Authors: Val McDermid
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #International Mystery & Crime, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General, #Mystery
The Skeleton Road (20 page)
The fall of Vukovar marked a new low in our morale. We’d had six interminable weeks of our own siege by then, but in spite of the hardship we were enduring, most of the damage perpetrated by the Serbian bombs had been to property, not people. In Vukovar, the human cost was staggering. Later, we’d learn that somewhere between two and a half and three thousand people had lost their lives in the ninety-day battle for the city. And most of the time we were under siege, hellish massacres were happening in mountain villages and small towns that we knew nothing about until weeks had gone past. By contrast, we lost less than a hundred lives in Dubrovnik. Not that the numbers diminish the individual loss, the individual pain.
But on 18 November when Vukovar was taken, we had no idea what our ultimate fate would be. That day, things looked incontrovertibly bleak. There was very little food and even less water. Disused wells had been opened up to supplement what the boats brought in, but there was still barely a litre per person per day. I’d been swimming in the freezing November sea, sometimes alone and sometimes with Mitja, just to remember what it felt like to be clean. But Tessa had reported that one of her friends had had a close encounter with a dead body in the little cove below the IUC, which made me lose my appetite for the sea.
By then, the city’s hotels were packed with refugees. They were sitting ducks for the Serb guns. The hotels had big picture windows to take in the spectacular views; all the better to be visible to the enemy. The poor bastards who had already fled from attack once were hammered all over again, this time often in a hail of flying glass.
Mitja was growing more haggard and weary with every passing week. But still, amazingly, when he managed to get back to our apartment, his spirits lifted. I made a point of hoarding interesting stories and unusual events to take his mind off the gruelling business of defence and counter-attack that occupied the rest of his time. When he wasn’t around, I spent most of my time at the IUC. I was still running seminars and tutorials for anyone who wanted them; since boredom was as much an enemy as the Serbs, a surprising number of people did. That kept me sane, and it also meant I had a stock of conversation to entertain Mitja and force him to think about the world beyond Dubrovnik.
The flipside of our conversations was his desire to share some of the burden of his work with me. I knew there was a lot he couldn’t tell me, but he did talk about what was going on in other parts of the city where I hadn’t been able to see things for myself. And he opened doors for me to talk to people who gave me valuable interviews that later formed the basis for my best work.
That’s how I ended up spending time in the mayor’s office. And that in turn made me realise that I had unique channels to access help for the beleaguered city and its inhabitants. I had Oxford, and its web of contacts and influence that spread into the most unlikely corners. Dubrovnik had treated me as one of its own. It was time for me to return the favour.
Although the siege was brutal and unrelenting for the citizens of Dubrovnik, the Serbs hated the fact that the civilised world thought they were pitiless and inhumane. They resented that their own ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Croats and the Nazis during the Second World War appeared to have been erased from our memories. So they allowed the occasional visitor from outside to come and see Dubrovnik for themselves in an attempt to demonstrate that the conflict wasn’t simply a one-sided atrocity. For example, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who was parachuted into Yugoslavia as Churchill’s principal liaison with the Tito-led partisans, was allowed through the blockade. But he was an old man by then, his influence drastically curtailed. Back in the UK, nobody paid much attention.
However, these visits gave me – and others such as Tessa and Kathy Wilkes, an Oxford philosopher who was also trapped by the siege – the opportunity to pass information to the outside world. Whenever we knew we were about to be visited by one of these outsiders, we would frantically write letters to anyone we knew with either political or fund-raising connections. I had contacts on national newspapers, and I always included a couple of articles about life under siege. Some of them ended up in the pages of the Guardian and the Independent; long afterwards, I still encountered people who told me that what I had written had given them their first taste of what was about to happen in the Balkans. More importantly, we had managed to persuade friends and colleagues in the UK to start raising money for the relief and recovery of Dubrovnik.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, we’d taken the first steps towards helping the city we loved to heal itself.
W
hen Macanespie stepped out of the plane at Chania airport, the warmth wrapped him in its soft embrace and at once he felt ten degrees kinder towards the world. He loved the feel of sunshine on his body and hated that his ginger skin prevented him from basking like a porpoise on the beach. There was no fun in lathering himself with factor fifty. And besides, he always missed a bit on the first day and spent the rest of the holiday hiding under parasols and rubbing aloe vera into pulsating flesh. But for a few brief moments, walking across the tarmac to the bus, he could luxuriate in heat and benevolence.
Proctor trailed at his heels, the perpetual misery-guts. On the no-frills plane, he’d muttered complaints about having to pay for bad food and worse coffee. Then he’d had a good moan about the lack of leg room. ‘Anyone would think you spent your life in business class,’ Macanespie had said in a vain attempt to jolly his colleague out of his bad mood. That was a triumph of hope over experience, he thought to himself as Proctor’s scowl only deepened.
On the flight to Crete, he’d attempted to go through the spreadsheet with Proctor. The longer this investigation went on, the more Macanespie seemed to be rediscovering a sense of professional purpose. It was the first time in years he’d felt energised by work instead of dispirited. Maybe it was time he got out of admin and into something more active. Once this was over, once he’d proved himself in the field, perhaps he could have a word with Wilson Cagney about reassignment. At the very least, he could try to achieve escape velocity from Planet Proctor.
Macanespie was pleased with his revised spreadsheet. The timeline had eliminated a few bodies from the list. As soon as possible, they’d start talking to the individuals who had access to the snatch-squad plans. Shake the tree and see what fell out. Some would be obvious non-starters. There were plenty of people at Scheveningen who saw what they were doing as the embodiment of law in action; they would never subvert what they saw as due process. The ones to focus on would be the ones who viewed it as just another job, who had no investment in the outcomes. There weren’t that many of them. And although they were lawyers who drew information from others, they were unaccustomed to being the focus of hard questioning themselves. Macanespie wasn’t convinced their mole would be able to withstand him in full aggressive Scotsman mode.
But that was down the line. They had seven hours in Chania for an evidence review. It didn’t feel long, but the investigation into Miroslav Simunovic’s murder didn’t seem to have produced much physical evidence. Their killer had become very good at what he did, apparently.
They emerged landside to find a uniformed woman police officer clutching a clipboard that read ‘Makanespy/Proktor’. She greeted them briskly and whisked them off to a waiting Skoda. ‘I take you to our local headquarter in Chania,’ she said, driving off before they’d even got their seat belts fastened. They hurtled through a hostile landscape of rocky red soil and scrubby vegetation that changed as they descended from the high plateau through pine trees and the scrappy start of the town that hugged the hillside. Beyond them, the sea sparkled and the long arms of the harbour extended into the cove where the centre of the town nestled in a higgledy-piggledy array of roofs. ‘Very pretty,’ Macanespie said over the fast radio chatter spilling into the car.
‘Very popular,’ the policewoman agreed. The steady build-up of traffic forced her to slow down; the presence of a blue-and-white police car seemed to have no effect on the aggressive driving of everyone else on the road, however. Macanespie was embarrassed to find he’d become the cliché of the passenger clinging to the grab handle above his window as the car swung round a tight corner away from the sea and into the heart of the town.
Within a couple of streets, they’d left the tourist accommodation and tavernas behind. They turned on to a long straight street lined with cars and well-cared-for houses with balconies and gardens. Halfway along, the cop squeezed the car into a space outside a blocky white box with a Greek flag fluttering from the balcony. Only the air conditioning units on the walls and the satellite dishes on the roof distinguished it from its neighbours. A courageous graffiti artist had sprayed his tag along the front of the building. Ironically, it made the cop shop look like the worst-maintained building on the street.
Once they emerged from the car and followed the woman up the side of the building, next to a straggle of olive trees, they could see it went back much further than its neighbours. Still, it didn’t look like a police station, Macanespie thought. Inside, however, it was a different story. A short corridor lined with indecipherable but unmistakable wanted posters brought them to an office where three desks huddled together, swamped with paper and the boxy screens of antiquated computer hardware. ‘Wait here, please. I will bring my colleague,’ the woman said, leaving them standing among the dust motes and the smell of burnt coffee.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Macanespie said. ‘I hope this isn’t the sum total of the CID office.’
Proctor sighed. ‘I told you this was a waste of time.’
‘You didn’t have any better ideas.’
As Macanespie spoke, a man in his early thirties bounced in on the balls of his feet. He wore a pale blue shirt, open at the neck, tight enough across the chest and the abdomen to show off his gym bunny muscles. His sleeves were short, revealing ripped biceps and triceps, and his neck was thick with overdevelopment. His trousers strained over muscular thighs. His black hair was gelled in place, a single lock falling over his forehead like Taurus the Bull. He looked as if he plucked his eyebrows, and his forearms were suspiciously hairless. On first impression, Macanespie thought he made Christiano Ronaldo look self-effacing.
‘Good morning and welcome to Chania,’ he said, his accent strong but comprehensible. ‘I am Christos Macropoulos and I am the detective here who speaks English. My colleague will bring us coffee soon, but first we can talk about how we can help each other, yes?’
The two Brits introduced themselves while Christos arranged the three office chairs round one desk. He quickly outlined the circumstances of Simunovic’s murder, opening crime-scene photographs on the computer screen as he went. Macanespie hadn’t had high hopes for the forensics, which was just as well since there was almost nothing to go on. No footprints. No fingermarks. No blood other than that of the victim. No DNA that any significance could be attached to. No eye witnesses in the building; too many eye witnesses in the streets nearby and no way of tracking most of them down short of advertising on the Internet.
‘And we all know that brings out the crazies,’ Christos said. The other two nodded sagely, as if they knew exactly what he was talking about.
‘Right enough,’ Macanespie said. ‘And it’s hard to get cooperation from your colleagues overseas when it’s all kind of tenuous.’
‘So, we think the killer came up behind Simunovic when he lets himself into his flat,’ Christos concluded. ‘He must have been quiet because it looks like the victim didn’t turn around. He used a very sharp blade. Maybe something like an open razor. And cut straight across the throat. Too quick for screaming. All the blood would spray outwards, away from the killer. So he wasn’t covered with the blood. And so he goes away, into the evening crowds and nobody sees him.’
‘How long was it till the body was found?’
‘We think about two hours. His neighbour across the stair, he goes out every evening at ten o’clock for a glass of ouzo down by the harbour. He opened his front door and came face to face with this.’ He clicked back to the first crime-scene photograph. ‘He heard nothing, saw nothing.’
‘How did he get into the building?’ Proctor asked. ‘Is there no security on the outside door?’
Macropoulos shrugged. ‘It’s a keypad. Not so hard to learn the code, I think. You look over somebody’s shoulder or if you’re more organised, you put a camera on it for a day or two and get everybody’s code.’
‘You printed the keypad, right?’
Macropoulos flexed his shoulders. ‘Of course this was done. Nothing but smudges and partial prints from official residents.’
And now the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. ‘What about CCTV?’ Macanespie asked.
Macropoulos sighed. ‘There is nothing on the apartment block or the street. It’s far enough away from the harbour to be safe to walk here. Most of the crime we have is street crime. Pickpockets, bag snatchers. Also credit-card fraud. They target tourists. But not in streets like this one.’
‘And down by the harbour? You said Simunovic was drinking in his regular bar. Is it in a tourist area? Is it covered by CCTV?’
Macropoulos gave a self-satisfied smile. ‘I thought you would ask about that.’ He got to his feet. ‘There are three cameras that cover the part of the harbour where he walks from his bar towards his apartment. In my office I have the recordings from that night on a flash drive so you can take them with you. But we look at them now, yes?’
‘Yes, please,’ Macanespie said with a triumphant glance at Proctor. As soon as Macropoulos had left the room, he gave a thumbs-up sign. ‘Cooking with gas now, Theo. Cooking with gas.’
‘You don’t think if there was something to be seen, the Greeks would have spotted it by now?’
Macanespie shook his head pityingly. ‘Watch and learn, Theo. Watch and learn.’
When Macropoulos returned, they crowded closer round the screen and concentrated on the images. The first camera was black and white, its images jerky and blurred. A constant flow of pedestrians moved back and forth through the field of vision. Macropoulos pointed with his pen as a big silver-haired man came into shot. ‘Simunovic,’ he said. They watched as he crossed the screen and disappeared. The video continued for another minute but it was impossible to see whether any individual was following their target.
The second camera was in colour, the register a little off so that everything looked like sixties Kodachrome. It was set a bit lower than the first and they had a much clearer view of people’s faces. Again, they watched as Simunovic walked across the screen. This time, Macropoulos picked out half a dozen people who came up behind him, tapping them with a pen. ‘We think they are also in the first shot. They are also interesting because they seem to be on their own. Not in a couple or a group.’
The third camera reverted to black and white, almost as fuzzy as the first. This time, Simunovic cut diagonally across the frame. This time, Macropoulos pointed to only two figures. And this time, Macanespie felt a little twitch of excitement. There were two other figures that had definitely been in the previous shot but who hadn’t been singled out by Macropoulos. One looked like a teenage boy – baggy board shorts, oversize T-shirt and baseball cap, carrying a skateboard. The other was a woman in a headscarf and big sunglasses, a cotton djellaba disguising her figure. She could, Macanespie thought, be anything from a size eight to a size twenty under that. She could be a he, come to that.
‘That’s fascinating,’ he said. ‘Do you have any ID on any of those guys?’
Macropoulos shook his head. ‘This happened on a Friday night. Thousands of holiday makers change over on a Saturday and leave the island. There was nothing we could do to stop that.’
‘I wonder… Do you still have the footage from those cameras for the nights before the actual murder?’ Macanespie sounded casual. ‘You know how it is. My boss, he’s obsessive about detail.’
Macropoulos looked startled. ‘You think the killer might be in the earlier footage too?’
‘I don’t. But my boss is the kind of bastard who would send me all the way back to look, just to make a point. It’d make my life easier if I could take copies of any other footage you’ve got. Futile, I know. But that’s how he is.’
Macropoulos grinned. ‘I have bosses like this too. If you wait here, I’ll get what we have. I know there is nothing more from the first camera because they reuse the same video tape every day. That’s why the quality is so bad. But I think there is more from the other two.’
Macanespie grinned at his retreating back. ‘He’s got fixed ideas about how an assassin should look. He doesn’t like the teenage boy with the skateboard and he definitely doesn’t like the woman in the baggy kaftan. Always supposing it is a woman and not some guy – remember that BBC foreign correspondent who got into Kabul by wearing a burka? So I want to take a look at who turns up earlier in the week. Somebody staked out that door code. This killer doesn’t leave things to chance, Theo. But maybe we’re the two heads that are better than one.’