with the body. And it’s those fragments that stay to haunt you if you don’t give them a proper burial.’ He laughed softly. ‘I sound like I’ve been drinking. Short answer: if you’re working with the dead, you don’t fool yourself the work’s ever going to finish. I guess that’s how I keep going.’
The Department of Forensic Medicine was one squat brown building among many at the sprawling hospital. Abby got out of the car and looked around. Her old office, EULEX headquarters, was just down the road, on the other side of a straggle of trees. Even on a Sunday morning she was nervous about being so close. A couple of doctors in white coats walked past, and she turned her head away. Levin saw, but didn’t comment.
He led her inside and down a flight of stairs into the basement. A knot began tightening in her stomach. It was all too familiar: the blistered paint, the scuffed tiles, the smells of nicotine and disinfectant leached into the walls. Her breaths came faster as she remembered waking up in Podgorica. From somewhere in the depths of the hospital she could hear the monotone beep of a cardiac machine like a dripping tap. Or was that just her imagination?
Levin opened a strong steel door. The swimming-pool tang of chlorine blew out at her. At least the EU had paid for a refurb here. The tiles were gloss white, the ceiling lights painfully bright after the dim corridor. On one wall a bank of metal doors like bread ovens hummed quietly.
Levin pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He spun open one of the doors and slid out a long, stainless-steel tray. Abby fixed her eyes at a point on the wall, then inched her gaze down until she could see what lay there.
It wasn’t what she’d expected. A skeleton lay full length on the slab, its arms at its sides and its skull staring at the ceiling. The bones were dry, aged caramel brown. It looked more like a museum exhibit than a war crime.
‘This is what Michael brought you?’ A nod. ‘Did he say why he had it?’
‘He just wanted to know what I could tell him about it.’
‘And?’
‘The body belonged to an old man, probably in his sixties or seventies when he died. About six foot tall, well built. And murdered.’
A chill went through Abby. For a second she imagined Michael’s skeleton laid out on a slab somewhere, a pathologist describing his murder as just another fact to be recorded.
Levin didn’t notice. He leaned over the skeleton and pointed to the ribcage. ‘You see here? Sharp force trauma. The fourth rib’s been snapped off – you can see the break.’ He poked a rubber-gloved finger through the chest cavity. ‘There’s a linear defect on the back of the rib where the blade cut the bone on its way out. Went right through him.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Most likely that he was stabbed through the heart. From the front, based on the direction of the cut, with a big knife or a sword.’
With a shock, she realised Levin was smiling. ‘Is that funny?’
‘Not for him, I guess. But we’re not going to open a case on him any time soon.’
She still didn’t get it. ‘Why not?’
‘Because he died something in the order of seventeen hundred years ago.’
Levin walked over to the wall, pulled off his gloves, and washed his hands. When he turned back, the smile had gone and there were no answers in his eyes.
‘Michael brought you a skeleton he’d found that was murdered over a thousand years ago?’ Abby repeated.
‘I got curious, so I ran some common isotope analysis on his molars and his femur. According to the chemical signatures, he grew up around here, but spent his later life somewhere around the eastern Mediterranean, near the sea. Varied diet, so probably rich.’
He pointed to greyish patches of bone on the skeleton’s legs and arms, not smooth but mottled, like coral. ‘That’s woven bone – it grows in response to wounds or bruising. This guy lived a violent life, but always recovered. Until someone stabbed him through the heart.’
Levin crossed to a steel filing cabinet and extracted a folder. From inside came a sheaf of papers and a small brown object in a plastic bag.
‘There was this, as well.’ He slid out the object and laid it under a magnifier on the workbench. ‘It’s a belt buckle. Take a look.’
Abby put her eye to the glass. All she could see was a mottled brown blur, like a bed of autumn leaves. She moved the magnifier up and down until the image became clear. Letters had emerged from the background, crusted and incomplete, but still legible.
‘LEG IIII FELIX.’
‘It’s the name of a Roman legion,’ Levin translated. ‘The “lucky fourth”.’ He caught her surprise. ‘I looked it up on the Internet. Apparently, they were based in Belgrade, so not so far from here. If you look underneath the writing, you’ll see the legionary crest.’
Abby squinted at it. Again, rust distorted the image, but she could make it out. A lean lion, proportioned like a greyhound, with a dreadlocked mane hanging over its shoulders.
‘The NATO guys aren’t the first occupying troops in this part of the world,’ Levin said. ‘I guess this one got unlucky.’
She remembered something he’d said. ‘Why did you say murdered? If he was a soldier, and stabbed with a sword, couldn’t he have been killed in battle?’
‘Sure, I guess. I thought it would be unusual for a guy in his sixties to be on a battlefield, and the wound’s so clean and deep he probably wasn’t wearing armour. It’s just a hypothesis.’
She looked up from the buckle and back at the skeleton on the table. Dead eye-sockets stared up at her. A
