The Skeleton Road (7 page)

B
y late afternoon, Macanespie and Proctor had worked their way through all eleven files. There were undoubtedly common factors over and above the ones Wilson Cagney had raised, as Macanespie pointed out, reluctantly acknowledging his boss might have had a point.

‘Every one of them thought they’d got away with it,’ he said. ‘They’d seen their cronies getting picked up and dragged up here to face trial. But they were all feeling pretty secure. They’d all changed their names and rewritten their histories. Most of them had cut loose from their families and their friends.’

‘Better to be alive than to have a life,’ Proctor muttered.

‘Oh, I think they mostly had a life. Just a different one from the one they started out with. Look at how they were living, for fuck’s sake.’ He pulled out one file. They’d numbered them because that was easier than trying to remember names and aliases. ‘Number six. Allegedly in charge of a rape camp outside Srebrenica. Estimates say between a hundred and a hundred and thirty women and girls were basically fucked to death by a succession of Serb soldiers. According to witnesses, number six enjoyed watching. And taking part himself on occasion, if the girls were young enough. He ordered the village elders to dig a grave pit ten feet deep. Then when he and his men had done with the women, they dumped them in the pit, put a layer of builders’ lime and soil over them, then added a layer of dead dogs and donkeys so that when the cadaver dogs went tonto, we’d dig down and find the dead animals and think that was all there was to it. And what happened to number six?’

Proctor cast his eyes heavenwards, summoning up the content of the file he’d read earlier that day. ‘Is he the one who ended up in Tenerife?’

‘No. He’s the one we tracked down working as a fitness instructor in Calgary. With the new young wife and the two daughters.’

Proctor winced. ‘Now I remember. Nice house in the suburbs, pillar of the local Serbian community.’

‘Who later claimed they had no fucking idea at all that he was one of the evil butchers of Kosovo.’ He threw the file down in disgust. Reading them one after the other this way had stirred a response that had sneaked up on him. In spite of himself, Macanespie was beginning to feel he’d like to track down this killer, if only to shake his hand. ‘So, as I said, all this lot had new identities. Here’s another thing. Not one of them was still in the Balkans, unless you count Greece. And the ones that were in Greece were all on islands well away from anywhere they might bump into anybody who knew what they’d done in their previous lives. Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete – you’re not going to find many Kosovar refugees wandering about the beaches there.’

‘It also means that whoever has been murdering them is more likely to have a clean run at it. If the guy on the run has chosen a bolthole where he’s unlikely to bump into any of his victims, chances are the assassin will be in the clear too.’

Macanespie frowned. ‘I’m not sure I agree with you on that one. I think we have to assume that the killer was never on the same team as his targets. So you’ve got number six hiding in plain sight among the Serbian community in Calgary. I’m betting some of them knew exactly who he was but they didn’t have a problem with sheltering him. However if the assassin is somebody who was around during the war years, they could be the very people who would recognise him.’

Proctor thought about it. ‘Good point. Of course, we can’t assume that our assassin was around then. It could be he was too young to have been involved. But he’s gone on this journey of revenge because of the damage the war did to his life. To his family, maybe. Or to his people, if you want to make a big patriotic thing of it.’

‘“Journey of revenge”,’ Macanespie said sarcastically. ‘You Welsh are the poets, right enough. So, we’ve got the new life. We’ve got living in exile. And we’ve also got the MO. They all had their throats cut from behind.’

‘That’s really up close and personal,’ Proctor said. ‘You’d need some nerve to do that.’

‘Which points us right back at General Dimitar Petrovic. Military training – hell, we trained him ourselves. And nerves of steel, by all accounts. He’s got an impressive record for an intelligence officer. Mostly they stay well out of the line of fire, but he was right in the thick of it more than once. He took “nobody left behind” very bloody seriously.’

Both men sat in silence for a moment, contemplating the files. ‘There’s only one thing that I struggle with,’ Proctor said at last, clicking his mouse and pulling up a set of personnel records.

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m looking at Dimitar Petrovic’s details here. He’s over six feet and he’s not a whiplash. The thing I have to ask myself is how he got close enough to these guys to slit their throats from behind.’

Macanespie shook his head. ‘Doesnae bother me. Just because he’s a big man doesnae mean he’s not light on his feet. My dad was twenty stone but he had fairy feet on a dance floor. He could sneak up on my mother when she was washing the dishes and nearly give her a heart attack. And look at the locations. He’s taken them all down at a time and place where he had them to himself. I think he’s staked them out over a period of time and worked out the vulnerable point where he could make his move with the best chance of success.’ He prodded the files, knocking them out of alignment again. ‘Look – a jogging trail. An underground parking garage. On the doorstep in a block of flats, twice. Inside the rear entrance to a dry cleaners. In a back alley, putting out the rubbish. In the guy’s own pool hut. Et cetera. He didn’t just leap out of the bushes like a fucking ninja. He planned this, every inch of the way.’

‘Petrovic, then? Are we agreed on that, at least?’

Macanespie sighed. ‘He’s the obvious choice. He disappeared off the radar just before the killing spree started. And every one of the victims was involved in atrocities that he had direct knowledge of. Either during the Croatian war, where he was directly involved as an active participant, running intelligence for the Croatian Army. Or during the Kosovo conflict when he was seconded to NATO. He was close to the international observers then – he saw a lot of shit first-hand, or else he heard about it from the poor bastards that survived. And his intel pinpointed some of the units directly involved in the atrocities.’

Macanespie tried to sound matter-of-fact, to hide from Proctor that this task was getting to him. His job had brought him into uncomfortable proximity with a wide range of the worst things human beings could do to one another. Over the years he’d learned to build a wall between the knowledge and the rest of his life. But occasionally an incident found a chink in his armour and inveigled its way into his nightmares. One of those had risen from those files to haunt him again.

A hill village in Kosovo. A group of Serbian soldiers with the red mist of conquest in their eyes. A round-up of all the males in the village. Supposedly you weren’t considered qualified to bear arms till you were fourteen, but the Serbs liked to err on the side of caution, so any boy who looked more than twelve was forced into the big barn on the edge of the village along with the others. Harsh commands backed up with rifle butts smashed into faces and bayonet slashes to arms and legs, and within half an hour, all the men were herded into the barn without even the respect paid to livestock. Because livestock were useful, after all.

Forty-six of them were pushed right back against the far wall, crowded into a small space, nostrils filled with the smell of other men’s fear. They knew what was coming but they tried to convince themselves this would be different from the horrors they’d heard about. Maybe what had filtered back to them had just been rumour, grown fat on people’s terror. Maybe their panic would be enough to send the Serbs on their way, laughing in derision at the pitiful Kosovars who couldn’t even control their bladders.

Seven soldiers filed into the barn, Kalashnikovs casually slung across their bodies. Then, on a word from their commander, a stocky shaven-headed man with surprisingly delicate features, they raised their guns and emptied their magazines into the bodies of the forty-six. A couple of the soldiers kicked the bodies aside when they had done, to make sure they were all dead. When they left, they set fire to the barn.

The only reason Alan Macanespie’s nights were disturbed by what had happened that afternoon was that there had been an unintended witness. One of the boys was not in fact dead. He’d been squeezed into the far corner of the barn. When the shooting started, he’d been flattened under the weight of bodies, briefly passing out in the crush. And so he’d appeared dead when the soldier’s boot crashed into his ribs. He’d come to as the flames were taking hold of the barn.

Somehow, in the smoke and the heat, he’d managed to crawl to a loading-bay door at the side of the barn and push it open far enough to tumble to the ground below, out of sight of the soldiers, who were laughing and drinking outside the barn. Dazed and wounded, the boy nevertheless managed to make it into the thick woodland behind the village. He lived to tell the tale. And he told it vividly, making it come alive as no official report could do. His words had lodged in Macanespie’s head. If he had shared Dimitar Petrovic’s visceral involvement with the Balkans, he’d have wanted to take the most primitive revenge possible on the evil thugs who had raped and murdered their way across his country.

Now, he forced the memory back in its box. ‘I can’t say I entirely blame him,’ he said.

‘They’re probably planning a hero’s welcome for him back home,’ Proctor said.

‘Even so, that’s not going to cut the mustard with Cagney. What we need to do now is draw up a list of everybody that had access to those files. From investigators down to the operational planners. We have to find some common denominators here.’ Macanespie looked glum. ‘That’s going to be a fucking nightmare shitstorm of trawling though files.’

‘Or we could take a short cut.’

‘How? We can’t farm it out. Nobody with that level of clearance is going to be daft enough to take it off our plates.’

Proctor shook his head. ‘That’s not what I meant, not at all. What does Cagney really want?’

‘The mole.’

‘That’s just a smokescreen. If we find the mole, that’s enough to earn Cagney a pat on the back. But the real glory? That’s not exposing some file clerk in ICTFY. The real glory is bringing Dimitar Petrovic to justice. That’s what’ll turn Cagney into a hero. The man who put justice first.’

Macanespie snorted. ‘Maybe so, Theo. But Petrovic is like the Scarlet fucking Pimpernel. How exactly do you think a pair of Foreign Office lawyers are going to bring him in?’

Proctor tapped the side of his nose. ‘Trust me, Alan. I’ve got one or two ideas on that score. Watch and learn, boyo. Watch and learn.’

Y
ou did this job for long enough, you learned the idiosyncrasies of the various sheriffs who were responsible for signing the warrants you needed to get the job done. In theory, Karen should have presented her case to a sheriff in Edinburgh. But that was still on the outer edges of her comfort zone. Much better to turn her charm on a Kirkcaldy sheriff that she already had a good working relationship with. And besides, if she pitched up at the local court first thing on Monday morning, she wouldn’t have to hang around the way she would in the capital. Even more importantly, she’d get an extra hour and a half in bed.

Karen had spent most of her working life in her native Fife but the creation of Police Scotland in 2013 had changed everything for her. The Cold Case Unit she’d been happily running from her office in Glenrothes had been amalgamated with those of other forces in a mash-up that skinned jobs down to the bone and shifted her workplace across the Forth Bridge to Edinburgh. Theoretically, she had more status – now she was in charge of a unit with national responsibilities. In reality, she was running a much bigger operation with almost the same amount of resources. The bosses called it ‘economies of scale’. But from where Karen sat, it meant doing a lot more with a lot less.

She’d lobbied to keep the job based in Fife, arguing that it was important to show people that the new national force wasn’t all about Edinburgh and Glasgow. She’d hastily backpedalled when her boss had suggested she might like to base herself at Gartcosh. That would have been a near-impossible commute. It was bad enough shuttling back and forth from Edinburgh in the rush hour. When she died and went to hell, it would be the approach road to the Forth Bridge in the rain and the dark of a cold December morning. The new, second crossing was billed as the magic panacea for commuters but she suspected it was going to be about as much use as the over-hyped, over-budget Edinburgh trams.

Karen had broached the subject of a move to Edinburgh. Or at least across the bridge. DC Jason Murray had already done just that, sharing a flat with three students, leading Karen to comment that it would take a gross of Mints to equal the joint IQ of his flatmates. But Phil, usually reasonable and willing to compromise, had dug his heels in. Living in Kirkcaldy was handy for his new job in Dunfermline; they’d only just finished doing up the house; Edinburgh house prices were outrageous; and he liked being able to walk to Raith Rovers home games so he could have a beer with his pals. It was the nearest they’d come to a serious falling-out, and it pissed Karen off that her priorities were so low down their collective totem pole. She loved Phil, but this nerve-shredding daily journey was doing her head in.

There was an obvious solution. She still owned her own house on the edge of the town. After she’d moved in with Phil, she’d rented it out, but she could easily serve notice to quit on her tenants. She’d have no trouble selling it and with the proceeds she could put down a decent deposit on a wee flat within walking distance of work. The only thing holding Karen back from that decision was the fear that it might mean the end of the road for her and Phil. He was the only man she’d ever lived with and part of her was afraid that if they split up, that would remain true. Besides, she loved him.

But that was in the future. Right now, she had to negotiate her way to a warrant that would force a bank to hand over information on one of its customers. She met the Mint off the Edinburgh train and together they walked through the Memorial Gardens and down to the familiar Scottish baronial-style turreted building that housed Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court. Karen sought out her favourite usher and checked who was on that morning’s bench. Relieved that the court seemed curmudgeon-free, Karen plumped for John Grieve. He always leaned towards the little guy, which didn’t always work to her advantage. But these days, getting one over on a bank definitely outranked putting the cops’ noses out of joint.

They were ushered into Sheriff Grieve’s room, a square box in the modern extension to the court. He looked up from his desk, peering over his half-moon glasses. With his bushy grey sideburns and wing collar, he resembled a man auditioning for a role in a Dickens TV adaptation. ‘DCI Pirie. And DC Murray. I thought you’d relocated to Edinburgh?’

‘Ach, we’re all one nation now, hadn’t you heard?’

His thin smile reminded her of a lipless lizard. ‘But which nation, Chief Inspector? That’s the question.’

‘We’ll all know the answer after the referendum, my lord.’ She laid the paperwork on the desk in front of him. ‘Right now, I’d settle for a warrant.’

He gave the application a quick once-over. ‘You’re looking for information from FCB?’ He chuckled. ‘Braver men than you have tried and failed.’

‘It’s not like I’m asking for anything that could compromise their business. Just a wee bit of minor inconvenience to help me with a murder inquiry.’ Karen stressed the word ‘murder’. Even with sheriffs who dealt in serious crime as a matter of course, it never hurt to remind them what was at stake.

Grieve smiled. ‘A day I can cause inconvenience to a banker is a day not wasted. After all, every one of us has to live constantly with the consequences of their cavalier attitude to our money. It’s really rather pleasant to have the chance to punch them in the metaphorical nose.’ A line appeared between his eyebrows as he read the warrant more carefully. She wasn’t worried. She’d made her case. Two minutes online had established which bank the sort code belonged to, and the specific branch. It was clear this was the primary lead on a murder. ‘And besides, this does seem to be an eminently plausible reason to seek their assistance. We do owe the dead a debt, I think.’ He uncapped an old-fashioned fountain pen and signed with a flourish. ‘There you go. Good luck with that, Chief Inspector. Any problems with the execution, don’t hesitate to come back to me.’

And she was off. ‘I have no problem with executing this lot,’ Karen muttered under her breath as she drove off towards the head office of the Forth and Clyde Bank. The bank occupied a quartet of black glass pyramids that slouched ominously by the point where the road from the Forth Bridge divided into two dual carriageways, one heading for Glasgow, the other for Edinburgh. When the grand new complex had been unveiled in 2007, just before the banks drove capitalism to the brink of collapse, the chief executive of the FCB had said, ‘This site is a metaphor for the new dynamism of Scotland. We are based in neither of our great cities, but we look towards both. We are about synergy and energy. We are the future.’

Unfortunately, the future hadn’t worked out quite as he’d imagined. When the banks hit the buffers following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, it soon became clear that FCB had abandoned the canny fiscal conservatism of its founding fathers. Along with many other apparently sound institutions, FCB had turned its solid foundations into Swiss cheese by inventing increasingly Byzantine ways to chase an illusory dime. And like many of those other institutions, it was deemed too big to fail.

Since the UK’s taxpayers now owned 69 per cent of FCB, Karen thought she and Phil should have the right to set up their portable Hibachi on one of the billiard table lawns or Italian marble courtyards and enjoy a picnic with the bank’s enviable views of the Pentland Hills to the south and the Ochils to the north. She snorted with sardonic laughter at the notion. For a start, they’d have to get past guards and gates that wouldn’t have been out of place in a medium-security prison. If she hadn’t phoned ahead to discover the name of the appropriate executive and then insisted on an appointment that morning, she’d have had no chance at penetrating the complex. Not even her police ID would have got her past the hard-faced behemoths in the gatehouse.

As it was, their photo ID was scrutinised and copied. Karen’s car registration plate was photographed, her appointment checked by phone and then finally they were allowed to enter.

The smoked glass that separated FCB’s offices from the outside world gave the interior a strange ambience. It was like being in a Hollywood movie where the colour register was slightly off. The effect was not so much futuristic as disconcerting. Gordon Fitzgerald, who rejoiced in the title of Head of External Compliance, was waiting for her as she arrived at the black granite reception desk. She’d expected the sort of tailoring that looked like it had cost as much as Phil’s entire wardrobe, including his exhaustive collection of Raith Rovers shirts. But what she got was high street off-the-peg that wasn’t any more of a statement than the Mint usually managed.

He thrust a hand out towards her. ‘DCI Pirie, lovely to meet.’ He gave the Mint a cursory nod. ‘Constable. Call me Fitz, everybody does.’
Dream on
, she thought. ‘Hope you were impressed with our security.’

‘Anybody would think you had something worth robbing,’ she said, dead-pan, taking his practised hand in hers. Warm, dry, firm but not challenging. Karen would have bet he’d learned it on a training course.

He laughed, a high nervy whinny. ‘Well, we are a bank.’

‘Aye, even if you don’t have any real money on the premises.’

‘It’s not about protecting money, the security. It’s because of the personal threats against individuals here at the bank after the financial crisis. Feelings ran high, as I’m sure you’ll remember. We do have your colleagues to thank for protecting us so effectively.’

Karen sometimes wondered heretically why they’d bothered. It didn’t happen often, but every now and again, it felt like mob rule maybe had a bit more decency at its root than what the ranters were reacting against. But she was a polis; she had a duty of care to members of the public. Bankers and wankers, junkies and jakies, the theory of policing said they were all equal before the thin blue line.

As if.

‘And now you have the chance to reciprocate. Can we go some place a wee bit less public?’ Karen gestured at the foyer. It was hardly a bustling hub of activity, but she wanted to assert herself from the word go. ‘Ideally somewhere with a computer terminal so you can access account information.’

He looked affronted, as if she had suggested inappropriate sexual contact. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he stalled. ‘But for now, we’ll use one of our meeting rooms.’ He led the way across the atrium and opened a door into a small but elegantly furnished room.

Interesting, Karen thought. She wasn’t being allowed inside the bank itself. This was little more than an ante-room to the real heart of business at FCB. Still, it would do for a start. She moved straight into one of the executive leather chairs that surrounded the round table at the centre of the room. The Mint hovered by the door and Karen didn’t wait for Gordon Fitzgerald to settle himself before she launched into her spiel. ‘I’m investigating a murder,’ she said. ‘I have a significant lead which consists of a sort code and the first five digits of an account number. I need you to match them up for me with a customer.’

Fitzgerald gave her his thin smile again. ‘We do have a duty of confidentiality, Detective. We can’t just hand over the details of hundreds of customers on your say-so.’

Karen smiled. ‘Come on now, Fitz. We both know we’re not talking hundreds of customers. It’s not like a particular branch has a block of account numbers that they hand out in order. Account numbers are assigned centrally, non-sequentially. So of the nine hundred and ninety-nine possible customers with the same first five digits, the chances are that only a very few will share the same branch sort code. I’m right about that, am I not?’

‘You are. But that doesn’t change the basic position. Client confidentiality, Detective. That’s paramount here.’

Karen opened her bag. ‘Very commendable. But I have something here that trumps your client confidentiality. Did you really think I’d come here asking for personal details of a bank account without a warrant?’ She placed the signed warrant on the table.

He picked it up as if it were toxic. ‘I’m going to have to run this past our legal eagles.’

‘It’s a warrant, Fitz. If you don’t cooperate, you’ll be in front of a sheriff this afternoon for contempt. In Kirkcaldy, to add insult to injury. Look, I’m not asking for the moon here. I can even narrow it down further for you. The man whose murder I’m investigating has been dead for at least five years. So I’m guessing that account hasn’t seen much action lately.’

He got to his feet. ‘I need to go and talk to somebody,’ he said.

Karen made a show of taking out her phone and setting the timer. She held it up to face Fitzgerald. ‘You’ve got half an hour. Then I’m phoning the sheriff’s officer.’

The glossy surface of his composure slipped for a moment, then he gathered himself. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’ He left the room faster than he’d entered it.

The Mint sat down opposite her. ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you, boss?’

She grinned. ‘Was it that obvious?’

‘I think he got the message. So, will they come across?’

‘We’ll see. Now, do your maths homework or play Candy Crush
or something useful while I check my email.’

The timer on Karen’s phone told her that twenty-seven minutes had elapsed when the door opened again. It wasn’t Gordon Fitzgerald who came in. It was a woman in her mid-forties dressed in an anonymous black suit and discreetly striped shirt. She carried a slim manila folder and introduced herself as she made for the chair between Karen and the Mint. ‘I’m Gemma Mackay,’ she said briskly. ‘I work for the bank’s legal department. I’ve read through your warrant and it all seems to be in order. We’ve taken a look at accounts held at that branch and there is only one that fits the partial number you supplied us with.’

‘Which makes everybody’s job easier,’ Karen said.

‘Indeed. However, you told my colleague that you anticipated the account in question would be dormant. Is that right?’

‘We think the account holder may be a murder victim. So yes, that’s what we anticipated.’

Gemma nodded. ‘Well, in a sense, you’re right. But in another sense, you couldn’t be more wrong.’