The Skeleton Road Page 5

  ‘Aye, well, I don’t care how weird it is if it gives me a way in to this case. Because what you’re telling me’s painfully short on detail. No clothes colours, no style, nothing we can compare with descriptions of what a misper might have been wearing…’ Karen sighed.

  ‘Sorry. I can’t even tell you what colour his socks were. But I’m sure there’ll be other things about him that’ll stand more chance of matching one of your missing persons.’ River pulled out her mobile and summoned a gallery of photographs. ‘Look.’ Karen hitched her chair round till she could share the screen. ‘This must have been in his back pocket.’ The phone showed a dark red card with a magnetic strip, the size of a credit card. ‘Do you recognise it?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘I don’t know. It looks like a hotel-room key to me, but there’s no printing on it to suggest where it came from.’

  Karen shook her head. ‘There’s hundreds of hotels and guest houses in the city. Maybe forensics can get some detail off the magnetic strip. But before I let them loose on it, I’ll see if the fingerprint bureau can get anything off it. Was that the only ID on him?’

  ‘That’s it. From where it was positioned, I’d guess it was in a back pocket. Whoever killed him probably took his wallet and anything else he was carrying that might identify him. I’m guessing once they had that, they stopped searching.’

  ‘You have to have a pretty strong stomach to search a corpse. I’ll just have to hope we get something off the key-card.’ Karen refilled their glasses and yawned. ‘Still, it makes a change from the usual cold-case scenario. No ploughing through somebody else’s crappy notes and getting depressed at the poverty of their skills.’

  ‘You never know, you might end up getting a foreign trip out of it if your victim turns out to have a past somewhere else.’

  Karen gave a dark chuckle. ‘Aye, right. Knowing my luck, he’ll be an Albanian people trafficker. So when will you have some more for me?’

  ‘DNA by Monday morning. I’ll get the bone analysis under way first thing tomorrow. There’s always facial reconstruction to consider if you’re not getting anywhere with the hotel key and the hardcore forensics,’ River added thoughtfully.

  Karen pulled a face. ‘I know. And they’ve got much better at it these days, with the 3D computer imaging. But it’s expensive and if our guy is from overseas, chances are slim we’ll pick up enough hits for a definite ID. I don’t know if I can justify it in terms of budget. But I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘That’s the joy of modern forensics, Karen. ID used to be the hardest thing to establish when you came across human remains. But these days, there’s no hiding place. We all carry our history under the skin. That glass of wine you’re drinking now? It’s just another contribution to the sum total of Karen Pirie.’

  Karen laughed and chinked her tumbler against River’s. ‘Another hundred and twenty calories to the sum total of Karen Pirie. And speaking of which, you’ve lost weight you didn’t have to spare.’

  River’s eyes slid away from her friend. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been busy. You know how it is.’

  ‘I know when I’m busy I put weight on. Eating rubbish on the run.’

  ‘I’m the opposite. I forget to eat.’

  Karen shook her head, a wry smile on her lips. ‘See, that’s a sentence that makes no sense to me. How can you “forget” to eat?’

  River pulled herself together and forced joviality into her voice. ‘Same way you “forget” to sleep when you’re hot on the heels of an answer to something nobody else has been able to figure out.’

  ‘You know me so well. But I’m not hot on anybody’s heels tonight.’ She yawned again. ‘And tomorrow is another day. Shall we hit the hay?’

  River glanced at her watch. ‘In a bit. I need to call Ewan. He’ll still be up. I’m in the usual place, right?’

  Karen stood up, draining her glass. ‘Yeah. And tomorrow we can get cracking on the mystery man’s ID. The sooner we know that, the sooner we can find the person who put a bullet in his brain. There’s a killer out there who’s had too many undisturbed nights. It’s time to give him nightmares.’

  In the Balkans, the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line. History and geography have constantly collided with the human capacity for cruelty in those disputed territories. It’s the place where I discovered my own vulnerabilities with depressing repetitiousness. But it’s also a place where I discovered love and hope and the possibility of redemption.

  Nothing has ever made me feel more mortal than the crash bang wallop of an artillery barrage. The scatter of light bursting across the sky, the shaking of the building around me, the terrible echo of the booming explosions filled me with terror. It’s not how I expected my working life to turn out when I signed up for a geography degree thirty-two years ago. I had no idea that being a geographer would include being shot at by snipers or driving an ambulance crammed with medical supplies halfway across Europe or hiding from secret policemen in rat-infested basements.

  I wasn’t raised for this sort of adventure. I grew up in the Howe of Fife, an island of conservatism and agriculture at the heart of a radical region with a history of mining, shipbuilding and fishing. My father was what’s politely called an agricultural labourer but would more accurately be described as a serf. My mother worked part-time in the farm dairy and she was the driving force behind my reaching escape velocity.

  I was lucky enough to arrive at University College, London just as the human geography aspect of the discipline was forging new areas of interest. Geography departments had traditionally been overwhelmingly male, but a new wave of feminist academics was infiltrating everywhere. The human geographies of women’s lives were laying claim to our attention, with headline-grabbing movements such as Greenham Common providing fruitful sources of research and published papers. I know this is a statement that may provoke some incredulity, but it was the most exciting time to be a baby geographer.

  My PhD supervisor was one of those radical groundbreakers. Melissa Armstrong had returned to London after five years of postgraduate and post-doctoral work in the US, fired up with Marxist and feminist ideology. She hit UCL with all the disruptive energy of a tornado, uprooting existing power structures and shifting the tectonic plates of physical geography to make way for something completely different. Melissa spent as much time with philosophers and social scientists as she did with her departmental colleagues and her energy left her colleagues reeling.

  I was one of only two female geography postgrads and we became her wingmen, her disciples and her proselytisers. Our admiration bordered on adulation, especially when she put her politics into practice. In the late 1980s, the dissident philosophical community in Prague issued a clandestine invitation to Western academics they suspected might be sympathetic to their cause. Come and help us subvert the regime by conducting underground seminars, they said.

  Melissa became a fellow of St Scholastica’s College, Oxford just in time to join that first wave of collaborationist libertarian academics. She became one of a group who taught in crowded flats and rooms above bars, bringing the same liveliness and imagination to those seminars as she delivered to us back in Oxford. (For I had followed her to Oxford, earning a Junior Research Fellow post at Schollies.) Even though the people they were teaching and inspiring were working long hours as scaffolders and shop assistants, street sweepers and lavatory attendants, they somehow found the energy and passion to respond more enthusiastically than I suspect we ever did.

  Melissa made the risky and unnerving journey many times. She smuggled books in her luggage – feminist texts disguised as airport novels – and smuggled out samizdat papers from the people she increasingly came to see as colleagues in Prague and beyond. Eventually the authorities grew suspicious of her repeated visits and after some harrowing encounters with the security police, the Czechoslovakian authorities told her she would be granted no more visas. Melissa was furious and frustrated, but her
determination to fight for freedom of speech and of learning burned just as bright in her heart. I remember the evening she found out that she would never be allowed back to work with her unofficial students in Prague again. We were in her office at St Scholastica’s and she opened a bottle of wine with such force that she bent the corkscrew.

  ‘I’m not giving up,’ she declared, sloshing Soave into a pair of tumblers. ‘They think they can shut us up, but it’s not going to work.’

  ‘But what can you do if they won’t let you back in?’

  Melissa took a long swig from her glass, then let her dark hair fall forward so I couldn’t see her face properly. ‘Some of the others are setting up a foundation to raise money to support the dissident community. They want to try to smuggle people out and support them till they can find university jobs here.’ Then she tossed her hair back, defiance on her face. ‘I don’t think that’s how you change the world.’

  ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere else to do what we’ve been doing in Prague. It’s not the only place where people are denied the freedom to talk and think. This is too important to walk away from, Maggie. These people need us.’

  It wasn’t long before Melissa found a solution that went some way towards satisfying her desire to spread the word of the new discipline that was being carved from the marriage of feminism, philosophy and geopolitics. The answer lay in Dubrovnik. Although it was part of the wider Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia had more freedom to connect with the West. And at the Inter-University Centre there, it was possible for academics from both sides of the ideological divide to meet. Those oppressed and constrained by the regimes they lived under could hide their dissident tendencies and disguise the nature of the encounters that made their time at the IUC so fruitful. They could engage in seminars and discussions of the latest theories, then take those subversive ideas back to their own campuses and spread them via the handfuls of students they could trust. Melissa was in her element, enthusiasm and intelligence transmitting themselves to everyone she encountered.

  Just as she did in Oxford, Melissa made learning fun. Seminars segued seamlessly into social occasions, late-night drinking sessions filled with discussion and disputation. She started a journal for dissident feminist philosophers and geographers, persuading a small German academic publishing house to fund the anonymous contributions. I remember sitting up into the night typing the handwritten articles, trying to make sense of the sometimes fractured English. But I was happy to be part of the adventure. Everybody loved Melissa; everybody wanted more of her.

  Unfortunately for Melissa, the fellows of Schollies were among that number. Instead of being proud of what she was achieving in the wider world, most of the governing body suffered from the tunnel vision that outsiders suspect all academics of. They were more interested in their own convenience than in the human rights of a bunch of wannabe philosophers they’d never heard of. Melissa was being paid by Schollies to teach and to shoulder her share of administrative duties. In her absence during the summer term of 1991, when it looked as if Croatia would be engulfed in civil war any day, the college Governing Body had appointed her Dean and were insisting she honour her teaching commitments.

  Melissa was livid. Although from my present perspective as a senior member of college I can see that the Governing Body had a difficult balancing act to fulfil, at the time, I was wholeheartedly in Melissa’s corner. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the role of Western academics was even more crucial for the future, she argued. Much more crucial than teaching undergraduates whose education had been infinitely more privileged. In my eyes, she had sole occupancy of the moral high ground. But in spite of her impassioned arguments to anyone who would listen, the college remained impassive. Come the autumn term, Melissa’s wings would be clipped. She wouldn’t be running seminars for dissidents in Dubrovnik. She’d be teaching Malthus and the history of population development in first-year tutorials.

  And that’s how I ended up in Dubrovnik on 1 October 1991, when the bombs started falling that cut off the water and the electricity to the city.

  7

  Alan Macanespie scratched his belly through the gap in his shirt buttons and slurped milky coffee from a cardboard carton. Theo Proctor’s lip curled in disgust as his colleague belched sour breath across the table. ‘You are disgusting, you know that?’ The Welshman waved a hand in front of his face and reached for his bottle of mineral water.

  ‘Just because you’ve no idea what a Saturday night’s for doesn’t mean the rest of us have to behave like we’re a bunch of choirboys.’ Macanespie shifted in his chair, his stomach following his movement like a sine wave of fat. ‘After listening to that twat Cagney yesterday, I needed to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. I’ve got better things to do with my Sunday morning than deal with this pile of crap.’ He scowled at a stack of folders piled on the table by Proctor’s hand. The loser’s hand that Cagney had dealt them had left him feeling bitter and insecure; unless he could see some light at the end of the tunnel that wasn’t an oncoming train, he felt he was staring at an undistinguished and premature end to a pretty low-key career.

  Proctor laid a slim hand on top of the pile. ‘No, you haven’t. Not if you want to keep your pension. Cagney’s got it in for the likes of us. He’s got a chip on his shoulder and he thinks the only thing us hard-working grunts are any use for is to make him look good.’

  Macanespie snorted. ‘He’s got his bloody Savile Row suits for that.’

  ‘And he wants the bosses to think those bloody Savile Row suits are where he belongs. So he needs results and if he doesn’t get them, he’ll have to hang somebody out to dry – and I sure as hell don’t want it to be me.’ Proctor flicked his laptop open and tapped it into life. ‘After WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, the one thing they’re all paranoid about is leaks. And let’s be honest, you can’t look at what’s been happening on our watch and not think somebody’s been taking the law into their own hands.’

  Macanespie burped again, glaring at the coffee carton as if it were somehow responsible for his own lack of finesse. He ran a hand over his ginger stubble and sighed. ‘And nobody gave a shit. Getting rid of that human sewage was doing the world a favour.’

  ‘You’d better not let Wilson Cagney hear you say that.’ Proctor frowned as he summoned up a spreadsheet. The fine black hairs on the backs of his bony fingers made them look like magnified insect legs as they scuttled across the keys. ‘You’re single, Alan. You’ve no kids. You might have nothing ahead of you but drinking yourself into an early grave, but I’ve got to think about Lorna and the girls.’

  There was a stony silence. Macanespie was motionless, his face revealing nothing of what was going on inside. Proctor had gone too far. For years, he and Macanespie had worked well together because they’d maintained a studied indifference to each other’s faults. It was like a marriage in a Catholic country before divorce had become legalised. They were stuck with each other and so they’d made the best of a bad job, pretending their mutual contempt didn’t exist, avoiding comment on the personal habits they despised. Proctor had never criticised Macanespie’s drinking or his disgusting departures from what the Welshman considered obligate personal hygiene. For his part, Macanespie had tolerated finicky behaviour that he reckoned was borderline OCD and never complained about Proctor’s perpetual displays of family photographs and endless tedious narratives about the brilliant, beautiful, erudite, talented paragons that were his daughters. That effective concordat had been blown out of the water by Wilson Cagney’s display of gunboat diplomacy. Now it seemed Proctor was happy to throw him under the bus, his sole justification the failure of Macanespie’s last relationship to go the distance. Probably, the Scotsman thought, he’d always been jealous because the fact that Macanespie hadn’t been married meant she hadn’t been able to take him to the cleaners after the split. Served her right. Macanespie had asked her to marry him more than once, but
she’d always sidestepped the offer. So she walked out the door with no more than she walked in with. But Proctor, he was stuck with the prim and proper Lorna till death. Served him right, frankly.

  Macanespie cleared his throat. ‘Remind me. What are we looking at?’

  ‘Over the past eight years, there have been eleven instances of an ICTFY target being assassinated within days of when they were due to be arrested.’ Proctor called up another screen and frowned at it. ‘The paperwork had been processed, the operation had been ordered. But in the gap between set-up and execution —’ He flushed as he realised the inappropriateness of his choice of words.

  ‘— there was an execution,’ Macanespie blurted, only too predictably. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself. That Scottish black humour just wouldn’t sit quietly in the corner. ‘And how many of those cases were ours?’

  ‘Eight had Brits leading the investigation. The other three had Brits on the team.’

  ‘The same Brits?’

  Proctor ran his finger down the screen. ‘Doesn’t look like it. Alexandra Reid was second string on two cases then led one. Will Pringle led three, Derek Green led two and helped out on a third, and Patterson Tait headed up the other two. So we can probably rule them out as our vigilante. But we’ll have to work our way down the totem pole in every case to find the common factor. The mole.’

  Macanespie grunted. ‘You’re kidding, right? You’re not seriously talking about embarking on the biggest waste of time this side of the 1987 Labour Party election campaign? We all know what this has been about. It’s been a kind of ethnic cleansing of scumbags. Scrubbing the Balkans clean of the gobshites that made it hell on earth in the nineties. You know and I know the top name in the frame for all of these assassinations.’