‘They think I was involved. I wasn’t,’ she added. ‘I got shot. That was about it.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Did the police speak to you?’
‘Just a few questions. I told them he was a good guy. I didn’t know him well.’
‘But he went to you just before he died.’ How many ways do I have to say this? ‘All I’m doing is trying to find out the truth. I thought you might help.’
Levin had been staring out the window at the panorama below. Now he looked up, meeting her gaze with sad, sympathetic eyes.
‘Michael came to see me at the lab. He had something he wanted my advice on. Professionally.’
She knew what Levin’s professional interests were. ‘A body?’
‘I shouldn’t say.’
‘For God’s sake,’ she pleaded. ‘You’re supposed to be in charge of finding dead people. Giving answers. You must get widows and orphans like me every day wanting to know what happened. Just treat me like one of them.’
‘There are channels,’ Levin murmured, but more for his own sake than hers. He stirred his tea, then stood, as if a decision had been made.
‘It’s easier if I show you.’
He drove her down the hill and across town to the hospital. Even on a Sunday morning, traffic was heavy.
‘You probably don’t remember, but I was in Iraq at the same time as you. Mahaweel.’ Shyly, the plain girl talking to the captain of the football team. ‘We met a couple of times.’
‘I remember. You were on the war crimes team – I heard good things about you. Now you’re pushing papers with EULEX. What happened?’
It wasn’t a new question, and she had a good stock of answers. A new challenge, time for a change, fresh opportunities. But she knew Levin wouldn’t buy it. She didn’t want to insult him with platitudes.
‘I gave up.’
‘Iraq?’
She shook her head. ‘I could deal with Iraq. It was such an epic disaster it was hard to blame anyone for what happened. Anyone who was there, I mean. Politicians, you expect to screw things up.’
He was waiting for her to say more. To her surprise, she found she wanted to. It was easy talking to him.
‘It happened in Congo,’ she said softly. She stared out the window at the triangular tower of Radio Kosovo, the well-dressed young Kosovars heading out for their Sunday strolls in the surrounding park. ‘A village called Kibala. I was there when a Hutu militia arrived one night. It’s a big mining area – lots of rare metals. The militias try to control the trade to fund themselves.’
Levin nodded.
‘Anyway, this militia decided the villagers hadn’t been paying them enough tribute. The UN knew there was a danger. They’d sent a battalion of Korean peacekeepers to keep an eye on things. I went to their base – I pleaded with their commander to go and secure the village. He turned me down point-blank. Then he told me to stay in the compound – said it was too dangerous to be out there.’ She heard her voice rising, shaking with the emotion. ‘For God’s sake, those men were trained and armed to the teeth. All the militia had were machetes and cocaine. Those peacekeepers could have run them out of town in five minutes. Instead, they left the villagers to their fate. Mostly women and children – all the men were off working in the mines. All I could do was listen to the screams.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Levin. ‘No one ever heard about it.’
‘Some people said it was economic. The metals from that part of the world go into a lot of mobile phones, apparently. Maybe the Koreans had orders not to disrupt the supply chain.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe not. After the fact, people get so hung up on why something was allowed to happen. But there are always a million reasons not to do anything. You don’t have to be corrupt, or cowardly, or inept. You just stay in bed and lock the door. When you’ve done that once …’
‘… it’s hard to ever leave again,’ Levin finished. ‘I know.’
He turned right. Abby glanced in the wing mirror to see if anyone had followed them.
‘How do you do it?’ she asked. ‘Keep going. There’s so much evil in the world, and whatever we do to hold it back, it just keeps coming. Doesn’t it ever get to you?’
Levin stared at the road and didn’t answer.
‘Come on,’ she pressed. ‘I told you my story.’
‘I haven’t got a story.’
‘Your secret, then.’
‘No secret. I guess it’s just …’ He pulled over as an ambulance fought its way past them towards the hospital. ‘If you don’t bury the dead, they stick around.’
‘Are we talking about ghosts?’
She’d meant it as a joke. To her surprise, Levin answered seriously.
‘Not like kids on Halloween in white sheets. But if something exists in the mind, then it exists, right?’
He frowned, unsatisfied with his answer. ‘If we don’t bury the dead properly, with reverence and dignity, then they haunt us. Check back through history. We’re the first great civilisation that doesn’t know how to deal with its dead. For us, it’s just a logistical problem, making sure they don’t take up too much space. Land’s valuable, right? But a person doesn’t just exist in his own body. There’s a piece of him in everyone who knows him, that doesn’t die 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?
If something exists in the mind, then it exists, right?
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.’