The Skeleton Road (17 page)

M
acanespie and Proctor toiled up the hill to their hotel. Edinburgh was full of unexpected hills, leaving Macanespie breathless and bad-tempered. ‘What the fuck do we do now?’ he demanded for the third time since they’d left Karen Pirie.

The answer was the same. ‘It’s Cagney’s problem, not ours.’

It wasn’t a helpful response. Macanespie was already pretty sure that Wilson Cagney was a man accomplished in always taking the credit and never accepting the blame. Somehow, Petrovic dead was going to end up on their plate just as surely as he had while still putatively alive. And right now, Proctor was about as helpful as a concrete lifebelt.

Back at the hotel, they huddled round Proctor’s laptop and Skyped their boss. Cagney seemed flustered, but Macanespie put that down to being dragged out of a meeting with people who could do his career more favours than a pair of down-table lawyers. ‘So what’s the story?’ Cagney leaned towards the camera, looming large and ill-shaped in the middle of the screen. ‘Why are the Scottish police interested in our man?’

‘Because they’ve found what they think is his corpse,’ Macanespie said.

Momentarily, Cagney’s eyes widened and his face relaxed. ‘Extraordinary. Where?’

‘Where’s not the point. What affects us is the “when”.’

Cagney frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What they found is a skeleton,’ Proctor said wearily. ‘On an Edinburgh rooftop. They reckon he’s been dead for eight years. He didn’t disappear to become an avenger. He disappeared because he was murdered.’

‘Murdered? Are they sure about that? If it’s a skeleton, how can they be so certain?’ Now Cagney looked pissed off.

‘The bullet wound to the head is a bit of a giveaway,’ Macanespie said.

‘Which doesn’t fit the MO of the assassinations. Our string of victims weren’t lured to their deaths, they were killed during routine stuff they did every day. And Petrovic was a Croat, not a Serb,’ Proctor added.

Cagney sat back, his brow furled in thought. ‘So somebody killed Petrovic before the other killings started, which means his death might have nothing to do with theirs. It might be nothing more than a bizarre coincidence.’

‘There’s an outside chance that the skeleton isn’t his. They’re waiting for DNA,’ Macanespie added.

Cagney sat up straight, flicking imaginary fluff from his lapel. ‘In a way, though, it’s academic. We should leave the Scots to worry about Petrovic. He’s no longer our concern. All this means is that we were wrong about the prime suspect.’ A tight grim smile compressed his lips. ‘Your job just got a little bit harder.’

‘Where are we supposed to start looking now?’ Proctor sounded plaintive. It was, Macanespie thought, a fatal show of weakness to a man like Cagney.

‘Do I have to spell everything out to you? There are still two avenues of investigation. The first one is internal. You have to work out where the leak is. Someone had sufficient access to all those investigations to finger the victims. Find the data trail and see where it leads. There can’t be that many people who have that level of clearance.’

‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Macanespie said. ‘Most of the lawyers who work at Scheveningen would be privy to what moves were being planned next. If you’re trusted enough to be part of the process, you have access to pretty much all of it.’

‘So make a list. And work your way through it.’

Proctor started to speak but Cagney cut across him. ‘And then there’s the external investigation. You need to go back and talk to the local police who dealt with the murders on the ground. There will be CCTV coverage on some of the cases, surely. Did nobody sit on the local cops at the time?’

‘Nobody was very bothered at the time.’ Macanespie spoke clearly and firmly. ‘The human rights brigade made all the right shocked and horrified noises, but you could tell they weren’t exactly crying themselves to sleep over it. The animals this guy was targeting, nobody doubted they were guilty. Not for a minute. There were a few questions over the strength of the prosecution material. Some doubts that it might not be quite rigorous enough for the court. But the investigators, they were rock-solid certain. So when those bastards turned up dead, the general feeling was, good riddance to bad rubbish.’

Cagney muttered something under his breath. ‘And this was seen as the delivery of justice, was it?’

‘The court did its best. It’s still doing its best. But it’s hamstrung by procedure on occasion,’ Proctor said wearily. ‘You ask the people on the ground and they’ll tell you, too many of these bastards have walked free. Too many war criminals never got charged in the first place. Some of their victims have to live day to day walking the same streets as the men who butchered their husbands or raped their daughters. You’ll not find many who’ll say that what they got was justice.’

Cagney sighed. ‘Be that as it may. The ending of the tribunal marks a new start for the Balkans. It’s time to draw a line and move forward. As I said before, these killings have to stop and we have to be seen to be dealing with those who have apparently meted out rough justice with impunity. I want this boil lanced. So you’d better get back to Holland and draw up a plan of action.’

Cagney’s image froze for a moment before disappearing. The call was over.

Macanespie looked at Proctor and gave a resigned shrug. ‘Looks like we’re fucked.’

Karen had never had an entirely easy relationship with her senior officers, even before she had been responsible for one of them serving life for murder. She’d been happy to leave her old boss from Fife behind when she’d been chosen to head up the Historic Cases Unit. But within weeks, her new boss had been felled by a heart attack and his shoes filled by the man she thought she’d left behind. Assistant Chief Constable Simon Lees, known without affection as the Macaroon, believed that if only his officers would simply obey the rules, there would be far fewer problems in his life. That was a conviction that had set him on a collision course with Karen from Day One.

It wasn’t that she’d set out to annoy him. When he’d arrived from Glasgow apparently believing he’d been sent as a punishment to live and work among a people barely one generation away from living in caves, she had been far from the only one he had patronised and dismissed. It had acted as a goad to a bull. Karen knew how good her colleagues were. Just because they weren’t flash city blowhards didn’t mean they weren’t on top of their jobs. So when it came to knocking Simon Lees off his high horse she’d been happy to oblige. She’d found interesting ways to undermine him, not least by coming up with a nickname that tied him to an item of confectionary whose main claim to fame was a historic series of adverts that would be viewed now as eyewateringly racist.

He’d tried to extract payback by sidelining her. But her reputation for intelligent and effective work in the Fife Cold Case Unit had spread beyond the walls of force HQ and she’d been picked out to lead a high-profile investigation whose success had caught the imagination of the public. Karen, a woman with no pretensions to being a police poster girl, found herself a media darling. Simon Lees had fumed for weeks, terrorising his wife and kids with the bad temper he couldn’t take out on Karen.

Finding her under his command again was the least appealing aspect of his new posting. But this time he was determined she wouldn’t get the better of him. He’d keep her on a tight rein, making sure she had just enough rope to hang herself but not so much that she could stray from his oversight. At least once a week, he randomly summoned her to his office to demand a full briefing on her current cases.

That afternoon, she’d wandered in half an hour after he’d sent for her. As usual, her thick mop of dark hair looked as if she’d shared a stylist with Dennis the Menace. Her make-up was minimal, her suit slightly rumpled, the trousers a shade too tight over the generous hips. He’d always assumed she was a lesbian, which was absolutely fine in today’s police service, but he’d recently discovered she was living with her old sergeant, Phil Parhatka. Probably had had to order him into bed, Lees thought sourly.

‘I expected you earlier,’ he said, straightening the papers on his desk.

‘I was doing some research and I lost track of the time.’ She gave an indifferent shrug. ‘You know how it is when something interesting turns up.’ She perched on the edge of an elegant sideboard he’d brought from his grandmother’s house. His secretary kept it buffed to within an inch of its life. Lees felt sure Pirie knew that.

‘And what would that be, exactly? That “something interesting”?’ He made the quotation marks sign with his fingers.

‘The Balkan conflicts at the end of the last century,’ she said, with aplomb. ‘Croatia. Bosnia. Kosovo.’

‘What on earth has that to do with us? Don’t you have enough work to do?’

‘This is work. We’ve got a skeleton on the roof of the John Drummond School. Dr Wilde – you remember Dr Wilde?’

Lees tried not to shudder. Another one of those bloody annoying women. She’d turned up in muddy construction boots and a waxed jacket that looked as if it had small animals lodging in its pockets, and helped Karen Pirie ride roughshod over proper procedure. Between the pair of them, they’d made his life far more complicated than it needed to be. It didn’t improve matters that Pirie had managed to solve the case on an unbelievably tight budget; until that pair had stuck their noses in, there hadn’t been a case to solve. ‘I remember,’ he said, his tone admonitory.

‘She says he’s been there for between five and ten years. We’ve got other forensics that indicate he’s a retired Croatian general who was a NATO security advisor in Bosnia and a UN monitor in Kosovo. Went off the grid eight years ago.’

‘What the hell’s he doing on a roof in Edinburgh?’ Lees couldn’t help feeling outraged. Why would someone come all the way from Croatia to get murdered in Edinburgh?

‘Not sure yet. He was living in Oxford when he went missing. With a geography professor. She thought he’d buggered off to Croatia to the family she never knew he had.’

‘All the same, why Edinburgh?’

‘We think he was into buildering. That maybe he came up to Edinburgh specifically to climb the John Drummond.’

‘Climb the John Drummond? It’s not a bloody mountain, Chief Inspector. What do you mean, climb the John Drummond?’

Karen raised her eyebrows. ‘Buildering, like I said. Free climbing. Up the outside of challenging buildings like the John Drummond.’

‘What? You mean, they treat buildings like a giant climbing frame?’ Lees looked as if he suspected her of making it up as she went along.

‘That’s about the size of it.’ Before she could say more, her phone rang. As if she’d never heard him insist that phones were switched off in his presence, she answered it, saying, ‘Gotta take this one.’ She pushed off the sideboard and turned her back to him. ‘You got something for me?’ A long pause. ‘And there’s no room for doubt?’ Another pause. ‘Brilliant. Thanks for that. I’ll call you later.’ She pocketed her phone and swivelled to face Lees. ‘That’s confirmation, sir. The skeleton on the roof is definitely General Dimitar Petrovic. Did I mention he’s got a bullet hole in the middle of his skull?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘So that makes him mine. I need to go and break the news to his bidie-in. Well, wife, actually. She married him. Let’s just hope for her sake he didn’t already have a wife back in Croatia.’ She half-turned towards the door. ‘Obviously I might have to go to Croatia. That’s likely where his enemies’ll be.’

‘Croatia? How can we afford that?’

‘If I have to go, I’ll get a cheap flight. I don’t think Jason has to come too. But in the meantime, I need to find me an expert on the Balkans. That’ll be London, I expect.’ She held up a hand to still the protest he hadn’t uttered yet. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait till the cheap tickets come on stream.’

And she was gone, before he could say anything more, leaving him feeling frustrated and outwitted. He was supposed to be her boss. He was supposed to command respect. How could she keep on getting the better of him? Sooner or later, he was going to have to show her who was boss.

He’d look forward to that.

T
essa didn’t recognise the number but she took the call anyway. You never knew when someone would turn up out of nowhere with key information that could lift the lid on something that some government somewhere wanted to stay well hidden. The voice, however, was not unfamiliar. She recognised Karen Pirie right away. ‘Have you any news?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid so. We’ve got the DNA results back and there’s no doubt that the man on the John Drummond School roof is General Petrovic. I’m sorry. I know you were close.’

‘Oh, God.’ Tessa’s voice was a groan.

‘I’d rather have told Professor Blake face to face, obviously. But I thought it would be better coming from you? If you don’t want to be the one to break the news, I’m perfectly willing to phone her myself, but maybe you could be with her? Nobody should be alone for news like this.’

‘Of course I’ll tell her.’ Tessa wasn’t sure how she felt. She’d been expecting this news ever since she’d heard what Karen had to say, but having it confirmed was a different matter. In her heart, she’d known that Mitja would turn up at some point. What she hadn’t foreseen was that his return would be heralded by an overweight Scotswoman with bad hair and an attitude. Mitja would have expected better.

‘We’ll need a statement from her in due course, but we can have that taken by local Thames Valley officers. If there’s anything she wants to know, she can call me any time.’

‘Will there be a murder investigation? Will you be in charge of that?’

‘Yes. But because it’s a historic case and the evidence trail is limited, it will be on a smaller scale. Which doesn’t mean we won’t pursue every lead and follow every avenue. Speaking of that, I need to ask you something that’s going to seem really inappropriate right now.’

Tessa made a wry noise. ‘You want to know if I was sleeping with him? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’ She could hear Karen breathing on the other end of the phone and imagined her pulling faces in her awkwardness.

‘And were you?’

Tessa gave a low laugh from the back of her throat. ‘You couldn’t be more off the mark, Chief Inspector. Mitja Petrovic was the opposite of attractive to me. Look, I’m a lesbian. You can ask anybody who knows me. It’s not a secret. I had no sexual interest in him whatsoever. I liked him a lot, and the fact that he made my friend happy gave him a shedload of Brownie points in my eyes. But me and Mitja? That was never going to happen.’

‘Fair enough. But I had to ask. You’re a lawyer, you appreciate that.’

‘I’m not offended. And thanks for not asking me in front of Maggie. But I’ll tell you one thing for nothing. Mitja didn’t run away because he was shagging somebody else. He fell for her like a ton of bricks all those years ago in Dubrovnik and he was as much in love with her when he disappeared. I know people say that all the time after somebody walks out, but he really was devoted. That’s why I never bought into Maggie’s notion that he’d upped sticks and abandoned her to go back to the life he left behind him.’

‘So what did you think had happened?’

Tessa had lain awake into the small hours debating what to say when this inevitable question arose. Should she admit to the dark theories she’d aired with Maggie? Or, since they’d been blown out of the water, should she just avoid muddying the waters? At last, she’d made her decision. ‘I didn’t know what to think. At first I thought he might have been pressed back into service, carrying out undercover intelligence work. But when so much time went by… Well, I assumed that whatever he’d been recalled for had gone horribly wrong. That he was either dead or a prisoner in some hell-hole jail.’

‘But you’re a human rights lawyer, right? Have you not got contacts that know about stuff like that?’

‘What? Who’s banged up in the Taliban’s jail? Or doing solitary in some Gulf state without access to counsel? There are limits to my reach, Chief Inspector. I’m mostly just a humble part of the international court machinery. Sure, I’ve put feelers out whenever I had the chance. Obviously, I drew a blank every time. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t right. I kept on asking because I didn’t know he was lying dead on a rooftop in Edinburgh.’ Tessa stared bleakly out of her office window, seeing nothing of the street below or the houses opposite.

‘Did you ever raise your theory with Professor Blake?’

‘Of course I did. And she didn’t buy it. She was determined to believe he’d gone home. Turns out we were both wrong. And now, if there’s nothing else you have to ask me, I’m going to go and pour myself a stiff drink and tell my best friend her husband’s never coming home.’

Maggie always liked to show her DPhil students to the door after their supervisions. It was the kind of thing you did with friends; she thought it made the encounter seem less formal. When she opened the door to usher out the bright Canadian who was writing about the post-mall geography of shopping, she wasn’t expecting to find Tessa sitting in the corridor outside her rooms. But she knew at once that the news would not be good.

Maggie was oblivious to the final remarks of her student as he reiterated his bullet points for the next chapter. She only had eyes for Tessa, getting to her feet, still enviably lithe and graceful in spite of the passage of years. Silent, Maggie stepped back and gestured to her friend to enter. She closed the door with infinite care, as if preventing it from making a noise would somehow ward off bad news. Then she leaned against it, waiting.

Tessa turned to face her, sombre and drawn. ‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘No room for doubt.’

Maggie closed her eyes and clenched her fists. It didn’t matter how much you anticipated something like this, you could never be prepared. She felt suddenly cold, as if she’d walked into an unexpected blast of chilly air-conditioning. A shudder ran through her, snapping her back into the moment. She opened her eyes and saw Tessa, lips parted, eyes troubled, arms held out from her sides as if on the verge of stepping forward to hug Maggie but unsure whether that was what was wanted.

So Maggie pushed off from the door and closed the distance between them, allowing Tessa to wrap her in her arms. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Tessa said. ‘Sorry for everything. All the things I thought, all the things I said that hurt you so much. I’m sorry.’

‘I know,’ Maggie mumbled. ‘I know.’

They stood in each other’s arms and Maggie had no sense of how much time had gone by. Dimly she thought she ought to be crying or screaming or rending her garments in some Biblical excess of grief. But all she felt was that cold numbness cutting her off from the mechanics of grief. At length, Tessa said, ‘Can I get you a drink?’

Maggie drew away from her and sighed. ‘I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how I feel. I always believed he’d walk through that door one day.’

‘Maybe if you’d told me you’d married him, I wouldn’t have been so sceptical.’ Tessa walked over to the window and gazed across the rooftops.

‘Should I have told you before or after I slept with you?’ Maggie’s voice was harsh, like a slap.

‘Oh Christ, that’s not fair,’ Tessa protested. She swung back to face her friend. ‘We took comfort in each other. That shouldn’t be an occasion of guilt. You were in so much pain, Maggie. And I missed him too. We gave each other love and support when we needed it.’

Maggie made a dismissive sound. ‘And then I hurt you all over again when I didn’t need it any more.’

Tessa shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now. What matters is we still have each other.’

‘But we don’t have Mitja.’ Maggie’s voice sounded almost as bleak as she felt. ‘I told you he wasn’t a killer. So many times, I told you he didn’t have it in him.’

Tessa’s face twisted in a wry grimace. ‘At the time, it made sense to me in the same way that it made sense to you to believe that he’d gone back to some mystery family like something out of
The Railway Children.
’

Maggie sighed. ‘I wish he had. I wish he was alive, even if it meant I couldn’t have him. All those years, lying dead in a strange place when he should have been with people who loved him.’ She made a choking sound. ‘I’d give anything for you to have been right, that all this time he’d been going round killing those evil bastards who destroyed his country. Just as long as he was in the world. Feeling the sun and the wind and the rain. He was always so alive, Tess. Even when things were hard, he had that spirit, that energy that made everything possible.’

‘I know. I can’t take it in.’

‘Who would kill him, Tess?’

‘Somebody from his past. He made plenty of enemies during the wars.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘No, that makes no sense. If it was somebody from his past they wouldn’t do it like that. He knew his enemies. They’d never get close enough to him to do it like that. Who would climb a building with him and then shoot him in the head? If you wanted to kill him, why not just walk up to him in the street and shoot him? Why go all the way to a strange city, do something as intimate as a free climb together and then shoot him?’

‘So you think it must have been somebody he trusted? Somebody from home?’

‘Nothing else makes sense. You have to trust somebody to go free climbing with them, don’t you?’

‘Yes, you do.’ Tessa frowned. ‘If it was somebody from the Balkans, the spooks should know they were in the country. I could ask Theo Proctor – you remember, the one who called me the other day when they were still treating Mitja like a suspect? He might be able to take a look and see whether there’s any record of who was around that weekend from the Balkans.’

‘Could you? Do you think they’d tell you?’

Tessa shrugged. ‘I can try. We’re all supposed to be on the same team.’

A tiny spark of hope ignited in Maggie’s eyes. ‘I have to know, Tess. I have to know who did this to him.’

‘I know.’ Tessa headed towards the kitchen. ‘I need a drink,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Do you want one?’

‘Lagavulin,’ Maggie said. ‘I want something that tastes like medicine. I want something that’ll make me better.’ All at once, her legs felt too weak to hold her and she staggered to her familiar sofa. When Tessa came back with the drinks, she settled beside her friend, their bodies touching in a complicit moment of shared pain.

‘Maybe we’ll never know the answer,’ Tessa said. ‘Maybe there’s no point in hoping.’

Maggie took a belt of whisky and winced as the heavy peat flavour hit her tastebuds. ‘Somebody killed him. Somebody he trusted. They must have had a reason. I’m not giving up on Mitja. I’m going to find out who did this, Tess. I’m going to find out who took his life from him.’