose had had to climb on to the cartwheel-cross to take a look. It had taken everything she had to turn the torchlight once again on the black blood of the stump. Something about the stark inhumanity of it made her gut turn to ice-water.

It looked like a cord had been used to tie off the blood vessels. This had probably reduced the bleeding. And Rose noticed something else – a hint of purple-blue, a sad, crocus colour, in the skin of the woman’s throat. Bruises. The hard touch of the killer’s fingers. Just another brute, Rose thought. Just another woman-killer.

It took her a long time to finish her examination. The boys in the patrol car would be cursing her name. But it was what they owed her, this poor bloody woman, whoever she was. To do their bloody jobs. To do everything they could.

Peeling off her latex gloves, Rose cast the beam of her torch once more over the body, and felt bile rise nauseatingly in her throat. She was a copper, born and bred; she’d always thought that good coppers could turn their feelings off and on like a tap, could choose what to feel and when to feel it. They could simply decide not to be horrified, not to be frightened, not to feel vulnerable, not to feel sick –

Her dad would’ve said so. His dad, too. But they’d never seen anything like this. Had anybody?

The torchlight glimmered on something in the grass, below the dead woman’s feet. Something plastic. Rose knelt, pulling on a glove. The plastic was a clear wallet for a bus pass or travel card; it had half fallen from its place in a woman’s purse.

Rose glanced up.

‘This yours, love?’ She thumbed a driver’s licence from its slot in the leather. ‘Let’s see who you are.’ Or were, she added silently.

She had to catch her breath when she saw the woman’s picture. The full top lip, the dark brows – the same face, of course, in a way, but Christ, what life there was in it then. The woman’s blonde hair was tousled into a loose pile on top of her head and she was smiling broadly in the photo booth. Must have been having a good day, that day.

Rose bent her head. Jesus.

She wiped her eye with a knuckle and blinked at the name on the licence. Katerina Zrinski.

‘This was you, Katerina,’ she said firmly, out loud. She tapped the photograph with her fingertip. Scowled up at the body on the wheel, the stark neck-stump, the horrendous burden knotted to the left hand. Nothing but evidence for the lab, that, now, she told herself. Just a body, a thing of bones and cold flesh. Not a person, not a woman – not Katerina Zrinski. You were long gone, Katerina, Rose thought, before he did that to you. She took a last look at the photo before she sealed it into a ziploc bag.

She bagged the purse, pushed it into the inside pocket of her coat and turned away from the monstrosity that had once been Katerina Zrinski.

A flash of movement caught Rose’s attention. Something moved in the deep, dark grass.

Rose spun round, bringing the torch up sharply. Swaying grass and distant trees. An insect danced fitfully across the beam.

Dawn had begun to show faintly, smudgily, above the horizon to the east; the fields, black when she’d arrived, were blues and greys now. But where Rose stood it was still dark, the meadow still a murk of shifting shadows.

There was someone out there.

Katerina’s body was a display, an exhibition, Rose thought as she played her torch over the swaying grass-tops. The killer had wanted someone to see this – otherwise, what was the point? He wanted to shock, to frighten – who knew what exactly went through a twisted mind like this – but he certainly wanted something, some sort of reaction. And surely there was no fun in getting a reaction if you weren’t there to see it …

He’s here, she thought. He’s watching.

She turned to look back to the lonely lane where the two cars were parked. The patrol car was a little island of off-white light in the darkness. It seemed a long way away. She flashed her torch on and off to catch their attention. The patrol car’s headlights blazed and faded as a response. They were still awake: that was something. Rose made a sharp gesture.

After what must have been a short debate, the younger PC, Ganley, climbed out of the car and started warily down into the field.

Again the noise behind her. Again Rose spun. Again nothing.

Then the night exploded.

A crash in the grass followed by a blinding white flash – Rose threw her arm across her eyes. After so long in darkness, so long in silence, the sudden burst of noise and light hit her like a blow to the face.

But it didn’t take her long to recover her senses. Light. Flash. Camera. Photographer. Go! Three generations’ worth of policing instinct kicked in in half a second, and DI Lauren Rose was sprinting full tilt through the grass, chasing the clunk of a camera-bag and the flicker of white trainer soles in the night.

She was a fast runner, always had been: good balance, a strong core, muscular legs – legs made for sprinting, not short skirts, she’d always thought. That had bothered her when she was younger. Not now.

The photographer veered left, probably hoping to lose Rose, but not factoring in the fraction of a second’s advantage his clumsy sidestep would give her – if she was quick enough.

But this wasn’t Rose’s first foot pursuit, and she’d read the move. She plunged forwards, straw-like grass stems raking across her face, and felt the edge of her shoulder thump into the man’s lower thigh. He made a grunt of pain and crashed to the floor. Dead-legged him, she thought, rolling swiftly to her feet. Good.

The man was face down in the grass, swearing a blue streak. She dropped a knee firmly into his lower back and dragged her cuffs from her pocket. Clunk, click, off to the nick. Pure muscle memory, this – she could’ve done it blindfold.

She straightened up, breathing hard. Rubbed her shoulder and looked down at the man groaning at her feet. His camera-bag – a swish one, it looked like – had fallen a few feet away from him. His head was turned to the side; he was grimacing with pain.

He blinked and swore when Rose turned the torch beam on his face. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Sharp cheekbones, eyes pale and close together, nose long and slightly indented at the tip. A spatter of acne under his raw-shaven jawline.

Rose dug the angular toe of her boot into his ribs.

‘Who are you?’ she asked shortly.

‘Let me up.’

‘Give me your name.’

‘Olly. Olly Stevenage.’

‘What were you –’

‘I mean Oliver. Oliver Stevenage. Put Oliver.’

‘What were you doing here?’

‘I’m a student.’

‘Agriculture student? What were you doing in the middle of a field at five in the morning?’

‘English Lit, actually. I –’

‘What were you doing here?’

The young man paused. His expression was somewhere between ‘afraid’ and ‘affronted’. Whoever the hell he was, Rose saw the lad wasn’t used to being spoken to like this.

‘I think I should have a solicitor,’ he said. ‘I’m allowed a solicitor.’

Rose swallowed, pushed her hair behind her ears. Turn it on, turn it off. Going postal on this toerag isn’t going to help Katerina.

A voice in her head added dully: Nothing’s going to help Katerina. Not now.

She dropped to one knee beside Stevenage, grabbing a handful of the student’s plaid shirt.

‘What did you see?’ she said, forcing her voice to remain level. It was like trying to get a grip on a snapped steel hawser. ‘Back there. What did you see? What did you take a photograph of?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Mr Stevenage, do you think the university will let you complete your degree once you’ve got a criminal record?’

‘I’m serious, I didn’t see anything. I took a shot in the dark – to coin a phrase.’ He smirked unpleasantly. ‘I saw the cop car, and someone with a torch. You, I guess. I pointed and clicked. Who knew what the flash might show up?’ A shrug. ‘I’m a journalist,’ he said. ‘I take chances.’

‘Actually, Mr Stevenage, you’re a student, and what you’re doing is trespassing on a crime scene and interfering with a police investigation.’ She bent closer. ‘So I suggest you cut out the wisecracks and start taking the situation you’re in a bit more seriously.’

The student squirmed and made an indignant face.

‘Look, it was Rob, all right?’

‘Rob?’ She shook him by his shoulder. ‘Rob who?’

‘Rob, my housemate. The guy your mates have got in the car. The guy who found – whatever it is out there. The body, right? He’s an astronomer – he was out here looking for, I don’t know, planets or whatever. I got a message from him saying he’d turned up something bloody weird, so along I trotted. I’m a –’

‘A “journalist”. Yes. You said.’

Rose turned as Ganley came galumphing through the grass. She looked up at him. The run had restored a bit of colour to his face, at least.

‘In your own time, PC Ganley.’

The young constable swallowed.

‘You all right, ma’am?’

‘Yeah.’ She stood, brushing grass from her charcoal trousers. ‘This is Oliver Stevenage, or so he says. The man who found the body – what’s his story?’

‘He was in the field making astronomical observations,’ Ganley said, falling automatically into the stiff, just-the-facts manner of the copper in court. ‘Apparently there was due to be an excellent view of the Orion nebula between two and five a.m., ma’am.’

‘Did he have the kit? Telescope, whatever?’

‘Yes, ma’am. Looked like a good one, too. And Conners reckons he’s kosher.’

‘Hm.’ She looked down at Stevenage, whose face, still pressed into the grass, was twisted into a self-righteous scowl. ‘All right. Get this one up and checked out. I want a full statement – and I mean full, Ganley. And get hold of that camera –’

Olly Stevenage set up an indignant babble of protest. She ignored it.

‘– and find out what’s on it. I want print copies of everything. All right? All right.’

She left the constable helping the complaining student to his feet. When she looked back to the lane, she saw that three new cars had arrived. She narrowed her eyes against the dawn light: couple of uniforms, half a dozen suits.

Major Crime Unit. Her colleagues. Great.

Rose swore crisply, and began to walk back along the faint path of broken stems.

‘What’s she got on? Potato-sack chic, is it? Alternative type – eco-warrior. Reiki classes, quinoa for breakfast, that sort of thing.’ DI Leland Phillips, tall, willowy, with a weak chin and lazy-lidded brown eyes, sniffed. ‘The papers are going to be all over this like flies on shit.’

You needn’t sound so happy about it, Rose thought.

‘Shame about the scene,’ grunted DS Mike Angler. He was a thickset man in his thirties with thinning hair and a permanent fuzz of stiff grey-black stubble. Unambitious, dim, bone idle. Phillips’s man, through and through. He scratched his fat chin. ‘SOCO ain’t gonna be happy, ma’am.’

Phillips made a self-satisfied humming sound through pursed lips.

‘Ye-es,’ he said, rocking on his heels. ‘Pity you couldn’t keep on top of the housekeeping here, Rose.’

She bristled. Couldn’t help it. These Major Crime Unit bastards – they knew how to push her buttons, all right. And a case like this – ‘juicy’, they’d call it – was right up their street. If she didn’t watch it, they were liable to take the case – and Katerina – away from her.

‘If SOCO can’t find enough here to give us something to work with, they’re in the wrong bloody job,’ she said.

Phillips crossed his arms in unimpressed silence. Angler emitted another grunt and sipped from his cup of takeaway tea.

The horror on the cartwheel-cross looked no better in the ghastly pale light of early morning. The body in its strange garments was horribly, unnaturally splayed. The blood-cap of the stump, now showing dark red, made a sickly contrast with Katerina’s white skin. The severed head knotted to the bony dead hand was an appalling violation.

‘Least there’s no mystery about how she died,’ said Angler.

That’s coppers for you, Rose thought. Mask your horror with a joke. Make an off-colour remark when you feel like crying with fear. Turn it on, turn it off.

She was closest to the body, resting a latexed hand on the wood of the cartwheel. Angler and Phillips stood a safe distance away – like spectators at a bonfire. She sniffed. The stale smell of the body caught at the back of her throat, but there were notes of fragrance there, too. Katerina had been wearing scent, something simple, rosewater maybe – and then something else more delicate, woody, complex –

‘Fuck me. This is a fucking nightmare, isn’t it? Christ Almighty. The state of it.’ DCI Morgan Hume, arriving late, pushing past Phillips and Angler to stand before the body with his hands on his hips. ‘Where are we at?’

Phillips opened his mouth to speak but Rose beat him to it.

‘DS Angler was just about to tell us how she died,’ she said quickly.

The tubby sergeant glared at her.

Hume, looking at Angler over his shoulder, prompted: ‘Go on, then, Poirot. Let’s have it.’

‘A knife-cut to the throat,’ Phillips cut in. ‘Rapid blood loss from the carotid artery. Over in seconds. The way they do it in slaughterhouses. Highly efficient, in a gruesome sort of way.’

Hume raised his unkempt eyebrows.

‘That so?’ He turned back to the body. ‘The thing about slaughterhouses, Phillips, the first thing you notice about them, is that there tends to be a lot of blood. On account of the bleeding.’ He snorted, shook his head. ‘Fucking hell.’ His foul-tempered gaze fell on Rose. ‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘Let’s have it.’

‘The beheading was clearly post mortem. Look here.’ She reached up and touched the woman’s skin by the bruised cut-line. Phillips winced. She took a grim satisfaction in that. ‘Barely any blood seepage round the cut, sir. Her skin’s been wiped down, but not thoroughly. I can smell her perfume. Without a proper scrubbing there’d be blood in the grain of her skin and you can see there isn’t, sir – if you look closely.’

‘Okay.’ Hume nodded. ‘So what was it, then? Natural causes? Ebola? Fucking bird flu?’

Phillips guffawed.

‘I’d guess beating and strangulation, sir,’ Rose said. ‘There’s faint bruising, maybe fingermarks, on her neck. No damage to her face, but you can see the edges of some serious contusion here, at her collar. Presumably a lot more under her shirt. Internal injury. That’s my guess, if I had to call it.’

‘Well, that seems pretty conclusive,’ Phillips said loudly. ‘Guess we can all go home now.’

The DCI ignored him. Looked up at the body, blinked, swore, scratched his jawline.

‘All right,’ he murmured.

‘Sir?’

‘Stick with it, Rose. It’s yours for now. Look her up, go dig out some family, friends, whatever you can find. I want to know who this Miss Zrinski was, what she did, who she knew, where she worked, who she was fucking – especially that. I’ll be at the station. Keep me posted.’ He turned away. ‘Phillips, give her whatever she needs,’ he said as he stumped past them, heading back to the lane.

Rose momentarily locked eyes with the tall, arrogant DI. Fat bloody chance of that, she thought.

Phillips was holding the woman’s bagged-up driver’s licence. He glanced down at it, smoothed the clear plastic of the bag to read the details. His face creased as if he’d smelled something rancid.

‘Have fun in the Leys,’ he said. Tossed the bag to Rose, then smoothed the parting in his hair. ‘Take an interpreter.’

But Rose was looking up again at the brutalized ruin of Katerina Zrinski. Was it someone you knew, Katerina? she wondered. It nearly always was. A lover, a neighbour – even a father or a brother.

The Leys was an immigrant district. She wondered where Katerina had come from, how far she’d travelled – just to end up here, to wind up like this. Poland, Lithuania, Russia?

The family would be hard. Family was always hard. She should know: it was a job the male coppers always ducked out of, turned over to the only woman of the team. ‘Job for a female officer, this.’ That was the formula. ‘Needs, y’know, a woman’s touch.’

Rose reached up to brush the fingertips of the dead woman’s right hand with her own.

This is going to be tough for your family, Katerina, she thought, and I’m sorry for that – more sorry than I can say.

Dropped her hand to her side, snapped off the glove, turned away. But not as sorry as this sick bastard will be when I catch up with him.

Everything is steeped in the vivid red of the abbot’s blood. Little Mouse looks down at his hands: they, too, drip with blood. The dead abbot, sprawled on his back, mouths Little Mouse’s name, over and over. Little Mouse is on his knees. The Serb has made him kneel. The muzzle of the soldier’s gun fills the world. The soldier presses it to Little Mouse’s forehead. The touch of it burns him like a ladle handle left over a gas flame, and he howls. He smells the oily smoke-smell. The monastery is burning, the village is burning – and now Little Mouse is burning, with flames of blood-red that dance and roar and rise and rise –

His own scream woke him. He jerked upright, wheezing for breath.

‘Child. You are awake.’ A voice he didn’t know. A man’s voice. Slow and old and thick with saliva.

‘Who’s there?’

Little Mouse’s head thundered to the pounding rhythm of his heartbeat. He blinked. Was it dark – or was he blind?

‘I am here, child. You have found … salvation.’

Little Mouse jumped with alarm as a match flared in the darkness and the swelling light of a candle illuminated a black-robed figure. He seemed out of focus, blurred. Little Mouse realized that his vision was fogged, a ragged ring of flickering shadow with a small, clear spot in its centre.

The figure approached, and settled with a murmur of discomfort on the foot of the bed.

‘Who are you?’

‘You will call me Father.’

‘I was shot,’ Little Mouse mumbled. ‘Wasn’t I? I was shot.’

‘You were. Is there pain?’

‘I – I can’t see right. My eye, my left eye is like looking through smudged glass. And my head hurts.’

The figure made a disapproving growl. ‘These are small things, beside the sufferings of Christ.’

‘Yes,’ said Little Mouse hesitantly. The figure seemed to be waiting. He did not want to anger the figure. He felt that something terrible would happen if he did. ‘Father,’ he added, in a small voice.

The figure let out a wet breath of satisfaction. Little Mouse shivered at the sound.

He shrank under his blanket as the candle began to move waveringly towards him. He saw its hooked black wick, the stub of dirty wax and the stained saucer the candle stood in. He stared at the gnarled thumb that gripped the saucer, deeply ridged at the knuckle, the thumbnail an inch long and rimmed with grime.

Then the candle lifted and illuminated a face straight from hell.

A pockmarked white brow. Bald head beneath a filthy skullcap. Long black shadows, the shape of graves, beneath high cheekbones. A damp, tangled white beard that clung to the chin and ropey throat. Spit glimmered on a tremulous lower lip the colour of over-boiled liver.

And his eyes – Little Mouse caught their pale gaze for a brief second and had to hide his face behind his hands.

‘How – how did I survive?’ Little Mouse whimpered. He thought of the man with the gun and the dead black eye of the revolver. He thought of the other children, Radi, Mirko, and all the brothers of St Quintus. He thought of the abbot with the coin of blood on his forehead. How many of them still lived? Of all the monastery’s faithful, was he the only one to escape the Serbs? ‘How can it be?’ he wailed.

The man – Father – didn’t answer. Instead he leaned closer to Little Mouse and said: ‘Are you of the True Church, child?’

Little Mouse nodded quickly. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.’

‘You are baptized and truly penitent?’ the man pressed. ‘Do you love the body of Christ?’

‘I am – I do, Father.’

He glanced up at the man’s face. The terrible pale eyes were wide and seemed to burn like the sun through cloud.

‘You will say the Roman catechism.’

Little Mouse gulped.

‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth,’ he recited, numbly.

‘Again.’

‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of –’

‘Why did God become man?’

Little Mouse stumbled. ‘That, that m-man might become God.’ Even in the strange hut and under the intense stare of the priest, there was a comfort in these questions.

‘Who showed to mankind the path from damnation to salvation?’

‘My lord Jesus Christ.’

‘Who is your saviour, child?’

The sob broke, rolling thickly, achingly up through Little Mouse’s throat, and spilled chokingly from his mouth. God is here, Little Mouse realized. Even in this darkest of times and most frightening of places.

‘M-my, m-my l-l-lord –’

The priest bared his brown teeth and leaned closer, his ravaged face so near that Little Mouse could smell onion and black tea on his breath.

‘I said who is your saviour?’ the priest demanded.

‘My lord Jesus Christ, Father! My lord Jesus Christ!’

And then Little Mouse was lost in tears. For what, exactly, he couldn’t say. He wept with grief, despair, as a lost child weeps – but he felt a strange happiness, too. Despite how harshly it had been tested, his faith remained true. Through his losses, Little Mouse had found his salvation in Christ’s love.

He pressed his face into the coarse, unwashed blanket and sobbed in gratitude. Was every brother and boy of St Quintus dead? Of all the flock of the monastery, had the Lord saved only him? He felt a hand on his shoulder. The touch of it was as hard, as strong as yew wood.

‘You asked why you are still alive,’ he heard the man say. ‘I will tell you. It is God’s doing. The demon Serb’s bullet is still lodged in your head, but by the grace of the Lord you live. Are you listening to me, child? The Lord spared you so that you may do his bidding, and serve as his instrument. You are blessed, truly blessed.’ The man’s voice had fallen to a hoarse whisper, clotted with emotion. ‘You belong to the True Church now,’ he rasped. ‘Do you hear? You belong to God now.’

Jackson Sharp

TRICK OR TREAT

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Prologue

Chapter One

4 October