Secrets of the Dead
Read Secrets of the Dead Online
Authors: Tom Harper
About the Book
Some secrets should stay buried forever…
Abby Cormac spent ten years trying to put the world’s worst criminals behind bars. Burned out, she thinks she’s left it all behind – until a terrible act of violence shatters her life once more. In a luxurious villa on the Adriatic coast, her lover, Michael, is murdered and Abby is left for dead.
Terrified and alone, Abby vows to bring Michael’s killer to justice. But when her investigation takes her across Europe and in contact with one of the Balkans’ most notorious gangsters, she soon realises that Michael wasn’t the man she thought she knew. He had discovered a secret – a legacy of betrayal and murder hidden by a conspiracy of silence – and Abby’s convinced that unravelling this secret will lead her to the truth. But powerful enemies are watching her every move and they will stop at nothing to ensure the secrets of the dead never come to light…
Tom Harper has written ten novels including
Lost Temple, The Book of Secrets
and
The Lazarus Vault
. He is a past Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, and his books have been translated into twenty languages worldwide. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons. For more information, visit
www.tom-harper.co.uk
The Mosaic of Shadows
Knights of the Cross
Siege of Heaven
Lost Temple
The Book of Secrets
The Lazarus Vault
ForDusty and Nancy Rhodes
and
Patrick and Mary Thomas
IN MEMORIAM
Every man seeks peace by waging war,
but no man seeks war by making peace.
– St Augustine,
City of God
The dead keep their secrets, and in a little
while we shall be as wise as they.
– Alexander Smith
Pristina, Kosovo – Present Day
ESCAPING WORK ON
a Friday afternoon was still a luxury Abby hadn’t got used to.
For ten years, work had been long days in the dark places of the Earth, listening to shattered people relive brutality on an unimaginable scale. Then evenings at a laptop in rooms converted from shipping containers, freezing or baking with the seasons, wringing all the blood and tears out of the stories until they became dry pieces of paper that would make presentable evidence for the International Court in The Hague. She never escaped. She’d lost count of the nightmares, the times she’d found herself kneeling over the chemical toilet deep in the night, desperate to purge the things she’d seen. Among the casualties over the years had been several promising relationships, a marriage, and finally her ability to care. But always, next morning, straight back to work.
Now all that was history. She’d transferred to the EU mission in Kosovo – EULEX – teaching the Kosovars how to be model European citizens. There had been war crimes in Kosovo, true,
but
they were someone else’s problem. She worked with the civil courts, trying to unwind the tangled questions of who owned what after the war.
The Lost Property Office
, Michael called it. She didn’t mind being teased. She could sleep at night.
She folded up her files and locked them away. She cleared her desk for the cleaners to come in over the weekend.
Shut down, turn off, leave behind
. Just before she killed her computer, she noticed a new e-mail had come in from the Director. She ignored it – another luxury. She could deal with it on Monday. It was 2 p.m. on Friday and her week was over.
Michael’s car was waiting for her outside the office. A red Porsche convertible, vintage 1968, probably the only one in the Balkans. Top off, despite the thunder clouds massing over the city. Michael revved the engine as she stepped out the door, a full-throated roar that would have made her wince with embarrassment if she wasn’t so happy. Typical Michael. She slipped into the passenger seat and kissed him, feeling his salt-and-pepper stubble graze her cheek. A couple of people coming out of the office stopped to stare, and she wondered if they were looking at the car or at her. Michael was twenty years her senior and looked it, though age suited him. There were lines on his face, but they only accentuated what was good about it: the ready smile, the devil-may-care gleam in his eye, the confidence and strength. When his hair started greying he didn’t cut it, just added a gold earring. So as not to look too respectable, he said. Abby teased him that it made him look like a pirate.
He cupped her chin and turned her head so he could see her throat. ‘You’re wearing the necklace.’
He sounded pleased. He’d given it to her a week ago, an intricate golden labyrinth studded with five red glass beads.
In
the centre was a monogram, a form of the early Christian X-P symbol though she’d never known Michael be religious. The necklace itself felt ancient. The gold was dark and glossy like honey, the red glass misted with time. When she asked Michael where he got it, he just gave a crooked smile and told her a Gypsy gave it to him.
From the corner of her eye, she noticed her black overnight bag lying on the Porsche’s back seat, next to his briefcase.
‘Are we going somewhere?’
‘Kotor Bay. Montenegro.’
She made a face. ‘That’s six hours away.’
‘Not if I can help it.’ He pulled out of the parking lot, past the security guard in his blue blazer and baseball cap. The man gave the car an admiring stare and threw them a salute. Among the drab rows of EU-issue sedans, the Porsche stood out like some kind of endangered species.
Driving one-handed, Michael reached down and pulled a hipflask from beside the handbrake. His hand brushed her thigh where her sundress had ridden up. He took a swig, then handed it to her.
‘I promise it’ll be worth it.’
And maybe he was right. That was the thing with Michael: however wild his idea, you always wanted to believe him. As soon as they’d escaped Pristina’s gridlock, weaving in and out of the traffic in ways even the locals – comfortably the worst drivers in Europe – wouldn’t have dared, he punched the accelerator and gave the car its head. Abby snuggled into her seat and watched the miles fly by. Roof down, they raced ahead of the wind, outrunning the storm that always threatened but never touched them. Across the Kosovo plain and up into the foothills, towards the mountains that squeezed the setting sun
against
the sky until it bled crimson. At the Montenegrin border a few words from Michael sped them past the customs officials.
Now they were deep in the mountains. Cold air eddied around them; above, even August hadn’t dislodged snow from the peaks. Michael kept the roof down, but turned the heat on full blast. Abby found a blanket in the footwell and pulled it over her.
And suddenly there it was. The road bent around through a rocky defile and emerged high above the bay, sunk in shadows between the mountains. All Abby could see were the lights of pleasure yachts and motorcruisers, clustered around the coves and beaches that fringed it like luminous algae.
Michael slowed, then veered left. Abby gasped: it looked as if he was driving off the edge of the cliff. But there was a track, unpaved, that ended at an iron gate in a stucco wall. Michael rummaged in the glove compartment for a remote control. The gate slid open.
Abby raised her eyebrows. ‘Do you come here often?’
‘First time.’
Through the open gate, Abby could see the flat roof of a house, ghostly white in the gathering darkness. It stood on a promontory halfway down the slope – about the only place you could put a house on this side of the bay. Across the water, Abby could see the bright glow of a town, and its outer suburbs strung all across the opposite hill. On this side, there was nothing.
Michael stopped the car on a strip of gravel outside the house. He pulled an unfamiliar key out of his pocket and unlocked the fat oak door.
‘After you.’
Nothing in the villa’s plain exterior had prepared her for
what
was inside. Working in Pristina on an expat EU salary, Abby was used to living comfortably, but this was luxury on a whole other level. The floors were marble: green and pink slabs forming intricate geometric patterns. Everything seemed to have been built for a race of giants: chairs and sofas deep enough to lose yourself in, a mahogany dining table that could have seated twenty people, and the biggest television she’d ever seen hanging on the wall. Opposite, almost as big, three Orthodox saints stared out of the gold of a triple-panelled icon.
‘How much did this cost you?’
‘Not a penny. It belongs to an Italian judge, a friend. He’s letting me borrow it for the weekend.’
‘Are we expecting anyone else?’
Michael grinned. ‘Got it all to ourselves.’
She pointed to the briefcase he’d carried in. ‘I hope you weren’t planning on getting any work done.’
‘Wait until you see the pool.’
He pulled open the glass door. Abby stepped through and gasped. Behind the villa, the pool terrace stretched right to the cliff edge. A mock-classical colonnade framed three sides: fluted columns and Corinthian capitals that didn’t really fit with the rest of the modern architecture. The fourth side was the cliff, with the bay far below. In the twilight, the pool seemed to flow straight into the sea. There was no rail.
Abby heard a soft click behind her as Michael touched a switch. Recessed lights in the pool made the water glow. When Abby peered in, she saw an undersea world of nymphs and dolphins, mermaids and starfish, a seaweed-haired god in a chariot drawn by four sea horses – all picked out in a dappled black-and-white mosaic. Fine traces of light shimmered across it, so that the monochrome figures seemed to dance underwater.
More lights had come on behind the colonnade. Each alcove held a marble statue on a marble plinth: Hercules, draped in a lionskin and leaning on his club; a bare-breasted Aphrodite clutching a robe that had somehow slipped below her hips; Medea, a coil of serpents fizzing from her hair. They looked solid, but when Abby touched one she felt it tremble on its base as if a gust of wind could blow it off. She flinched.
‘Careful,’ said Michael. ‘They’re not making any more of those.’
Abby laughed. ‘They can’t be original.’
‘Every one, so I’m told.’
Dazed, Abby wandered on past the silent figures. She came to the end of the terrace and looked down. The cliff was so steep that even there she couldn’t see its base: only a froth of silver foam on the water drifting off the rocks. She shivered. The flimsy sundress wasn’t nearly enough this late in August.