Secrets of the Dead (19 page)

‘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.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Most likely that he was stabbed through the heart. From the front, based on the direction of the cut, with a big knife or a sword.’

With a shock, she realised Levin was smiling. ‘Is that funny?’

‘Not for him, I guess. But we’re not going to open a case on him any time soon.’

She still didn’t get it. ‘Why not?’

‘Because he died something in the order of seventeen hundred years ago.’

Levin walked over to the wall, pulled off his gloves, and washed his hands. When he turned back, the smile had gone and there were no answers in his eyes.

‘Michael brought you a skeleton he’d found that was murdered over a thousand years ago?’ Abby repeated.

‘I got curious, so I ran some common isotope analysis on his molars and his femur. According to the chemical signatures, he grew up around here, but spent his later life somewhere around the eastern Mediterranean, near the sea. Varied diet, so probably rich.’

He pointed to greyish patches of bone on the skeleton’s legs and arms, not smooth but mottled, like coral. ‘That’s woven bone – it grows in response to wounds or bruising. This guy lived a violent life, but always recovered. Until someone stabbed him through the heart.’

Levin crossed to a steel filing cabinet and extracted a folder. From inside came a sheaf of papers and a small brown object in a plastic bag.

‘There was this, as well.’ He slid out the object and laid it under a magnifier on the workbench. ‘It’s a belt buckle. Take a look.’

Abby put her eye to the glass. All she could see was a mottled brown blur, like a bed of autumn leaves. She moved the magnifier up and down until the image became clear. Letters had emerged from the background, crusted and incomplete, but still legible.

‘
LEG IIII FELIX
.’

‘It’s the name of a Roman legion,’ Levin translated. ‘The “lucky fourth”.’ He caught her surprise. ‘I looked it up on the Internet. Apparently, they were based in Belgrade, so not so far from here. If you look underneath the writing, you’ll see the legionary crest.’

Abby squinted at it. Again, rust distorted the image, but she could make it out. A lean lion, proportioned like a greyhound, with a dreadlocked mane hanging over its shoulders.

‘The NATO guys aren’t the first occupying troops in this part of the world,’ Levin said. ‘I guess this one got unlucky.’

She remembered something he’d said. ‘Why did you say murdered? If he was a soldier, and stabbed with a sword, couldn’t he have been killed in battle?’

‘Sure, I guess. I thought it would be unusual for a guy in his sixties to be on a battlefield, and the wound’s so clean and deep he probably wasn’t wearing armour. It’s just a hypothesis.’

She looked up from the buckle and back at the skeleton on the table. Dead eye-sockets stared up at her. A scratch on the forehead made it look creased in thought, as if having been pulled from the darkness he was squinting to see her.

Who were you?
she wondered.

Who are you?
the skull seemed to reply.

‘Did Michael say where he found the skeleton?’

‘He said he’d been up north, near the Serbian border. Bandit country. I didn’t ask why he was playing Indiana Jones there. Must have needed protection, though, because he arrived in a US Army Landcruiser. An American soldier helped bring the body in.’

‘Did you get his name?’

‘He left his autograph. Michael made him sign the paperwork, said it was better if his name wasn’t on the docket.’ Levin shuffled through the documents in the folder. ‘Here – Specialist Anthony Sanchez, 957th LMT.’

‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘As far as I know, all the Americans are down at Camp Bondsteel, by Ferizaj.’ He could see what she was thinking. ‘Have you got a yellow badge?’

Yellow badges were what admitted you to KFOR bases. They were supposed to be limited to NATO personnel, but
Michael
had had one, somehow. He used to drop in on the bases to buy duty-free cigarettes and alcohol at the PX’s.
Is that appropriate for a customs officer?
she’d asked. Michael had just laughed.

‘Did you tell the police about this? After Michael was killed?’

‘I showed them the body, just in case it had anything to do with Michael. When they found out how old it was, they didn’t want to know – told me to send it to the cold-case squad. I didn’t mention Specialist Sanchez. I didn’t think it would do him any good.’

The clinical smell in the enclosed basement was beginning to make Abby light-headed. She desperately needed air.

‘Thanks for everything, Dr Levin. I hope I haven’t got you in trouble.’

‘I’ll be fine. Just make sure you don’t end up back here on my table. The sort of questions the police were asking when they came here …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You might not want to know the answers.’

‘I need to know.’

‘I know.’ Levin locked the file back in the cabinet. ‘You have the look in your eyes. I see it all the time.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The look of someone chasing ghosts.’

Two-handed, Levin pushed the drawer back into its steel mausoleum and slammed the door shut.

Constantinople – April, 337

THE MESSAGE IS
waiting for me when I return home.
Come to dinner at the palace tonight
. It isn’t clear if it’s an invitation or an order, but I’m not going to refuse. My slaves spend the afternoon digging out the toga from the store cupboard where it’s languished, and scrubbing it with chalk to obliterate the stains. It takes us an hour of folding, tucking and cursing to remember how to make it sit right. My steward murmurs that I look splendid, just like the old days. He sounds wistful.

The Hall of Nineteen Couches stands in the palace complex in the shadow of the Hippodrome. A larger-than-life statue of Constantine with his three sons commands the entrance, staring down the length of the hall. In the apse at the opposite end, Constantine and his half-sister Constantiana lounge on the top couch like some incestuous pair of Egyptian gods. From there, the other eighteen couches run down the sides of the hall like the two straight tracks of the hippodrome. This is where the race is decided: the closer you are to the imperial couple, the nearer you are to winning. Constantine
never
used to like giving dinner parties: he hated having to rank the world so baldly. The sentimentalist in him couldn’t bear to see his guests’ disappointment when they found themselves next to the door; the pragmatist knew the value of uncertainty. You move more carefully when you don’t know where you stand.

I take my allocated place – second from the end, left-hand side, sharing the couch with a gaunt chancery official, who wolfs down his food as if he hasn’t eaten in a week; a senator from Bithynia; and a grain merchant who can only speak in bushels. I listen to his prattle about a blight in Egypt and whether the Nile flood will fail this year, as I scan the other guests. Eusebius is there, near the head of the room, deep in conversation with Flavius Ursus. I wonder what a bishop and a soldier have in common to talk about.

‘The price is already up five denarii from last month.’ The merchant tears into a skewered dormouse. Fat veined with blood dribbles down his chin. ‘It’s curious, you see? Usually in the spring the price drops as the seas open and the grain ships start to arrive again.’ He chuckles, as if it’s a riddle worthy of Daedalus. ‘Augurs and conjurors read the future in dead entrails and the flight of birds. I can read it in the price of wheat.’

I humour him – it’s the least painful option. ‘What do you see?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ He looks at me as if I’m a child. ‘Trouble.’

At last the meal’s over. Slaves clear the platters away. Guests stand and begin to mingle. The grain merchant makes his excuses and escapes to the other side of the room, as bored of me as I am of him. I push forward to the front of the room, trying to catch Constantine’s eye, but the press of bodies is
too
thick. Instead, I stumble into a circle of men deep in a conversation. They fall silent when I intrude.

‘Gaius Valerius Maximus.’ It’s Eusebius, in a gold-trimmed toga hardly less grand than Constantine’s. Again, there’s an edge of ridicule in the emphasis as he says my last name. ‘Have you found the truth yet?’

‘I’m waiting for someone to enlighten me.’

‘One of our brothers in Christ was beaten to death with a statue of the philosopher Hierocles,’ Eusebius explains for the benefit of the others. ‘A notorious persecutor was sitting just behind him. The Emperor has ordered Gaius Valerius Maximus to find the killer.’

The knot of men around him nod seriously. They’re strange company for a bishop to keep: the Prefect of Constantinople; the Prefect of Provisions who oversees the bread ration; two generals whose faces are more familiar than their names; and Flavius Ursus, Marshal of the Army. Nothing in his face acknowledges the conversation we had yesterday.

Eusebius glides away to talk with a pair of senators who’ve accosted him. He seems to know everyone here. I spend a few more minutes with Ursus and the generals, discussing arrangements for the Persian campaign, its prospects, whether they can reach Ctesiphon by autumn.
Just like the old days
.

But something’s different. These are men at the peak of their powers – they should be brimming with confidence. Instead, they seem stiff and tentative. Even as they’re speaking to me, their eyes dart around the hall. At first, I assume they’re merely bored. But they’re not looking for someone to speak to: they’re watching everything. Who brushes whose arm. Who smiles, frowns, nods. Who makes a joke and who laughs.