Quintin Jardine - Fatal Last Words

Boras nodded. ‘True, and I have no thought of it.’

Arnott nodded to a guard, who stepped forward and unfastened his cuffs.

‘Is this room bugged?’ he asked. ‘I don’t see anything, but you may be more subtle than I give you credit for.’

‘There’s nothing here,’ the woman promised. ‘This room is kept for lawyers and clients; we couldn’t use anything we taped so there would be no point doing it.’

‘I can see that. You can leave us.’ He pointed to the guard. ‘He can go too.’

‘No,’ said Skinner firmly. ‘He stays; he can stand as far away as this room allows, but he stays. I want him as insurance against you banging your head off the wall then accusing us of helping you do it.’

The prisoner chuckled. ‘I can see that too. OK, I agree.’ As Arnott left the room, the warder went to its furthest corner and the two police officers took seats at the table.

‘Right,’ Skinner began briskly. ‘We didn’t come here for the drive, Dražen.’ He took three photo prints from his pocket and laid them on the desk. ‘So tell us, who is he?’

‘First, what’s in it for me?’

‘I told you, we’re not here to do a deal with you.’

‘That’s what you said, but you’ve got here in under three hours. It seems that you need the information I have. I’m right, am I not, Mr Skinner? Maybe I’m right too in that you have a personal interest in this case. The Daily Mail report said that you live in the village where a man was killed, for which this guy is on the run.’

‘Yes and no. I live there, but the man isn’t necessarily on the run because he did the killing. In fact I don’t believe that he did. Dražen, you have no cards in your hand. You know this man? OK, from where? Was he a business acquaintance? I doubt that, not going by the way he lived. Were you at school together, or university? Possible, but if you were we could have checked that without driving down here, you know that. So that leaves your other activity. Let’s summarise that. Your father was a Bosnian immigrant to Britain who made it big here. When his country was torn apart and NATO got involved, he volunteered his services to the intelligence community, placing agents in the Balkans as employees of his business. Eventually, so did you, when you set up in business for yourself. Don’t ask me why, but I’m certain I reckon you know this man from those days. If you choose not to give me his name, I can ask your father, or your former associates in America.’

Boras’s eyes darkened. ‘You can ask my father if you can find him. A few days after my arrest, he disappeared. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since, not even by my mother.’

‘Because he was afraid you’d incriminate him in Stevie’s murder?’ asked McIlhenney.

‘Not for a second. Because there are forces still at work in our region who would kill him if they could, for the things that he and I did against them, just as they’d kill me if they could get to me. As for the other people your boss mentions, you’d get nothing out of them. They have too many others still at risk to give one up. Plus, I think you’ll find that they’ve disowned me. I’m probably as much at risk from them as from my enemies in Serbia.’

Skinner frowned. ‘You know,’ he murmured, ‘I believe everything you’ve just said. But you’re going to give us that name, with no promises or inducements; I believe that too. I’m Scottish, Dražen. My writ doesn’t run down here, and you’re well aware of that. No, you’re going to talk to us, because your conscience is going to make you, because you owe, not us, necessarily, but a widow and a baby up in Edinburgh. This morning you said something about sending a gift to wee Stephanie. You can’t. This is all you can do; all that it’s in your power to offer in atonement. . without, of course, admitting your sin. So, let’s have it.’

Boras leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He looked towards the guard in the corner. ‘He has to go now,’ he said.

Skinner nodded. ‘If that’s what you want.’ He turned to the man. ‘Leave us, please.’

As the door closed, Boras laid both hands on the table. ‘I believe you’re a fair man,’ he told the chief constable. ‘If this helps the Crown not to press for a heavy minimum sentence if I’m convicted, so be it, but I don’t expect you to try to fix that.’

‘I won’t. I can’t. Go on.’

‘About four years ago, the people you referred to, in America, asked my father and I for help. They had an agent they wanted to place in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and were looking for a way in. The man had a specific task: he was to go into Serbia to look for witnesses to an act of genocide ordered and presided over personally by a notorious general, a beast, a piece of shit named Bogdan Tadic. He was confident that he’d killed them all, but there was intelligence that a very few had slipped the net and that they were in hiding, near Uzice, in fear for their lives. The operative was briefed to find them, and keep them safe. With them in safe hands, Tadic could be arrested and sent for trial at the International Tribunal at the Hague. My father and I were happy to help with that, but he had placed three people through his office in Sarajevo within the previous year. His business, Continental IT, was big, but yet another appointment might have attracted attention. So we decided that I would handle it through my company, Fishheads. We were supposed to be deadly business rivals, he and I, so my building up a presence there seemed quite natural.’ He stopped and looked Skinner in the eye. ‘You don’t give my father enough credit, you know. He’s a genuine Bosnian patriot, and through him so am I.’

‘I’ve never doubted that,’ the chief constable told him. ‘However, I also give you both credit for being murderers, and not for patriotic motives.’

‘Be that as it may,’ Boras retorted. ‘Ah, let’s not get into a debate. I met the agent in Washington,’ he continued. ‘His name was Lazar Erceg, born in Tuzla to a British mother and to a Yugoslav, a professor of modern Balkan history. He was perfect for the job, and I could pass him off as an employee, no trouble, given his upbringing. When he was eleven the father managed to arrange a move to Cambridge, and young Lazar completed his education there. Then Yugoslavia exploded, Milosevic came to power and things were bad for anyone who wasn’t a Serb and for some who were. Professor Erceg went home, to help found Bosnia as an independent nation, became a member of the first government, and was promptly killed, shot by a sniper. They never caught the assassin, but nobody needed a picture to be drawn. Young Lazar was in the British Territorial Army. He wanted to go home to fight, but his mother said, “No way!” and he obeyed her. He stayed in Cambridge and became an academic like his father, within the same area, supplementing his income by writing scripts for the BBC World Service. By this time he sounded as English as I do, so he was never asked to broadcast, but he came to the attention of the Foreign Office, and eventually of other people as well.’

‘He was recruited then?’

‘He was never recruited. He volunteered, for any job, as he put it, that needed doing and for which he might be suitable. Then he waited; while the war ended, while the Kosovo insurgency happened, he waited. Not in Cambridge, though, not all the time; he went back home whenever he could. He visited the family he still had there, and he came to know the country his father had died to found. While he was there, he heard of Tadic, and what he did. It isn’t one of the most notorious atrocities, because the dead were numbered in dozens, not in thousands, but that didn’t matter to them, how many were piled into the mass grave. It was an ethnic Bosnian enclave, in Serbia; people in a couple of small villages, minding their own business when Tadic warned them to get out of the country. They ignored him. He didn’t give them a second chance. It was brutal, horribly brutal.’