The Unquiet Dead Page 24

  The war had begun with a program of hate and the steady administration of incendiary propaganda.

  You Muslim women, you Bule, we’ll show you.

  You will see, you Muslims. I will draw a cross on your back. You will all be baptized.

  We will burn you alive.

  And in fourteen days, Srebrenica will be gone.

  * * *

  Damir Hasanović was a man admired and respected the world over, a man whose only mission had been justice. A man who’d sacrificed everything to that end.

  For his reputation to be torn down at this last when Dražen Krstić had known nearly two decades of prosperity was something Khattak couldn’t bear. It was something he wouldn’t do.

  One part of him knew that no matter the provocation, Hasanović couldn’t have caused Krstić’s death. But from a hollow place within himself, the place where identity folded back upon itself to reveal rawer, more vulnerable layers, he acknowledged a more insidious truth—the part that wished he had done it himself.

  * * *

  Rachel waited for Khattak to speak, unable to dispel her sense of disquiet. Little things were tugging at the edge of her awareness. Things she had seen or heard yet failed to understand. Maybe it was the night she’d spent reading about Ratko Mladić. Maybe it was the eerie watchfulness of her mother or the newfound sobriety of her father. Maybe it was Zach’s continued absence from their lives.

  She was missing something—brittle, intangible, and just on the edge of discovery.

  She lined up the photographs she had taken from Hadley across the bronze table. She included everything they had collected during their first visit to Drayton’s house. Personal papers, the holdings of his filing cabinet. The letters she had read that haunted her like the poetry of the damned. The things the imam had interpreted for them.

  Nate came to look over her shoulder.

  “You need a cup of coffee,” he said. “And then I can help you tackle this.”

  “I need three.”

  She was grateful for his support, for his kind eyes and steady hands, or maybe grateful wasn’t the word. She chose not to question her strange kinship with Nathan Clare. He was the part of Esa Khattak that opened up to her, sharing himself as an equal. She didn’t complain about her relationship with Khattak, she knew they were an excellent team, just as she knew there was something of himself he held back.

  Which was fine with her, because there was plenty she was holding back herself.

  * * *

  Khattak stirred from his reverie, shifted the papers on the table. His long fingers pushed a folded sheet of paper toward her.

  “What’s this? I don’t remember seeing it before.”

  Rachel flattened it out on the table’s smooth surface. “Piano music? I found it in Drayton’s house. Maybe Nate or Mink gave it to him.”

  Nate appeared behind her shoulder with a tray of coffee.

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “Chris didn’t play, as far as I know. And I don’t think it is piano music.” Rachel studied the minute notations on the five-line staff as Nate set down his tray.

  “You’re saying this isn’t music? It’s some kind of code? Something someone sent him?” It reminded her of a spy novel she’d read.

  “No, it’s music. It’s just not arranged for the piano. Look at this. It’s written in treble clef. The piano accompaniment below it links two staves: treble and bass.”

  “What is it then?”

  “An arrangement for the violin. I can play the melody for you if you like.”

  “I don’t know that it matters,” said Khattak. “Did he play the violin?”

  “No. If he were a musician, he’d likely have offered music lessons instead of languages.”

  Rachel’s interest sharpened. “So why did he have it, then?” She’d gotten it from the back of his filing cabinet, crammed in with the first batch of letters she’d found. “It could have been sent to him like the letters. Maybe it means something.”

  “Shall I play it and see?”

  They followed Nate into the great room.

  “This will be a bit rough.”

  It wasn’t. He transposed the notes easily, his foot on one of the pedals. It was slow, insignificant. Until it became relentless, urgent. Thick with heartache. A layered anguish inhabiting the room, swelling out from the piano to the upper gallery. Nate’s fingers lingered over the keys. The music built to its intolerable climax.

  Just imagine this youngest boy I had, those little hands of his …

  Mummy, I’ve come. At last I’ve come.

  Where have you been, my son?

  I waited for you to come through the woods. Each passing day was an agony. Until there was no hope left that you would come.

  I never believed that people could do this.

  * * *

  Her heart was breaking. The music was breaking it.

  “Stop,” Khattak said.

  Nate lifted his hands, placed them in his lap. His face paled at the expression on Khattak’s face. “You recognize it.”

  “Did you give it to Drayton?”

  “No. It sounds familiar but I can’t place it.”

  There was a sickness beneath Khattak’s skin. “The Adagio attributed to Albinoni. Vedran Smailović played it on his cello in the streets of Sarajevo.”

  For citizens of a fallen city.

  “Do you think Drayton knew what it was?”

  “I think a man like Krstić would have made a point of finding out.”

  “You were right then, sir. It wasn’t just about Srebrenica.”

  “Perhaps there’s some symbolism here,” said Nate. “Srebrenica was the final movement of the war.”

  His words hung on the air with the closing notes of the music.

  Rachel forced herself to take up the photographs again. It was too much. All of it was too much, the letters, the music, the silenced voices of the missing and dead. Something in the case had to break.

  “What are these?” Nate asked, his voice hushed. “A specialized form of pornography?”

  “They’re from the war. These women may be dead, for all we know.”

  “I think this one is dead. This isn’t a photograph, is it? It looks like a color photocopy.” He pointed to a grainy image on a faded page. The figure in it was clothed. The body hung from a tree. Dark gold hair framed the face. The pink scarf that spilled down its neck had been used to hang the body.

  “These others are prints, this one isn’t. Why?”

  “It’s not from his collection.” Khattak’s voice was harsh.

  Rachel hadn’t noticed the photograph before, the disturbing image buried by others even more graphic.

  “This is just a girl,” she said. Images revolved in her mind. “A girl like Hadley or Cassidy. Look at the way the paper is folded. It was sent to him, like the letters. They murdered women as well?”

  “Ten thousand women died in the war. I’d guess the girl in this picture hanged herself.”

  They looked at each other grimly.

  “Someone wanted him to know this. David Newhall?”

  “It may have been his cousin or his niece. Perhaps a friend.”

  Rachel shook her head. This was something else. Something out of place, like the music, the gun, the residue of the candles. A connection she wasn’t seeing.

  “Drayton had a gun,” she said slowly. “He was threatened with exposure. Someone sent him the letters, the picture, the sheet music. The Bosnian lily was planted in his garden. Doesn’t it seem like momentum was building against him? He wanted Hadley and Cassidy, but Dennis Blessant stood in his way. He was pressured on all sides: Melanie, Dennis, the letters. He took a walk along the Bluffs at night, the same night he had the argument with Dennis, yet he didn’t take the gun. Why not? Why did he leave the gun on the floor surrounded by puddles of wax?”

  “Maybe someone took his gun and forced him to go on that walk,” Nate suggested.

  “His are the only prints on the gun. He
left it behind on purpose. I just can’t figure out why.”

  “If Chris really was pushed, someone must have followed him on his walk. Dennis Blessant?”

  “Whoever followed him would have had to wait until Melanie returned to her own house. They’d have to wait until Dennis drove away. Neither Melanie or Dennis reported any cars or noise on the street. As far as we know, there were no silent watchers in the undergrowth.”

  “Melanie’s too self-involved to have thought about the presence of others. Dennis was probably distracted by the argument.”

  “And Drayton’s house is secluded from the rest of the street. So there could have been someone there.” She balled up her fists in disgust. “Again, that leaves us with nothing conclusive. Just the same old question of the gun. Did Drayton fall, or didn’t he? I doubt we’ll ever know.” She faced her boss squarely. “So where do we go from here, sir?”

  “Perhaps we need to widen our net. Find other suspects.”

  “No one has a greater motive than David Newhall. His parents, his brothers. Can we really afford to take his testimony at his word?”

  “Hasanović worked for fifteen years to identify his parents’ bones. What does that say about his patience? This isn’t the end he wanted for Dražen Krstić. You won’t convince me of it.”

  Rachel was afraid to dispute it. It was the first time she’d heard Khattak speak with such emotion. He wasn’t a man who dealt in ultimate truths; as she did, he traversed the underground cities of doubt and discrepancy where human frailty revealed itself in layer upon layer of incongruity. She owed it to him to try, regardless.

  “Maybe he didn’t see it as murder. If I were standing in Newhall’s shoes, Drayton’s fall would look a lot like justice to me.”

  Khattak’s face closed down. If he couldn’t convince Rachel, what hope was there? She was only arguing what everyone would think once Newhall’s true name was revealed, as it would be. And just like that, the decades of Hasanović’s struggle for justice would be washed away, the tragedy of Bosnia swept aside for the cheap titillation of scandal. Khattak was determined not to let that happen.

  “Sir,” Rachel said, reading his resistance in the stiffness of his posture, his slightly bent head. “You said we should widen the field. I still think it’s possible there’s a museum connection here. The average person doesn’t walk away from that kind of money.”

  She flinched from Khattak’s look, as cold and remote as if he’d never worked with her, never known her loyalty or perseverance at his side.

  “Mink won’t take the money—not when she knows where it came from.” His tone suggested an implicit faith in the librarian. He turned away. “I need some air. I was planning to walk over to Ringsong. Maybe there’s something more Mink can tell us about Drayton or the girls, something she hasn’t thought of yet.”

  This was worse, Rachel realized. Worse than misunderstanding each other over a war in a place that meant little to most people. It was worse that he couldn’t separate his work from his desire to return to the museum like a touchstone.

  “We’re not done here, sir.”

  “I am. Finish with Nate if you like.”

  Rachel knew she couldn’t change his mind. “Be careful, sir. Let’s not give too much of our case away.”

  Khattak’s gaze disquieted her. “I’m not sure what it is you fear from Mink Norman. Whatever it is, you’re wrong.”

  She’d been slapped down but she had to risk saying it. “Then would you ask her about the meeting on the night of Drayton’s fall? Because that’s where Newhall claimed he was. At least we should know if that much is true.”

  Khattak didn’t argue. His assent was somehow worse than any rebuttal he could have made.

  * * *

  She drove home, avoiding Nate’s sympathy, his assiduous offer of help. Slowly through cantering drifts of rain, past the outline of Newhall’s house in the gloom and the van parked in its driveway, straight down the highway until an hour later she was home, her thoughts churning, her stomach aboil. It was how her body coped with anxiety. Or with fear and shame. She hadn’t done anything to deserve Khattak’s rebuff, yet she yearned for his good opinion. Of her work, nothing more, she insisted to herself.

  It would have been companionable somehow to review the photographs with Nate, but not after Khattak’s cool dismissal. He’d seen into her. Recognized her weakness and exploited it, making her seem feeble and possessive. She shrugged it off. What did her feelings matter when set against Hadley’s or David Newhall’s? Or the girl who had hanged herself. Perhaps the answer had been here all along.

  She spread the photographs she had taken at Drayton’s house across her bed.

  The gun that lay on the floor. The puddles of wax. The atlas opened to the Drina River. The papers he’d collected: some stored in the safe, some jammed into his filing cabinet, some taken by Hadley Blessant. The yellow-headed lilies. The Adagio in G Minor.

  The music made her think of Zach, although not because he’d had the chance to play any more than she had. In her head, she lumped the arts together. Someone who loved music adored art and vice versa. Look at Nathan Clare. A man of letters whose home was filled with exquisite paintings and objets d’art. Who was willing to fund a museum about a long-ago time in a faraway place. The beauties of Andalusia: literature, history, cultural synthesis. A place of learning and libraries, those palaces of memory. The ring songs of Andalusia, the music of a dazzling civilization.

  Music, history, art, and lore.

  A long ago time in a faraway place—the golden palaces of memory.

  Her fingers arranged the photographs she’d taken at Drayton’s house in a circle. The music. The photograph. The lilies. The gun. She peered closer.

  And now the coagulum that had clouded her perceptions evaporated into discovery.

  I feel as though I’m in a pantomime.

  Was it the Blessants? she had wondered. From the beginning, the Blessants had been an occlusion.

  The music. The photograph. The lilies. The gun.

  It had to be. It could be nothing else.

  She was playing a hunch, the kind Khattak would discard without a word, but it didn’t matter. She had finally grasped the nature of Christopher Drayton’s death. She needed to meet the survivors the imam had told them about.

  Once she’d taken care of two small matters.

  With gut-churning certainty, she found her phone and dialed her brother. When he’d listened to her request and made his promise to help, she made another call, this time to schedule a meeting with Audrey Clare.

  The woman who had been at the periphery of Drayton’s murder.

  The woman who held the key to the truth.

  32.

  This was the city’s still center, the very essence of Islam: in a walled courtyard, water, a tree, and the warm geometry of stone. In the deep blue velvet sky by the minaret hung a sliver of incandescent silver light: the first moon of spring.

  There were things he wanted Mink to say, things he wanted her not to say.

  Was he there as Esa Khattak, director of Community Policing? He thought not. He thought he was there to listen to the sound of water murmuring through rooms of stone. He was there to cup his hands over the sweet globe of her face. He was there to share the hard things within himself. Things he could not say to Rachel, the language absent between them where words were quietly necessary.

  “It’s late, Esa,” she said, opening the door.

  He made excuses, lied to them both. “Something’s happened. I must speak with you about Hadley.”

  The door gave way. The first fresh sails on his personal ship of joy began to unfurl. He followed her, heedless of the tension that narrowed her shoulders, shortening the smooth sweep of her neck.

  “Esa,” she said, drawing the name out over her lips. “Is it wise of you to come here on your own?”

  “I thought we were beyond pretense.”

  “Aren’t you here to ask me questions about your case? Abo
ut Christopher Drayton?” She sounded angry.

  With an effort, he made himself remember Hadley. This was Andalusia, not a garden of bones. Not the darkling meadows of Srebrenica. “May we sit in the courtyard?”

  She’d stopped at the forecourt. He stood close, inhaling the scent of oranges from her hair.

  “Ask me what you’ve come to ask.”

  He thought for a moment of one of the verses Hadley had lettered for the display.

  We see / that things too quickly grown / are swiftly overthrown.

  “Did Hadley ever speak to you about Drayton? Did she suggest that she may have been frightened of him?”

  “Frightened? Why?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “Yes. I see that you return here time and again to ask me questions.”

  He studied her face, seeking a clue as to her anger.

  “Don’t look at me like that. You’ve come for your work, why else should you come?”

  “Mink, I have a duty—”

  “I don’t care about your duty. Why do you come to Andalusia? What do you want from me?”

  He began to feel angry himself. “Isn’t it a place of welcome?” He didn’t say, as he’d thought so many times, of belonging. “I’ve come because Hadley is close to you. She was worried about Drayton—I thought you might have known.”

  “So you’ve come to taunt me with my imperfect sheltering of my charges. You say Drayton was a fugitive, a war criminal, and you accuse me of having left the girls in his path.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I thought perhaps she may have told you something that would help with our questions about Drayton’s death.”

  “You told me about him, Esa. If I knew something that would have helped you, wouldn’t I have said so by now?”

  “Not if it was a confidence from a young girl.”

  “So you expect me to break that confidence.”

  He stared at her helplessly. Her pale eyes were like moonstones in the delicate light of the forecourt. She wore her hair loose. It fell in soft gold waves that made him want to banish the subject of Hadley altogether. “I thought you’d want to help me. As you did before.”