Chapter Eleven

10 October

For a gangland psycho, Dmitry Rakić lived a pretty quiet life. But then, Rose reflected, his girlfriend was dead and half his mates were banged up at St Aldate’s on trafficking charges – what was there for him to do? Rose popped open a packet of crisps. Went on watching his windows.

Three days she’d been on stakeout. To begin with – for the first day – she’d railed against it, knowing that sitting on her arse in a parked car was no job for a bloody DI, knowing that Hume, damn him, was punishing her for letting Olly Stevenage grab his smartphone shots at the crime scene. She’d brooded on it as she’d sat watching Rakić’s flat, worked herself into a fury over it – given Angler a proper earful when he’d come to relieve her at quarter to midnight.

The unshaven DS had grunted something about ‘Time of the month, is it, guv?’ as he’d peeled back the cellophane on his corner-shop Cornish pasty.

By now she was settled into the job. Not happy – but focused, clear on her objectives, committed to getting all she could from her hours of watching, watching, watching …

Rakić did his own shopping – bog roll, milk, bread from the Polish corner shop. Plus a lot of bottles from the off-licence further up the street. He was drinking hard, it seemed, wasn’t eating a lot. Had a cleaner, a trim young black girl who came on Tuesdays. She’d checked out okay: on a student visa from Mozambique, training as a nurse at St Michael’s. Rakić watched a lot of TV, often late into the night. He took walks, after midnight, to nowhere in particular. Didn’t seem like he was looking after himself too well; he looked unslept, dishevelled.

Guilt. Grief. Who knew?

But then, he wasn’t stupid either, Rose knew. Stupid gang leaders didn’t stay gang leaders long. What with Katerina and the drugs bust in the Leys – not to mention the ruckus at All Souls – he had to know the police would be all over him. Rakić was treading carefully.

The living-room light in the flat went out. The bathroom light went on. Rose sighed. What a bloody week.

St Aldate’s might have been as full as a high-season B&B with dodgy Leys faces but it was starting to look like a lot of work for sod-all result. Rakić ran a tight ship; no one was talking. Big Nitić, the thug who’d cracked her ribs and dangled her over the stairwell, was going down for GBH, and based on the gear they’d seized from the estate they could maybe nail a handful of others on intent to supply – but these were pretty slim pickings, a poor return on a high-risk investment. And no one seemed to know a bloody thing about Katerina Zrinski.

Hume was going spare.

It didn’t help the investigation that Professor Matt Brask had dropped out of the frame. His alibi, an international symposium in York over the days in which Katerina went missing and was killed, had checked out.

Yes, Rose was glad that Brask wasn’t a killer. He seemed like a decent guy and she was happy that her initial suspicions had been unfounded. But it was another avenue closed off, another dead end. She was running out of leads.

They were getting a lot of calls – that was true. No shortage of hoaxes and pranks; more trolls, time-wasters and sickos than they knew what to do with. Just last night uniform had rushed to Wadham College at half-two in the morning – a first-year student had rung 999 in a state of hysteria, reporting a severed head in his bed.

A mannequin’s head, it turned out, soused in tomato ketchup.

The poor lad had been in bits. Next morning three guys from his block were all over Twitter and Facebook, crowing about the ‘classic’ prank. It was just ‘banter’, they told the WPC who’d paid them a visit.

The chief super was leaning on the university to get the little bastards slung out.

All this was against a wearying backdrop of hard-boozing students in Halloween fancy dress, gruesome fly-posters for this college’s ‘Murder Ball’ or that club’s ‘Trick or Treat Social’, zany Halloween-themed cocktails in the local bars …

And all the while young Mr Oliver Stevenage kept up a torrent of vitriol against the force, the investigation and Rose herself.

She had the latest copy of the student paper on the passenger seat. Strewn with crisp crumbs and marked by spilt coffee. It was no less than the rag deserved. Angler had brought it for her – ‘Case you get caught short,’ he’d grinned coarsely.

Stevenage’s leader column had had her seething.

This newspaper, he’d written, fully acknowledges the benefits – cultural and socio-economic – brought to Oxford by the vibrant law-abiding East European community. We hold no brief for the far-right agenda; we are not interested in a racist witch-hunt.

But when the Thames Valley Major Crimes Unit investigation – under the panicky leadership of Ms DI Lauren Rose – allows members of an immigrant crime ring to commit perhaps the most wickedly vile crime in Oxford’s history, making no arrests in the case and leaving the only suspect – a tattooed Balkan hoodlum – to swagger about the streets unimpeded and unquestioned, we have no hesitation in saying that the force is failing in its duty to our city, to the safety of the public and to Katerina Zrinski.

If you didn’t know better, you might almost think he gave a damn. She’d thrown down the paper thinking that Stevenage had almost achieved the impossible: making her want to defend Dmitry Rakić.

National press were making their presence felt, too. Crime reporters from most of the major dailies had been nosing around headquarters. So far Hume had kept them away from her – or her away from them.

She shifted in her seat for the thousandth time, trying in vain to get comfortable. Took a mouthful of tepid bottled water and wondered whether the corner shop on Davenport Road would be open yet.

She checked her watch: barely eight. The light of a TV screen had glowed in Rakić’s window all night. All quiet on the Western Front.

Her phone went off like a grenade.

‘Christ.’ She laughed at herself, at her own jumpiness – her dad wouldn’t have known whether to laugh or cry, seeing her startled out of her wits by a bloody ringtone.

Fumbled for the phone in her bag, hit the green button.

‘Rose here.’

‘Ma’am?’ She knew the voice – struggled to place it. ‘Ma’am, it’s PC Ganley.’

That was it: the awkward copper who’d made a bollocks of her crime scene. She hardened her voice, only barely aware that she was doing so.

‘What is it, Ganley? Something up with your radio?’

‘No, ma’am.’ His voice wavered as though on the brink of breaking. Poor lamb, she thought uncharitably. Someone steal your BMX? Beat you up for your lunch money? She’d heard Phillips say that, with some young coppers, when they said ‘ma’am’ they really meant ‘mummy’. There was something in that.

‘Then what the hell’s the matter, Constable?’

‘There’s something – something I think you should see, ma’am.’

Rose’s skin prickled.

Oh God.

‘It’s –’ The PC paused. She heard him gulp. Then he said: ‘Ma’am, it’s another one. Ma’am – the bastard’s done it again.’

Rakić would hear the squeal of tyres and the urgent rev of the engine but Rose didn’t give a shit about that now. This had nothing to do with Rakić – oh Christ, none of this had anything to do with Rakić, none of it ever had – she’d known it, she’d known it.

The man had been under the closest surveillance for three damn days, and now another innocent person lay dead.

Rose slammed her palms against the steering wheel. That stupid, pig-headed bastard Hume! And Phillips, with his certainty, his self-satisfaction, his know-it-all sneer –

All this time the murderer had been out on the streets, out in the open, stalking his victim. This was the time they might’ve got him; this – when he’d broken cover, was taking risks – had been their opportunity. And where’d she been? Eating bloody crisps and watching an insomniac thug drink himself stupid in front of the TV.

It was still early, the traffic starting to build up but not yet at its rush-hour peak. She jumped a red light on the Botley Road and gunned the engine hard down the A34. PC Ganley had given her a location south of the city. A field, he’d said. A field, and a stand of trees.

When she pulled up on the worn verge of a nowhere B-road a little way east of Boars Hill, the first faces she saw were those of DI Leland Phillips and DCI Morgan Hume. Ganley had told her, with an apologetic dip in his voice, that the pair of them would be there – ‘but I thought you ought to be told, ma’am,’ he’d added.

It was a snub, an obvious signal that she was being sidelined. Wasn’t this her investigation? On another day she’d have leapt out of her car spitting fire.

Not today.

Phillips was white-faced. Hands in his pockets to hide the shakes. Nothing but pride keeping his chin up. Hume, meanwhile, simply looked knackered, utterly spent – twenty years older than the dynamic DCI she’d seen the day before.

Rose hadn’t time to hold anyone’s hand – least of all her boss’s.

‘Guv. What have we got?’

Hume shook his head.

‘God knows.’ A drawn-out sigh. ‘Fu-u-ck. Go and have a look.’ He pointed over to the police cordon at the edge of the stand of spindly birches.

Rose gave herself no time to think, to wonder, to imagine. She headed off at a brisk pace across the yellowish sheep-cropped grass.

Phillips called after her: ‘Brace yourself, Rose.’

Rose tried to ignore him. Walked on towards the shivering trees. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than Katerina, she told herself as she ducked under the twanging police tape.

She was wrong.

There was a D-shaped clearing on the edge of the wood, like an inlet cut into a coastline. Rose stood in its middle, her nostrils filled with the smell of blood. The semicircular curve of pale trees hemmed in her horizons and drew her gaze naturally towards a central point – the point straight ahead of her.

She faced it. She stared it down.

It had been a man, once. Now it was a smear of deep red with bared white teeth. Raw flesh against grey bark. Twisted hands cupped limply around the clean head of an iron nail.

Rose moved towards the thing. The leaf mould was spongy beneath her feet and smells of rot and fungus mingled with the metallic stench of blood.

He’d been skinned. He looked like a thing on a butcher’s counter. His blood-red flesh was dotted with small black flies. His arms had been wrenched over his head, his hands fixed to the tree trunk with a single nail. He was oddly dressed, robed in a heavy, greasy fabric – an untreated animal hide, Rose guessed. She thought of the animal bones left in Brask’s office.

She took a step nearer, leaned in for a closer look –

The realization hardened quickly in the pit of her stomach: no, not an animal hide. She gulped down a mouthful of bile. It was the man’s own skin, draped across his shoulders, coiled about his waist and bound in a loose knot in front like a loincloth.

A wide bolt of hessian, marked with black blood, hung round the man’s neck. Its ends dangled to the floor.

Rose felt the blood rush from her head, but she steadied herself. She forced herself to lift her eyes and meet, again, the dead stare. All humanity had been flayed from the face, the nose, brows, lips torn away. And yet –

And yet there was a terrible, unbearable expressiveness in the muscles and tendons that remained. It spoke of horror. Of despair. Of pain.

She’d wait for Matilda Rooke to give the official verdict but, on looking into the staring lidless eyes of the thing nailed to the tree, Rose already knew for sure: the skin had been ripped from live flesh. Whoever had done this had done it to a living, breathing man.

She knew it, but she couldn’t contemplate it. This astonishing cruelty. The inhuman horror of it. She swore under her breath and stepped back. Took a last look at the skinless skull frozen in a silent scream. Turned away.

Hume and Phillips talked her through what they knew.

‘David Norfolk, forty-eight years of age.’ Hume, slumped in the front seat of Phillips’s car like a pile of dirty washing, wagged a driver’s licence wearily. ‘Lived locally, if this is up to date.’

‘We found that by the tree,’ Phillips supplied. ‘Couldn’t miss it, really. No accident – he wants us to know who these people are.’

‘Like with your Miss Zrinski.’

Rose said: ‘It’s the same guy.’

It wasn’t a question.

‘We’re running checks on Mr Norfolk,’ Hume said. ‘Older than Katerina Zrinski, different sex, different nationality. Maybe they’ve something in common but my guess is not.’

‘No pattern,’ Phillips put in self-importantly. He’d recovered some of his old bulletproof arrogance.

Rose murmured: ‘Yet.’

They were quiet for a few moments. And Rose knew what Hume and Phillips were thinking. It was the same thing she had herself been thinking as she walked away from what was left of David Norfolk. A phrase that loomed above them as large as the horizon but no one dared utter. It was always the way. Her oldest brother, Michael, had told her about it; he’d been a DC down in Wandsworth, back in the early nineties, when some nutter had made a name for himself stabbing sex workers. Of course it was all over the papers but at HQ it was like a dirty word.

Serial killer.

The thing no one wanted to say, wanted to admit. The bleak reality no one dared confront.

Hume rubbed at his face with both hands. In front of her, in the driver’s seat, Phillips was pinching colour back into his cheeks.

‘What next, guv?’ Rose prompted. Was she the only one with a sense of urgency? Could no one else see that it was only a matter of time before this happened again? Another innocent tortured and defiled. Another horror nailed to a wheel or a tree in an Oxford meadow.

Hume looked at her. An old man, she thought, bitterly, resentfully. A tired, beaten-up, defeated old man.

Did he understand what he’d done? Did he realize that by single-mindedly going after Rakić, by letting his own prejudices lead him by the nose … did he know what that had cost David Norfolk?

Of course he bloody well did. It was written all over him. Well, she hoped it made him sick.

‘Any ideas, Inspector?’ he said.

Rose felt her blood rise. Her stomach clenched like a fist.

Now it’s my case. Now you need my help. She was on the brink of yelling in the old copper’s face: Why wasn’t I called in straight away? Why did you think this was a job for your fucking boys’ club?

The radio crackled. Hume took the call.

A report from the university, Rose heard. Another body. This one on a roof.

One name, one face sprang sharply into Rose’s mind: Brask. She was out of the door and running for her own car before Hume had said a word.