The Skeleton Road

by Val McDermid

  ‘And how else is it going to change if we don’t impose a higher expectation on them? You think there isn’t a new generation of young people in the Balkans who want things to be different? Who look at the world through the prism of Facebook and Twitter and see another way of living? Who are fed up with the old way of doing geopolitics in their back yard?’

  Another look exchanged. Macanespie’s shoulders slumped, confronted yet again by the ignorance of a suit from London who didn’t have a clue how this world worked. ‘Maybe. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with us.’

  Cagney compressed his lips into a thin exasperated line. ‘The killing has to stop. These assassinations – because that’s what they are, let’s not glorify them with words like “rough justice” – they’ve got to be history.’

  ‘I take your point,’ Macanespie said. ‘But why is that our problem? We didn’t do the killing or commission it. Not even behind our hands.’

  ‘Because what they all have in common is that every one of those assassinations was a case where we had a key front-line involvement. We, us, this office. We’re the common denominator. Either somebody on our team thinks they’re channelling Charles Bronson or there’s a mole leaking the product of our investigations to a third party who’s got his own programme of Balkan cleansing going on.’

  Proctor was visibly shaken and Macanespie suspected he was too. He’d never put it together quite like that. They exchanged another look, this time aghast. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Macanespie hissed under his breath.

  ‘Like he said. We’re not killers,’ Proctor said, indignant.

  Cagney allowed a smile to twitch one corner of his mouth. ‘Now that I’ve met you, I’d have to agree. But somebody is. And I’m making it your job to find who.’ He pushed back from the table and stood up.

  ‘We’re lawyers, not detectives,’ Macanespie said.

  ‘You might have been lawyers once. But these past few years, you’ve been hunting dogs, triangulating the whereabouts of a bunch of butchers. This is your last assignment. Find the avenger. You can make a start first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday,’ Macanespie protested.

  ‘You sound like a shopkeeper.’ Cagney’s contempt was obvious. ‘The sooner you get started, the sooner you can deliver. Then maybe you’ll have a career to come home to.’

  5

  Maggie Blake went to pull the heavy drapes across the window of her sitting room. Catching sight of the full moon, she paused, looking out over the silvered rooftops towards the dreaming spires of central Oxford. St Scholastica’s College was far enough out to feel a little aloof from the hurly-burly of the tourist-trap heart of the city, but from her suite of rooms on the third floor of Magnusson Hall she looked over gleaming slates punctuated by chimney pots, across the blank space of the University Parks towards Keble, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and beyond that, slivers of the crenellations, towers and stone facades of a variety of college and university buildings. She was one of the few remaining fellows of the college who lived within its walls and she was grateful for the privilege. It freed up more of her income to travel for pleasure, not purely at the dictates of her research grants. And she loved the view from this room, where she read and wrote and met the handful of postgraduate students she supervised.

  Because this had been a day shot through with memories, she recalled the first time she had brought Mitja to her rooms. They’d both been war-weary, sleep-deprived and aching from two days in the back of a truck that had dropped them off on the Banbury Road in the small hours. The college had been still, only a couple of lights burning in student rooms. The bathetic quacking of a mallard duck had disturbed the peace as Maggie had fumbled her key into the front-door lock of Magnusson Hall, and Mitja had chuckled. ‘Dinner,’ he said softly.

  They’d climbed the stairs slowly. Maggie remembered the straps of her rucksack biting into the tender places on her shoulders and the tremble in her quads as she’d headed up the final flight.

  And then they were in her sitting room, and the moonlight bathed the panoramic skyline. Mitja dropped his bag like a sack of stones and made for the windows as if drawn by a tractor beam. He leaned his forehead against the glass and groaned. ‘Do you remember when Dubrovnik was as beautiful as this?’

  She wriggled out of her rucksack straps and crossed the room, wrapping her arms around him, leaning round his shoulder to see a little of the view she’d missed. ‘I remember. The first time I saw the city at night, I thought it was like something from a fairy tale. The city walls. The grid of streets. The bulk of the cathedral like a treasure chest. The harbour glittering in the moonlight. The floodlights at Fort St Ivan reflected like columns in the water.’

  ‘And now it’s rubble. It’s ruins.’ He straightened up and pulled her round to his side, drawing her close with an arm tight across her back. ‘I don’t understand why my people never grow up. You English —’

  She dug an elbow in his ribs. ‘Scottish, remember?’

  He shook his head, impatient. ‘You see, you may be as bad as we are.’ There was indulgence in his tone, but weariness too. ‘OK, then. Those English had a civil war. But they got over it. You don’t have cavaliers and Cromwell’s men still hating each other and killing each other. They had their wars of roses as well, those English, but people from Yorkshire and Lancashire don’t fight in the streets.’

  ‘Only over football, I believe.’ Maggie couldn’t help being facetious; being back in Oxford was filling her with deep joy, like a reservoir recovering from a long drought.

  ‘I am serious.’

  ‘I know you are. But it’s late and I am beyond tired. I have whisky. Shall we take a glass to bed?’

  This time, he laughed. ‘You know exactly how to make things better.’

  They had taken the bottle to bed, but hadn’t got past that first glass. The unfamiliar combination of warmth, comfort and the absence of fear made them easy prey for sleep, and not even the desire that sprang constantly between them could keep it at bay.

  That night had been the start of a new phase in their relationship. Like every other phase, it had been complicated, tumultuous and glorious. No life plan Maggie had ever concocted had included anyone like Mitja. But then, it hadn’t included underground universities or civil wars either.

  Leaving the curtains open, Maggie sat down at her desk, deliberately angled at forty-five degrees to the window so she had to turn her head to get the full benefit of the view. She should be heading for bed. It had been a long and stressful day, the unwelcome party shading into an unwanted dinner for twenty, and she was physically tired. And yet her mind was still busy, jumping restlessly from one encounter to another, and always coming back to the one who wasn’t there.

  Without thinking about it, she ran her fingers over the touch pad and wakened her Mac. Maybe it was just the wine talking, but what if it was time to give in to the nagging voice at the back of her mind that kept suggesting she needed to write about her time in the Balkans? She’d addressed it professionally, of course. Balkan Geopolitics: An Archaeological Approach had become the standard textbook on the region. And the reader she’d edited that had dissected the media responses to the conflict had attracted mainstream attention on radio and TV as well as print. Maggie had written about the consequences of the siege of Dubrovnik. But she’d never written about what it had been like to live through it. She’d never told the story of how she came to be there, nor of the convoluted journey that had led her to Kosovo with its massacres and rape camps.

  At first she’d shied away from telling that story because it was too fresh. Maggie wanted more distance from those traumatic events so she could set them in context. Then she’d held back because she couldn’t write a narrative without placing Mitja front and centre, and she was living with him in Oxford by then. She knew he wouldn’t approve of or agree with everything she had to say about those years shuttling back and forth between her life in Oxford and her life in a war zone. And she didn’t want to
sow discord between them.

  And finally, she’d kept her silence because he was gone and she couldn’t let go the hope that he’d come back. To make public things he’d be unhappy to read felt like too big a risk.

  But the years had drifted past and there had been no word from Mitja. Not so much as a birthday greeting or a Christmas card. Nothing to acknowledge what they had been to each other. Just silence. A silence more profound than she’d ever known in the Balkans. ‘There’s nothing silent here,’ he’d once said to her. ‘Everything speaks, if you only know how to listen.’ Well, this silence wasn’t speaking, that was for sure. And there was no valid reason now for Maggie to hold her tongue. Even if she decided not to publish, there would be a satisfaction in setting things down. A chance to revisit her history and perhaps find a different angle, a new truth.

  Even if she didn’t know how the story ended.

  6

  Karen drove slowly down the late-night back street, not wanting to disturb the neighbours. The houses here were homes to the kind of families that didn’t have wild weekend parties. Steady, middle-class lives behind solid respectable facades. More often than not, there was barely a light showing if she came home after eleven. Her job had made her sceptical about what really went on behind those smartly painted front doors, but as far as she was aware, none of their neighbours had so much as an outstanding parking ticket. It was entirely different from the rackety street where she’d grown up, with its loud evenings and shouting matches on the pavement, the drunken midnight fights and singing. Loving Phil Parhatka had altered her life in more ways than she could have imagined.

  For years they’d worked together in the former Cold Case Unit in Fife, adapting to new technologies, learning how to read between the lines of old case reports, winkling the truth out of its defensive shell. She’d always been one step above him on the ladder of rank, but they’d never let that stand in the way of being mates. They had each other’s back, and there had been times when she’d felt he was the only one on her side. They’d been a team and their success rate proved the value of that.

  For her part, she’d known early on she was fighting against feelings that ran much deeper than friendship. She fancied him, she fantasised about him and she hated herself for risking their working relationship with her schoolgirl longings. When he was kind, she told herself he’d treat the Mint – or even a pet dog – with the same consideration.

  And then it had all changed. Right in the thick of their toughest case, she’d discovered he felt the same way. Within weeks she’d moved out of her identikit box on a soulless modern development and into Phil’s late Victorian villa, a house that had been restored to within an inch of its life by his sister-in-law, an ardent architectural historian who had watched too many TV makeover shows. Karen still couldn’t quite believe she’d escaped into so much respectability.

  Sometimes she was tempted not to turn into the gravel drive between the voluptuous herbaceous borders, to keep on driving to the end of the street and beyond, back to where she wouldn’t be found out for the fraud she feared she might be.

  But not tonight. Tonight, she led the way into the stone-built semi like a woman who belonged. The house was silent and dark, save for a dim glow from the rear. ‘Phil home?’ River asked, her boot heels clattering on the encaustic Victorian tiling. ‘Or is it just cop instinct always to leave a light on?’

  ‘He’s away on a course this weekend. Something about developing collateral offences.’ Karen switched on lights as they went through to the kitchen at the back of the house. It was the only room where Phil had managed to stem the tide of his sister-in-law’s fantasy. When Karen had moved in, it had been a seventies relic. Now it was all stainless steel and wood, surfaces littered with appliances and general clutter; a proper kitchen where meals were made and people sat around talking to each other.

  ‘What does that mean?’ River collapsed into a kitchen chair, looking grateful for the break. Her dark hair was uncharacteristically loose and wild, forming a chaotic halo round her head, and her big grey eyes had blue shadows underneath them. She’d always been slim; now she was tending towards skinny, her veteran waxed jacket taking on new vertical creases where there was no longer flesh to fill it. Her jeans were unusually loose on her, the denim pooling at her knees and inner thighs.

  ‘I know I was dubious about him leaving cold cases just because we’re together, but he’s really got stuck in to this Murder Prevention Team. Apparently, there’s been some research that indicates that men who are violent abusers tend towards petty criminality in other areas of their lives. Like, they don’t pay their TV licence, they drive their cars without insurance, they run red lights, they shoplift. The kind of shit people do to prove to themselves they’re not just another brick in the wall.’ Karen pulled a bottle of Aussie red out of the wine rack and unscrewed the cap. ‘So Phil’s team is developing this strategy where they try to take the abusive partners out of reach of the victims by putting them under the microscope and hitting them with every little infringement. Sometimes they get enough to put the bastard behind bars. Other times, they just harass the bastards to the point where it’s easier to walk away and go and live somewhere else.’

  ‘Isn’t that simply shifting the problem somewhere else?’ River picked up the glass that Karen had poured for her. She sniffed it, sipped it then nodded once. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yeah. But hopefully somewhere that also has the same policies in place. The idea is that they eventually get the message that abusing their partners means they’ll be abused themselves in a slightly different but very uncomfortable way. Plus sometimes the team gets enough to put them behind bars, which means they’re right out of the equation in a way that spares the victim having to give evidence about what he did to her.’

  ‘And does it work?’

  Karen shrugged. ‘Phil thinks it saves lives.’ She took a large bag of salty-and-sweet popcorn out of the cupboard and tipped it into a bowl. ‘But more to the point: tell me about my skeleton.’ Once they’d bagged and tagged the remains, River had taken them to the mortuary. Karen had left her to it. In her experience, people got on better with the things they were best at if you left them to it. Looking over their shoulders never improved the quality of the work. While the forensic scientist had examined the body, Karen had focused on the recent history of the John Drummond, trying to establish who had had access and when. It would have been a thankless task at any time, she suspected, but on a Saturday afternoon and evening, it was damn close to impossible. All she’d been able to establish were denials. Nobody had made regular use of any part of the building for a dozen years, not since a charity involved in organising outdoor adventure training for deprived inner-city teenagers had moved out. Nobody had squatted the building. Nobody from the security company nominally charged with its preservation from harm would admit to having ever climbed the stairs. Nobody associated with the school back in the mists of time had been reported missing. Most importantly, her quest to find anyone who knew anything about free-climbing the John Drummond had gone cold. Fraser Jardine’s pal had his phone turned off and until he got back to them, that tantalising line of inquiry was going nowhere. All those negatives. Now she was gagging for something positive.

  River crunched a mouthful of popcorn to annihilation. ‘It’s a male. And he died from a small-calibre gunshot wound to his forehead. Beyond that, much of what I can tell you is best-guess at this point. I’d guess he was murdered because of the site of the entry wound.’ She pointed to a spot above her right eyebrow. ‘I’ve never seen a suicide shoot himself there. The temple. The roof of the mouth. Once, right between the eyes. But never way off centre like this.’

  Karen nodded, stuffing popcorn in her mouth. ‘Mmm. Thought as much.’

  ‘Plus there’s no sign of a bullet. But that doesn’t necessarily mean someone removed it. There are signs of rodent and bird activity on the bones and around the body.’

  ‘So a squirrel or a magpie could have
carried off a bullet and dropped it elsewhere?’

  ‘Easily. As far as ID is concerned, I’d say he was somewhere between forty and fifty when he was killed. His dental work is interesting. There’s a couple of crowns, pretty expensive gold and porcelain work, probably done in the two or three years before he died. And probably in this country. But there’s other stuff, older stuff. I’ve seen work like that in bodies from the west end of the old Eastern bloc. Ukraine, Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, that neck of the woods.’

  ‘So you think he’d come from there but he was living here?’

  ‘Looks that way. Unless he was some sort of deep undercover agent. That’s not the sort of place you’d choose to have your teeth fixed if you had a choice. Not back then.’

  ‘Back when?’

  River considered, swirling the wine in her glass. ‘I’d say he’s been dead between five and ten years. It’s hard to be precise, there’s too many variables. His clothing has decomposed, which means natural fabrics. We did find a few fibres under his body. I’d say he was probably wearing cotton underwear, cotton chinos rather than jeans – no rivets – and a shirt that was a mix of cotton and linen. Woollen socks and what looks like some kind of grippy climbing shoe. Most of the material has rotted or been scavenged by rodents or birds for nesting, but the rubber trim and soles are pretty much intact. There are a few bits of wool still between the sole and the bones of the foot.’

  ‘The shoes make sense. We’ve got a witness who says there are mad bastards who free-climb the outside of buildings like the John Drummond. That offers an explanation of how he got up there without having to come through the building and reach the skylight without a ladder. Because there’s no sign of a ladder anywhere.’

  River took another handful of popcorn. ‘People never cease to amaze me. Why would you want to climb up a building when there’s a perfectly good staircase inside? I get the point of going up a mountain. The challenge, the relationship to nature. The views, for God’s sake. But buildings? That’s just weird.’