The Skeleton Road

by Road, The Skeleton

  ‘So when it came to the breakdown of Yugoslavia, they could go right back to their old habits?’

  ‘As you say. And when it came to civil war, it was easy to think of the enemy as less than human. That made it OK to rape and torture and massacre, because they were vermin who needed to be put down.’ Maggie pushed off from her desk, warming to her subject, moving around and gesturing with her hands as she spoke. Karen could see exactly why she’d be a success in a lecture theatre. Clever, dynamic, lit up by passion.

  ‘And you think it’s finally changing?’

  ‘I think there are grounds for cautious optimism. This generation, the post-war kids, the ones who’re coming through their teens now, they’re growing up in a different world. Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media mean that they’re encountering kids from the other communities online and they’re discovering that they have much more in common.’

  ‘Really? I’d have thought that online anonymity provided more of an opportunity for bullying and trolling,’ Karen said. ‘That tends to be what we see most of in our job.’

  ‘I’m not denying some of that goes on. But mostly what they’re seeing is that their attitudes are the same as the people they thought were their enemies – none of them wants to spend their lives trapped in the old cycles of violence and revenge.’ Maggie waved at her desk, where assorted digital gadgets huddled together. ‘They want an economic future where they can have games consoles, and stream music, and buy the latest clothes. Not one where they might end up as refugees with all their possessions tied up in a bedsheet on the back of an ox-cart.’

  ‘Ironic that it’s taken twenty-first-century materialism to give them a different set of priorities. Communism didn’t manage it, but offer them an X-box and suddenly the past doesn’t matter,’ Karen said.

  ‘It’s a mash-up of those aspirations and their new understanding of how little difference there truly is between them. It might mean that we can lay to rest a thousand years of brutal wars in that region. That, and the fact that they no longer have a valid role as the buffer zone between the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires.’ She stopped abruptly, as if recalling who she was talking to.

  ‘Interesting,’ Karen said. ‘Maybe we’ll get there in Scotland too.’

  ‘Try eradicating educational segregation on religious grounds,’ Maggie said. ‘It makes it harder to discriminate if you can’t figure out someone’s religion based purely on the name of their school.’

  Karen gave a derisive snort. ‘Aye, right. Oddly enough, that’s not one of the suggestions that’s being put forward by the pro-independence lobby.’

  Before they could dive further into the murky waters of sectarianism, a deep buzzing cut across Maggie’s reply. ‘That’ll be Tessa.’ She left them for a moment to let the lawyer in.

  ‘Something dodgy going on, eh, boss?’ Jason muttered under the low murmur of indecipherable voices from the hallway.

  ‘Aye, but dodgy doesn’t always mean illegal.’ Karen stood up, ready to face her opponent. However hard she tried, she couldn’t think of lawyers in any other terms.

  The tall, slender woman who swept in ahead of Maggie had all the self-assurance of the best of the breed. Black hair stranded with silver was pulled back in a loose ponytail; her pale skin and soft features combined to give the impression of collected intelligence and compassion. She was dressed casually, in linen trousers and a dark blue sweater, but it was the kind of casual that cost a lot to achieve. ‘I’m Tessa Minogue,’ she said. ‘I’m a human rights lawyer, strictly speaking. But I am here on Maggie’s behalf. If I don’t like the way your questions are heading, I will intervene.’ She didn’t bother smiling. She took the opposite end of the sofa from where Maggie had been sitting, demonstrating a confident familiarity with the room and its occupant.

  Karen introduced herself while Maggie perched on the edge of her seat again, hands clasped between her knees. ‘We’re here looking for help,’ Karen concluded. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I’m not trying to be obstructive,’ Maggie said.

  ‘We all have a right to protect our own interests,’ Tessa said.

  Bloody smug lawyers. ‘So if we could just crack on?’ Karen said. The other women nodded. She flipped open her notebook. Time to be very precise. ‘You opened a joint bank account thirteen years ago with Dimitar Petrovic. For six years or so, you both used it. You paid a monthly sum into the account, he deposited various amounts at irregular intervals. Most of the withdrawals were cash, and on his card. Then eight years ago, he stopped using the account. You continued to pay in four hundred pounds a month but you don’t draw down that money.’ She looked up. ‘Were you in a relationship with Dimitar Petrovic?’

  Maggie glanced at Tessa, who nodded. ‘He was my partner, yes.’

  ‘We’ve had some difficulty finding any official information about Mr Petrovic. Can you explain why that might be?’

  ‘Why are you so interested in General Petrovic?’ Tessa interrupted.

  ‘All in good time, Ms Minogue. Professor?’

  ‘There isn’t a paper trail because he’s not British,’ Maggie said wearily. ‘He was a general in the Croatian Army. He was an intelligence specialist. Later he worked with NATO during the Bosnian conflict and with the UN during the war in Kosovo.’

  ‘Is that where you met?’

  Maggie nodded. ‘I was teaching in Dubrovnik when the Croatian war broke out. That’s when I met Mitja.’ She inclined her head towards the lawyer. ‘And Tessa too.’

  ‘We all spent a lot of time together during the siege of Dubrovnik,’ Tessa said. ‘When you come under fire, it forges close bonds.’

  ‘I imagine it does. So, the three of you were friends?’

  ‘Mitja and I were a couple,’ Maggie said. ‘And Tessa was friends with both of us.’

  ‘He came to join you here after the war was over?’ Karen.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what was he doing for a living?’

  ‘He was a security consultant. He also gave occasional lectures. War and Peace Studies, that sort of thing. But I don’t understand why you’re interested in this. We were tediously law-abiding.’ Maggie was regaining her edge, turning Karen’s questioning back at her.

  Sensing that, Karen sharpened her approach. ‘What happened eight years ago?’

  ‘In what respect?’

  ‘He stopped using the bank account. Why?’

  Maggie gave Tessa a pleading look. The lawyer crossed her legs and held her left elbow with her right hand. ‘General Petrovic moved away.’

  ‘He left you?’ Karen addressed herself to Maggie.

  ‘He left,’ Tessa said.

  ‘Where did he go?’ Karen was still facing Maggie.

  ‘I presume he went back to Croatia.’ Every word cost Maggie, Karen could see.

  ‘But you don’t know that? Did he not tell you where he was going?’

  Maggie wrapped her arms round herself. ‘He didn’t tell me he was going, never mind where. He just left, all right?’ There was a pause. Karen waited. She was good at waiting in interviews. ‘I knew he missed Croatia. He talked a lot about the regeneration work that was under way. Sometimes he sounded quite wistful. Nostalgic. But when I suggested making a trip back, he said he didn’t want to be a tourist in his own country.’ She sighed. ‘I assumed the pull towards home was stronger than the pull towards me. I kept putting the money in the account in case he needed it. I know that sounds pathetic, but I knew that things wouldn’t be straightforward for him in Croatia. Nothing’s ever straightforward in the Balkans,’ she added with a bitter laugh. ‘And I hoped that my putting the money in the account for him would make him understand he could come back when he was ready.’

  ‘So you haven’t heard from him since he left? He’s not been in touch?’

  Maggie stared at the faded kilim on the floor. ‘No. Not a word.’

  ‘And what about you, Tessa? Has he been in touch with you?’

  ‘Of cour
se not. Why would he be in touch with me and not Maggie?’

  Karen could think of at least one reason, but this probably wasn’t the time to accuse the lawyer of sleeping with her best friend’s bloke. ‘I just wondered,’ she said mildly. ‘So, Professor, when he left, did he say he was going out for a while? Or going away for a few days? How did he put it?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. I left on the morning of the third of September eight years ago to go to a conference in Geneva. Mitja said he might go climbing in Scotland while I was away. When I got home, he was gone. He’d taken almost nothing with him, which made me think he’d gone climbing, as he’d said he planned to do. But he didn’t come back.’

  ‘The people he usually climbed with hadn’t seen him or heard from him,’ Tessa chipped in. ‘We checked.’

  That fitted with what Karen had learned earlier in the day from John Thwaite and Robbie Smith. ‘Did he ever say anything about free climbing? Or buildering, I think it’s called. Where people climb the outside of buildings?’

  ‘He’d done it a few times,’ Maggie said. ‘But he didn’t tell me much about it because it was illegal and he didn’t want me to get into trouble if he got caught.’

  ‘And was there any mention of doing it with an old friend from the Balkans?’ Karen asked.

  Maggie shook her head. ‘All his climbing buddies from Croatia were still there, as far as I know.’

  ‘Apart from us,’ Tessa said. ‘A bunch of us used to do a bit of hillwalking when we were all in the Balkans at various points during the conflict. There were a few places you could go in safety and get away from it all. And the three of us still did get out in the hills after Mitja moved here. Snowdonia and the Black Mountains, mostly. But we never went with anyone else from those days. What has all of this to do with anything?’

  ‘Was there anybody from his life in the Balkans that he saw much of while he was living here?’

  Maggie frowned. ‘Occasionally someone would come over on government business. Or some sort of military training. They’d meet up for a drink, or he’d invite them over for dinner. But he didn’t go out of his way to seek them out.’ She shrugged. ‘We had a social life of our own.’

  ‘Mitja wasn’t somebody who harked back to the past,’ Tessa said. ‘He lived in the here and now. But I’m going to ask you again, Chief Inspector: what is all this in aid of?’

  They had arrived at the hard place now. ‘So neither of you has seen or heard from Dimitar Petrovic since September 2007?’

  Both women nodded. ‘That’s right,’ Tessa said.

  Karen lowered her voice. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I think I may have some very bad news. A few days ago, the skeletonised remains of a man were found on the roof of a building in Edinburgh. We have reason to believe that man was Dimitar Petrovic.’

  Maggie’s mouth fell open and her eyes widened. ‘No. There has to be a mistake. I’d know if he was dead. I’d know.’ Her voice was firm, filled with denial.

  Tessa straightened up, uncrossing her legs and shunting herself along the sofa so she could put an arm round her friend. ‘It can’t be Mitja. It just can’t. How did this man die? Was it a fall?’

  ‘Nothing so straightforward, I’m afraid. He was murdered.’

  21

  It was as if Karen’s words made sense of an absurdity. Murder was plausible to Maggie Blake in a way that simple death had not been. Tears spilled from her eyes and she began to moan, low and insistent, as if a terrible pain was twisting inside her. Karen, who had broken this news more than her fair share of times because of her gender, held back both sympathy and inquiry. She knew it was always better to let the first storm pass.

  Tessa meanwhile attempted to pull herself together. ‘He can’t be dead. That’s not possible. If he’s dead, then who —’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Maggie exploded, rounding on her. For a moment, Karen thought she was going to slap her friend. ‘I told you. I said he could never —’

  Tessa grabbed her arm. ‘Not now. We’ll do our grieving in private.’ She stressed the last two words, giving Karen a swift sideways look.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Karen said.

  Maggie ran her hands up the sides of her head, gripping her hair in bunches, as if trying to tear it out by the roots. ‘Are you sure it’s him?’

  ‘We can’t be a hundred per cent sure at this point,’ Karen said. ‘He had no ID on him. But he was found with a hotel key-card that had the imprint of some debit-card details on the magnetic strip. When we checked that out, it corresponded to your joint account. Given that General Petrovic hasn’t used the account for eight years, and now you’re telling me you haven’t seen him or heard from him in all that time… I’m sorry, but it’s hard to think of another explanation.’

  ‘Unless he killed the skeleton then went on the run,’ Jason said. ‘With him being a soldier and all, maybe that’s how it went? I mean, anybody could have his hotel key-card, right? He might even have left it himself to confuse things.’

  Karen looked at him in disbelief. Sometimes she wondered how Jason had lived this long. Did he seriously think that Maggie Blake would feel better about being deserted by a murderer rather than losing her lover to a killer?

  ‘He’s got a point,’ Tessa said. ‘And Mitja might not have pulled the trigger – he might simply have been there when it happened. But after what he’d been through, there are good reasons why he might have chosen to disappear. If it was his word against a Brit, for example. Or if he was afraid the killer might come after him. Really, Chief Inspector, what you have is very circumstantial. Very thin.’

  Maggie slumped against the arm of the sofa. ‘I don’t understand. Is it him or is it not? That’s all that matters.’

  ‘And that’s what we need to establish,’ Karen said. ‘I’m really sorry, Professor Blake. I think you have to prepare yourself for the worst, but we do need to make sure we’ve made a correct identification. How old was General Petrovic when he left?’

  Maggie looked baffled. ‘He was forty-seven on the seventeenth of August. Just a few weeks before he left. Why? What does that prove?’

  ‘The remains we found have been aged by our forensic team. They put him between forty-four and forty-seven.’

  ‘But that’s meaningless. That doesn’t narrow anything down.’ Maggie’s words were defiant but her eyes told a different story.

  Karen didn’t need to point out that it failed to exclude the general from the reckoning. ‘Can you tell me, had he ever broken any bones that you know about?’

  Maggie frowned. ‘Not when we were together.’

  ‘He never mentioned any accidents from before?’ You wouldn’t necessarily tell your partner every detail of your medical past. But River had said it would have been a bad break. An interruption to the dead man’s life, presumably.

  ‘He had a scar on his left thigh. He said it was from an accident when he was a student. Some idiot in a delivery van knocked him off his bike. I think he might have broken his leg, but I don’t remember the details. Is it important?’ Maggie looked close to tears again.

  ‘That might be a useful detail. We do know our victim broke his left femur at some point. It doesn’t prove anything, obviously, but it does seem to tie in with what you remember.’

  ‘What about DNA? Isn’t that the gold standard of ID these days?’ Tessa leaned forward, fixing Karen with her eyes.

  ‘We have managed to extract DNA from the remains, but as yet we’ve nothing to compare it to. Do you have contact details for any members of General Petrovic’s family?’

  Maggie shook her head slowly. ‘I never met them. So many people lost track of their families during the Balkan wars. People died. People ran to distant relatives in other countries. People were displaced. All I know is that he was an only child. I don’t even know the name of his village.’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘It never seemed important,’ she mumbled through her fingers. ‘We were about the future, not the past. That’s w
hat he always said.’

  There was an awkward silence, broken only by Maggie blowing her nose. Tessa reached for her hand and squeezed it tight. Then Jason spoke again. ‘What about next of kin? Did he not have to provide the name of a next of kin for official documents and that?’

  Maggie gave Tessa a sidelong glance. ‘I was his next of kin.’

  ‘Not officially, though,’ Tessa said.

  ‘Yes, officially. I’m sorry, Tess. I know I should have told you, but we didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. It just made it easier for him to stay.’

  Tessa stiffened, her face frozen. ‘You married him? When?’

  ‘A few weeks after he came over for good. Do you remember, we rented a cottage in the west of Ireland? We did it then. Somebody he knew in the UN sorted out the paperwork.’ She sniffed and fiddled with a heavy silver ring on the third finger of her right hand.

  ‘Bloody hell, Maggie. Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we had no secrets.’

  ‘We didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t want to make a big fuss. We wanted something that was ours, that’s all.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose and shivered. ‘Right now, even that feels like a betrayal. I never got to grieve properly when he went. I had to act like, you know, shit happens. Men leave. But it wasn’t just a casual thing. He was my husband. We didn’t do it lightly, but when he disappeared, I thought he’d torn up all those vows we made, and that really hurt.’

  Tessa put her arms around Maggie again and held her close. ‘You poor darling.’ She stroked her hair, her face all concern and sorrow.

  Everybody has secrets, Karen thought. Secrets and lies. But she reminded herself that she had a job to do. ‘We still need to find a way to establish a positive ID,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in speculating what happened on that roof until we know for sure whether we’re looking at General Petrovic or somebody else entirely. And if we’ve not got access to a blood relative, we’re going to have to come at this from a different angle. Do you still have anything belonging to the general that might have retained his DNA. A hairbrush? A toothbrush? Something like that?’