The Skeleton Road (13 page)
Authors: Val McDermid
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #International Mystery & Crime, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General, #Mystery
Robbie tugged at his beard. ‘He didn’t join in much. It felt like he was only there for the climbing. The rest of it – the rest of us, really – he could do without. When he stopped coming, I think it was a while before I noticed. He didn’t contribute much to the conversation, only the climbing. And other people were just as good as him at figuring out routes and holds.’
‘That’s right. It was a bit of a jolt when it dawned on me we hadn’t seen him for over a year,’ John added.
‘Did he ever fall out with anybody, that you know of?’
They looked at each other, puzzled. ‘Not that I ever heard,’ John said.
‘No disagreements on climbs, no arguments?’
Robbie scratched his armpit while he considered. ‘He wasn’t that kind of bloke. He never got into it with anybody. Some people, it’s like they’re always looking for a chance to get stuck in. But Tito wasn’t like that. He was pretty much live and let live. Maybe he got all his fighting done when he was in the army.’
Now for the tricky part.
‘I’m going to ask you about something that some people think is illegal. Hand on heart, I’m not interested in minor infringements of the law here. I’m more concerned about making sense of some puzzling information.’
John began to bounce in his chair. ‘Is this about that body they found on a roof in Scotland?’ He prodded Robbie in the ribs. ‘Remember? I showed you in the canteen yesterday. A skeleton up on a high roof, somewhere that’s been shut up for twenty years.’ He grinned at Karen. ‘You think it’s him? You think it’s Tito?’
‘I’ll be honest, guys. Right now, I don’t know. But his name has come up. So what about climbing up buildings then? We know it goes on. We know it’s a bit of a dark secret because people get into all sorts of trouble. But was Tito into it when he was in Oxford? Because, frankly, there’s nothing else to climb around here.’
Robbie stared at the floor. John looked panicky, then shrugged. ‘Oh, what the hell. Yes, buildering goes on. And yes, Tito was into it. We were talking about it one time on a trip to the Peak District and he said he’d done it a few times.’
‘Did he do it by himself? Or with other people from the club?’ Karen tried not to show how eager she was to hear the answer.
Robbie raised his eyes. ‘He wouldn’t tell us who he went out with. Just that it was somebody he used to know back in Yugoslavia.’
I refused to allow myself to have any expectations of Mitja. All day after our dinner at Proto I kept teetering on the edge of teenage mooning over the handsome colonel, but I scolded myself back to sense. After all, I was twenty-six years old and far too worldly to fall for the obvious charms of a clever, handsome man who could doubtless take his pick when it came to wanting more from an evening than a discussion of neocolonialism, feminism and deconstructing the Cold War. No, we’d had a fascinating evening and that would be an end to it.
And so I was genuinely surprised to emerge from a day’s lectures at the Inter-University Centre to find a Mercedes parked on the road beyond the slender palm trees. The rear door swung open and Mitja unfolded himself out of the back seat in full dress uniform. ‘I have an hour to spare,’ he said. ‘I thought we could walk up to the old town and have a drink, if you’re not too busy?’
Of course I wasn’t too busy. Even if I did feel a little uncomfortable to be walking alongside a senior officer in full regalia. We headed up between the two forts towards the Pile gate, picking up our conversation where we’d left it the night before. ‘Is there any news from Vukovar today?’ I asked.
‘Nothing new,’ he sighed. ‘But I am more concerned with what’s happening in Montenegro.’
That was the first time Mitja had mentioned Montenegro to me. Only a few miles to the east, events there were likely to have more effect on me here in Dubrovnik than whatever was going on in Vukovar on the eastern borders of the country. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
‘Any day now, we are going to hear the JNA and the puppets who are running Montenegro saying that Dubrovnik is a threat to their territorial integrity. They want to “neutralise” us to avoid ethnic clashes – that’s their way of saying they want to destroy us. They have this crazy claim that we should be part of their country anyway, that this narrow strip of coast only belongs to Croatia because some stupid Bolshevik cartographers made a mistake drawing up the maps.’ He made an explosive noise with his lips. ‘As if we have anything in common with those bloody butchering Montenegrin Serbs.’
‘That sounds ominous,’ I said.
‘It’s just propaganda. They’re spreading rumours that we’ve got an army of Kurdish mercenaries ready to attack the Bay of Kotor and invade them.’ He gave a sardonic grin. ‘Even stupid Montenegrin Serbs know better than that. Who would rely on Kurdish mercenaries, for God’s sake? If I was planning to invade Montenegro, I’d have a Croatian army at my back.’
‘And are you planning to invade Montenegro?’ I tried to make my voice sound light.
He laughed, his brown eyes sparkling with mischief. ‘No, Maggie. There are things I would much rather do this evening than invade Montenegro.’
We were drawing close to the Pile gate, the massive stone bastion that guards Dubrovnik to the west. He pointed up at the eroded statue of St Blaise in its niche above the gate. ‘You see underneath the saint, there is a relief of three heads close together? The man flanked by the two women?’
‘What about them?’
‘You know the story?’
I shook my head. I’d barely got to grips with the major landmarks of the Old Town, never mind the details of the statuary. ‘No, who are they?’
‘Legend has it that they’re two nuns and a priest who fell in love with each other. Forbidden love in every way. Apparently they were more interested in having sex together than in their holy offices. So their images were carved into the gate to mortify them.’
I laughed in delight. ‘An early version of the tabloid press. We name and shame the guilty.’
‘Maybe. But I like to think that we’re a people who understand and celebrate love in all its different forms.’
I felt a little shiver run up the back of my neck. ‘What? Croatia is the embodiment of Foucauldian fluidity?’
‘Why not? We don’t have to become bourgeois in every respect just because we’re no longer Communist.’ He reached out and took my hand. I know it’s the worst kind of cliché but truly, it did feel like an electric shock. ‘There are other ways of being, wouldn’t you say? As a feminist?’
Everyone thinks themselves unique when they fall in love. The truth is, we all lose ourselves in the same way. Whether it takes hours or days or weeks, we all find ourselves in a place of wonder and urgency, where we believe nobody has ever been before to quite the same degree. If everyone felt like this, our script goes, the world would come to a grinding, grinning halt.
And that’s how it was with Mitja and me. I couldn’t have told you the morning after how we got from the Pile gate to the tangle of sheets in the hotel room in the Old Town; at this distance, it’s even more of a blur. All I remember is the door closing and the terrible hunger for each other’s bodies. The brief grip of panic when I wondered whether seeing me naked would kill his desire, whether we’d fit together or be awkward and uncomfortable, whether this was just a mad response to the threat of war. Then the tumult of desire answering desire.
One thing I do know for certain. From the very first time, the sex was sensational. I wasn’t short of experience when I met Mitja. I enjoyed sex and I’d been lucky with my lovers. But all that good stuff faded to grey beside the love we made. And the quality of our physical relationship cemented everything else. Maybe it was the meeting of our minds, the sharing of a common sense of humour, the delight we both took in challenging the other’s position that gave the sex an extra helping hand. However the biofeedback went, it worked.
And it never stopped working. From those first weeks when we fell into each other’s arms every time like starving wolves to the night before he walked out of my life for ever, making love was always what pulled us straight into each other’s orbit and healed whatever else was wrong in our world. I believe that continuity of tenderness, that perpetual passion was one of the principal reasons he left the way he did. If he’d tried to talk it through, explain why he had to go, I’d have dragged him into bed and that would have been another night, another day when he’d have stayed because he wanted to.
But I’m getting ahead of myself now.
That night reconfigured everything for both of us. In truth, we couldn’t have picked a worse combination of time and place to fall in love. The morning after that first night, on 16 September 1991, the JNA mobilised the 2nd Titograd Corps in Montenegro, supposedly because of the threat posed by Croatia. I heard the news at work; I’d been in a daze all day, but that popped the bubble of my happiness. Everybody knew where this was heading now. Nobody could bury their head in the sand any longer.
Leaving on the next bus would have been the rational thing to do. It’s what most people with any sense did. I might even have done it myself if the mobilisation had been announced a few days earlier. But going was no longer an option. To leave Dubrovnik then would have been to turn my back on my best-ever chance of happiness.
I look back at that choice now and all that stemmed from it. I saw horror and hardship, courage and catastrophe, devastation and daring. I experienced things I still can’t talk about with equanimity. But even with the benefit of hindsight, I know I would have stayed. And I’m glad that I did.
A
ll day, Maggie had been twitchy. She felt eyes on her back when she stopped for coffee on her way to the squat concrete block where she was due to give her seminar. She heard footsteps behind her as she cut up the steps from Ashton Lane. She’d never scrutinised a seminar audience so closely, checking every man in the room to gauge whether he could have been one of the pair under the bridge.
The first thing she’d done when she’d got back to her hotel after last night’s incident was to instruct the front desk to deny she was there if anyone phoned or asked in person. If her hosts called to check she’d arrived safely, that would be too bad. She hung the Do Not Disturb sign outside, slid the chain in place and double-locked the door. And just because she could, she shoved the chair under the door handle. Maggie wasn’t sure how effective it would prove, but that was what people did in books and films. It couldn’t hurt.
Once she was certain she was as secure as she could be, she opened up her laptop and tried to concentrate on her notes for the morning’s seminar. She needed to take her mind off what had happened. She knew from years of experience under fire in the Balkans that there was no point in brooding after the fact. You had to turn your back on what had terrified you and move on to the next thing, otherwise you’d go crazy. She’d seen that happen to journalists more than once. Raw kids, swaggering into a war zone, determined to make their name. No fallback internal resources to sustain them when they looked death or worse in the face. Next thing, they were running for the first transport out, rapidly deciding that maybe they could be a music critic after all.
The best way to draw a line was to hang out with people who’d walked the same beat. She’d been lucky. She’d had Mitja. But even if he wasn’t around, as often as not she had Tessa. Failing that, there were always colleagues or NATO personnel that she could sit in a bar with. She’d never felt alone with her demons. But that encounter under the bridge had been different. It had come out of the blue and she had no idea what lay behind it. Except that Tessa had told her Mitja was showing up on someone’s radar.
So her attempts to divert her attention to the morning’s work were only partly successful. She ended up in bed, still wearing her underwear and a T-shirt, watching junk TV till exhaustion finally swamped her in the small hours. When she woke up, the BBC breakfast show was interviewing some classical composer about a collaboration with a crime writer. It was almost as dreamlike as the memory of the men under the bridge.
By the time she’d showered and dressed, she’d managed to distance herself from the episode. But that didn’t mean she’d forgotten it and she remained vigilant all through breakfast and on the short taxi ride to the university precincts.
After the seminar, lunch. Maggie knew she was distracted to the point of rudeness, but she couldn’t help herself. She excused herself as soon as basic manners would allow and practically ran out into the street, gulping at the fresh air as if it could protect her. She hailed a passing taxi then abruptly changed her mind, stepping back on to the pavement and letting the tide of lunchtime shoppers swallow her up. A hundred yards down the street, when she was as sure as she could be that nobody was on her trail, she flagged down another cab to take her to the station.
As her train slipped south across the river, on the bridge next to the one that had sheltered her attackers, her anxiety levels fell to manageable levels. She was sitting in the last seat, able to see the length of the carriage, a turn of the head away from anyone who entered from behind. Even so, she couldn’t quite relax. Every time the train stopped, she was alert.
When her taxi deposited her at last at the gates of St Scholastica’s, Maggie finally felt on safe ground. She longed to be back in her own rooms, but habit carried her into the lodge. She greeted the porter over her shoulder as she went to check her pigeonhole. As well as the usual assortment of post, there was a blue envelope with her name in familiar flowing script, clearly delivered by hand. A note from Dorothea, in the context of recent events, obviously wouldn’t keep.
She shoved her thumb under the flap and tore it open. But before she could pull out the contents, a voice close to her shoulder said, ‘Professor Blake? Could I have a word, please?’
Maggie whirled round, even as her brain processed the information; a woman’s voice, an East Coast accent, another bloody stranger. She took in a stocky woman of middle height with a shrewd gaze, a messy haircut and a slightly crumpled business suit. Behind her loomed a much younger man with a worried look and an equally wrinkled suit. ‘Who are you?’ she blurted out, sounding guilty even to her own ears.
‘I’m sorry, Professor, I was just about to tell you they were looking for you,’ the porter said.
‘Who?’ Maggie repeated.
‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie from Police Scotland. And this is Detective Constable Murray. We’d like to speak to you.’ The woman glanced at the porter. ‘In private.’
‘Police Scotland? Is this about my parents?’ Maggie didn’t believe that. If something had happened to them, it would be a local bobby delivering the news. But it was a good holding question. She wasn’t mollified by the identity of the strangers. She remembered what Tessa had told her: the people she’d heard were interested in Mitja were on the official payroll too. And she couldn’t think of any other reason why the police would be looking for her.
‘I don’t know anything about your parents, Professor. That’s not why I’m here.’
‘So what is this about?’
Karen Pirie smiled. It was a bit too uncertain to be reassuring, Maggie thought. ‘I’d rather explain somewhere more private. Do you have an office we could go to?’
Maggie considered her options. She could dig her heels in and insist on information here and now, but the porters were as leaky as they were loyal. Besides, this woman didn’t seem the sort who’d back down easily. She could take them to the Senior Common Room, but at this time of the evening, there would be no privacy there either. That left her with two choices: tell these cops to piss off, or invite them to her set.
‘Why would I want to talk to you?’ she hedged.
Karen’s mouth tightened momentarily. ‘Why would you not? Professor, I’ve been hanging around here for the past twenty-four hours because I need your help. That’s the top and bottom of it. I don’t understand why you would see that as a problem. I really don’t.’ She spread her hands in a gesture of openness.
‘What if I refuse?’
Karen dropped her hands. ‘Then we will go away. I’ll get the answers to my questions somewhere else. It won’t be as straightforward, but I will get the answers. And if they’re the answers I expect, it’s going to be a lot harder on you than talking to me now. I’m not saying that as a threat. I’m trying to say it as a kindness.’ This time, it was sympathy Maggie saw in the other woman’s eyes.
Unsure whether she was doing the right thing, Maggie gave in. ‘Come up to my rooms,’ she sighed.
‘Shall I tell the Principal?’ the porter asked as they moved towards the door that led into the college.
Maggie half turned and gave him a withering look. ‘Not until I’m arrested, Steve.’
In silence, they followed her down the driveway till they came to Magnusson Hall, a daunting Victorian sprawl of red and yellow brick that had started life as an insane asylum. ‘It’s the top floor,’ Maggie said, leading the way to an ornate wooden staircase. ‘No lift, I’m afraid.’ It was a lie; to comply with legislation on disabled access, the college had installed a lift at the rear of the building. But Maggie was feeling petty. She generally took the stairs. If they wanted to talk to her, they could visit on her terms.
By the time they reached her front door, Karen was pink and breathing hard. Maggie felt a moment’s schadenfreude; her heart rate was barely elevated. She unlocked the door and led them down the hall to the room where she conducted her supervisions, gesturing at a pair of armchairs opposite the small sofa where she preferred to sit. She dropped her backpack by her seat and perched on the edge, elbows on knees, leaning forward. ‘Now tell me,’ she said.
‘I’d like you to cast your mind back thirteen years,’ Karen said. ‘You opened a bank account at the Forth and Clyde Bank. It was a joint account with a man called Dimitar Petrovic.’
Maggie felt a cold sensation in her chest, as if part of her body had been put in a blast chiller. ‘What if I did?’ To her surprise, her voice came out cramped and breathy.
Karen sighed. ‘We know you did. It’s a matter of record. Can you tell me why that was? Were you in a relationship with Dimitar Petrovic?’
Maggie jumped to her feet. ‘Jesus. I might have known. You lot are all in bed together.’ She pulled her phone out of the pocket of her jeans and stabbed at the screen. ‘I’m saying nothing to you without a lawyer.’ Even in her agitation, she could see Karen looked stunned. ‘Don’t act the innocent with me. I’m calling my lawyer and until she gets here, this conversation is over.’