The Skeleton Road

by Val McDermid

  While she was waiting for the mass spectrometer to do its thing, she turned her attention to the tooth she’d been working on late into the night. Like rings on a tree, teeth have layers that reveal the age of their owner. Every year, our bodies lay down two microscopic layers of cement – one light, one dark. Whatever we do to look youthful on the outside, after we die, our bodies reveal the hidden truth.

  River had started on the tooth first thing the previous morning, cleaning it off with a slurry of pumice, then she’d left it under running tap water for eight hours. Next she’d cleaned it with alcohol before slicing it into sections with a diamond-edged cutter. Finally, she’d dehydrated the slices with more alcohol, cleaned them with xylene and mounted them on microscope slides. Already, she’d asked two anatomy students to study the slides under the microscope and count the rings. Always better to have as many eyes as possible on a detailed job like this. Besides, the students would improve their skills.

  River focused the microscope and started counting. Her first pass came out at forty-six. Next time, forty-seven. Third time lucky repeated the second result. Only then did she compare it with the students’ results. One said forty-seven; the other, forty-eight. So, they were all in the same ball park. It looked like Karen’s skeleton was in his late forties. Maybe a bit old to be clambering around on the outside of buildings, but some people just never knew when to give up. River sat back, flexing her shoulders. Time for a cup of coffee, then she’d have all her ducks in a row for Karen. She’d give her a written report, of course. But she knew Karen too well. Her friend would want as much detail as fast as possible. It always amused River that the woman in charge of cold cases was probably the least patient person she’d ever come across.

  Fortified with caffeine, River made the call. Karen’s voice had the hollow sound and background noise that signalled she was in a car. ‘You driving?’ River asked.

  ‘No, I’m letting Jason have a wee shot behind the wheel. We’re on our way to Oxford.’

  ‘Oxford? As in, England?’

  ‘Aye. Not the one in Northumberland, either.’

  ‘Why are you going to Oxford?’

  ‘To talk to a professor about a bank account.’

  River chuckled. There was nobody better than Karen at making you drag a story out of her. ‘You care to expand on that?’

  ‘We got the imprint of some partial bank details on that room key you found at the crime scene,’ Karen said. ‘Turns out it was an FCB account. So I toddled off to the pyramids this morning in the hope of finding out who it belonged to. I tell you, even with a sheriff’s warrant those bastards did not want to talk to me.’

  ‘Hard to believe.’

  ‘Turns out the reluctance was due to the fact that the account isn’t entirely dormant.’ Karen paused, waiting for River to play her part.

  ‘How can it not be dormant if the guy’s dead?’

  ‘Because it’s a joint account. It was opened in 2001. Every month since then, one of the account holders has paid in four hundred pounds. Up until September 2007, the other account holder paid in irregular amounts, ranging from a hundred pounds to seven hundred and fifty pounds.’

  ‘Interesting. What about money going out of the account?’

  ‘Until September 2006 cash got taken out at ATMs. Mostly in Oxford, but some in London, some in Edinburgh, and some in Venice and Ravenna. And there were payments to a credit card as well. Nothing big. Modest grocery bill levels. But since then – nothing.’

  ‘That’s weird. If one person’s still paying in, you’d think they’d be taking it out as well.’

  ‘You would, wouldn’t you?’

  River was intrigued. Knowing Karen, she suspected there was more to come. ‘So who are these people?’

  ‘The one who stopped paying in is a man called Dimitar Petrovic. The address he gave when they opened the account was St Scholastica’s College, Oxford. Does anything about that strike you as weird?’

  River dredged her memory. ‘Wasn’t that the last college to go mixed? Was it still a women’s college back then?’

  ‘Give the girl a coconut. You are spot on. This guy with no visible credit history, according to the bank, was apparently living in a women-only establishment. And nobody at FCB noticed. Or if they did notice, they didn’t give a toss. Because the other account holder was as respectable as you or me —’

  ‘Hey now,’ River protested. ‘Don’t you be accusing me of respectability.’

  ‘Very funny. Do you want to know about this woman or not?’

  ‘Tell me, tell me. Who is she?’

  ‘At the time the account was opened, she was Dr Margaret Blake, geography fellow of St Scholastica’s College. She’s now Professor Blake. And every month she’s paying four hundred quid into a bank account she never touches. Tell me why you’d do that.’

  ‘Hmm. I’d say she hopes he might be coming home.’

  ‘Either that or she thinks he might have needed the money, wherever he was going. Whichever it is, it’s interesting, don’t you think?’

  ‘Definitely. I’m guessing you haven’t phoned to say you’re coming?’

  ‘Got it in one. I don’t want to give her time to come up with some clever academic doublespeak to bamboozle me with, the way you smart buggers do.’

  River laughed. ‘Like you’re such a pushover. Well, it’s term time, she should be in her lovely study looking out over the dreaming spires, enjoying the luxury of a light teaching load and high-table dinners.’

  ‘So, given that it looks like Dimitar Petrovic might be our man, what can you tell me about him?’

  River woke up her screen and went through the key points. ‘The skeleton is definitely a male. He was somewhere between forty-six and forty-eight when he died and around six feet tall. I already told you about his dental work. When his mother was carrying him, she was living in an area that’s now eastern Croatia or north-western Serbia. He was in the same area when he was around six or seven years old, when his adult teeth were formed. The analysis of his femur tells us a different story, and it’s a bit confused. Based on my experience, I’d say he’d spent the last seven or eight years of his life between the Balkans and the UK. He could have been in Kosovo or Montenegro. It’s impossible to be more precise than that, I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s still pretty amazing,’ Karen said. ‘Now I know that, it’s maybe worth googling him.’

  ‘There’s a bit more. He’s got a small metal plate on his left femur. He’ll have had a bad break there at some point, but it was a long time ago. The bone’s healed round the plate and there’s nothing on the metal or on the screws to identify a manufacturer. And that says Eastern Bloc to me, given the age of the injury. They were slow to start marking up orthopaedic implants. So it only has value as presumptive ID.’

  ‘Interesting. What about DNA? Did you get any?’

  ‘I did. I’ve sent it over, you’ll have to get someone to run it on the database.’

  ‘Brilliant. Good job, River.’

  ‘I enjoyed it,’ she admitted. ‘I do like a good puzzle. But it looks as though you’ve sorted it all out without me.’

  ‘You’re my belt and braces. You make it impossible to argue with what I’ve found out. And since Margaret Blake seems to be kidding herself on a massive scale, I’m going to need all the help I can get on that score.’

  15

  Glasgow was a changed city from the one where Maggie had passed a miserable January week the year before she’d gone to Dubrovnik. She’d spent New Year partying with family and old school friends in Fife, then travelled across the country for the Institute of British Geographers’ annual conference where she felt like a very small fish in a very big pond. The grim concrete student residence was more depressing than anywhere she’d lived in London or Oxford, and every time she walked out of the front door, she was greeted by a different form of rain.

  It had been 1990, the launch week of the city’s year as European City of Culture. Maggie couldn�
��t help cleaving to that oldest of jokes, that she’d seen more culture in a tub of yoghurt. The city felt grey and grim, and every modern building spoke of architects who didn’t give a shit about the people who had either to occupy or to look at their work. It was bewildering to her. All around were old buildings that spoke of an aesthetic that had got lost along the way – imposing sandstone tenements, the stunning Victorian Gothic of the university quadrangle buildings, the slender white church tower that rose above the elegant Park District, the towers of Trinity College. How had people turned their back on that and produced glass-and-concrete boxes that took no account of how people lived their lives? She’d come away feeling that it was about time geographers started looking at the impact of ugliness on urban living.

  But a revolution had happened to the city since then. Maggie had been reluctant to accept the invitation to give a seminar at the university because her previous visit had simply reconfirmed her conviction that Edinburgh was the only Scottish city fit for living. However, the prospect of turning fifty had persuaded her it was time to take stock of her life and tunnel her way out of the ruts and habits that trammelled her life and her thinking.

  And so she had accepted. And now she was glad. Everywhere, the city was being tarted up for the impending Commonwealth Games. Even the white lines on the roads were being repainted. Her hotel was right on the banks of the Clyde, opposite the striking contemporary buildings housing the non-identical media twins of BBC Scotland and STV. After dinner, since it wasn’t raining and there were few things she enjoyed more than walking in cities at night, she set off along the river. The brown water moved sluggishly with the tide, distorting the reflections of a series of dramatic apartment and office blocks on both sides of the river. There were new bridges too, one known locally as the Squinty Bridge because it crossed a bend in the Clyde at an angle, another a footbridge thrown across the water to celebrate the millennium. If she hadn’t seen it for herself, Maggie wouldn’t have believed this glittering riverside panorama was in Glasgow.

  The hum of the constant flow of traffic on the motorway over the Kingston Bridge formed a counterpoint to her thoughts. After so many years, she could go for days without consciously thinking about Mitja, but the milestone birthday and the party gathering of the people she cared most about had thrust him into the front of her mind, even without Tessa’s unwelcome intervention at the weekend.

  Maggie understood intellectually why he’d left the way he had. He knew her – and himself – well enough to understand that she would use every weapon at her disposal to keep him and that part of him would want to be kept. She would have been a ball and chain around his leg, making him drag her behind him every step of the way till finally friction wore through the bonds and freed him. It would have been a horrible, destructive process for both of them. Kinder, really, to walk away as he had done.

  And yet… She could not quite understand or forgive the silence that had echoed down the years. By not spelling out to her that he truly was gone for good, he had condemned her to hope. That was what felt cruel to her, and Mitja was not a cruel man. So it made no sense.

  After he’d gone, some of her friends had urged Maggie to go looking for him. To return to Croatia, to use her connections to track him down as if he were a war criminal like Milosevic or Karadzic. She’d thought about it. She’d even imagined a showdown in some tiny mountain village, confronting him with his desertion in the face of his wife and a brood of raven-haired children with his eyes and mouth. But in the end, she had too much pride for that. He’d wounded her self-esteem, no doubting that. But her self-respect was not holed below the waterline. There was enough to keep her dignity afloat. Just.

  She’d half-expected him to surface in Croatian politics, or on a wider stage. Every few months, she’d google him to see whether he’d shown up. But always, she drew a blank. Perhaps the years in Oxford with her had taught him that he could live a quiet life; reading and thinking, working their allotment, rock climbing with friends. Perhaps he’d settled for precisely that sort of life, but instead of living it with her, he’d wanted to be surrounded by his family and the people he’d grown up with.

  Sometimes the pull of home was irresistible. She’d never felt it herself. Maggie had lived too long away from Scotland to want to return. But she’d seen it in so many others. This, the year of the independence referendum, had also been branded the year of homecoming and she knew several academics who had upped sticks and gone back north of the border, unable to bear the thought of their country choosing a destiny without their input.

  What she couldn’t believe was that he’d fallen out of love with her. She couldn’t believe he was running from her, only that he was running to something he needed more. And tonight, as happened so often when she was walking by water, she wished he was by her side. In Dubrovnik, they’d often walk by the sea, the rhythm of their steps matching the rhythm of the waves. Then later, in Kosovo, they’d always tried to find a river or a lake to walk beside as a respite from the fear and the fighting. And in Oxford, of course, there had always been the Cherwell and the Isis. He would have enjoyed this Glasgow riverbank walk, she thought as she approached the dark underbelly of the Jamaica Street bridge.

  Some lights would have been a good idea, Maggie thought as the dimness swallowed her. The light pollution of the city produced enough of a glow to walk by, but someone less schooled in night city walking might easily have been unnerved.

  As if to reinforce her thought, the bulk of a man’s body suddenly appeared at the far end of the arch, blocking out light and looming large. Feeling no sense of disquiet, Maggie veered slightly to one side, leaving plenty of room for him to pass.

  But he veered too, and into her path rather than away from her. Within a couple of steps they were almost face to face. She tried to sidestep him but he spread his arms, blocking her passage.

  Now she felt disquiet. ‘Excuse me,’ she said in her most imperious voice.

  ‘Well, well, well. If it isn’t Professor Blake. How’s it going, Professor?’ he said. The accent was local but it sounded exaggerated; coarse and threatening.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Maggie was no stranger to danger but this was all the more unnerving for being hundreds of miles from a war zone, in a city centre where street crime was at an all-time low.

  ‘Just a wee bit of information and nobody gets hurt.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person? I’m just a geography professor.’

  He moved closer. She could smell rank sweat and garlic breath. ‘I’ve got the right person. Where’s Dimitar Petrovic?’

  Her heart lurched in her chest. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, sounding more panicky than she wanted to. She took a step backwards, then another. A third step and she’d be far enough away to turn and run. Her assailant didn’t look like he had much of a turn of speed.

  She raised her foot for that crucial third step and nearly fell over as a hand pushed her firmly in the small of the back. ‘Not so fast,’ a voice behind her growled. ‘Answer the question.’

  Maggie swivelled round. The man behind her was smaller but he too had his arms spread wide, obstructing her escape route. ‘Let me past,’ she demanded, anger rising in her and overwhelming the fear.

  ‘Not till you answer the bloody question,’ the fat man behind her said, close up and menacing.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now let me pass or I swear, I’ll start screaming.’

  ‘You can scream all you like. This is Glasgow. Nobody cares.’ Now his hand was on her shoulder, heavy and threatening.

  And then salvation. The slap of running shoes, the sound of urgent breath, and all at once a third man was among them. He skidded to a stop. ‘You all right, hen? These guys bothering you?’

  ‘Fuck,’ the fat man said, turning on his heel and lumbering back the way he’d come. The other man pushed past Maggie, making her stagger, running to catch up with his part
ner.

  Left alone with the runner, Maggie felt a wave of physical weakness. The man’s voice brought her back to the moment. ‘Are you all right? Did they guys hurt you?’ The genuine concern in his voice touched her.

  ‘They didn’t touch me. They just scared me, that’s all.’

  ‘Where are you heading? I’ll walk you back.’ He was jogging on the spot now, as if he too was experiencing a reaction from the brief drama.

  ‘I’m staying in a hotel along the Broomielaw, near the exhibition centre. Thanks for the offer but I think I’ll just get a taxi back. In case those two are still hanging around.’

  ‘OK. But let me walk you up to Central Station. You’ll be able to pick a cab up at the rank there.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, almost believing it. She’d been shelled and shot at. She’d seen the aftermath of massacres and gang rapes. Surely she was capable of dealing with threats from two middle-aged men in suits under a Glasgow bridge?

  ‘No way,’ the runner said. ‘My mammy brought me up right. I’m not letting you out my sight till you’re safe on board a black cab. And that’s that.’

  And so it was. Sitting on the edge of her seat in the back of the taxi she stared out into the night. What the hell was going on? First Tessa, now these thugs. Why was Mitja suddenly on people’s agenda? And why did everyone think she knew where he was?