The bone road, p.14
The Bone Road, page 14
A lone cop stood guard on the gate. The solitary sentry looked lax to Simo, almost an afterthought, and he decided that he would arrange for another to join him. The Bosniaks and family members of the missing were understandably appalled that the graves had lain hidden for so long, and, they assumed, common knowledge amongst the local Serbs, whom they viewed in the very least as complicit in the murders. Meanwhile, the Serb majority objected loudly and publicly to what they complained was slander – they knew nothing about the murders. Who was to say that the bodies were Muslim Bosniaks and not, in fact, Serbs buried in the mud? Simo found all the posturing infuriating and insulting. It was extremely unlikely the bodies were Serbs, and almost certainly those of the Bosniaks who’d disappeared twenty-odd years earlier, during the war. Somehow, victory wasn’t enough for some; now they wanted to rewrite the history of the dead too, reclaim their bodies, erase the Muslim names from the memorials and carve Serb names there instead. They wanted to be both victors and victims, a stance that frankly baffled Simo. Some fellow Serbs agreed with him, although it was an unpopular and even dangerous public point of view. It made you liable for more than demotion. At the last mass grave he’d attended, Simo recalled the Serbian digger driver helping the task force with the site excavation. The man had pretended to family and neighbours that he was working on a building project forty miles in the opposite direction, and had set off from home and driven fifteen miles the wrong way before surreptitiously turning around and heading to the site.
The yard reeked with a raw animal smell of dung, silage and rotting straw. Drizzle was falling, turning the mud into a runny and glutinous paste that welded itself to Simo’s office shoes in clumps, making them heavy. He tried to shake it off but only succeeded in spattering his trousers. Pausing outside the farmhouse, he glanced up to see the pale face of a woman he took to be old Mrs Ristić peering out of an upstairs window. She conveyed a look of withering dislike at the village of tents erected around her farmyard. The task force had offered them a flat in town, but they’d refused to move, declining to speak with the investigators. Mrs Ristić had also declined to let the forensic team use the bathroom, so until the portable toilets arrived they were reduced to peeing in the woods.
Simo walked slowly towards a corrugated barn that stood beside a stagnant green pond. A mortuary had been set up inside, and that’s where he’d find Jenny. A guard stationed outside the barn spotted Simo’s badge and opened the door for him.
Lights had been strung up from the rafters but Simo didn’t turn them on, not yet. The stillness calmed him. There was no smell, only a faint scent of earth and the damp of the barn and the scuffle of the wind against the corrugated roof. Several shapes were laid out on makeshift tables beneath sheets: a femur, a skull. Judging from their current proximity to one another, Simo figured they may or may not end up belonging to the same cadaver. He never forgot that these scattered and mixed bones waiting to be sieved had once been people. They had been loved and were grieved for every day. To be able to identify and reunite these bodies with their sons or daughters or parents was a gift, however sad, for which Simo was grateful. People needed a grave to rest flowers against, otherwise they remained lost too, a part of them forever wandering through the roads and forests, calling out the names of the dead. He listened to the knock-knocking of the wind, which creaked the ironwork of the roof.
‘Jenny?’ he called, but no one answered. Unnerved amongst the dead, his hand moved automatically to the Glock at his hip. No one answered but the wind and a finger of ivy tap-tapping against the window. He closed his eyes and murmured a prayer from his own Orthodox liturgy and then a prayer from the Koran, and then began a Calvinist hymn that Jenny Fraser had taught him. Her grandmother had taught it to her, and she always recited the hymn in the mortuary at the start of each day. Surrounded by the evidence of man’s wickedness and viciousness, she said that she needed to remember the goodness of humanity. Simo only needed to think of Jenny and of how a person would give up time with her own kids to identify the dead, in order to bring peace to some and justice to others. He felt a presence at his shoulder and then Jenny’s Scottish voice joined with his own. When they’d finished, she clapped him roughly on the shoulder.
‘You do that when I’m not here?’ she said, touched.
He shrugged. These souls had lain in the dark long enough. Simo saw spread out on a tray at Jenny’s feet the tiny phalanges from several fingers as small and fragile as the bones of a thrush. He made the same promise to the dead in the mortuary that he always made, the one that he and Jenny swore – We will do all we can to find out who you are and return you to your loved ones. He glanced at her and saw she was murmuring the same oath aloud. He cleared his throat and stood.
‘You told me to meet you,’ he said.
‘This way.’
They walked past the first excavation site, where the bodies had been found buried beneath the carcass of a horse, poisoning a stream. Then traipsed in the direction of a larger stream, almost a river, one of the many tributaries leading to the Drina. They trudged for twenty minutes across sodden and wind-riven fields. The long grass scuffled and shook with movement, each blade baubled with round drops of dew. The mud sucked at his shoes and Simo wished he’d worn boots.
‘This is a long way from the first excavation site,’ he remarked over the sound of cattle lowing from the fields, which was startlingly loud.
‘This stream had high levels of contaminants too,’ Jenny explained. ‘We decided to dredge it yesterday. One of the team noticed flint chips in a sample from the bed, but the soil here is mostly clay. When he checked the net again he realised it wasn’t flint he’d picked up but teeth.’
‘How many?’
‘No way to tell yet. We can’t be sure how many bodies are jumbled together in the mud. We found five under the horses in the field.’ She gestured behind her. ‘But here beside the stream there’s another grave. More bodies were weighted and simply thrown into the river, where they sank into the mud, covered over by years of silt and sediment. It’s going to take time to find them all.’
‘Anyone talking about what happened?’
Jenny shook her head. ‘No one knows anything, of course.’
Simo wondered about the farmer who owned the land. Old Mr Ristić. The chances were that he knew something about the bodies. Guilt often ate its way upwards, like maggots through a corpse. That was the problem: for all the young ambitious fellows, like Josif Borisov who wanted to live in their clean modern offices and absolve themselves of the past, the land itself belched out these rotten secrets that in the spring refused to stay hidden, rising upwards towards the surface. It was a battle between those in the majority who wanted to forget, and those like Simo, who needed to find the missing pieces – a finger, a shard of hip, a hint of the truth – to put towards the reckoning. A fragmentary payment in flesh towards a debt that could never, ever be repaid.
The early morning light thickened like churned butter, spreading out across the sky. With a squelch, he realised he had trodden neatly into a pile of steaming cow shit. In the distance, just beyond a ragged crop of trees, Simo glimpsed the shores of the lake, the surface shimmering orange and gold. A flock of geese took off with a flurry of honking and white wings, the sun catching them, turning them into flaming arrows. Simo laughed. Always, in the midst of dung and death, beauty caught him off guard and gave him a shove sideways. Jenny caught his expression and smiled, understanding. Then his smile faded. There was an unpleasant feral smell, rotten and foul on the wind.
‘I can smell death.’
‘One of the bodies might not be old.’ Jenny pointed to a mound several metres away, right beside the stream. ‘Over here. Come.’
Simo sniffed again and tried not to gag. The smell was stronger here. Something newly rotten.
‘This is where we’ve been digging the first trench. The other bodies almost certainly date back to the war, but this one has been here for – my guess – less than a week.’
Simo stepped over to where a plastic tarp had been pulled across and drew it back to see a half-concealed figure lying on its back, face covered with leaves. He pulled out his phone and took several photographs.
‘Drugs execution?’ asked Jenny. ‘This is border country and they’ve been pressing the farmer to sell the land.’
‘Possibly.’
He crouched down, pulled on a pair of latex gloves that he always kept in his jacket pocket, and with something approaching tenderness brushed aside the leaves and the thin top layer of earth. Even though he had only seen him briefly at a press conference, Simo was certain that this was the face of Ryan Mackinnon. His face was swollen and bruised, whether from injury or from decomposition, he could not yet tell. Simo knelt amongst the leaves and for the second time that morning offered up his ritual prayers for the dead. Whatever Ryan Mackinnon had done, no one deserved to be left here like this: to lie hidden in the woods amongst the birds, decaying leaves and the skitter of insects.
Simo remained while the crime scene was photographed, and the body lifted and wrapped in plastic sheets. He supposed that whoever had buried Ryan’s body on top of the old grave site had thought it the perfect hiding place. The ditch was a palimpsest of murders and atrocity. Whoever had killed Ryan knew about the other bodies. Knew that they lay hidden here while their families grieved and mourned without bodies to bury and sanctify. They had remained silent year after year, and whoever had buried Ryan had used their silence to conceal another crime. Briefly, Simo closed his eyes, disgusted at the human race. The mass graves had remained undisturbed, their fetid secret concealed for the best part of a quarter century. There had been no reason for Ryan’s murderer to think that anything would change. Yet as the snow and ice melted from the mountains, bringing sudden and unseasonable floods, the land herself had writhed and twisted, and the groundwater rose and belched out the rotten secrets, poisoning the living with sins of the past. At long last, someone had come looking.
Simo followed closely behind in his own car while Ryan’s body was driven slowly away in an ambulance to the hospital mortuary. He felt responsible. He hadn’t wanted to leave him alone. Ryan had been alone long enough. Simo did not call Heather Bishop; he wasn’t ready for her to formally identify the body, not yet. It needed to be cleaned up, having been left in a shallow grave on the riverbank for days. At least now he could tell her officially she was no longer a suspect. There was no possible way that Heather Bishop would have hidden her boyfriend in a mass grave from the war.
In the cool of the morgue, Simo stood in silence while the body was unwrapped and loaded onto the mortuary table. The pathologist carefully preserved all the debris in the plastic wrappings – mostly leaf mould and the odd stowaway beetle. There was a knock on the door and Jenny stepped inside.
‘My friend, Professor Jenny Fraser. Forensic anthropologist from Glasgow,’ said Simo. ‘Do you mind if she observes?’
The pathologist straightened, like a schoolboy when the headmaster enters the room. ‘No. It’s an honour. You testified in three war crime trials at The Hague. Isn’t that right?’
‘Four.’
‘And, of course, I’ve read your book on the Balkans, Professor. I think it’s even here somewhere,’ he added, glancing around.
Simo grimaced, hoping that the pathologist wasn’t about to ask Jenny for an autograph. If he was, he thought better of it and returned to photographing the body.
‘He’s not in rigor anymore. He must have been dead for at least three days or more. That’s an estimate. I won’t know until I’ve done the full post-mortem,’ said the pathologist, finishing his photographs and putting away his camera.
Simo nodded. Ryan had been gone longer than that, so whoever had taken him hadn’t killed him straight away. Jenny pointed to Ryan’s right hand and Simo noticed that his fingernails were missing. Someone had wanted him to suffer, or had wanted to extract information.
‘Cause of death?’ he asked.
‘We won’t know until we open him up. But it looks to me like he’s been shot at fairly close range with an automatic weapon.’
Simo said nothing. That was an execution-style hit. It was the mark of the Serbian and Bosnian drug gangs, not the weapon of choice of an avenging lover. What had Ryan Mackinnon got himself caught up in? Whatever he’d done, Simo felt only pity. No one deserved this.
‘Here, help me undress him,’ said the pathologist.
Simo hesitated. Even though he didn’t like to admit it, the fresher bodies brought an involuntary revulsion.
‘It’s up to you. I share an assistant, and if you’re not in a hurry . . . we can wait. I’ve a heap of paperwork and some lab work I can run.’
Jenny rolled her eyes. ‘For goodness’ sake, Simo.’ She reached for a set a gloves and overalls. Trying to disguise his reluctance, Simo followed suit.
In silence, the three of them carefully removed the black cycling trousers and the ragged remains of a hooded top and T-shirt from the body, cutting the fabric away when they were unable to peel it back. Simo disliked the task immensely. Sadness and solemnity warred with nausea.
Jenny was looking closely at the corpse’s face. ‘Ryan Mackinnon? That’s who you think it is?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ answered Simo, surveying her narrowly. Something was clearly bothering Jenny, and he trusted her instincts.
‘There’s something familiar about him. But his face is pretty swollen. And the name doesn’t ring a bell.’
‘Ah, a present for you,’ said the pathologist, interrupting. He held up a blood-smeared bullet, popping it into a plastic evidence bag. Simo took the bag from him and peered closely at the remains of the bullet.
Once the torso was exposed, the violence inflicted upon the body was revealed. Wounds from several gunshots had torn holes in the body, now a tangle of muscle and exposed organ and bone, fetid and wet. The smell was deeply unpleasant. Simo felt a stirring of rage.
He felt the lightest touch on his arm. As always, Jenny exuded the right blend of professionalism and sympathy. One couldn’t empathise too much, or one couldn’t function enough to do the job.
‘I’ll clean him up, so we can get him formally identified,’ said the pathologist.
‘I can help if you like,’ offered Jenny. ‘Since you’re missing that assistant.’
Simo felt another wave of gratitude toward Jenny. He knew that she’d make sure nothing was overlooked. He left the room with some relief, stripping off his gloves. It was cold in the morgue but he was perspiring. He glanced at his watch. It was time to let Heather Bishop know.
13
Heather had never been more grateful to see anyone; she was desperate to escape this place. Petra had arrived to pick her up less than an hour after she rang. The hotel in the woods terrified her and she wished she could rid herself of the sense that whoever had been in her room last night was still out there amongst the trees, waiting.
‘What the hell did you go there for?’ demanded Petra on the drive back down the mountain.
‘It was close. The website said it was a spa. I was so tired,’ said Heather.
The trees looked almost as dark in the daylight, conspiring together in a thick knot of green, the tops shrouded in a layer of early morning mist as thick as woodsmoke. The road wound and switched between them, while the red-roofed hotel with its empty windows seemed to watch them leave. Heather half expected to find them back there as they turned the next bend and sighed with relief when Petra reached the junction onto the main road.
‘Tell me again, what you said on the phone. About man in your room.’
Heather told her.
‘Show me your neck,’ she said, when Heather had finished.
Heather dutifully turned down the collar on her fleece, saying, ‘But I told you, he used a pillow. He didn’t try to strangle me with his hands. There isn’t a mark.’
Petra shook her head. ‘I think it was a bad dream. You under so much stress. Or a ghost. That place is evil and full of spirits.’
‘It wasn’t a ghost. He had bad breath. Ghosts don’t eat onions.’
‘It was terrible dream then. What they called? Night terror.’
‘I scratched him. Look, blood under my nails.’
She shoved her hand up to Petra’s face, close for her inspection.
‘Yes. They are dirty. I see.’ Petra wrinkled her nose in distaste.
‘It’s not dirt, Petra. It’s blood. It’s not mine. You already said, I don’t have a mark.’
‘Well, what you want to do? Call police?’
‘What’s the point? You don’t believe me, why would they?’
Heather folded her arms and sat back in her seat, frustrated. Petra lit a cigarette. Heather longed to ask her to stop, but it was Petra’s car and she’d dropped everything to come and collect her.
‘Hotel was used as a rape camp for Muslim women,’ said Petra, drawing on the cigarette. ‘They were kept as prisoners in the bedrooms, chained up and raped day and night by Serb soldiers. They chained to stop them running away, and from jumping off balconies. More than two hundred women taken there. I only know of three who come back.’
Heather thought of the scratches on the walls, the unchanged, aging bathroom where she had washed, and felt a wave of sick guilt. Petra and Simo kept quietly reminding her about this country’s past, but she remained swaddled in her own misfortunes. She hadn’t thought to see what was right in front of her. The room where she had tried to sleep was probably the same room where other women had been tortured and abused. That’s what she’d felt – the women’s fear and hopelessness had leached into the fabric of the building, reaching down and down into the earth beneath.
