Authors: Graham Hurley
Imber turned the photo over. The ink had smudged over the years but the date was still legible. February ’93.
‘Pelly must have taken these.’ Imber was leafing through the rest of the shots.
‘How do you know?’
‘Guy I went to see today served with him out in Bosnia; gave me the full picture.’ Imber dropped into the spare chair and dug around in his briefcase. ‘I’ve brought a map.’ He shook it open and laid it on the desk. ‘It’s now rather than then but I thought it might help.’
Faraday stared down at the map. It showed the whole of the Balkans from Slovenia in the north to Macedonia in the south, a patchwork of tribal states reaching inland towards the border with Romania. Imber bent to the map, finding the Adriatic port of Split, and Faraday followed his finger as he traced the road that Pelly would have driven time and again, trucking heavy engineering materials through the mountains to the town of Vitez.
It was here, said Imber, that the Cheshire Regiment had established their battalion headquarters, fortifying an abandoned school. The Brits had arrived under a UN mandate, protecting the supply lines that kept tens of thousands of refugees in Central Bosnia alive.
‘The guy I met this morning was a loggie.’ Imber glanced up at Faraday. ‘That’s a Logistics Officer. Dealt with the likes of Pelly every bloody day. Pelly was a corporal, 42 Field Squadron, Royal Engineers. It was blokes like him who had to get accommodation for the squaddies sorted before the winter came. They started with the school. Then the Serbs got stroppy out towards Banja Luka and the whole thing kicked off.’
He returned to the photos, picking a different shot this time – the coaches more distant, the women visibly exhausted, their kids hollow-eyed with fear. Mountains pressed in on the valley, folds of snow speared with fir trees.
The women and kids, said Imber, were Bosnian refugees, Muslims driven from their villages by the Serbs and dumped at the border. The border was at a place called Turbe. The townships of Travnik and Vitez lay down the valley. This was territory controlled by the Croats and they too had no love for the Muslims.
‘So what happened to these people?’
‘The UN built a refugee centre in Travnik. There were hundreds of women and kids in there. They had shelter and food and water and somewhere to shit but that was about it. Pelly would have lent a hand.’ He tapped the photo. ‘No question.’
Faraday gazed at the photo, at the blank hopelessness on these women’s faces, at the faltering progress they made from shot to shot, struggling away under the eyes of the watching soldiers. He began to lay the
photos out on the map, side by side, the grimmest testimony to an almost-forgotten war.
‘And their men?’
‘Driven into camps. Killed. Tortured. Starved.’ Imber’s finger found a particular group of soldiers. ‘We’re talking ethnic cleansing. According to the loggie the Serbs were world class. These guys happen to be regular troops. The worst of the lot were the paramilitaries, football thugs and criminals bussed in from Belgrade, out of their heads most of the time on plum brandy. They’d move from village to village, drag the men away, rape the women, nick everything that moved, then torch the houses. This particular day they’d had enough of the women and packed them into coaches and drove them to the border. The Croats could sort them out. Or maybe the UN.’ He paused, fingering another grinning face. ‘The Serbs even charged a fare. Eighty Deutschmarks each to be dumped in the snow. Welcome to Croatia.’
Faraday was trying to imagine what scenes like these would do to serving soldiers – to someone like Pelly, trained for a very different war. He’d once heard the Bosnian conflict described as medieval. Now, however dimly, he began to understand why. Blood and honey, he thought. Life reduced to the very basics.
‘Tell me more about Pelly.’ He sank into the chair behind the desk, reaching for a separate set of photos.
Imber obliged. Pelly, it seemed, had joined up in his teens. At twenty-one he’d been in the Falklands, part of the task force that landed at San Carlos Water and fought their way to Stanley. Afterwards, for at least a couple of years, he had stayed on as part of the sapper team dealing with the hundreds of live minefields left by the vanquished Argies. The start of a new decade found Yugoslavia on the point of collapse. The Croats
and the Serbs wanted to divide the spoils. The losers would be the Muslims. And so two years later Pelly found himself in Vitez, with his blue UN beret and his Minolta compact, and a passion to help that quickly soured into anger and disgust.
‘The loggie said he became obsessed. Most of the blokes managed to cope. Pelly couldn’t.’
‘And you think he definitely took these?’
The second stack of photos featured more of the refugees from the coaches. By now they’d made it to makeshift accommodation in the ruins of some kind of factory and Faraday found himself looking at a tight semicircle of women huddled around a fire of smashed-up wooden pallets.
‘That would be the camp at Travnik,’ Imber confirmed.
He wanted to know the date. Faraday turned the photo over. Same handwriting.
‘March ninety-three.’
‘Spot on.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s the month the MoD asked for voluntary redundancies. Gave Pelly the perfect out. By then he’d had enough of taking orders; wanted to do it his way. The loggie said the blokes thought he was crazy. Same story as before. Pelly took it too personally. They were glad to see the back of him.’
‘So he left Bosnia that month?’
‘Far from it.’ Imber was eyeing the rest of the photos. ‘What else have you got there?’
Faraday sifted quickly through the pile. There must have been nearly a hundred shots. After a while Pelly had put the woodsmoke and the squalor of the refugee camp behind him. Instead he was in a valley. The snow was thinning on the mountain slopes and there was a
greenness to the landscape that spoke of spring. Half close your eyes, thought Faraday, and this could be Switzerland or Austria: high Alpine meadows, wild flowers underfoot, eagles and kites riding the first thermals as the air slowly warmed beneath them.
Then, with a fierce abruptness, came a shot of a still-burning house. The place looked new, an upmarket chalet with a brick drive and a double garage and space on the lawn for a modest swimming pool. But most of the roof had gone, and there were scorch marks around the windows where the glass had blown out, and on closer inspection Faraday could see pockmarked areas of white stucco where bullets had hit. He reached for another photo, then a third. More houses, equally ruined. Family cars – one of them a Ford Mondeo – put to the torch. Pets – a cat, a pair of Alsatians – butchered in the snow. And finally a line of corpses, possibly a whole family, lying where they must have fallen, their arms outstretched, bags nearby, each head with a neat bullet hole and a spreading crimson stain beneath.
Faraday, who’d seen hundreds of photos from the Scenes of Crime reports, couldn’t take it in. One moment this village must have been every estate agent’s dream. The next, it was a charnel house.
At the very bottom of the pile, beneath the burned-out mosque and the blackened remains of someone who’d been burned to death, was a photograph of a horse. Pelly must have come across it in the meadow behind the houses. It was standing in bright sunshine, head down, munching grass, totally untroubled by the carnage beyond the distant curtain of drifting smoke.
Faraday passed the shot across, saying nothing. These were images from a nightmare, all the more powerful for being so recent. No wonder Pelly was so
wound up. An experience like this would stay with you forever.
‘Place called Ahmici.’ Imber was collecting the photos. ‘Little village near Vitez. Pelly was one of the first in. Did the recce. Took the shots. The Croats and the Muslims had been at each others’ throats for weeks. The Croats thought a massacre might sort it out. Staked out the village at dawn. Cut off the escape routes. Then the death squads went in. Killed each family as they made a run for it. First the men. Then the male children. Then the rest. Very Balkan.’
‘And Pelly?’
‘Released some of these shots to the press. His bosses didn’t get the joke. He was out of uniform within a month. Redundancy package, the lot. Apparently they couldn’t understand why he didn’t become a plumber in Swindon. Probably still don’t.’
Faraday sat back in the chair. Images like these would haunt any man. Ten years later Pelly was still living with them. Literally.
‘So where does this take us?’ he asked at last.
‘Dunno.’ Imber was still looking at the horse. ‘The bloke I met this morning was lucky enough to be flown home. Copped a nasty wound and never went back.’
‘Someone shot him?’
‘No, he hit a local car on a mountain road. Head-on. Bloke only had one headlight. You know what the squaddies used to call those?’ He laughed softly. ‘Bosnian motorbikes.’
Sunday, 29 February 2004
Some sixth sense told Faraday not to expect good news. He fumbled for his mobile in the gloom, wondering what could warrant a call at half past seven on a Sunday morning. It was Dave Michaels, already in his office at the MIR. He’d just had a bell from one of the Crime Scene Investigators up at the nursing home. The CSI had been making an early start on the garage round the back and had been curious about the presence of an ambulance in the front drive. One of the staff had told him about a fatality during the night. Woman by the name of Mary Unwin had just been discovered dead in bed. Ring any bells?
Faraday was already on his feet.
‘Anything else? Any details?’
‘None. The CSI didn’t even know if it was of interest. Just trying to be helpful.’ Dave Michaels knew all about Mary Unwin because Tracy Barber had fed him a full account of yesterday’s interviews.
Faraday was heading for the little en suite bathroom. Still on the mobile, he filled the basin and reached for the soap. He told Michaels to contact the mortuary at the hospital and then sort out a Home Office pathologist for the post-mortem. Last night’s actions for the outside inquiries team would have to be revised. He wanted a couple of DCs into the home for interviews with night staff, residents and anyone else
who might have anything useful to say about Mary Unwin’s movements over the last twelve hours and about her general state of health. The latter should involve the GP who regularly visited the nursing home. Was there any kind of pre-existing condition? Had she been feeling ill? What had she eaten or drunk?
Faraday mopped at his face with a wet flannel, each successive question prompting another, overwhelmed by the sense that
Congress
had just arrived at an important crossroads. Make the wrong decision, take the wrong turn, ignore an important lead, and the consequences didn’t bear contemplation.
Finally, his checklist exhausted, Faraday waited for a response.
‘Pelly?’ Michaels queried.
‘Check with the Surveillance Unit. Find out if he’s still at the home.’ Faraday reached for a towel. ‘Ever get the feeling he’s winding us up?’
DC Tracy Barber was already at her desk in the Major Incident Room by the time Faraday arrived. He called her along to his office. Dave Michaels had passed on the news about Mary Unwin and Barber closed the door before turning back to Faraday. She’d been thinking, she said, about yesterday’s interview at the home.
‘You remember the way it was? You on the bed? Me by the door?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The door wasn’t quite shut. I’m sure someone was out there in the corridor.’
‘You’re telling me you saw someone?’
‘No, but I had a sense – someone moving, footsteps, a presence. Eavesdropping would have been a doddle, the way you had to shout.’
Faraday nodded. Barber was right. Anyone with an interest in his conversation with Mary Unwin could have picked up the drift from several rooms away.
‘Who do you think, then?’
‘No idea. Pelly was out, according to the surveillance log. I checked it first thing, as soon as Dave Michaels told me.’
‘Out for sure?’
‘Out as in doing the weekly Tesco shop. Eighteen loaves of Mighty White and a trolleyful of Complan. He didn’t come back until gone five.’
‘Lajla?’
‘Could have been. She’s light on her feet. But then it could have been anyone.’
A knock on the door brought Dave Michaels into the office. He’d just been on to the surveillance team trailing Pelly. The man was currently having breakfast with a middle-aged white male in the Farringford Hotel, in Freshwater Bay. Faraday knew the hotel well. It had once belonged to Alfred Lord Tennyson, a lovely confection in Victorian Gothic that nestled in the shadow of Tennyson Down. Odd, thought Faraday, that this investigation should come full circle. A body recovered from the foot of the cliffs. And now the prime suspect tucking into eggs and bacon barely a mile inland.
Michaels was still standing in the open doorway.
‘PM?’ Faraday queried.
‘I phoned Pembury at home. He’s duty call-out.’ Michaels grinned. ‘We just ruined his weekend.’
Winter had always hated Sundays. When Joannie was alive it was the one day of the week when she had tried to coax her husband into some kind of domestic routine. She’d ask him to drive her to one of the local
gardening centres. Or they might visit her mum in Brighton. Or she’d draw up a list of DIY jobs around the house and threaten to call in a tradesman unless Winter rolled up his sleeves and did them himself.
Winter always succumbed to these chores with as much grace as he could muster but deep down he’d always thought of Sundays as the one moment in the week when real life let him down. He thrived on the small print of the job: on phone calls, meets, mischief, manipulation, business, the ongoing carnival that paid the bills. Sundays, unless he was on a job that spilled over the weekend, brought all that to a temporary halt. It was a different kind of time, dead time. Worst of all it made him stop and think.
At Maddox’s insistence, they’d set out on a walk to the low line of trees that marked the distant edges of Pagham Harbour. She’d found him a pair of gumboots and a thick fleece, and she’d wound one of her own scarves around his neck. The weather was miserable, a thin grey light and a hard, bitter wind that scythed across the flat fields, and Winter’s mood was soured further by the knowledge that the life he’d somehow taken for granted had so suddenly come to a full stop.