The Skeleton Road (12 page)

‘Where we come from, that’s generally thought of as hillwalking rather than climbing,’ Karen said. ‘Did he do the serious rock stuff as well?’

‘Oh yes. There’s a cupboard downstairs that’s still full of his equipment.’

Karen tucked that away for future reference. If Maggie Blake didn’t have any obvious source of Petrovic’s DNA, there might be something in Dr Simpson’s basement that would do the trick. ‘What about buildings? Did he ever talk about free-climbing buildings? I bet you’ve got some real challenges here in Oxford.’

Dr Simpson pursed her lips. ‘That would be against the law, Chief Inspector.’

Karen shrugged. ‘A man who came through the Balkan wars wouldn’t be put off by a wee bit of civil disobedience, I suspect.’

But the shutters had come down. Whatever Dorothea Simpson knew about Dimitar Petrovic’s transgressions on university property, she wasn’t about to share it. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Chief Inspector.’ She struggled to her feet. ‘And now I need to be left in peace. I’m an old woman and I tire easily.’ She looked expectantly at the door. Karen took the hint and shooed Jason down the hall. On the way out, she thanked Dr Simpson. She considered asking the old woman not to warn Maggie Blake of their interest. But that, she reckoned, would be pointless. Tough old birds like Dr Simpson did what they were going to do regardless of interdictions from lassies like Karen.

As they walked back to the car, Jason said, ‘So. Looks as if we’ve got a war hero on our hands.’

Karen raised her eyebrows. ‘He might be a general, Jason. That doesn’t make him a hero.’

A
lan Macanespie stared out of the window at the empty green landscape the train was hurtling through. He’d never have admitted it, but in spite of the fact that he was racing towards a meeting with Wilson Cagney, all he felt was relief.

He wasn’t by inclination a man of action. His strength lay in interrogating the intel that passed across his desk and making sense of it and in building bridges with those who kept the wheels going round, not in terrorising middle-aged women. He’d hated having to do it and hated even more being possessed by this anxiety that it was going to have terrible unforeseen consequences for him, his continued employment and his pension. He should never have allowed himself to be seduced by Proctor’s hare-brained plan, as if he was one of a pair of James Bonds. Even Proctor was acting now like the idea had been nothing to do with him.

But at least he was out of the front line, and for that he was grateful. Only an hour earlier, he’d been hunched over his phone in a hotel lobby, wishing he looked more nondescript. He was pretty sure there hadn’t been enough light under the Jamaica Street Bridge for Maggie Blake to have seen any identifying features. And he had been wearing a beanie hat pulled down low over his ears, hiding his tell-tale ginger hair. But still. She’d seen him outlined against the city’s glow and she must have been traumatised by the encounter. What if his silhouette was carved on her mind’s eye, clear as day? What if she stepped out of the lift and instead of walking into the breakfast room, she turned towards reception and saw him lurking there like a great fat toad? She might not have called the police the night before, but she’d sure as hell call them this morning if she saw one of her attackers hanging around her hotel lobby.

He’d tapped his phone and sent an instant message to Proctor, who was outside the hotel in a hired car. They had no idea whether Maggie Blake would be on foot, in a taxi or in a car driven by herself or someone from the university, so they’d tried to cover all the bases. Macanespie wasn’t even sure why they were still following Maggie Blake. Proctor had been adamant they should stay on her tail, though. ‘She might run to him,’ he’d said.

‘No way,’ Macanespie had grumbled. ‘If she knows where he is, she’ll know how to get in touch with him without putting him in the wind.’

‘She’s a middle-aged geography professor, not an asset.’

‘And he was a general in intelligence. You think he won’t have drilled her in the basic business of covering his back? For fuck’s sake, Theo, you could take misplaced optimism as your specialist subject on
Mastermind
.’

But still, Proctor had won the argument. So Macanespie had been stuck in the hotel lobby since the crack of sparrowfart, just in case Maggie Blake decided she needed to leave the hotel at dawn for a ten o’clock seminar less than a mile away.

And then everything had changed. His phone had rung, jerking him out of his fugue of monodirectional vigilance. The screen told him it was Wilson Cagney and his heart juddered. He was supposed to be in Scheveningen, not Glasgow. If Cagney was paying attention – and Macanespie reckoned Cagney was always paying attention – he’d realise he wasn’t hearing a foreign phone ringtone.

He jerked into action, as if sudden movement would make everything all right. ‘Yes, Wilson?’ he said as soon as he answered.

‘Get on the next flight to London,’ Cagney said without preamble. ‘You and Proctor. I need you in my office asap. Let me know when you’re on the ground at this end.’

That was it. A dictionary definition of peremptory. No room for manoeuvre. But interesting that whatever bee Cagney had in his bonnet, it was buzzing so loudly it had drowned out the sound of the wrong ringtone. Galvanised, Macanespie had jumped to his feet and practically run out of the hotel.

Proctor had been incredulous and then grumpy. ‘We’ll be quicker getting the train,’ he’d reasoned as they drove back to the hire-car agency along the quayside from the hotel. And so now they were heading south, trapped for the best part of five hours in a cloud of ignorance.

When they announced their arrival in London, Cagney instructed them to meet him in a coffee shop in Covent Garden. ‘I’m attending a conference at King’s,’ he explained. ‘I haven’t got time to go back to the office.’

They found him in a corner at the rear of the busy café, back to the wall, his intimidating glare keeping other customers at bay. When they arrived clutching their Americanos, he drained his double espresso and turned the glare on them. ‘I set you a task. So why is it that I’m the one handing over the information?’

‘The trail went cold eight years ago,’ Macanespie said. ‘That’s a lot of ground to cover.’

Cagney rubbed one eye with the tip of his index finger. ‘You pair make me so tired. Here’s the latest instalment in what you need to know. Obviously, we have a flag on General Dimitar Petrovic. And yesterday that flag started waving. A detective constable from Police Scotland ran his name through criminal records and DVLA. Nothing of interest came up, of course. But I want you two to go to Edinburgh and talk to DC Jason Murray and his boss, DCI Karen Pirie. Who happens to be in charge of their Historic Cases Unit. I want to know what her interest in Petrovic is and whether she has any information that could help us lay hands on him.’

‘Why can’t we just phone her?’ Macanespie said. ‘We’re all supposed to be on the same side, aren’t we?’

Cagney’s look of contempt turned the coffee sour in Macanespie’s mouth. ‘Because we’re not lazy bastards. And because, as you should know by now, you always get more face to face. I want to know what’s happened to make Police Scotland care about Petrovic and I want to know the whole story, not some cobbled-together five-second version handed down by a busy DCI over the phone. It’s got to be more than a coincidence that they’re suddenly interested in Petrovic right when we’re moving on him. I want to know how his name has turned up in their inquiries.’

‘Could you not just have asked?’ Macanespie said. ‘You’ve got the reach, after all.’

‘When officers at my rank start asking questions, alarm bells ring. Whereas you —’

‘Edinburgh?’ Proctor said, trying to deflect Cagney’s barely suppressed irritation.

‘It’s where the Historic Cases Unit is based. Don’t phone ahead. Keep the element of surprise.’ Cagney ran a hand down his silvery silk tie, smoothing it against his starched white shirt. ‘See if you can get this one right, boys.’ He stood up and edged out from behind the table, taking care not to brush against anything that might be grubby. ‘I’ll expect to hear from you very soon.’

Macanespie watched his perfectly tailored back zigzag through the coffee addicts till he disappeared from sight. ‘Patronising wee twat,’ he said. All the same he couldn’t help recognising that something was stirring in him in response to Cagney’s dismissiveness. Macanespie wasn’t ready to be written off yet.

‘I can’t believe we’ve got to go back to Scotland. Why couldn’t he have told us that over the phone? We’d have been in Edinburgh by now, whether we’d been coming from Scheveningen or Glasgow,’ Proctor complained.

‘He thinks he can drive us out through the petty exercise of power.’ Macanespie grimaced at the acidic tang of his coffee and stood up. ‘Well, fuck him, say I. He’s going to have to try a lot harder. Come on, Theo, let’s away back to Scotland and see if we can get a decent cup of coffee from DCI Pirie.’

W
hile Jason had still been deciding between a full English or kippers, Karen had already been researching the next phase of her inquiry into the death of the man she was now presuming was Dimitar Petrovic.

Her day had begun even earlier, with a Skype conversation with Phil Parhatka. Whenever she worked with River, she found herself thinking more fondly of her lover. They’d finally got together in the middle of the same high-profile cold-case investigation where she’d first met River. Karen had been in her early thirties then, resigned to living alone, self-reliant and stoic. She had plenty of pals; she was known as good company. Sociable and reliable but ultimately a loner. But in the space of a few weeks, her life had turned upside down. Love and friendship had kicked down the protective barriers she’d spent years constructing, and now she recognised that she was a different woman from the one who had always put her job front and centre because there wasn’t anything else big enough to occupy her.

Now not a day went by without her talking to Phil. There was no sense of obligation on either side; when work forced them apart they spoke because they wanted to, because a day without communication felt incomplete. It had practical advantages too. Even though they were no longer in the same unit, their shared occupation meant each could offer the other meaningful advice. And the distance between her work on cold cases and his on the Murder Prevention Team – unhelpfully known as the Muppet Squad – added a useful layer of detachment.

And so her first act on waking had been to Skype him. She’d caught him at the kitchen table, supping a mug of tea and working his way through a bacon-and-egg roll. ‘I turn my back for five minutes and bang goes the fruit,’ Karen teased.

‘River ate it all,’ he said. ‘She thinks five a day is her starter for ten.’

‘You don’t mind her staying?’

‘Not at all. We went out for a curry and a couple of beers last night, that’s how I missed your call.’

‘On a school night? She’s a bad influence.’

‘No, it was me. I felt like a wee celebration. We had a bit of a result yesterday.’

Karen gave a grim smile. She loved when Phil’s team nailed one of their targets. It meant one more woman safe in her home, at least for a while. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘You remember that big-time property developer I told you about? The one who’s behind that new shopping mall just off the motorway by Rosyth?’

She did. And she wished that was one piece of knowledge that wasn’t embedded in her head. ‘The one who raped his wife in front of one of his investors then let him have a go too? That the one? Told her best pal and the pal came to us?’

Phil nodded. ‘And we couldn’t persuade the wife to make a complaint because she was so scared of what he would do to her. Well, we started putting him through the grinder and we were struggling. The usual stuff – vehicle excise duty, car insurance, TV licence – wasn’t giving us any leverage because all that gets sorted out by his very efficient PA. So, we heard a whisper that he was taking cash backhanders. But we couldn’t get anybody to talk to us and we couldn’t see any of the usual signs of flashing unaccountable cash. Then Tommy had a brainwave.’

‘Really? I didn’t think he had enough brains to cause a wave.’

Phil pulled a face at her. ‘You think anybody who supports Rangers is brainless.’

‘And your point would be…?’

‘That for once, he was able to draw on his recent understanding of lower league football to come up with an interesting idea.’

Karen pretended to swoon. ‘I’m all ears.’

‘Among our target’s other interests is a major shareholding in a First Division football team. Last season, the average attendance at a home game was just over fifteen hundred. But this season they’ve been reporting home gates of nearly three thousand. And let me tell you, it’s not the quality of the football. Not to mention the fact that the photos we’ve tracked down online show roughly the same number of bodies in the stands.’

‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘Ghost punters, Karen. A lot of the spectators hand over hard cash going through the turnstiles on the day. Fifteen quid a time. If you’re adding an extra thousand fake bodies to your tally, you’ve laundered fifteen grand, just like that. You’ve successfully legitimised dirty money. Multiply that by twenty home games and you’re looking at a cool three hundred K over a season.’

Karen gave a low whistle. ‘That’s fabulous. Bribery and corruption, defrauding the taxman and the VAT… Oh, that’s beautiful, Phil. But how do you stand it up?’

‘Tommy managed to get a crew together on Saturday. Woolly suits keen to have a shot at doing something in plain clothes. So every turnstile had one of our boys watching it with a wee clicker in his pocket, head-counting everybody who paid in to see the game. Now, we might be a bit out either way, but Tommy’s lads clocked the crowd at fourteen hundred and sixty-seven. The official gate for the match was three thousand and forty-three.’

Karen laughed with delight. ‘I can see why you felt like a celebration.’

‘Aye. He’s a nasty, violent bully, this bastard. And it’ll give us great pleasure to nick him. But what about you? How’s it going?’

She brought him up to speed with her investigation. ‘So we’ve got to hang around here all day waiting for Maggie Blake to come back from Glasgow. How frustrating is that?’

‘But at least you know a bit more about Petrovic than you did before.’

‘That’s true. I googled him last night and his name comes up in passing in a couple of long articles about Bosnia and Kosovo. But it’s not very informative. If it really is him, I’ll need to track down somebody who knows what they’re talking about in terms of the Balkan wars.’

‘But in the meantime, you can pursue the angle of who might have been up the John Drummond with him.’

Karen frowned. ‘You reckon?’

‘Isn’t climbing supposed to be one of those close-knit communities? Where everybody knows everybody else? If he had climbing buddies in Oxford, chances are they might still be around. Maybe there’s a club or something?’

‘Round here? I’ve not seen a gradient since we got here. There’s nothing to climb.’

‘Except buildings.’ He looked annoyingly smug.

‘They’ll not have a club for that, it’s against the law.’

‘Aye, but I bet they’ll have a proper climbing club that goes off on trips and excursions. I bet a few of them are into the extreme building stuff.’

Karen pouted. ‘I hate it when you’re right. I’ll get on to it as soon as I’ve had a shower.’

‘Minger. Fancy Skyping before you’re clean and dressed.’ He grinned at her.

‘I’ve got a T-shirt on. And besides, you can barely tell I’m human on Skype, never mind whether I’ve done my hair and cleaned my teeth.’

‘Are you coming home tonight?’

‘I hope so. It kind of depends on when Maggie Blake gets back.’

‘OK. Well, text me when you know what your plans are. I miss you, Karen.’

‘Me too. Later, babe.’ They blew kisses at each other and then it was over. As always, Karen felt her spirits lifted by talking to Phil. And now she had something concrete to chase down.

Fifteen minutes later, she was absorbed in her screen. There was a university climbing club, but she reckoned that would be a waste of time. Anyone who had been a student when Petrovic had been in Oxford would be long gone. There was a climbing wall at Oxford Brookes University where there might be staff who were plugged into a wider climbing network. Karen imagined that training on a climbing wall might be a decent apprenticeship for going up the outside of buildings. Her third option was a local climbing club that claimed to cater for everybody from casual hikers to serious rock geeks. That, she thought, would be her first target.

By the time she made it to the dining room, Jason was munching his way through a sticky pile of pastries. ‘Morning,’ he mumbled. ‘You have a good lie-in?’

‘I’ve been working, Jason,’ Karen said, trying not to let him irritate her so early in a day when they would be spending most of it together. She helped herself to fruit salad, yoghurt and a large latte from a machine. What she really wanted was what was on Jason’s plate, but she was gradually winning her lifelong battle with bad eating habits. If she was going to fall off the wagon of sensible choices, then she was determined it would be for something more luxurious than Coco Pops and a mass-produced Danish. ‘We’re going to talk to someone who knows about climbing,’ she said, enjoying the sense of virtue even more than the fruit.

‘Round here? There’s nothing to climb. I don’t think we saw a hill since Sheffield,’ he said, unconsciously echoing her.

‘There’s buildings, though. And these mad bastards have to learn their techniques somewhere. I’ve already tracked down the secretary of the local climbing club and he’s arranging for a couple of their lads to meet us in East Oxford later this morning.’ She couldn’t help feeling pleased with herself. Between Phil’s brainwave and her people skills, it looked like the day wouldn’t be wasted after all.

It wasn’t hard to identify the two men Karen had arranged to meet in the vegetarian café in the Cowley Road. One was in Lycra cycling leggings and a clingy neon-green T-shirt that she suspected was made from some fabric that had had more scientific input than the entire contents of her wardrobe. His hair was cropped close to his head and his bony face was scraped clean of any hint of facial hair. The other wore the kind of trousers that unzip at the knees to take advantage of the three days of British summer, topped with a lightweight plaid shirt covered in zips and pockets. His hair was badly shaped and shaggy and he had one of those full-on beards that hasn’t seen razor or trimmer in years. Each had a small day pack at his feet, a water bottle in the side pocket.

Karen walked up to the table in the window, Jason trailing behind her. ‘John Thwaite and Robbie Smith?’ She gave them her standard warm greeting smile. They looked about the same age as her; old enough to have been around when Dimitar Petrovic had been alive and climbing.

The cyclist nodded. ‘I’m John, he’s Robbie. And you’re the police, right?’ He had the sort of northern accent that wouldn’t have been out of place in
Coronation Street.

Karen made the introductions, ordered chai for herself and tea for a slightly baffled Jason. ‘Thanks for taking the time to meet me,’ she said.

‘Not a problem. We both work the evening shift in the labs at the hospital. I just cut my bike run a bit short. No big deal,’ John said. He was displaying an eagerness that Karen was familiar with. For some people, the chance to be involved in something as edgy as a murder investigation is more thrilling than almost anything else they can imagine. Even when the victim is disturbingly close to home. That always made her feel slightly queasy.

Robbie looked less keen, studying them from under heavy eyebrows. ‘I can’t stay long,’ he said in an accent that Karen couldn’t narrow down any further than ‘southern’. ‘I’ve got a dental appointment at noon.’

‘Thanks for coming. I understand you’ve both been active members of the climbing club for about ten years?’

‘I joined eleven years ago,’ John said. ‘And Robbie came along that winter. We’re both serious rock climbers, so we’ve done quite a few expeditions together. The Torridon range, the Cuillins, the Assynt peaks in your country. Do you know them at all?’

Patronising prick
. ‘I’m more of a walker,’ Karen said. ‘The West Highland Way, the John Muir Way, the Cape Wrath Trail.’ It was a lie, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t going to be condescended to by some geek who probably shaved his legs more often and more thoroughly than she did.

‘Some great walking there,’ Robbie said. ‘I did Cape Wrath a few years ago. Spectacular, I thought.’

‘But you didn’t ask to meet us so we could swap walking routes,’ John cut in. ‘How can we help you, Chief Inspector?’

‘We’re trying to make contact with a man called Dimitar Petrovic. I wondered if you knew him?’ Both men looked doubtful but Karen persisted. ‘He was a general in the Croatian Army who came here at the end of the Balkans War and I’m told he was a keen climber. About six feet tall, black hair. His friends called him Mitja.’

Robbie’s face cleared. ‘You mean Tito. She means Tito, Johnno.’ He smiled and his face was transformed. He looked ten years younger and 100 per cent happier. ‘We don’t bother with proper names when we’re out on the hill. I only know this one’s name because we work together. I know it sounds a bit mad, but when you’re climbing you want to lose yourself in what you’re doing. So your guy, he was always just Tito to us after he let on that he was from Yugoslavia.’

‘So how well did you know him?’

‘Tito? I haven’t thought about him in donkey’s. He was a good rock monkey,’ John said, admiration in his voice. ‘He was already climbing with club members when I joined, though I was never clear whether he was actually a member.’

‘One thing I noticed – because it was odd, with him being a foreigner – he never did any of the foreign trips,’ Robbie said. ‘We did expeditions to the Alps, the Dolomites and the Pyrenees the first few years I was in the club, but Tito only ever did the home nations climbs.’

‘You know, I’d never thought about that,’ John said. ‘But you’re right.’

‘Was there anyone in particular he always climbed with?’ Karen asked.

They looked at each other, shaking their heads. ‘He’d climb with anyone. It wasn’t something that bothered him. He was more patient than I am with people who are a lot less skilled.’

So, no particular partner. Damn.
‘When you all went on your trips to Scotland and the like, I presume you stayed in bothies and climbing huts?’

Robbie nodded. ‘Mostly. But sometimes we’d just sleep out in bivvie bags if the weather was OK.’

‘When you were sitting around in the evening, eating and drinking and talking, what did Tito have to say for himself?’

This time, their shared look was genuinely nonplussed. ‘Nowt, really,’ John said. ‘Not personal stuff. He had a girlfriend that he lived with, but that’s all I know about his life outside the rock.’