Chapter Twenty-six
31 October
Mass graves. Bloodied bodies. Shelled-out towns. The old reports from The Hague had painted this part of eastern Croatia as a hell on earth.
But now, out of the car window, bathed in clear, cold, late-autumn light, it looked almost like heaven.
Rose turned to her translator and driver, Dragan.
‘Is the whole country this beautiful?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Dragan said simply. He moved the hired car up a gear, nodded with satisfaction. ‘Most beautiful country.’
The villages they passed through were picture-book pretty, set in expansive landscapes of stone and river, forest and sky. As Rose watched, a dark crowd of thousands of starlings rose from a stand of bare trees to perform a dramatic flight over the road, furling and unfurling like a black flag waving in the wind.
So strange that only twenty-five years ago this was a nation in the grip of civil war. Twenty-five years ago this soil was soaked with blood and this countryside was in flames.
Twenty-five years ago a man was tied to a tree and his body was stripped of its flesh.
Twenty-five years later, Rose wondered, had his killer returned?
She thought of the Interpol files from France a decade before, the terrible monochrome pictures of dismembered corpses strewn across dusty floors. Had he ever, in fact, gone away?
‘Not far,’ Dragan said, gesturing as a road sign flashed by.
Niza. The town nearest to the tree from which the man’s body had been strung. Would anyone there remember? Would anyone care?
Rose was counting on it. Niza was her best shot at getting to the dark heart of this case.
A mile or so later they swung on to a side road and followed its winding course up into starkly handsome hill country.
‘Many monasteries in the hills,’ Dragan said conversationally. ‘Higher you climb, closer you are to God.’
Another sharp turn-off, into a swaying tunnel of overhanging trees, and then a steep, straight climb to where a whitewashed gable end marked the western edge of a small huddle of buildings.
Dragan revved noisily up the slope, swung the car into a bare tract of land that seemed to serve as a car park. He killed the engine and slapped the steering wheel with finality.
‘Here we are,’ he said, beaming behind his blackout sunglasses. ‘Welcome to Niza.’
Rose smiled uncertainly.
She’d come to like this beefy, uncomplicated Croat. He was a good translator – he’d spent four years in England, working variously as a taxi driver, hospital porter, trucker’s mate and nightclub bouncer – and knew every inch of this part of Croatia. He was maybe thirty-five, forty. He thought fast, learned quickly and spoke without thinking.
And he smiled a lot. Even when Rose had explained who she was, what she was doing in Croatia and what her interest was in Niza, he’d smiled – smiled and said, ‘No problem.’
A hard man to faze. A hard man full stop. Reminded her of some coppers she’d known.
They climbed out of the car. It had been mild enough down in Slavonski, to the south-west, where her connecting flight from Zagreb – a wind-buffeted hundred-mile hop in a twin-propellered rust bucket – had set her down. Up here, though, it was blustery and stingingly cold. Rose shivered.
Dragan, who seemed comfortable in his tracksuit bottoms and tatty hoodie, stretched extravagantly and said: ‘All right, boss. What now?’
She zipped her coat, checked her pockets for notebook and pen.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘we do some old-fashioned police work.’
Twenty-five minutes of door-to-dooring around the village reminded Rose that people – whatever their nationality or language – really aren’t so different underneath.
No one likes talking to coppers.
She’d shown the picture of the dead priest to maybe seventeen people. Her in-built persistence coupled with Dragan’s straight-talking charm had earned them maybe five half-useful answers – plus a nice collection of suspicious looks, frank refusals, slammed doors and Croat go-fuck-yourselves.
‘Nasty memories,’ Dragan had shrugged after a middle-aged lady had threatened to set her dogs on them. ‘A long time ago, but nasty, still. Painful. No one wants to be reminded.’
‘Don’t people want justice?’
‘Some, maybe. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, maybe. But it’s just a word now, justice. The trials go on and on. War crime. Milošević, Karadžić. Me, I’d sooner forget.’
But someone has to remember, Rose thought.
As they crossed the deserted village square, Dragan said he knew the butcher in the village; he’d done a little business with him, he explained vaguely. Poached venison, Rose guessed – though from what she knew of Dragan it could have been anything from used car parts to smuggled small arms.
‘Old man, this Karel, very, very ancient,’ he said. ‘Knows everything in Niza. Knows nothing outside Niza – but in Niza, everything.’
The butcher’s shop was a small place, with no display window at the front, just a faded wooden sign and a rickety fly-screen. They squeezed inside to find themselves in a terracotta-tiled space, just big enough for the two of them, framed by an L of glass-fronted counters.
The air was suffused with the smell of blood.
Dead rabbits and dusty cured hams hung on hooks from the ceiling. Along the counter, heavy cuts of dark-red meat were crowded artlessly into the chiller shelves. For Rose, the sight was almost overpowering: these last few weeks she’d seen enough raw flesh and exposed white bone to last a lifetime.
A slightly built old man stood at a bloodstained chopping block behind the counter. Half turned away from them, he pulled fistfuls of feathers from a scrawny partridge. He seemed unaware of their presence until Dragan cried: ‘Karel, you old hound! Put down your breakfast and talk to us.’
The man turned, still holding the half-plucked partridge by the neck. Very, very ancient was about right, Rose saw. The man’s face was like a crumpled brown paper bag. But his dark, deep-set eyes were clear and quick. At the sight of Dragan, his face broke into a grin.
He said something in Croatian and extended a hand that was stained red past the wrist by years of butchery. Dragan shook it vigorously. The old man, with a questioning glance at Rose, said something that sounded like ‘supruga’. Whatever he’d said made Dragan laugh.
‘He wants to know if you are my wife,’ the translator explained with an amused look. Another burst of Croatian. She heard the word ‘Oxford’: Dragan said it twice, with emphasis, proud as a new undergraduate of his tenuous association with the ancient city. But he might as well have said Addis Ababa or Saturn for all the recognition that showed in the old butcher’s face.
Then the butcher spoke animatedly, with excited gestures, the half-bald partridge swinging haplessly from his fist as he talked. Dragan nodded with the pained look of a man trapped in a conversation he is too polite to bring to an end.
When Karel paused for breath Dragan murmured to Rose: ‘He is filling me in on all the village gossip. This guy. Russia might invade, America might sink beneath the sea, and this fellow would still speak of Lizaveta Handzel’s divorce and Martin Krasić’s new pick-up truck.’
Rose smiled.
‘I know the type.’ She took the photo of the man and the tree from her pocket. ‘Show him this. See what he remembers.’
Karel the butcher seemed to be about to unleash another volley of Niza gossip – but when Dragan placed the photo on the countertop he fell silent. His smiling mouth narrowed to a furrowed crease.
Dragan rapped out a question and the butcher nodded.
As he began, hesitantly, to speak, Rose nudged Dragan.
‘Translate as he goes,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t want to miss anything.’
The burly Croat nodded. What followed wasn’t easy to keep track of – the two men speaking over one another, Karel thoughtful and slow, Dragan brisk, professional, concentrating hard – but Rose managed. By the end of the brief exchange she felt, for the first time in a long while, as though she’d taken a step forwards.
Karel remembered. He remembered the horror that had run like a flash flood through the devastated village when the mauled body was discovered. Despite the years of bloodshed, the killing of the priest had shocked the village to its soul.
‘Priest?’ Rose put in sharply.
The word sent a reel of images across her mind’s eye: Brask in his dog collar, Father Florian and the Church of the Queen of Peace, the ancient martyrs, the Oxford murders – the twisted religion that drove the Trick or Treat Killer.
Yes, Karel said, the man was a priest. Or had been, once. He’d been defrocked, long ago, before he’d come to Niza. Nobody knew why, Karel said, but out here, nobody cared much for what was ‘official’. The man knew Latin, said Mass, wore a priest’s collar and crucifix: he was a priest.
He lived out in the woods, by himself. Didn’t come to the village much. People said he was crazy, but then people were always saying that about someone. And anyway aren’t all priests crazy? Why else choose a life without women? The wizened butcher shook his head. No way for a man to live.
‘Would anyone else remember him? Is there anyone else we could talk to?’
A shrug. Maybe. There was an old woman who lived not far from the priest’s place. She’d surely remember him well enough, if they could get any sense out of her. She was the widow of old Matić, the ironmonger, who’d caught tetanus from a rusty nail and died, although that was a long time ago, before this last war, and before their daughter ran off with some young fellow, or so people said –
Dragan broke off with an apologetic look at Rose.
‘And so on,’ he said. ‘More local gossip.’
‘Could we go and see this woman? Can he tell us where to find her?’
Dragan passed on the question and the butcher, hands waving, poured out a long stream of complicated directions. Even in English Rose felt sure she’d have struggled to follow him – but Dragan absorbed the information impassively, nodded and turned to Rose: ‘Shall we go?’
‘Did you get all that?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Then let’s go.’
They thanked the old butcher, who smiled – perhaps less happily than before – and wished them good luck.
Rose was glad to step out of the shop’s smothering fug of blood. On the walk back to the car she breathed the cold upland air gratefully.
‘Quite a guy, huh?’ Dragan chuckled as he clambered back into the driver’s seat and banged shut the door. ‘What a character.’
Rose nodded. Quite a guy indeed. He’d given her her first solid lead in days: she wouldn’t forget him in a hurry.
If the villages they’d passed through on the way to Niza were scenes from a fairy tale, this, Rose thought, was where the witch lived.
The roof sagged and the gutters were thick with moss and lank yellow weeds. The brick walls looked damp-eaten; the bent iron drainpipe was crusted with rust. Off-white bracket fungus jutted from the timbers.
Beyond the smeared, uncurtained windows Rose could see nothing but darkness. ‘Someone lives here?’ she muttered as she eased open the stiff metal gate.
Dragan shrugged, eyeing the tumbledown cottage with unease.
‘That’s what the butcher said.’
‘An old woman living all alone in this place? Christ. Poor thing.’
Dragan said nothing. He seemed spooked. Rose had assumed the guy was bombproof – but then she knew that everyone has their hang-ups, their weaknesses; everyone comes to a tipping point sooner or later.
If a sixteen-stone Croat bouncer was scared of a harmless old biddy, who was she to make fun?
She knocked loudly on the cottage door.
Shuffling noises came from inside.
‘Stay behind me if she turns violent, Dragan,’ Rose murmured. ‘And remember, little old ladies can smell fear.’
The big translator scowled. Gotcha.
Rose wiped the smirk off her face as the door opened hesitantly inwards. She knew the drill here. Be polite, be open, be confident. Speak up. Accept a cup of tea when it’s offered. Try not to look bored. What you want will be in the detail, the incidentals, the stuff they don’t think is important.
The face that poked out from behind the door was narrow and pale-skinned, framed by stiffly pinned grey hair – a good-looking woman she’d have been, once. She had plastic-rimmed glasses and when she opened her mouth her ill-fitting dentures clacked.
‘Jesi li ovdje o Olga?’
It didn’t sound like ‘Yes?’ or ‘Hello?’ Rose glanced at Dragan, who shifted his feet uncomfortably.
‘She wants to know,’ he said, ‘if we’ve come about Olga.’ He shrugged.
Olga? Rose thought quickly back to what the butcher had said. Before their daughter ran off with some fellow …
Dragan spoke curtly to the woman. Engleska, England. Policija, police. The woman blinked slowly, drew open the door, muttered something indistinct.
‘She says to come in,’ Dragan said unhappily.
Rose gestured. ‘After you.’
They followed the old woman into the cottage.
Mrs Matić directed them to a little room where they waited as she puttered away in the kitchen. After a few minutes she brought them cups of a bitter, mould-green herbal tea. The old woman settled into a bony armchair whose upholstery was worn to a dull shine. Rose perched on a three-legged stool while Dragan squatted on the carpet before an unlit wood stove that was grimy with old ash. Everywhere were the smells of disuse and decay.
‘Jesi li ovdje o Olga?’ the woman asked again.
‘Tell her,’ Rose said quietly, ‘that we don’t know anything about Olga. Tell her we’re sorry.’
When Dragan did so the woman wobbled her head, said something in a high, querulous voice. ‘ “Sorry” butters no parsnips,’ Dragan translated. ‘Mr Matić will be very angry when he learns that you still have not found our daughter.’ He gave Rose a wry look.
So Mrs Matić was a little confused. Living alone here in the woods with only the memories of a dead husband and runaway daughter to keep her company, Rose couldn’t blame her. They’d just need to be patient and show the poor woman a bit of understanding.
Besides, this could work in their favour. Mrs Matić, it seemed, lived in the past. The past was what Rose had come all this way for; memories were all they had to go on.
Rose produced the picture of the dead man tied to the tree. Dragan asked the question.
Mrs Matić looked at the picture and turned a sharp, bird-like look on Rose. Rose saw the foul green tea quiver in her teacup.
‘Does she know who he was?’ Rose urged.
At Dragan’s repeated enquiry the old woman set down her cup and rose to her feet. The sunken hollowness of her face seemed to deepen but a sort of sorrowful clarity came into her dim blue eyes.
For a moment Rose thought she was about to ask them to leave.
‘Prati,’ the woman said. Rose didn’t know the word but the woman’s stiff rheumatic gesture was clear enough. Follow.
The old woman shuffled around the back of her armchair, towards the far end of the room. There must have been a window in the far wall, but if there was, its light had long been blocked out by the heaps of accumulated belongings. Old furniture, mildewed books, newspapers tied with string, a rack of women’s clothes.
Rose had seen this sort of thing before and knew what it was about. Olga. The missing daughter.
A part of it was pure attachment, a desperate clinging to the things of the past, as if by association they might conjure the spirit of the departed: as long as we have the bed Olga used to sleep in, the records she used to listen to, the books she used to read, we still have Olga.
The other part was to do with hope.
When Olga comes back, what will she think if I have thrown away all her good dresses?
Rose found herself thinking of the Zrinski girls, Sofia and Adrijana. How long would they hang on to Katerina’s things? How long would they keep Katerina’s room just as it was? When would they delete her number from their phones? When, if ever, would they stop half expecting their sister to walk in through the door?
Her dad had kept a wardrobe full of her mum’s dresses for years, after. Never looked at them, never touched them. All sheathed in dry-cleaners’ dust covers but there, all the same.
It made Rose want to weep.
She followed Mrs Matić into the shadows with Dragan sloping along behind like a sulky schoolboy. The old woman led them through a narrow passageway between stacks of worm-eaten dark-wood furniture. The carpet beneath their feet was worn through to the weave. Many footsteps, many times a day.
Where the passageway opened out Rose saw that the rear window of the room was not only blocked out, it was boarded up. The darkness here was no accident.
And nor was the light: three sweet-smelling wax candles flickered on the floor, by the wall. They illuminated a photograph in a black frame, covered by a cracked pane of glass.
A portrait of a young woman.
Olga.
Rose came alongside Mrs Matić and gently touched her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. There was no need for Dragan to translate.
The old woman’s shoulders shook.
Olga had been a nice-looking young woman, perhaps in her early or mid-twenties. Dark hair, indigo eyes, a laughing, open-mouthed smile. Wouldn’t have been the first pretty country girl to take off with a persuasive young man. Rose thought of Susie Canning, the vicar’s daughter who’d gone missing the previous week in Oxford for the same reason. Then she thought of Caroline Chaudry, whose absence had occurred under far more sinister circumstances.
She heard Dragan mutter behind her: ‘What has this to do with the dead man?’
Fair point. Focus, DI Rose.
‘Ask her if Olga knew the priest,’ she told the translator.
Mrs Matić shuddered before she answered that yes, yes, Olga knew him. The priest was an old fool, sick in the head, and Olga had sometimes taken him food and medicine. She cared for everyone in the village, Mrs Matić said, everyone who was hungry, cold, ill – everyone who needed help.
‘Was Olga a religious girl?’
Yes, of course – a very good girl, a good Catholic girl.
Sounds familiar, thought Rose.
But that was not why she helped the priest. She helped everyone: Bosniak Muslims from the south, Orthodox Serb refugees from the east. Everyone.
Again the old woman turned the fierce, bird-like look on Rose. Was it the thought of the Serbs, the men who’d ravaged her village and burned down the monastery?
‘Does she think the Serbs took Olga?’ Rose asked gently.
Everyone said she went off to the city with David, the railwayman’s boy, Mrs Matić said. But that was nonsense. David, like so many boys, was in a mass grave somewhere and nobody wanted to admit it.
Olga was killed.
‘By the Serbs?’
A tight-lipped shake of the head. No. The Serbs have done many terrible things – but it was not the Serbs who killed Olga.
Rose tried to catch Dragan’s eye, to tell him, with a look, to go steady here, to tread carefully. But he was already replying to the old woman, and now the old woman was snapping back at him. Dragan frowned, shook his head.
Rose didn’t want to butt in – she was aware, more than ever, that she was an outsider here, a stranger. But whatever thread had been spun here was fragile and threatened to snap at any moment.
‘What’s she saying?’ she interrupted at last – but Dragan ignored her. He was growing red-faced, through anger or embarrassment.
Mrs Matić talked on, making clawed gestures with her hands.
‘Dragan –’
The big translator swiped a hand through the air: Enough. Looked at Rose. A vein bulged in his temple.
‘We are leaving,’ he said. He turned and ducked back into the corridor of old furniture.
Mrs Matić watched him go, then with a slight start looked up at Rose as if laying eyes on her for the first time. The woman frowned.
Again the wavering question: ‘Jesi li ovdje o Olga?’
‘I’m so sorry,’ was all Rose could say. ‘Thank you – I’m so sorry.’
She went after Dragan.
‘What the bloody hell was that all about?’
He was getting into the car, sunglasses on, heavy jaw set. She jumped in beside him, fizzing with anger.
‘I said, what the bloody hell was that all about? What did you think you were playing at?’
‘Crazy old bitch,’ Dragan muttered. ‘Nothing but a lot of crazy talk. What do you expect? Crazy woman living in a crazy place like this?’
He reached for the ignition key – but Rose snatched it from its slot and pocketed it smartly.
‘We’re not going anywhere until you explain what the hell happened back there. What did she say to you? Insult your mother, slag off your football team, what?’
Dragan sighed. Pushed his sunglasses on to his forehead, rubbed at the side of his nose.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what she said.’
‘Please do.’
‘Then I will explain something to you.’
‘All right.’ Because what woman doesn’t like having men explain things to her?
‘Good.’ Dragan pressed his hands together, nodded. ‘Okay. She said that the priest, the dead priest, took in a boy, a refugee boy, thirteen, fourteen years of age. He had been badly hurt in the massacre. Perhaps the priest saved his life. He lived with the priest, in his cottage.’
Rose shook her head in irritation.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that? Can’t you see that could be relevant?’
Dragan gave her a level stare.
‘The old woman did not say it,’ he said, ‘like I have just said it.’
Christ.
‘Then tell me how she said it.’
‘Very well.’ He sniffed, wagged a finger. ‘But remember, we are not all like this. Croatia, we are a modern country. Remember this. We are not backward peasants in broken-down houses. We have Wi-Fi, smartphones, Twitter. We take selfies, drive Toyota Prius.’ An ironic smile. ‘We are not scared of the dark, Inspector. Because we are east of Berlin you think we are all fucking Borat. We are not.’ He wagged his finger again. ‘We are not.’
He let out a deep-chested sigh. Subsided.
Rose smiled. ‘Okay. Understood.’ She let the smile fade. ‘Now tell me what she said.’
She found bodies, animal bodies, cats, dogs, Dragan said, in bracken near the priest’s cottage – not long after the refugee boy arrived. Their bones had been pulled from the flesh. One day, after Olga had been out in the village, she came home with a strange thing, a horrible thing, made out of greasy bones. Olga would not say where it had come from. But the old woman had known.
‘Strange,’ Rose said. She was careful to keep her voice neutral. No sense in jumping to conclusions.
Dragan nodded uncomfortably.
‘All this stuff about the refugee boy, though,’ he said. ‘The old woman said that it was just what the priest told the villagers – that it was not the truth.’
‘Then what was the truth?’
‘A crazy story.’
‘All right.’ He slapped the dashboard in irritation and glared red-faced at Rose. ‘She said that the old priest had brought a demon into his house. All right? She said that the priest raised the demon as his son. That the demon had devoured her daughter, Olga – and that in the end the demon had devoured the priest, too.’
Dragan shook his head, pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes.
‘Wasting time on a mad old hag’s bogeyman stories. This is how police work in England?’ He held out a meaty hand for the car key. ‘Can we go now?’
As they drove away, Rose stared out of the car window but saw nothing of the world beyond. Her thoughts were elsewhere. A thing made from greasy bones, given to the girl just before she disappeared. Like the one left for Katerina. Like the one left for Brask.
A demon? No.
But a damaged, lonely young man, scarred by the war, cut off from the world and raised in isolation by a zealous priest –
Someone had taken the girl, Rose thought. Someone had slaughtered the priest.
A cold feeling of horror uncurled in her stomach.