The Skeleton Road (19 page)

K
aren loved the kitchen in Phil’s house, but the wifi signal wasn’t powerful enough in there to carry a FaceTime call. So she’d had to set herself up in what they scornfully called ‘the library’. Shelves of books – some fake, concealing a plasma TV – overstuffed club chairs, a leather-topped desk and a tartan carpet combined to make Karen feel she’d stumbled into the badly dressed set for some stereotyped sitcom. She adjusted the lighting so the camera wouldn’t pick up background detail, set the system to record and called Adam Turner’s number.

The ringtone warbled and she thanked her lucky stars again that it had been so easy to track down the journalist. By happy chance, when she’d googled him she’d found a piece he’d filed only a couple of days previously in the
Telegraph.
A quick call to the paper’s staffer in Edinburgh had produced a contact number and email address and the rest had been amazingly easy. She’d texted him, he’d replied and they’d set up the call.

And now her own image on the screen was dissolving and morphing into a man’s face in the bottom half of the screen, a pock-marked yellow wall behind him. His skin had a jaundiced tint that might have had something to do with the decor or the climate. Or possibly, with him being a journalist, the drink. His eyes were indistinct behind large glasses with fashionable heavy black rims. His untidy brown hair was thinning; under the bright lights of his hotel room, Karen could see pink scalp gleaming through. She hoped she didn’t look as unappealing, though you could never be sure with digital communications. ‘Hi, Adam. This is Karen Pirie from Police Scotland,’ she said, producing her best reassuring smile.

‘Hello, Karen. Thanks for accommodating my schedule.’ He had a typical broadcaster’s voice – rich, dark and warm, with the faintest trace of a northern accent. All the better for delivering horrors into people’s living rooms. He seemed alert and eager, which was a welcome plus in Karen’s world.

‘No, I appreciate you taking the time out to talk to me.’

‘You’re welcome. I’m always happy to take a walk down memory lane. Even when the memories are as horrific as the Balkans. You wanted to talk about my time in the Balkans? Specifically, about Dimitar Petrovic? Is that right?’

‘Spot on.’

He chuckled. ‘That’s a long time and a lot of miles ago. I thought everyone had forgotten the Balkans. There’s nothing grabs the headlines less than last year’s war. So what’s your interest? What’s General Petrovic been up to?’

‘He’s not been up to anything for a while. He’s been dead for the past eight years.’

Turner’s eyebrows rose. ‘Really? I didn’t know. The last I heard he was living the quiet life in Oxford. But that must be, what? Nine, ten years ago. Why are you so interested in a man who’s been dead for eight years?’

‘Because we’ve only just found his remains.’

‘I don’t understand. Surely somebody must have noticed he wasn’t around? Didn’t – what’s her name? Moira? Maggie? Something like that – didn’t she report him missing? Or is she the prime suspect?’

‘She thought he’d left her and returned to Croatia. He was a grown man, there were no suspicious circumstances other than his absence. So there was no reason why the police would take an interest. And no, Professor Blake is not the prime suspect,’ she added drily, knowing that without that denial Maggie would remain firmly in the media’s frame of interest. ‘Apart from anything else, I haven’t said anything that would indicate the potential existence of any suspect.’

‘Come on, Chief Inspector. You and I both know we wouldn’t be having this conversation unless there were suspicious circumstances. So where did he turn up? And why did it take so long? I mean, I know disposing of a body’s the hardest part of committing a murder, but eight years is a long time.’

‘His skeleton was found on the roof of a building that was about to be demolished.’

‘Wow.’ Turner looked impressed. ‘And nobody noticed there was a dead body on the roof? That’s weird.’

‘Not really. It was hidden from sight. And the building’s been empty for the best part of twenty years, so there was no reason for anybody to be poking around up there.’

‘Wow. And this was where? London? No, wait, you’re Police Scotland. So, Scotland somewhere?’

‘Edinburgh.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser. What was he doing in Edinburgh?’

‘Apparently his hobby was a thing called “buildering”. Where you free climb the outside of buildings. For fun.’ Karen still couldn’t keep the disbelief from her voice. Adam Turner’s face froze, his mouth open. ‘Oh God,’ she groaned. ‘Here we bloody go.’ She drummed her fingers on the desktop till the blur resolved itself and they re-established a connection.

‘So he climbed this building and got killed?’

‘That’s what we’re surmising.’

‘And it’s a skeleton. I’m guessing he either had his head caved in or he was shot. Anything else would be hard to categorise as murder. How am I doing?’

She had to smile. ‘Right on the money. A bullet wound to the head, to be precise.’

‘And you think whoever killed him did it because of what he did during the various wars in the nineties?’

Give a little to get a lot
. She hoped. ‘He was leading an apparently blameless life in Oxford. It seems to me the chances are that whatever happened on that roof was a result of his past life, not his present one. And we have reason to believe he did his buildering with someone he’d known back then.’

Turner chuckled. ‘I love that police speak. “Reason to believe”. And I’m guessing you’re reluctant to talk to the powers that be about General Petrovic’s war because they’ll spin you a line composed largely of bullshit?’ He froze again, his face blurring to resemble a cookie decorated by a toddler. So much for modern technology replacing the face-to-face. Karen wouldn’t swap the interview room and the whites of their eyes for a roomful of iPads. It did have its uses, especially when the witness was on the other side of the world. But it was too easy to hide behind the technology. She knew from her own experience that if you wanted to freeze the screen to earn yourself some breathing space, all you had to do was open up more apps or programs that would interfere with your FaceTime demands for bandwidth. Then you could compose yourself and figure out your answer. She didn’t think that’s what Adam Turner was doing here, but she was glad of a moment to come up with an appropriate answer.

The screen resolved itself and Turner reappeared in sharper definition. ‘Did you hear me?’

‘The last I heard was “bullshit”.’

‘What I said after that was that one of the reasons our lot are reluctant to talk about the Balkans is that it’s hard to take a black-and-white approach. The Serbs think they get the blame for everything – and there’s good reason for that because they mostly started it and they committed the worst atrocities. But nobody has clean hands in those conflicts. Not the Croats, not the Albanians, nobody. They were all capable of appalling things, given half a chance. But the war crimes tribunal focused almost exclusively on the Serbs. So back home, where there’s not much of a free press, it’s seen totally as a biased tool of NATO and the West, and as a result it hasn’t provided any kind of focus for reconciliation. Just more resentment. So our lot want to stay well clear of the aftermath. You made the right choice, coming to me rather than the military.’

Nothing like vanity to make a witness open up. And nothing like a bit of flattery to play into that.
‘Believe me, I know that. Soon as I dipped into your book, I knew you were the man I needed to talk to. So, what can you tell me about General Petrovic?’

‘A very clever boy. He came from nowhere and shot up the ranks at record speed. When Yugoslavia broke up, he was one of the first that we cherry-picked to bring over here and train in our ways and means. He was definitely a rising star when the war started.’

‘When you say he came from nowhere, what do you mean?’

‘He wasn’t one of the ruling elite. He was basically a farm boy. He came from one of those half-a-horse villages up in the hills near the Serbian border. But he got picked up by a school teacher who knew a bright boy when he saw one.’

‘Do you know the name of the village?

‘Now you’re asking. The nearest town was Lipovac, I seem to remember. What was the name…?’ He closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips to his forehead. ‘Padrovac. Podruvec. Podruvci… I think it was Podruvec,’ he said triumphantly, straightening up and looking pleased with himself. ‘I’ve never been there, that’s why I don’t remember so well.’

‘Brilliant. So he came from this wee village and went into the Yugoslavian Army?’

‘That’s right. The way I heard it, he aced every course they sent him on, so they shunted him into intelligence. Then when the end of the empire struck, he signed on with the Croatian Army. I suspect he never entirely fitted in with the other lot, him being a Croat. Tainted by the Second World War, you see.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean. You’re going to have to treat me like an idiot on this one.’ Karen gave a shame-faced smile. This time, it wasn’t flattery but a genuine lack of knowledge. She’d given up History before they made it to the Second World War. She was great on the medieval kings of Scotland, but anything more modern was sketchy.

‘Right. Well, basically, the Balkans has been conflict central since time immemorial. And grudges go back a long way. So when the Nazis piled into the area, the Croats saw this as their chance to stick it to the Serbs. They sided with the Germans and got stuck into their own personal genocide. About half a million Serbs were executed, quarter of a million were expelled from their own country and another quarter of a million or so were forcibly converted to Christianity.’

‘Jesus. I had no idea it was that bad.’

‘So the Serbs feel they had a few scores to settle. All the years Tito held the reins, they nursed their grievances, then when the country fell apart they seized their chance. There’s no denying the horror of the atrocities they inflicted, but they think they had just cause. That’s rubbish, of course. All you get from an eye for an eye is a lot of people stumbling around in the dark. And there’s no virtue in making yourself as repulsive as your enemy.’

‘Aye, right. But I can see how you’d get there. And I see how Petrovic would have felt more at home in the Croatian Army. How did you come to meet him?’

‘It was just after the siege of Dubrovnik was lifted. I was one of the first journalists in the city once the Sarajevo Accord was in place. Petrovic had been pinned down in the city during the siege, and I interviewed him for a piece for the
New York Times
about his experiences. I was impressed. Clever came off him like a smell. A couple of months later, he got promoted to general. Round about the Miljevci Plateau battles, I seem to recall. We ran into each other on a regular basis after that. The Croatians were trying to keep everybody sweet, to play the good guys, so they lent him out to NATO and the UN. But I don’t think he ever forgot where his true allegiance lay.’

Karen scribbled some notes as he spoke, wondering where this was going to take her. ‘Would you say he had enemies? Personally, I mean. Not just guys on the other side who hated him in principle.’

Turner lit up a cigarette while he thought. He took a deep drag and frowned. ‘Not that I ever heard. But then, I wasn’t looking. If you want to get an answer to that question, you’d have to talk to people in Croatia who knew him back then.’

‘You say both sides were each as bad as the other. Was he ever involved in any of the front-line stuff that people might want to take revenge over?’

Turner shook his head firmly. ‘That wasn’t really his beat, though he could be pretty proactive when it came to protecting his guys. But he was too far up the totem pole to get his hands literally dirty. And for another thing, he was too valuable to them as an intelligence analyst and a strategist ever to be allowed too near the front line. They lost the benefit of his skills when he got caught up in Dubrovnik and they made bloody sure that never happened again.’

‘And yet he walked away from it all at the end of the war to live what looks like a quiet life in Oxford.’

‘I think that’s the sane option. I only stayed as long as I did because I knew I could leave whenever I wanted to. The Balkans was a basket case at the end of the nineties. I hear some of the next generation are trying to do things differently, but that’s a long time to wait. If you had the brains to stop hating and the chance to get out and make a life that wasn’t based around fighting old wars, you’d be crazy not to go for it.’

Karen pondered that for a moment. ‘So he took the sensible option. Then somebody took that from him. Why do it? And why wait so long?’

‘You’re not going to get the answers to those questions talking to the likes of me. If you really want to know, you’re going to have to go to Croatia. And then you’re going to have to find someone willing to give you the answers.’

Karen gave a thin smile. ‘I might just do that.’

Turner shook his head pityingly. ‘Good luck with that one. Rather you than me.’

B
eing back in Dubrovnik felt not so much like travelling back in time as moving along a Möbius strip. The city Maggie returned to was not the city she had left, with its bullet holes and bomb damage, its stricken roofs and its battered walls. Rather, it was the city she’d first arrived in, its medieval stone glowing in the sun, its former beauty restored almost without trace. A casual observer would have no sense at all that this had been a city under siege, a harbour that provided no safe haven, an enclave plunged into a past life with no running water or electricity.

She strolled through the Pile gate, past the Franciscan Friary and down the Stradun towards the old harbour, a route she’d walked practically every day when she’d lived here. Only four months, but it loomed so significant in her memory it felt like a much bigger chunk of her life. She was proud that she’d had some part in the restoration of the city. The money she’d helped to raise had repaired roofs, replaced windows, paid stonemasons to restore the damage. Now the cafés and bars, the shops and restaurants had reinvented themselves. The tourists were back, appreciating the history and grace of the city, mostly unaware of how close it had come to being lost.

When she reached the harbour, Maggie paused, remembering the night she’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Tessa, watching the burning boats and trying not to think of them as a metaphor for her life. She’d fixed her life to Mitja, believing it was for ever. When she thought he’d left her, it was as if she was cast adrift, her anchor gone, at the mercy of whatever storms blew her way. Now, understanding that he’d been taken from her had restored some of her old certainties. It was a terrible thing to admit, but knowing he was dead was almost easier to bear than believing he’d abandoned her.

She checked her watch then turned and retraced her steps up the Stradun, heading for the familiar red tablecloths of the Café Festival. The last time she’d seen the building with its elegant stone arches, it had been gutted by fire, soot-stained and wrecked. Now, it served as a potent reminder to Maggie of what had been regained.

The tables on the street were full of tourists, people-watching, eating and drinking in equal measure. Maggie walked past and into the long dim interior where a handful of locals took coffee at the bar counter. Now she was less certain of herself. It had been almost twenty years since she’d seen the man she was meeting today, and she had no idea how he would look. He’d assured her he’d googled her and felt confident he’d recognise her from the photograph on the university website. She’d tried to do the same for him, but Radovan Tomic had remained resolutely elusive. Rado, the man whose flat she’d inhabited during the siege, was clearly the kind of UNESCO diplomat who kept a low profile.

She paused, looking around her. Then a paunchy middle-aged man got to his feet and walked towards her, arms outspread. ‘Maggie!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s great to see you.’ And before she could avoid it, she was pulled into a hug, his bald sweating head pressed against her cheek, his fat belly hard against her ribs. He held her at arm’s length, then hauled her into his embrace once more. ‘You look as fabulous as ever,’ he said, leading her by the hand to a corner table. He’d perfected his English over the years. Always good, now it was almost without a trace of an accent.

The years had not been kind to Rado, she thought as he fussed with his napkin and the waiter bustled around with glasses of water and menus. Too many years of expense account lunches and business class travel. She remembered a slender, rather glamorous young man, olive-skinned and dark-haired, brown eyes as inquisitive as a blackbird’s, chiselled features and high, broad cheekbones. Now the cheekbones were subsumed in plumpness, the eyes sunk in flesh and the close-cropped fringe of hair a salt-and-pepper mixture. ‘It’s good to see you,’ she said after they’d ordered coffee.

‘I was counting up when I got your message. I think the last time I saw you was in London in 1996. Mitja was there for some NATO summit and I was at a UNESCO meeting. I can’t believe we left it so long.’

‘I know. And what’s it like, being back in Dubrovnik?’

He pursed his lips in a little moue of dissatisfaction. ‘It’s not exactly where the action is. Still, I’m only here for six months to cover a colleague who’s on maternity leave. It’s a bit below my pay grade, but they asked me to do it because I know the patch. But never mind that.’ His face grew serious. ‘You said when you contacted me that you had news of Mitja. I’m guessing that it’s not good news?’

Maggie held back till the waiter had deposited their coffees, then slowly shook her head. ‘The worst, I’m afraid.’ She stared into her cup, unable to meet Rado’s eyes. ‘He was murdered, Rado. I thought he’d left me. I thought he’d come back to Croatia, to what he’d left behind. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. He did one last climb and when he got to the top, somebody shot him in the head.’

‘Oh my God,’ he said, aghast. ‘Maggie, that’s dreadful.’ He reached across the table and gripped her hand in his soft plump paws. ‘You poor, poor dear.’

‘Never mind me. Poor, poor Mitja,’ she said, eyes moist.

‘Do the police know who did this?’

Maggie sighed. ‘No. And it’s been so long, frankly I doubt there’s much chance of them finding out who killed him.’

‘This is terrible news. So why have you come back to Croatia, Maggie? You think the answer is here?’

‘I think there are answers here, Rado, but not the ones you mean. I’ve come back to find out who Mitja was. I need to know his story.’ She ran a finger and thumb along her eyelids, wiping the suspicion of tears away. ‘I should have done this a long time ago. But at first, there was no need. We were enough for each other in the here and now. We stayed away from each other’s history. And then after he went, I was scared to come back here for fear of what I might find. But now there’s nothing left to fear. The worst thing that can happen already has. Now all I want is to know the whole story. The bits he never got round to sharing with me. Because I need to know everything there is to know. That’s all I have left of him, Rado. A complete history shouldn’t be too much to ask.’

A quick flash of panic shot across Rado’s eyes. ‘Don’t you think you should leave sleeping dogs alone? If he didn’t tell you, presumably it’s because he thought it would be best if you didn’t know.’

‘That’s not the way it works, Rado. You lose those privileges of silence when you die. It’s all up for grabs. It’s all fair game. I want to see the places where he grew up, talk to people who knew him when he was a kid. Do you know something?’

Rado shook his head. ‘What?’

‘I don’t even know the name of the town where you guys grew up.’

Rado gave a sharp little laugh. ‘It wasn’t a town, Maggie. It was a bunch of houses and barns. Barely even a village.’

‘All the same, it must have had a name, Rado. Tell me the name.’

He looked hunted. ‘It doesn’t really exist any more. The Serbs…’ He spread his hands in a gesture of helpless resignation.

‘It still had a name. What was it called?’

He swallowed hard. ‘Podruvec. You’ll struggle to find it on a map, though. The nearest place of any size is Lipovac.’ He grimaced. ‘That was the big city, bright lights to us.’

Maggie tapped the name into her phone and showed it to Rado. ‘Is that right?’ He nodded. ‘See, here’s the funny thing. As well as not knowing where my husband —’

‘Husband? You married him?’ A look of consternation crossed his face.

‘Yes, we got married. We kept it very quiet. It just made life simpler in practical terms. What I was saying, though, is that as well as not knowing where my own husband came from, I never met a single one of his old friends from back home, except you. And your family left the village when you were fourteen and you never went back. So I never knew anyone who could fill in the blanks.’ She gave him a watery smile. ‘Except you, Rado.’

‘But like you said, I left when Mitja and I were only fourteen. You know what it’s like at that age. You’re self-obsessed. All you remember is your own concerns.’

‘I don’t believe you. You must have known his family. His parents. You must remember them.’

Rado spooned sugar into his cup and stirred it. ‘Sure, I remember them. His mum made the best orahnjaca I ever tasted. His dad kept sheep and goats. He was a bit of a drinker. But he was sharp enough. That’s where Mitja got his brains from.’ He gave an apologetic shrug. ‘That’s about all I remember.’

‘But you guys met up again later, at university. You must have talked about life back in Podruvec. People you knew. Kids you were at school with. Come on, Rado. There’s no point in holding back now.’

Rado’s eyes were slithering round the room, coming to rest on nothing. ‘I’m not holding back, Maggie. We had other things to talk about. You said yourself, Mitja wasn’t somebody who lived in the past.’

‘Rado, I spend half my working life with students concocting excuses to explain why they’re six months behind with their DPhil. Or they haven’t done the revisions to their master’s thesis that we discussed at our last supervision. I know when people are being evasive. And right now you’re being very bloody evasive. When I said we’d got married, you looked like somebody had dropped you right in the shit. What’s the big secret, Rado? I always wondered if he had a wife back home. Kids, even. That’s it, isn’t it? You can tell me. I’m not going to be angry with you for keeping his secret all those years. Because I know now he walked away from them to be with me. And he stayed with me because he wanted to be with me, not her. Right up to the point where somebody put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. So I want to know, Rado. I want to know the truth.’ Maggie ran out of things to say and stopped abruptly, glaring across the table at the ruined face of Mitja’s childhood friend.

Rado got to his feet, pulling out his wallet and dropping an overly generous note on the table. ‘Let’s walk,’ he said.

Maggie followed him out on to the Stradun. He gripped her hand tight and said, ‘Give me a minute,’ and for the second time that morning she walked down to the harbour. When they reached the quayside, he stood on the edge of the quayside staring out at the pleasure boats bobbing at their moorings. He let her hand go and took out a crocodile cigar case. He extracted a fat cigar and busied himself with lighting it. Once he’d puffed out a cloud of blue smoke, he seemed to relax.

‘You’re right,’ he sighed. ‘Jablanka was her name. She was the same age as us, and we competed to take her out when we were thirteen. I used to think she liked me best, but then we moved away and Mitja had her all to himself. And yes, before you ask, she was beautiful. Not brilliant or bold like you. But she was very sweet. Very traditional. And so he married her. By the time he had finished university, he knew he had outgrown her. But they had two sons by then, and he loved his boys so he tried to keep it alive.’ He sucked on his cigar and bought himself a few moments.

‘So what happened?’

‘He met you,’ Rado said. ‘We went for a drink after he came to your class at the IUC and he was on fire. I never saw him like that before. He couldn’t stop talking about this clever, beautiful woman who had inspired him with a passion to understand what the hell she was talking about. And the rest, you know.’

‘So, what? He just never went home again?’ Maggie’s tone was defiant. It was a way to keep the anguish at bay.

‘I don’t know exactly what happened,’ Rado said. ‘I know he planned to go back and tell her the marriage was over. But the siege got in the way. And then he made the excuse of waiting till you went back to Oxford.’

‘And then he went back?’

Rado sighed, blowing more smoke over the water. ‘Like I said. I don’t know what happened. He came back from Podruvec in a mess. He was upset and angry. He wouldn’t tell me what had happened. I don’t know where Jablanka is now, or the boys. My brother went back to Podruvec a couple of years ago – he was working in the area and he thought he’d take a look for old times’ sake. But there was almost nothing left of the place. It’s one of those villages that got eaten up by the war and never found its feet again.’ He took another hit on the cigar, grimaced and threw the unsmoked half of it in the water. ‘Whatever happened to Jablanka, she’s not in Podruvec any more.’

‘But there might still be someone there who can tell me where to find her?’

Rado gave her a look that seemed to offer her pity rather than hope. ‘If you’re really sure you want answers, that’s where you’re going to have to go.’

Later, Maggie would remember that curious way of phrasing the reply. But right then, all she could think of was finding Jablanka Petrovic and filling in the blanks in Mitja’s past. For the first time in days, she felt she could reach out and touch his hidden life. All she wanted now was the whole picture. And Rado had shown her where she could find the key.