The Skeleton Road (8 page)

T
heo Proctor fussily double-checked the preparations for the Skype call. ‘I still think you should talk to her,’ he said. ‘You know her better than I do.’

Macanespie pulled a face. ‘She’s not going to give anything up to the likes of me. Tessa Minogue has too good a conceit of herself for that.’

‘But you worked alongside her for a couple of years. You’ve got common ground.’

‘The key word in that sentence is “common”. Tessa thinks she’s a cut above the likes of me. She thinks I’m a pig. And it’s not like we always saw eye to eye. She’s a human rights lawyer, not a criminal advocate. So she was forever shouting her mouth off about the rights of the accused versus the rights of the victims, whereas we had to stick within the parameters of the law. She was all about what was right, and there were times when I thought she was completely off the wall. I was all about what was achievable. She once told me that legalistic bastards like me were the last hiding place of men like Radovan Karadzic.’

Proctor winced. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

‘Aye. Especially since Karadzic’s lawyer was in the middle of arguing that he wasn’t getting his human rights. Just like all the bleeding heart human rights lawyers. Black and white. But able to change sides in a heartbeat.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes. Anything you’re not sure about?’

Proctor ran through everything in his head. Tessa Minogue had been his idea, but he’d expected Macanespie to do the actual talking. He knew quite a lot about Minogue, but he couldn’t have said how he knew all of it. Over the years in a tight community like that surrounding the ICTFY, knowledge percolated through, apparently by osmosis.

So, he knew that Minogue had first been in the Balkans during the Croatian war. She’d been a post-graduate researcher in international law at the time and, although her research had to do with the rule of law in the midst of a wider conflict, she’d been co-opted by Maggie Blake in the campaign to restore the shattered Old Town of Dubrovnik. Presumably that had been when she first met Petrovic, who had been running the Croatian Army’s intelligence operation in the area.

But the end of the siege of Dubrovnik was only the end of the beginning of the long conflict in the region, a conflict whose heart Petrovic was somehow always close to. When the fighting spilled over into Bosnia-Hercegovina, with Karadzic and Milosevic forming an unholy alliance against the Croats and the Muslims, Petrovic was the man who always appeared to have his finger on the pulse of the action. He seemingly had contacts everywhere; sometimes in the least likely places. His intelligence background made him useful not only to the Croatians but also to a wider coalition of concerned parties. Before long, Sarajevo was under siege, experiencing constant bombardments and terrible privations that made Dubrovnik look like a tech rehearsal. Sarajevo endured almost four years of hell, provoking despair in everyone who had anything to with its defence and survival. And through it all, like a thread in a tapestry, was Dimitar Petrovic. He moved apparently seamlessly between the Croats and the international observers, offering intelligence to NATO commanders and his own generals alike.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Tessa Minogue was doing service as an international observer and a provider of legal advice to the EU and NATO forces who were trying to damp down the appalling rise of barbarism in the region. The more stories emerged of atrocities, massacres and gang-rapes, the more vital it became that there should be some record of what was happening. Tessa and her colleagues made it their mission to provide witness, to gather testimony and to work towards some kind of long-term legal recourse.

Also in the middle of it all was Maggie Blake. She’d somehow managed to turn the conflict into a rich seam of academic product – research papers, conference lectures, individual chapters and then whole books on the geopolitics of the Balkan wars. Whenever she could be away from Oxford, she was somewhere in that battleground, interviewing anyone who would talk to her, watching and listening to every detail of what was going on around her, apparently unafraid of the bombs and the snipers and the marauding soldiers of all sides.

At first, Macanespie and his colleagues had thought the places where Maggie turned up were pretty random. And then Tessa Minogue had let slip that it was more than academic kudos that drew Maggie to the Balkans. Macanespie had seen the note on the file, scribbled on a yellowing page from a Banja Luka hotel notepad:

On a couple of occasions, Petrovic had turned up in the UK, always with solid military or diplomatic reasons. Both times he’d vanished off the official radar for a few days; both times Tessa had mentioned in passing to colleagues that he was staying with Maggie Blake in Oxford. Then after the Dayton Agreement in 1995, Petrovic had surfaced in Oxford. He’d spent six months living with Maggie, but when the Kosovo Liberation Army organised itself and started fighting back against Milosevic’s campaign of violence and property sequestration in Kosovo, he’d returned to the war zone, this time as an accredited NATO observer.

Frankly, Proctor thought, it was hard to imagine anything worse than being one of the impartial witnesses to the brutality and barbarism of those dying years of the twentieth century in that corner of the Balkans. The Second World War was supposed to have put an end to that sort of savagery in Europe; Kosovo had been the worst kind of wake-up call to remind everyone how thin was the skin of civilised behaviour.

Preparing the witness statements for the court hearings was bad enough for Macanespie and his colleagues. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it would do to a man’s soul to experience these situations at first-hand. Petrovic had done all that, and more. As a colonel in the Croatian Army, he must have been involved in some of the strategic planning that had ended so badly. He’d seen so much destruction; so many lives lost, homes destroyed, people stripped of the future they’d planned. Really, it was no wonder that something inside him had snapped.

The team at ICTFY had been committed to delivering justice, partly so there could be some form of truth and reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia. But inevitably, bureaucracy and the interminable wrangling of lawyers had ensnared that purity of purpose and what they’d ended up with had been a shadow of what they’d hoped for. For men like Dimitar Petrovic, the frustration must have been beyond bearing. Macanespie had heard that three of the Balkan countries – Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia – had suicide rates that put them in the world’s top twenty. Faced with that level of despair it was little wonder that a man with the wherewithal to take the law into his own hands should do so. Left to their own devices, Macanespie knew he and Proctor wouldn’t have found it in their hearts to do anything about Petrovic’s personal crusade.

But they hadn’t been left to their own devices. Wilson Cagney, a man personally untouched and unmoved by what had happened in the Balkans in the last decade of the twentieth century, had decreed that vengeance outwith the confines of the law was not going to be tolerated.

Before Macanespie could pursue that thought further, the laptop trilled, signalling that Tessa Minogue was on the line and ready for the call. Moving with unexpected speed, he scooted round the desk so he was in Proctor’s line of sight and able to see the screen but invisible to the laptop’s camera. He readied a pile of paper and a Sharpie so he could write notes to his colleague if necessary.

Proctor set the recording system running then picked up the call. As always with Skype, the skin tones were like nothing found in nature and a face he knew to be attractive was distorted like the reflection in a fairground mirror. ‘Hello, Tessa,’ he said, giving her the closest he could manage to a welcoming smile. ‘Thanks for agreeing to talk to me.’

‘It’s always a pleasure talking to you boys at the tribunal, Theo. We’re all after the same things, are we not?’

Already Macanespie felt she’d wrong-footed them. There was often an uncomfortable gap between what the human rights lawyers wanted and what the tribunal officials were willing or able to give. They all had bitter experience of that, and the morally ambivalent horse-trading that went on as a result.

‘I don’t have to tell you we’re in the process of winding things up,’ Proctor said.

‘Like I could forget. It’s a tough call, Theo. There comes a point where so much time has gone by that arguably your witness testimony is tainted by repetition and coloured by reportage. It’s an irony that we take such care of the human rights of people who had no regard for the rights of their victims. But I do get where you’re coming from and I can’t honestly take up arms against you.’

‘That’s very generous of you, Tessa. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. We’ve got a few cases that we’re still proceeding with. Karadzic, Mladic and a couple of others. We’re in the last stages of trying to make sure the cases are watertight and I’ve got the thankless task of tracking down one or two outstanding witnesses that we think can supply us with reliable testimony.’

‘Good luck with that one,’ she said, her grin arriving on his screen as a pixelated grimace. ‘So many ended up scattered to the four winds. And who can blame them?’

‘One of the people we’re trying to pinpoint is an old friend of yours. General Petrovic of the Croatian Army. Dimitar Petrovic.’

Tessa pushed her long black hair behind one ear. ‘Mitja? God, there’s a name from the past. I haven’t seen Mitja in, what? Eight years? He was living with Maggie Blake in Oxford. Then he walked out on her.’

‘What happened to make him go?’

Tessa shrugged. ‘Who knows why a man does anything? Why this interest in Mitja now, though?’

Proctor smiled. ‘You know how it is. He’s always been on our list but there were always more pressing names to talk to. He just slipped through the net. And now, we’re struggling, to be honest. Do you know where he went after he left Professor Blake?’

‘Ah, you know she’s got a chair now. Obviously somebody’s keeping closer tabs on Maggie than on Mitja.’

Proctor’s eyes widened, then Macanespie held up a sheet of paper with ‘Publications’ scrawled across it. ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Proctor said. ‘It’s more to do with the fact that she keeps writing about the Balkans and we see her publications.’

‘If you say so, Theo.’

‘So, going back to my question… Have you been in touch with General Petrovic since he left Maggie Blake? And do you know where he is?’

‘That’s two questions, Theo. To which the answers are, “no”, and “not exactly”.’

Macanespie’s head popped up, his expression eager. He gave Proctor a thumbs-up. Proctor seemed unconvinced that it was justified. ‘”Not exactly”? How inexactly are we talking here?’

‘I don’t know anything for sure. But I always thought Mitja would go back to Croatia. He loved his country, Theo. He really missed it.’ She sighed. ‘He never talked much about his life before the war, which made me wonder what it was he’d left behind. Wife, probably. Kids, maybe. Extended family for sure. He grew up in the east. He once said Vukovar had been his nearest decent-sized town growing up.’ She spread her hands in a gesture of futility. ‘That’s all I know. He was always very good at deflecting questions about his past. But then, none of us was talking much about our history during the war. We were all too busy making sure we had a future. When there are bombs falling all around you, you’re completely focused on the here and now.’

‘So you think he went home?’

‘Don’t you? Back to the arms of his family. Back to the people who would heal him. I often wondered whether he was nursing a case of PTSD, you know. There were times when he seemed to absent himself from the company. He’d just shut down. He was in the room, he was at the table, but he wasn’t present, if you know what I mean?’

‘I’ve seen what you’re talking about. And that’s why he left Maggie? Because he was homesick? After six or seven years living quite happily with her in Oxford, he just upped sticks and went back to Croatia?’ Proctor couldn’t help sounding incredulous.

Tessa sighed. ‘It’s not so fanciful a notion, Theo. He didn’t have much of an identity over here. He did a bit of lecturing – war and peace studies, that sort of thing. The occasional bit of security consultancy when one of his old NATO mates tossed him a bone. But Maggie had become the star. Ironic for him, a man who was right at the heart of that whole series of wars, that the person with the opinions that counted was his girlfriend. Who was only there in the first place because she
was
his girlfriend. I can see how that would be hard to accommodate in the long term, can’t you?’

‘But back in Croatia, he’d still be the big man, is that what you’re saying?’

She gave a rueful smile. ‘I’d have thought so, wouldn’t you? He was one of their unequivocal war heroes.’

‘It’s a reasonable assumption. But if that’s the case, it’s hard to believe he hasn’t shown up on our radar. Ever since the tribunal was set up, we’ve had teams on the ground, looking for leads into the whereabouts of alleged war criminals. And witnesses, obviously. But not once have we had a whisper that Petrovic is on the patch.’

Tessa pushed her hair behind her ear again. Was that a tell? Was it her involuntary reaction to a question that made her uneasy? Or just a play for time? ‘I don’t know what to say to that, Theo. It’s possible people are shielding him? You know how clannish they can be over there. If he’s made it clear that he’s done with all that, I could imagine a little village in the mountains closing ranks and keeping him under wraps. Karadzic was living in Belgrade for years when he was one of the most wanted men in the world. Supposedly going to Serie A football matches over in Italy, for heaven’s sake. If they can protect a monster like him, they’re not going to think twice about helping a hero like Mitja to live under the radar.’