The Skeleton Road (25 page)
Authors: Val McDermid
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #International Mystery & Crime, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General, #Mystery
There are few places as beautiful as the Balkans in spring. Fruit trees in blossom, meadows carpeted with wild flowers, trees in leaf a hundred shades of green. Back in the early nineties, it was still common to see carts drawn by horses. Men with rolled-up shirtsleeves drove tractors that had the antique look of children’s toys, and I can remember occasionally even seeing oxen pulling ploughs. Women worked the fields, heads covered in bright scarves. Civil war was raging throughout Croatia, but depending on where you were, you could go for days without noticing. So it was that first time Tessa and I returned.
When people think about war, they imagine whole countries consumed by conflict. The truth is that the battle lines are drawn patchily. Strategic targets are chosen and focused on. Particular towns are bombed and besieged while just a few miles down the road, life stumbles on in an approximation of normality. What else are you supposed to do if they’re not actually shooting at you, after all? We have an astonishing capacity for keeping our heads down and just getting on with things.
Of course, beneath the surface, life was far from normal. Everyone was living in a state of anxiety. Would their town be next? Would some JNA commander decide their menfolk were too dangerous to remain alive? Was this the time to make a break for it and head for those distant cousins in Slovenia or Albania?
Those were the conversations I wanted to be part of. When his military responsibilities claimed Mitja, which was more often than not, I spent my days finding people I could interview. I didn’t have a clear idea what I would ultimately write about the region, not least because I had no idea how bloody and brutal the next few years would become. But I knew I wanted to record as much front-line testimony as I could so that, when I did come to write, I would have a thorough spread of research materials.
It wasn’t always easy to conduct these interviews. The first problem was the language barrier. Even after three months in Dubrovnik, my Serbo-Croat wasn’t really good enough for discussing abstract concepts. I could comfortably hold conversations about the day-to-day, so without an interpreter, I was limited in terms of what I could ask. Paradoxically, I think now that this turned out to be a positive thing. The work I ended up doing on the region and its wars is completely underpinned by the experiences of the local populations; it is rooted, as human geography should be, in an embodiment of the conflict.
The second problem I had was persuading people to talk to me. I grew up in a country with a small population – there are just over five million Scots – so I understand what a friend of mine calls ‘half a degree of separation’. Everybody appears to be connected to each other. In Croatia, with its four million, that phenomenon is even more pronounced. It seemed as if everyone knew who Mitja was, and my relationship to him. That made some people eager to talk to me; but for others, it was a very good reason to avoid any kind of communication. But I knew I had to persuade the unwilling. If I didn’t cover the spectrum of experience and opinion, I couldn’t hope to produce work of any value.
It was a challenge and I was glad of that because it meant I wasn’t spending my time pining for Mitja’s company. I knew he had an important job to do, even if he couldn’t tell me what it was most of the time, and I didn’t want to be the kind of pathetic camp follower who sits at home twiddling her thumbs. When we could be together, it was all the richer because my work meant at least one of us could talk about what we’d been doing all day. God knows he needed something to take his mind off the constant jockeying for power on both sides of the battle lines. When I look back at that period, I have no idea how anyone kept track of the shifting sands of power and loyalties on either side. Somehow, Mitja held all that in his head.
All that and more. Not only did he have to stay on top of what was happening. He also had to develop the intel to help his commanders create a strategy for survival for their country. He couldn’t go anywhere without bodyguards. We met in hotel rooms then, and whenever he came to me, there were always men with submachine guns on guard at either end of the corridor. If it had been up to them, they’d have been stationed on the threshold of the room. But that was where I put my foot down. Even generals are entitled to some privacy.
Later, he wrote me a letter explaining that those moments snatched with me were what kept him sane. ‘I could see the guys around me starting to lose their grip. They’d been removed from any kind of normality for so long they’d forgotten the reality of what we were fighting for. All they had to cling to was the ideology. And that way you lose your humanity. You become the beast you’re fighting. You saved me from that. And because you saved me, I learned what would preserve and protect my guys. Although they didn’t want to leave the front, I made them take time away from the war. I sent them back to their families whenever I could. I think that’s part of the reason we were able to hang on against the overwhelming odds.’
I’m proud of that now. At the time, I sometimes felt guilty that I was taking him away from what he should be doing. But not guilty enough to give him up. I remember one magical day in particular. Tessa and I were due to leave for Oxford the next morning, and somehow Mitja had managed to squeeze a whole afternoon away. We’d come down from Zagreb to Starigrad a few days before and he surprised us by turning up in a Land Rover. His bodyguards kept a discreet distance while we drove to the Velika Paklenica canyon nearby. ‘We’re going up the Anika Kuk,’ he told us. ‘It has the hardest climbing routes in all of Croatia.’ He must have seen the horror on my face for he burst out laughing.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’re not doing the rock climb. I know you don’t climb. There’s a walkers’ path to the summit, we’re going up that way.’
‘Some other time,’ Tessa said. ‘We’ll come back when the war is over, Mitja, and you can take me up the rock.’
‘That’s a deal,’ he said. ‘But all we’re doing today is enjoying the scenery.’
It was the perfect day for it. Clear and sunny, but cool and crisp too. We started up the canyon, towering cliffs looming over us. Sometimes looking up at the overhangs was almost as vertiginous as looking down from a summit. We climbed steadily upwards, the wide path cutting up the steep mountainside in a series of zigzags. When we came to tumultuous streams tumbling over rocks and boulders, there were bridges to take us safely across. Although the scenery was wild, the terrain had been tamed for us.
Or so I thought till we reached the final section, a steep scramble over broken cliffs and promontories. By the time we struggled to the summit I was exhausted, my thighs trembling with the effort. Mitja and Tessa both burst out laughing when I collapsed on my back, groaning, too knackered to appreciate the stunning views down the mountain and across to the coast. I was saved by the contents of the rucksack Mitja had been carrying – water, salami, cheese, bread, olives and apples. Water never tasted so good.
After we’d eaten, Tessa set off ahead of us on the descent. Mitja and I sat on a chunk of rock, leaning into each other, talking about a future together. A future we imagined would arrive a lot sooner than it did.
K
aren replaced her phone in her pocket and checked out Maggie and the priest. It looked like the conversation had gone downhill after she’d butted out. Maggie was on her feet now, edging into the aisle and away from Father Begovic. Karen took a few steps towards them, but Maggie met her halfway. ‘We’re done here,’ she said. ‘Whoever killed Mitja, the answer isn’t here.’
Karen was inclined to agree with her. The conversation with the priest had recast everything in a new light. Petrovic as avenging angel, as war criminal – that was a very different picture from the patriotic hero and supporter of the peacekeeping NATO and UN forces that she’d been fed previously. And it was equally clear that it was as much a surprise to his widow as it was to Karen herself. How would that feel, she wondered. To discover that the man you loved, the man whose memory you cherished, was soaked in the blood of innocent people? How did you even start to integrate those contradictions?
‘Did he have anything else to say?’ Karen asked. ‘Like evidence? Like how this whole thing stayed buried all these years?’ She had to speed up to keep pace with Maggie.
They were at the car before Maggie replied. She fastened her seat belt and said, ‘It stayed under the radar because it was personal. In the twisted calculus of death they use here, you don’t have to report a war crime if it arose from family circumstances rather than the furtherance of war.’
The perversity of human illogic never ceased to amaze Karen. ‘Tell me you just made that up.’
‘I wish.’ She buried her face in her hands. Karen waited, understanding that it would be a bad move to start the engine and drive off. She didn’t think Maggie was actually crying, so thankfully she wasn’t going to have to go into compassionate mode when what she really wanted to do was to interrogate the professor.
At length, Maggie raised her head and sighed. ‘Apparently word seeped out about eight years ago. A rumour from the Serb side. An investigator turned up and started asking questions. She didn’t know Mitja’s name and of course nobody told her. She could see this wasn’t exactly an armoured compound of highly trained and heavily armed guerrilla fighters so she accepted there had been a mistake and left.’
Karen snorted. ‘Not much of an investigator, then. Did she not notice the graveyard on the way up the hill?’
‘The priest says that was only built a couple of years ago.’
‘Eight years ago, you said? So she was here before Mitja was killed?’
‘Yes.’
Karen could feel the pieces falling into place in her head. ‘So somebody was talking.’ She started the engine and turned the car around. Again, people materialised as if by magic, watching them leave as stony-faced as they’d watched them arrive. ‘Somebody was saying the words “massacre” and “Podruvec” in the same sentence.’
‘For all the difference it made. If Father Begovic is right, what happened is that one of the children of the victims grew old enough to carry on the feud to the next generation.’
Karen pondered that for a moment. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. They rounded the bend and confronted the graves again. ‘Because —’
‘Please, pull over,’ Maggie said urgently.
Karen drew alongside the grass verge and killed the engine. ‘I want to see his boys,’ Maggie said. She got out and walked across to the memorial, head bowed. Karen followed a few steps behind.
At the plinth, Maggie scrutinised the photographs more closely than she had before. About halfway round, two photographs sat next to each other. Two boys, barely distinguishable one from the other. Cheeky grins, laughing eyes, a matching rumple of black hair. They had a sparkiness that reminded Karen of Phil’s nephew and made her think they’d have been a handful.
‘They look like him,’ Maggie said, her voice cracking. ‘He never wanted kids. Which suited me, because I didn’t either. Stupid woman that I am, I thought our reasons were the same. That we were sufficient for each other. That we had plans enough for ourselves, just the two of us. Not this. Not that he didn’t want kids because he couldn’t face the prospect of that much pain a second time.’
Karen couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wasn’t banal. So she took another step forward and put an arm round Maggie’s tight shoulders.
‘How did he bear it?’ Maggie said softly. ‘How did he manage to carry that burden alone? Worse, how did I not notice? What kind of partner was I, not to see his pain?’
‘He chose not to let you see it, Maggie. And from the sounds of it, he was a man who knew his own mind. If you hadn’t been such a rock for him, he probably wouldn’t have got through it as well as he did.’ It wasn’t much of a consolation but it was better than nothing, Karen reckoned. Years of death knocks had made her proficient at ‘better than nothing’.
‘I can’t take it in,’ Maggie said. She patted Karen’s hand then slipped away from her, taking a last look around before she walked back to the car.
They set off in silence. A few kilometres down the road, Maggie said, ‘What were you going to say when I asked you to stop? You said you didn’t think Mitja was killed by a member of the family he killed. Why?’
‘For one thing, Begovic was quite clear that Mitja said there would be no survivors to carry it on. And it was a wedding. You take babies and little kids to weddings as a matter of course. To believe his theory, you’d have to believe that there was a kid who survived somehow and that whoever brought the kid up also knew enough about the massacre to provoke the kid into taking revenge. Now, if they cared that much, why wait all that time? Why not just deal with it long before?’
‘Because it would be the kid’s vendetta, not yours. That matters, believe it or not. And because this is a region that invented the notion that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. There’s a school of thought that says the whole 1991 Croatian war kicked off because the Serbs saw their chance to take revenge for what the Croats did to them fifty years before. Round here, they still argue about whether they were better off under the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottomans. Trust me, waiting sixteen years to get your own back is a blink of an eye for this lot.’ Maggie’s bitterness was evident; Karen couldn’t help thinking she was enjoying a freedom of speech that being away from the university allowed her.
‘OK. I’ll bow to your superior knowledge. But there’s something else that suggests to me that the general’s murder wasn’t a straightforward vendetta.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I had a visit earlier this week from a couple of government officials. The kind that don’t feel the need to explain exactly what they do or which department they really work for. Frankly, the kind you’d never tire of slapping. They showed up because my criminal records search for Dimitar Petrovic was flagged up on their system as being of interest.’ Karen flashed a quick look at Maggie to see how she was taking this unexpected turn in the conversation.
‘That’s not really surprising. He was attached to NATO and the UN during the nineties. He briefed Foreign Office officials on occasion. The security services obviously kept a watching brief,’ she said wearily.
‘That wasn’t why they were interested.’
‘What do you mean?’
Karen pulled a face. ‘I don’t know how to say this without making you furious. But I’m going to tell you anyway because I need all the help I can get to find the person who killed your man.’
‘I’m past fury, Karen. I haven’t got anything left today. My tank is empty.’
‘OK. The reason they wanted to know why I was interested in Mitja was that they thought he’d spent the last eight years operating as a kind of vigilante, hunting down war criminals and assassinating them.’
Maggie made a strange choking noise. Karen swiftly turned to check out that she was all right and was bewildered to see the professor was laughing.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ Maggie spluttered. ‘You have no idea how funny…’ She laughed again, almost a howl this time. There was nothing Karen could do but wait it out.
After a couple of minutes, Maggie recovered herself. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You must think I’m a madwoman. It just cracked me up, you coming out with that line so portentously. There’s no way you could know this, but Tessa’s been convinced of the very same thing for years now.’
‘Tessa? Your lawyer Tessa?’
‘Yes. She does a lot of work at The Hague for the international criminal court. She’s worked on Rwanda, Kosovo… And other stuff. Anyway, according to her, after Mitja went missing, people started gossiping that he was behind this vigilante justice thing. I never believed it because I didn’t think the man I knew was capable of such cold-blooded murder. But she said I was just being sentimental. What an irony.’ She laughed again, but this time it was harsh and bitter. ‘God, I wish she’d been right. Then at least he’d have still been alive.’
Karen sighed. ‘I’m sorry. Anyway, they were taken aback when I told them the reason I was looking for info on Mitja. But in the light of what we learned today, it seems likely to me that he was a victim of this vigilante killer. Maybe even the first victim.’
‘Oh God,’ Maggie groaned. ‘Today just goes on getting worse and worse. And presumably this killer was somebody he knew and trusted. Or else he’d never have gone climbing with them. I can’t imagine what his last thoughts must have been like. The sickening betrayal of it. Everything he’d done, everything he’d been, reduced to that terrible moment.’
Karen forbore from mentioning the last moments of the Serbian clan at their family wedding. In the light of that, it was hard to have much sympathy for Mitja Petrovic. The single act that now defined him in her head didn’t come into any category Karen recognised as heroism. But still, that didn’t mean his killer got a free pass. The status of the victim wasn’t supposed to have an impact on the hunt for their killer, in spite of the tendency of the media and even some cops to create a hierarchy of victimhood. It was a propensity that Karen deeply disapproved of. To her, the dead were equal when it came to dispensing justice. ‘I’m going to catch him,’ she said. ‘The person who did this. I’m going to make him stand trial.’
‘Won’t you have to hand it over to the spooks?’
Karen shook her head. ‘My house, my rules. He was killed in Scotland. It’s my case.’ She saw a roadside inn up ahead and pulled into the car park. ‘We need to eat. And I have something I want you to look at.’
The interior was plain – wooden tables, padded stools and benches; a long zinc counter with a couple of beer taps and a boxy coffee machine that might have been state-of-the-art in the seventies. It smelled of pipe tobacco, thanks to the two elderly men playing backgammon and smoking fiercely by the empty fireplace. They barely glanced up as the two women entered and looked uncertainly about them. A short woman with hair pulled back in a tight ponytail appeared behind the bar like a jack in the box. She said something Karen didn’t understand. Maggie replied and within a few sentences they were chatting like old friends. The exchange ended in smiles and nods and Maggie led Karen over to a table in the corner.
‘We’re having a bottle of the local Riesling, which is drier and fruitier than you’d expect. And a stew from whatever the landlord killed at the weekend. Probably rabbit and an assortment of game birds. With potatoes and bread,’ Maggie said. ‘There wasn’t a lot of choice.’
‘That’s fine by me.’
‘So what’s this thing you wanted to show me?’
Karen took out her phone and opened the list of names that Jason had sent her. ‘We’ve managed to track down the hotel Mitja had booked into in Edinburgh. We thought his climbing partner might be staying in the same place so we got hold of the list of fellow guests. None of them has an obviously foreign name.’ She sighed. ‘It’s never that straightforward. So we think either his companion was somebody he knew back then but wasn’t necessarily from there, or else they were using an alias. Obviously, if it’s an alias, chances are you’re not going to recognise that. But if it is someone else from back then – a Brit or an American or a Canadian – you might just spot them.’
Maggie looked sceptical. ‘It’s a long shot, don’t you think?’
‘It’s the only shot I’ve got right now.’ She offered the phone to Maggie. ‘You want to take a look?’
Maggie shrugged. ‘After today, what else have I got to lose?’ She reached for the phone and started to read the names. Her face was without expression as she scrolled down, shaking her head as she went. There was a moment where she blinked a few times in quick succession but she continued to shake her head. When she came to the end, she handed the phone back. ‘I’m sorry. None of those names mean anything to me.’
Karen had seen some good liars in her time. At that precise moment she’d have put Professor Maggie Blake in the top three.