Retribution

FORTY-SEVEN

The compound near Mitrovica hadn’t improved at all over the years since Harry had last seen it; it seemed smaller than he remembered, with fewer containers and the concrete base pitted and cracked, weeds sprouting towards the grey daylight. The floodlights high on the gantry looked battered and weather-beaten, and the gantry itself had a line of rust running its length like dried blood. Most of the Portakabins had been burned, and one only had to turn and look at the surrounding mesh fence with a roll of razor wire along its top, to gain the feeling that this was a ghost camp long overshadowed by the spectre of what had happened here.

Archie Lubeszki, the UNMIK security man, unlocked the gate and led the way inside. They had left his white UN vehicle on the road with a driver standing guard. The atmosphere was damp and sour, like an old garage long unused, and a lingering whiff of burnt wood hung in the air. In the remaining Portakabins, the electrical fittings had been torn from the walls, the wires left hanging bare, and whatever else had been salvageable had gone.

‘Locals,’ Lubeszki explained. He was a stocky Canadian in his fifties with a beard and thick glasses. ‘They broke in a week ago without warning and trashed the place.’

‘If it had been me,’ said Rik with feeling, ‘I’d have done the same.’

Lubeszki nodded. ‘I guess. But it’s been here a while, so why now?’ The last part was rhetorical.

Harry walked across to the huts and along what had been a linking corridor, his footsteps drumming on the warped and rain-soaked floor. A soulful hum sounded as the wind passed through broken windows, and a length of wallboard flapped like a funereal drumbeat. He shivered and tried to get some feeling from the place. . some sense of memory. But it was too cold, too insulated now by time and events. Whatever badness had happened here had leached out of the place long ago, leaving nothing but a sense of failure.

Lubeszki led them round to the rear of the buildings. The perimeter fence stood less than thirty feet away. Beyond the mesh a stretch of rough grass and weeds ran into a thick belt of trees. The interior looked dark and forbidding, a shifting mass of shadows, and a dread hush hung over the place as if all life had been stilled along with the girl who had died here.

High on the fence was a scrap of pink ribbon. It was knotted in a bow and secured by a piece of wire.

‘They say that’s where her dress caught on the wire,’ Lubeszki explained. ‘As she went over.’ His voice was neutral, neither confirming nor denying that he believed it. He pointed through the mesh to a spot on the ground beneath the piece of material, and the small wooden stake Harry had seen in the photograph. It had been replanted with a bunch of flowers; fresh and colourful, they looked recent. ‘And that’s where she was found, right there.’

Rik stared up at the top of the wire and blew out some air. ‘Strong,’ he murmured, ‘to do that.’

There was no arguing with that. The fence here was at least ten feet high. Harry couldn’t recall if the roll of razor wire had been in place back then, but it would still have taken muscle to throw the girl over. Bikovsky could have done it; Pendry, Broms and Carvalho, too. Orti would have lacked inches, but he’d been a tough character. But not Koslov.

Lubeszki seemed to be reading his mind. He said, ‘She wouldn’t have weighed more than a scrap. Folks here lived on what they could find and everyone was undernourished. Come on — I’ll take you to see the woman who knew her.’ He turned and led them out of the sad compound, locking the gate behind him. ‘Don’t know why I bother doing this,’ he grunted, snapping the lock into place. ‘Nobody’s coming back here, not since the news broke and they trashed the place.’

That will change, Harry wanted to tell him. If Kleeman is the man, all hell will break loose and this place will become the most photographed symbol of failure on the planet.

The woman Lubeszki had found lived in a decaying ruin of a cottage halfway up a steep mountain track. Scattered piles of bricks showed that there had once been a huddle of houses here; too big for a hamlet, too small for a real village. But a community nonetheless. Hers was the only one still in use. Harry wondered aloud how she survived. And why.

‘She’s still here because she refuses to move,’ Lubeszki replied softly. ‘Beats me why, after everything that happened here. But I guess it’s all she’s got.’

He knocked respectfully on the warped wooden door. It opened to reveal an old woman in a black headscarf and a grey dress. She had a face lined by the elements and too much sorrow, her eyes dull and devoid of expression. Her cheeks were contoured by a lack of teeth, and she eyed the three men one by one, studying their eyes.

Lubeszki spoke gently, indicating Harry and Rik. The woman nodded and invited them in.

It was a tiny room piled with ancient, tired furniture that had long lost its bloom, a storeroom of effects that Harry thought probably reflected the old lady’s life. She indicated a bench for the three to use and sat down on a hard-backed chair, and waited.

When they were seated, Lubeszki spoke again at length. The old woman turned her head and stared at Harry for a few moments, her eyes suddenly alive, but dark. Then she began speaking, and Lubeszki translated.

‘The girl’s family lived up among the trees, over there.’ Lubeszki pointed towards an area described by the woman, who did not turn to look, but merely gestured over her shoulder as if it would be bad luck to face the spot. ‘They arrived two years before, she does not know from where, and kept to themselves. The man was a mechanic. He worked wherever he could. There were two children and the mother. The family name might have been Tahim but she cannot be certain; they had an accent and besides, she did not care because they were nice enough, so what does a name matter?’ He waited as the woman talked on. ‘One day Serbs came in trucks. They were heavily armed and drunk, looking for men and boys to kill. The father was taken away and shot. The mother was violated then hung from a tree. The house was burned down. She thinks the children were in the forest at the time, collecting wood, and stayed hidden. She herself was too old so the Serbs ignored her. The children learned to fend for themselves, coming down only to get food. They were small for their age. . undernourished. But tough. They hid out for weeks.’ The old lady talked on, gradually finding a rhythm with Lubeszki and filling the gaps.

Her face softened at one point in the narrative. ‘The girl would come down in the night and I would give her what I could. It was not much. She was so pretty. . an angel among the ugliness of this place. Then she was taken.’

‘Taken.’ Harry leaned forward. ‘You mean killed?’

Lubeszki nodded. ‘Back then, it meant the same thing.’ He listened again as the woman spoke. ‘Her body was found near the wire, like a piece of discarded rubbish.’

Harry said softly, ‘Does she know the girl’s name?’

Lubeszki asked her. ‘It was Aisha. A beautiful name for a beautiful child, she says. But nobody was surprised that she got caught; she took too many chances, trying to look after her brother, who was sick.’ He asked the woman something and she explained briefly. ‘The boy was badly beaten one evening by a Serb militiaman. He was kicked unconscious, but he was lucky: the militiaman was alone and too drunk to finish him off, and fell over. The girl, Aisha, helped her brother get away, but he was never very strong after that.’

‘What happened to him?’ Harry asked. The odds sounded less than slim. Already sick and weakened through malnutrition as he was, the weather out in the woods would have been fatal to him.

‘She never saw him again. Probably in a hole in the trees, like so many others.’

Harry began to turn away. Then, for no reason he could think of, he said, ‘What was the boy’s name?’

Lubeszki asked the question and the woman replied.

‘Selim, she says. It means “Peaceful”.’ The woman chattered on and Lubeszki added, ‘But the boy didn’t like the name. He chose another one instead — one he said meant “Protector”. It wasn’t a meaning she had ever heard, but he was just a boy.’ He echoed her shrug. ‘He was small for his age and weak, but at sixteen, every boy thinks he can take on the world.’

Sixteen in 1999, seventeen if the Russian file was correct. Either way, it would make him twenty-eight years old now. If he’d survived.

‘What name did he choose?’

‘Kassim. He took the name Kassim.’