Back across the town, at the hospital, she had discovered English speakers, had been taken down into a basement area and shown a museum to an atrocity, and had been given another name, American or north European, and another address had been scratched on her map. A short distance from the hospital, at a semi- detached house, she had met a man, emaciated, with a seriousness in his eyes that marked obsession and isolation. He had been on his way out for the day, heading for Osijek, and was already late… but another cross was placed on the map at the far extremity of the page.
She sat on a bench in shade, with a rectangular block of ebony stone in front of her. It was twice her height, a foot thick, with a flying dove sculpted on it. From where she was, at that angle, she could see through the stone, and the blue skies were in the dove’s form. A little away from it, there was a square garden. Small clipped evergreens grew from a base of white stone chippings, and on a slab beside them stood jars of red glass for candles, with a cross, no more than a metre high, close to them. The arms of the cross were covered with chains and strings of beads from which hung crucifixes and medals from the army, football and basketball clubs. There were identity cards, too, preserved in laminate pouches. It was very quiet. She had heard a buzzard cry as it circled above, and the low pitch of a tractor that pulled a sprayer. To her left, she could see a knot of youngsters working with equipment inside corridors marked by white tape.
The lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies had told her about Ovcara. She knew that the wounded had been taken from the basement of the hospital, where the museum was, brought to this site and butchered. When the bodies had been exhumed medical equipment was still attached to them… The sun came up hard from the ground, burning her. It was one thing, she reflected, to be told about a place of mass murder in a London library, another to be there. The cross draped with the little mementoes scratched hardest at her, the symbols of the living, and the light flickered brightly on the beads and chains that wind and rain had polished. She had been told that the man was in the field and would come when it was convenient to him.
First his shadow, then his voice: ‘Miss Laing, I hear you got the push-around and ended up with Danny Steyn. He pushed some more, and you were sent to me.’
She grimaced. ‘I seem to have bounced off a few walls.’
‘I’m William Anders. Danny called me. About the village, yes?’
‘About the village.’ She showed him her card.
‘You mentioned to Danny a man called Gillot.’
‘I did.’
‘It’s Harvey Gillot, yes?’ He had a lazy drawl, conversational but compelling, not to be ignored. ‘Why did you – I assume you’re a criminal investigator – mention that name to Danny?’
‘Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has an investigation division. The Alpha team, of which I’m a member, is tasked to look for the breaking of our country’s laws in the area of arms dealing.’
‘A noble calling, Miss Laing. I dig up bodies – those killed in acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and plain old murder – and I hope that the fruits of my labours will end up in a court of law. If The Hague and the International Criminal Court, or the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, hears evidence I have provided, I’m well pleased. Most especially in Africa, I see the results of unfettered arms-trafficking.’
‘Harvey Gillot is an Alpha-team target.’ She thought a slice of his confidence had seeped away: his eyes had narrowed and the wide smile was falser. ‘We have intelligence, also, that a village near to the town has collectively taken out a contract on his life…’
‘Do you?’ Sobered, reflective, and a cigar case came out of the pocket. ‘Do you now?’
‘I’ve been sent here to try to find out what Harvey Gillot did that, eighteen, nineteen years later, has caused a community to pay for a killer to assassinate him. That’s my brief.’
‘Is it?’ A cigar was clamped in the teeth and a big lighter threw up a flame. ‘Is it now?’
‘Do you have anything that takes me in the direction I’m looking at?’
Smoke from the cigar masked his face but Penny thought she saw, almost, regret in the eyes. He said, nearly a whisper, ‘I believe I’m responsible.’
‘Responsible for what?’
‘I believe I’m responsible for initiating that contract, Miss Laing.’
He thought a gleam had come into her face – always did when an investigator reckoned a key had been handed over that opened a long-locked door. She had a little notepad on her knee and a pencil stub.
The forensic scientist William Anders, a lion of his academic community on the Californian coast, a scourge of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, felt what his wife – an academic in European renaissance art, and back home with the kids – would have called a frisson of guilt. He asked how long she had.
Time enough.
He spoke of a call, of a journey to the edge of ploughed strip that had been declared clear of mines a couple of days previously, and of an arm raised: he said the arm was in the air like the one in the lake that was waiting for the great sword, Excalibur, to be heaved in its direction. He received, as a reward for the image, a wintry smile from Miss Penny Laing.
He told her that four bodies had been excavated. He explained that his examination of their pubic symphyses had identified approximate age and estimated height, and told her why dental records for the male cadavers were unavailable. He told her which one would have been the village schoolmaster, then what mutilations they had suffered. She murmured something about having been in the Democratic Republic of Congo and seen combat aftermath, its effect on civilians, and he reckoned she would have been useless at digging on site, squeamish and without the fibre it took.
Should he have done it? Was it a crime?
Was he not a professor of his discipline, a world authority? Did he give a fast fuck, or a slow one, about the life and future times of Harvey Gillot?
He described a piece of paper he had retrieved from the older man’s pocket. He had regained his composure. Normally he would have flirted with a young woman, teased her a little, joked and smiled, and maybe later he would have looked for a coy smile, perhaps a drop of the eyes, some fun. Didn’t see it in Penny Laing. He wondered if she was overwhelmed by the place, a front line in history. He didn’t flirt with her. He was graphic in picturing for her the level of decay, but also related why the women wore no wedding rings or other jewellery. ‘I’m getting there, Miss Laing.’
‘There’s nowhere else I have to be.’
‘A guy from a village came to the hospital and I met him while I took a break out of the mortuary and had a smoke. I was asked a simple question: had anything of significance been found? I gave a simple answer through Danny, who did the interpreting. The piece of paper had the name of a hotel and its address, somewhere on the Croatian coast, and the name of a man. You know what that name is. I gave it to the guy from the village. Should I have censored that information? I don’t like censors, Miss Laing.’
‘Can you tell me the history of the village?’
He threw down his cigar end and stamped on it. He told her she’d have to hang around because he had work to supervise. He hadn’t come halfway around the world to sit in the shade and talk. He walked away.
She called after him, ‘I think you’re right to take responsibility for the contract to kill Harvey Gillot.’
She had a starting point, and it was as if a weight had lifted off her. When he had come back from the field and his students had trudged to their tents, he had done sustained talking, and a picture had been unveiled for her.
Nineteen years later… some buildings new and glossily painted, others old and broken. A repaired town and a damaged town. Should have been a picture-postcard place, not one that tanks had rolled through. When they had, and when the fighter bombers had been overhead, Penny Laing had been ten. Weeds grew in the walls of the buildings that had missed out on repair, trees sprouted where there would have been TVs or easy chairs, and charred beams were crazily collapsed. She had been ten, worrying about going to a new school after her next birthday and glorying in the puppy her parents had bought. She had not known that shells and bombs had fallen on this town. She wondered if her parents had – and thought it none of their business. There had seemed a stillness about the streets. There was a degree of normality, in the banks, cafes, bars, a hospital with elderly patients outside the wards, dragging on cigarettes, young women with bulging bellies, policemen in a patrol car, men fishing by the bridge over the little river that joined the Danube. But abnormality, too, in the suppressed noise, as if people went on tiptoe, and the buildings that gaped open.
She thought she’d had enough for one day and drove back to the hotel. Later she would walk, then type up
