by Anna Smith
Eventually, Adrian spoke. ‘We must go now, Rosie. We have a long drive to Macedonia.’
CHAPTER 35
They had stopped in a little Kosovan town in the early evening so that Rosie could find a place to put her story together. They also needed to rest for the night, having driven all the way from Olovo south to Kosovo – or what was left of Kosovo, Matt had remarked. Every bombed-out town and village they drove into was still raw with the same depressing story of communities and lives ripped apart by war. Houses and mosques had been razed to the ground by rampaging Serbian soldiers who left behind a trail of destruction. Most of the streets were deserted and only the drone of the patrolling NATO vehicles broke the silence. Soldiers from KFOR, the United Nations force, were posted around, armed with rifles to keep the peace since the ceasefire a few months earlier. But in most of the areas south of Pristina there was nobody left to fight, and anyone who hadn’t fled from the bloodbath had little fight left.
‘If we stay here for the night,’ Adrian said, as he pulled up to what might once have been a smartish small hotel, ‘we can head straight for Kacanik tomorrow early, then it’s only a few miles to Macedonia. It should only take a morning to get to where we’re going.’
Kacanik. The name flashed up a blur of faces and horror stories as Rosie recalled the refugees spilling across the border post of Blace into Macedonia a few months earlier. Many of them had walked from Kacanik with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. Nobody had been prepared for the mass exodus of desperate refugees fleeing from the Serbs into their nearest southern neighbours. In the beginning it had been a trickle of fifty or a hundred a day coming across – old men and women with bruised faces telling waiting reporters how they were dragged from their homes and beaten with rifles. Frightened families had recounted seeing neighbours and friends with their throats cut lying at the roadside as Serbian paramilitary gangs showed no mercy.
‘Come on boss, you’ve got a splash and spread to write.’
‘I’m here, I’m here,’ Rosie shook herself back from the dark reverie as Matt rapped on the window.
She pushed the door open and got out, gazing around at the quiet streets, the narrow roads, still strewn with rubble from bomb-blasted buildings. A military truck flying the Dutch flag came trundling up the road, and the soldiers seated in the back with the canvas pulled across like curtains on a stage, waved cheerily. One of them whistled, and Rosie smiled at them.
‘Come on. Let’s go.’ She slung her rucksack on her back and dragged her hold-all out of the boot, then followed Adrian up to the hotel entrance.
*
The call from McGuire to tell her they’d arrested Raznatovic in Belgrade had come as no surprise. Mickey Kavanagh had tipped Rosie off about half an hour earlier, and it was then she’d made the decision they’d stop at the first place that looked reasonable so she could fire up her laptop and get started. She was glad of Mickey’s tip-off, because she was one step ahead by the time McGuire phoned, reeling off suggestions to her. This was boots and saddles time – McGuire had used his favourite phrase when he was rolling out a big story. He wanted every cough and spit.
In her earlier stories, they’d held off on any mention of Raznatovic and his background, because McGuire agreed with Rosie that they had that all to themselves. They’d do it when the time was right, when they could blast the whole story on the front page. Having the picture from Hoffman of Goran Boskovac and Tim Hayman was the icing on the cake. Nobody else would even have a sniff at that.
‘We’ll keep the story of your kidnapping till you get back, Rosie, and then we can milk it for all it’s worth. But right now, I want you to write chapter and verse of what we know about Raznatovic – everything about his early years, his part in the Bosnian massacre, and how he managed to dupe the authorities here and come in as a Bosnian refugee. Everything about the slaughterhouse and his life in Glasgow with the hoodlums. Right up to his arrest in Belgrade … And how it was us who tracked him down,’ McGuire had said. ‘And the stuff about him working as a GP in London is brilliant. The Home Office will shit themselves over that!’
Now, in her hotel bedroom, Rosie read her copy for the final time, making sure there were no loose ends as she would be on the move by the morning, until they got to the Macedonian town to try to find Emir’s grandmother.
Rosie rubbed her face vigorously with both hands. She could do with a drink and a cigarette. She’d been smoking more in the last couple of weeks than she’d done in months, and vowed to cut it down to the occasional one with a drink when she got back home. She looked over the second story for the spread, which she’d written around the photograph of Boskovac and the minister.
McGuire had told her the story of Hoffman’s murder was on the wires and the foreign pages of the broadsheets, but it hadn’t made the main TV news in the UK. A German being bumped off in a hotel bedroom in Belgrade could be anything. But he couldn’t conceal his delight that the Post would be the only paper that could reveal the truth behind his murder. He said he’d get a decent tie looked out for the TV cameras when they came to interview him about the Post’s groundbreaking exclusive. This is what he lived for.
This was what Rosie lived for too, but right now it didn’t feel that way. She thought of Emir, and how frightened he was as he’d gripped her hand in the hospital. She thought of her meeting with Hoffman, and how troubled he’d seemed. She knew the image of him in the bedroom was sure to haunt her for years to come. Part of her wished she didn’t do this any more, that she was back in Glasgow, seeing TJ off to New York and planning a trip to see him. But a bigger part of her couldn’t wait to see this story in the paper. She looked out of the window into the blackness. Her mobile rang.
‘You nearly finished, Rosie?’ It was Matt. ‘There’s a gin and tonic with your name on it at the bar.’
‘I’m on my way.’ Rosie pushed back her chair, stood up, and pinged the story over to McGuire.
*
The sunburst red-and-yellow Macedonian flag fluttered high on the border post at Blace. Rosie was glad to see it, even though the very sight of it brought back disturbing images. The garish flag was known as the sun of liberty, and it had meant safety and refuge for so many fleeing Kosovans just a few months ago. Right now, for Rosie, it meant they were almost home. By this evening, they would be on a plane from Skopje airport to London, and in Glasgow the following day.
‘Can you stop here for five minutes?’ Rosie asked Adrian as they crossed the border. ‘I just want to look at something.’
He glanced at her curiously and pulled up at the side of the road.
Rosie got out and crossed over to stand closer to the edge of the sprawling field. It was on this very spot she’d witnessed human suffering on such a huge scale that, even weeks after she’d returned home, she couldn’t look upon an empty field without seeing a seething mass of desperate refugees living in the muddy squalor they’d been abandoned to for days. Now the vast field at the foot of the rugged hillside lay empty and silent. But even though fresh grass had grown over the mud and slime, Rosie could still hear the noises in her head. The crying of children, the coughing and hacking of people ill from sleeping rough and lying in the rain with nothing but the clothes they’d been wearing when they’d been burned and battered out of their homes days earlier.
With the sound of the rushing river at the far side of the field, an image came into her head of the morning she’d seen an old woman limp to the edge of the river. She’d hitched up her heavy coat and skirt to urinate in public, because there was no option, and Rosie had watched as the woman wept at the sheer indignity of it all. She swallowed her tears as she remembered walking among the people one chilly, smoky dawn, and finding their stories of mutilated bodies in the streets they’d left behind almost too far-fetched to be believed. It was only days later, when the people were finally bused to refugee camps around Blace that she’d gone behind the wired fences to speak to them and realised that so many of them told the same storie
s, they just had to be true. But it was over now. And as she looked at the row of tall, skinny poplar trees that separated the border from Kosovo, she was glad she’d returned to see for herself that it really was over. Perhaps now her sleep would not be so haunted.
‘Okay.’ She turned to Matt and Adrian who were standing at the car watching her. ‘Let’s go.’
In the car, Matt squeezed her shoulder. ‘You all right, Rosie?’
‘Yeah. I’m good, Matt.’ She took a deep breath and read the piece of paper she’d pulled out of her bag. ‘There’s no address,’ she told them. ‘Just the name of the grandmother and the name of the town of Tetovo. We’ll just have to wing it, guys. I’ve been in Tetovo before when I was here during the war, and I remember there were a couple of centres set up where refugees could go to find each other. So many of them had been split up in the chaos after they came over to Macedonia that it took months to hook them back up together.’
‘Is that what happened to Emir’s grandmother?’ Matt asked.
‘That’s what he told me. He said she was taken in a bus from here on the border with one of his aunts, and that they’d been in touch a couple of times to say they were now living in Tetovo until they could go back home. So let’s hope she’s still there, because a lot of the Kosovans did go back home in recent weeks once the NATO forces had made it safe for them.’
‘If she is old, I think she will still be there,’ Adrian said.
‘I hope so.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Because we only have one shot at this.’
*
They reached the outskirts of Tetovo after a couple of hours’ drive through awesome scenery, past sweeping fields and lakes, surrounded by the skyline of snowcapped mountains. The town was sprawled across the grassy plains at the foot of a mountain, and the closer they got to it, the more crammed together it seemed to be. Down the ages, Tetovo had always been an Albanian enclave and Muslim town. After the Bosnian war, it took several thousands of the fleeing Bosnians, and when the Kosovo conflict kicked off, at least a hundred thousand people flocked there. As they drove through the bustling town, it was clearly still a little chaotic from the massive influx of refugees, with people milling around in the main square, or outside centres that looked like aid shelters.
‘Phrases like needles in haystacks are coming to mind, Rosie,’ Matt said.
‘Looks like it. But let’s see if we can find a centralised place – if there is such a thing – to ask some questions.’
Adrian pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out. He went into a cafe and spoke to some men sitting at a table playing a board game with match-sticks.
‘I’m glad Adrian’s here,’ Matt said. ‘My Macedonian is shite.’
‘What, like your Spanish?’ Rosie grinned at him.
‘I thought my Spanish was actually muy impressive, by the way, señorita.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Rosie said.
After a couple of minutes Adrian came back. ‘There are some aid agencies still working in the town. They have given me a couple of names. We must go up past the main square, and the centres are close to a mosque up at the edge of the town.’ He got into the car and they drove off, winding their way through the traffic in narrow, busy streets.
‘This reminds me a wee bit of that shithole in Morocco – Sale – we drove through that time with Adrian last year.’
‘Yeah,’ Rosie said. ‘But without the body in the boot.’
All three of them laughed, recalling the tension and danger of the last big investigation that had brought them all together, hunting for the kidnapped toddler stolen from her parents on the Costa del Sol.
‘Let’s hope we don’t have the same trouble getting out of the country as we did at the end of that trip,’ Adrian said, lighting a cigarette.
They managed to find a place to park close to the mosque. All three of them got out of the car. Rosie knew she and Matt stuck out like sore thumbs among the Muslim women and men. A few months ago, towns like this were heaving with press and TV cameras, filming refugees arriving in buses, and interviewing displaced persons before they were shunted to neighbouring towns and villages that were all trying to cope with the sudden influx.
All Rosie had to go on was a photograph of Emir’s grandmother and aunt and their names. He’d told her about them the night he stayed in her house and said they were now living in Tetovo. When he died, Rosie had insisted that Don and the DI quietly gave her a copy of the photograph and his old address that was in his belongings. It was the least they could do, she’d told them.
At the makeshift reception area in the hall next to the mosque, Rosie asked the weary-looking man at the desk if he spoke English. He answered her in French. Rosie’s grasp of the language gathered that they needed another part of the building. He took them to an office close by where a woman sat behind a desk. Rosie showed her the name and the photograph. The woman looked at the names and went down a list. She looked up and shook her head.
‘Is not here.’
‘You have never had a record of either of the two women?’
The woman shook her head. Rosie gave Matt a frustrated look. The woman watched them, then stood up.
‘You can try across the road in the shelter for the old people. They may know. But I have nothing here.’
They crossed into the shabby building which looked like it had been a clinic or small hospital ward, with rows of beds and a waiting area. Rosie went up to the main desk and spoke to the woman, who shook her head, not understanding. Adrian arrived at her shoulder and spoke in what Rosie guessed was Macedonian, or some kind of variation of Serbo-Croat that most Slavs understood. He took the piece of paper from Rosie and showed it to her. She got out a huge book and opened it, muttering something to Adrian. Rosie watched as she scanned her finger down the list of names, then she stopped and smiled up to Adrian, and spoke.
‘Is here,’ Adrian said. ‘She has the name on the list.’
The two of them spoke again, and Adrian thanked her.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘She gave me an address, but she isn’t supposed to. It is close by. The woman is living with an Albanian family.’
The address was on the far side of the town, through a warren of blocks of flats and up narrow little streets that led to rows of ramshackle houses. Rosie’s throat felt tight with emotion as they drove past people who were clearly poor refugees, idling through their days, waiting to find out what the future held for them. She wondered where they would end up – would they ever go home? Would they ever be able to find something of the life they had when so much that was precious to them had been lost? If Emir hadn’t ended up in Glasgow, he might have been wandering around here, caring for his grandmother, clinging to the only family he had left. She was dreading meeting them, afraid they would see through her story that Emir was happy.
When they stopped the car outside the address, half a dozen people gathered, eyeing them suspiciously as they went towards the houses. A middle-aged man approached them and they stopped. Adrian gave them the names of the two women. His face showed nothing, but he immediately disappeared inside a house and, moments later, a woman, came out looking confused. She was not old enough to be Emir’s grandmother, and Rosie assumed from the picture she must be the aunt.
‘I am Besa.’ She put her hand on her chest. ‘You are looking for my aunt?’
‘Yes,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you. You speak English?’ She smiled, gratefully.
‘A little. From the hotel I am working in many years ago.’
‘I am looking for the grandmother of Emir. I am from Scotland. I am a journalist. I would like to talk to you about Emir.’
The woman’s face lit up, then fear registered and her eyes grew dark.
‘Ah! Emir is okay?’ Her expression pleaded for reassurance.
Rosie steeled herself as the woman studied her face. She took a deep breath and opened her mouth to speak, but the woman intervened. ‘Emir is hurt?’ She shook her head, t
ouched her lips. ‘You come to us with bad news.’
Rosie glanced at Adrian and Matt, then nodded. ‘Yes. I’m sorry. Emir … Emir was killed.’ The tears came without warning, spilling out of her eyes. It was all she could do to stop herself from breaking down.
Her words hung there like a cruel blow. In this farflung little corner of the world where people had seen too much sorrow, a stranger now came to break more hearts.
The woman’s face fell and she kind of crumpled, seeming suddenly unsteady on her feet. Rosie stepped forward and reached out an arm, but a woman standing behind her supported Besa who was now in tears.
‘Emir,’ she whispered and buried her face in her hands, shaking her head. ‘No Emir. He is a good boy. His mama … His papa … murdered by the Serbs. Please. No Emir.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Rosie, sniffed and wiped her tears, but they just kept coming. ‘I’m so, so sorry, ’she said again.
The people close by looked on disconsolately as Besa dabbed her eyes with her apron and tried to compose herself. ‘What happen?’ she asked.
‘It’s a very long story,’ Rosie said, ‘but he was killed. He was murdered, and the police in Scotland are investigating.’
‘Why killed? Why Emir?’ Besa looked bewildered.
Rosie knew she would have to give more. Besa deserved to know more.
‘Emir was helping me with a story for the newspaper, because bad things are happening to refugees in the UK. They are being kidnapped and killed. He was one of them who was attacked. They tried to kill him.’ Rosie paused. ‘They killed his friend.’
‘Jetmir?’ Besa looked shocked, then mumbled something in Albanian.
‘I’m afraid so.’
Besa shook her head again. ‘Please … Please. Why you come here? You come all this way to tell us this?’
‘Because …’ Rosie swallowed. ‘Because I promised Emir in the hospital before he died. He asked me to come here and to tell his grandmother that he is fine and is happy. I made a promise to him.’ She bit her lip. ‘Emir was a very brave young man. He was helping me to find the people who were killing the refugees. He wanted to find out what happened to Jetmir. We were working together.’ She shook her head. ‘I feel bad because I was the only friend he had, but …’ Rosie choked. ‘But I couldn’t save him.’