The Eyewitness (5 page)

Solomon flicked through the pages of the album. There were pictures of two parties: the women, dancing and drinking wine, the men, drinking beer and smoking. At Muslim weddings, it was traditional for the two sexes to celebrate separately. The last photograph was of a large group of people, men and women, standing in front of a farmhouse: all the wedding guests gathered together. Solomon showed it to the old woman, “Are they all family?” he asked.

She peered down at the picture through narrowed eyes, then tutted impatiently. She waved at a bookcase by a narrow wooden staircase.

“Over there, a magnifying-glass,” she said to Kimete.

Kimete retrieved it and handed it to her. The old woman grasped it with her left hand, bent over the photograph and examined it.

“Some are family. Some are friends.”

“Do you know them all?”

“I know the family, of course. Some of the others, no. It's been many years since I was there.”

“Can I borrow this photograph,” asked Solomon, 'to help with identification?"

Kimete translated and the old woman nodded.

“You need all of them?”

Solomon pulled the group photograph away from the page. It had been stuck on with a small loop of sellotape and came away easily.

“Just this one will be enough.”

He placed it on the table and made a quick sketch in his notebook before numbering the figures. There were thirty-eight. Solomon asked the old woman to tell him the names of the people she knew. It took her the best part of an hour and five of his cigarettes, squinting through the magnifying-glass before she had finished. Twenty-seven of the people at the wedding were members of the immediate family. One was a cousin of the bride who had been killed by a land mine just weeks afterwards. Six were friends of the bride and groom, whom she knew by name. She didn't know who the remaining five were, but she was sure they weren't relatives. For each person she identified, Kimete filled out a missing person's information form, with as many details as possible, when and where they had last been seen. Teuter Berisha's information was sketchy at best: in many cases all she had was a name and how its owner was related to her.

When they had finished, Solomon thanked her and put away the notebook. He folded up the bloodstained card. On the back there were four identical bar codes on self-adhesive labels. He pulled one off and gave it to Kimete, who stuck it on to the top of the blood-donor's information sheet. When the sample went to the lab no one would know who had given it or where it had come from. The bar code was the only form of identification.

Solomon put the card into a foil zip-lock pouch and sealed it.

“What happens now?” the old woman asked Kimete.

“We isolate your DNA from the blood sample, and we compare it with DNA samples from the bodies,” said Kimete.

“We do that in our lab in Sarajevo. Then I'll come back. As I said, it shouldn't take more than a few days.”

Before he left, Solomon shoved two logs into the stove and wrapped the old woman's shawl around her shoulders before kissing her forehead lightly.

“Bring more cigarettes next time,” she said.

Solomon stood back and studied the photographs on the white board Alain Audette had couriered from Belgrade photographs of the twenty-six bodies in the truck. Solomon had stuck them around the edge of the board. In some cases Audette had been able to obtain names from information found on the bodies, and Solomon had written them under the respective photographs with a black marker-pen.

In the centre of the white board he had stuck a copy of the photograph that Teuter Berisha had given him. He'd used his computer to blow it up to four times its original size so that he could see the faces more clearly. In many cases he could match the faces of the dead with faces in the wedding picture.

The five people in the wedding photograph that Teuter Berisha hadn't been able to identify didn't appear to be among the dead, and neither did the six friends of the bride. That left twenty-seven people in the wedding photograph, and Solomon could match all but one to the smaller photographs around the edge of the white board Chuck Miller knocked on Solomon's open door.

“How's it going, Jack?” he asked.

“Identification's easy,” said Solomon.

“Doubt we're even going to need the DNA evidence.”

Miller waved the file he was holding.

“So this is a waste of six thousand bucks, then?” he said.

“Those are the results?”

“Hot off the presses.”

Solomon held out his hand and Miller gave him the file. It contained the DNA profiles from the bodies in the truck, and the blood taken from Teuter Berisha. A computer program had compared the samples and highlighted similarities that pointed to a genetic link. The closer the old woman's relationship to the dead, the more genetic similarities there were. Mother-child relationships were the easiest to spot, followed by siblings, but the program was accurate enough to pinpoint more distant relationships. Solomon went through the twenty-six reports. In more than half of the cases there was a clear genetic link to Teuter Berisha's blood sample.

“Seems pretty conclusive,” said Miller, as he walked over to the white board “Yeah, the pictures are, too.”

Miller studied the wedding photograph.

“Jeez ... so everyone at that wedding was killed?”

Solomon shook his head.

“Not all of them. But the ones in the truck were all members of the same family and lived on the farm.”

“I gather there's no question that it was ethnic cleansing?”

“Muslim family, Serbian neighbours.”

“You'll pass it on to the War Crimes Tribunal, then?”

“Soon as I've informed the relative.”

“The old woman who gave the blood sample?”

“Yeah. I'm going to drive over this afternoon with Kimete.”

“Rather you than me,” Miller said. He looked at his watch.

“I've got a conference call with London,” he said.

“Catch you later.”

He left and Solomon stood for a while staring at the wedding photograph. Happy faces. The men in jackets and ties, the women in long dresses. The bride and groom.

Solomon used the marker pen to draw circles around the faces that he'd matched with the dead, then drew lines connecting them with the corresponding photographs on the edge of the white board He took a step back and scrutinised his handiwork. It looked like one of the diagrams that Miller used to flesh out the quarterly reports sent to the various funding groups that supported the Commission. But this was no organisation al flowchart. Every line represented a journey: from joyful wedding guest to victim of ethnic cleansing. A journey that had ended with lungs heaving, throats burning, the taste of blood, eyes bulging. And a little girl, clutching her teddy bear to her chest as she died.

Solomon turned away from the white board Kimete was waiting for him in the car park. She was wearing a thick wool coat with the collar turned up against the wind and smoking a Croatian cigarette. She stubbed it out as Solomon walked up. The Walter Wolf brand she favoured was about half the price of Marlboro, and twice the strength. She had brought half a dozen black-market cassette tapes, mainly rap music, and they played them at full volume as they drove to Mostar.

It was just after midday when Solomon parked the four-wheel-drive outside Teuter Berisha's cottage and walked with Kimete to the front door. The ground under their feet was wet from recent rain, but the sky overhead was clear blue and the stone of the cottage was bone dry from the northerly wind that cut across the bleak countryside.

Solomon knocked on the door with the flat of his gloved hand, then turned the rusting metal handle.

“Nana?” he called, as he pushed open the heavy wooden door.

The old woman was sitting by her stove, sipping from a small white bowl. She grinned when she saw him, and put down the bowl on a wooden tray that lay on her lap.

“Come in, young man,” she said, 'and close the door before I freeze. Have you brought that pretty girl with you?"

Kimete popped her head around the door. The old woman grinned when she saw her.

“Slobodno!” she said. Come in. She cupped her hands around her bowl and nodded at a metal pot on the stove.

“There's soup help yourselves. Bowls are in the kitchen.” Then she spotted the carton of Marlboro under Solomon's arm. She beamed as he put them on the table next to her rocking-chair.

Solomon took off his shoes, then handed her the carrier-bag he'd brought with him. The old woman opened it and took out a packet of biscuits, two cans of coffee and a kilo bag of sugar lumps he'd purloined it all from the office canteen.

“Are you married, young man?” she enquired.

“Because if you've no one to warm your bed at home you're welcome to move in with me.”

Kimete fetched two bowls from the cramped kitchen, which smelt of damp. A grey cloth hung on a hook at the side of the stove and she used it to hold one of the handles of the pan as she poured out the lumpy green vegetable soup.

Solomon sat down on a wooden chair and took a mouthful. It was good, sweet onions, cabbage and a strong garlicky aftertaste.

“You made this, Nana?”

She wrinkled her nose.

“My cousin's wife. Not a patch on my cooking but my hands aren't up to much, these days. What do you think?”

Solomon took another sip.

“It could do with a little more seasoning,” he said.

The old woman's eyes brightened.

“Exactly!” she said.

“She's a miser with salt and pepper, always has been. Treats it like gold dust.” She held the bowl to her lips, then grimaced as she swallowed. She wiped her chin with her clawed right hand.

“Still, beggars can't be choosers,” she said, and laughed harshly.

Solomon put down his bowl on a three-legged wooden stool and took out his notebook and the wedding photograph. The old woman's face fell.

“It was them, wasn't it?” she said.

Solomon nodded.

She closed her eyes and muttered something under her breath. Solomon looked down at his notebook and riffled through the pages. When he looked up again, her eyes were still closed, her back ramrod straight.

“I'm sorry, Nana,” he said.

“It's not a surprise,” she said quietly.

“I knew they were dead. Of course they were dead, they had to be. But knowing and believing aren't the same thing.”

Solomon knew what she meant. Time and time again he'd broken bad news to people who already knew that the worst had happened, but until they heard it from him, the official harbinger of death, there was always some slim hope to cling to. It was his job to take it away.

The old woman opened her eyes and forced a thin smile.

“I don't know how you can do the job you do, Jack Solomon,” she said, as if she'd been reading his mind.

“Someone has to do it, Nana,” he said, but even as the words left his lips he realised how banal they sounded. And how much he was beginning to hate his work.

He placed the photograph on the table in front of her.

“All of the dead in the truck were family members,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless as it always was when he had to rehearse the details of death. It was easier to deliver bad news if he made it sound neutral. As if he was reading a weather forecast.

“Twenty-six in all. Would you like me to go through their names?”

He waited while Kimete translated.

“Nemapotrebe,” Mrs. Berisha said quietly.

“There's no need.”

“The twenty-six includes the little girl. Your great granddaughter.”

“Shpresa.”

Solomon spoke slowly, giving Kimete time to translate.

“That's right. Shpresa. Twenty-six including her. Now, in the wedding photograph, there are twenty-seven relatives, and that doesn't include Shpresa.”

“Because she hadn't been born then.”

“That's right.” Solomon tapped the man who'd been blown up by a land mine shortly after the wedding.

“And this man died, you said.”

She nodded.

Then Solomon pointed to the teenage girl.

“Which leaves this girl,” he said.

“She is definitely not among the dead in the truck.”

“Nicoletta.”

“Yes, Nicoletta. Nicoletta Shala, you said.” He pointed at the man and woman who stood at either side of her.

“Agim Shala and Drita Shala. Her father and mother?”

“Yes. He is my brother's son. My nephew.”

The cottage door creaked open. Solomon jumped, then relaxed when he saw that the visitor was a gangly boy barely into his teens, his skin peppered with acne and his dark hair lank and greasy. The old woman waved him in impatiently.

“Close the door. The heat's getting out and firewood doesn't grow on trees.”

The boy did as he was told.

“You always say that, Nana,” he said.

“It might have been funny fifty years ago, but it's an old joke now.”

The old woman picked up her walking-stick and waggled it at the boy.

“I've already told Mr. Solomon that you're a good boy who respects his elders, so don't go proving me wrong,” she said.

The boy was holding a large brown-paper bag, which he carried into the kitchen. Then he returned and sat down on a stool.

“This is Mr. Solomon,” said Mrs. Berisha.

“I told you about him, remember? And this is his friend, Kimete.”

The boy kept his head down, his fringe hanging like a curtain over his eyes.

“The policeman from Sarajevo,” he muttered. He spoke in English, heavily accented.

“I'm not a policeman,” said Solomon.

“I work with the police, but I'm not a policeman. You speak good English.”

The boy shrugged, but steadfastly refused to look at him.

Solomon turned to the old woman.

“I was saying, Nicoletta wasn't among the victims.”

At the mention of the name, the boy jerked as if he'd been stung.

“You know Nicoletta?” Solomon asked.

The boy shrugged again.

“They were at school together for a while, before his family moved away,” said the old woman.

“He spent holidays on their farm.” She reached over and pinched the boy's cheek with a gnarled hand.