Secrets of the Dead

XVII

Rome – Present Day

UNTIL THE VERY last minute, she didn’t guess what they’d do to her. Blindfolded, she was dragged back downstairs to the car, then driven for what seemed an eternity. The hand on her back never relaxed. She lay curled in a ball, face down in her stale vomit, reliving her nightmares. The villa on the coast and the black museum and all the evil places on earth she’d been. Different voices spoke inside her, overlapping ghosts. Hector: You spend too long chasing dead people, you need to come up for air. Michael, on a beach somewhere on holiday: Never get involved. Reports she’d written, dispassionate and correct. Witnesses saw the victim being bundled into a car by unknown men; she was found dead in a forest eight hours later.

Except when they came for me, there weren’t even any witnesses.

The car stopped. A door opened. She felt a shove against her back, and then a shuddering blow as she fell and landed on her shoulder. Above her head, the door slammed shut. She heard the roar of an engine and the squeal of tyres; she choked as a blast of exhaust fumes blew in her face. Then there was silence.

She pulled the blindfold off her face, and emerged, gasping, into the sodium glow of the city at night. Far in the distance, a pair of brake lights veered around a corner and vanished.

She was alone. Plane trees rustled overhead; a fine rain wet her cheeks and washed down her tears. She pulled herself to her feet and staggered to the stone wall a few feet away. Below, hemmed in by concrete, the Tiber flowed eternally by. A hundred yards downstream she could see a bridge, and on its far side the bulk of the Trastevere Prison, next to her hotel.

They’ve almost brought me home. It felt like one final twist of the knife.

She staggered over the bridge, and hammered on the door of her hotel until they let her in. In her room, she pulled every spare blanket she could find out of the cupboard and heaped them up on the bed, then crawled under them.

It was almost dawn before she fell asleep, and when she did, the dreams were savage.

She slept until noon, until a chambermaid barging through the door made her scream so loud the desk receptionist heard it and came running. She showered and dressed. She went to the little café on the corner and drank three espressos sitting on a tall stool at the counter. She caught a couple of the men staring, though they weren’t likely to proposition her. In the mirror behind the bar, she could see a fat bruise where Dragović’s gun had left its mark on her swollen chin. She touched it and winced.

She picked over her memories of the night before, still sharp and raw. She had to handle them carefully, like a rubber-gloved pathologist. A cigarette would have helped, but a sign above the counter said NO SMOKING and she didn’t want a confrontation.

Have you ever wondered why you’re not dead?

Dragović doesn’t know either, she thought. Something happened at the villa that even he doesn’t understand.

It still felt incredible. Two days ago, Dragović had been headlines and rumours, a bogeyman on the shadows of the world stage. Now, he was as real as a beard scraping against her skin. Her coffee cup trembled on its saucer.

Two deaths, but only one body.

There had to be someone else. Someone who’d stopped the killer and called the police. Who’d sent her the letter with Michael’s sister’s address, and then the text message at the British Library. I can help.

Was that true? Nothing had helped so far. She remembered the figure in York chasing her through the rain. In Rome, the only person who showed up was Dragović. Some help.

She was pretty sure Dragović hadn’t sent the message. She’d seen him read it off her phone – he’d been as confused as she was. And if he’d wanted to get hold of her, he could surely have found an easier way than sending Latin riddles to her phone.

To reach the living, navigate the dead.

The poem and the symbol – what did they mean? The symbol on the necklace and on the stone, the poem on the stone and on the manuscript. And how did Michael ever get hold of either of them?

Michael.

Her head hurt. She thought about another coffee and decided not. Her body was starting to feel as if it might shake itself apart.

Michael. He was the missing link, the void at the centre of all her swirling thoughts. Every time she approached him, she drew back for fear of what she might find. He’d taken her to a villa owned by the most wanted man in the Balkans. Even she couldn’t pretend to herself it might have been coincidence. Dragović had the poem and the symbol in stone, Michael had them in gold and papyrus.

And where did he get the necklace? She remembered what Michael had said when she asked him. A Gypsy gave it to me.

She had to go back. Whatever Michael was doing, it had begun in Kosovo. She put down her coffee cup and headed for the door.

At least I’m not dead, she told herself, trying to make light of it and not hear the mordant voice coming straight back at her.

Yet.

Pristina, Kosovo

Pristina sat on sloping foothills, with a green forested ridge above, and the constant belch of the Obelic power plant at the bottom. In between stood a fairly standard-issue Warsaw Pact town: squat apartment blocks punctuated by the occasional piece of concrete whimsy. Going back was like pulling on an old set of clothes you never much liked in the first place. Abby sat in the back of the taxi as it crawled up Avenue Bil Klinton, past the gilded statue of the former president, one arm raised to wave at the permanent traffic jam. He might have been impeached in America, but in Kosovo he remained invincible. On every corner, stern-looking NATO soldiers watched from billboards and reminded the population they were safe. Outside the parliament building, pictures of the missing flapped from a fence. Some of the pictures looked blank, so that only if you stared carefully did you see the faded traces of the photographs; others might have been put up yesterday. A row of ghosts.

And what about the people left behind? Abby wondered. The mothers and wives and children of those men (they were all men). Did their memories fade like the photographs, until all the pain had bleached to whiteness? Or did they survive, hardy and unwilting as the plastic flowers that garlanded the railings?

Is that what Michael will become? It seemed impossible.

They turned left, past the hotel with the Statue of Liberty replica on its roof, past the Palace of Youth and the Grand Hotel. If you wanted a symbol of Kosovo, that was it: forty-four storeys of socialist nostalgia, half of it wrapped in hoardings promising luxury to come, the other half untouched in fifteen years.

The taxi dropped her off at her flat. She didn’t have a key, but Annukka, the pretty Finnish girl who lived opposite and worked for the OSCE mission, kept a spare. It was late Saturday afternoon; from inside the apartment, she could hear singing.

Annukka answered Abby’s knock dressed with a towelled turban over her head. She must be getting ready to go out.

‘Oh my God, Abby.’ She threw her arms around Abby and kissed her on both cheeks. She looked genuinely pleased to see her, so much so that Abby had to check her memories. In her mind, Annukka was the sort of neighbour who watered your plants and smiled in the hallway. But perhaps it had been more than that. For all the hard work, aspects of being on mission were like summer camp. You made friends, shared intimacies, and then summer ended and most of it got forgotten in a welter of promises to write and keep in touch. That was what had made it so easy with Michael.

Except now he’s gone and I’m still chasing after him.

‘We’ve all been so worried about you,’ Annukka was saying. ‘We heard some crazy stuff about you and Michael. On the news, even. Some journalists came by, but I didn’t say anything. Well, I didn’t know. Seriously, though, are you OK?’ She looked at the gash on Abby’s chin where the pistol had cut it, the swelling around her mouth. ‘What happened to your face?’

Abby put her hand on Annukka’s shoulder. ‘Can we talk about this later? I just got here and I really need to sort myself out.’

‘Sure. I mean, of course, any time. Anything I can do to help, let me know, OK?’

She was so sincere, so briskly kind, Abby almost wanted to cry.

‘I was hoping you still had my spare key.’

‘Right.’ A shadow flickered on Annukka’s face. ‘I’m really sorry, Abby, but I have to tell you I gave it to the police. Two guys from EULEX and some Kosovo Police. They wanted to search your apartment. I thought perhaps they were getting some stuff for you. I don’t think they gave the key back.’

Abby stared at the wooden door, the Cyclops-eye of the peephole poking out of it.

‘You’re welcome to stay with me,’ Annukka chattered on. She frowned. ‘Except, I’m supposed to be going out with Felix tonight and I’ll probably stay over. We lost the water here again and they say it won’t come back until tomorrow. I can give you a key for my place, if you want?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Abby assured her. ‘I’ll go down to the police station and get it back.’

She walked slowly down the stairs until she heard Annukka’s door latch shut. Then she sat down and buried her head in her hands.

I can’t even get into my own home. Of all the things that had happened since Michael drove her to the villa, that seemed the most unjust. The world had turned its back on her; she was being nudged towards the exit. The cold step was her only home, strictly temporary. Even when Annukka hugged her, she’d felt like a drowning woman slipping out of her grasp.

We lost the water here again. That was the thing with Pristina. Ten years of international government, billions of dollars in reconstruction money, and when you flipped a switch or turned a tap you still couldn’t be sure what would happen. It’s lucky England got its plumbing from the Victorians, Michael used to joke. If we had to rely on the UN or the EU we’d still be running around with buckets picking lice off each other.

Buckets.

She stood and went downstairs. Outside, around the back of the building, there was a courtyard where the landlord kept the bins. Half a dozen satellite dishes stared down at her; the cables of illegal electrical hook-ups snaked down from a concrete pole.

The block was built in the shape of an H, but the ground-floor flat had filled in the intermediate space with a kitchen extension. Abby peered through the kitchen window and saw it was empty.

She dragged one of the bins over against the wall and clambered up on it, then hauled herself on to the kitchen roof. The wound in her chest throbbed in protest; for a second, jack-knifed over the edge of the roof, she thought she might pull the scar apart. She gritted her teeth against the pain.

I just want to get into my own home.

Anger took her over the edge and on to the gravel-covered roof, clutching her side as if she’d run a marathon. In the corner outside her bathroom window, a bucket of stagnant water sat under a sawn-off drainpipe. She’d kept it there for flushing the toilet when the water was off. It used to live inside, but somehow she always forgot to refill it. After being caught out for the third time, Michael had jury-rigged it for her so she’d never have to remember.

She’d used the bucket so often, in the end she just left the bathroom window unlocked permanently. Michael teased her it wasn’t secure, but Pristina – despite Kosovo’s reputation – was one of the safest cities in Europe. She worked her fingers under the lip of the window and tugged. For a moment it wouldn’t give – she wondered if some dutiful policeman had seen the latch and locked it. But it was only stiff from disuse. The window swung out. A few seconds later, she was standing in her own home.

Going back to the London flat had been disorienting for the changes: her past, rearranged. Here, it was what hadn’t changed that threw her. Everything was exactly as she’d left it when she went to work that Friday morning, before the trip to Kotor Bay. The washing-up sitting in the drying rack. The cold laundry balled in the tumble drier. A jaundiced, weeks-old newspaper on the sofa. The air smelled damp and sour; dust dulled every surface. She felt like an explorer opening an Egyptian tomb.

She shivered. The flat might not have changed, but she had: she didn’t belong here any more. And not everything was the same. The longer she looked, the more she noticed things. The drawer in the bedroom that hadn’t been closed properly. The photograph on her bookcase one shelf down from where it should have been. The door to the spare room, which she always wedged open for the light, that had been allowed to close.

What were they looking for?

Suddenly, she felt very afraid. The place had dispossessed her: she didn’t want to be there. She went into the bedroom and stuffed some clothes into a bag. She rummaged through the wardrobe, looking for a warm coat. Even that was painful. Interleaved on the hangers with her skirts and blouses, she found some of Michael’s clothes, shirts and trousers that had crept in and accumulated from all the times he’d stayed over. She found herself touching them, rubbing the cloth between finger and thumb, as if it might be possible to squeeze some small residue of Michael out of it. She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help it. She was crying again, but she didn’t try to stop herself. It felt natural, as if something deep within her had finally managed to reach the outside.

Her hand ran over a suit jacket and stopped. Under the pin-striped cloth she felt something stiff and solid. She slipped her hand inside the pocket, and came out holding a slim red leather diary. She had to smile. Michael’s diaries had been a standing joke. He’d owned at least three that she’d known about, possibly more, different shapes and sizes that lived independent existences, turning up in pockets or on desks or shelves more or less at random. Whenever Michael had to make a date, he wrote it in whichever diary came to hand. The one time Abby pointed out how inefficient this was, he’d looked mock-wounded. I’m half-Greek and half-Irish, he’d said. Timekeeping’s not in the genes. Amazingly, she’d never known him miss an appointment.

She opened the diary and turned through the pages, the last weeks of Michael’s life. He hadn’t used it much – most of the jottings were routine meetings, minor errands. But two entries stood out. One, three weeks before he died: Levin, OMPF, underscored three times. The other, the following week, Jessop, 91.

The screech of the telephone cut through the silence. Abby almost dropped the diary. The phone rang on, penetrating every corner of the flat; Abby didn’t move. She felt like a burglar, caught in the act. It’s your home, she scolded herself.

She didn’t pick up. The phone kept ringing, until she was almost used to it. Then it stopped. Down on the street outside, she heard a car draw up. She ran to the window and looked down. A silver Opel 4 x 4 with EU markings had pulled up on the kerb across the road. A door opened, and she ducked back in case anyone saw her through the window. How did they know she was there? Did Annukka call them?

I’m an EU employee, standing in my own flat on a Saturday afternoon. But it wasn’t really like that. She ran to the kitchen and took the spare key from the biscuit jar, just in case she needed to come back. Then she slipped into the bathroom, clambered down off the roof as quickly as the pain in her side would allow, and disappeared down the footpath that ran between the apartment buildings and chain-link fences. She didn’t look back.