The Skeleton Road (14 page)

I
f you couldn’t deal with being wrong-footed, you’d never cut it as a cop. Karen knew that. But that didn’t mean she’d learned to be sanguine about it. She always felt that she should be better prepared. Forewarned, forearmed. All that sort of thing. So when Maggie Blake started ranting about lawyers, she was almost affronted by her failure to anticipate such a move. They’d come, in effect, to do a death knock. Usually the greatest call on her experience was to find a way to be sympathetic while extracting the necessary information. There had been one occasion when it had all gone off like a box of cheap fireworks, but that had been when she was delivering the bad news to the mother of a notorious drug-dealing villain, who seemed to think her son’s death was the fault of the police rather than her son’s lifestyle choices. A nice middle-class woman with nothing to hide shouldn’t be kicking off and demanding a lawyer.

Unless, of course, she didn’t have nothing to hide.

Karen sat still while Maggie Blake made her phone call. Somebody called Tessa, apparently.

‘I’ve got the cops here,’ Maggie said. Her shoulders were hunched defensively round her phone. ‘Yes, here. In my study… They’re being very cagey but it’s something to do with Mitja… No…’ She ran a hand through her hair and paced towards the window, turning her back on them. As she passed her desk, she reached out and grabbed a silver photo frame, flipping it face down without breaking step. ‘Can you get here right away? I’m not answering any questions without a witness. And advice…’

Karen watched Maggie’s shoulders relax. It sounded like this Tessa was a friend as well as a lawyer. If Karen was right about the identity of the John Drummond skeleton, it would be better for Maggie to have a friend at her side. Even if the friend was a lawyer.

‘Great. Thanks.’ Maggie drew a deep breath then swung round to face them. ‘My lawyer’s on her way. So if you don’t mind, we’ll put this on hold till then. Would you like a drink? Tea, coffee? Something stronger?’

Karen shook her head. She didn’t want Maggie to leave the room. There wasn’t exactly rapport between them. But there wasn’t quite hostility either. ‘You sound like you’re from my neck of the woods?’ she said. It was a cheat of a question; she’d checked out the professor on the web and discovered she’d attended Bell Baxter school in the heart of Fife, less than twenty miles from where Karen lived. ‘I’m from Kirkcaldy,’ she added.

Maggie looked sceptical. ‘Is that what they teach you to do? Stoke up the fellow feeling to break down the barriers?’

Karen sighed. ‘I was only making conversation while we wait for your pal Tessa to turn up. If you’d rather sit here in silence, please yourself. Me and DC Murray’ll get our phones out and play
Angry Birds
to pass the time if you’d rather?’

Maggie closed her eyes briefly. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just not very comfortable right now.’

‘I understand that.’ Karen gave her the smile that Phil insisted transformed her from ogre to sweetheart. ‘I’m not trying to trip you up or catch you out. Just doing a wee bit of Fife lassies’ bonding. Because I’m a long way from home too.’ Face it, she thought. She’d have to rely on the geographic bonding because on the surface they didn’t have much else in common. Maggie was immaculately groomed and stylish, her neat brown hair shaped like a bell, her make-up understated but effective, her outfit well-chosen to emphasise a figure that was slim and shapely. She reminded Karen of one of those faintly glamorous executives who turned up on BBC4 dramas. What saved her from homogeneity was her eyes: hyacinth blue, direct and nested with laughter lines. They made Karen think that, in other circumstances, they might have enjoyed a drink together.

Now Maggie nodded wearily. ‘I grew up in the Howe of Fife. Just outside Ceres.’

Farming, then
.
Range Rovers and green wellies.
‘A bit different from down my way.’

As if she’d read Karen’s mind, Maggie expanded: ‘My dad was a farm labourer.’

Ouch. Very wrong, Karen.
More like you than you thought.
‘Mine worked at Nairns. Linoleum then vinyl flooring.’

‘Funny how linoleum’s come back into fashion.’

‘Aye. It’s environmentally friendly. Unless you live downwind of the factory or you’ve a fondness for the smell of linseed oil.’

The two women chuckled.
Ice broken. Job done.
‘You’re a long way from the Howe of Fife here,’ Karen said.

‘In more ways than one. When I was younger, all the interesting work in my field was being done down south, so I didn’t have any choice in the matter.’

‘You ever think about coming back to Scotland? Especially now. The year of Homecoming. The referendum. All that?’

‘This is my home now. I only go back a couple of times a year to see my parents. My friends are here, my colleagues are here.’

‘You don’t feel like you’re living in exile, then?’ Karen, who hadn’t yet decided which way to vote, was nevertheless convinced she’d feel like a foreigner if she had to live in England.

Maggie shrugged. ‘I try to live like I’m a citizen of the world. I’ve seen the damage narrow nationalism can do and I don’t want any part of that.’

‘Fair enough. I take it you’re talking about the Balkans when you talk about nationalism?’

In a moment, some of Maggie’s defensiveness returned. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans and leaned against her desk. ‘Why do you say that?’

Karen fell back on the placatory smile. ‘I googled you, of course. Your book on the geopolitics of the Balkans is apparently the standard work on the subject.’ She gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘I don’t even know what that means, geopolitics. But I’m guessing you’ve spent a bit of time over there to get a better idea of what you’re writing about.’

‘I have. It’s a part of the world that changes people’s perspectives. It certainly changed mine.’

Karen desperately wanted to ask about Petrovic, but she forced herself to stay silent. ‘A wee bit different from Fife,’ she said.

Maggie gave a wry smile. ‘Yes and no. The extreme sectarianism that infects parts of Scottish civil society isn’t so very different from the religious hatreds that divide communities in the Balkans.’

‘You mean Rangers and Celtic? Protestant against Catholic?’

‘Exactly. As in the Balkans, what they have in common is that all sides share the same mix of ethnicity. It’s as if they have to be twice as fierce in their hatred of what they perceive as “difference” so they can establish the right of their own position. It’s madness. And it’s gone on for centuries. But finally, with this generation, there seems to be a sliver of hope for change.’

‘In Scotland?’

‘I don’t know about Scotland. I mean in the Balkans. And it’s thanks to the Internet. In the past, each community tried to keep itself quarantined from the people it defined as “other”. Each generation was taught to demonise the outsiders. They didn’t communicate with them, they didn’t have any opportunity to discover how much common ground there was between them.’

‘So when it came to the breakdown of Yugoslavia, they could go right back to their old habits?’

‘As you say. And when it came to civil war, it was easy to think of the enemy as less than human. That made it OK to rape and torture and massacre, because they were vermin who needed to be put down.’ Maggie pushed off from her desk, warming to her subject, moving around and gesturing with her hands as she spoke. Karen could see exactly why she’d be a success in a lecture theatre. Clever, dynamic, lit up by passion.

‘And you think it’s finally changing?’

‘I think there are grounds for cautious optimism. This generation, the post-war kids, the ones who’re coming through their teens now, they’re growing up in a different world. Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media mean that they’re encountering kids from the other communities online and they’re discovering that they have much more in common.’

‘Really? I’d have thought that online anonymity provided more of an opportunity for bullying and trolling,’ Karen said. ‘That tends to be what we see most of in our job.’

‘I’m not denying some of that goes on. But mostly what they’re seeing is that their attitudes are the same as the people they thought were their enemies – none of them wants to spend their lives trapped in the old cycles of violence and revenge.’ Maggie waved at her desk, where assorted digital gadgets huddled together. ‘They want an economic future where they can have games consoles, and stream music, and buy the latest clothes. Not one where they might end up as refugees with all their possessions tied up in a bedsheet on the back of an ox-cart.’

‘Ironic that it’s taken twenty-first-century materialism to give them a different set of priorities. Communism didn’t manage it, but offer them an X-box and suddenly the past doesn’t matter,’ Karen said.

‘It’s a mash-up of those aspirations and their new understanding of how little difference there truly is between them. It might mean that we can lay to rest a thousand years of brutal wars in that region. That, and the fact that they no longer have a valid role as the buffer zone between the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires.’ She stopped abruptly, as if recalling who she was talking to.

‘Interesting,’ Karen said. ‘Maybe we’ll get there in Scotland too.’

‘Try eradicating educational segregation on religious grounds,’ Maggie said. ‘It makes it harder to discriminate if you can’t figure out someone’s religion based purely on the name of their school.’

Karen gave a derisive snort. ‘Aye, right. Oddly enough, that’s not one of the suggestions that’s being put forward by the pro-independence lobby.’

Before they could dive further into the murky waters of sectarianism, a deep buzzing cut across Maggie’s reply. ‘That’ll be Tessa.’ She left them for a moment to let the lawyer in.

‘Something dodgy going on, eh, boss?’ Jason muttered under the low murmur of indecipherable voices from the hallway.

‘Aye, but dodgy doesn’t always mean illegal.’ Karen stood up, ready to face her opponent. However hard she tried, she couldn’t think of lawyers in any other terms.

The tall, slender woman who swept in ahead of Maggie had all the self-assurance of the best of the breed. Black hair stranded with silver was pulled back in a loose ponytail; her pale skin and soft features combined to give the impression of collected intelligence and compassion. She was dressed casually, in linen trousers and a dark blue sweater, but it was the kind of casual that cost a lot to achieve. ‘I’m Tessa Minogue,’ she said. ‘I’m a human rights lawyer, strictly speaking. But I am here on Maggie’s behalf. If I don’t like the way your questions are heading, I will intervene.’ She didn’t bother smiling. She took the opposite end of the sofa from where Maggie had been sitting, demonstrating a confident familiarity with the room and its occupant.

Karen introduced herself while Maggie perched on the edge of her seat again, hands clasped between her knees. ‘We’re here looking for help,’ Karen concluded. ‘That’s all.’

‘I’m not trying to be obstructive,’ Maggie said.

‘We all have a right to protect our own interests,’ Tessa said.

Bloody smug lawyers.
‘So if we could just crack on?’ Karen said. The other women nodded. She flipped open her notebook. Time to be very precise. ‘You opened a joint bank account thirteen years ago with Dimitar Petrovic. For six years or so, you both used it. You paid a monthly sum into the account, he deposited various amounts at irregular intervals. Most of the withdrawals were cash, and on his card. Then eight years ago, he stopped using the account. You continued to pay in four hundred pounds a month but you don’t draw down that money.’ She looked up. ‘Were you in a relationship with Dimitar Petrovic?’

Maggie glanced at Tessa, who nodded. ‘He was my partner, yes.’

‘We’ve had some difficulty finding any official information about Mr Petrovic. Can you explain why that might be?’

‘Why are you so interested in General Petrovic?’ Tessa interrupted.

‘All in good time, Ms Minogue. Professor?’

‘There isn’t a paper trail because he’s not British,’ Maggie said wearily. ‘He was a general in the Croatian Army. He was an intelligence specialist. Later he worked with NATO during the Bosnian conflict and with the UN during the war in Kosovo.’

‘Is that where you met?’

Maggie nodded. ‘I was teaching in Dubrovnik when the Croatian war broke out. That’s when I met Mitja.’ She inclined her head towards the lawyer. ‘And Tessa too.’

‘We all spent a lot of time together during the siege of Dubrovnik,’ Tessa said. ‘When you come under fire, it forges close bonds.’

‘I imagine it does. So, the three of you were friends?’

‘Mitja and I were a couple,’ Maggie said. ‘And Tessa was friends with both of us.’

‘He came to join you here after the war was over?’ Karen.

‘Yes.’

‘And what was he doing for a living?’

‘He was a security consultant. He also gave occasional lectures. War and Peace Studies, that sort of thing. But I don’t understand why you’re interested in this. We were tediously law-abiding.’ Maggie was regaining her edge, turning Karen’s questioning back at her.

Sensing that, Karen sharpened her approach. ‘What happened eight years ago?’

‘In what respect?’

‘He stopped using the bank account. Why?’

Maggie gave Tessa a pleading look. The lawyer crossed her legs and held her left elbow with her right hand. ‘General Petrovic moved away.’

‘He left you?’ Karen addressed herself to Maggie.

‘He left,’ Tessa said.

‘Where did he go?’ Karen was still facing Maggie.

‘I presume he went back to Croatia.’ Every word cost Maggie, Karen could see.

‘But you don’t know that? Did he not tell you where he was going?’

Maggie wrapped her arms round herself. ‘He didn’t tell me he was going, never mind where. He just left, all right?’ There was a pause. Karen waited. She was good at waiting in interviews. ‘I knew he missed Croatia. He talked a lot about the regeneration work that was under way. Sometimes he sounded quite wistful. Nostalgic. But when I suggested making a trip back, he said he didn’t want to be a tourist in his own country.’ She sighed. ‘I assumed the pull towards home was stronger than the pull towards me. I kept putting the money in the account in case he needed it. I know that sounds pathetic, but I knew that things wouldn’t be straightforward for him in Croatia. Nothing’s ever straightforward in the Balkans,’ she added with a bitter laugh. ‘And I hoped that my putting the money in the account for him would make him understand he could come back when he was ready.’