The Skeleton Road

by Val McDermid

  When I asked Varya what the dress code was for Proto, she looked as startled as Fabijan had. ‘Proto?’ Her bark of laughter was harsh. ‘At Proto, you’re swimming with the big fishes, not just eating them. I don’t think I know anybody who ever had dinner at Proto.’

  That would be best bib and tucker, then, I deduced. Only, I didn’t have any bib and tucker with me, never mind my best. A trawl through my limited wardrobe produced a sleeveless black jersey dress with a scoop neck. It hadn’t flattered me in Oxford, but I’d lost a crucial few pounds since my arrival in Dubrovnik, thanks to my system adjusting to the unfamiliar diet. I’d get away with it if I could find a pretty wrap or a scarf to drape across my shoulders and knot above my cleavage.

  Next morning, I took a detour to the morning market in Gunduli´ceva Poljana, only a few streets away from the cramped rooms where I was teaching. As usual, the Old Town was bustling; half of Dubrovnik was heading to or from the market to stock up on fresh groceries, honey and wine. I knew there were a couple of stalls that sold embroidered tablecloths and shawls and I reckoned I might find something cheap and cheerful – the opposite of what Proto sounded like.

  I was surprised by how sparse the stock was, but I assumed people shopped early at the market, and that the early birds had stripped the stalls of their best produce. I managed to find a simple gauzy scarlet cotton wrap with tassels and a pattern of painted gold scrolls, which looked classier than it cost.

  If I wanted to know what I taught that day, I’d have to track down one of the class and ask them. I felt like a teenager, stomach hollow and head adrift. I knew at the time how ridiculous it was to feel this way about a man – a soldier, for God’s sake – that I’d barely met. And yet my attempts to scold myself into attentiveness were fruitless.

  From the outside, Proto didn’t look much different from many of the Old Town restaurants. An old stone building on a corner with tables hugging the walls, well-dressed couples leaning towards each other over cold Dalmatian wine, glasses misted with condensation. I walked in and as soon as I said I was with Colonel Petrovic, the maître d’ bowed deeply and ushered me up a flight of marble stairs to a leafy outdoor terrace. It was a warm September evening, the light just beginning to fade from the sky, and he was standing at the edge of the terrace in a dazzling white shirt and tight black dress trousers with a red stripe down the seam.

  I may have moaned.

  He met me halfway across the room, taking my hands in his and kissing them both. Then, a hand in the small of my sweating back, he escorted me to our table. ‘Thank you for coming, Doctor,’ he said as the waiter placed the menus in front of us.

  ‘Thank you for inviting me, Colonel.’

  He shook his head. ‘Please. My friends call me Mitja.’ He gave me that killer smile. ‘I hope we’re going to be friends.’

  ‘I hope so too, Mitja.’ I struck back with my own finest smile. ‘My friends call me Maggie, by the way.’

  And so it began. Over seafood soup rich with tomatoes and mussels, grilled squid and rožata, we talked and talked and talked. From focality to Foucault, from the fault lines of the landscape to the fault lines in Balkan politics, we covered the kind of ground that generally requires longer and deeper acquaintance than we could lay claim to. We laughed too, ambushed by humour in unlikely places. And all the while, I watched his face, learning its planes and contours. We were both startled when the waiters started clearing the tables around us in that pointed way that says unequivocally it’s time to go home. I felt dazed and dazzled by the conversation. I didn’t want it to end.

  We emerged into the dimly lit street, ours the only footsteps as we headed towards the Pile gate. ‘I have a car,’ he said, steering us past the taxi rank.

  ‘It’s not far, I’ll walk,’ I said. ‘I like the night air.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll walk with you,’ he insisted. ‘Wait a moment.’ He jogged across the street to a big Mercedes. The driver’s window descended, Mitja spoke briefly then came back to me. ‘My driver is never happy when I go off on my own,’ he said ruefully, falling into step beside me, a careful few inches between us. ‘He’s convinced some crazy Serb will try to kill me.’ He gave a soft chuckle. ‘He has an inflated idea of my importance.’

  And so we came to the subject we’d both managed to dodge all evening. ‘Is there going to be all-out war?’ I asked.

  He thrust his hands deep into his trouser pockets. ‘It’s hard to see how we can avoid it. Vukovar is under siege. They come under fire daily from the JNA. People are dying in the streets and we can’t stop it happening. The Serbs want to crush the city and take over the territory. I know it’s on the other side of the country, but it’s foolish to think what’s going on will end there. Milosevic wants a Greater Serbia that will swallow us all and make us his slaves.’

  ‘So, shouldn’t you be off doing military things, not taking geographers for fancy dinners?’ I wasn’t teasing. I genuinely wondered what the answer would be.

  He danced a few steps ahead of me and turned to face me, arms extended, moving backwards so the distance between us stayed constant. ‘You think I’m… what? Fiddling like the Emperor Nero while Rome burns around me? Maggie, all day I am doing “military things”. We go over and over the same things. The same plans, the same dispositions.’ His voice rose, the passion obvious. ‘We try to wave a magic wand and generate more troops, more weapons, more ordnance. Every day, we analyse the latest intelligence, and what it tells us is that we are probably fucked. But still we prepare ourselves. We are as ready as we can be. Now we just have to wait.’

  ‘Can’t you do something? Can’t you take the fight to them?’ I suspected this was probably a stupid question but I didn’t know what else to ask.

  ‘They have overwhelming superiority in numbers, in strength. In reserve. Our only chance is to keep the moral high ground. To be the good guys. So when the time comes to call for help, people like your government will go, “Those Croatians, they deserve our help.”’ He pressed his palms together in an attitude of prayer. ‘Meanwhile, I convince myself there will be a future that we need to prepare for. So I try to find people who will help me understand how to do that.’ He gave a sweeping bow, then swung back to walk alongside me. ‘Of course, it helps if they are beautiful as well as clever.’

  ‘Cheesy,’ I said. ‘I expected better.’

  ‘Ah, I am just a simple soldier,’ he said, hamming up his accent.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I was trying to sound cynical and hard-bitten but my stomach was churning. I longed for him to reach out and touch me, to take me in his arms so we could move beyond the cerebral to learn something more feral about each other.

  He fell silent, hands back in his pockets. We walked through the night city, the silence unbroken except for the stray barking of tethered dogs and the occasional mutter of TVs through open windows. ‘I’m afraid of what will happen to my country,’ he said eventually, his voice low and serious. ‘We are a little cog in the big wheel of somebody else’s politics. What we thought we knew is gone. We don’t know how the future is going to be for us. All I know is that there are going to be some bad times ahead.’

  It wasn’t the time for anodyne words. I reached out and tucked my arm in his. We carried on in silence to the threshold of Varya’s house, a few minutes away. ‘This is me,’ I said. I didn’t want to say goodbye, but there wasn’t any other option. I slid my arm out of his and turned to face him. For a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me.

  But no. He simply inclined his head towards me and said, ‘Thank you for a beautiful evening. I enjoyed our conversation.’

  ‘Me too. And that wonderful meal.’

  He took a step backwards. ‘Life was supposed to get easier after communism,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t feel easy.’ His face was in shadow; I had no idea what those expressive eyes were saying.

  ‘Maybe we can do this again?’

  ‘It would be a pity not to. But now, I have to go and do what you called
“military things”. Goodnight, Maggie.’ He turned away, moving quickly down the street and disappearing round the corner. I leaned against the crumbling stucco of Varya’s house, all of a sudden too weak in the knees to stand upright. For the first time since I’d arrived in Dubrovnik, I wondered about the wisdom of being here.

  16

  Arriving in Oxford from the north, you could make it to St Scholastica’s College without so much as a hint of the dreaming spires. There were bits of the city that Karen was sure she’d seen on reruns of Inspector Morse but those were the bits that could have been pretty much anywhere south of the Pennines. There was something about the between-the-wars semis and the Victorian redbrick that was definitively English and, to Karen’s eye, definitively alien.

  The college itself was nothing like she’d expected. No venerable Cotswold stone quadrangles with manicured lawns and staircases worn by generations of undergraduate feet. There were more gothic pinnacles on top of the John Drummond school roof than there were here. Even the entrance was mundane – plain wrought-iron gates firmly closed against the world, a porter’s lodge built from dirty yellow brick that looked more like a sentry box than the way in to a world of learning. Even the Adam Smith College in Kirkcaldy presented a more enticing prospect.

  ‘Looks closed for business,’ the Mint said.

  ‘These places never close, they just keep the rest of us at arm’s length.’

  He checked the time on his phone. ‘Will she not have gone home by now?’

  ‘She lives here. Drive back the way we came, we’ll park on the street. I don’t want us to draw attention to ourselves.’

  ‘She lives here? What, like a student?’

  ‘Kind of. But they get a wee flat, the fellows do. They call it a set.’

  ‘Fellows? I thought this was a women’s college? How can they be fellows?’

  ‘It’s what they call the teachers here. I suppose it goes back to when there weren’t any women.’ Karen shrugged. ‘Which I’m guessing wasn’t that long ago, relatively speaking.’

  ‘OK. I get that. It would be like me calling you “sir”, like they do with Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica. Which is pretty stupid, but I kind of get it. But how come they call a flat a set?’

  ‘You’ve got me there, Jason. I just know they do.’

  ‘How come?’

  Karen sighed. Educating Jason was an uphill struggle. ‘How come I know? Because I read books, Jason. Because I watch things on the telly that aren’t boy comics doing panel games.’

  They found a parking space a couple of streets away and walked back to the lodge. A middle-aged black man sat behind the counter, resplendent in gleaming white shirt and perfectly knotted dark blue tie. He smiled and stood up. ‘Good evening. How can I help you?’

  Karen matched his smile. ‘I’m looking for Professor Blake.’

  The porter shook his head regretfully. ‘I’m afraid she’s not in college this evening.’

  ‘Will she be back later?’

  ‘Would you like to leave a message? You can put it in her pigeonhole.’ He pointed over Karen’s shoulder to a honeycomb of wooden compartments that lined the wall. Names were painted neatly beneath the top two rows; the lower levels were larger and were simply alphabetised. ‘She’ll pick it up as soon as she returns.’

  ‘Will she be back this evening?’ Karen persisted.

  Now the porter’s smile had faded, replaced with a stubborn set to his jaw. ‘I couldn’t say.’

  So much for low key, she thought, fishing out her ID. ‘I’m DCI Pirie from Police Scotland,’ she said. Her tone was still pleasant but there was steel lurking in it. ‘I’ve come a long way to speak to Professor Blake. I’d appreciate it if you could give me some idea of when she’ll be here.’

  The porter looked disconcerted. ‘You’ve come from Scotland?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It’s a long way,’ the Mint reiterated, in case there was any doubt.

  ‘Is everything all right? Is it her parents?’

  ‘Obviously I can’t discuss the matter with anyone other than Professor Blake,’ Karen said repressively.

  The porter gave a little laugh. ‘I suppose so. But it’s ironic, you coming all the way from Scotland to talk to her. Because Professor Blake’s gone to Glasgow.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Glasgow?’

  ‘She left this morning. She told me she’s giving a seminar at the university.’

  Karen groaned. ‘I don’t believe it. Do you know when she’ll be back?’

  He nodded. ‘As it happens, I do. She said that, with it being term time, it would be a quick trip. She’ll be back tomorrow evening.’

  Karen thanked him and walked out into the muggy evening air, Jason at her heels.

  ‘Are we going to go to Glasgow, boss?’

  ‘No point,’ Karen said slowly, thinking aloud. ‘It’s already too late to head north tonight. Plus we don’t have a Scooby where she’s staying. By the time we track her down, she could be on her way back…’ Her voice tailed off and she pulled out her notebook. ‘Plus we’ve got another address, remember?’

  ‘Where they were staying when they opened the account.’ Jason looked pleased with himself.

  ‘Aye. Let’s go and shake the tree and see what falls out.’

  The original address for the joint bank account of Dimitar Petrovic and Margaret Blake was a squat Victorian villa in a side street that ran between the Woodstock and the Banbury roads, about a mile from St Scholastica’s College. The two detectives sat in the car and contemplated it. ‘The form said 21A,’ Karen said. ‘I’m not seeing a 21A. Just a 21.’

  ‘Looks like there’s a basement, boss. You can see the tops of the windows from here. Do you want me to go and take a wee stroll up the drive and see what I can see?’

  ‘What? And have some respectable citizen call the locals to say there’s a prowler? Do you fancy explaining yourself to a woolly suit looking for an easy boost to his arrest record? No, we’ll go and knock on the door. The way things are going on this inquiry, chances are it’ll be somebody that moved in six months ago,’ she added gloomily, getting out of the car.

  The bay window that fronted on to the street divulged a wall of books, a chintz-covered sofa and heavy curtains held back with generous swags. It was too dim to see anything more, but the frosted glass panel in the front door revealed a distant glow of yellow light. Somebody was home. Or else trying to convince burglars that was the case. Karen pressed the bell; they heard it ring in the recesses of the hall. Long seconds passed, then the quality of light changed, as if a door had opened. A brighter light snapped on. More time passed, then a vague darkness began to take approximate human shape. They heard a tapping sound, then the door opened and stopped abruptly, held in place by a chain. Half a face, framed in short white hair, peered at them through one large varifocal lens. ‘I don’t want to change my gas supplier, and I have no need of Jesus,’ a sharp, precise voice said firmly.

  ‘You and me both,’ Karen said, fishing out her ID and holding it close to the single magnified eye. ‘DCI Karen Pirie, Police Scotland. I’m looking for 21A. Can you help me?’

  The single visible eyebrow rose. ‘No such place. It doesn’t exist. And besides, this isn’t Scotland.’

  ‘We know that,’ Jason muttered from behind Karen.

  ‘It used to exist,’ Karen said.

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  Already, Karen hated Oxford. ‘What does that mean, exactly?’

  ‘It existed in effect but not in reality.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m just a simple police officer. You’re going to have to explain that in words of one syllable. Could we come in while you do that?’

  The eye studied her steadily. ‘Why don’t you tell me what this is about?’

  ‘I have a professional interest in someone who used to live at 21A.’ This was precisely the kind of idiotic exchange that had made Karen stop watching Inspector Morse some years before.

/>   ‘That narrows it down to Professor Blake or General Petrovic, then.’

  ‘Is that because they’re the only two people who ever lived there?’

  Half a smile carved a series of wrinkles into a cheek. ‘Well done, Detective Chief Inspector.’ The door closed and the chain rattled.

  ‘Is she letting us in?’ Jason demanded.

  The door opened. ‘She is,’ the old woman said. ‘Shut the door behind you.’ She had the imperious tone of someone accustomed to being deferred to. And obeyed. She set off down the hallway, listing to one side, NHS-issue metal walking stick supporting her. Karen and Jason exchanged a look and followed the woman into the living room they’d seen from the street. The switch by the door turned on three floor lamps that bathed the comfortable room with light. Now they could see her clearly, Karen estimated her to be in her late seventies or more. She could see the signature traces of pain and stubbornness in her face. The woman settled in a high armchair beside a plain, elegant wooden fireplace and waved her stick towards the sofa. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘What’s your name, ma’am?’ Karen asked, nudging Jason, who was looking around him as if he’d never seen bookshelves before. ‘Notebook, Constable.’

  ‘I am Dr Dorothea Simpson,’ the woman said. ‘Not a doctor of medicine, but a doctor of philosophy. Although I am an historian rather than a philosopher. Until my retirement, I was, like Maggie Blake, a fellow of St Scholastica’s College.’

  ‘Is that how you know Professor Blake?’

  Dr Simpson inclined her head, ‘Indeed. Would you care to tell me the nature of your interest in my former tenants?’