The Eyewitness (7 page)

The handwriting was a childish scrawl and he had trouble deciphering some of the words, but he didn't want to ask Emir for help. His spoken Bosnian was just about good enough to hold a simple conversation, but his reading and writing skills were basic. However, Nicole's message was simple: she had seen her family taken away at gunpoint, and had no doubt that they had been killed. She was running away from the farm, away from Pristina, away from Kosovo. She had considered killing herself, but said she didn't have the courage so she was going to forget everything the life she once had, the people she knew. She was starting a new life, with a new name, and she was never coming back. She told Emir to forget her. Then she spoilt it by signing it 'always in my heart'. With a pay-off like that, Solomon knew that Emir would never forget her. And maybe she had known it, too.

“She's hurt,” said Solomon quietly.

“She wrote this because she was hurt. She's trying to blot out what happened.”

“I know that,” said Emir.

“I'm not stupid.”

Nowhere in the letter did it say where she was going or what she was planning to do.

“Did she have friends in the city? Someone who might have given her somewhere to stay?”

Emir shook his head again, vehemently this time.

“I was her friend. If she was going to stay with anyone she would have stayed with my family.”

“But you're not in the city, are you? You live quite a way outside. Maybe she wanted to stay in the city.”

“No. She didn't know anyone. She had friends in Pristina, but not in Sarajevo.”

“Can I borrow this?” Solomon asked, holding up the letter.

“Just for a while?”

“No!” Emir snatched it out of Solomon's hand. A small piece tore off in Solomon's fingers.

“Now look what you've done!” Emir hissed.

“I'm sorry,” said Solomon quickly. He gave the scrap to the boy.

“It's okay, there's no writing on it, and you can stick it together again.”

Emir ignored him. He put the torn piece in the middle of the letter, folded it and slid it back into the envelope.

“The letter might help me find Nicole,” said Solomon.

“She doesn't want to be found,” said Emir.

“That's what she says, but that's not what she means. Sometimes people try to push away those they love when they really want to be helped.”

“I can't help her.”

“No, but maybe I can,” said Solomon, holding out his hand.

Emir stuffed the envelope into his jacket.

“It's important that we find out who killed Nicole's family,” said Solomon.

“Important to whom?”

“Don't you want to know?”

“It won't bring them back, will it? Besides, we know who did it. Like Nana said, the bastard Serbs.”

“But which Serbs? We need to catch the men responsible and put them on trial.”

“You don't get it, do you?” Emir sneered.

“It's all Serbs. They want us dead. For every one you catch and put in prison, there's a thousand who would do just the same. It's just like it was after the Second World War. You put a few hundred Nazis on trial, but all of Germany knew what was going on in the camps. They knew that the Jews were being rounded up and taken away and they were glad. It was the same in Bosnia and Kosovo. Putting Milosevic on trial was great publicity, but if the people hadn't backed him, he wouldn't have been able to do what he did. If you think that putting a few Serbs on trial is going to make a difference, you're a fool.” He stood up.

“I shouldn't have come.”

“Then why did you?” asked Solomon. He stayed where he was, crouched against the wall, and looked up at the boy.

Emir didn't answer. He tossed away the butt of his cigarette.

“Because you want me to find her,” said Solomon.

Emir snorted softly.

“You think so?”

“You want me to find her so that you know she's all right,” said Solomon.

“Because that letter isn't enough, is it? No matter how many times you take it out and read it, it's not the same as knowing where she is and what she's doing. I'll find her, Emir, I promise.”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind and ran out, rattling the corrugated iron sheet aside and bolting through the gap like a frightened rat.

Solomon finished his cigarette, then returned to his car, thinking about what Emir had said. Maybe he had been right. Maybe putting a few Serbs in the dock wouldn't make a difference, not to the grand scheme of things. But as Solomon climbed behind the wheel, he swore to himself that he would find Nicole, and the men who'd killed her family. He'd find them and make sure they paid for their crime. If nothing else, he'd get justice for the men and women who'd died in the back of the truck .. . and for the little girl with the teddy bear.

When Solomon got back to his office he found Chuck Miller sitting in his chair, his feet up on Solomon's desk.

“So how was the lovely Ms Tourell?” Miller asked, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

Solomon cursed under his breath.

“She called, yeah?” he said.

“Damn right she called,” said Miller, swinging his feet off the desk.

“Half an hour after you hightailed it out of here. Said she could reschedule for Friday but it'd mean turning her diary upside down. What the hell are you going? Playing fast and loose with one of the interpreters? Quick bang in a cheap hotel room?”

“Don't be ridiculous!” snapped Solomon.

“Ridiculous?” said Miller.

“I'm not the one flaunting office procedures. We have diaries, Jack,” Miller pushed Solomon's across the desk, “So that we know where our people are. Then, if anything goes pear-shaped, we know where to look.”

“I didn't have time to change the diary,” said Solomon.

“Bull-fucking-shit, Jack. I was here when you left remember? You lied to me.”

“I was planning to see Lisa,” said Solomon, 'just not today."

“That's not the point, I'm your boss. There has to be trust for the relationship to work.”

Solomon sighed.

“Look, Chuck, I knew you'd be pissed off if I cancelled Lisa so I didn't tell you. And it wasn't a quick screw.”

“Whatever it was, it better have been damn important for you to lie to me.”

“It was the Pristina case. The truck.”

Miller jabbed a finger at Solomon's chest.

“I knew it.”

“Well, if you knew that's what I was doing, why the accusations?” asked Solomon.

“I wanted to hear it from your lips. I told you, that case is over. We've identified the remains, you wrap up the file and pass it on. We don't have the resources for you to play detective.”

“I'm not playing anything,” retorted Solomon.

“I'm trying to track down an eyewitness.”

“The Tribunal will do that,” said Miller.

Solomon tutted.

“They're as stretched as we are,” he said.

“They're only after the big fish these days, or the easy cases. This isn't an easy case. There's only one witness and she's vanished. If I send over the file now, it'll get lost.”

“Twenty-six deaths, you said?”

“That's right. Women. Children. Grandparents.”

“And clearly racial?”

“All ethnic Albanians.”

Miller threw up his hands.

“So it's a perfect case for the Tribunal. It's a war crime, clear-cut. Twenty-six deaths, they'll follow it up.”

“I don't think they will,” said Solomon.

“No one other than the missing witness saw what happened. All we know is that twenty-six people were herded into a truck, and the truck ended up at the bottom of a lake. Without the eyewitness, there'll be no case.”

Miller jabbed his finger at Solomon's chest again.

“That's not your problem! Our budget is stretched as far as it can go. I've a list of cases pending as long as my arm and I can't afford to have you playing the maverick. End of story.”

“Fine,” said Solomon, flatly.

“Fine isn't good enough, Jack. I want your word that you'll drop this case.”

“How about I work it on my own time?”

“Haven't you heard a word I've said? The file goes to the Tribunal. Today.”

“Okay.”

Miller gestured at the white board “And they come down off your wall. Today.”

“Okay,” said Solomon.

“I mean it.”

“I said okay.”

Miller stared at him.

“Okay. No hard feelings, yeah?”

“You're the boss.”

“That's right.” Miller gripped Solomon's shoulder.

“We should have a drink some time, after work.” He left the room.

“Sure,” said Solomon to himself.

He removed the photographs from the white board and put them into a desk drawer, then wiped off the black felt-tip marks he'd used to link the pictures of the dead with the faces in the wedding photograph.

He sat down at his desk and tapped at his computer keyboard, then got up and walked over to the framed Sarajevo street map that hung by the door. He ran his finger along Obala Kulina Bana Road and found the main post-office building. Virtually destroyed during the siege of Sarajevo, it had been painstakingly rebuilt and was now one of the most impressive buildings facing the Miljacka river. Inside it was all gleaming brass and polished mahogany with marble floors, but so much money had been spent restoring it to its former glory that there was little left to pay staff. Whenever Solomon had been there the queues had been horrendous. Even if Nicole had posted her letter there Solomon doubted that anyone would remember her.

When Solomon arrived at work the next morning, a typewritten memo from Chuck Miller was tucked under his keyboard. He groaned as he sat down and read it. Evidently Miller hadn't felt that the verbal warning was enough, or that an email would be a permanent enough record of his instructions. Solomon had no doubt that a copy had been placed in his personnel file.

Miller was a seasoned memo writer and never used one word where half a dozen would do, but the meaning was clear: drop all interest in the Pristina truck case referred to in the memo only by its reference number and pass it to the Tribunal investigators. And keep the appointments diary up to date. Solomon screwed it up and tossed it into his wastepaper basket.

He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out the Pristina truck file. He signed it off, scribbled a note that it was to be forwarded to the War Crimes Tribunal and dropped it into his out-tray.

A stack of manila files was waiting for his attention and he picked one up and opened it: six Albanian factory workers had been taken off a works bus at gunpoint, marched into a wood and clubbed to death with rifle butts then doused with petrol and set on fire. The problem wasn't identifying the dead their names were all on a roster at the factory it was finding out who was who from a pile of charred bones. A Serbian army unit had been responsible: the police had taken statements from the rest of the workers on the bus, almost all of whom were Serbs. To a man they had refused to say anything other than that soldiers had boarded the bus and ordered off the Albanians. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Solomon wondered what sort of men would allow their work mates to be murdered, then refuse to identify the perpetrators. It wasn't that they were scared of the repercussions, Solomon knew: it was that they almost certainly supported what the soldiers had done.

All Solomon had to do was to cross-check the DNA samples from the charred remains with DNA taken from relatives and ensure that the individual remains were given to the right families. Wherever possible they would be returned by a worker from the Family Outreach Programme, men and women trained to deal with grieving families.

Solomon flicked through the file. There were no photographs, just closely typed pages and computer printouts. It was the sort of case that would make Miller's statistics look good: six bodies identified; six sets of relatives informed. End of story. Case closed. Solomon swore. At Miller. At the Commission. At the bloody futility of it all. Then he picked up the truck file from his out-tray and went over to the photocopier. It took him twenty minutes to photocopy every document. He also made several copies of Nicole's picture, a blow-up of the smiling face in the wedding photograph. The Tribunal could do what they wanted with the case, but as far as Solomon was concerned, he was still working on it. No matter what Miller said.

It was a great name for a policeman, Solomon thought, as he started on his second bottle of Heineken. Dragan Jovanovic. The name "Dragan' inspired trepidation, if not fear, before you even met the man. A shovel-like hand fell on his shoulder and thick sausage-sized fingers squeezed. He winced.

“Started without me, did you? And why are you drinking that foreign muck? Sarajevsko Pivo not good enough for you, huh?”

“You're late, Dragan,” said Solomon, without turning.

“Yeah, well, I've got more to do than shuffle papers,” said Dragan, sliding on to the stool next to him.

Solomon ordered him a bottle of Sarajevsko beer, and they clinked bottles.

"Zivjelil' said Solomon. Cheers.

Dragan worked for the Sektor Kriminalisticke Policije, the equivalent of the British CID, and was based at the Sarajevo Canton Headquarters in La Benevolencije Street, off Mis Irbina Street. He was one of the first policemen Solomon had met in Sarajevo and, like detectives the world over, he enjoyed a drink and the opportunity to swap stories.

“So, how is life Jack?” he asked. He was a big man, well over six and a half feet tall with a barrel chest that strained to burst out of his cheap dark blue suit, and weight-lifter's thighs that threatened to do similar damage to his trousers. His hair was close-cropped and greying at the temples, although he was only in his early thirties.

Solomon pulled a face.

“Like you say, I shuffle papers. I cross reference DNA samples, and then I break bad news, like I was the fifth horseman.”

Dragan's huge craggy face creased into pained frown.

“Horseman?”

“Death, war, pestilence and famine. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I feel like I'm riding behind them on some clapped-out old nag, the fifth the bringer of bad news.”

The frown slackened, but Solomon could see his friend was still confused.

“Forget it, Dragan, I'm having a bad day, that's all.”

“Can't be any worse than mine, old friend,” he said, wiping the top of his bottle with the flat of his hand.

“Butcher killed his wife and .. .”

“Butchered her?”

Dragan flashed a lop-sided grin, showing a row of greying slab-like teeth.

“Sausages.”

“For God's sake.”

Jovanovic raised his eyebrows.

“She was half gone by the time one of the customers complained.”

“The taste?”

“Found a fingernail.”

Solomon groaned.

“Oh, God, Dragan, that's fucking disgusting.” He took a long swig of beer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“What about the skull? The hips? The big stuff?”

“All went through the grinder.” Dragan drained his bottle and slammed it down on the bar. The barman looked over at him, and he motioned for two more beers.

“Both Sarajevsko this time,” Dragan said.

“No more of that foreign muck for my friend. He drinks with Bosnians, he drinks Bosnian beer. Okay, Jack?”

“You buy it, I'll drink it,” said Solomon.

Dragan nodded, satisfied.

“So, other than papers and bad news, what's bothering you?”

“A case. Down in Pristina. A family were taken from their farm and put in the back of a truck. That was three years ago. The truck's just turned up in a lake in Serbia. Twenty-six dead.”

The two beers arrived, the men clinked bottles again and drank.

Solomon continued, “I think there's an eyewitness. A girl. She was sixteen when it happened, nineteen now. Her name's Nicole Shala. Her parents were both in the truck. Agim Shala and Drita Shala.”

“She saw who did it?”

“I'm guessing so, and that's why she's running.”

Jovanovic nodded slowly.

“Victims were Albanians?”

“You ought to be a detective.” Solomon smiled. It was no great leap of intuition for the policeman. The surname alone was enough to identify the family background.

“Pristina three years ago? A lot of Serb special forces were killing back then. If she saw anything, it was probably just uniforms and camouflage makeup.”

“Do you start all your investigations with this negative attitude?”

“Just the difficult ones. Is the Tribunal on the case?”

“Miller says I'm to pass on the file, and I'm doing that. But you know as well as I do how stretched they are. They'll take one look at it and say exactly what you said.”

Dragan drank some beer.

“The victims, they were shot?”

“Three were, to get them into the truck. But they all died of suffocation when the truck went into the lake.”

Dragan exhaled through pursed lips.

“So she didn't see them killed?”

“Probably not. Why?”

“Because if no one saw the truck go into the river, who's to say it wasn't an accident?”

“Come on, Dragan, you know it was murder. Had to be.”

“I'm just playing devil's avocado.”

“Advocate. Devil's advocate.”

“What's avocado?” asked Dragan, frowning.

“That green fruit thing. Soft inside, with a stone.” Solomon slid an envelope out of his pocket and placed it on the bar in front of the policeman.

“She came to Sarajevo about three years ago. I want to find her. That's her details, and her family's. And most of the Commission paperwork on the case. The last contact she had with her family was about four weeks after the abduction. She wrote to a friend outside Sarajevo. Said she was starting a new life.”

“Got the letter?”

Solomon shook his head.

“The guy she wrote to has a hard-on for her. It was all I could do to persuade him to let me read it. But it had a Sarajevo postmark.”

“That's not much help,” said Dragan.

“All mail posted in the canton has a Sarajevo postmark. Anyway, if she was smart, she wouldn't have posted it close to where she lived.”

“I don't think she's that smart,” said Solomon.

“And I don't think she expects anyone to be after her. I think she just wanted to tell this boy that she was all right and that he was to forget about her. She's a teenager, Dragan.”

“Back then kids grew up early in Yugoslavia. That's if they got to grow up at all. This girl, she had friends here? Someone who might take care of her?”

“I don't think so. The impression I got was that she came to Sarajevo precisely because she didn't know anyone here.”

“And why didn't she go to the police?”

“Hell, Dragan. I don't know. She'd seen her family forced into a truck at gunpoint. She'd seen three of them shot. That's got to be enough to make anyone act irrationally.”

“And no one's heard from her since?”

“Just the letter.”

Dragan sucked air through his teeth.

“It does not look good.”

Solomon jerked his thumb at the envelope.

“You can look for her, yeah?”

Dragan picked up the envelope and took out the sheaf of papers. He licked his thumb and forefinger, then flicked through them. He stopped when he got to the photocopied photograph of Nicole.

“Pretty girl,” he said.

“And it's not easy for a young girl to survive here on her own.”

“What are you getting at, Dragan?”

“You were in Vice in the UK, weren't you? You know what I'm getting at.” He waved the picture in front of Solomon.

“A young girl looking like this arrives in Sarajevo, the pimps are around her like dogs to a wounded rabbit. Hadn't you thought that?”

Solomon hadn't. He hadn't even noticed how pretty Nicole was. To him she was just a scared teenager on the run. He took the picture from Dragan and stared at it. Shoulder-length blonde hair with a slight curl, a cute upturned nose, high cheek-bones and full lips. She was pretty, all right. She was tall, almost as tall as her father, and the dress she was wearing was cut just low enough to suggest that even at sixteen she had a good figure. Dragan was right. A pretty, vulnerable girl would be easy prey for the Sarajevo pimps.

Dragan took back the picture.

“What was she? A farm girl?”

“Still at school, I think.”

“They'll have had her in a brothel within an hour of her setting foot in the city.”

“When did you get so cynical?” asked Solomon, but the question was rhetorical. Solomon had been a policeman for ten years in London, five in plain clothes, three in Vice, and cynicism went with the job. He motioned to the barman for two more beers.

“Assuming you're right, where could she be?”

Dragan laughed harshly.

“Pretty blonde girl, still in her teens? They'd break her in here, sell her to the highest bidder. By now she could be anywhere in Europe.”

Sarajevsko beer generally came in squat brown bottles, but one of the beers that the barman put in front of them was in a green one. Dragan reached for it and took several deep gulps. Most Bosnians insisted that the beer tasted better out of the green bottles, although the labels were identical. Solomon picked up the brown one. It all tasted the same to him.

Dragan burped nosily.

“It's the way it goes,” he said.

“We're a trading post for prostitutes all over Central Europe, you know that. They can't get into the EC from their own countries anywhere near as easily as they can through the Balkans. And the real money's made in Italy, Germany or the UK. They can earn ten times as much in a Rome brothel as they can here.”

“So you're saying she's not in Sarajevo?” Solomon tapped out a Marlboro and offered it to the policeman who took it and used his thumbnail to ignite a match. Solomon stuck a cigarette in his mouth and leaned forward to take a light from Dragan.

“I'd say there's a good chance. That or she's dead.”

“Oh, come on, Dragan. Now you're overplaying the hard-boiled detective.”

Dragan shrugged carelessly.

“Do you want to know how many dead hookers I have to deal with in a month? Overdoses, suicides, pimps slitting their throats, customers strangling them? Prostitution isn't a long-term career. Not here.”

“Let's try looking on the bright side, shall we? Let's suppose for a moment that she's not dead, and that she's still in Sarajevo. Where might she be?”

“Nightclub, if she's lucky. A brothel if she isn't.”

“Could you find her?”

“Needle in a hay stick.”

“Haystack,” said Solomon.

“Thank you for the English lesson,” said Dragan.

“But you understand what I am saying?”

“I didn't ask if it was easy, Dragan. I asked if you could do it.”

Dragan narrowed his eyes.

“Make it a challenge and I'll do your work for you, is that what you think?”

“Hell, Dragan, would you rather I tried to bribe you?”

Dragan chuckled throatily.

“Okay, I'll try. But first I'll check that she's not turned up dead. That's easy enough. Then I can check arrest records through our information section, but without fingerprints I only have a name and a three year-old photograph to go on.”

“What about running it past the federal police? If she was trafficked, they might have come across her.” Dragan had spent six years with the federal police, the country's equivalent of the FBI, dealing with country wide and international crime, before joining the Sarajevo canton police. He'd been an inspector with the Odjeljenje Za Organizovani Kriminalitec I Droge, the department investigating organised crime and drugs.

He shrugged.

“Sure I'll try. A lot of my contacts have moved on, but I'll see if I can get someone to access their records.”

“What about trawling through the bars?”

The policeman chortled.

“Do you know how many cases my boss has given me this week?”

“That's a no, then, is it?”

Dragan laughed and slapped Solomon on the back, hard.

“I love the English and their sense of humour,” he said.

“It's irony,” said Solomon.

“Verging on sarcasm.”

Dragan waved for another two bottles of beer.

“These bars where the hookers work, how dangerous are they?” Solomon asked.

“You've never been?”

“Never felt the urge,” said Solomon.

Dragan looked at him in disbelief.

“Bullshit,” he said.

“I worked in Vice for three years, which pretty much got it out of my system,” said Solomon.

“Plus, it's illegal here and I wouldn't want to go breaking any Bosnian law.”

“It is illegal in England too, no?”

“It's complicated,” said Solomon. He drained his bottle as the barman placed a fresh one in front of him.

“Prostitution as such isn't illegal. You can pay for sex without any problems. What's illegal is to offer to pay for sex. That's importuning. And it's illegal to offer sex in exchange for money. That's soliciting. It's the proposal that's illegal, not the act itself.”

“That's crazy.”

“You're probably right. But because it's such a grey area, Vice cops don't bother busting the girls, unless they're too blatant and the neighbours start to complain.”

Dragan was frowning, deep furrows cutting across his brow.

“So let me get this right. If the girl doesn't say how much she's charging, she can't be done for prostitution.”

“She wouldn't be done for prostitution anyway, it would be soliciting.”

“Isn't that what a lawyer does? You call them solicitors, right?”

“That's different.”

Dragan jabbed a finger at Solomon.

“Got you!” He laughed.

“English humour.”

Solomon leaned back on his stool.

“Screw you, Dragan. If you're going to take the piss, forget it.”

Dragan gripped his shoulder and shook him, like a grizzly bear showing affection to its cub.

“Don't get upset, Jack. You know I love you.”

“I don't know why I put up with you. You butcher the English language and you never buy your round.”

“Because we're the same, you and I. We know that nothing we do really makes a difference. But if we didn't do what we do, the world would be an even worse place than it is.”

“That's one hell of a philosophy,” said Solomon.

“Once you unscramble it.”

Dragan threw back his head and guffawed, slapping Solomon's back so hard that his head jerked backwards. He drained his beer and winked at the barman, who was already reaching for two fresh bottles.

“So the prostitutes in London, they are not breaking the law?” he asked.