And she was gone, before he could say anything more, leaving him feeling frustrated and outwitted. He was supposed to be her boss. He was supposed to command respect. How could she keep on getting the better of him? Sooner or later, he was going to have to show her who was boss.
He’d look forward to that.
24
Tessa didn’t recognise the number but she took the call anyway. You never knew when someone would turn up out of nowhere with key information that could lift the lid on something that some government somewhere wanted to stay well hidden. The voice, however, was not unfamiliar. She recognised Karen Pirie right away. ‘Have you any news?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid so. We’ve got the DNA results back and there’s no doubt that the man on the John Drummond School roof is General Petrovic. I’m sorry. I know you were close.’
‘Oh, God.’ Tessa’s voice was a groan.
‘I’d rather have told Professor Blake face to face, obviously. But I thought it would be better coming from you? If you don’t want to be the one to break the news, I’m perfectly willing to phone her myself, but maybe you could be with her? Nobody should be alone for news like this.’
‘Of course I’ll tell her.’ Tessa wasn’t sure how she felt. She’d been expecting this news ever since she’d heard what Karen had to say, but having it confirmed was a different matter. In her heart, she’d known that Mitja would turn up at some point. What she hadn’t foreseen was that his return would be heralded by an overweight Scotswoman with bad hair and an attitude. Mitja would have expected better.
‘We’ll need a statement from her in due course, but we can have that taken by local Thames Valley officers. If there’s anything she wants to know, she can call me any time.’
‘Will there be a murder investigation? Will you be in charge of that?’
‘Yes. But because it’s a historic case and the evidence trail is limited, it will be on a smaller scale. Which doesn’t mean we won’t pursue every lead and follow every avenue. Speaking of that, I need to ask you something that’s going to seem really inappropriate right now.’
Tessa made a wry noise. ‘You want to know if I was sleeping with him? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’ She could hear Karen breathing on the other end of the phone and imagined her pulling faces in her awkwardness.
‘And were you?’
Tessa gave a low laugh from the back of her throat. ‘You couldn’t be more off the mark, Chief Inspector. Mitja Petrovic was the opposite of attractive to me. Look, I’m a lesbian. You can ask anybody who knows me. It’s not a secret. I had no sexual interest in him whatsoever. I liked him a lot, and the fact that he made my friend happy gave him a shedload of Brownie points in my eyes. But me and Mitja? That was never going to happen.’
‘Fair enough. But I had to ask. You’re a lawyer, you appreciate that.’
‘I’m not offended. And thanks for not asking me in front of Maggie. But I’ll tell you one thing for nothing. Mitja didn’t run away because he was shagging somebody else. He fell for her like a ton of bricks all those years ago in Dubrovnik and he was as much in love with her when he disappeared. I know people say that all the time after somebody walks out, but he really was devoted. That’s why I never bought into Maggie’s notion that he’d upped sticks and abandoned her to go back to the life he left behind him.’
‘So what did you think had happened?’
Tessa had lain awake into the small hours debating what to say when this inevitable question arose. Should she admit to the dark theories she’d aired with Maggie? Or, since they’d been blown out of the water, should she just avoid muddying the waters? At last, she’d made her decision. ‘I didn’t know what to think. At first I thought he might have been pressed back into service, carrying out undercover intelligence work. But when so much time went by… Well, I assumed that whatever he’d been recalled for had gone horribly wrong. That he was either dead or a prisoner in some hell-hole jail.’
‘But you’re a human rights lawyer, right? Have you not got contacts that know about stuff like that?’
‘What? Who’s banged up in the Taliban’s jail? Or doing solitary in some Gulf state without access to counsel? There are limits to my reach, Chief Inspector. I’m mostly just a humble part of the international court machinery. Sure, I’ve put feelers out whenever I had the chance. Obviously, I drew a blank every time. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t right. I kept on asking because I didn’t know he was lying dead on a rooftop in Edinburgh.’ Tessa stared bleakly out of her office window, seeing nothing of the street below or the houses opposite.
‘Did you ever raise your theory with Professor Blake?’
‘Of course I did. And she didn’t buy it. She was determined to believe he’d gone home. Turns out we were both wrong. And now, if there’s nothing else you have to ask me, I’m going to go and pour myself a stiff drink and tell my best friend her husband’s never coming home.’
Maggie always liked to show her DPhil students to the door after their supervisions. It was the kind of thing you did with friends; she thought it made the encounter seem less formal. When she opened the door to usher out the bright Canadian who was writing about the post-mall geography of shopping, she wasn’t expecting to find Tessa sitting in the corridor outside her rooms. But she knew at once that the news would not be good.
Maggie was oblivious to the final remarks of her student as he reiterated his bullet points for the next chapter. She only had eyes for Tessa, getting to her feet, still enviably lithe and graceful in spite of the passage of years. Silent, Maggie stepped back and gestured to her friend to enter. She closed the door with infinite care, as if preventing it from making a noise would somehow ward off bad news. Then she leaned against it, waiting.
Tessa turned to face her, sombre and drawn. ‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘No room for doubt.’
Maggie closed her eyes and clenched her fists. It didn’t matter how much you anticipated something like this, you could never be prepared. She felt suddenly cold, as if she’d walked into an unexpected blast of chilly air-conditioning. A shudder ran through her, snapping her back into the moment. She opened her eyes and saw Tessa, lips parted, eyes troubled, arms held out from her sides as if on the verge of stepping forward to hug Maggie but unsure whether that was what was wanted.
So Maggie pushed off from the door and closed the distance between them, allowing Tessa to wrap her in her arms. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Tessa said. ‘Sorry for everything. All the things I thought, all the things I said that hurt you so much. I’m sorry.’
‘I know,’ Maggie mumbled. ‘I know.’
They stood in each other’s arms and Maggie had no sense of how much time had gone by. Dimly she thought she ought to be crying or screaming or rending her garments in some Biblical excess of grief. But all she felt was that cold numbness cutting her off from the mechanics of grief. At length, Tessa said, ‘Can I get you a drink?’
Maggie drew away from her and sighed. ‘I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how I feel. I always believed he’d walk through that door one day.’
‘Maybe if you’d told me you’d married him, I wouldn’t have been so sceptical.’ Tessa walked over to the window and gazed across the rooftops.
‘Should I have told you before or after I slept with you?’ Maggie’s voice was harsh, like a slap.
‘Oh Christ, that’s not fair,’ Tessa protested. She swung back to face her friend. ‘We took comfort in each other. That shouldn’t be an occasion of guilt. You were in so much pain, Maggie. And I missed him too. We gave each other love and support when we needed it.’
Maggie made a dismissive sound. ‘And then I hurt you all over again when I didn’t need it any more.’
Tessa shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now. What matters is we still have each other.’
‘But we don’t have Mitja.’ Maggie’s voice sounded almost as bleak as she felt. ‘I told you he wasn’t a killer. So many times, I told you he didn’t have it in him.’
Tessa’s face twisted in a wry grimace. ‘At the time, it made sense to me in the same way that it made sense to you to believe that he’d gone back to some mystery family like something out of The Railway Children.’
Maggie sighed. ‘I wish he had. I wish he was alive, even if it meant I couldn’t have him. All those years, lying dead in a strange place when he should have been with people who loved him.’ She made a choking sound. ‘I’d give anything for you to have been right, that all this time he’d been going round killing those evil bastards who destroyed his country. Just as long as he was in the world. Feeling the sun and the wind and the rain. He was always so alive, Tess. Even when things were hard, he had that spirit, that energy that made everything possible.’
‘I know. I can’t take it in.’
‘Who would kill him, Tess?’
‘Somebody from his past. He made plenty of enemies during the wars.’
Maggie shook her head. ‘No, that makes no sense. If it was somebody from his past they wouldn’t do it like that. He knew his enemies. They’d never get close enough to him to do it like that. Who would climb a building with him and then shoot him in the head? If you wanted to kill him, why not just walk up to him in the street and shoot him? Why go all the way to a strange city, do something as intimate as a free climb together and then shoot him?’
‘So you think it must have been somebody he trusted? Somebody from home?’
‘Nothing else makes sense. You have to trust somebody to go free climbing with them, don’t you?’
‘Yes, you do.’ Tessa frowned. ‘If it was somebody from the Balkans, the spooks should know they were in the country. I could ask Theo Proctor – you remember, the one who called me the other day when they were still treating Mitja like a suspect? He might be able to take a look and see whether there’s any record of who was around that weekend from the Balkans.’
‘Could you? Do you think they’d tell you?’
Tessa shrugged. ‘I can try. We’re all supposed to be on the same team.’
A tiny spark of hope ignited in Maggie’s eyes. ‘I have to know, Tess. I have to know who did this to him.’
‘I know.’ Tessa headed towards the kitchen. ‘I need a drink,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Do you want one?’
‘Lagavulin,’ Maggie said. ‘I want something that tastes like medicine. I want something that’ll make me better.’ All at once, her legs felt too weak to hold her and she staggered to her familiar sofa. When Tessa came back with the drinks, she settled beside her friend, their bodies touching in a complicit moment of shared pain.
‘Maybe we’ll never know the answer,’ Tessa said. ‘Maybe there’s no point in hoping.’
Maggie took a belt of whisky and winced as the heavy peat flavour hit her tastebuds. ‘Somebody killed him. Somebody he trusted. They must have had a reason. I’m not giving up on Mitja. I’m going to find out who did this, Tess. I’m going to find out who took his life from him.’
It was clear right from the start that Dubrovnik was hopelessly under-defended. The only regular military unit in the city was a light infantry platoon stationed in the Napoleonic fort on Srdj hill, near Varya’s house. According to Mitja, that would be a target for enemy forces. ‘You need to move out,’ he insisted.
‘How can I just turn my back on them? They’ve been really kind to me since I got here.’
‘Anyone who can leave the city is getting out. You think they’ll take you with them if they decide to make a run for it? Trust me, Maggie, you’ll go home one day and find the house empty and the cupboards bare. At a time like this, people look to their own first. And that’s what I’m doing here. If you insist on staying, I want you to be somewhere safe.’
And so I caved in. He was right about Varya’s family, though. They were gone by the end of the week, throwing themselves on the charity of relatives in Slovenia. Ironically, their house remained untouched in the subsequent artillery attacks, while Mitja’s idea of safety turned out to be the opposite of safe. Because he was proud of his country and its heritage, it was inconceivable to him that the Serbs would bomb the hell out of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So he moved us into an apartment in the very heart of the Old Town, a stone’s throw from the cathedral, with a view of a slice of the harbour from the bedroom window. It had been the home of a friend of his, a UNESCO bureaucrat, who had fled the city as soon as hostilities had broken out in Vukovar. I’ve often wondered whether he feels guilt or shame at abandoning his friends and neighbours when he thinks about Dubrovnik. Probably not; that’s the kind of emotional response that makes it hard to continue with a fulfilled life.
The apartment was spacious and comfortably furnished. Rado’s idea of a kitchen store cupboard was packets of instant noodles and bottles of Scotch. When we moved in, I laughed at that. It wasn’t long before I changed my tune and regularly sent up a prayer of thanks for his prescience. In a city under siege, having any kind of food staple is a powerful bargaining chip. And a glass of whisky at the end of the day becomes one of the true glories of life. Having Mitja there some of the time was the icing on my personal cake, the MSG in my instant noodles.
Even though I was buoyed up by love, life soon became pretty grim. The major offensive against Dubrovnik began on the first day of October. The army came at us from the south-east, from the north and from the west. The artillery attacked Srdj hill; the booming echo of the guns vibrated through the city at irregular intervals. I still can’t hear unexpected fireworks without my chest constricting. And the air force’s MiG-21s pounded Komolac to the west of us, destroying our access to electricity and fresh water.
We were without either from then until the end of December.
We take the staples of modern life so much for granted until we’re deprived of them. People do live quite well without what we consider to be basics, but they manage because they’ve never been de-skilled by their presence. To lose them when you’ve lived all your life with power at the touch of a switch and water at the turn of a tap is shocking, then unsettling, then grindingly depressing.
There were a few generators in the city, but fuel was at a premium and they were only used sparingly. Most people had a small stock of candles, but they soon ran out. The city fell into the habit of going to bed when it grew dark. It was unusually cold that year, and being under the covers was one way to stay warm. Besides, within days, there was a blackout rule and a curfew. Those of us who’d been trying to meet up in the evenings to maintain a vague pretence of intellectual life as normal were soon stymied.
Mitja was seldom home. It’s hard to imagine in this world of instant communication, but in the whole city under siege there was one single satellite phone and fax machine which was moved almost on a daily basis to protect it from the bombardment, and more often than not Mitja was with the phone. The enemy helicopters buzzed the city constantly, trying to spot the satellite dish. Whenever they did, the MiGs would follow, attempting to shoot it out of commission.
Even worse than the strafing fire of the MiGs was the constant shelling. First they attacked the fort on Srdj hill. Then the Belvedere Hotel. Then the Argentina Hotel. And so on. I remember standing in the Inter-University Centre with a bunch of refugees from the surrounding countryside, watching the pines of Srdj hill burst into spikes of flame as they were fire-bombed. It felt completely unreal, to see the bright orange and yellow flame along the whole ridge, then darker gouts of flame feeling their way down the hill towards the city. And suddenly, clouds of butterflies were all around us, escaping from the inferno that their habitat had become. It was a surreal moment.
I couldn’t understand why the Serbs wanted to destroy Dubrovnik. It had no value as a strategic target. Its walls made it almost impossible to capture; destruction was the only tactic that could be used against it. But why destroy a place if your goal is to absorb it into your wider empire? One evening when Mitja had returned late with a box of scented candles someone had ‘liberated’ from a gift shop, we sat in the flic
kering light and I asked him that question. ‘It feels like any building that’s tagged as a heritage site, or a hotel, or a hospital is fair game. Every bloody church and monastery except the Serb Orthodox church. There’ll be nothing left but rubble. Why are they doing this to the city?’
‘Precisely because it’s a tourist honey-pot,’ he said. ‘They want to make a point. To say we can’t hide behind our history. To show the world they can’t be intimidated by what outsiders think is important. And they also thought we’re a soft target that would surrender at the first sound of gunfire. They miscalculated badly. They didn’t understand how much we love our history. Our heritage. Our country.’
I sighed. ‘You’d think that’s one thing they would understand. You’ve been fighting for a thousand years in the Balkans over the same ground.’
He filled up our glasses with more whisky, his expression both grim and weary. ‘And we’ll probably be fighting for the next thousand over the same things. In a strange way, it’s almost appropriate that this should be happening in Dubrovnik. It’s a medieval war in a medieval city.’
He was wrong, of course. It was a thoroughly modern war because Dubrovnik was also a modern city. We relied on our home-grown criminals – men who had been smugglers, with their fast, silent boats, men who knew every channel on the Dalmatian coast, men who raced between the Serb ships and the rocky shorelines to bring in weapons and water, medicines and milk. They kept us alive.
The Serbs hated to be outwitted. And so one day they fire-bombed the old harbour. Late that night, after the all-clear, after the curfew was set, a few of us sneaked down to the harbour to take a look. It was a bright moonlit night; I remember thinking we were taking a hell of a chance because the MiGs would be able to see their targets clearly, if they’d chosen to do a night run. The streets were silent and sinister with shadows. But from the harbour, we could see the bright flares of a dozen or more burning boats being carried out to sea by wind and tide. Burning, then sinking. The Irishwoman standing next to me muttered, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’
The Skeleton Road Page 19