Diary of a War Crime

by Simon McCleave

  Bloody hell. Maybe I should have stuck with him?

  ‘Shower’s free,’ came the shout of a male voice from the bathroom.

  ‘I hope you didn’t piss in it!’ Lucy yelled back.

  ‘That’s for me to know and for you to find out,’ the man said with a laugh.

  ‘Oh, that’s really bloody romantic, Harry!’

  Harry Brooks came out of the bathroom with a white towel around his waist.

  Of course, he was only Harry while they were in the bedroom together. Tomorrow he would be DCI Harry Brooks, her guvnor in CID.

  Brooks gyrated his hips around. ‘I think skirts must be much more comfortable than trousers. Everything down there is much looser and can just swing about.’

  ‘Lovely. You don’t have to stop being romantic just because you’ve rinsed your spuds,’ Lucy said, rolling her eyes.

  Brooks shrugged. ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘If you want to stroll into Peckham CID in a little skirt tomorrow morning, I think you should go for it,’ Lucy said getting off the bed laughing.

  Brooks took her by the hand, twirled her around as if they were dancing, and then kissed her. ‘Let’s do this properly, Luce. No more of these grotty bedrooms, eh?’

  Here we go again, she thought.

  ‘I quite like the grotty bedrooms. It’s all part of the excitement,’ Lucy said.

  Brooks pulled her closer to him. ‘I mean it. I’ll leave Karen and we can do this properly.’

  ‘I don’t want you to leave Karen. This is fine.’ Lucy moved his arms from around her waist.

  ‘Is it?’

  Lucy laughed. ‘Harry, I’m just going through the whole father figure thing.’

  Harry smiled and shrugged. ‘I don’t care. How does that song go, I will be your father figure, put your tiny hand in mine.’

  ‘Oh my God. Are you actually quoting George Michael lyrics to me?’ Lucy grinned and shook her head.

  ‘Oh, is that who it is?’

  Lucy went to the bathroom door. ‘Right, I’m having a shower. I suggest you get dressed and get going before you’re missed.’

  ‘I do love you, you know that?’ Brooks said.

  ‘Just sod off, Harry. I’ll see you in the morning.’ Lucy smiled and shut the door behind her.

  She knew that she was falling for Brooks, but she was afraid she was going to get hurt.

  What the bloody hell am I doing?

  CHAPTER 7

  It had just gone 8am when Ruth and Lucy strode down the long corridor of St George’s Hospital in Tooting, South London. Constructed back in the 1700s, it was one of the largest hospitals in Europe.

  Ruth could feel a slight tension in her stomach. Even though she had seen her fair share of post-mortems, she just couldn’t quite get used to them. She told herself to get a grip as the sound of her and Lucy’s shoes echoed around the long, cold, windowless corridor.

  Lucy pushed open the door to the mortuary and held it for Ruth. As they entered the cavernous examination room the hospital’s Chief Pathologist, Professor Sofia Deneuve, came over. She was tall and thin, with angular features and a no-nonsense attitude to her work. Ruth actually liked her as she was a refreshing change from some of the bumbling old male pathologists who seemed stuck in some post-war time warp.

  ‘Morning, ladies. Are you here about Mr Mujic?’ Professor Deneuve asked in an accent that had a trace of Edinburgh in it.

  Lucy nodded. ‘Yes. DC Hunter and I aren’t convinced that the death was from natural causes.’

  Professor Deneuve looked down at her notes for a moment. ‘The coroner asked me to get this preliminary PM done this morning and to rush through the toxicology report.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘Looks like you girls were spot on.’ Professor Deneuve wandered over to the body.

  Ruth was glad that her theory about a forced entry hadn’t been as far-fetched as she worried it might have seemed.

  ‘What’s the cause of death?’ Ruth asked.

  Professor Deneuve beckoned Ruth and Lucy to come closer to the naked, white cadaver that was laid out on the metal gurney. Mujic’s upper body was almost completely covered in hair.

  He looks like he’s wearing a hair jumper. Imagine being married to him! Ruth thought before realising that the poor man in front of her had probably been murdered.

  ‘I found this,’ Professor Deneuve said, pointing to the skin just behind his ear.

  At first, Ruth couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Sorry, I ...’ Lucy said with a frown.

  Then Ruth spotted it.

  ‘There’s a needle mark,’ she said.

  Professor Deneuve nodded as she touched the skin to make it more visible to the eye.

  ‘How did you see that from there?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I grew up on a lovely Battersea estate full of smackheads. I can spot a needle mark at ten paces,’ Ruth quipped.

  Lucy rolled her eyes at Ruth’s dark humour. ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Someone injected your victim in the neck. The skin hasn’t healed, so it was broken in the last twenty-four hours,’ the professor explained. ‘But I would have missed it even on a routine post-mortem.’

  ‘Has the toxicology report come back yet?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Yes. He died from fentanyl toxicity.’

  What the hell does that mean?

  ‘Fentanyl?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Very strong opiate painkiller. It’s fifty times stronger than morphine. In the medical profession, it’s just started to be used in the treatment of pain in cancer. At the concentration that we found in the victim’s bloodstream, he would have been unconscious in seconds and dead in under a minute. But if you hadn’t flagged up the suspicious circumstances, we would have probably missed the injection mark and we wouldn’t have done a toxicology report. It would have gone down as natural causes, which I’m guessing your killer was counting on.’

  Ruth looked at Lucy – not what they expected to hear when they first walked in. Now they were dealing with a murder case.

  BY MID-AFTERNOON, HAMZAR Mujic’s flat in Comeragh Gardens had been sealed off as a murder scene. Ruth had organised for uniformed officers to contact every resident in the block and take witness statements. They were still waiting to talk to the neighbour who had heard shouting and some kind of struggle. His evidence was now key in narrowing down the time of the attack.

  Ruth and Lucy continued to scour the flat for evidence while scene of crime officers, SOCOs, dusted for prints and anything else that could give them forensic evidence.

  Ruth spotted Lucy looking at something on the wall.

  ‘Found something?’ she asked as she went over.

  On the wall was a small, framed pencil sketch of a smiling woman sitting at a table.

  ‘You think it’s his wife?’ Ruth asked as she peered towards the bottom of the frame where there was a tiny inscription. ‘Amina Mujic, 1987, Mount Strigova.’

  ‘Amina. Pretty name,’ Lucy said. ‘Given the date, her age and name, I’m guessing she has to be his wife.’

  ‘I wonder what happened to her?’ Ruth said thinking out loud. There had been no evidence that anyone else lived in the flat with Hamzar Mujic, and no sign of a woman. For a moment, Ruth felt a sadness as she thought of their victim living in a strange city, alone and a long way from home.

  Lucy gestured to the wall. ‘Actually, it wasn’t the picture I was looking at.’

  Next to the sketch was a large corkboard attached to the wall. The board itself was empty and had about ten coloured pins dotted around its surface.

  ‘What do you notice about this board?’ Lucy asked.

  At first, Ruth didn’t know what she was talking about. Then, as she looked properly, she could see that there was a small fragment of paper under each of the pins on the board.

  ‘Someone tore whatever was on this board down rather than removing it carefully,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Could be nothing. But at the moment,
we have no motive. There are valuables and money in the flat that are untouched. So, who wants to kill a seventy-year-old Bosnian refugee?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘No idea. But it wasn’t an argument that got out of hand. Someone forced their way into the flat and injected him in the neck. It was completely premeditated,’ Ruth said. ‘Anything in all these papers on the desk?’

  ‘Lots of handwritten stuff written in Bosnian. I think they speak a dialect of Serbo-Croat, don’t they?’ Lucy asked.

  I’ve no idea if I’m honest.

  ‘That sounds about right,’ Ruth said with a shrug.

  Lucy picked up a well-thumbed Serbo-Croatian/English dictionary. ‘I could use this, but I think we’ll get a translator to look at some of it.’

  Ruth noticed something else about the corkboard that didn’t look quite right.

  ‘This isn’t flush to the wall,’ Ruth said with a frown as she went to the board and saw a half-inch gap behind it. Taking the board with both hands, she lifted it from the two nails that it hung on.

  The wall behind was bare. Turning the corkboard around, Ruth could see that someone had taped a clear A4 plastic wallet to the back. Inside was a thick, dark brown leather journal with the initials HM embossed in gold.

  Ruth pulled the journal out, looked at it, and then passed it to Lucy. ‘Hamzar Mujic, I presume?’

  ‘Whatever is in there, Mr Mujic didn’t want anyone to find it or read it,’ Lucy said as she opened it up.

  Ruth noticed that each page had a date written at the top in intricate handwriting. However, the words were in a language she didn’t understand. ‘Looks like some kind of diary or journal.’

  Lucy stopped at a page and then showed it to Ruth. ‘Day before yesterday. The name Simo Petrovic. Then something else. Over here these four names written in a column.’

  Mersad Avdic

  Katerina Selimovic

  Safet Dudic

  Hamzar Mujic

  Ruth pointed to the top of the page where a name was written all in capital letters.

  BEN FLEET

  ‘Let’s run those names through the PNC when we get back,’ Ruth suggested.

  ‘This word here by the name Simo Petrovic. It’s in capitals and underlined.’ Lucy pointed to the word and tried to pronounce it. ‘Ubijena.’

  Grabbing the dictionary, Ruth flicked through to the word and looked for its English translation. ‘Ubijena ... Here it is.’ Then she stopped and looked at Lucy.

  ‘What does it say?’ Lucy asked with a frown.

  ‘To kill or to murder,’ Ruth replied.

  CHAPTER 8

  Petrovic crossed his legs as he opened up his copy of The Times. He was desperate for news of his football club, Fudbalski Klub Partizan, or Partizan Belgrade as they said in Britain. They were top of the Championship and had a good chance of winning the league.

  Petrovic was fiercely proud of his childhood team. He remembered when his father had taken him to his first game at the Partizan Stadium in the late 1970s. It had been packed with men who roared and sang, fuelled by cheap vodka and strong cigarettes. The songs told of a time when the Serbs had been ruled by the cruel, evil Ottoman Turks in the 14th and 15th centuries. He remembered fondly singing along to ‘The laughing eye and the weeping eye’. It told the story of a man who had one eye that was constantly wet from laughter and one wet from tears. When his son asked him why he had two such different eyes, the man explained that one eye laughed at the joy of being surrounded by his Serbian family and friends. The other eye wept for that time before the Turkish infidels invaded their land.

  Petrovic loved everything about being a Fudbalski Klub Partizan supporter. It had been drummed into him that the club had been formed from soldiers of the Yugoslav Army who had fought the German Fascists in World War II. To support any other club was an anathema to his family. The team’s nickname was Parni Valjak, which meant The Steamroller. His father told him it was because in the 1950s, Parni Valjak’s strong physical presence and precise passing would destroy opposing teams. Petrovic wasn’t sure that was true, but it sounded heroic.

  Petrovic glanced around at Brompton Cemetery in West London where he had arranged another meeting with Colonel Tankovic, who said he needed to see him urgently. They couldn’t talk on the phone as Petrovic was paranoid that if MI5 suspected his true identity, then they might be recording his calls.

  Before Petrovic had time to scan for the football results, he heard the crunching of Tankovic’s shoes on the gravel.

  ‘Kako ste,’ Tankovic said, which was a traditional Serbian greeting, as he shook Petrovic’s hand firmly. ‘And at last the summer is coming.’

  Tankovic hitched his trousers an inch as he sat down, so as not to sag the knees. He took out a packet of cigarettes, gave one to Petrovic, and used his lighter to light them both.

  Petrovic folded his paper, took a deep drag on the cigarette, and sat back. As the warm breeze picked up, he could smell the sweet citrus scent of the nearby lime trees and their white budding flowers that hung in clusters. He knew that Tankovic had bad news for him and he was just delaying it for a moment.

  ‘What happened, moj najbolji prijatelj?’ Petrovic asked. It meant ‘my best of friends’.

  ‘The police are looking into our Peckham friend’s untimely demise,’ Tankovic told him.

  ‘Why? It should have been signed off as natural causes,’ Petrovic said with a sense of unease. He had been meticulous in leaving no sign of a struggle. He had positioned Mujic’s body carefully in the chair. The needle mark and traces of fentanyl should never have been found.

  ‘I don’t know. It could be nothing. It’s hard to get details from my source at the moment.’

  Petrovic felt his anger grow. ‘How worried should I be? Do I need to buy plane tickets? These fucking little materinas!’

  ‘You must keep your calm, Simo. I am sure that it will blow over. And from what I hear, you don’t need to worry too much,’ Tankovic said knowingly.

  ‘Why not?’ Petrovic asked, now curious as he calmed down a little.

  Tankovic raised an eyebrow. ‘My source says that there are two women investigating the case.’

  Petrovic smiled and snorted derisively. ‘Women? What kind of a country is this?’

  RUTH AND LUCY WERE now sitting in the ground-floor flat of the landlady, Mrs Dalila Thomas. She was late sixties, Afro-Caribbean, and wore a colourful housecoat. The kitchen was small, tidy, and smelled of spices such as cumin and ginger. The fridge was adorned with crayon drawings that Ruth guessed had been given to her by her grandchildren.

  Lucy opened her notepad. ‘And how long had Mr Mujic been a tenant here?’

  ‘I looked earlier. He came here eighteen months ago,’ Mrs Thomas replied.

  ‘Were there any problems with Mr Mujic as a tenant?’ Ruth asked.

  Mrs Thomas shook her head sadly. ‘No, no, no. He was a lovely man. A real gentleman, you know. I would go in most mornings and we would have coffee, and talk.’

  ‘No problems paying the rent?’ Lucy enquired.

  ‘No. Always on time.’

  ‘Do you know if he had any friends? Anyone that came to visit him?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘Only Mr Advic. They knew each other from when they lived in Yugoslavia. Before the war.’

  ‘Mr Advic? Do you remember a first name?’ Ruth queried.

  ‘No, sorry. They were about the same age. And they would talk in their own language and I couldn’t understand a word,’ Mrs Thomas said with a laugh.

  ‘Any idea how we can get in touch with this Mr Advic?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘No. Sorry. Mr Mujic does have a daughter though. And she gave me her number if anything ... you know, happened to him. I spoke to her this morning to tell her. She was very upset. It was terrible, you know?’

  ‘And she lives in London, does she?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘Yes. West London somewhere. Different world over that way isn’t it? I’ll give you her number if that helps you?’

  Lucy
nodded. ‘Yes, that would be really helpful.’

  ‘And you never heard Mr Mujic rowing with anyone?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘No. He was such a nice man.’

  ‘He didn’t say that he was scared of anyone or anything? Or that someone wanted to harm him?’ Lucy asked.

  Mrs Thomas paused, and Ruth could sense that the question had sparked something in her mind.

  ‘Last two weeks maybe. He was not himself, you know. Very quiet. I would say “What’s the matter with you? You are sitting here with me, but your head is a long, long way away.”’

  ‘But he never told you why he was so distracted?’ Lucy said.

  ‘No. But you could see it. Something was wrong with him. I thought it was all these papers that he was reading. Stuff he brought back from the library, and newspapers.’

  Ruth looked questioningly at Lucy. What papers?

  ‘Where did he keep all these papers?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘On that big old desk in his living room. When I let myself in yesterday, I saw that they had all gone. I thought maybe he’d thrown them all away or had given them to somebody?’

  Or maybe the person who killed him took them, Ruth thought.

  THE SUN HAD CUT THROUGH the April clouds and it was warm as Lucy and Ruth wandered along the North End Road market which stretched across the border between Fulham and Hammersmith. A couple of phone calls had confirmed that Sanja Mujic, their victim’s daughter, was running an aromatherapy stall in the market that day, about halfway along the street.