Secrets of the Dead

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.

Zoltan Dragovic. 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 Dragovic 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, Dragovic 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, Dragovic 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, Dragovic 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, Dragovic 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 Milosevic 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 Dragovic 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 UCK 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 Milosevic 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, Dragovic failed. NATO moved in to Kosovo and Macedonia and showed the gangsters what real military power meant. Dragovic 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 – Dragovic 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 Dragovic’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 Dragovic 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. Dragovic 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.