A ladder stood extended in front of the wrecked letter boxes, and a pallet full of plasterboard had been plonked down right in the middle of the porch. Milena studied the markings on the wall. If her interpretation of the lines was correct, the ceiling height would come down to just about one hand’s width above the entrance door.
Mr Šoć, the caretaker, put his hammer drill to one side, tugged a piece of paper out of the pocket of his overalls and announced, ‘It’s all been approved, Ms Lukin.’ He stepped over the toolkit and held the letter under her nose, which bore the logo of the building management company.
‘Well, I hope you’re at least getting adequately remunerated for your work,’ Milena responded; it sounded every bit as snarky as it was meant to.
She couldn’t really blame the caretaker, as he was only doing what he had been told to do by others – in this particular case, the owner of the travel agency, who had given instructions to reduce the space available to the residents in order to create a few square metres’ worth of extra storage space for himself. No use getting upset about it. His actions many years ago regarding the communal storage spaces and drying rooms had been far more high-handed and brazen.
One by one, these windowless rooms had been converted into offices for debt collectors and visa agents without anybody being able to establish who had struck what murky deals with whom. By comparison, the question of whether the roof terrace was communally owned was crystal clear: it had been requisitioned by the people living on the top floor and turned into luxury maisonettes. The fact that the building had, since then, begun to suffer from subsidence as the old foundations gave way under the additional weight evidently bothered no one.
Milena drove down King Lazar Street, heading straight for the monument to Duke Vuk and the Institute for Forensic Science and Criminology. These days, wheelie bins blocked all the parking bays there, now that the refuse rooms that had once housed them had all been turned into beauty salons and mobile phone shops. And when these new shop windows were installed on the ground floor it presented the perfect opportunity to reduce the width of the footpath outside. And every time that happened, some caretaker was always to hand to pull out a piece of paper and announce that all these changes had been properly authorised. Milena parked her car at sharp angle outside the Red Cock pub.
She really ought to try and contact the city planning office. But the chances of anybody there taking any notice of the lowering of a ceiling in some porch were next to zero. You required connections even to denounce somebody.
A short while later, Milena was up in her office, hanging her jacket over the chair; she switched on the kettle and opened the window. That afternoon she had to go and see Uncle Miodrag in hospital, but first she had to finish the organisational chart for the upcoming semester. And she had to call Alexander Kronburg. She shovelled instant coffee into a mug and poured hot water over it.
The job was tempting: to monitor the reform of the Serbian justice system on behalf of the German embassy. But how did the guy imagine she’d set about it? She couldn’t pack up and leave just like that. She had contractual obligations and couldn’t let down her students.
She turned on the computer and adjusted the keyboard. On the other hand, the offices of the German embassy surely had central heating, air conditioning and reserved parking spaces behind the building. She took small sips and pictured a solicitous assistant bringing her coffee to her each morning.
There was a knock on the door. Milena typed in her password (Adam’s birthday), pressed ‘enter’ and looked up.
Boris Grubač, the director of the institute, was standing in the middle of the room. His ample stomach protruded, pushing his striped tie towards her. He extended both hands and proffered a little package – a box of jelly bananas. He carefully placed it on her desk and straightened it up. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Just a little something.’
She glanced at the box. It was a luxury assortment in two layers that could be opened like drawers – definitely too extravagant to be just ‘a little something’. She eyed her boss suspiciously. The corners of his mouth were moist and he positively oozed unctuous bonhomie.
‘Why, thank you.’ Milena put on a smile. ‘By the way, I had a conversation with the German ambassador the other week.’
‘I know,’ Grubač replied.
She recoiled in surprise. ‘How?’
‘His secretary calls this office almost every day. Did nobody tell you?’
‘Does that mean you know what this is all about?’
‘Don’t keep the poor guy hanging on. Put yourself in his shoes: as a foreigner, he has no clue about what’s going on, and for some reason I can’t fathom he’s very keen on you. Why aren’t you using it to your advantage? Tell him what he wants to hear, or what you want him to hear. The key thing is to make sure he coughs up for the privilege at the end of the day. It’s called consulting. Ever heard of it?’
‘It’s a tad more complicated, I’m afraid.’ Milena searched for her telephone, which had started to ring somewhere.
‘And so long as you don’t neglect your work here, this kind of consultancy isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the institute. Quite the contrary. So, Ms Lukin, why don’t you put yourself about a bit?’
Milena looked at her mobile. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘this is important. Could you give me a minute?’ She nodded, and pressed the green button.
The voice at the other end was calm and very matter-offact. The tone was in marked contrast to the information it was conveying – for a moment, Milena thought she hadn’t heard correctly.
She got up and stepped over to the window. Her mind was racing.
‘Where are you?’ she asked mechanically, grasping the window handle. ‘Stay where you are. I’ll come straight away.’ She lowered the phone and stared numbly at the screen.
‘Bad news?’ Grubač asked behind her back.
Milena walked to her desk and grabbed her bag.
‘So how should we leave things?’ he asked. ‘What do we say to the ambassador?’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Where do you think you’re off to?’ he called after her.
Milena hurried down the hall. On the staircase, she dialled Siniša’s number, crossed the foyer and spoke into the phone, ‘Call me back as soon as you get this…’
As she pushed through the institute door, she added, ‘Goran Valetić is dead.’
✴
Slavujka Valetić was standing just a few metres away from the entrance to the forensic institute – in precisely the spot where she had been a quarter of an hour earlier, when she had ended her call to Milena. She was pale, almost translucent, with no bag and no jacket. She was much smaller than Milena remembered her. Milena pulled over to the kerb, stopped and turned on the car’s hazard lights.
It was ten days since she and Milena and Siniša had met in the Café Präsent. What a tragedy. First the parents, and now the brother. Slavujka had received the news only a few hours ago, and in the meantime had gone to identify the body. She would probably never get the image out of her head. Milena couldn’t find any words to say.
Slavujka displayed no emotion when Milena hugged her. She only said, ‘I don’t have a lot of time. Can we talk somewhere?’
Milena opened the passenger door, took the files from the seat and threw them into the back.
When they were sitting side by side in the car and staring at the dusty dashboard, Slavujka began, ‘He sent me an email.’
‘When?’
‘As if he knew something was about to happen to him.’
‘You mean…’ Milena leant back.
‘I didn’t take his message seriously. I thought: it’s all so much crap – now he’s playing the victim. The egocentric bastard’ll try anything to get attention.’
Milena reflected. Who was Goran afraid of ? The man who had also threatened her, whose name she didn’t know? Or had he been afraid of her, Milena Lukin? Their run-in at Talinovac, at the scene of the crime – maybe he thought she’d been lying in wait for him, dogging his footsteps.
‘What I don’t get,’ Slavujka continued, ‘is that he goes to the forest and uses a noose when he’s got his official revolver in a drawer, or in his glove box. Does that make any sense to you?’
‘What did he write to you?’ Milena was searching in her bag for her notebook, when her phone announced the receipt of a message: Siniša saying that he was on his way. ‘Can I see the email?’
‘I was up in the mountains with my friend. We just wanted to switch off for a while. I had no idea…’
Slavujka blew her nose and swiped the display with her finger. Milena asked, ‘Did you tell the police about your suspicions?’
‘They were just concerned with closing the file. But they gave me this.’ She opened her fist. A silver necklace with a little charm.
Milena closed her notebook and touched the tiny football boots. She knew the charm, had seen it in the photograph, and then again when she had run into Goran in Talinovac. If their meeting hadn’t taken such an unfortunate turn, maybe Goran would still be alive today. Now the only thing that mattered was to explore all the possibilities.
‘There are some things you should know,’ said Milena.
Slavujka clenched her fist.
‘Your brother was given money, one thousand euros, to persuade your parents to return home.’
‘One thousand euros?’ Slavuja blinked, confused. ‘Who from?’
‘It was probably a way of encouraging people to take part in the return programme. The sum’s laughable, I know, but it might have been enough to make Goran blame himself after your parents’ death. Maybe it all just got on top of him.’
‘So you think it was suicide.’
‘If there’s something fishy going on here and someone’s trying to sweep a murder under the carpet, we’ll find out, I promise you.’
The hazard lights kept blinking. Slavujka asked, ‘What else do you know?’
‘There’s a suitcase,’ Milena continued. ‘Your father’s. Neighbours from Talinovac kept it safe, and then handed it to your brother.’
‘Papa’s old leather suitcase.’ Slavujka gave a short laugh. ‘You want to know what was in it? I can tell you.’ She tipped her head back in thought. ‘Newspaper clippings, photographs and – I wouldn’t mind betting – a load of diagrams, with lines and branches, like a family tree. And the whole lot neatly organised in clear plastic folders. You see, my father had a thing about charts and plastic folders.’ Mockingly, she added, ‘It must be wonderful to know that you’re always in the right, mustn’t it? And so convenient, too; all the errors and mistakes are always made by other people.’
With her slender, slightly overlong nose, Slavujka was the spitting image of her father, at least judging by the pictures Milena had seen in the newspapers.
‘Your father was onto something,’ Milena tried to reassure her, ‘and maybe he didn’t see the danger he’d brought on himself, or possibly he underestimated it.’
‘My dear Ms Lukin, my father was always onto something, and the danger could not be too great for him. That was his thing, see? He turned everybody against him with his know-it-all attitude and revelled in it. The fact that his pig-headedness destroyed our family didn’t bother him. My mother was a wreck. My family’s been wiped out. I’m the only one left. And shall I tell you something? I hate my father for that. How could he do that to me?’ She pushed open the passenger door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ve had enough.’
‘Wait!’ Milena also got out. ‘What did Goran say in his email to you?’ she called after Slavujka. ‘That the files from the suitcase are with Diana?’
Slavujka stopped in her tracks. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Then it’s imperative we find her.’
‘Her mobile’s dead.’
‘Do you have her address?’
‘Just stop, will you?’ Slavujka crossed her arms. ‘I don’t want to be the next one to be strung up or shot. Get it? Why the hell did I call you?’
‘If the papers are with Diana, we have to get them from her. The material mustn’t fall into the wrong hands.’
‘She ought to just chuck the stuff away. Case closed.’
‘I don’t think she knows anything about the papers.’
‘Even better.’
‘Come on, get in.’
A dark car with its headlights on full beam roared towards them, braked hard and came to a stop just a few centimetres behind the Lada. A tinted window was lowered, and Siniša leant across the passenger seat. ‘I know, I’m late. I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve arrived in the nick of time,’ Milena said. ‘There’re two things we need to do.’
Siniša pushed his sunglasses up to the top of his head.
‘We’ve got to find out whether Goran committed suicide.’
‘Is that what they’re saying?’ Siniša switched off the engine. ‘Interesting. I’ll tell you straight off: it wasn’t suicide, that’s a dead cert. And we can prove it. What else?’
‘We need Diana’s address. I’m going to the office.’ Milena bent down and asked Siniša, ‘Could you take Slavujka home?’
‘It would be an honour.’
Milena opened the passenger door.
‘OK,’ Slavujka said. ‘You win. Veteran Street.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Number nineteen. Diana Adamac.’
Siniša had got out of the car and buttoned up his jacket. ‘I’m devastated,’ he said. ‘Ms Valetić, I’m so sorry for your loss.’
Milena got into her Lada and started the engine. In the rear-view mirror, she watched Siniša solicitously help Slavujka into his car.
She had already reached the intersection when she finally remembered to switch off her hazard lights.