The Skeleton Road (15 page)

‘So you haven’t heard from him since he left? He’s not been in touch?’

Maggie stared at the faded kilim on the floor. ‘No. Not a word.’

‘And what about you, Tessa? Has he been in touch with you?’

‘Of course not. Why would he be in touch with me and not Maggie?’

Karen could think of at least one reason, but this probably wasn’t the time to accuse the lawyer of sleeping with her best friend’s bloke. ‘I just wondered,’ she said mildly. ‘So, Professor, when he left, did he say he was going out for a while? Or going away for a few days? How did he put it?’

‘It wasn’t like that. I left on the morning of the third of September eight years ago to go to a conference in Geneva. Mitja said he might go climbing in Scotland while I was away. When I got home, he was gone. He’d taken almost nothing with him, which made me think he’d gone climbing, as he’d said he planned to do. But he didn’t come back.’

‘The people he usually climbed with hadn’t seen him or heard from him,’ Tessa chipped in. ‘We checked.’

That fitted with what Karen had learned earlier in the day from John Thwaite and Robbie Smith. ‘Did he ever say anything about free climbing? Or buildering, I think it’s called. Where people climb the outside of buildings?’

‘He’d done it a few times,’ Maggie said. ‘But he didn’t tell me much about it because it was illegal and he didn’t want me to get into trouble if he got caught.’

‘And was there any mention of doing it with an old friend from the Balkans?’ Karen asked.

Maggie shook her head. ‘All his climbing buddies from Croatia were still there, as far as I know.’

‘Apart from us,’ Tessa said. ‘A bunch of us used to do a bit of hillwalking when we were all in the Balkans at various points during the conflict. There were a few places you could go in safety and get away from it all. And the three of us still did get out in the hills after Mitja moved here. Snowdonia and the Black Mountains, mostly. But we never went with anyone else from those days. What has all of this to do with anything?’

‘Was there anybody from his life in the Balkans that he saw much of while he was living here?’

Maggie frowned. ‘Occasionally someone would come over on government business. Or some sort of military training. They’d meet up for a drink, or he’d invite them over for dinner. But he didn’t go out of his way to seek them out.’ She shrugged. ‘We had a social life of our own.’

‘Mitja wasn’t somebody who harked back to the past,’ Tessa said. ‘He lived in the here and now. But I’m going to ask you again, Chief Inspector: what is all this in aid of?’

They had arrived at the hard place now. ‘So neither of you has seen or heard from Dimitar Petrovic since September 2007?’

Both women nodded. ‘That’s right,’ Tessa said.

Karen lowered her voice. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I think I may have some very bad news. A few days ago, the skeletonised remains of a man were found on the roof of a building in Edinburgh. We have reason to believe that man was Dimitar Petrovic.’

Maggie’s mouth fell open and her eyes widened. ‘No. There has to be a mistake. I’d know if he was dead. I’d know.’ Her voice was firm, filled with denial.

Tessa straightened up, uncrossing her legs and shunting herself along the sofa so she could put an arm round her friend. ‘It can’t be Mitja. It just can’t. How did this man die? Was it a fall?’

‘Nothing so straightforward, I’m afraid. He was murdered.’

I
t was as if Karen’s words made sense of an absurdity. Murder was plausible to Maggie Blake in a way that simple death had not been. Tears spilled from her eyes and she began to moan, low and insistent, as if a terrible pain was twisting inside her. Karen, who had broken this news more than her fair share of times because of her gender, held back both sympathy and inquiry. She knew it was always better to let the first storm pass.

Tessa meanwhile attempted to pull herself together. ‘He can’t be dead. That’s not possible. If he’s dead, then who —’

‘Don’t you dare,’ Maggie exploded, rounding on her. For a moment, Karen thought she was going to slap her friend. ‘I told you. I said he could never —’

Tessa grabbed her arm. ‘Not now. We’ll do our grieving in private.’ She stressed the last two words, giving Karen a swift sideways look.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Karen said.

Maggie ran her hands up the sides of her head, gripping her hair in bunches, as if trying to tear it out by the roots. ‘Are you sure it’s him?’

‘We can’t be a hundred per cent sure at this point,’ Karen said. ‘He had no ID on him. But he was found with a hotel key-card that had the imprint of some debit-card details on the magnetic strip. When we checked that out, it corresponded to your joint account. Given that General Petrovic hasn’t used the account for eight years, and now you’re telling me you haven’t seen him or heard from him in all that time… I’m sorry, but it’s hard to think of another explanation.’

‘Unless he killed the skeleton then went on the run,’ Jason said. ‘With him being a soldier and all, maybe that’s how it went? I mean, anybody could have his hotel key-card, right? He might even have left it himself to confuse things.’

Karen looked at him in disbelief. Sometimes she wondered how Jason had lived this long. Did he seriously think that Maggie Blake would feel better about being deserted by a murderer rather than losing her lover to a killer?

‘He’s got a point,’ Tessa said. ‘And Mitja might not have pulled the trigger – he might simply have been there when it happened. But after what he’d been through, there are good reasons why he might have chosen to disappear. If it was his word against a Brit, for example. Or if he was afraid the killer might come after him. Really, Chief Inspector, what you have is very circumstantial. Very thin.’

Maggie slumped against the arm of the sofa. ‘I don’t understand. Is it him or is it not? That’s all that matters.’

‘And that’s what we need to establish,’ Karen said. ‘I’m really sorry, Professor Blake. I think you have to prepare yourself for the worst, but we do need to make sure we’ve made a correct identification. How old was General Petrovic when he left?’

Maggie looked baffled. ‘He was forty-seven on the seventeenth of August. Just a few weeks before he left. Why? What does that prove?’

‘The remains we found have been aged by our forensic team. They put him between forty-four and forty-seven.’

‘But that’s meaningless. That doesn’t narrow anything down.’ Maggie’s words were defiant but her eyes told a different story.

Karen didn’t need to point out that it failed to exclude the general from the reckoning. ‘Can you tell me, had he ever broken any bones that you know about?’

Maggie frowned. ‘Not when we were together.’

‘He never mentioned any accidents from before?’ You wouldn’t necessarily tell your partner every detail of your medical past. But River had said it would have been a bad break. An interruption to the dead man’s life, presumably.

‘He had a scar on his left thigh. He said it was from an accident when he was a student. Some idiot in a delivery van knocked him off his bike. I think he might have broken his leg, but I don’t remember the details. Is it important?’ Maggie looked close to tears again.

‘That might be a useful detail. We do know our victim broke his left femur at some point. It doesn’t prove anything, obviously, but it does seem to tie in with what you remember.’

‘What about DNA? Isn’t that the gold standard of ID these days?’ Tessa leaned forward, fixing Karen with her eyes.

‘We have managed to extract DNA from the remains, but as yet we’ve nothing to compare it to. Do you have contact details for any members of General Petrovic’s family?’

Maggie shook her head slowly. ‘I never met them. So many people lost track of their families during the Balkan wars. People died. People ran to distant relatives in other countries. People were displaced. All I know is that he was an only child. I don’t even know the name of his village.’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘It never seemed important,’ she mumbled through her fingers. ‘We were about the future, not the past. That’s what he always said.’

There was an awkward silence, broken only by Maggie blowing her nose. Tessa reached for her hand and squeezed it tight. Then Jason spoke again. ‘What about next of kin? Did he not have to provide the name of a next of kin for official documents and that?’

Maggie gave Tessa a sidelong glance. ‘I was his next of kin.’

‘Not officially, though,’ Tessa said.

‘Yes, officially. I’m sorry, Tess. I know I should have told you, but we didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. It just made it easier for him to stay.’

Tessa stiffened, her face frozen. ‘You married him? When?’

‘A few weeks after he came over for good. Do you remember, we rented a cottage in the west of Ireland? We did it then. Somebody he knew in the UN sorted out the paperwork.’ She sniffed and fiddled with a heavy silver ring on the third finger of her right hand.

‘Bloody hell, Maggie. Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we had no secrets.’

‘We didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t want to make a big fuss. We wanted something that was ours, that’s all.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose and shivered. ‘Right now, even that feels like a betrayal. I never got to grieve properly when he went. I had to act like, you know, shit happens. Men leave. But it wasn’t just a casual thing. He was my husband. We didn’t do it lightly, but when he disappeared, I thought he’d torn up all those vows we made, and that really hurt.’

Tessa put her arms around Maggie again and held her close. ‘You poor darling.’ She stroked her hair, her face all concern and sorrow.

Everybody has secrets, Karen thought. Secrets and lies. But she reminded herself that she had a job to do. ‘We still need to find a way to establish a positive ID,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in speculating what happened on that roof until we know for sure whether we’re looking at General Petrovic or somebody else entirely. And if we’ve not got access to a blood relative, we’re going to have to come at this from a different angle. Do you still have anything belonging to the general that might have retained his DNA. A hairbrush? A toothbrush? Something like that?’

Maggie frowned. ‘He never used a hairbrush. He just ran his fingers through his hair.’ A hint of a smile as a memory ghosted across her mind. ‘I threw away his head from the electric toothbrush after a couple of years – it was dusty and disgusting. I thought when he came back, I’d just give him another one.’

‘Makes sense,’ Karen said. ‘Anything else of his that you’ve still got? Any clothes he’d actually worn, that sort of thing?’

She thought for a long moment then got unsteadily to her feet. ‘His electric razor. It’s in the bathroom drawer, right where he left it. I’ve never cleaned it or anything.’ She started for the door.

‘Jason,’ Karen said. ‘Bag and tag, please.’

He got to his feet and set off in Maggie’s wake, patting his pockets for an evidence bag. Tessa looked Karen straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re pretty sure it’s him, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve been in this job a long time and, in my experience, the simplest explanation almost always turns out to be the right one. DC Murray, he still gets carried away with romantic notions about people who run away from their lives so they don’t get the blame for something they didn’t do. People do run, it’s true. But we’re social creatures. For most of us, it’s unsustainable to butt out of the lives of our nearest and dearest and never go back. We see it all the time in witness protection. They just have to see their old gran on her eightieth birthday. Or their beloved football team in the cup final. Or their granddaughter’s first communion. Bear in mind, these are people that can pretty much guarantee that resurfacing anywhere near their old life is going to have serious consequences. But still they do it. Now, from what you’ve both told us about their relationship, I can’t see Dimitar Petrovic abandoning the woman he loves without so much as a Christmas card to say he’s all right.’

Tessa shrugged one shoulder. ‘He walked away from his life in Croatia – whatever that was before he met Maggie. I was around a lot of the time when the fighting was still going on. I met plenty of his fellow soldiers, guys he was friendly with. But I never met anybody from his life before Dubrovnik. It was as if he’d cut himself loose from his past so he could be with Maggie. If he could do that once, he could do it again, surely?’

‘I don’t know. I never met the man. But there’s no point in speculation. If we can get a sample of his DNA, we’ll have the answer in a day or so.’ Karen gave her an assessing look. ‘What were you going to say when Maggie cut you off?’

Tessa blinked slowly. ‘How strange is that? I really can’t recall. You know how it is, the shock provokes strange outbursts. And then you forget as quickly as you started to speak what it was you were going to say.’ She gave a lazy smile. ‘All I was thinking about was how I have to be there for Maggie.’

Aye, right.
She was a good liar, Karen thought. But a liar nonetheless. Whatever she was hiding might have nothing to do with Dimitar Petrovic’s death. And it might have everything to do with it. Sooner or later, she’d find a way to dig it out. ‘We’re going to have to go back through his movements around the time he disappeared,’ she said.

‘Good luck with that one, officer. Can you remember what you were doing on a particular night eight years ago?’ Tessa sounded remarkably amused for a woman who’d just learned one of her best friends was dead. Maybe she hadn’t been as fond of General Petrovic as she made out. Or maybe she’d been too fond. The kind of fond where you have to cover up.

‘I’ve been in cold cases quite a while now. We’ve developed techniques for helping people to remember,’ Karen said. ‘Jogging their memories with what was in the headlines back then. What was in the charts. What was on the telly. You’d be amazed what surfaces. We’ll obviously be asking you, since you knew him.’

Before Tessa could reply, Jason and Maggie returned. He held up a sealed plastic bag with details of the shaver inside scribbled on it. ‘Got it, boss.’

‘Thanks. There’s one more thing, Professor. We don’t actually know what General Petrovic looked like. I wonder, could you let us have a photograph of him? It might be helpful when we’re interviewing potential witnesses.’

Maggie’s hand flew to her mouth. Before she could respond, Tessa said, ‘Why don’t I email you a selection of photographs? I can do that when I get home.’

Karen stood up. ‘That would be perfect, thank you. We’ll be back in touch as soon as we have a result one way or another. In the meantime, Professor, it’d be helpful if you could start making some notes about the last week or so before General Petrovic went missing. We’ll be taking a full statement from you in due course, but if you write down what you can remember, it’ll make things easier when we do that.’ She fished a business card out of her jacket pocket. ‘This is me. Call me any time if you come up with anything that might help us figure out what happened on that rooftop. And again, I’m very sorry to be the bearer of bad news.’

Maggie looked ten years older than she had when Karen had pounced on her in the porters’ lodge. She sighed heavily. ‘People say it’s better to know, don’t they? So you can have closure?’

Karen nodded. ‘I believe so.’

Maggie’s expression was scornful. ‘That’s bollocks. Knowledge destroys hope. It’s hope that’s been keeping me going for the last eight years. How am I going to get through the days now?’