The Skeleton Road

by Val McDermid

  He waved them towards a baggy leather sofa that looked as if it had originally been expensive but had been serially maltreated. Laurie himself slumped into a matching armchair that faced a vast plasma TV where a fireplace had once stood. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s this serious matter?’ He didn’t look or sound convinced.

  ‘I’ll get to that in due course,’ Karen said. ‘I wanted to talk to you about something you said to Fraser Jardine.’

  Laurie scratched his armpit and yawned. ‘Fraser? What did I say to Fraser?’

  ‘When he said he was going to the John Drummond School building, one of your mutual pals asked if he was going up from the inside or the outside. And that jogged his memory and he came up with something you’d said about climbing the John Drummond.’

  Laurie straightened up and looked wary. ‘Never happened. A wee joke, that’s all.’

  ‘Mr Laurie, I’m not looking to nick anybody for trespassing. But I am looking for some help. There’s no catch here. I’m just trying to fill in a bit of background.’

  ‘I’ve never been in the John Drummond,’ he said, quickly and firmly. ‘There’s absolutely nothing I can tell you about the place. Nothing.’

  ‘What is it you do for a living, Mr Laurie?’ Karen asked casually. The framed monochrome photographs of black jazz musicians that lined the walls were not, she suspected, a clue. More of a style statement.

  ‘I work for RBS.’ Seeing her lip curl, he added hastily, ‘I’m not a banker. I’m a buildings services executive.’

  Karen smiled. ‘What? You count the chairs? Not so many of them as there used to be, I guess. So, like most people you don’t have anything to do with the police on a daily basis. I just want to explain that it’s nothing like the telly. I’m a lot smarter than most of those dozy detectives you see on the box. And I’m a lot less patient. I’m trying to do this the polite and quick way. But we can do it down the police station in a way that’ll make you very late for your work tomorrow.’ She gave him a smile that her colleagues had learned the hard way not to trust.

  Laurie looked at the Mint as if he was expecting some male solidarity. The Mint looked stolidly at his feet.

  ‘I’ve not done anything,’ he said plaintively.

  ‘Free climbing,’ Karen said. ‘What do you know about free-climbing buildings, Mr Laurie?’

  ‘I’ve seen videos on YouTube. That kind of thing.’

  ‘I think you can do better than that. I don’t know why you’re being so cagey, Mr Laurie. I couldn’t give a toss about what you do in your spare time. All I’m trying to do is find out how a murder victim might have got on to the roof of the John Drummond School without any trace of a break-in.’

  ‘Murder?’ Laurie’s voice was a squeak. ‘You never said it was a murder.’

  ‘I was trying to spare your feelings. Now, are you going to tell me about the John Drummond or not?’

  ‘I want a lawyer,’ Laurie stammered.

  The Mint looked up. ‘Like the boss said, we’re not accusing you of anything. We’re just looking for information. You get a lawyer, you start to look like a man who’s done something wrong.’

  Karen looked at the Mint with new respect. Twice in two days he’d said something that wasn’t stupid. Was there some new drug going the rounds that she hadn’t heard about? ‘So, the John Drummond?’ she said.

  Laurie hunched his shoulders and folded his arms. ‘It’s not like we do anybody any harm, right? It’s the challenge.’

  Karen wanted to give him a verbal slap but she held back. A bunch of well-heeled boys desperate for a cheap thrill. Not content with bringing the global economy to its knees, they had to go about the place like daft wee boys showing off. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Who’s the “we”?’

  ‘Me and a couple of guys I was at uni with. We did a bit of climbing back then. Winter climbing in the Highlands, a bit of Alpine stuff. Then we got hooked on free-climbing rock. It’s an amazing feeling. Anyway, about three years ago, there was this BBC series, Climbing Great Buildings. Which basically did what it says on the tin. And we started tracking down online vids of people free climbing big buildings.’ His voice tailed off.

  ‘And then you started doing it?’

  Laurie looked sheepish. ‘We weren’t hurting anybody. We did it at night, always out of the way, so we wouldn’t freak anybody out.’

  Karen shook her head, despairing at the jackass stupidity of young men. ‘So tell me what you know about the John Drummond.’

  He sighed. ‘You get to know people who do the same thing. A lot of them I just know from online. But we share info. Routes to get up difficult buildings, tips for getting past particular obstacles. Somebody from down south was talking about the John Drummond, about how there was pretty much no security and you could get up and down without any fear of getting caught. And how it was really challenging as a climb because there’s a lot of overhangs on the way up. And a guy I know from Glasgow, he chipped in and said he’d done it solo on Midsummer’s Eve when it didn’t even get properly dark and how amazing it had been and the view was great.’ He sighed again. ‘So we did it. And that’s all I know. I don’t know anything about a murder, I swear to God.’

  ‘So you did go up the John Drummond?’

  He nodded. ‘September. Friday the thirteenth. We thought it would be funny to go up when it was supposed to be unlucky.’

  ‘Did you go on the roof?’

  ‘Aye, that’s the whole point. You’ve not really climbed it unless you go right the way up.’

  The Mint leaned forward, raising a finger for permission to speak. He knew better than to interrupt Karen directly in mid-flow. She nodded. ‘Does that mean you climbed up the wee turrets in the corners?’

  ‘The pinnacles? Aye, we each did one of them.’

  ‘Did you go inside any of them?’ Karen was back in the driving seat.

  ‘Dougie stuck his head in one for a look. But he said there was nothing to see and it was too wee to get inside. So we left it at that and went back down again. Was that where he was, the dead guy? In one of the pinnacles?’ The yellow complexion took on a greenish tinge.

  ‘Did you ever come across a free climber from the old Eastern bloc?’ Wrong-foot them with the question they don’t expect. That was Karen’s MO.

  Laurie looked confused. ‘What? You mean a Russian or something?’

  ‘Maybe more like the Baltic states. Or the Balkans?’ It dawned on Karen that he didn’t know what she was talking about. He’d barely have been at primary school when the Balkan conflict had shaken Europe’s postwar consensus. ‘Latvia. Lithuania. Estonia. Croatia. Serbia. Bosnia. Poland, even.’

  His face cleared. ‘Right. No, I don’t think I ever have. I’ve messaged with a couple of Americans and New Zealanders, but that’s about it for foreigners.’ He smirked. ‘Unless you count the English.’

  That was a record for 2014, Karen reckoned. Almost lunchtime before somebody had given a nod to the upcoming independence referendum. ‘You’re going to have to give us a list of all your free-climbing contacts. DC Murray here will sort that out with you.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  It was the question they always asked. How had the victim’s life been stripped from them. ‘He was shot,’ Karen said. ‘Somebody stood in front of him and pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger.’

  The Mint made a gun shape with the first two fingers of his right hand. ‘Boom,’ he said. ‘Just like that. He’ll no’ be doing any more free climbing.’

  All that summer, there had been talk of war. At the beginning of June Croatia had seceded from Yugoslavia, determined to escape the domination of the Serbs. But there were enough ethnic Serbs within the borders of the new country to create a groundswell of support for the idea of creating a new Serbian state inside Croatia. It was an idea that had the wholehearted backing of Serbia and of the Yugoslavian armed forces, egged on by Slobodan Milosevic with his strong-arm, strong-man tactics. The clash of aspirations was a recipe
for disaster, but I was too young and Melissa was too optimistic to believe the disaster would really happen.

  And so when Schollie’s Governing Body put a stop to Melissa’s latest Balkan mission, we saw this as merely a temporary hiccup. In Melissa’s head, her absence would be short-lived and the gap could easily be plugged by a bright post-doctoral research fellow groomed to think in the same way as her mentor. I would lead some seminars, work with the writers of papers, and help to set up courses at the new institutions that would rise from the ashes of the old Communist state. What could possibly go wrong?

  For the first few weeks, it seemed as if Melissa might have been right. That all the sabre-rattling would come to nothing. That there was no real appetite for a fight. Yes, there was fighting going on in Vukovar, but that was a long way away and nobody in Dubrovnik seemed to be panicking over it. Dubrovnik didn’t feel scary at all. Not like the trip to Prague I’d taken with Melissa a few years before, when the secret police had come knocking at the door of a house where we’d been leading a clandestine seminar. The hosts had opened a concealed trapdoor in the kitchen floor and bundled us into a damp cellar where the only sound apart from our panicked breathing was the scrabble of rats’ claws on stone and the overhead thuds as they jumped over the joists in the floor above our heads. That had been scary, all right. But by the time I travelled to Dubrovnik, the stranglehold of the Communist state had been broken. We were all Europeans now.

  I embraced my new life with open eyes, open arms and open heart. I’d discovered when I escaped Fife and arrived in London that immersing myself completely was the way to make the most of every new experience and I was happy to have the chance to do that again. I was renting a room from Varya, a primary school teacher. Melissa had worked with her on a research project and knew the hard currency I’d be paying for my garret under the eaves would make a difference to her family. I was, I think, the only person who had a room to herself – even Varya’s elderly mother had to share with the ten-year-old daughter of the house.

  My room was spartan – a single iron bedstead with a wafer-thin mattress, a plain pine cupboard with shelves and hanging space for three shirts and a jacket, a table barely big enough for an open A4 notebook, and a rickety wooden chair. A crucifix hung above the bed with an emaciated Jesus gazing down mournfully, reflected in the small mirror on the opposite wall so I could see him from my bed. But the view across the city made up for everything. Varya’s house was outside the walled city itself, at the foot of Srdj, the steep ridge above Dubrovnik. At the back of the house, a narrow garden ran to where the pine trees and scrubby undergrowth began. But from my window at the front of the house, I had a panoramic view of the ancient walled city.

  Until I saw Dubrovnik, I had no notion of what a walled city really meant. I’d seen a fragment of the wall the Romans had built around London. Six metres high, two and a half metres thick. I thought that was impressive. The walls of Dubrovnik are twenty-five metres high and eight metres thick – between three and four times the scale of London’s defences. Looking down across the patchwork of terracotta roofs and the white hulls of boats in the harbour was an inspirational start to those September days when I was first finding my feet in the city. Some mornings, the sky was a deep unbroken blue, a colour we never see in the UK. On other days, because the summer was drawing to a close, wispy skeins of cloud created a tigerskin sky.

  The seminars I was leading had a real sense of liberation about them too. There was an exhilaration in the air after all those years of oppression, but also a kind of disorientation. We take so many of our freedoms for granted; in those early days in Dubrovnik, I saw at first-hand how it was unsettling as well as liberating to have permission to think, write and speak openly. And of course there were plenty of academics around from the Communist era who were clinging grimly to their old jobs and their old ways. Still, what we were doing felt like continuing a revolution.

  The sparkle of intellectual independence seemed to light up our social interactions too. Although people’s resources were limited, everyone was eager to find any excuse to get together and have some kind of party. From sedate afternoon teas graced with pastries laden with honey and nuts to raucous drinks parties fuelled by slivovitz and rakija, I had invitations galore.

  I was young and eager enough to show up to most of them. I knew this period in Dubrovnik would open up professional possibilities for me – contacts to be made, papers to be written, maybe even a book – and so I wanted to meet as many people as I could. I was surprised at how many knew about the underground university movement, and I was touched by their pleasure in our continued involvement. And so most of my evenings were occupied with these social encounters that constantly opened new areas for my intellectual curiosity to explore.

  Melissa had prepared me for that. What she hadn’t prepared me for was love.

  10

  By 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 w
ho 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.’