Secrets of the Dead

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 cafe 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 Dragovic’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?

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

It still felt incredible. Two days ago, Dragovic 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 Dragovic. Some help.

She was pretty sure Dragovic 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. Dragovic 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.