Secrets of the Dead

fell.

The captain parked the Landcruiser at the side of the road and led them on to a veranda along the front of the densely packed SEA huts. They came to a door, knocked and entered.

Specialist Anthony Sanchez was sitting on a wooden bunk, playing an Xbox on a forty-inch TV screen perched on a steel chair. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in a khaki T-shirt that left plenty of room for his gym- worked biceps. He looked around as the door opened. On screen, a racing car careered off the road and exploded in a fireball.

‘I guess you’re why they told me not to go out today.’ The brim of his patrol cap sat low on his face, covering his eyes. His voice was husky, his features surprisingly delicate for the strong body.

‘I’ll wait in the car,’ the captain said.

Sanchez punched the power on the television. Without its light, the room was so dim they could barely see him. He reached across to the facing bunk and swept a pizza box off it. ‘Sorry we don’t have crumpets or tea or none of that.’

Jessop sat. ‘Tell me about Michael Lascaris.’

The patrol cap turned from Abby to Jessop, then down to the floor. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘You brought a body in to the Forensics department together,’ Abby said. ‘It’s your signature on the docket.’

The cap didn’t move. Rain drummed on the roof of the hut. A long, slow sibilant escaped from Sanchez’s lips: maybe a drawn-out expletive, or just the air deflating from him.

‘I haven’t seen Mr Lascaris in a while.’

‘He’s dead,’ Jessop told him.

‘I don’t really follow the news.’ Sanchez fiddled with the game controller in his hand, thumbing the joystick in aimless circles.

‘Tell me how you met Michael,’ Abby said.

‘In a bar.’

‘That sounds right.’

‘He came to find me here on base. He was a civilian, but I guess he knew his way around. Bought me some beers, it was all cool. Then he said he read a report I put in from one of the LMT missions.’

‘LMT?’ Jessop queried.

‘Liaison and Monitoring Team. My unit. We go out in teams of three in an SUV and talk to the locals, feed it up the chain of command. Bridge-building, right?’

‘What was your report about?’

‘Up north, round about Nothing Hill. We were in this mahallah –’

‘A what?’

‘A mahallah. You know, like a village? Anyways, we were talking to some guys up there, and some farmer rides up on his Kosovo Harley.’ He saw they didn’t understand. ‘You’ve seen them, right? They take a garden rotovator, put on some wheels instead of the blades, then bolt a handcart on the back of it to make like a pick-up. We call them Kosovo Harleys.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Abby. Jessop looked mystified.

‘This guy says he thinks his neighbour’s got a weapons stash on his land. He’s an upstanding citizen and he wants us to know. Truth to tell, he probably wants the field for himself. So what, right? We go and look where he says, and sure enough there’s a hole and a cave with a couple of rusted AKs and some sidearms. It’s a big deal, but it’s not that big a deal. Where it gets crazy is when we shine our flashlights around. This place – it isn’t just a cave. It’s like a tomb or something, old paintings on the walls and a big-ass stone coffin.’

The rain beat harder than ever. All Abby could see of Sanchez was his silhouette against the barred window.

‘And that was where you found the body?’

‘Not then. We had a mission. We took the guns and called the cops to arrest the landowner. The CO put a guard on the door. Then we came home. It’s not really our sector – we’re Battle-Group East, and that was way north. We were just up there generating some goodwill.’

Goodwill to whom? Abby wondered.

‘I wrote it down in a report, and a week later Mr Lascaris showed up in the bar asking if he could see this place. I told him sure, but it ain’t going to be on the clock. I only go where they tell me. And two days later, the staff sergeant calls me in and says I’m assigned to escort a civilian on a fact-finding mission. He was kind of pissed about it because it screwed up his schedule, but Michael was one of those guys, he made things happen.’

You can say that again.

‘We went north towards Mitrovica, back to the cave. Like I said, Battle-Group North had put a guard on it, Norwegian dude, but Michael had some fancy paperwork and it was no problem. We went in there with some pry- bars and hammers. Michael points to the coffin and says, “Let’s get that thing opened up.”’

The rain had eased. The only sound in the room was the drip of water from the eaves outside.

‘Now I did two tours in Iraq before I came here, and I saw some shit. But this was freaky. It was dark as hell in there, and I’m thinking about King Tut’s curse and all that History Channel bullshit. And that lid was heavy. Almost bust my fingers lifting it – specially when I saw what was inside.’

‘A skeleton,’ said Abby. She remembered the empty sockets, the waxy bones against the steel table.