Secrets of the Dead

XI

Thalys Train, Near Rheims – Present Day

WHAT WAS MICHAEL doing with a seventeen-hundred-year-old scroll?

Why was he willing to pay a hundred thousand euros to read it, when he didn’t even know what it would say?

Where did he get that kind of money?

The questions chased themselves around her head as she sat in her seat and stared out of the rain-spattered windows. An illuminated readout above the carriage door registered their speed. 287 kmh. Hurtling along – going where?

Michael had always had money. If she was honest, it had been part of his appeal. Not the money itself, but his way with it, the easy extravagances. Growing up as the daughter of a minister, indulgence wasn’t just a practical impossibility: it was a moral outrage. Being with someone who spent his money without doubts or regrets had been a gush of freedom. His ridiculous car, which even the gangsters in Pristina wouldn’t touch; the champagne and fine wines that flowed every time he entered a restaurant; the hotel suites whenever they went away. Each time Abby thought she’d got used to it and couldn’t be shocked, he’d find some new way of spending money that appalled and thrilled her all over again. And if she said anything, he’d shrug and give her a kiss on the forehead.

You can’t take it with you.

A phone started to trill. She didn’t recognise the sound: it was only when other passengers started staring at her that she realised it was hers. It was the first time she’d heard it ring. She jabbed the button.

‘Abby? It’s Mark.’ She needed a moment to place the name. ‘From the Foreign Office. Are you out of the country?’

She hesitated. How does he know? The ringtone must have sounded different.

‘There wasn’t much to do in London,’ she said. ‘I thought a change of scene might help.’

‘Right. Gosh. No stopping you. Are you going to come back?’

‘I’m on my way home now.’

‘Wonderful. Give me a bell when you’re back and we’ll arrange for you to come in.’

‘Have you got a job for me?’

‘We’ll have a chat.’

London

Mark met her and brought her up to the office. Once again, the vast and empty corridors overwhelmed her. Statues of Victorian statesmen dressed as Roman generals lurked in the shadows, one empire to another. Classical Graces peered down from a ceiling frieze. Trust, Fortitude, Justice … Everything she’d once believed in.

Mark led her back to the third-floor meeting room. It overlooked a vast marbled atrium, where a hundred years ago an imperial monarch had taken homage from her far-flung subjects. Now it was mostly used for seminars and cocktail parties.

‘How was the trip? Somewhere nice?’

‘I went to Paris.’

‘Mmm, lovely. Gorgeous this time of year. Did you make it to the Matisse exhibition? How long were you there? Stay somewhere nice? Sugar?’

It was all small talk as he pottered about making coffee, but she had the feeling he was paying close attention to her answers.

‘When can I come back to work?’

‘Champing at the bit, eh?’ His pomposity was breathtaking.

I was ducking bullets in war zones while you were still round the back of the bike shed playing with dirty magazines, Abby told him silently.

‘HR are worried about your “well-being”.’ He held up his fingers in quotation marks. ‘They’re insisting on a full assessment – medical, psychiatric, the works – before they’ll bring you off the bench.’

She put on her best sane face. ‘Psychiatric assessment?’

‘You’ve suffered severe physical trauma, stress, and bereavement. Your file says there was also some memory loss.’

‘Short-term. Haven’t they ever heard of getting back on the bike?’

‘We’re just watching out for you.’ He took off his glasses and gave her a nothing-shall-come-between us look. It made her want to punch him.

‘So why did you want to see me?’

‘I didn’t.’ A self-deprecating grin. ‘I’m just the go-between, really. Chai-wallah. Hello.’

A man had appeared at the door. He came in and locked it behind him. He had iron-grey hair chopped short and awkward, a hard face and an economical precision in his movements that reminded Abby of soldiers she’d known.

‘Mrs Cormac, my name is Jessop.’

‘Jessop’s from Vauxhall,’ Mark explained.

He means SIS, Abby thought. Often known as MI6, as their incongruous job adverts put it.

Jessop seated himself across the table from her and unzipped his bag. Out came a small, pen-shaped piece of plastic.

‘Does that squirt poison ink or something?’ Nerves made her flippant.

‘Voice recorder.’ Jessop pushed a button on the end of the device. A red light went on.

‘This interview is taking place under the terms of the Official Secrets Act. Please state your name and confirm you’re aware this conversation is being recorded.’

Interview? ‘What’s this got to do with the Official Secrets Act?’

‘Just bureaucracy,’ Mark assured her. ‘Dotting the i’s and t’s. It’s as much for your protection as anything.’

It’s good to know I’m protected. ‘What do you want?’

‘We don’t believe that Michael Lascaris’s death was an accident.’

Abby almost threw her coffee over him. ‘Of course it wasn’t an accident. They broke in and murdered him.’

‘People can still be murdered accidentally,’ Mark said. Trying to smooth the waters. ‘The wrong place at the wrong time, that sort of thing. What Mr Jessop’s saying is that he doesn’t think this was one of those scenarios.’

‘We think Michael Lascaris was targeted,’ Jessop confirmed.

Abby tried to control her breathing. ‘And?’

‘In an earlier statement, you said you believed the villa in Montenegro belonged to an Italian judge.’

‘That’s what Michael told me.’

‘In fact, it’s registered to a charter yacht outfit in Venice, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a shipping company based in Zagreb. The ultimate beneficial owner is believed to be Zoltán Dragović.’

‘Should I know him?’

‘You worked in the Balkans and you never heard of Zoltán Dragović?’ said Jessop.

Mark looked up from his pad. ‘She suffered some memory loss,’ he offered. Always happy to help.

But the memories were coming back. Abby put her hands on the table and looked at Jessop.

‘He’s a gangster.’

Jessop gave a dry laugh. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘You can see it doesn’t look good,’ Mark put in. ‘A senior EU customs official staying in a house that belongs to one of the most wanted men in Europe.’

‘Michael didn’t know,’ Abby insisted.

‘Did you ever hear him mention Dragović?’

‘Never.’

‘Have you been in touch with any of Michael’s associates since you returned to England?’

‘Associates?’ She stared at him in disbelief. ‘You’re making him sound like some kind of criminal.’

‘Colleagues? Friends? Family?’

‘I visited his sister in York. I wanted to offer my condolences.’

‘How did you get her address?’

‘Someone sent it to me.’ She glanced desperately at Mark, but he was writing something and didn’t look up. ‘Wasn’t it you?’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Come on, she told herself. You’ve been through worse than this. Sitting in a shack in some godforsaken corner of the earth, the only unarmed person in the room. The awful smell of sweat, blood and rifle grease. Men – some of them just boys – jabbing guns at her, their nostrils flaring from the cocaine that gave them their courage. Her only protection then had been a piece of paper from a court five thousand miles away.

But that was there – the outer darkness, as some of the old Foreign Office hands still called it. This was home. All those years, all those hellholes, what kept her alive hadn’t been her pieces of paper or her diplomatic accreditation. It had been faith – unwavering belief that whatever fatuous, bureaucratic mistakes her government might make, it was a force for good in the world. And now that same government had her locked in a room, twisting her words with unspoken allegations and lies.

‘What made you decide to go to Paris?’ Jessop asked.

‘I fancied a break.’

‘Less than two months ago, you suffered a horrendous attack. You’re barely back in the country a fortnight and you’re already racing off on overseas adventures.’

‘Mark says I’m supposed to be acting erratically. He thinks I’m cracking up.’

Jessop raised his eyebrows and gave her a sceptical look. She supposed that was a compliment, of sorts. Mark picked up a file and leafed through it.

‘According to our man in Podgorica, they found a gold necklace at the crime scene. You said it was yours?’

‘That’s right.’

‘A present from Michael?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I see it?’ Mark saw that she was about to say something and cut her off. ‘I’ll save you some embarrassment. The security people who searched your bag when you came in, they said they’d seen it in there. Couldn’t help noticing it, actually.’ He held out his hand. ‘Please?’

She wanted to wipe the patronising sincerity off his face once and for all, but didn’t know how. She wanted to run, but the red light next to the door didn’t blink. She wanted to scream, but she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

She fumbled in her bag and brought out the necklace. Mark gave her a smile that made her want to knock his teeth out.

‘I think we’ll just keep this for a little while.’

Of course, she thought dully. She could see them waiting for a reaction and refused to give it to them. It was the one thing she could withhold.

She picked up her bag and stood. ‘I’d like to go now.’

Mark was still eyeing the gold necklace. Jessop escorted her to the door.

‘Be careful,’ he warned her.

‘In case my government locks me up and robs me again?’

‘Someone targeted Michael. It’s entirely possible they’ll come back for you.’

He swiped his card and the light went green. Abby pushed past without a word. No one tried to stop her.

She didn’t know where to go. She felt as if she were dangling on the end of a rope, strung up to the sky for all to see and jeer at. Every face that glanced at her, every footstep behind her, every arm that jostled her in the crowds around Trafalgar Square seemed to accuse her of something terrible, unsayable. This is what we were supposed to stop, she thought. Guilt without evidence, accusations without charge. And walking out of a room without the things you brought in.

That was what hurt most. The necklace had been her last relic of Michael. To have surrendered it felt like the worst sort of betrayal.

Why do you need to know? a weary voice inside her asked. And another, firm and insistent, answered as it always had: To do him justice.

She wandered, aimless at first, but gradually gaining purpose as an idea took root in her mind. Her stride lengthened, and she noticed with small pleasure that the scar in her side didn’t hurt so much. She walked up Southampton Row, past Russell Square and the British Museum, and then worked her way north-east until she came out on the Euston Road. Across from her loomed the British Library, a vast, red-brick piazza in the shadow of St Pancras Station. In the courtyard, a bronze giant sat hunched over a pair of compasses, inscribing the laws of the world. A pair of leafless iron trees guarded the door, where a rubber-gloved guard rifled through her bag.

There’s nothing in it, she wanted to shout.

She’d left the Foreign Office without the necklace, but she hadn’t come away empty-handed. They’d given her a name. And names, she’d learned through ten years of beating against locked doors, were what got you through the labyrinth.

She went into the reading room, settled down in front of a computer terminal and started searching. Answers appeared almost at once.

Zoltán Dragović. War criminal, sex trafficker, drug baron, spy – the Balkan full house. Definitely a millionaire – probably billionaire. Place of birth unknown, possibly circa 1963. Rumoured to be the child of an Albanian father and a Serbian mother, though no one who would admit to being his parent had ever been found. Believed to be active in the Rome underworld from the mid-eighties, first as an employee and then rival to the notorious Banda della Magliana criminal gang. Took on the Italians at their own game and, by all accounts, won bloodily. Returned to Yugoslavia in 1991, just in time to see the country disintegrate and profit from it.

She read on. In the years 1991 to 1995 Dragović had operated like a state within a state. NATO might have tried, belatedly, to bomb the country back to the dark ages: on the ground, Dragović had already got there. He’d set himself up like a barbarian chieftain of old, running a military kingdom based on plunder, rape and permanent war. The reaper, they called him. His paramilitary army was second only to the Yugoslav National Army in size, and in brutal efficiency second to none. But while others killed for politics or religion, Dragović focused on cash. When sanctions bit the Serb people hard, prices sky-rocketed and so did his profits. Oil, gold, cigarettes, shoes – if there was a market for it, Dragović owned it. He took looted artworks from the Sarajevo Museum and fenced them to private collections across Europe.

After the Dayton Accords ended the war, Dragović went to ground. While his fellow gangster-paramilitaries spent their war gains in an orgy of alcohol and drugs and murder in Belgrade, he disappeared. There’d been speculation he feared reprisals from a state apparatus that wanted his silence – DOES THE REAPER FEAR DEATH? one contemporary headline in the Serbian magazine Vreme asked – but later reports suggested he’d actually used the time to travel Europe’s cities. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Rome, Istanbul – all the places where the heroin trade flourished. One story said he’d even visited the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague as a tourist. He’d walked right past the security guards and sat in the public gallery for fifteen minutes. No one noticed.

In 1999 his patron Slobodan Milošević had attempted a comeback tour reprising his greatest hits: the brief but bloody attempt to do to Kosovo what he’d done to Bosnia. This time, an impatient NATO gave him three months and then launched the bombers. Everyone thought Dragović would pile in with the rest of the Serbian paramilitaries for one last tilt at the golden goose, but instead he stayed out. Some claimed he’d actually supplied the Albanian-nationalist UÇK with weapons he’d bought in the IRA’s going-out-of-business sale. Perhaps it was a quixotic gesture to his Albanian heritage; perhaps he’d seen that Milošević was doomed and had been buying credit with his enemies. A year later, he was rumoured to have been helping Albanian-nationalist terrorists trying to foment the civil war that almost erupted in neighbouring Macedonia.

For once, Dragović failed. NATO moved in to Kosovo and Macedonia and showed the gangsters what real military power meant. Dragović stopped trying to overthrow governments and, by all reports, concentrated on making money. While justice slowly caught up with his contemporaries – either the fastidious, time-consuming justice of the Hague, or the summary version doled out on the streets of Belgrade – Dragović stayed in the shadows. The last of the old-time gunslingers who still hadn’t hung up his guns. There were warrants outstanding from the International Criminal Tribunal on war crimes charges, and Interpol on drug- and people-trafficking charges, but as the years went by the urgency faded. They’d almost got lucky in 2008, when the Turkish authorities had arrested him in Istanbul, but he’d escaped before extradition proceedings could begin. Allegations that the Russian security services had facilitated his escape as reward for services rendered were vigorously denied.

Abby sat back feeling slightly ill. It wasn’t just the crimes: it was the queasy feeling of rifling through her own memories as much as Dragović’s past. She’d never met him, but she’d filed paperwork at the International Tribunal on his case; once, she’d ridden along with a squad of NATO peacekeepers as they turned over an abandoned farmhouse in a remote corner of Bosnia where he might have been seen. All they’d found was a pile of rubbish where the locals had been tipping, and a dead crow.

She looked at the photograph staring out of the screen. There weren’t many pictures of Dragović on file: this one was small and out of focus, as if it had been cropped from the background of something else. All she could see was a narrow face, an angular jaw and two jet-black eyes staring at the camera, as if he’d just noticed the photographer.

And what did Michael have to do with you? she wondered. Dragović ran one of the biggest smuggling rings in Europe, and Kosovo was its crossroads. Michael must have come up against him in the course of his work.

So why did you take me to stay at his house?

She pressed the mouse button so hard she thought she’d break it. The window closed, the face vanished.

The reading room was stifling. She needed air. She pushed through the doors, past the stacks of ancient books entombed in glass that made the core of the building, and down the steps to the piazza. She was craving a pill, but settled for a cigarette.

As she rummaged in her bag, she saw her phone glowing in its depths. She’d kept it on silent for the reading room, but someone must have sent a message. Her heart sank. The only person who’d ever called her on that phone was Mark.

What do they want from me now?

Trembling in the cool evening air, she took out the phone and opened the text message. Strangely, the sender’s number wasn’t displayed.

ARCUMTRIUMPHISINSIGNEMDICAVIT. Friday 17h. I can help.