The Skinner's Revenge. Chris Karsten
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see her,” said Ella as they got out. “She’s a part of Abel. They’re inseparable, Abel and his mother. She’s the one who led me to him.”
“From her grave.”
“She can help me again.”
“Only once your sick leave is over, when the trauma counsellor has signed you off.”
An unmistakable smell hung in the long, silent corridor leading to Dr Koster’s office. Not the usual antiseptic odour of hospital corridors, but a whiff of decay, and of strong deodorant sprays and cleaning agents, with undertones of chlorine, formaldehyde and death.
It was not exactly an uplifting professional environment, but this was where Ella had become acquainted with Abel’s first two victims. Naked and defenceless on the stainless-steel autopsy table, here the bodies had talked to Dr Koster, told him what had happened to them, helped him fill in the details of their violent passing.
Ella had come here to look at Mia Vermooten, the ambitious high-flyer who had been the Nightstalker’s first victim. And his second victim: pretty, frisky Emma Adams.
“Where’s the coffin?” asked Dr Koster.
There were brownish smears and stains on his overcoat – dried blood, or coffee, Ella guessed. Harder to tell his age. The grey stubble on his wrinkled face and the brown pigmentation on his forehead and the back of his hands put him on the wrong side of sixty, perhaps even seventy, she speculated.
“I’d love some tea,” said Silas, “while we’re waiting for the Messrs Poppe.”
Dr Koster switched on the kettle. Ella watched as he scooped coffee into a mug. He’d remembered, she thought with some satisfaction, that she didn’t drink tea.
She’d come to Dr Koster’s domain to see the third victim as well: the reporter. She’d found it much harder to look at him, at someone she’d known as a living, breathing, laughing human being. She knew it was him, lying there on the autopsy table without a face, the skin completely stripped from his skull.
“What are you going to do with the old lady?” asked Dr Koster. “When we’re through with the coffin?”
Silas shrugged. “Put her back in her grave. What else?”
“She’ll need a new coffin. You can’t put her back in an old, rotten coffin.”
“I’ll put in a requisition for a new coffin. Pine, with rope handles. Poppe & Son can rebury her.”
Ella had not seen the Nightstalker’s fourth victim on Dr Koster’s table. She’d known him even better than she’d known the reporter. Much better. Intimately, in fact. She’d still been in ICU when Dr Koster had completed his autopsy report on Zack. Her condition had been critical. The doctors had feared the onset of sepsis where Abel had cut into her stomach with an unsterilised blade. She’d attended Zack’s funeral in West Park in a wheelchair, pumped full of antibiotics and strong pain medication. Afterwards, she’d been taken straight back to her hospital bed.
There was a sound at the service entrance and Dr Koster looked up. “They’re here.”
Poppe & Son’s coffin trolley came rolling up the slight incline. Under their grisly load, rubber wheels crunched over the clean tiled floor, the swing doors of the autopsy room were pushed open and then silently closed again, aided by hydraulic springs.
“Thank you – you can leave the coffin on the trolley,” said Dr Koster. “I’ll call you when I’m finished with her.”
“How long will it take?” asked Mr Poppe Senior.
“Not long.”
“We’re busy. We have a funeral tomorrow.”
“She’s not going anywhere. The day after tomorrow, the next day…”
After the Messrs Poppe had left, Dr Koster’s assistant appeared with a claw-hammer and a large screwdriver.
The screws were rusted, but as the wood was rotten, damp and covered with red mud, the coffin wasn’t going to be reused. It took the assistant only a few minutes to dislodge the lid and lift it away.
2. 1991-1993: Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Mountains, forests, rivers. Rolling verdant hills dotted with villages. Cottages built of stone, corrugated iron and wood huddled around places of worship. Bells pealing in church towers, muezzins calling from minarets. Riverbanks with trees and fruit-laden orchards, juicy red pomegranates, vegetable patches, fields of oats and wheat, grassy pastures covered with white and yellow daffodils. A landscape unchanged for centuries, inhabited by simple people going on their unhurried way. Not always at peace, for these parts have had their fair share of bloodshed and suffering. The Balkan killing fields: the scene of invasion and massacre by the Barbarians and Vandals in the Dark Ages, by the medieval Ottomans, by the power-crazy Austro-Hungarians, by adversaries in two World Wars.
Now there was a new invasion: brutes operating in the name of reprisal are advocating bloodshed, even calling it necessary. It can be traced all the way back to the Great Schism in the eleventh century. So old is the suppression and annihilation of the Serbs.
The new horde came from Serbia, wreaked havoc in Croatia, then crossed the border to Bosnia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina nothing that stood in their way was sacred. Prijedor, Sanski Most, the Sana valley, further along to the west and south and east to Banja Luka, Srebrenica, Mostar and Sarajevo. They convinced one another that the problem was an ethnic one, always had been. They had long memories, and they never forgot old injuries, which they were now intent on redressing. Ruthlessly they advanced, with their tattoos and guns and cannons, and nothing would ever be the same again.
When the sun rose over the hills during this blood-drenched time, the early morning light bathed the pastoral landscape in a fresh rosy glow, calling to mind the blood of the men, women and children that had been spilled there.
* * *
In the mountains around Sarajevo, eight battalions of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps were strangling the life out of the city and its residents with snipers’ bullets and shells. Buildings, many of them historic, had been reduced to rubble: Ottoman structures from the fourteenth century, Austro-Hungarian façades more than two centuries old.
Very few areas in the city were left unscathed, and when the shelling abated, dark, sooty clouds hung over the bomb craters and rubble. The air was filled with the acrid smell of gunpowder, fire and charred remains, and echoed with the cries of the wounded and maimed. In the streets and on the pavements the dead were left lying, because only the foolhardy, or those with a death wish, would brave the bullets to try and reclaim their loved ones’ bodies.
At a military base in the hills around Glasinačko Polje, Vlatko Galić and Zoran Dragnić had been trained as snipers. Then Vlatko, with his Zastava M76, and Zoran, with his AK47, were unleashed to do what they did best: sow terror and spill the blood of unarmed men, women and children in the city of Sarajevo. They squatted in a deserted building in the Serbian neighbourhood of Kovăcići, south of the great Miljacka River, which slices through the length of Sarajevo like a knife. The seventy-fourth snipers’ nest in the beleaguered city.
In an empty apartment on the seventh floor, Vlatko had taken a hammer and chisel on the day of their arrival and knocked a vertical hole in the outside wall of the living room: not big, a slit just large enough to accommodate the barrel and scope of his rifle. The Zastava M76 was a Yugoslavian sniper rifle, a replica of the Russian Dragunov, but using more effective 7.92 x 57mm Mauser bullets. Like the Dragunov, it had a flash suppressor at the end of the barrel to conceal the ignition of gas when a shot was fired, thus concealing the location of the shooter.