The Skeleton Road

by Road, The Skeleton

  ‘We instigate a lot of CRO searches in Historic Cases. Who is it that you’re interested in?’

  Macanespie dipped his head, acknowledging that he understood she wasn’t a pushover. ‘Dimitar Petrovic.’

  ‘And can I ask why General Petrovic is an individual of interest to you?’

  Proctor glowered at her. ‘The clue is in the names. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Petrovic.’

  ‘Are you telling me that Dimitar Petrovic is wanted for war crimes?’ Karen tried not to sound as if this was a complete surprise.

  ‘We’re not telling you anything,’ Proctor said. ‘We’re here to establish what you know about Petrovic and his whereabouts.’

  Karen bristled. There were few things she hated more than petty bureaucrats throwing their weight around. She shook her head. ‘That’s not how it works. For a start, I don’t think you have any jurisdiction here. Under the terms of the Scotland Act, we’re responsible for our own justice system north of the border. And while we’re happy to cooperate, we don’t take orders from your ministry or its functionaries.’ She had no idea whether she was right, but she enjoyed saying it and it sounded good. She smiled. ‘So once you’ve told me why you’re interested in Petrovic, maybe I’ll consider telling you what I know. Why don’t we give you a few minutes to have a wee think about that?’ She got to her feet, ostentatiously collecting coffee, bag and notebook.

  In the corridor outside, Jason gave her his standard look of puzzlement. ‘How come you don’t want to tell them about the skeleton? I mean, once Dr Wilde gives us the thumbs-up on the ID, it’ll be on the Internet, right?’

  ‘Aye, but they don’t know that. Because they don’t know what we know. And likewise, I don’t know what they know, but as soon as I tell them what we know, there’s no incentive for them to tell us what they know and they’ll just disappear back over Hadrian’s Wall and leave us none the wiser. Does that make sense?’

  Jason looked dubious. ‘I suppose. But what if they won’t tell us?’

  ‘Then we’ll call their bluff and send them on their merry way. And they won’t like that because then their boss will have to talk to our boss and he’ll not be a happy bunny.’

  ‘Then our boss’ll give you a hard time.’

  Karen gave the kind of smile that makes small children cry. ‘I don’t think so. Not for maintaining the integrity of our investigation, he won’t.’

  Five minutes later, she walked back into the interview room. Macanespie and Proctor looked glum. ‘We’ll show you ours if you show us yours,’ Macanespie said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. You first, you’re the guests.’ Karen won a wry smile from Macanespie and another glare from Proctor.

  ‘We’ve been seconded to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. To be honest, it’s had mixed success. Part of that has been because a string of significant players never made it to the courtroom. They were, in effect, assassinated before they could be arrested. They were all Serbs. And the prime suspect is General Dimitar Petrovic, who disappeared from our radar just before the killing started.’ He leaned back and folded his hands over his generous stomach.

  ‘Why? What made him a suspect?’

  Proctor sighed. ‘He’d been making a lot of noise about what a poor job the tribunal was doing. That what was needed was a proper truth and reconciliation forum like they had in South Africa. We decided to check him out after the first murder, because he’d been complaining about that particular individual enjoying his freedom on the backs of massacred Croats. He had actually given information to the tribunal about where this individual was living, and his new identity. But he thought we were dragging our heels, that we weren’t doing anything about it, when in fact we were building a strong case against him. Anyway, when we went to take a look at what Petrovic was up to, we discovered he’d vanished. Nobody seemed to know where he was or what he was doing.’

  Macanespie nodded. ‘And after the second murder, a wee bird whispered that Petrovic had decided to take the law into his own hands. He has a little list, apparently. So far, we think he’s executed eleven suspected war criminals.’

  Karen almost felt sorry for him. ‘No, he hasn’t.’

  Macanespie looked startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ Proctor demanded.

  ‘I’ll know for certain within twenty-four hours, but I’m pretty sure that Dimitar Petrovic isn’t the Lone Ranger of the Balkans. Mostly because he’s been dead for eight years.’

  ‘Dead?’ Macanespie echoed.

  ‘It must have crossed your mind, surely? It’s often the reason people disappear without a trace. Plus, you had a load of other murders in the frame.’ Karen couldn’t quite believe they hadn’t already considered that option. But both men looked discomfited.

  ‘You said “other murders”,’ Macanespie said. ‘He was definitely murdered, your dead man?’

  Karen nodded. ‘Shot in the head.’

  ‘See, now. Right away, that doesn’t fit. The murders we’re looking at, none of the victims was shot. They all had their throats cut. And they were Serbs. All the other victims were Serbs. And Petrovic is a Croat. Not to mention that he isn’t a notorious war criminal,’ Proctor said sarcastically. ‘Why would we think he was a victim in the same series?’

  ‘Beats me,’ Karen said. ‘But if you’re looking for Petrovic, I reckon you’ll find what’s left of him in our mortuary. I don’t suppose you can come up with anybody who might have wanted him dead? The first one of your victims, for example?’

  Macanespie frowned then shook his head. ‘No. Petrovic was potentially a useful witness in several trials, but he wasn’t crucial to any of them. He had enemies, like everybody who played a part in those conflicts, but I never heard that he was the top of anybody’s shit list.’

  ‘So you can’t actually help my investigation?’

  ‘No,’ Proctor said firmly.

  Macanespie pushed a business card across the table towards Karen. ‘But if you come across anything that might help ours…’

  Karen scraped her chair back. ‘My pleasure,’ she said, her tone indicating the opposite. ‘Jason will see you out, gentlemen. I’ve got a murder to solve.’

  23

  Macanespie and Proctor toiled up the hill to their hotel. Edinburgh was full of unexpected hills, leaving Macanespie breathless and bad-tempered. ‘What the fuck do we do now?’ he demanded for the third time since they’d left Karen Pirie.

  The answer was the same. ‘It’s Cagney’s problem, not ours.’

  It wasn’t a helpful response. Macanespie was already pretty sure that Wilson Cagney was a man accomplished in always taking the credit and never accepting the blame. Somehow, Petrovic dead was going to end up on their plate just as surely as he had while still putatively alive. And right now, Proctor was about as helpful as a concrete lifebelt.

  Back at the hotel, they huddled round Proctor’s laptop and Skyped their boss. Cagney seemed flustered, but Macanespie put that down to being dragged out of a meeting with people who could do his career more favours than a pair of down-table lawyers. ‘So what’s the story?’ Cagney leaned towards the camera, looming large and ill-shaped in the middle of the screen. ‘Why are the Scottish police interested in our man?’

  ‘Because they’ve found what they think is his corpse,’ Macanespie said.

  Momentarily, Cagney’s eyes widened and his face relaxed. ‘Extraordinary. Where?’

  ‘Where’s not the point. What affects us is the “when”.’

  Cagney frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What they found is a skeleton,’ Proctor said wearily. ‘On an Edinburgh rooftop. They reckon he’s been dead for eight years. He didn’t disappear to become an avenger. He disappeared because he was murdered.’

  ‘Murdered? Are they sure about that? If it’s a skeleton, how can they be so certain?’ Now Cagney looked pissed off.

  ‘The bullet wound to the head is a bit of a giveawa
y,’ Macanespie said.

  ‘Which doesn’t fit the MO of the assassinations. Our string of victims weren’t lured to their deaths, they were killed during routine stuff they did every day. And Petrovic was a Croat, not a Serb,’ Proctor added.

  Cagney sat back, his brow furled in thought. ‘So somebody killed Petrovic before the other killings started, which means his death might have nothing to do with theirs. It might be nothing more than a bizarre coincidence.’

  ‘There’s an outside chance that the skeleton isn’t his. They’re waiting for DNA,’ Macanespie added.

  Cagney sat up straight, flicking imaginary fluff from his lapel. ‘In a way, though, it’s academic. We should leave the Scots to worry about Petrovic. He’s no longer our concern. All this means is that we were wrong about the prime suspect.’ A tight grim smile compressed his lips. ‘Your job just got a little bit harder.’

  ‘Where are we supposed to start looking now?’ Proctor sounded plaintive. It was, Macanespie thought, a fatal show of weakness to a man like Cagney.

  ‘Do I have to spell everything out to you? There are still two avenues of investigation. The first one is internal. You have to work out where the leak is. Someone had sufficient access to all those investigations to finger the victims. Find the data trail and see where it leads. There can’t be that many people who have that level of clearance.’

  ‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Macanespie said. ‘Most of the lawyers who work at Scheveningen would be privy to what moves were being planned next. If you’re trusted enough to be part of the process, you have access to pretty much all of it.’

  ‘So make a list. And work your way through it.’

  Proctor started to speak but Cagney cut across him. ‘And then there’s the external investigation. You need to go back and talk to the local police who dealt with the murders on the ground. There will be CCTV coverage on some of the cases, surely. Did nobody sit on the local cops at the time?’

  ‘Nobody was very bothered at the time.’ Macanespie spoke clearly and firmly. ‘The human rights brigade made all the right shocked and horrified noises, but you could tell they weren’t exactly crying themselves to sleep over it. The animals this guy was targeting, nobody doubted they were guilty. Not for a minute. There were a few questions over the strength of the prosecution material. Some doubts that it might not be quite rigorous enough for the court. But the investigators, they were rock-solid certain. So when those bastards turned up dead, the general feeling was, good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  Cagney muttered something under his breath. ‘And this was seen as the delivery of justice, was it?’

  ‘The court did its best. It’s still doing its best. But it’s hamstrung by procedure on occasion,’ Proctor said wearily. ‘You ask the people on the ground and they’ll tell you, too many of these bastards have walked free. Too many war criminals never got charged in the first place. Some of their victims have to live day to day walking the same streets as the men who butchered their husbands or raped their daughters. You’ll not find many who’ll say that what they got was justice.’

  Cagney sighed. ‘Be that as it may. The ending of the tribunal marks a new start for the Balkans. It’s time to draw a line and move forward. As I said before, these killings have to stop and we have to be seen to be dealing with those who have apparently meted out rough justice with impunity. I want this boil lanced. So you’d better get back to Holland and draw up a plan of action.’

  Cagney’s image froze for a moment before disappearing. The call was over.

  Macanespie looked at Proctor and gave a resigned shrug. ‘Looks like we’re fucked.’

  Karen had never had an entirely easy relationship with her senior officers, even before she had been responsible for one of them serving life for murder. She’d been happy to leave her old boss from Fife behind when she’d been chosen to head up the Historic Cases Unit. But within weeks, her new boss had been felled by a heart attack and his shoes filled by the man she thought she’d left behind. Assistant Chief Constable Simon Lees, known without affection as the Macaroon, believed that if only his officers would simply obey the rules, there would be far fewer problems in his life. That was a conviction that had set him on a collision course with Karen from Day One.

  It wasn’t that she’d set out to annoy him. When he’d arrived from Glasgow apparently believing he’d been sent as a punishment to live and work among a people barely one generation away from living in caves, she had been far from the only one he had patronised and dismissed. It had acted as a goad to a bull. Karen knew how good her colleagues were. Just because they weren’t flash city blowhards didn’t mean they weren’t on top of their jobs. So when it came to knocking Simon Lees off his high horse she’d been happy to oblige. She’d found interesting ways to undermine him, not least by coming up with a nickname that tied him to an item of confectionary whose main claim to fame was a historic series of adverts that would be viewed now as eyewateringly racist.

  He’d tried to extract payback by sidelining her. But her reputation for intelligent and effective work in the Fife Cold Case Unit had spread beyond the walls of force HQ and she’d been picked out to lead a high-profile investigation whose success had caught the imagination of the public. Karen, a woman with no pretensions to being a police poster girl, found herself a media darling. Simon Lees had fumed for weeks, terrorising his wife and kids with the bad temper he couldn’t take out on Karen.

  Finding her under his command again was the least appealing aspect of his new posting. But this time he was determined she wouldn’t get the better of him. He’d keep her on a tight rein, making sure she had just enough rope to hang herself but not so much that she could stray from his oversight. At least once a week, he randomly summoned her to his office to demand a full briefing on her current cases.

  That afternoon, she’d wandered in half an hour after he’d sent for her. As usual, her thick mop of dark hair looked as if she’d shared a stylist with Dennis the Menace. Her make-up was minimal, her suit slightly rumpled, the trousers a shade too tight over the generous hips. He’d always assumed she was a lesbian, which was absolutely fine in today’s police service, but he’d recently discovered she was living with her old sergeant, Phil Parhatka. Probably had had to order him into bed, Lees thought sourly.

  ‘I expected you earlier,’ he said, straightening the papers on his desk.

  ‘I was doing some research and I lost track of the time.’ She gave an indifferent shrug. ‘You know how it is when something interesting turns up.’ She perched on the edge of an elegant sideboard he’d brought from his grandmother’s house. His secretary kept it buffed to within an inch of its life. Lees felt sure Pirie knew that.

  ‘And what would that be, exactly? That “something interesting”?’ He made the quotation marks sign with his fingers.

  ‘The Balkan conflicts at the end of the last century,’ she said, with aplomb. ‘Croatia. Bosnia. Kosovo.’

  ‘What on earth has that to do with us? Don’t you have enough work to do?’

  ‘This is work. We’ve got a skeleton on the roof of the John Drummond School. Dr Wilde – you remember Dr Wilde?’

  Lees tried not to shudder. Another one of those bloody annoying women. She’d turned up in muddy construction boots and a waxed jacket that looked as if it had small animals lodging in its pockets, and helped Karen Pirie ride roughshod over proper procedure. Between the pair of them, they’d made his life far more complicated than it needed to be. It didn’t improve matters that Pirie had managed to solve the case on an unbelievably tight budget; until that pair had stuck their noses in, there hadn’t been a case to solve. ‘I remember,’ he said, his tone admonitory.

  ‘She says he’s been there for between five and ten years. We’ve got other forensics that indicate he’s a retired Croatian general who was a NATO security advisor in Bosnia and a UN monitor in Kosovo. Went off the grid eight years ago.’

  ‘What the hell’s he doing on a roof in Edinburgh?’
Lees couldn’t help feeling outraged. Why would someone come all the way from Croatia to get murdered in Edinburgh?

  ‘Not sure yet. He was living in Oxford when he went missing. With a geography professor. She thought he’d buggered off to Croatia to the family she never knew he had.’

  ‘All the same, why Edinburgh?’

  ‘We think he was into buildering. That maybe he came up to Edinburgh specifically to climb the John Drummond.’

  ‘Climb the John Drummond? It’s not a bloody mountain, Chief Inspector. What do you mean, climb the John Drummond?’

  Karen raised her eyebrows. ‘Buildering, like I said. Free climbing. Up the outside of challenging buildings like the John Drummond.’

  ‘What? You mean, they treat buildings like a giant climbing frame?’ Lees looked as if he suspected her of making it up as she went along.

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’ Before she could say more, her phone rang. As if she’d never heard him insist that phones were switched off in his presence, she answered it, saying, ‘Gotta take this one.’ She pushed off the sideboard and turned her back to him. ‘You got something for me?’ A long pause. ‘And there’s no room for doubt?’ Another pause. ‘Brilliant. Thanks for that. I’ll call you later.’ She pocketed her phone and swivelled to face Lees. ‘That’s confirmation, sir. The skeleton on the roof is definitely General Dimitar Petrovic. Did I mention he’s got a bullet hole in the middle of his skull?’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘So that makes him mine. I need to go and break the news to his bidie-in. Well, wife, actually. She married him. Let’s just hope for her sake he didn’t already have a wife back in Croatia.’ She half-turned towards the door. ‘Obviously I might have to go to Croatia. That’s likely where his enemies’ll be.’

  ‘Croatia? How can we afford that?’

  ‘If I have to go, I’ll get a cheap flight. I don’t think Jason has to come too. But in the meantime, I need to find me an expert on the Balkans. That’ll be London, I expect.’ She held up a hand to still the protest he hadn’t uttered yet. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait till the cheap tickets come on stream.’