The Eyewitness

The Eyewitness

Most of the working girls that spoke to me about prostitution and trafficking wouldn't want to be identified for obvious reasons, but I want to thank Angela, Francesca, Jessica, Kim and Sophie. Not their real names, but they know who they are.

I am grateful to Denis O'Donoghue and Barbara Schmeling for casting their professional eyes over the manuscript and to Hazel Orme who helped me get it into shape for publication. Carolyn Mays at Hodder and Stoughton oversaw The Eyewitness from conception to production and the book is all the better for her enthusiasm, support and professionalism.

There should have been ghosts four and a half thousand body-bags, every one containing the remains of a human being who had met a violent death and yet as Jack Solomon walked down the length of the storage facility there were no whisperings of vengeful thoughts, no movements in the shadows, not even a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck. There was nothing, just the hum of the air-conditioning units that kept the temperature at between two and eight degrees Celsius. Did that mean that four and a half thousand souls had moved on to whatever form of afterlife lay beyond? Solomon doubted it. Solomon didn't believe in an afterlife. He didn't believe in God, either. He'd seen the aftermath of too many atrocities committed in the name of religion to believe in god. In any god.

A technician was using an electric saw to slice off a piece of a femur that had been gripped in a carpenter's vice. He was wearing a white coat, surgical gloves and a cotton mask, and nodded as Solomon walked by. Another technician in dark blue overalls was cleaning the concrete floor with an industrial vacuum-cleaner. He, too, wore a mask.

The white body-bags were stored in metal racks, seven high, each with an identification number scrawled in black ink. Above them were rows of brown-paper bags, each with a number on it. For each body-bag, there was a corresponding brown-paper bag.

Solomon had two numbers on a computer printout and he kept looking back and forth between the numbers on the printout and the numbers on the body-bags. The numbers were consecutive. The bodies had been pulled from the same communal grave.

The body-bags that matched the numbers on the printout were lying next to each other in the centre of one of the racks. One of the bags, Solomon knew, contained just a torso and a leg. The head had not been found. That was the elder of the two brothers. The skeleton of the younger man was virtually intact. Solomon had read both post-mortem reports, written in perfect English by a German doctor who had carried out the autopsies in a Portakabin close to the mass grave where they had been found. Both men had been shot in the back at close range. Not once but more than a dozen times. And a hatchet had been used to hack at their legs. The German doctor had been unable to say whether this had been done before or after death, but Solomon knew that there would have been no point in inflicting the injuries afterwards. They'd been mutilated, thrown on the ground, and raked with machine-gun fire.

Solomon pulled over a metal ladder and climbed it slowly to reach the two brown-paper bags that went with the body-bags.

He took them down a white-painted corridor to the viewing room. Two Muslim women were sitting there with the interpreter, a mother and daughter. Mothers were always the worst and Solomon was grateful for the presence of the interpreter. The interpreter was a buffer, a filter for the bad news, and it kept Solomon one step removed from the horror of the situation. The interpreter was a man in his late thirties, a former soldier who had been trained to liaise with the families of the missing.

The room had been made as comfortable as possible, with two small sofas, and posters of country scenes on the wall. There was a vase of sweet-smelling white flowers on a side table. Two large books lay on a coffee table: one contained photographs of the clothes and personal effects taken from bodies that had been buried, the other images of bodies that had been left lying on the ground. Solomon had never discovered the reason for this distinction. There were so many other ways in which the dead could have been segregated by sex, age, manner of death. Before DNA testing, the photographs had been the main key to identifying the dead.

The mother and daughter had already looked through them and had recognised the clothing that had belonged to two bodies in the holding facility. They had given blood samples, and their DNA had been checked against DNA taken from the bones. It was a perfect match.

That the woman and her daughter had been called back meant that they were already expecting the worst. But Solomon knew from past experience that they wouldn't believe it until they had heard it from him, and had viewed the possessions found with the remains. After denial would come acceptance, and then the questions.

They wore yellow and blue head scarves and padded sleeveless jackets over cheap cotton skirts. Their clothing was threadbare but clean, and Solomon knew they'd put on their best for him. The daughter's boots had no laces and neither woman wore any jewellery. Solomon put the bags on the table and sat down, forcing a smile.

Both women thanked him.

“Hvala lijepo. Hvala za sve.” Thank you for everything. The people in the viewing room always thanked him even though he only ever brought bad news.

Solomon pushed one of the bags towards the daughter, but it was the mother who reached for it. If there had been any doubt about the identification, the old woman and her daughter would have worn surgical gloves to prevent contamination. But in this case there was no doubt. She opened it and took out a black jacket, edged with gold, with a picture of Elvis Presley on the back. The old woman gasped and put a hand to her mouth. The jacket was the first thing they had recognised in the book. It was distinctive, and Solomon doubted that there was another like it anywhere in the Balkans. It had been cleaned and there were creases along the sleeves where it had been ironed. Down the corridor was a laundry room where every item of clothing was washed and ironed before being placed in a bag. It was horrific enough to view clothing taken from the dead; it would be a thousand times worse for the relatives to see them in the state in which they arrived at the facility.

The old woman laid out the jacket on the table. There were five ragged holes in the back. The woman poked her finger into one, frowning. Her daughter leaned over and whispered, “Metaci.” Bullets. The old woman wailed and sat back, her hands on either side of her weathered face. The daughter took a pair of socks out of the bag. They had been neatly folded. She opened one out and examined the heel, then took a deep breath and blinked back tears. She spoke to the interpreter, the words tumbling out faster and faster, until she sat back, gasping.

“She darned the socks for her brother the day before the Serbs came and took the men away,” said the interpreter.

“She says his wife couldn't sew, she was always pricking herself with the needle, so she did it for him.”

Solomon nodded and smiled. There was nothing he could say. He wondered where the wife was, but the fact that she wasn't there probably meant she was dead, too.

The daughter took the rest of the clothing from the bag and laid it out carefully. She bit down on her lower lip. There were rips in the cotton trousers, at the back of the knees. Solomon knew they were from the hatchet blows, but the bloodstains had come out in the wash.

She found a rusting wristwatch at the bottom of the bag, and the old woman took it from her and stroked it.

The second bag contained just a shoe with the upper coming away from the sole, and a torn plaid shirt. Like the Elvis jacket, it was peppered with bullet-holes. The daughter peered into the bag. Solomon knew that she was wondering where the rest of her brothers' belongings were. He did not want to explain that the bodies had been moved several times by Serbs trying to cover up the evidence of their crimes, and that in the process many had fallen apart, and the remains mixed up.

Solomon spoke in English, pausing to allow the interpreter to translate.

“I want to explain what has happened, so that there is no confusion,” he said.

“The DNA we have taken from your blood matches two of the bodies we have in this facility. The belongings we have here were taken from the remains, but it is the DNA that gives conclusive proof.” Solomon turned so that he was facing the younger woman. Siblings were always easier to deal with. The pain was bad, but not as bad as for a mother who had to accept that her child had been murdered.

“There is no doubt that they were your brothers. We can make arrangements for you to collect the remains so that they can be buried according to your religion.”

“We have no money for a funeral,” said the daughter.

The interpreter translated, and Solomon said, “There are charities that can help. We can tell you who to contact.”

The old woman spoke quickly, almost jabbering, her hands stabbing at the air.

The interpreter translated: the old woman had said that she was certain there had been a mistake, that her sons were not dead but were being held in a concentration camp deep inside Serbia.

“I'm sorry,” said Solomon slowly.

“With DNA, there is no mistake. I know that mistakes were made in the past, that funerals were held and then those who were thought dead returned, but that was before we had DNA. There is no doubt. I am sorry. It is time to bury your sons and to mourn. It is time to accept that they have gone.”

The old woman looked at him with tear-filled eyes and nodded slowly.

Solomon stood up. The interpreter could give them any more information they needed. His own work was done.

The daughter grabbed the hem of his jacket and spoke to him in rapid Serbo-Croatian. The interpreter translated: she wanted to see the bodies.

Solomon always had to say the same thing: “It is not possible. Not at the moment.”

It was, of course, perfectly possible. The two women could have been taken into the room and shown the two body-bags among the four and a half thousand. But then they would have asked for the body-bags to be opened, and Solomon knew that the sight of what was inside would stay with them for ever. Best that they remembered their loved ones as they had known them, not as the bones and grinning skulls in the white bags. He shrugged and repeated that it wasn't possible.

He left the viewing room and walked back down the corridor to the exit. He passed the photographic room, where a man was arranging a pair of trousers on the floor and positioning a camera above it. The work went on. There were more books to be filled with photographs and sent round the world so that relatives overseas could look through them in the hope of identifying something that had come from the missing. Solomon found the books more disturbing than the facility with its thousands of dead. The body-bags were cold and impersonal, but the books were chilling catalogues, every item personal, taken from the body of a murder victim.

He had to unlock the door to get out of the facility, then relock it behind him. It was always locked so that no one could enter by mistake.

Solomon climbed into his white Nissan Patrol four-wheel-drive, with its diplomatic plates, and drove away. He was always glad to leave Tuzla, partly because the storage facility was such a depressing place, but also because the air was so polluted that his throat was red raw after a few hours. The vehicle bucked and rocked over the uneven road surfaces as he headed out of town. Tuzla was built on a huge underground salt lake that had been mined for hundreds of years. The town had started to sink as the mine works collapsed, so some bright Communist engineer who had forgotten his basic chemistry decided to pump in water. It dissolved the salt and the collapse increased: now driving around the town in a regular car meant a broken exhaust-pipe and scraped body work After the war, there had been no money to repair the roads so the sinking continued.

He drove past the huge coal-fired power station on the edge of town, a massive remnant of the Communist system that had once dominated the region. Huge cooling towers belched clouds of steam into the air, but the damage was done by the coal-furnace chimney from which eye-watering smoke poured over the town twenty-four hours a day, and by the chemical plants built around the power station.

The road to Sarajevo was a single carriage way that wound its way through mountains and gorges, past small villages where every house had been reduced to rubble, and fields with red signs warning of mines. Some areas had been cordoned off with yellow tape to await the arrival of mine-clearance charities. It was only 130 kilometres to Sarajevo, but Solomon had never made the drive in under two and a half hours. There were two mountain ranges to cross and a farm vehicle, bus or a slow-moving army patrol meant a frustrating tailback; even on a clear road the hillside fell away so sharply that Solomon rarely got into top gear.

About an hour outside Sarajevo, his mobile phone rang as he was negotiating a hairpin turn in second gear behind a truck piled high with boxes of toilet paper. He held the phone between his shoulder and ear so that he could keep both hands on the steering-wheel.

It was his boss. Chuck Miller was an American who had worked for a succession of non-governmental organisations around the world, including spells in Sierra Leone, Mongolia and Bangladesh. His stint with the International War-dead Commission was just another line on his curriculum vitae. He was a manager and a grant-getter, an administrator who knew how to play the funding game, and it was as a result of his efforts that the Commission's budget had more than doubled since he'd joined four years earlier.

“Jack, where are you?” he asked.

“Just about to drive into a gorge,” said Solomon, pulling hard on the wheel and stamping on the brake.

“Take it easy,” said Miller.

“Good co-ordinators are hard to find. Can you talk?”

“Yeah, go on,” said Solomon.

“The road doesn't get any better for the next ten kilometres.”

“Remember that case you handled three years back outside Pristina?”

“Sure.” It had been one of the first that Solomon had handled on his arrival in the Balkans. An entire family had disappeared from a farm on the outskirts of Pristina, the capital of neighbouring Kosovo. It had happened during the spring. A farmer had seen the women tilling the fields in the morning; a Kosovar army patrol had gone past in the afternoon and a sergeant recalled seeing two men from the farm working on a broken-down tractor. The next day, at about three o'clock, a shopkeeper from Pristina had driven down the half-mile track to the farm to buy eggs, which were in short supply: he could get four times the price for them that he paid the farmer so he made the trip several times a week. There had been no one in the rambling farmhouse, and although he had pounded on his car horn, no one had come. No one ever came. The entire family had disappeared. There was a kettle on the stove, boiled dry. Half a dozen cows in a nearby field were gathered at the gate, waiting to be milked. There had been a broken bowl in the kitchen, and a small pool of dried blood on the stone-flagged hallway, the only signs that the family had not left by choice.