The Skeleton Road (23 page)
Authors: Val McDermid
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #International Mystery & Crime, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General, #Mystery
M
aggie said something that sounded to Karen like, ‘
Pozdrav, svechenitch
,’ and the priest inclined his head. He had a thick mop of silver hair framing a square face with strong features and incongruously dark eyebrows. Karen put him around seventy. Old enough to know what they’d come to learn.
‘They say you are English,’ he said. His accent was quite pronounced but Karen could make out what he was saying.
Maggie smiled. ‘Scottish, actually. You speak English?’ She sounded surprised.
‘Where do you think Mitja learned his English?’
Maggie’s eyes widened. ‘He spent time in England, training at a military college.’
‘That made it better, but he learned it first from me.’
‘And where did you learn it?’ Karen knew that any time spent building a relationship with this man would help them. Showing an interest in him rather than simply pumping him for information was the first step.
He gave her an approving nod, as if he understood what she was doing. ‘During the Communist years, there wasn’t so much work for a priest. So I became a teacher at the university in Belgrade. A Croat among the Serbs, when we were all supposed to be one Yugoslav people. I taught English literature. It wasn’t usual in a Communist state. But here in Yugoslavia, we pretended we were different. We were the good Communists. The ones the West could love. And so I taught Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Robert Burns to bored students who were forced to take my course.’
‘That’s amazing. You speak really well,’ Karen said.
‘I have listened to the BBC for years. But you flatter me. I know I don’t speak as well as I understand.’
‘We should introduce ourselves,’ Maggie said. ‘I’m Professor Maggie Blake from Oxford University.’
Spoken like a woman who knew exactly how powerful a line it was when it came to opening doors, Karen thought. ‘And I’m Karen Pirie. From Edinburgh.’ Simpler not to go into too much detail yet.
The priest pulled a chair into the aisle and sank into it with the grateful sigh of the elderly. He placed his hands on the head of his stick and studied them carefully. ‘I am Father Uros Begovic. This has been my parish since 1971. Even when it wasn’t supposed to be a parish. I have been minister to the people of this village for more than forty years. I used to come home at weekends and holidays and turn from lecturer to priest.’ He ran one hand over his black cassock. ‘Easier on the outside than on the inside.’
‘And that’s how you knew Mitja,’ Maggie said.
He tipped his head towards her, peering over the rimless glasses perched on the end of his nose. ‘I prepared him for his First Communion. But you – why are you interested in him? Why have you come here in search of his past?’
Karen could see the wrestling match going on inside Maggie. She reckoned the priest could too. It was time for the truth. Or at least part of it. She waited, hoping Maggie understood that.
The professor raised her head and stared at the crucifix above the altar. ‘I loved him. We were married. I never knew his history.’
‘You didn’t want to know,’ the priest said gently. ‘And that’s not something you should be ashamed of.’
‘But now he’s dead. Now I need to fill in the blanks.’
He nodded. ‘And you?’ He turned to Karen. ‘What is your interest?’
‘Why can I not just be her friend, along for the ride? Along to support her?’
He smiled. ‘You could be her friend, it’s true. But I think you are a police officer.’
Karen was taken aback. She was accustomed to the cloak of invisibility granted to wee plump women with uninteresting wardrobes. People who weren’t expecting a cop seldom picked up on her profession. ‘What makes you say that?’
He pulled a rueful face. ‘In this job, in this part of the world, you develop an instinct. You didn’t tell me enough when you introduced yourself. And there’s something in your eyes. A distance, maybe. And of course Novak told me Professor Blake said Mitja was murdered.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Besides, you didn’t comfort her with a hug.’
Another bloody Sherlock Holmes. Just what the world needed.
‘Well, since you’ve worked it out, you’ll know that I need to know about the general because it’s my job.’
Begovic laughed, a peal of genuine mirth. ‘You came here looking for justice? Here? You think a single death matters to these people? After what happened here?’
Stung, Karen went straight for the jugular. ‘Isn’t that what your whole faith is based on? One single death among many? You of all people should know it matters. To someone who loved him, nothing matters more.’
The smile disappeared from his face as swiftly as if he’d been slapped. He looked over his shoulder at the crucifix then lowered his eyes. ‘You’re right.’ He took a deep breath and lifted his head to meet Maggie’s face, still frozen in shock at the exchange between priest and polis. ‘I will tell you what I know. But I warn you, it’s a bad, bad story.’
‘I don’t care,’ Maggie said. ‘I’m past all that. I’ve been so wrong already about who he was. All I want now is to know the truth.’
He settled himself in the chair, a solid black block, built to inspire confidence. Karen was still reserving judgement. In her head, all organised religions were elaborate con tricks. Unlike Maggie, she wasn’t convinced she could rely on a priest for truth.
‘I offered English lessons in the village. Mitja was clever and full of big ideas. So was his friend Rado. A couple of the others started out with them, but they didn’t stay long. But those two? Always a competition, to see who was best. But Rado moved away with his family when they were teenagers and Mitja was left without a rival.’
He smiled fondly at the memory. ‘It was maybe just as well. Because a new competition had started up between them. The type that spoils friendship. It was a girl, of course. Jablanka Pusic. She was a pretty girl. Very demure and, I think, kind. Not as smart as the boys, but she was the only girl of the same age in the village and they were both in love with her. So when Rado left, Jablanka and Mitja became a couple.’
He sighed. ‘He was very clever, very talented. His parents saw that and looked to me to help him. I told him to enrol in the university in Zagreb, not Belgrade. I thought he would be more at home among Croats. And I hoped that he would find a girl who was a match for him.’ He looked Maggie in the eye again. ‘But if you know him, you know he was someone who struggled to break his word. And he had made promises to Jablanka. They were married the summer after his first year at university and by the time he graduated he was the father of twin sons.’
Karen was impressed by how well Maggie was reacting. Her arms were wrapped around her body, as if they were literally holding her together. But her face was calm and when she spoke, her voice was under control. ‘What are their names? His sons?’
The priest appeared momentarily uncomprehending.
‘What are his sons called?’ Maggie tried another form of words.
He drew in a sharp breath, his shoulders rising. ‘I christened them Paskal and Poldo.’
‘Where are they now?’ Maggie asked.
The priest looked helplessly at Karen. She knew the answer, but she wasn’t about to let him off the hook. ‘After university, Mitja joined the army,’ he said, veering away from the question. ‘Jablanka stayed here. It was easier for her to raise the children with her family to support her. Besides, Mitja was never based in one place for long. At first, he came back often. As much as he could, I think. But time went by and his job became more important. He was doing the kind of things he couldn’t talk about to anyone, not even me, he came back less often. And then his parents died within a few months of each other, so there was even less reason to be here.’ He stared at his hands, knobbly with arthritis, folded over each other on his stick. ‘Sometimes couples grow in different directions. But Mitja loved his boys. So when he did come back, he spent his time with them. Out in the hills or playing football or watching American movies that somehow he could always get his hands on.’ He blinked hard at the recollection. ‘He loved his boys.’
Maggie stared straight ahead, eyes holding images only she could see in a thousand-yard stare. ‘He never mentioned them to me. Not once.’
‘It was probably the only way he could deal with it,’ Karen said. ‘Compartmentalise.’
‘And then the war came. Mitja was trapped in Dubrovnik and he met you.’ He squeezed out a crooked smile. ‘He told me about you. The last time he was here. He said he had finally met the woman I had wanted him to find at the university. The woman who was a match for him.’
Maggie looked as if she might burst into tears. ‘He said that?’
The priest nodded, but it was clear to Karen he took no pleasure in the moment. ‘You went back to Oxford after the siege was over and he made his plans. To come back here, to tell Jablanka it was over between them. That he wanted a divorce.’
‘What did she say? How did she react?’
The priest closed his eyes for a moment. It might have been prayer, it might just have been escape. Then he stared dully at the floor. ‘Like I said. The war came. It came right here.’
K
aren could see a slow dawning behind Maggie’s eyes. She was finally joining up the dots and it was a terrible reckoning. ‘What happened?’ Karen was not prepared to give any quarter.
‘Mitja was very good at his job,’ the priest said. He seemed to be ageing before their eyes. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard. ‘The Serbs believed in punishing the places their most dangerous opponents came from. They wanted to make them mad with grief so they were not as good soldiers.’ He was turning in on himself, looking inwards, not outwards.
‘It was a bitterly cold day,’ he said. ‘There was a little snow on the ground, on the trees, on the roofs. The light was starting to fade when they arrived. Three Land Rover patrol vehicles. A detachment of JNA soldiers, their faces covered with balaclavas. They drove into the centre of the village and started rounding everyone up.’ He paused to gather his words.
‘There had been a lot of massacres by then. They didn’t all make headlines, but we’d heard about them. Villages, towns, sometimes just a family farm. They thought it would be the men. That they’d be herded into a barn or a field then shot. People were sobbing, the soldiers were dragging everyone out of their houses. Then a truck arrived. The soldiers made everyone climb into the truck then they drove a couple of kilometres down the road. There’s a meadow. They drove to the far side and forced all the children out of the truck. The mothers were screaming, the fathers were screaming, the children too. They left the children there with half a dozen soldiers to keep them penned together. Fourteen of them. The oldest were eleven, the youngest was only eighteen months old.
‘They drove back across the field and parked the truck in sight of the children. All the adults thought they were going to be shot in front of their own children and grandchildren. But it was worse than that. Much worse.
‘The man in charge of the soldiers, he shouted at the adults to shut up. And then he said, “This is for Dimitar Petrovic. He is the enemy of my people.” And then he waved to the soldiers on the other side of the meadow. “My men are telling your children to run to Mummy,” he told them. And that’s just what the children began to do. A couple of the older ones picked up the toddlers and ran with them. Stumbling through the snow, desperate to get back to their mothers.’ His voice cracked. The two women sat like stones, scarcely breathing.
‘Then the soldiers opened fire. They used the children’s heads for target practice. Scarlet on white. Explosions of blood on the snow.’ Tears were leaking from the corners of his eyes. ‘They were good shots. The children’s bodies were mostly untouched. Perfect. Their heads – that was a different story. Pray you never see a child’s head after it’s been hit by a rifle bullet.’
There was a long silence. Then the priest spoke again. ‘That’s where Paskal and Poldo are. In that meadow, with their twelve friends.’
Karen wanted to smash something. Or worse. ‘What happened to Jablanka?’
Begovic ran a hand over his face, as if he was washing it. ‘The soldiers made everyone stay in the truck then drove them back to the village. They stood around laughing at the sight of everyone screaming and running down the road to the meadow.
‘I’d left Belgrade by then, but I was visiting a colleague in Lipovac. I got a call late that night and I came straight here. I’ve never seen grief like it. People were falling apart. Most people had lost a relative but what the whole village had lost was its future. Jablanka was taking the weight of it all on her shoulders. She kept saying it was her fault for marrying Mitja, that she should have let him go free when he went to Zagreb, then none of this would have happened. I sat with her for a while. Talking and praying. And she seemed calmer when I left.’
His shoulders slumped. ‘In the morning, her sister found her dead. She’d hanged herself from the roof with two leather belts belonging to her sons.’
No wonder he never talked about his past.
Karen had heard some harrowing stories in her time, but nothing as bad as this. ‘How come this story never got out? I know you said not all of the massacres made it into the press, but this would have been front-page news. Like Srebrenica.’
‘We didn’t talk about it,’ the priest said. ‘Not to outsiders.’
‘You didn’t talk about it?’ Karen was incredulous. How could you let an atrocity like that go past unmarked? How could you not shout it from the rooftops? Buttonhole every journalist in the Western world?
‘We didn’t have to,’ he said. ‘Not after what Mitja did.’
And so I was banished. That’s what it felt like, anyway. An overcrowded fishing boat up the coast to Trieste then a long cramped train journey back to the UK. It was only when I set foot on Italian soil that I understood how stressed I’d been for the past three months. Tiredness hit me like a wall and, although I was convinced I was so sad I would never sleep again, I think I was virtually unconscious from Trieste to London.
I got back to Oxford late on a cold, foggy January afternoon. I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but what I got was mostly a blank indifference. A war? How quaint. Now, about your teaching supervisions… Melissa was fascinated, of course, but I realised that was more to do with getting her name on my subsequent publications as a joint author. I understood properly for the first time how very insular academics can become. I made my mind up that I was never going to let that happen to me. It’s the main reason why I make sure I cram as much travel as possible into my working life and why I fight for research projects that give me a proper window into other people’s worlds.
However, I didn’t have time to brood back then over the lack of interest at Schollie’s High Table in my Dubrovnik adventure, as one of the more senior fellows described it. I had DPhil supervision meetings to conduct and a first-year class to run on Imagining Geopolitics; I had papers to propose and, I thought, a book to write about the relationship between the fall of communism and the expansion of geopolitical thinking; I had to raise awareness and funds to help my friends back in Dubrovnik; and every night, I had to write to Mitja.
It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1992 email coverage was patchy, slow and unpredictable. So I wrote him old-fashioned letters. He’d told me where to send them – ‘They can always find me,’ he’d said. ‘I’m not allowed to be out of touch for more than a few hours, not ever.’ I numbered them in the top left-hand corner of the envelope so he could read them in the correct order, but also so that he could be sure none had gone missing. Neither of us really trusted the authorities to allow us completely free communication.
His letters to me arrived sporadically. I’d go for a whole agonised week without a word, then five or six would arrive together, sometimes showing signs of having been ill-treated at the very least. Sometimes the envelope would contain only a few scribbled sentences at an angle on the page, a clear sign of late nights and poor light. Other times, there would be half a dozen sheets of tight script, giving a detailed account of the aftermath of some atrocity or a description of a particular landscape or a plan for us to have a day out in the mountains when the Balkans stopped tearing themselves to pieces.
I cherished the letters equally. What they represented was the totality of our relationship. We were more than just sex; we were laughter, we were intellectual curiosity, we were political opinions, we were engagement with the landscape. We were the future, not the past. I held those thoughts and feelings close to me. They were my only comfort when being without him became too hard to bear.
Which was most days, if I’m honest. His absence was like the enervating thrum of machinery just on the threshold of hearing, a vibration that wears down your resistance till you understand you would commit an act of violence to make it stop. I slept badly and I suspect I wasn’t the world’s best thesis supervisor. My mind, like my heart, was elsewhere.
By now, news was filtering out of the shocking extent of the massacres that had been happening with a numbing regularity since the JNA had started their full-scale war against Croatia. It seemed that not a week had gone by without another bloodbath in some small community or town. I’d heard a little of this from Mitja, but I don’t think even he grasped at the time the full extent of the carnage that had been carried out against his fellow countrymen.
I knew from his letters that hospitals and clinics were desperate for supplies. So I decided that as soon as term was over, I was going to drive an ambulance loaded to the roof with medical necessities to Croatia. This wasn’t just about my love life, it was about my humanity. I managed to track down an ambulance that was being taken out of service in the West Country, so Tessa and I caught a bus down to Plymouth and drove back in the rickety old vehicle. Tessa knew a mechanic who agreed to restore the engine, and I set about filling it.
We went round every Oxford college, talking to Junior Common Room meetings, to college fellows drinking port after dinner, to sports societies and dining clubs. Anyone who’d listen, really. I contacted pharmaceutical companies and persuaded those of my colleagues who taught medics to pump their contacts for anything they could get their hands on. By the time the Easter vac began, we had an ambulance crammed with medicines, dressings and all the paraphernalia that went with them. We were like a hospital pharmacy on wheels. Tessa’s friend had persuaded one of his mates to repaint the ambulance with giant red crosses on every panel, just to drive home the point that we were on a mission of mercy.
I didn’t tell Mitja what we’d done. He knew I was coming, knew Tessa and I were arriving by road. We’d arranged to meet in Pula, in the north, near the Slovenian border, almost as far away from the war zone as it was possible to be. He gave us directions to a little restaurant on the edge of the strip down by the port. ‘It’s easy to find,’ he wrote. ‘And they have space for car parking beside it.’
We’d had one or two sticky moments on the way with border officials wondering what we were up to. But nothing we couldn’t bluff our way through. And finally, we were driving down the coast to Pula, singing at the tops of our voices.
Mitja was right, it was easy to find the restaurant. And my heart jumped when I spotted him sitting at a pavement table. He glanced up when he saw the ambulance then looked away. Then looked again, realising it was a right-hand drive with British plates. And then he understood what he was seeing. He jumped to his feet and ran across the street towards us, his face split open in a grin of pure delight.
That’s how I’ll remember him. Running towards me, arms wide, hair blowing back from his forehead, laughing like he hadn’t a care in the world. Everyone should carry a memory like that.
Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps us going.