The Skeleton Road

by Road, The Skeleton

  ‘We’re trying to trace Dimitar Petrovic,’ Karen said.

  The woman gave a cynical snort of laughter. ‘Better women than you have failed in that particular quest, Chief Inspector. I don’t know of anyone who has seen hide nor hair of the general since he walked out on Maggie… let me see, it must be at least seven years ago. Or was it eight? I confess, I was taken aback by his desertion. Mitja and Maggie seemed so well matched, both as intellectual combatants and lovers.’

  ‘How did you come to know the general?’

  ‘Maggie brought him back as her trophy from the wars,’ Dr Simpson said. Her smile was warm, but the look she gave Karen was mischievous. She paused, cocking her head to one side, waiting for Karen to pick up the baton.

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ Karen said.

  ‘Maggie’s a Balkans specialist. She spent a lot of time there during the various conflicts in the nineties.’

  ‘And they met there?’ A nod. ‘So he was a general in which army?’ Karen knew next to nothing about the Balkan wars, but she knew enough to know that some factions were definitely considered to be worse than others.

  This time, the nod came with an approving smile. Karen felt like a student who was surviving a particularly tricky tutorial; she hoped Jason would continue to keep his mouth shut. ‘He started out in the Croatian Army. The side of right, you might say. But later he was attached to NATO forces as a special advisor. He was an intelligence specialist, I believe,’ Dr Simpson said.

  ‘So he met Professor Blake when she was, what? Researching the war?’

  ‘She was teaching a fledgling version of feminist geopolitics at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik when the war caught her out. They met there, in Dubrovnik, and when the war in Kosovo was finally over some years later, he joined her here in Oxford. But the college was still a single-sex institution. They needed somewhere to live and they didn’t have a lot of money. I was about to retire and I loved to travel until this damned hip shackled me.’ She whacked her leg with the cane without wincing. Extra-strong painkillers, Karen thought. ‘So we were the answer to each other’s needs. Mitja has a panoply of practical skills and he transformed my basement into a self-contained flat. In return, I had resident house-sitters while I went gallivanting.’

  ‘How long did they live here, in your basement?’

  Dr Simpson studied a corner of the ceiling while she considered. ‘Between six and seven years,’ she said. ‘They didn’t travel much. I’d have thought they’d have been in and out of the Balkans once things settled down, but even Maggie’s scarcely been back in recent years. She has a team of post-graduate researchers of one stripe or another to do the groundwork these days, of course. She produces brilliant research proposals that bring the university pots of cash, then she writes equally brilliant books that add lustre to her reputation. All without leaving the comfort of her fellows’ set at Schollie’s.’

  Karen thought she detected a tinge of bitterness; perhaps Dr Simpson felt she’d deserved the career Maggie was enjoying.

  ‘And when the general left? What provoked that?’

  ‘I have no idea. Nor, I think you’ll find, does anyone else. Maggie came back from a three-day conference in Geneva to find he’d gone. No note, no explanation. At first she thought he might have gone climbing. But his equipment was still sitting in the cupboard downstairs. All of it, as far as she could tell.’

  ‘Didn’t she report him missing?’ Like a kitten who spots a loose piece of string, Jason seized on something he knew he could usefully engage with. Karen, who wanted to travel in a completely different direction, entertained mildly violent thoughts.

  ‘I don’t know how you deal with these things north of the border, but the police here took the view that a grown man in good health who walks away from his life is quite within his rights. They could not have been less concerned.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not a high priority for us, unless there’s good reason to suppose otherwise. And I’m guessing there was no reason for that?’ Karen decided to follow this line for the moment.

  ‘Indeed. It was baffling rather than suspicious. Maggie has always believed he went back to Croatia, to a putative family life there. I’ve never quite managed to convince myself of that, but no alternative ever presented itself. And now here you are, asking about Mitja after all this time. Which suggests to me that an alternative has finally presented itself. Would I be right?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t disclose the details of our inquiry at this point.’ Karen knew it was an unsatisfactory response; she’d just plummeted from an alpha student to a borderline fail.

  ‘You are planning to talk to Maggie, though?’

  ‘As soon as we can. She’s out of town at the moment. I really appreciate your help. But I wonder, could we just backtrack a wee bit? You mentioned rock climbing. Was General Petrovic a keen climber?’

  Dr Simpson smiled. ‘It was a passion rather than a hobby. He and his friends spent many weekends in the Scottish Highlands. Bagging Munros, I believe it’s called.’

  ‘Where we come from, that’s generally thought of as hillwalking rather than climbing,’ Karen said. ‘Did he do the serious rock stuff as well?’

  ‘Oh yes. There’s a cupboard downstairs that’s still full of his equipment.’

  Karen tucked that away for future reference. If Maggie Blake didn’t have any obvious source of Petrovic’s DNA, there might be something in Dr Simpson’s basement that would do the trick. ‘What about buildings? Did he ever talk about free-climbing buildings? I bet you’ve got some real challenges here in Oxford.’

  Dr Simpson pursed her lips. ‘That would be against the law, Chief Inspector.’

  Karen shrugged. ‘A man who came through the Balkan wars wouldn’t be put off by a wee bit of civil disobedience, I suspect.’

  But the shutters had come down. Whatever Dorothea Simpson knew about Dimitar Petrovic’s transgressions on university property, she wasn’t about to share it. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Chief Inspector.’ She struggled to her feet. ‘And now I need to be left in peace. I’m an old woman and I tire easily.’ She looked expectantly at the door. Karen took the hint and shooed Jason down the hall. On the way out, she thanked Dr Simpson. She considered asking the old woman not to warn Maggie Blake of their interest. But that, she reckoned, would be pointless. Tough old birds like Dr Simpson did what they were going to do regardless of interdictions from lassies like Karen.

  As they walked back to the car, Jason said, ‘So. Looks as if we’ve got a war hero on our hands.’

  Karen raised her eyebrows. ‘He might be a general, Jason. That doesn’t make him a hero.’

  17

  Alan Macanespie stared out of the window at the empty green landscape the train was hurtling through. He’d never have admitted it, but in spite of the fact that he was racing towards a meeting with Wilson Cagney, all he felt was relief.

  He wasn’t by inclination a man of action. His strength lay in interrogating the intel that passed across his desk and making sense of it and in building bridges with those who kept the wheels going round, not in terrorising middle-aged women. He’d hated having to do it and hated even more being possessed by this anxiety that it was going to have terrible unforeseen consequences for him, his continued employment and his pension. He should never have allowed himself to be seduced by Proctor’s hare-brained plan, as if he was one of a pair of James Bonds. Even Proctor was acting now like the idea had been nothing to do with him.

  But at least he was out of the front line, and for that he was grateful. Only an hour earlier, he’d been hunched over his phone in a hotel lobby, wishing he looked more nondescript. He was pretty sure there hadn’t been enough light under the Jamaica Street Bridge for Maggie Blake to have seen any identifying features. And he had been wearing a beanie hat pulled down low over his ears, hiding his tell-tale ginger hair. But still. She’d seen him outlined against the city’s glow and she must have been traumatised by the e
ncounter. What if his silhouette was carved on her mind’s eye, clear as day? What if she stepped out of the lift and instead of walking into the breakfast room, she turned towards reception and saw him lurking there like a great fat toad? She might not have called the police the night before, but she’d sure as hell call them this morning if she saw one of her attackers hanging around her hotel lobby.

  He’d tapped his phone and sent an instant message to Proctor, who was outside the hotel in a hired car. They had no idea whether Maggie Blake would be on foot, in a taxi or in a car driven by herself or someone from the university, so they’d tried to cover all the bases. Macanespie wasn’t even sure why they were still following Maggie Blake. Proctor had been adamant they should stay on her tail, though. ‘She might run to him,’ he’d said.

  ‘No way,’ Macanespie had grumbled. ‘If she knows where he is, she’ll know how to get in touch with him without putting him in the wind.’

  ‘She’s a middle-aged geography professor, not an asset.’

  ‘And he was a general in intelligence. You think he won’t have drilled her in the basic business of covering his back? For fuck’s sake, Theo, you could take misplaced optimism as your specialist subject on Mastermind.’

  But still, Proctor had won the argument. So Macanespie had been stuck in the hotel lobby since the crack of sparrowfart, just in case Maggie Blake decided she needed to leave the hotel at dawn for a ten o’clock seminar less than a mile away.

  And then everything had changed. His phone had rung, jerking him out of his fugue of monodirectional vigilance. The screen told him it was Wilson Cagney and his heart juddered. He was supposed to be in Scheveningen, not Glasgow. If Cagney was paying attention – and Macanespie reckoned Cagney was always paying attention – he’d realise he wasn’t hearing a foreign phone ringtone.

  He jerked into action, as if sudden movement would make everything all right. ‘Yes, Wilson?’ he said as soon as he answered.

  ‘Get on the next flight to London,’ Cagney said without preamble. ‘You and Proctor. I need you in my office asap. Let me know when you’re on the ground at this end.’

  That was it. A dictionary definition of peremptory. No room for manoeuvre. But interesting that whatever bee Cagney had in his bonnet, it was buzzing so loudly it had drowned out the sound of the wrong ringtone. Galvanised, Macanespie had jumped to his feet and practically run out of the hotel.

  Proctor had been incredulous and then grumpy. ‘We’ll be quicker getting the train,’ he’d reasoned as they drove back to the hire-car agency along the quayside from the hotel. And so now they were heading south, trapped for the best part of five hours in a cloud of ignorance.

  When they announced their arrival in London, Cagney instructed them to meet him in a coffee shop in Covent Garden. ‘I’m attending a conference at King’s,’ he explained. ‘I haven’t got time to go back to the office.’

  They found him in a corner at the rear of the busy café, back to the wall, his intimidating glare keeping other customers at bay. When they arrived clutching their Americanos, he drained his double espresso and turned the glare on them. ‘I set you a task. So why is it that I’m the one handing over the information?’

  ‘The trail went cold eight years ago,’ Macanespie said. ‘That’s a lot of ground to cover.’

  Cagney rubbed one eye with the tip of his index finger. ‘You pair make me so tired. Here’s the latest instalment in what you need to know. Obviously, we have a flag on General Dimitar Petrovic. And yesterday that flag started waving. A detective constable from Police Scotland ran his name through criminal records and DVLA. Nothing of interest came up, of course. But I want you two to go to Edinburgh and talk to DC Jason Murray and his boss, DCI Karen Pirie. Who happens to be in charge of their Historic Cases Unit. I want to know what her interest in Petrovic is and whether she has any information that could help us lay hands on him.’

  ‘Why can’t we just phone her?’ Macanespie said. ‘We’re all supposed to be on the same side, aren’t we?’

  Cagney’s look of contempt turned the coffee sour in Macanespie’s mouth. ‘Because we’re not lazy bastards. And because, as you should know by now, you always get more face to face. I want to know what’s happened to make Police Scotland care about Petrovic and I want to know the whole story, not some cobbled-together five-second version handed down by a busy DCI over the phone. It’s got to be more than a coincidence that they’re suddenly interested in Petrovic right when we’re moving on him. I want to know how his name has turned up in their inquiries.’

  ‘Could you not just have asked?’ Macanespie said. ‘You’ve got the reach, after all.’

  ‘When officers at my rank start asking questions, alarm bells ring. Whereas you —’

  ‘Edinburgh?’ Proctor said, trying to deflect Cagney’s barely suppressed irritation.

  ‘It’s where the Historic Cases Unit is based. Don’t phone ahead. Keep the element of surprise.’ Cagney ran a hand down his silvery silk tie, smoothing it against his starched white shirt. ‘See if you can get this one right, boys.’ He stood up and edged out from behind the table, taking care not to brush against anything that might be grubby. ‘I’ll expect to hear from you very soon.’

  Macanespie watched his perfectly tailored back zigzag through the coffee addicts till he disappeared from sight. ‘Patronising wee twat,’ he said. All the same he couldn’t help recognising that something was stirring in him in response to Cagney’s dismissiveness. Macanespie wasn’t ready to be written off yet.

  ‘I can’t believe we’ve got to go back to Scotland. Why couldn’t he have told us that over the phone? We’d have been in Edinburgh by now, whether we’d been coming from Scheveningen or Glasgow,’ Proctor complained.

  ‘He thinks he can drive us out through the petty exercise of power.’ Macanespie grimaced at the acidic tang of his coffee and stood up. ‘Well, fuck him, say I. He’s going to have to try a lot harder. Come on, Theo, let’s away back to Scotland and see if we can get a decent cup of coffee from DCI Pirie.’

  18

  While Jason had still been deciding between a full English or kippers, Karen had already been researching the next phase of her inquiry into the death of the man she was now presuming was Dimitar Petrovic.

  Her day had begun even earlier, with a Skype conversation with Phil Parhatka. Whenever she worked with River, she found herself thinking more fondly of her lover. They’d finally got together in the middle of the same high-profile cold-case investigation where she’d first met River. Karen had been in her early thirties then, resigned to living alone, self-reliant and stoic. She had plenty of pals; she was known as good company. Sociable and reliable but ultimately a loner. But in the space of a few weeks, her life had turned upside down. Love and friendship had kicked down the protective barriers she’d spent years constructing, and now she recognised that she was a different woman from the one who had always put her job front and centre because there wasn’t anything else big enough to occupy her.

  Now not a day went by without her talking to Phil. There was no sense of obligation on either side; when work forced them apart they spoke because they wanted to, because a day without communication felt incomplete. It had practical advantages too. Even though they were no longer in the same unit, their shared occupation meant each could offer the other meaningful advice. And the distance between her work on cold cases and his on the Murder Prevention Team – unhelpfully known as the Muppet Squad – added a useful layer of detachment.

  And so her first act on waking had been to Skype him. She’d caught him at the kitchen table, supping a mug of tea and working his way through a bacon-and-egg roll. ‘I turn my back for five minutes and bang goes the fruit,’ Karen teased.

  ‘River ate it all,’ he said. ‘She thinks five a day is her starter for ten.’

  ‘You don’t mind her staying?’

  ‘Not at all. We went out for a curry and a couple of beers last night, that’s how I missed your call.’

&nbs
p; ‘On a school night? She’s a bad influence.’

  ‘No, it was me. I felt like a wee celebration. We had a bit of a result yesterday.’

  Karen gave a grim smile. She loved when Phil’s team nailed one of their targets. It meant one more woman safe in her home, at least for a while. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘You remember that big-time property developer I told you about? The one who’s behind that new shopping mall just off the motorway by Rosyth?’

  She did. And she wished that was one piece of knowledge that wasn’t embedded in her head. ‘The one who raped his wife in front of one of his investors then let him have a go too? That the one? Told her best pal and the pal came to us?’

  Phil nodded. ‘And we couldn’t persuade the wife to make a complaint because she was so scared of what he would do to her. Well, we started putting him through the grinder and we were struggling. The usual stuff – vehicle excise duty, car insurance, TV licence – wasn’t giving us any leverage because all that gets sorted out by his very efficient PA. So, we heard a whisper that he was taking cash backhanders. But we couldn’t get anybody to talk to us and we couldn’t see any of the usual signs of flashing unaccountable cash. Then Tommy had a brainwave.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t think he had enough brains to cause a wave.’

  Phil pulled a face at her. ‘You think anybody who supports Rangers is brainless.’

  ‘And your point would be…?’

  ‘That for once, he was able to draw on his recent understanding of lower league football to come up with an interesting idea.’

  Karen pretended to swoon. ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘Among our target’s other interests is a major shareholding in a First Division football team. Last season, the average attendance at a home game was just over fifteen hundred. But this season they’ve been reporting home gates of nearly three thousand. And let me tell you, it’s not the quality of the football. Not to mention the fact that the photos we’ve tracked down online show roughly the same number of bodies in the stands.’